The smoking station.
Sachs supposed that, unable to smoke indoors many places in Italy, nicotine addicts would migrate to places like this: decks and patios. The view was spectacular. You could see the entire expanse of Naples Bay, the misty form of the volcano to one side and, to the other, a massive castle, which was nearby.
Sachs walked from the smoking station around the corner of one of the sheds, secluded from view. There was a bench here, where Garry and Frieda would have settled in for their limonarono—or whatever the gerund of that verb might be.
Natalia said, in a weak voice, “The attack occurred over there.” She pointed to the roof of the adjoining building, delineated by yellow police tape. “I will never look at this place again the same way. So pleasant once. And now, so terrible.”
They walked to the tape. There was no gap between this building and the one next door; they were separated only by a brick wall, about three feet high. Looking left, Sachs and Ercole could see another cordoned-off area of police tape on the adjoining structure, where the actual crime had occurred. This was out of sight of the smoking station. A logical place for an attack.
“Let’s go.”
“But the tape!” Ercole whispered.
She smiled at him. Mindful of her joints, Sachs sat on the wall and eased onto the neighboring roof. Ercole sighed then leapt over. Natalia remained on the roof of her building. The pebbles covering the tar paper meant that they could find no footprints, so they didn’t worry about booties or rubber bands. Pulling on latex gloves, Sachs took samples of the stones and flecks of tar from the place where the assault had occurred and the route leading to it.
When she was finished, she looked across the street and to the south at a tall building a half block away.
“What is that?”
Ercole noted the modern high-rise. “A hotel. The NV, I believe. A very nice place.”
She squinted into the sun. “It looks like that’s a parking garage.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“About level with the roof here. Let’s find out if they have a CCTV, and if it’s pointed this way.”
“Yes, yes, good. Many parking structures have video security. I’ll follow up on that.”
She nodded and they returned to the smoking station and she performed a similar evidence collection there, as Natalia watched with curiosity. “It is like that show CSI. Isn’t it?”
“Very much like that,” Sachs said.
In ten minutes they were finished. Sachs and Ercole thanked the young woman. She shook their hands firmly and opened the door for them to leave. “Please, I am sure Garry could not have done this. In my heart I know.” Her eyes darkened and she glanced in the direction of the building next door. “Those men, those Serbians, you should look once more at them. I read people very good. I do not trust them at all.”
Chapter 30
She is free.”
“Free?”
Beatrice Renza continued speaking to Ercole Benelli. “She recently has broken up from a long relationship. But it had been ending for some time.”
“Some time?”
“Why are you repeating my statements as questions?”
Honestly. This woman. Ercole’s lips grew taut. “I don’t understand. Who are you speaking about?”
Though he had an idea. No, he knew exactly.
“Surely you do. Daniela Canton, of course.”
He began to repeat the name, as a question, but stopped fast, lest he give the brittle woman more ammunition to fire his way. (Besides, as a police officer, he well knew that repeating questions is virtually an admission of guilt: “Poaching? Me? How can you say that I’m poaching?”) Instead, a different inquiry: “Why are you telling me this?”
They stood in the laboratory on the ground floor of the Questura. The situation room for the Composer case was presently devoid of Ercole’s colleagues. Only Amelia Sachs, Rhyme and his aide Thom were there—co-conspirators in the Garry Soames matter—so he felt confident in slipping into the lab to ask Beatrice to analyze the evidence they’d collected at the scene of the sexual assault, the roof of Natalia’s apartment. Before he had been able to ask her to do this, however, she had regarded him with a tilted head and, perhaps seeing his lengthy glance toward Daniela, up the hall, had fired away.
She is free…
“It was a sad story.” Apparently Beatrice had no interest in responding to his question about why she was sharing Daniela’s story. She pushed her green-framed glasses higher on the bridge of her nose. “He was a pig,” she snapped. “Her former lover.”
Ercole was offended, for two reasons: One was this prickly woman’s assumption that he had any interest whatsoever in Daniela. The other was his affection for pigs.
Still, interesting: Daniela. Unattached.
“I hadn’t wondered about her status.”
“No,” the lab analyst said, clearly not believing him. Beatrice had a round face, framed by a mass of unruly black hair, presently tucked under a plastic bonnet. She was pretty in a baker’s-daughter sort of way, Ercole reflected, though he knew no bakers, nor the offspring of any. Short of stature, she had a figure that could be described as, well, bustily squat. Her feet pointed outward and she tended to waddle when she walked, making a pronounced shuffling sound if she wore booties. Daniela moved through the halls with the grace of…what? Well, Beatrice had brought up the animal metaphor. Daniela moved with the grace of a lean cheetah. A lean and sexy cheetah.
Beatrice was more a sloth or koala bear.
Then, realizing the comparison was unkind and unfair, Ercole blushed in shame.
Pulling gloves on and taking the evidence bags, Beatrice said, “She was with Arci—Arcibaldo—for three years. He was somewhat younger. As you can see, Daniela is thirty-five.”
That much? No, he could not see it, not at all. He was surprised. But he was intrigued that she liked younger men. Ercole being thirty.
“He wished to be a race car driver but that was a dream, of course; driving is not in his blood.”
Unlike Amelia Sachs’s, he thought ruefully, and reminded himself once more to take the Mégane in for a checkup. The gearbox did not sound healthy.
Beatrice said, “He merely dabbled at the sport, Arci did. But he was a handsome man.”
“Was? Did he die in an accident?”
“No. By ‘was’ I mean that he is in the past tense to Daniela. As a handsome driver, however mediocre, he had plenty of opportunities for bunga-bunga.”
The expression, popularized by a former Italian prime minister, defied exact definition but, then, a likely meaning could be easily ascribed.
Beatrice looked at the bags and set them on examination tables. She noted the chain-of-evidence cards (his name only, not Amelia’s) and placed her signature below his. “He worked for a racing team in Modena. Doing basic things, assisting mechanics, shepherding cars here and there. What happened was that he and Daniela returned from Eurovision—”