Viper Read online

  ‘I’m sure it would,’ laughed Luella, well used to flattery, ‘but for now I would like it sniffing over those boxes as we unpack them. Any chance?’

  ‘Your wish is my command.’ He added a perfect, military-trained bow.

  Luella’s colleague Giulietta was fitted into the harness containing the antenna and got ready to start her pre-mapped walk of the grid. Gallo finished wiring the monitor and the rest of the rig.

  ‘One minute!’ shouted Luella, doing a final systems check before giving her colleague the cue to start walking. ‘Okay, off you go.’

  Every hour, Giulietta switched with her other colleague, Emilio. Every two hours they took a break and talked. Every half-hour it rained. Every three-quarters of an hour Dino Gallo suggested different restaurants, clubs, parks and places he would like to take Luella to. After six hours she was on the verge of giving in and consenting to dinner.

  Then the call came.

  Luella took off her rubber gloves, grateful for the cool air on her hands. She pulled the cellphone out of the pocket of her overalls.

  The voice on the other end – the coordinator from her office – said she was being put through to Capitano Tomms, who was at Sorrentino’s home.

  Luella listened carefully but couldn’t believe what she’d been told.

  Bernardo was dead.

  73

  Santa Lucia, Napoli

  Sorrentino had been found by his housekeeper.

  Dead in the middle of his waterbed.

  Blood and water all over the place.

  Bella Di Lazio had taken her weekly money off the worktop, rung the cops and gone home.

  She wouldn’t weep for him. He’d been mean and arrogant. Hadn’t given her a pay rise or a tip in the two years she’d worked for him. Good riddance.

  Less than two hours after Bella had gone, the ME had already completed his visit.

  Sylvia Tomms arrived with her brain still reeling from all the other developments – Creed; the Tortoricci murder; the killings at the Castellani camp; and of course Franco, the runaway cousin.

  Lieutenant Marco Vassopolus – known by all who couldn’t remember how to say or spell his surname as Marco V – showed her around the scene. ‘Housekeeper found him like this. Bullet wound to the skull. Silencer. No forced entry.’

  ‘ME give you time of death?’

  Marco shook his head. ‘Still fixing it. He did a partial on the body, said by the cooling he reckoned it might be ten to twelve hours ago.’

  Sylvia checked her watch. ‘Late night, early morning by the sound of it.’ She walked the protective transparent sheets around the deflated, blood-soaked waterbed where the corpse still lay. It looked like Sorrentino had fallen into the mouth of a giant man-eating plant. Something straight out of Beetlejuice.

  ‘The guy was a skunk, but he didn’t deserve this.’ She bent over the body. ‘When will the van be here to move him?’

  ‘Next thirty minutes. Morgue said they’ll ring when it’s on its way.’

  Sylvia peered at Sorrentino’s waxy face. His jet-black hair was now plastered in the crimson gel of his own blood. ‘Hard to think that he was such a playboy. Tried it on with everything in a dress. Even me. Guess dying on his bed is somehow appropriate.’

  ‘Exhibits team said they found a lot of – you know – erotica, around the place.’

  ‘Erotica?’ Sylvia laughed. ‘Any chance of being more precise?’

  He coloured a little. ‘Lubricants, lotions, velvet handcuffs –’

  ‘Velvet, eh? Imagine if we had those as standard issue. Any letters or diaries?’

  ‘No letters. We found some address books. Not one black book, but two – well, actually they were red and green address books.’

  ‘Let me guess, one for work, one for pleasure?’

  ‘Both pleasure. The green one was for women he’d slept with – complete with ratings out of ten – the red one was for those he was still hunting.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I guess all of us reds can heave a sigh of relief.’ Sylvia grimaced as she looked closer at Sorrentino’s empty eyes and pale-blue lips.

  ‘The bed’s blown out but he wasn’t popped on the mattress,’ said Marco. ‘Look near the edge and you can see where the perp slit it with something after he dropped the vic there.’

  Marco always talked in American cop jargon and it irritated the hell out of her. She’d have picked another lieutenant if there had been any others to pick. Some of her homicide squad were currently working more cases than she was, and to top it all Pietro had called in sick.

  ‘Where exactly was he when he got shot?’ asked Sylvia, noticing no powder burn marks on Sorrentino’s face. ‘From the size and shape of the flesh wound it looks as though he was more than a metre away. Am I right?’

  ‘Doc said the same – though he didn’t stay long. He had another case to get to. Said he’d do his notes on this one when he got back to the lab.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Larusso.’

  Sylvia slapped her forehead. ‘Was he sober?’

  Marco V shrugged. It was about as diplomatic as he could manage.

  Sylvia said what they were both thinking. ‘That man’s a disgrace. He should run a wine cellar not a Medical Examiner’s desk. What else did he say?’

  Marco motioned his boss around the circular bed towards the doorway. ‘See the spatter up the wall? Larusso thinks the shooter took Sorrentino out just after he entered the bedroom. Light switch is interior left side of the door. Il Grande Leone comes in the darkened room, pops on the switch, takes a few paces forward and then, blam! That’s the way he thinks it went down.’

  Sylvia studied the spatter marks. She wasn’t so sure. Sorrentino was a tall guy. Six foot, maybe six-one. The blood had sprayed vertically, not horizontally. ‘Look at the cornice and the ceiling,’ she said. ‘We’ve got spray up there and…’ she looked closer, wrinkled her face and added, ‘what also looks like part of his once great brain. See the grey matter, clinging to the bottom of the cornice?’

  Marco cringed. ‘I see it.’

  Sylvia paced around again; her feet in slip-ons, similar to the plastic clogs surgeons wear. ‘Get the techies to send me the first reports when they’ve run a laser trajectory kit over it.’ She pulled up beneath the blood spray and examined the area at her feet. ‘This carpet’s all fucked up with blood, but look at the wall. This brown spot here around waist height looks like something else, maybe a trace of faeces. Did the great La-fucking-Russo sniff this one out?’

  Marco shook his head.

  Sylvia took in the room from the killer’s perspective.

  Walked it through. ‘Sorrentino was made to stand here by the shooter. Then – well, then he literally had the shit frightened out of him before he was killed. He’d pressed himself against the wall, scared to move.’ She pointed to the dead scientist. ‘When you move him, you’ll see he messed himself. Our ME should have seen that. And if he had been sober and not aching to run for his next drink, then maybe he would have done.’ Something else was wrong. A shot from close up should have blown a bigger hole in the wall, not to mention a bigger hole in Sorrentino’s head. ‘Forget what the Prof said. Bernardo wasn’t killed straight away. It wasn’t that kind of killing.’ Her eyes roamed across the room. ‘Even more interesting is the question of where our shooter had been standing.’

  Marco was still staring at the stains of blood, brains and shit. ‘Why? Why does it matter that much where he was? Someone blew Sorrentino’s brains out and dumped him on his bed.’

  Sylvia wagged a finger. ‘It certainly does matter. For a start it tells us the killer is a man, not a woman. Look at the carpet pile and the blood flow. There are no drag marks across the carpet. Someone picked up a six-foot-tall, dead man, carried him several metres and dumped him on the bed. Not many women can do that.’

  ‘I’ve dated a couple,’ he joked. ‘Not that that’s anything to brag about.’

  ‘As may be, Romeo. But I doubt any of them
could put a bullet in your brain from across the bedroom with one single shot.’

  Marco started to get the picture. ‘The killer was a pro?’

  Sylvia wondered how Marco had made lieutenant. ‘Another thing; given most of the blood is on and around the bed, leaking out towards the wall, our man may well have got himself covered in it. You can bet someone’s burning old clothes tonight, if they haven’t done so already.’

  Marco V started making notes. He’d have street dumpsters, house garbage sacks, garden fires and local drains checked straight away.

  Sylvia walked and talked from the doorway to the corpse. ‘I think our killer was waiting in the dark. I’d say he stuck his gun to Sorrentino’s head when the light came on. Then he moved him over here.’ She stepped gingerly to the spot where the carpet was stained the heaviest. ‘While Sorrentino stood here, the gun still on him, the shooter stepped back and made himself comfortable on the bed. I think for a minute or so he just sat there and enjoyed scaring the living crap out of him.’

  ‘Forensics said they’d come back to the bed, they’re still dusting other parts of the apartment.’

  Sylvia moved back to the corpse and examined it once more. ‘Then, after he’d had his moment of fun, he shot him. Just the once. Dead centre in the forehead from nearly three metres away. Hence the blood and brain sprayed up there on the wall and ceiling.’

  ‘So, I’m right. It certainly sounds like a pro job.’

  ‘You’re an annoying little shit, but yes, you are right.’ Sylvia pointed up at the wall in front of her. ‘Now, when forensics dig the bullet out of that wall, I want to know its entire ballistic history and I want to know it in Ferrari-fast time. I’m betting that for once it’s Sorrentino’s work and not his play that got him into trouble. And I also bet that slug matches those from the victims at the Castellani campsite.’

  Sylvia had seen enough. She stepped out of the crime scene and shuffled off her gloves and changed shoes. On the way to the car she checked her phone and picked up a message from Susanna Martinelli, a coordinator in the Incident Room. They finally had an ID on the second victim found buried near Vesuvius.

  It was nineteen-year-old Gloria Pirandello.

  She’d been missing for six years and was another one of the names on Creed’s list.

  74

  Stazione dei carabinieri, Castello di Cisterna

  The briefing that afternoon turned out to be one of the longest Jack had attended. During it, he literally found himself reading the writing on the wall.

  Creed’s picture had been removed from the Priority Board. He was no longer a suspect.

  Franco Castellani’s photograph was ringed in red marker – the search for him had drawn a blank but was ongoing. Surveillance was still on his cousin Paolo, and there were reports that someone fitting Franco’s description had been seen boarding a train to Rome. Security cameras were being checked.

  Sorrentino’s famous face and crime-scene pictures from his apartment filled a new Evidence Board and a separate but linked team was working that line of inquiry and dealing with the press. Sorrentino was certainly going to make front-page news. Few people doubted that it was the handiwork of the man who had killed the missing women. Taking out Sorrentino would certainly slow down their progress on identifying victims at the dig.

  The crimes at the Castellani campsite had their own board and Jack couldn’t help but feel saddened by looking again at the young faces of Rosa Novello and Filippo Valdrano.

  The Jane Doe burned in the pit still hadn’t been identified. The body shots of her were so graphic that some of the team struggled to look at them.

  Sylvia finished handing out the actions, then turned to what Jack found the most intriguing board of all. The one dedicated to the murder of Alberta Tortoricci. ‘What I say to you all now is in confidence and doesn’t leave this room. No gossip in the canteen, no chatting to your friends outside.’ She pointed to a portrait shot of Alberta Tortoricci taken almost ten years ago, a time when her hair was much longer and her face was free of the worry of having met and testified against the mob. ‘This thirty-eight-year-old woman was the prime witness in the trial of Bruno Valsi, the son-in-law of Camorra Capo Fredo Finelli. Here’s the timeline – Valsi comes out of Poggioreale after a five stretch and within five days Alberta turns up dead. But this lady isn’t just killed. She’s tortured, mutilated and then, after death, her body is set on fire. I hope no one is struggling to see the connections.’

  The room filled with mutterings. Sylvia let them die down before she continued. ‘They found her body in Scampia, rolled in an old carpet and dumped in rubble near a disused factory. They’d electrocuted her. Broken more than twenty of her teeth, then sliced off thirteen centimetres of her tongue.’

  The audience, hardened though they were, audibly registered their disgust.

  ‘Finally, after all that, they’d doused her in paraffin and burned her to the bone.’

  A small man near the front raised his hand, ‘Was she alive when they set her on fire?’

  ‘No. I met the ME – and earlier this morning I spoke briefly to Lorenzo Pisano, who’s heading the inquiry. They tell me she died of “asphyxiation, caused by the cessation of breathing and heart activity ”. Maybe some small mercy in that.’

  There were more murmurings. Pisano was carabinieri top brass. One of the few public figures brave enough not only to spearhead the battle against the Camorra, but to be seen to spearhead it.

  ‘At the end of this meeting, Major Pisano has prepared a special briefing and some of you will be asked to attend that. There is a possibility – nothing more, nothing less at this stage – that the Tortoricci death may be linked to our case.’

  Questions and comments flew thick and fast. How could a mob revenge-killing be linked to their serial killer? Was there any significance in the fact that no women disappeared, or were tortured and burned, during Bruno Valsi’s five years in prison? Opinions were divided. During that time frame there’d been several unsolved murders and missing women that they’d not even considered. Many saw the hand of the Camorra everywhere but nobody could point to anything amounting to forensic or circumstantial evidence to connect Valsi to any of the murders, except that of Tortoricci.

  Jack was also in two minds. The use of torture on Alberta Tortoricci was consistent with his profile of a serial sadistic murderer, but the post-mortem burning of the corpse threatened to be a red herring. Then again – take it away, and would they even be connecting the cases?

  Jack was still answering the question as he, Sylvia and two of her team made their way across the city to the briefing with anti-Camorra supremo, Major Lorenzo Pisano. Maybe he could answer the most worrying question of all. How do you hunt down a serial killer when he’s surrounded by a mob of other killers?

  75

  Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio

  Flies buzzed hungrily around the remains of the slain fawn, their grey wings tipped with blood. Franco Castellani watched with fascination as they disappeared into its wounds and gorged themselves on meat and plasma.

  He’d hacked off chunks of the animal, cooked them on a camp fire and eaten them. Now he felt sick. He guessed the flames hadn’t been hot enough to roast the meat properly.

  Worse than anything, his throat felt as though he’d swallowed a ball of fibreglass. His head ached and pounded. He was desperately thirsty and was out of water. The big irony was that it was now raining again. Absolutely pouring down.

  There were shops a few kilometres from where he was hiding. He knew them well. He’d stolen from them as a kid – biscuits and sweets – and he was fully prepared to steal from them again.

  His feet squished in mud as he trudged through the sodden undergrowth. He soon felt drained and faint. He settled on a rock beneath the shelter of a cluster of pines and giant old maples. His stomach growled and then twisted itself in painful knots. Franco got to his feet and threw up. He felt better for a second and then hurled again. For the next ten minutes h
e retched continuously. Afterwards, he slumped in the undergrowth near the piles of vomit and passed out.

  Visions came in his state of delirium. Images of Rosa, lying naked in the back of the car. Her eyes as big as saucers. Her mouth open in a perfect O. He wished he’d touched her mouth; put his fingers on those lips – plump and red against her china-white skin. He reached out in his mind and it was his mother, not Rosa, who reached back. He was a toddler now, waking in bed. Mother’s hand brushed his perfect baby face and she told him how beautiful he was. His father called – a deep voice full of gravel and grit – and mother’s hand vanished. A flash of blue jeans and an open white shirt. The smell of cigarettes and cologne. Then everything went dark. Too dark. No touch – no contact. A child’s cry filled the darkness. Voices faded. Franco strained to remember their faces – their eyes, hair colour, the shape of their mouths – but he couldn’t. He had nothing. He was alone again.

  The rain touched his lips and reminded him of his thirst. He got to his knees and felt the sodden earth soaking through his jeans. He was covered in vomit and mud. He stood and the world swirled. His heart drummed a deep bass warning through his chest. Slowly he weaved his way across the parkland, Vesuvius boiling silently behind him, rain clouds stretching their grey spectral arms from above him.

  There were voices nearby, he could hear them clearly. Police voices, carabinieri. He’d heard them several times, even seen the troops on a couple of occasions. They were working in the taped-off area where the bodies had been found. They looked stupid, digging – like they were planting potatoes.

  Franco put his hand to the back of his jeans and pulled out the old Glock.

  It was fully loaded and the safeties off.

  He’d kill them if he had to.

  In fact, it’d be his pleasure.

  76

  Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale (ROS)