Michael Morley - Viper

'The guys. I hate the fucking guys. Where we supposed to go?'

'Like they give a fuck? It would have been different if we were guys.'

Franco started to peel the label off the bottle. He always tried to get it off without tearing, but never managed. 'Camorra soldiers. Us? You think so?'

'Why not? We can do stuff. We can run messages, do deals, scare the shit out of people and that.'

'Well, at least, I can. I'm not sure you can scare a fish.'

Paolo laughed and took a long swig of the beer. It wasn't as cold as it should have been; the fridge was playing up again. 'Grandpa would never let us work for the System, you know his feelings.'

Franco knew them well. The Camorra was the thing that he hated most. The thing that had ruined his life.

'You going to stay in tonight?'

'No. I'll have another beer with you, then I'm going out. You know I have to.'

Paolo avoided his eyes. He never knew where his cousin went, or what he got up to. He just understood that sometimes he had to be on his own. It was better that way.

Stazione dei carabinieri, Castello di Cisterna The wet morning air tasted of stone and flint. Jack King clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and prayed he'd find decent coffee inside the local carabinieri HQ.

It was a rectangular, purpose-built, brick barracks. Four storeys high and home not only to the investigation division but also more than a thousand soldiers. Grey metal gates opened as Massimo flashed his ID. They were ushered across a gravelled driveway, past a frayed but still fluttering Italian flag, into a small, cool dark reception area tiled in cheap, dull marble.

'Wow, this place is depressing.' Jack squinted down a warren of dimly lit corridors decorated in spirit-sapping greys and faded blues.

'Not all of Italy is an art gallery,' remarked Massimo stoically, as he led them past a series of closed doors. They were still several offices away from that of Capitano Sylvia Tomms when she appeared from the depths of the warren. Mass kissed her lightly on both cheeks.

'Sylvia, this is Jack King. It's best we talk in English but his Italian is quite good – especially the bad words – so be careful what you say about him.'

Sylvia laughed and stuck out a hand. 'Hope the jet lag isn't too bad. Thanks for coming.'

'I'll survive. Please call me Jack. It sounds like you have quite a puzzle on your hands.'

She smiled. 'Step by step, little by little, we will solve it. Come to my room. I'll get you both something to drink and show you what we've got.'

The office was tiny and cluttered. Her desk was covered in papers, photographs, memos and maps. In the middle, a flat-screen monitor rose from a heap of plastic water bottles, sandwich wrappings, old cigarette packets and coffee cups.

'Please take a seat. Just put those anywhere on the floor.' Sylvia motioned to two hard wooden chairs and the skyscrapers of files she'd built on them. The floor was also stacked with documents. Jack and Massimo had to place the papers they'd moved under the chairs.

'I'm sorry about the mess. I have an office three times smaller than any male Capitano, and whenever I try to order bookshelves or filing cabinets they never come. I think they're trying to tell me something, no? Anyway, this is how I work, and for me it is no longer a problem.'

Jack liked her. She seemed smart and didn't let shit get her down. A good way to get through life.

Sylvia pulled papers from beneath a thick teetering stack. 'An old man walking his dog in Mount Vesuvius National Park discovered what he suspected might be a human bone. He was right. We recovered more than a hundred smashed and fragmented bones from the site.'

Jack made a mental note of the severity of the destruction. The multiplicity of broken bones indicated a high level of rage and an urgent need for gratification.

Sylvia ploughed on. 'Local anthropologists managed to piece together the outline of a human skeleton. Here, look at this.' She handed over a series of glossies showing a partially reconstructed skeleton.

Jack was impressed. He'd seen experts back in the States struggle with similar cases. 'It's a good job. I'm amazed they got so much done so quickly.'

Sylvia looked pleased at the compliment. 'They are among the best in the country, maybe the best in the world. From the jawbone we have managed to get a conclusive match with dental X-rays. Our skeleton is that of Francesca Di Lauro, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Casavatore, last seen about five years ago.'

Jack scanned the shots again. 'The bones are black

– I take it that's from some kind of burning?' 'Total burning. We don't know how or where or when, but all the bones were like that.'

'Anything from Tox?'

'Not much. Seems a regular accelerant was used to burn her. Paraffin.'

'What kind?'

Sylvia looked puzzled. 'Paraffin is paraffin, no?'

'That's what I used to think. Have them dig deeper. I worked a case in New York and found there are dozens of types of paraffin. Some comes as wax, some is cheap and imported from places like India. I guess there's locally produced stuff as well.'

'Italian factories use paraffin a good deal,' added Massimo. 'Industrial paraffin, chlorinated paraffin oil, that type of chemical. There will be records, health and safety documents, batch numbers.'

Sylvia scribbled a note to herself and Massimo wondered if she'd ever find it again amid the mess. Jack turned back to the photographs, fanned them out and looked for a close-up of the bone fragments. 'You got any better blow-ups? Ones of the end of the bones, the splintered parts?'

Sylvia slid Jack a BCU – a Big Close-Up – of a shattered hip.

'What are you looking for?' asked Massimo.

'I'm trying to work out when our killer set his fire. Looking at this shot, the hip is blackened, though there are traces of cream bone at the edge, where it's been bludgeoned, chopped with something. If it had been chopped first, then none of the cream of the bone would be showing; the splintered end would be as blackened as the rest.'

Massimo followed his train of thought. 'So Francesca's corpse was dismembered after it was burned? That seems unusual. I would expect a killer to try to dispose of a body, and any evidence attached to it, by dismembering it first, then burning it and all the clothing and anything else that he'd come into contact with.'

Sylvia Tomms had worked gangland shootings, a rape murder, and numerous messy domestics, but this was new ground. 'Go slow for the lady police officer,' she said. 'Let me get this right. You're suggesting someone killed Francesca, doused her in paraffin, burned the corpse, then chopped it up and buried it?'

'Maybe,' said Jack carefully. 'But even that doesn't quite make sense to me. Your ME should be able to set things right.'

'What? What am I missing?' asked Sylvia.

Jack turned to Massimo. 'You've got a dead body – what do you do with it?'

'Dump it,' suggested Mass, 'in the woods or in the sea. Chop it up, bury it in a forest, or on some land that you own.'

Jack wagged a finger. 'Okay. So what's with the burning?'

'Like Mass just said, to get rid of forensic evidence, in case the body or part of the body is discovered,' suggested Sylvia.

'That makes sense if it's after the dismemberment,' said Jack. 'Burning pieces of a corpse is easier than burning a whole body. Not many people have the space and privacy to light a giant bonfire and burn an entire corpse.'

'Or the time,' added Massimo.

Sylvia was now in sync with their thinking. 'Another explanation. One that fits with the cream ends to that burned bone, is that the fire was not only pre-dismemberment, it was also ante-mortem.'

Jack nodded. 'You've got it. That's the next assumption. In fact, the most likely one. I suspect the killer set her on fire while she was still alive. Perhaps he even wanted to watch her burn to death. And if that's the case, then the guy you're hunting is not just a killer – he's a sadist and a serial killer.'