David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“Nice,” Peroni answered. “You got a corpse there too?”

She nodded, surprised perhaps that he got the point so quickly. “Last May. It was the first, as far as we know.”

“Who?” Falcone asked immediately.

“A man,” she said. “Just a tourist from D.C. In spite of what we saw today we don’t think this is sexual. We could be wrong…”

Leapman rocked his chair to and fro in disapproval.

“We just don’t know,” she continued. “The building is near the Marina. Pretty safe most of the time, but San Francisco ’s a city with some rough parts nearby. The cops wrote it off as street crime. Just one thing, though.”

She pressed the button and ran through a new series of photos. They were of the victim, facedown on the rose-coloured stone floor. He was naked from the waist up. The cord that had been used to strangle him still dug deep into the flesh at the back of his neck. A rough pattern was cut into his lower back in an approximation of the shape they’d seen in the Pantheon that morning.

Leapman cleared his throat, lit a cigarette and said, “He was still practising then. It took a little while before he got it right. Next.”

More photos, this time of a stumpy circular tower with two galleries at the summit, pointing up into a clear blue sky.

“ Coit Tower, also San Francisco,” Deacon continued. “Three weeks later they found this when they were opening up for the day. On the floor of the tower too. Our guy’s good with locks.”

It was another corpse. Totally naked this time. A man, facedown, with grey hair. He was running to fat. Perhaps fifty. The cuts on his back were a little less ragged. The pattern was larger, running out to the folds of flesh at his waist, and more distinct: a geometric dance of angles and curves that made a recognizable image.

“Who was he?” Falcone demanded.

“Tourist from New York,” Leapman replied. “Traveling alone. He’d been hanging out in gay bars, which complicated things for a while.”

They could just about make out the withering glance Leapman was casting them across the room. “That’s the trouble with city cops,” he continued. “Narrow minds. They like to jump to quick conclusions. The San Francisco guys figured they had another dead queer on their books. They didn’t even call us in. We hadn’t a clue any of this was starting to happen. Not for another month.”

He nodded at Emily Deacon. She cued up a shot of a classical building, with a white colonnaded portico and a rotunda dome, partly in brick. Only the stars-and-stripes flag fluttering from a pole told them this was not in Italy.

She took up the story. “ Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia. End of June now. This was Thomas Jefferson’s home, which may or may not be significant. Jefferson designed it himself. The neoclassical influence probably comes from his time as ambassador in Paris but you don’t need to be an architect to see where the idea originated.”

“Dead tourist in the hall when they opened up,” Leapman interjected impatiently. The image of a body came up on the screen. “Woman this time, local, from Virginia. You can imagine the picture.”

“Still nothing sexual?” Falcone asked.

Leapman shook his head.

“Can I see the autopsy reports for some of these people?” Teresa Lupo asked.

“No,” Leapman replied. “We don’t have copies here. Besides, I don’t see the point.”

“Maybe-” she began.

“The answer’s no. Next.”

It could almost have been the same building, except for the window in the portico, which had now changed shape.

“This is Jefferson too,” Emily Deacon explained. “The University of Virginia just around the corner. The Rotunda is effectively a half-size copy of the Pantheon. Just four days later. A man’s body in the centre of the hall, and this is pretty much what we saw today. The killer’s got the pattern he wants now and he doesn’t shift from it.”

She keyed up the corpse. The arms and legs were at the selfsame angle as those of the woman in the Pantheon. A second photo showed the cadaver turned onto its front.

“His scalpel work is improving,” Leapman said.

“Plus,” Deacon interjected, “he’s getting picky about the way he positions the body. The head faces due south. He kept to that afterwards. From now on, too, he alternates the position of the limbs. Sometimes angled like this. Sometimes with the feet together and the arms at ninety degrees to the torso.

“The point about facing south is particularly odd,” Emily continued, “because in most of those buildings there was no obvious reason. They weren’t aligned in any particular direction. We only picked up on this later. In the Pantheon itself the entrance and the high altar do face north-south. You could see why he’d lay the body that way. All these ones before-it’s as if he was planning for what happened last night. As if the Pantheon was some kind of final destination.”

“How hard is it?” Costa said.

“What?” Leapman asked.

“What he’s doing to their back.”

Leapman looked at his colleague. He seemed out of his depth once he went beyond purely procedural matters.

“It’s not simple and it’s not that difficult either,” she said. “I can give you the summary of the psychological profiling later. We’re not done here yet.”

Another photo, a tiny circular building almost hidden in a wood, but still with an obvious ancestry. “We were on the case by this time but he wasn’t making it easy for us. There was another hiatus now, until the middle of July. Perhaps he was worried he was pushing his luck. This is a folly in Chiswick, west London. Again, an American visitor. This time a woman.”

Now another Pantheon copy, this time by a lake. “Ten days later, Stourhead in Wiltshire, southwest England. By now he’s stretching out the miles. Maybe he knows we’ve seen something. Maybe he wants us to see something.”

A familiar facade from Venice filled the wall. “End of August. Il Redentore. By Palladio, which has clear echoes of the Pantheon. The killer’s playing games and earning a lot of air miles. The victim’s a man this time.”

“How many?” Falcone asked. “In all?”

“Seven that we know of, excluding last night,” she said. “There’s nothing to suggest we have them all, though. This guy’s clever. He hops countries. He kills at unpredictable intervals. It’s only over the last few months that we’ve managed to collate the information to prove there’s a pattern that goes beyond those first killings in the States. All we know for sure is that he’s murdered five men and three women. All American. All Caucasian. All middle class. All unexceptional. For all we know they were picked at random to prove a point.”

“Which is?” Costa asked.

She played with the remote and pulled up a composite shot, seven scarred backs, each with the flesh marked in a similar fashion, then moved on to a graphic.

“This is the pattern from one of the later deaths. Probably the closest he got to what he was trying to achieve.”

She turned on the room light, picked up a printout of the composite of the wounds, and placed it on Leapman’s desk. Then she reached into a drawer and took out a thick black pencil, a ruler and a compass and drew a square on the sheet, almost to the edges.

“The pattern’s actually a subset of a more complicated idea.”

Very quickly, with the kind of skill Costa associated with an architect or an artist, she marked four straight lines inside the square, running from the point where the arms of the cross met the perimeter. Finally, she used the compass to join the points where both the curving lines and the straight ones met at the edge, describing a perfect circle.