第 14 页

‘Tell them anyway.’

Another call. And she could tell from the tone, if not the words, that there was nothing to do to expedite the arrival of the tactical force.

‘They have hammers and cutters and a torch.’

A fast shift, fourth to second. She punched the accelerator. The engine howled.

A phrase of her father’s came to mind. A bylaw of her life.

When you move they can’t getcha …

But just then: A blond teenager, his long curls flying in the breeze, steered a peppy orange scooter through a stoplight, oblivious to any traffic.

‘Shit.’

In a blur of appendages, Sachs used the gears, the foot brake and the hand brake to decelerate and then skid around the Honda, missing the kid by inches. He didn’t even notice. Sachs saw he wore earbuds.

Then first gear, and they were on their way once more.

‘Left here.’ Ercole was shouting over the screams of his laboring engine.

It was a narrow street they were speeding along. Residential – no stores. Pale laundry hung above them like flags. Then into a square around a tiny anemic park, on whose scarred benches sat a half-dozen older men and women, a younger woman with a baby carriage and two children playing with scruffy dogs. It was a deserted area and the Composer could easily have slipped the victim out of his car and underground without anyone’s seeing.

‘There, that’s it,’ he announced, pointing to a shabby wooden doorway in the abandoned building Giacomo Schiller had referred to. This, like all the building façades nearby, was covered with graffiti. You could just make out the faded sign: Non Entrare.

Sachs brought the Mégane to a stop twenty feet from the door, leaving room for the tactical officers and ambulance. She hurried out. Ercole was close behind her.

Jogging again. But carefully. Sachs kept a close monitor on her legs – she suffered from arthritis, which had become so severe she’d nearly been sidelined from her beloved profession. Surgery had removed much, if not all, of the pain. Still, she always stayed mindful. The body can betray at any moment. But now, all functioned smoothly.

‘You’re new to this, right? To entry.’

‘Entry?’

That answered the question.

She’d learned enough. ‘First, we secure the site, make it safe from hostiles. It doesn’t help the victim, even if he’s seconds away from dying, if we die too. Okay?’

‘Sì.’

‘When it’s clear, we try to save him, CPR, open airways if we can, apply pressure to stop bleeding, though I don’t think blood loss is going to be a problem. After that we secure the crime scene to preserve evidence.’

‘All right … Ah, no!’

‘What?’

‘I forgot the booties. For our shoes. You are supposed to—’

‘We don’t wear those now. They’re too slippery. Here.’

She dug into her pocket and handed him rubber bands. ‘On the ball of your feet.’

‘You carry those with you?’

They both donned the elastic.

‘Gloves?’ he asked. ‘Latex gloves.’

Sachs smiled. ‘No. Not in tactical situations.’

The door, she was surprised to see, was barred with the cheapest of locks and a hasp that was affixed to the wooden door and frame with small screws.

She dug into her pocket and the switchblade was in her hand. Ercole’s eyes went wide. Sachs smiled to herself, as the thought occurred that the weapon was Italian – a Frank Beltrame stiletto, a four-inch blade, staghorn handle. She flicked it open and in one deft move pulled the bracket away from the wood, then tucked the knife away.

Holding her finger to her lips, she studied Ercole’s nervous, sweaty face. Some of the consternation was from the harrowing drive; the source of the remainder was clear. He was willing, but he was not battle-tested. ‘Stay behind me,’ she whispered.

‘Yes, yes.’ Which came out more as a breath than words.

She pulled a halogen flashlight from her pocket, a tiny but powerful thousand-lumen model. A Fenix PD35.

Ercole squinting, surely thinking: Rubber bands, flashlight, flick-blade knife? These Americans certainly came prepared.

A nod toward the door.

His Adam’s apple bobbed.

She pushed inside, raising the light and the gun.

There was a startling crash; the door had struck a table, spilling a large bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water.

‘He’s here!’ Ercole whispered.

‘Not necessarily. But assume he is. He may have set up the table to warn him somebody breached. We have to go fast.’

The entryway atmosphere was pungent, the walls covered with graffiti. It resembled a cave in some wilderness, rather than a man-made structure. A stairway led down two flights. They went slowly. The halogen would give them away but it was their only source of illumination. A fall down these steep stones could be fatal.

‘Listen,’ she said, pausing at the bottom. She believed she’d heard a moan or grunt. But then nothing.

They found themselves in an old brick tunnel about eight feet wide. The aqueduct, a square-bottomed trough about two feet across, ran through the middle. It was largely dry, though old iron pipes overhead – the ceiling was six feet above them – dripped water.

Ercole pointed to their left. ‘The reservoir would be there, if the map is correct.’

A rumbling began in the distance and grew in volume. The floor shook. Sachs supposed that it was the subway, nearby, she recalled from the map, but it also occurred to her that Naples was not so very far from Mount Vesuvius, whose volcano she’d read might erupt at any time. Volcanoes equal earthquakes, even the smallest of which might pin her under rubble – leaving her to die the worst death imaginable. Claustrophobia was her big fear.

But the roaring rose to a crescendo, then faded.

Subway. Okay.

They arrived at a fork, the tunnel splitting into three branches, each with its own aqueduct.

‘Where?’

‘I am sorry. I do not know. This part was not on the map.’

Pick one, she thought.

And then she saw that the left branch of the tunnel contained not only an aqueduct but a terracotta pipe, largely broken. Probably an old sewer drain. She was recalling the scatological trace from the Composer’s shoes. ‘This way.’ She began along the damp floor, the smell of mold tickling her throat and reminding of the uranium-processing factory in Brooklyn, site of the Composer’s first murder attempt.

Where are you? She thought to the victim? Where?

They pressed on, walking carefully in the aqueduct until the tunnel ended – in a large, dingy basement, lit dimly from airshafts and from fissures in the ceiling. The aqueduct continued on arched columns to a round stone cylindrical structure, twenty feet across, twenty high. There was no ceiling. A door had been cut into the side.

‘That’s it,’ Ercole whispered. ‘The reservoir.’

They climbed off the aqueduct and down stone stairs to the floor, about ten feet below.

Yes, she could hear a gasping sound from inside. Sachs motioned Ercole to cover the aqueduct they’d come down and the other doorways that opened off the basement. He understood and drew his pistol. His awkward grip told her he rarely shot. But he checked that a round was chambered and the safety catch off. And he was aware of where the muzzle was pointed. Good enough.

A deep breath, another.

Then she spun around the corner, keeping low, and played the light through the room.

The victim was fifteen feet from her, sitting taped in a rickety chair, straining to keep his head raised against the upward tension of the noose. She saw clearly now the mechanism the Composer had rigged – the deadly bass strings running up to a wooden rod hammered into a crack in the wall above the victim’s head, then to another rod and finally down to a bucket filling with water. The weight in the pail would eventually tug the noose tight enough to strangle him.

He squinted his eyes closed against the brilliance of the flashlight.

The room had no other doors and it was clear that the Composer wasn’t present.

‘Come inside, cover the door!’ she barked.

‘Sì!’

She holstered her weapon and ran to the man, who was sobbing. She pulled the gag out of his mouth.

‘Saedumi, saedumi!’

‘You’ll be okay.’ Wondering how much English he spoke.

She had gloves with her but didn’t bother now. Beatrice could print her later to eliminate her friction ridges. She gripped the noose and pulled down, which lifted the bucket, and then she slipped the noose over his head. Slowly she lowered the bucket. Before it reached the floor, though, the stick wedged into a gap between the stones gave way and the pail fell to the floor.

Hell. The water would contaminate any trace on the stone.

But nothing to do now. She turned to the poor man and examined him. His panicked eyes stared from her to the tape binding his arms up to the ceiling and back to her.

‘You’ll be okay. An ambulance is coming. You understand? English?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, yes.’

He didn’t look badly hurt. Now that he was okay, Sachs pulled on latex gloves. She removed her switchblade once more, hit the button. It sprang open. The man recoiled.

‘It’s all right.’ She cut the tape and freed his hands, then feet.

The victim’s eyes were wide and unfocused. He rambled in Arabic.

‘What’s your name?’ Sachs asked. She repeated the question in Arabic. All NYPD officers in Major Cases who had occasion to work counterterrorism knew a half-dozen words and phrases.

‘Ali. Ali Maziq.’

‘Are you injured anywhere, Mr Maziq?’

‘My throat. It is my throat.’ He took to rambling again and his eyes darted once more.

Ercole said, ‘He doesn’t seem too injured.’

‘No.’

‘He is, it seems, quite disoriented, though.’

Tied up by a madman and nearly hanged in an old Roman ruin? No surprises there.

‘Let’s get him upstairs.’

CHAPTER 19

The tactical team arrived.

A dozen SCO officers. They appeared in deadly earnest and were fully confident as they scanned the area and gripped their weapons like true craftsmen.

Sachs stopped them at the entrance. She was wearing the NYPD shield on her belt, gold for detective, which gave her some authority, ambiguous though it might be. The commander asked, ‘FBI?’ A thick accent.

‘Like that,’ she said. Which seemed to satisfy him.

The man was large of body and large of head, which was covered with a fringe of curly red hair, about the same shade as hers. He nodded to her and said, ‘Michelangelo Frasca.’

‘Amelia Sachs.’

He vigorously shook her hand.

She gestured past him to the arriving medical team, a burly man and a woman nearly as imposing – they might have been siblings – and they sat Maziq on a gurney and took his vitals. The medic spent a moment examining the red ligature mark and said something in Italian to his partner and then to Sachs: ‘Is okay, is good. In physicalness. His mind, very groggy. Drunk I would say if he was not Muslim. Maybe it is being drugs the assaulted used.’ They assisted Maziq into the back of the ambulance and had a conversation with Ercole.

The young officer spoke at length to Michelangelo, presumably about what had happened. He gestured toward the entrance.

‘I have told them where to search and that the killer may still be nearby.’

Sachs noted that the men wore black gloves, so she wasn’t worried about fingerprints, and hoods, which would prevent hair contamination. She dug into her pocket and handed Michelangelo a dozen rubber bands.

He looked at her quizzically.

‘Fai così,’ Ercole said, pointing to his feet.

The commander nodded and his eyes seemed impressed. ‘Per le nostre impronte.’

‘Sì.’

‘Buono!’ A laugh. ‘Americana.’

‘Tell them to walk quickly through the entrance room, where we found the table and water bottle, and to avoid the chamber where we got the victim. That’s where most of the evidence will be and we don’t want it contaminated any more.’

Ercole relayed the information, and the big man nodded. He then quickly deployed his troops.

She heard voices behind them. A large crowd had gathered – among them reporters, calling questions. The police ignored the journalists. Uniformed officers strung yellow tape, as in America, and kept back the crowd.

Another van arrived, large and white. The words Polizia Scientifica were on the side. Two men and a woman climbed out and walked to the double doors in the back, opened them. They dressed in white Tyvek jumpsuits, the name of the unit on the right breast and the words Spray Guard over the left. They approached a uniformed officer, who pointed to Sachs and Ercole. The three approached and spoke with Ercole, who, she could tell from his gestures, told them about the scene. The woman glanced at Sachs once or twice during the lengthy explanation.

Sachs said, ‘If I can borrow a suit, I’ll search with them. I can show them exactly where—’

A man’s voice interrupted her. ‘That is not necessary.’

Sachs turned to see the prosecutor, Dante Spiro. He was approaching from behind a clutch of uniformed officers and cars. One officer leapt forward and lifted the yellow tape for him, high so that Spiro did not have to bow down.

‘Procuratore,’ Ercole began.

The man cut him off with a stream of Italian.

The young officer said nothing but looked down and nodded every few seconds as Spiro continued to speak to him.

Ercole said something, nodding to Maziq, sitting in the back of the ambulance now, looking much better.

Again, Spiro shot words his way, clearly unhappy.

‘Sì, Procuratore.’

Then the young officer turned to her. ‘He says we can leave now.’

‘I’d like to search with the team.’

‘No, that is not possible,’ Spiro said.

‘I’m a crime scene officer by profession.’

Michelangelo appeared in the dim doorway. He spotted Spiro and approached. He spoke to him for a moment.

Ercole translated. ‘They have finished the search. No sign of the Composer. They’ve gone down all the aqueducts and searched all the rooms in the basement. There is a supply tunnel that leads to the subway station. No sign he was anywhere there.’

‘The building above the basement.’ She nodded to the structure behind them.

Michelangelo said, ‘Is sealed off with concretes. No entrance is possible from sotto terra.’

As the woman forensic officer walked past her she said, with a smile, ‘We’re going to step the grid.’

Sachs blinked.

‘Yes, we know who you are. We use Ispettore Lincoln Rhyme’s book in our lessons. It is not in Italian but we took turns translating. You are both an inspiration. Welcome to Italy!’

They vanished through the doorway.

Spiro fired another dozen sentences to Ercole, then walked off toward the ancient doorway, pulling on his own blue latex gloves.

Ercole translated, ‘Procuratore Spiro appreciates your assistance and your offer to help with the scene but he thinks it would be best, for continuity’s sake, if the investigation is conducted by Italian law enforcement.’

Sachs decided that to push the matter further would merely embarrass Ercole. He looked desperately to the Mégane and lifted a hand to her shoulder, as if to direct her toward it. Her glance at him had the effect of lowering the limb as if it were in free fall, and she knew he would never try to usher her anywhere again.