Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

“We never found her.”

“There was no trace of her at all?”

“Well, there are packs of wild dogs running around here, you know. They’d pretty much clean up every scrap.”

But no dog did this, thought Jane, her gaze back on the carvings. Her cell phone suddenly rang, and the goats rushed to the opposite side of the pen in a panicked, bleating scramble. “Sorry,” said Jane. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, surprised that she’d even gotten a signal out here. “Rizzoli.”

Frost said, “I did my best.”

“Why does that sound like the beginning of an excuse?”

“’Cause I’m not having much luck finding Lily Saul. She seems to move around quite a bit. We know she’s been in Italy at least eight months. We’ve got a record of ATM withdrawals during that period from banks in Rome, Florence, and Sorrento. But she doesn’t use her credit card very much.”

“Eight months as a tourist? How does she afford that?”

“She travels on the cheap. And I do mean cheap. Fourth-class hotels all the way. Plus, she may be working there illegally. I know she had a brief job in Florence, assisting a museum curator.”

“She has the training for that?”

“She has a college degree in classical studies. And when she was still a student, she worked at this excavation site in Italy. Some place called Paestum.”

“Why the hell can’t we find her?”

“It looks to me like she doesn’t want to be found.”

“Okay. What about her cousin, Dominic Saul?”

“Oh. That one’s a real problem.”

“You’re not going to give me any good news tonight, are you?”

“I’ve got a copy of his academic record from the Putnam Academy. It’s a boarding school in Connecticut. He was enrolled there for about six months, while he was in the tenth grade.”

“So he would have been-what, fifteen, sixteen?”

“Fifteen. He finished up that year and was expected to come back the following fall. But he never did.”

“That’s the summer he stayed with the Saul family. In Purity.”

“Right. The boy’s father had just died, so Dr. Saul took him in for the summer. When the boy didn’t return to school in September, the Putnam Academy tried to locate him. They finally got a letter back from his mother, withdrawing him from the school.”

“So which school did he attend instead?”

“We don’t know. Putnam Academy says they never got a request to forward the boy’s transcripts. That’s the last record of him anywhere that I can find.”

“What about his mother? Where is she?”

“I have no idea. I can’t find a damn thing about the woman. No one at the school ever met her. All they have is a letter, signed by a Margaret Saul.”

“It’s like all these people are ghosts. His cousin. His mother.”

“I do have Dominic’s school photo. I don’t know if it does us much good now, since he was only fifteen at the time.”

“What does he look like?”

“Really good-looking kid. Blond, blue eyes. And the school says he tested in the genius range. Obviously he was a smart boy. But there’s a note in the file, says the kid didn’t seem to have any friends.”

Jane watched as Mrs. Bongers soothed the goats. She was huddled close to them, cooing to them in the same shadowy barn where, twelve years ago, someone had carved strange symbols on the wall, someone who could very well have moved on to carving women.

“Okay, here’s the interesting part,” said Frost. “I’m looking at the boy’s school admission forms right now.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s this section his father filled out, about any special concerns he might have. And the dad writes that this is Dominic’s first experience at an American school. Because he’d lived abroad most of his life.”

“Abroad?” She felt her pulse suddenly kick into a faster tempo. “Where?”

“Egypt and Turkey.” Frost paused, and added, significantly, “And Cyprus.”

Her gaze turned back to the barn wall, to what had been carved there: RXX-VII. “Where are you right now?” she asked.

“I’m at home.”

“You got a Bible there?”

“Why?”

“I want you to look up something for me.”

“Let me ask Alice where it is.” She heard him call out to his wife, then heard footsteps, and then Frost said, “Is the King James version okay?”

“If that’s what you’ve got. Now look at the contents. Tell me which sections start with the letter R. ”

“Old or New Testament?”

“Both.”

Over the phone, she heard pages flipping. “There’s the Book of Ruth. Romans. And there’s Revelation.”

“For each of the books, read me the passages for chapter twenty, verse seven.”

“Okay, let’s see. Book of Ruth doesn’t have a chapter twenty. It only goes to four.”

“Romans?”

“Romans ends at chapter sixteen.”

“What about Revelation?”

“Hold on.” More pages rustling. “Here it is. Revelation, chapter twenty, verse seven. ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan’”-Frost paused. His voice softened to a hush.-“‘Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.’”

Jane could feel the pounding of her own heart. She stared at the barn wall, at the carving of the stick figure wielding the sword. It’s not a sword. It’s a scythe.

“Rizzoli?” said Frost.

She said, “I think we know our killer’s name.”

Beneath the Basilica di San Clemente, the sound of rushing water echoed from the blackness. Lily shone her flashlight through the iron grate that barred the way into the tunnel, her beam revealing ancient brick walls and the faint glimmer of moving water far below.

“There’s a subterranean lake under this basilica,” she said. “And you can see the underground river here, which never stops flowing. Beneath Rome is another world, a vast underworld of tunnels and catacombs.” She gazed at the rapt faces staring at her through the gloom. “When you return to the surface, when you walk the streets, think about that, about all the dark and secret places that lie right beneath your feet.”

“Can I get a closer look at the river?” one of the women asked.

“Yes, of course. Here, I’ll hold the light while you each get a peek through the grate.”

One by one, the people in her tour group took turns squeezing in beside Lily to peer into the tunnel. There was nothing much to see, really. But when you travel all the way to Rome, for perhaps your once-in-a-lifetime visit, it’s a tourist’s duty to look. Today, Lily had only six on the tour, two Americans, two Brits, and a pair of Germans. Not such a good haul; she wouldn’t be taking home much in the way of tips. But what could one expect on a chilly Thursday in January? The tourists in Lily’s group were the only visitors in the labyrinth at the moment, and she allowed them to take their time as they each pressed against the metal grate, their crackling raincoats brushing against her. Damp air whooshed up from the tunnel, musty with the smell of mold and wet stone: the scent of ages long past.

“What were these walls, originally?” asked the German man. Lily had pegged him as a businessman. In his sixties, he spoke excellent English and wore an expensive Burberry coat. But his wife, Lily suspected, was not so fluent in English, as the woman had said scarcely a word all morning.

“These are the foundations of homes that were here in Nero’s time,” said Lily. “The great fire of A.D. 64 reduced this neighborhood to charred rubble.”

“Is that the fire when Nero fiddled while Rome burned?” the American man asked.

Lily smiled, for she’d heard that question dozens of times before and could almost always predict who in the group would ask it. “Actually, Nero didn’t fiddle. The violin wasn’t invented yet. While Rome burned, he was said to have played the lyre and sung.”