Giorgio Faletti - I Kill

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I’m on my way to Roby Stricker’s place. Meet me there and don’t say a word to anyone. I have to check a few things out and I want you there with me.’

‘Something wrong?’

‘I don’t think so. I have a hunch, so small that it’s probably nothing, but if I’m right, the whole thing might be over.’

‘You mean…?’

‘See you at Stricker’s.’ Frank cut him off.

Now he was sorry to be driving an unmarked vehicle instead of a real police car with a blue lamp and a siren. He chided himself for not having asked for a magnetic light to put on the roof.

Meanwhile, he started blaming himself. How could he have been so blind? How could he have let his personal resentment cloud his vision? He had seen what he wanted to see, heard what he wanted to hear, and accepted only what he felt like accepting.

And they had all paid the price, Nicolas most of all. If he had used his head, Nicolas might still be alive and No One behind bars.

When Frank got to Les Caravelles, Morelli was waiting for him in front of the building. Frank left his car on the street without worrying about the no-parking zone. He rushed past Morelli; the sergeant followed him inside without a word. They stopped at the desk and the doorman looked at them with genuine concern. Frank leaned on the marble counter.

‘The keys to Roby Stricker’s apartment, please. Police.’

The clarification wasn’t necessary. The doorman remembered Frank: his nervous swallow was proof enough. Morelli showed his badge anyway. In the lift on the way up, he finally plucked up the courage to question Frank’s furious mood.

‘What’s going on, Frank?’

‘What’s going on is that I’m a complete idiot, Claude. A total fucking idiot. If I hadn’t been such a hothead, I would have remembered how to be a cop and we might have avoided a lot of this.’

Morelli didn’t understand but saw that the American wasn’t going to stop to explain. They reached the door, which still had police seals on it. Frank tore off the strips of yellow tape. He opened the door and they went inside the apartment.

There was the usual sense of inevitability that hovers over a crime scene: the broken picture on the floor, the marks on the carpet, the dust traces left by forensics, the metallic smell of dried blood evoking a man’s vain struggle with death.

Without hesitation, Frank went into the bedroom. Morelli watched him standing at the doorway surveying the room. The blood on the marble floor had been cleaned away. The only evidence of the crime committed there were the traces of blood on the walls.

Frank stood motionless for a few seconds and then did something strange. He reached the bed in two strides and lay down on the floor in the same position in which Stricker’s body had been found, which forensics had traced on the marble tiles before removing the body. He lay there for a long time, barely moving. He raised his head to check something that could obviously only be seen from the floor.

‘There it is, damn it. There…’

‘There’s what, Frank?’

‘Stupid, stupid. Me, most of all. Busy looking at things from above, when the answer was below.’

Morelli’s mouth opened and shut but no words came out. Frank suddenly jumped up. ‘Come on. There’s something else we have to check out.’

‘Now where are we going?’

‘Radio Monte Carlo. If I’m right, that’s where we’ll find the answer.’

They left the apartment. Morelli looked at Frank as if he had never seen him before. He seemed to have gone crazy. They ran through the elegant lobby of the condominium, throwing the keys at the doorman who seemed very relieved to see them go. Outside, they jumped into Frank’s car. A uniformed officer was already eyeing it with his ticket book in his hand.

‘Drop the bone, Ledoc. On duty.’

The agent recognized Morelli. ‘Oh, it’s you, sergeant. Okay.’

He saluted them as the car skidded into traffic without yielding the right of way. They sped down the street past the Church of Sainte-Dévote, towards the harbour. Frank remembered that it had all started there, in a boat full of death that had crashed into the wharf. If he was correct, the story would end right where it had begun. No more faceless ghosts. Now it was time to chase real people, with faces and names.

They broke the speed limit on their way to Radio Monte Carlo on the other side of the harbour, their tyres screeching over the road.

It had stopped raining. They left the car next to a boat that was about to set sail. Frank was in the grip of some sort of fever, talking to himself, moving his lips silently and muttering words that only he could understand. The sergeant could only follow, waiting for that mumble to start making sense.

They rang the bell, and half a second after the receptionist opened the door, they were inside the huge lift that doubled as a freight elevator and, luckily, was at the ground floor.

They went up to the radio station where Bikjalo was waiting for them with the door open.

‘What’s up, Frank? Why are you here now?’

Frank pushed him aside and rushed past. Morelli shrugged an apology.

Raquel was at the reception desk and Pierrot was standing on the other side, picking up CDs to take to the archive. Frank stopped at the entrance to the control room where, behind the glass doors, he could see the cables for the phone, satellite and ISDN connections.

He turned to Bikjalo, who had followed him with Morelli. ‘Open this door!’

‘But-’

‘Do as I say!’

Refusal was not an option. Bikjalo opened the door and a gust of fresh air blew into the room. Frank stood for a moment, puzzled by the tangle of wires. He ran his fingers under the shelves holding the connectors for the phone lines.

‘What’s going on, Frank?’ pleaded Morelli. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’m looking for, Claude. We’ve been going crazy trying to intercept that bastard’s phone calls. And we failed. We could keep on trying for our entire lives and we’d still fail. And here’s why.’

Frank seemed to have found something. His hands stopped under one of the shelves. He pulled hard, trying to extract an object fastened to the metal counter, and he finally succeeded. When he stepped back, he was holding a flat metal box, twice as big as a pack of cigarettes, with a wire and a phone plug at one end. The box was wrapped in black duct tape. Frank held it out to the two astonished men.

‘This is why we weren’t able to intercept an outside call. That son of a bitch was calling from right here.’

Frank had great difficulty expressing himself, for he was facing a complicated truth and wanted to say everything at once.

‘Here’s what happened. It wasn’t Ryan Mosse who killed Stricker. I was being stubborn and wanted so badly for him to be guilty that I never even considered any other options. Here, too, No One was diabolically clever. He gave us a clue that could be interpreted in two ways, either as a reference to Roby Stricker or to Gregor Yatzimin. Then he just sat back and waited. When we put Stricker under the protection of the entire police force, he simply went and killed Gregor Yatzimin instead. And when the dancer’s body was discovered and we left Stricker alone to rush to Yatzimin’s apartment, No One went to Les Caravelles and killed him, too.’

Frank stopped for breath then careered on. ‘That was his real aim. He wanted to kill Stricker and Yatzimin on the same night!’ Bikjalo and Morelli were stunned. ‘When he killed Stricker, there was a struggle, and No One hit him in the face by accident. He didn’t take Stricker’s face because it was damaged, and whatever he does with the faces, it wasn’t useful to him any more. He left the apartment convinced that Stricker was dead, but the poor guy was still alive and had time to write a message in his own blood.’