Rhyme could see, however, they were not enough for an identification.
But he turned to Beatrice, who nodded knowingly. She had anticipated him. She typed at the keyboard and a moment later another print appeared, in a separate screen, beside the partials from the trash bin. They were the Composer’s other prints, pulled from the leaves on the branch where he’d spied on Ali Maziq at dinner the night he was kidnapped at the bus stop.
“This might be a moment or several.” She began playing Rubik’s Cube with the two sets of prints, trying to place them together, enlarging and shrinking, rotating them, moving them from side to side. The room was silent, every eye on the screen.
She adjusted her elaborate, green-framed glasses, studying it carefully. She spoke in Italian.
Ercole said, “She believes this is the Composer’s print, three partials combined into one nearly whole.”
Beatrice began to type fast as a machine gun. She said something in Italian. Ercole turned to Rhyme and Sachs. “She has sent it already to Eurodac, Interpol, Scotland Yard, and IAFIS, in the United States.” Beatrice sat back but kept her eyes focused like gun muzzles on the print.
Spiro was about to ask a question but Ercole said, “And I asked the owner of the station but he saw no one at the trash bin. And his employees did not either.”
The prosecutor nodded with an expression that explained that this was to have been his question. He opened his mouth once more.
Ercole said, “And no CCTV.”
“Ah.”
After two excruciating minutes, a noise interrupted. A beep from Beatrice’s computer. She bent to the screen and nodded.
“Ecco. Il Compositore.”
She turned the monitor toward them.
The face of a bearded, shaggy-haired man was on the screen. It was a Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Sheriff’s Office mug shot. He was pudgy and stared at the camera with piercing brown eyes.
Below was the text that accompanied the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System report. “His name is Stefan Merck, thirty years old. He’s a mental patient, committed indefinitely for assault and attempted murder. He escaped from the hospital three weeks ago.”
Chapter 55
Amelia Sachs, on her phone, turned back to the room and announced, “I’ve got the director of the mental hospital in Pennsylvania. She’s Dr. Sandra Coyne. Doctor, you’re on speaker.”
“Yes, hello. Let me understand. You’re in Italy? And this is about Stefan Merck?”
“That’s right,” Sachs said. And explained what her patient had been up to.
The woman reacted with silence, presumably stunned. Finally she spoke. “Oh, my,” she said in a husky voice after a moment. “Those kidnappings in Naples. Yes, they made the news here. The stories said the crimes were modeled after one in New York, I think. But it never occurred to us that Stefan might be the one behind them.”
Rhyme asked, “What’s his diagnosis?”
“Schizophrenic personality, bipolar, severe anxiety disorder.”
“How did he escape?”
“We’re a medium-security facility. And Stefan had been on perfect behavior since he’d been here. He had grounds privileges and apparently some very careless landscapers left a shovel outside. He found it and dug under the chain link.”
“He was committed for attempted murder?”
“At another facility, yes. He permanently injured him. He was found incompetent to stand trial.”
Rossi said, “I am an investigator here, in Naples. Please, Doctor. How could he have paid for this, the trip? He has resources?”
“His mother died years ago, his father disappeared. There was some trust money and he’s had some relatives visit recently, an aunt and uncle. They might have given him something.”
“Can we get their names?” Sachs asked.
“Yes, I’ll find them in the files.” She took down Sachs’s contact information and said she’d send the information as soon as they hung up.
“Is there anything you can think of,” Sachs asked, “that might help us understand why he’s doing this?”
After a pause, the woman said, “Stefan has his own reality. His world is a world of sounds and music. Nothing else matters to him. I’m sorry to say we don’t have the money or authority to give patients like him access to what would help. In Stefan’s case, instruments or the Internet. He’s told me for years he’s starved for sounds. He was never dangerous, never threatening, but something must have pushed him even further from reality.” A pause, then she said, “You want to know the kind of person you’re dealing with here? In one session he told his therapist he was very depressed. And why? Because he didn’t have a recording of Jesus’s crucifixion.”
Those words resonated with Rhyme. He sometimes imagined walking the grid at famous historical crime scenes, using modern forensic techniques to analyze the crimes. Calvary was perhaps number one on his list.
Sachs asked, “Why Italy? Any connection here?”
“Nothing from his past. But I do know that just before he escaped, in one session, he kept referring to a special woman in his life.”
“Someone with an Italian connection? Can we talk to her?”
A laugh. “That would be pretty difficult. It turned out he was referring to a three-thousand-year-old mythological being. Euterpe, one of the nine muses in Greek and Roman lore.”
“The muse of music,” Ercole said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Sachs asked if there were any special foods he might eat, any special interests he had—anything that might help them find stores or places he would tend to go.
She could think of nothing, except to add the curious comment that Stefan didn’t care about the taste of food. Only the sound of eating. He preferred crunchy foods to soft.
Hardly helpful, from an investigative perspective.
Rhyme asked if she had pictures of Stefan other than the mug shot.
“Yes, let me find them. Give me an email.”
Rossi recited the address.
A moment later they appeared, a half-dozen images depicting a stout, intelligent-looking young man with perceptive eyes.
Spiro thanked her.
The woman added, “Please, obviously, he’s suffered a break, a bad one. But until now, he’s always been eminently reasonable. With these kidnappings, he’s become dangerous. That’s clear. But if you find him please, before you hurt him, just try to talk.”
“We’ll do our best,” Sachs said.
Disconnecting the call, Rossi muttered, “Try to talk? To a man who didn’t think twice about sniping at two officers?”
Spiro gazed at the pictures of the kidnapper. In a soft voice he said, “What are you up to, amico mio? How does your assault on these poor souls in New York and in Naples help you find comfort?”