Conor Fitzgerald: Fatal Touch

Caterina took some crime scene tape and went over to the pile of cobblestones, and stared at them blankly, looking for their significance. Inspector Panebianco, who had not said hello, was standing beside Blume and taking copious notes.

She looked at the notebook in her hand, and, without removing her latex gloves, rapidly sketched the piazza, including the two trees, the restaurant, a bar, a potted sacred fig, the cars parked in herringbone formation in the middle of the piazza; she counted the cars, counted the bolted-down tables and potted plants outside the restaurant, and counted the windows of the buildings overlooking the scene. The cornice along the roof of the tall pink building was a strange white, and she realized the sun was about to clear the rooftops behind. She would have to phone Elia soon, make sure he was OK. As she counted the windows, a pair of brown shutters swung open and a head bobbed out, then back in again. When it reappeared, it was in the company of two more. The three heads gave a friendly nod to the shutter to the left as it opened and another head appeared.

She looked at the cairn of cobblestones, neatly piled there as if for a well-organized riot later that afternoon. She picked one from the top, turned it over, and glared at its gray underside. Was she supposed to be looking for blood, matted hair, bone fragments? Maybe the killer used a cobblestone to batter the victim, but what sort of killer would then put the weapon back in the pile, ready for discovery? Throw it into the river, sure; dump it in a garbage container, maybe, or even just roll it under a parked car.

If the Commissioner was testing her endurance or obedience, she was not going to fail. She checked thirty of the elongated cubes forming the top of the pile, putting aside two with strange chipping on their sides. The idea that a killer had restacked a neat pile after bludgeoning his victim to death in the middle of a piazza surrounded by sixty windows and doors was ridiculous.

The photographer was taking shots of a spot on the ground. He seemed to be moving slowly, but Caterina realized that in the minute or so she watched him, he had taken at least half a dozen separate pictures, all of them close-ups. They were setting up a sort of tent structure around the body, which was largely obscured from overhead by the magnolia tree and from street view by the parked cars, but more and more brown shutters were opening and more heads were looking out. The sun struck the upper stories of the pink building in front, and the halogen lights of the technicians suddenly seemed sickly and yellowish. More uniformed officers had arrived, and the entrances to the piazza were properly sealed off now. The technicians were packing up, and Panebianco was nowhere to be seen.

The Commissioner called her name, inviting her over. She braced herself. She was not afraid of seeing a dead body, but it would be the first she would look at as a murder investigator.

“His skull is caved in from behind,” said Blume as she reached him. He bent down and lightly stroked the curly white hair at the back of the prostrate figure. “You can feel the concave indent here.” He cupped his hand slightly, making his fingers disappear. “Want to feel?”

“No thanks,” said Caterina.

“Not for fun,” said Blume. “Put your hand there. Touch the damage. You need to know.”

She bent down, pushing her satchel behind her back, put her hand at the back of the dead man’s white head, wrinkling her nose against the powerful smell of alcohol, urine, and something else.

“Deeper,” ordered Blume. “That’s the foramen magnum, where you have your fingers now, which is the natural hollow for the spinal column. Move your fingers up to the occiput… There!” he said as Caterina shuddered, closed her eyes, and almost lost her balance. “You’ve found it. It’s almost as if the foramen magnum just continued higher up into the skull than it should, but if you put your index finger in it now you can feel the circular edges. It’s like a divot from a bad golf shot.”

Caterina completed the examination, then stood up, and ripped off her latex glove. Smiling, Blume took the glove and held out a new one for her, which he seemed to have ready in his hand.

“You need to keep them on while we’re here,” he said.

“Of course, I don’t know why I did that. It was stupid.”

“You’re doing great. Find any suspicious stones?”

“No. I don’t think so. Two, maybe. But unlikely.”

“Don’t forget to give them to the technicians before they go,” said Blume. “But for now, I want you just to stand here. Do you pray?”

“Sometimes.”

“Really?” said Blume. “I don’t. Nothing out there to pray to. But I find it helps if you just stand as if you were praying. It gives a bit of respect back to the victim and helps empty your mind of noisy thoughts. It’s not the same thing as concentrating. Concentration is what we do next.”

He stood there, hands behind his back, head bowed, and she did the same, conscious of the risk that this could be a humiliating initiation rite and Rospo might right now be snapping photographs of her solemn, prayerful pose for the office bulletin board.

But she had to believe the Commissioner would not treat her like that. So she stood beside him, and did not turn or raise her head. The corpse staring up at them from the ground showed no visible signs of injury on this side, no blood, no bruises. His arms were at his sides and his legs were placed neatly, but that could have been the solicitude of the two policemen who had let him down gently. Green paper bags, like the ones her mother brought onions home in, had been put over his hands. He was wearing dark pants, with a brown belt, a blue narrow-rib corduroy shirt, and a dark jacket. His shoes were heavy, brown, scuffed, and messy, like Blume’s.

Blume’s lips seemed to be moving. Maybe he was praying? Hoping it would not earn her a reprimand, she bent down again, and lifted the dead man’s arm ever so slightly, then glanced back up at Blume.

“They’ve done all that stuff,” he said, but his tone was approving. “Rigor has set in. We got a body temperature reading that puts the time of death back at more or less when the German tourists say they found him. The magistrate, Bianchi, has already been and gone. He’s interviewing the German tourists and then he’s signing it over to his colleague, De Santis.”

“De Santis who’s investigating the muggings?” said Caterina. “So Bianchi is treating this as a mugging gone wrong and transferring the case just like that?”

“I am not privy to the workings of his fine legal mind,” said Blume. “But rarely have I seen a man less keen to take on a new case.”

She stood up and felt the soothing warmth of a beam of sunlight on the nape of her neck, as the sun cleared the building behind. The victim suddenly looked very white.

“His name was Henry Treacy,” said Blume, his voice still hushed. “He was Irish, born in 1949, in a place called Killken-, no Killarney, no that’s not it either. Kill-something.” He held out an ID card for her to see. “This was in his wallet.”

“Wallet?”

“Yes. You forgot to ask Rospo about that and he, of course, didn’t volunteer the information. It could still be an attempted mugging. Struggle, violence, death, and then the mugger runs off without his loot. But the presence of a wallet does open the way to new possibilities. As does the fact that this guy may well be foreign, but he’s no tourist. He’s been living here for years. Rospo knew him by sight. Did you notice the burn marks on the left side of his face?”

“Yes,” said Caterina. “They look old. I guess he grew the beard to hide the scars.”