J. Ellison - The Cold Room

“I cannot judge how long, nor how well the healing will be. Their palms were abraded entirely, the burns are more severe in the center of the hands. Dio mio, to place one’s hands on a burning fire, I cannot imagine who could want to tolerate such pain. They are sedated, but conscious, if you need to speak to them. They want to know about a cat.”

“That must be Gavin,” Taylor said. “Which one asked?”

“They both did. On an eye signal, they spoke in unison. They both simply said cat. ”

Clever boys.

They thanked the doctor, who nodded, shook their hands and went on her rounds.

“You ready to rattle their cages?” Baldwin asked.

“You bet.”

Taylor opened the door to the twins’ room. They were lying quietly in their beds, side by side, each facing the other. They were staring at each other so intently, the longing so concentrated that Taylor felt like they were communicating telepathically.

The sameness of their faces was eerie. Taylor had known identical twins in the past-she’d worked a case that centered around identical twin girls just last year-but Tommaso and Gavin were different. More alike. She knew it was a psychological response, the concept of the two being raised apart and still finding themselves on a psychotic path was mind-boggling. Identical twin necrophiliacs. This was one for the medical journals.

Neither man acknowledged their entrance. She knew Baldwin was itching to interview them, so she stepped aside and let him talk first.

“My name is Dr. John Baldwin,” he began. Neither twin turned to him, though Taylor could see that the one in the bed they’d labeled A flinched a bit. So they didn’t like doctors. Add to that the current situation; their pain must be tremendous. Interesting.

Baldwin continued. “I’m with the FBI. This is my colleague, Detective Jackson, from the Metro Nashville Police.”

She watched for a tell, but neither man gave any indication that they knew, or cared, about Tennessee.

“You’ve been placed under arrest by the Italian judiciary, who have named you both indagato. Essentially, you’ve been indicted on the charge of murder. You will stand trial, most certainly be convicted. Italy isn’t fond of Il Macellaio. In addition, we will be separating you as soon as we finish this interview. And I’ll let you know, on the record, that while Italy does not have the death penalty, the United States most surely does. One of you will be extradited, and under federal law the United States has the right to seek the death penalty against you.”

Still nothing. No word, no movement from either bed.

Baldwin took a small plastic chair and set it between the beds, at their feet. He settled into the chair and smiled pleasantly. “You may think that you’ve tricked us by obscuring your fingerprints. You were wrong. We know who each of you are.”

He turned to the man in bed A. “Gavin.” He looked to his right, to bed B. “Tommaso.”

“Ha,” the twin in bed B said. “See, you are already making incorrect assumptions. You have no way of identifying either one of us.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong. You may have thought you were clever, but we’ve seen much better. Your dental records are being flown here as we speak. The dentists at the 31st Dental Squadron at Aviano have kept detailed records on all of their patients. One call to the archives and they were able to locate the records of Thomas Fielding.”

Taylor spoke for the first time, addressing the man in bed A. “And Gavin, Dr. Simpson from Manchester was very disappointed to hear that we needed your radiographs. He also kept meticulous records. He already told us to look for very slight lower anterior crowding. Thomas had braces when he was a teenager. Your foster parents wouldn’t spring for it, decided you were just fine as is.”

At the mention of foster parents, the man in bed A squirmed. They already knew it was Gavin, knew he was the man passed out when they arrived at the cottage. That his brother had held his hands to the face of the skillet for a fraction longer than necessary, like a child maliciously pulling off the wings of a fly to see what would happen.

Baldwin finished their assessment. “And Thomas, we know about the amalgam fillings. The military was a bit behind the times when it came to dentistry, they weren’t concerned with the aesthetic, cosmetic advances being made in private practice. While all the boys your age, including Gavin here, had their teeth filled with tooth-colored resin composite, you were still receiving the amalgams. Identical twins don’t have identical dentition, and environmental factors further indicate differences. So you burned yourselves, put yourselves through all this pain, for nothing. Gavin, you’ll be returning to the States with us. Thomas, the Italians have a cell with your name on it.”

Baldwin stood. Taylor was impressed; she knew what restraint it took not to try to wrestle every ounce of information out of them at once.

The twin they knew was Gavin started to cry.

Taylor spent the next hour on the phone with Julia Page, going through every permutation for extraditing Gavin back to Nashville.

The judiciary in Italy wasn’t keen on the death penalty, and as such wouldn’t extradite either of the brothers to a country that would charge them with death. And they had themselves a lovely little conundrum, one they hadn’t told the brothers about. There was a massive limitation to using the dental records. The radiographs could prove only one thing-the identity of each of the twins.

But there was no way to definitively tie Gavin to the Tennessee murders and Tommaso to the Italian and British murders without a bite-mark match. Neither man had bitten his victims, and as such, it was inside the realm of possibility that the twin they knew as Tommaso had actually been in Tennessee, and the twin they knew as Gavin could have been in Italy. At least enough to force reasonable doubt into the jury’s minds.

Without knowing who was who, they couldn’t charge either brother with the separate murders. They knew Tommaso was responsible for the Italian murders and the murders in London, and Gavin was responsible for all the stateside murders. But knowing and proving in a court of law were two entirely different beasts. A good defense lawyer would blow the case to pieces with this simple fact. It was going to take hours of investigation to link every piece of circumstantial evidence to each individual’s crimes.

Once Taylor wrapped things up with Julia, she chewed on the end of a pencil and thought about the situation. She wondered just how much the twins knew about the various ways their identities could be revealed. The plan to eradicate their fingerprints was simple, but ingenious. Taylor wondered which one had thought it up. Probably Tommaso, he of the more sophisticated and pronounced killing methods.

There was going to be a delay while all the details were sorted out. Which meant they had some time to themselves while the Italians, the U.S. and British Embassies, the Met, the FBI and Metro Nashville sorted through the mess. This situation was above all of their pay grades.

She needed sustenance. She found Baldwin, who was on the phone to Pietra Dunmore, making sure she listed all the forensics they had so the cases could start moving forward. He hung up the phone, ran his hands through his hair.

“I’m whipped. Let’s go grab a drink and head back to the hotel.”

“Sounds good.” He retrieved his jacket from the chair back, shrugged into it. She ran her hand up the smooth linen. Too bad they couldn’t stay here, run away from all their troubles.

The walk back took five minutes-the beauty of Florence was its intimate size, and they quickly passed through the Strozzi Palace courtyard to Colle Berreto.