Rania explained, “The title of a speech that a politician in Rome gave at some public forum. It has been widely reprinted. ‘The Burial Hour’ refers to the asylum-seeker problem. Many of the citizens in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, France, feel that they are endangered—they are being buried by the hordes and hordes of migrants pouring into their countries. Like a landslide, crushing them.
“Accordingly, the citizens of the destination countries, like Italy, they are increasingly hostile to the poor souls.” Now she was speaking to Rossi. “There are some who believe that the police, for instance, do not investigate crimes against the immigrants as energetically as they would crimes against citizens or tourists. This Composer may be psychotic but he is also clever. He knows about these attitudes of many people here—many officials—and he believes you won’t work so hard to stop him. So he hunts refugees.”
Rossi said slowly, “Yes, I have heard people say that. But you would be wrong in suggesting we don’t care about the victims. I assure you we will investigate this crime just as carefully as we did the first one. Just as carefully as if the victim were a priest or the prime minister.” He then could not help but smile, it seemed. “Perhaps more diligently than if he were a prime minister.”
Rania clearly did not see the humor. “I do not observe many officers here.” She looked around.
“This is Naples. We have street crime. We have Camorra. There are recent reports of terrorist cells planning operations throughout the EU, including Italy. We are too little butter spread on too much bread.”
She was unmoved by his words. Her eyes again dipped to the sheet, now quite bloody, and she said nothing more.
The Scientific Police van arrived. From it climbed the officer Sachs remembered from the scene where they rescued Ali Maziq from the aqueduct reservoir room.
We’re going to step the grid…
They got to work but after an hour of diligent searching, there seemed precious little to show. The footprints had been obliterated near the victim, though some were recovered near where the car had been parked, behind the line of trees. A few Libyan dinars and a Post-it were recovered from under the body. No phone or prepaid card or wallet. One witness came forward, an NGO worker from a charity based in London that helped in refugee camps around the Mediterranean. He had not seen the actual killing but he had glimpsed the Composer’s face as he paused over the body, after leaving the noose.
The worker couldn’t add any details, but Rossi summoned his uniformed associate Giovanni, with whom he spoke for a moment. The officer went to his Flying Squad car and returned a moment later with a laptop. He loaded a program and Sachs saw it was SketchCop FACETTE, a good facial reconstruction software program. Though the FBI prefers actual artists, even now in this high-tech age, most law enforcement agencies found that people with suitable talent are hard to find, and so they used this or a similar program.
In ten minutes an image of the Composer was complete—if pretty generic, in Sachs’s opinion—and was uploaded to the Questura, where officers in turn sent it to police throughout Italy. Sachs would receive a copy too.
The evidence was packed into plastic bags and delivered into Ercole Benelli’s waiting, and gloved, hands. He filled out a chain-of-custody card then looked around him, studying the scene. After a moment he said that he would place the evidence in the trunk of the Mégane. He wandered off in that direction.
Rossi received a call and, taking it, walked away from the scene, gesturing Bubbico after him.
Sachs was looking over the camp. What a sprawling, chaotic place it was. Many blue tents but also improvised shelters. Stacks of firewood, laundry lines from which flags of faded cloth dangled, hundreds of empty cardboard cartons, discarded water bottles and empty food tins. People sitting on rugs, on wooden cartons, on dirt. Mostly cross-legged. Some were squatting. Everyone seemed thin, and more than a few appeared to be ill. Many of the lighter-complexioned were badly sunburned.
So many people. Thousands of them. A flood.
No, a landslide.
The Burial Hour…
A voice startled her. “Ah, it appears that you too, Detective Sachs, suffer from a disability.”
She turned and found herself face-to-face with Dante Spiro.
“Your disability is being hard of hearing.”
She blinked at these words.
He slipped a cheroot into his mouth. Being outside, he lit it and inhaled deeply, then put the gold lighter away. “You were ordered to limit your work to crime laboratory assistance. And acting as an Arabic-language interpreter. You are not doing the former and you are not doing the latter. You are here in the thick of an investigation.” He looked at her gloved hands and the rubber bands on her feet.
Dante Spiro will not be happy. But I will deal with him later.
Later is now, I’m afraid, Rhyme.
He approached. But, never one to shrink from a fight, Sachs walked up to him, stood just feet away. She was inches taller.
Another person approached. Ercole Benelli.
“And you! Forestry Officer!” The words were contemptuous. “She is not under my command but you are. Letting this woman onto the scene, out in public—exactly what I told you should not happen—is completely unacceptable!” As if the words didn’t have enough edge in a foreign language, he switched to Italian. The young officer’s face turned red and he lowered his eyes to the ground.
“Procuratore,” he began.
“Silenzio!”
They were interrupted by a voice that called urgently from behind the yellow tape. “Procuratore Spiro!”
He turned, noted that the man addressing him was a reporter, one of several at the police tape line. Since the crime had occurred outside the chain-link fence, the reporters could get closer to the action than if it had happened inside. “Niente domande!” He gestured with his hand abruptly.
As if he hadn’t spoken, the reporter, a young man in a dusty, rumpled suit coat and tight jeans, moved closer and lobbed questions to him.
At which Spiro stopped, completely still, and turned to the reporter. He asked something in Italian, apparently seeking clarification.
Ercole translated in a whisper. “The reporter is asking the prosecutor’s response to a rumor that he is being praised in Rome for his foresight in asking two renowned American forensic detectives to come to Italy to help solve the crime.”
Spiro replied, according to Ercole, that he was unaware of such rumors.
The young officer continued. It seemed that Spiro had put aside his ego and was considering what was best for the citizens of Italy, in protecting them from this psychotic killer. “Other, lesser, prosecutors would have been too territorial to bring such investigators here from overseas but not Spiro. He knew it was important to use Americans to get into the mind of a killer from their own country.”
Spiro answered several more questions.
Ercole said, “They ask was it true that he himself deduced that the killer would strike here and nearly made it in time to catch the Composer. He answers that yes, that is true.”