Garrett stood and said, “Thank you, sir. I’m sorry about Donatello, but it has nothing to do with the Knights. I promise.”
Marco stood up, shook his hand, and said, “I’ll be in touch.”
Garrett went back downstairs, finding the Turtles, waiting anxiously on the results of his conversation. He said, “It’s okay. They know about Donatello, but it’s okay. I’m still the primary protective detail. I can still initiate.”
Raphael said, “That won’t matter if we don’t get to the drones. Donnie was the man for that.”
Garrett’s laptop chirped on the desk. He picked it up, scrolled a bit, then closed the cover saying, “You guys need to figure that out. I have to go. I’ve got to check on something.”
Chapter 37
Inspector Lia Vairo pulled her car into a spot adjacent to a sprawling greenspace, seeing carabinieri personnel putting up crime scene tape and managing a small crowd. She exited her vehicle and walked to the side door of the apartment complex, flashing her badge at a man there.
Agitated, he said, “You guys can’t start stringing up crime tape all over the place. It’s in a single room. You can’t make this entire building look like a murder scene.”
And she realized he was with the apartment complex. She said, “Sorry, that’s not my job. Not my jurisdiction. All I do is solve the crime.”
She went up the stairs, down the hallway, and saw Jonathan the photographer. She said, “Another one?”
He said, “I’m not sure. I’ll let Rio tell you about it.”
She entered and found the same assistant from the other crime scene bent over a body. Only now, he was on her team. She said, “What do you have, Rio? Same thing?’
He looked up at her from the body and said, “Took you a while to get here.”
She said, “Not all of us live near the EUR. Trastevere is a little longer drive.”
“Trastevere? No kidding. You got a secret international student as a boyfriend?”
She smiled, saying, “No boyfriend, just a bad divorce that left me with the flat. My ex-husband rented it out before the separation. He got everything else, I got the flat.”
He chuckled and said, “Lia Vairo from Trastevere. Never would have figured that.”
She said, “I went to see the owner of this place first, before coming over. It’s a VRBO rental, and the man who rented it is an American.”
“You have him? You know who it is?”
“No. The identification is false. It’s from an online resource that sells ‘novelty identification’ but really sells IDs that duplicate American ones, mainly for college students trying to buy drinks in bars. The owner had no way of telling what was real, and VRBO doesn’t do any background checks to see.”
Rio said, “So no help?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Because of the company’s liability for providing false identification instead of ‘novelties,’ they immediately respond to any law enforcement request, and I’m now waiting on the IP address of the guy who bought this ID. I’ll bet it came from here, in Italy, but the killer is American. I promise.”
Rio said, “We have the DNA from the kiss. If you can find him through the identification he used, all we need is a swab of his mouth.”
Surprised, Lia said, “We got DNA from the kiss on the other body? When did that happen?”
Rio grinned and said, “Yeah, we did. I got the results right before this call, but I don’t know if this is the same guy. It feels the same, but it’s not.”
“Why?”
“For one, this is not the woman’s apartment. The killer rented the place instead of using the woman’s own place like the other three. For another, he or she came to kill. The victim made it about five feet into the place before he wrapped her neck in a cord and squeezed the life out of her.”
“So no sexual assault? Just a killing? That’s like the other ones.”
“Yeah, but this one was planned. It was calculated. You said yourself the others were crimes of passion. A lamp to bash someone’s head, a knife found at the apartment to slit a throat. This time he brought the killing with him. And he murdered someone outside his usual targets. The woman is an immigrant from Africa. A black woman. All of the others were Caucasian and blond.”
“So a copycat?”
Rio stood and said, “I’m not sure, honestly. It’s not his MO. Not a streetwalker’s house, and he’s brought the weapon with him. I agree that the others were because something went wrong, but on this one he came in solely to kill. Maybe he’s changing his MO. Maybe he’s decided that just killing is better than anything else. I don’t know.”
Wearing gloves, he went to the open kitchen window and held up a red cord of about a half-inch in diameter draped across the sill, most of it hanging outside, saying, “This is the killing weapon. And he left it here in the windowsill. Like he wanted us to find it.”
She said, “It’s bright red. What is it?”
Confused, Rio said, “It’s a climbing rope. A kernmantle climbing rope. Nothing more.”
“And he hung it outside the window? Why?”
“Who knows? He left it for a reason, though. He placed it.”
She nodded, then repeated, “It’s red.”
“So? What’s that mean?”
She turned a circle, then said, “In the Bible, there’s a prostitute from Jericho who hid spies from the land of Israel. When the Israelites return to sack Jericho, she’s told to protect herself by hanging a red cord outside of her window. The Israelites saw the cord and spared her life, even though she was a whore. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think it’s the same killer and he used a red cord on purpose. It’s something to do with her being a prostitute.”
“But this cord didn’t spare the woman’s life. It’s the method by which she died. Doesn’t really fit into the biblical story.”
“I know. But he placed the cord outside the window. Maybe he thought by killing her he was sparing her.”
“That makes no sense.”
Lia looked around the room and said, “This guy is crazy. Nothing he does makes sense. Get some DNA off of that rope, and let’s match it.”
A uniformed police officer came up the stairs and said, “Ma’am, we have a couple of United States officials who want to see you.”
Rio stood up, saying, “What?”
The officer said, “I stopped them at the door, but they’re pretty insistent. They want to talk to the officer in charge.”
Lia looked at Rio and said, “More strangeness. What do you think?”
“Can’t hurt to talk to them. But not up here.”
“I agree.” She turned to the officer and said, “Tell them I’ll be down shortly.”
In the park, Garrett heard the words through his tablet and felt like he’d been struck by the hand of God.
She knows why I did it. She knows what this is about.
She had recognized the significance of the rope, and it was a sign. Maybe she could end his agony. Maybe she was the one. Maybe she could break through the spell that had held him in pain since Syria.