Michael Morley - Spider

'That's quite rare, isn't it?' asked Jack.

'Yes, it is. And even though blood typing is my pet subject, I'm afraid it's hard to say exactly how rare in Italy; probably less than nine per cent of the population are of the AB grouping. AB is the rarest and incidentally the newest of discovered blood groups. O is the oldest, it goes back to the Stone Age. A is the next oldest, and has its roots in the farming settlements of Norway, Denmark, Austria, Armenia and Japan. AB, however, dates back less than a thousand years and came about as all the blood groups began to mix in Europe.'

'And the Rhesus factoring?' asked Jack.

Annelies removed her glasses for a moment. 'As I'm sure you know, the D antigen is the most common. If it is present, we describe the grouping as positive. In Cristina, it was missing, therefore she is Rhesus negative. Probably only about three per cent of the population share her blood type.'

'This really helps us,' said Jack, turning to Massimo, 'but only if you can find it on him, or find the scene where BRK cut up Cristina's body. Evidentially, tying her blood to a suspect would be a very powerful argument in court.'

'Yes, but finding the scene?' said Benito, shrugging his shoulders. 'So far it has not been possible.'

'Where have you tried?' asked Jack, non-judgementally.

'We've had to focus mainly on Livorno and the big cities that have strong links with the town and province,' said Benito, 'so we're working out towards Pisa, which is twenty kilometres away, Lucca, forty kilometres, Florence, about eighty and finally Siena, which is about a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty kilometres away. We're looking at hire car businesses, hotels and guesthouses and even longdistance trucking companies. We are asking them all if they have had to clean any blood from any of the vehicles or property used by recent clients. So far nothing.'

Jack doubted the search would provide anything to build a case on but he understood that they had to go through the motions. Often it was the routine checks, rather than brilliant detective work, that provided critical breakthroughs.

'Let me get this right,' he said, addressing the pathologist again. 'According to your report, you believe the killer kept the head for maybe up to two weeks before he sent it here?'

'Approximately,' said van der Splunder, cautiously. 'Please be careful not to mix up death and decapitation. Death was on, or about, the fourteenth; decapitation and dismemberment were most likely on or around the twentieth.'

'You mean death wasn't through decapitation – he killed her, kept her corpse, then beheaded her?'

'Exactly.'

'How did she die?' asked Jack.

The pathologist flinched. 'I found some evidence of pre-mortem focal bruising on the larynx.'

'She was strangled, or choked somehow?' asked Jack.

'I believe so,' said van der Splunder. 'There was no evidence of ligature strangulation, so I imagine it was done manually. Indeed, some of the marks on the throat are consistent with continuous deep pressure, possibly from a man's knuckles.'

Jack knew what it meant, and why she had flinched. It would have taken about four minutes to strangle Cristina in this way. He hoped that she'd blacked out after about thirty seconds when her brain became starved of oxygen, but he was sure it would still have been a horribly slow death. Perhaps the most horrible imaginable, with the killer using his hands to choke her to the point of death, then easing up and letting her recover, before choking her again. Jack knew many stranglers who had turned the act of murder into a sexual marathon, indulging their violence in small ebbs and flows, before brutally climaxing with the final fatal pressure of their fingers.

'Care to share your thoughts with us?' said Massimo casually.

Jack shook himself out of the death scene, and returned to the more functional business of the timeline. 'Let's presume BRK was responsible for Cristina's murder and also for the desecration of Sarah Kearney's grave in Georgetown. Given the approximate time of Cristina's death and the recorded time that some kids discovered Sarah's disturbed grave, we should be able to work out the window when he had to fly out of Italy and into America.'

Massimo nodded. 'We are already doing border patrol passport checks on all male US citizens over thirty years of age who entered and left Italy in the last three months. You will be amazed at how many come and go!'

Jack ploughed on. 'Well, if we get this timeline right, we should be able to narrow the focus considerably.' He moved to a whiteboard, picked up a black marker and wrote the key points as he talked. 'Cristina is last seen alive by friends on the night of June the ninth. The day after, the tenth, she's reported missing. She's killed around the fourteenth, but he hangs on to the corpse, keeping it intact for six days, which takes us to the twentieth.' He glanced over to the pathologist and she signalled her agreement with his account. 'On the twentieth he started disposing of the limbs. We have our first public finding of remains two days later, on the twenty-second, and the next significant date is the arrival of Cristina's head at police HQ in Rome on the twenty-fifth, which is examined by the good professor here on the twenty-sixth.' Jack paused to make sure he hadn't made any mistakes. No one corrected him, so he slotted in the last pieces of the jigsaw. 'The FBI thinks he was in the cemetery at Georgetown, South Carolina on the night of June the thirtieth, morning of July the first, so it's reasonable to presume that he may have left Italy on the evening of June the twenty-fifth, or morning of the twenty-sixth, which would have got him into America on the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh, just a couple of days before the desecration of Sarah's grave.'

'Is there a direct flight from Italy to Georgetown?' asked Massimo.

Jack frowned. 'Don't know. Myrtle is quite a big international airport, maybe there are flights from Rome or Milan.'

'We'll re-focus on these tighter dates,' promised Benito, adding to his ever-lengthening list.

They stared at the board again, then Massimo asked, 'Why do you think he picked Livorno?'

'Good question,' replied Jack. 'In the past, BRK has always killed near a major coastline. A tidal sea is a very handy way to dispose of a body, so it might be as simple as that. Or there may be a bigger significance that we are yet to discover. We can't rule out a connection to a port – it could be that he is a sailor of some kind – although I have to say that we've done extensive checks with the American navy and haven't come up with any possible suspects.'

'Livorno has a very active port,' said Orsetta. 'Unless I'm mistaken, I think there's a naval academy there.'

'There is,' said Benito, 'it's the training school for officers. The Italian navy has been in Livorno since the late eighteen hundreds.'

'How do you know that?' asked Orsetta with a wry smile.

Benito held up his hands in mock surrender. 'Okay, so I once dreamt of being a sailor, and ended up as a policeman instead. It's nothing to be ashamed of.'

Once the laughter had died down Jack picked up the thread. 'We don't really know why BRK was in Livorno, but we're going to presume that he was there and that somehow he singled out Cristina. Were there any witness reports of her being seen with any strangers over the last few days before she disappeared?'

Massimo shook his head.

'Didn't think so,' continued Jack, 'so it's possible that BRK persuaded her to get into a vehicle and travel voluntarily with him to a secluded place that he'd set up beforehand.'

'Hang on,' said Massimo. 'Orsetta, wasn't Cristina into helping out at some architectural dig near Florence?'

'Yes, she was,' confirmed Orsetta. 'Friends said she was regularly at Montelupo Fiorentino; there was some talk about uncovering a frescoed burial chamber.'