Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

A laugh. ‘That would be pretty difficult. It turned out he was referring to a three-thousand-year-old mythological being. Euterpe, one of the nine muses in Greek and Roman lore.’

‘The muse of music,’ Ercole said.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Sachs asked if there were any special foods he might eat, any special interests he had — anything that might help them find stores or places he would tend to go.

She could think of nothing, except to add the curious comment that Stefan didn’t care about the taste of food. Only the sound of eating. He preferred crunchy foods to soft.

Hardly helpful, from an investigative perspective.

Rhyme asked if she had pictures of Stefan other than the mug shot.

‘Yes, let me find them. Give me an email.’

Rossi recited the address.

A moment later they appeared, a half-dozen images depicting a stout, intelligent-looking young man with perceptive eyes.

Spiro thanked her.

The woman added, ‘Please, obviously, he’s suffered a break, a bad one. But until now, he’s always been eminently reasonable. With these kidnappings, he’s become dangerous. That’s clear. But if you find him please, before you hurt him, just try to talk.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ Sachs said.

Disconnecting the call, Rossi muttered, ‘Try to talk? To a man who didn’t think twice about sniping at two officers?’

Spiro gazed at the pictures of the kidnapper. In a soft voice he said, ‘What are you up to, amico mio ? How does your assault on these poor souls in New York and in Naples help you find comfort?’

Rhyme, with no interest in that question, was wheeling forward, examining the evidence chart.

Rossi spoke to Daniela Canton in Italian and she pounded the keys. He announced to the room, ‘I’m sending the pictures to our public information office. The images will get them on our website and to the press. They will go to the other law enforcement agencies too. Soon there will be a thousand officers looking for him.’

Rhyme wheeled closer yet to the evidence charts, scanning them. Again and again. The process was like reading a classic novel — every time you pick up the book again, you find something new.

Hoping for some insight, the slightest nudge toward understanding.

But he was hardly prepared for the particular revelation that burst into his thoughts.

At first, he scowled. No, it couldn’t be. There had to be a mistake. But then his eyes came to one entry and stopped abruptly. Eyes still on the easel, Rhyme asked in an edgy voice, ‘Does something up there strike anyone as odd?’

When those in the room looked toward him blankly, he added, ‘The tread marks and shoe prints.’

Sachs barked a surprised laugh. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But there you have it.’

Spiro understood next: ‘One of the shoe prints at the farmhouse is the same size as the shoe print at Garry Soames’s apartment.’

Ercole Benelli added, ‘And one of the auto treads, the Continental tire that I found at Garry’s, is the same as one of those at the farmhouse. How can this be?’

Rhyme said, ‘Suggesting that the same person who broke into Garry’s apartment was at the Composer’s farmhouse.’

‘But Natalia Garelli broke into Garry’s,’ Ercole said.

Rhyme turned to Spiro. ‘We assumed that. But we never asked her about it.’

‘You are right. We did not.’

Sachs added, ‘And Natalia didn’t blame Garry when we talked to her. She said he was innocent. She wanted the Serbs next door to take the fall.’

Rossi touched his mustache and said, ‘It looks like you didn’t cross-contaminate anything, Ercole, with the date-rape drug trace. The two scenes — Garry’s apartment and the Composer’s lair — are legitimately linked.’

Spiro: ‘But how?’

Lincoln Rhyme said nothing. His attention was wholly on two evidence charts — not ones from Italy, but the first two, describing the scenes in New York.

After reading the charts twice Rhyme sighed, shaking his head.

Ercole asked, ‘What, Captain Rhyme?’

‘It was right there in front of us. The whole time.’

‘But what?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Now I’ve got to make a call to America. But in the meantime, Massimo, put together a tactical team. We’ll have to move fast if the answer is what I think it is.’

Forty minutes later, the team was assembled on a quiet street in a residential neighborhood of Naples.

A dozen SCO officers were divided into two groups, each on either side of a door to a modest single-family home, painted mustard yellow. Rhyme could see the glint of the low sun off the equipment of a third team, heading through an alley to cover the back door.

He himself was on the street, his wheelchair parked beside the Sprinter van. Dante Spiro stood beside him, his cheroot, unlit, clamped between his teeth.

Amelia Sachs, he could see, was behind the front entry team, the one on the right, though she’d been told, to her irritation, that she wouldn’t be allowed to join in, if a dynamic entry — that is, six-guns blazin’ — was necessary. The leader of the unit, the massive officer named Michelangelo let her remain in a forward position, though. And he’d given her a bulletproof vest, Polizia printed on the front and back. She wanted to keep it as a souvenir, after the case was over.

When they’d arrived on the scene, Michelangelo had looked Sachs over and, with a sparkle in his eyes, said, ‘ Allora! Dirty Harriet.’

She’d laughed. ‘Make my day!’

Now Massimo Rossi climbed from the front seat of a Flying Squad car. He pressed an earbud deeper into his ear as he listened to a transmission. He straightened. Apparently the team in the rear was ready. He walked to the house and nodded to Michelangelo. The big officer knocked with a fist — Rhyme could hear the blows from this distance — and called, ‘ Polizia. Aprite! Open this door!’ And stepped back.

What followed was anticlimactic in the extreme.

No gunshots, no barricades, no battering rams.

The door simply opened and although he was too far away to hear, it was clear to Rhyme that Charlotte McKenzie from the US Consulate, uttered nothing by way of protest. Nor did she express any surprise. She nodded and held up her arms in surrender. The man standing behind her, Stefan Merck, did exactly the same.

Michelangelo’s tactical team had cleared the house.

Hadn’t taken long; like most single-family homes in this part of Naples, it was small. The well-worn place had mismatched furniture, most of it a decade old. The feel of a rental.

With the help of two SCO officers, Rhyme’s clever wheelchair surmounted the single step and wheeled into the living room where Charlotte McKenzie was sitting on a divan with her hands together, as if she’d just put aside her knitting. Rossi and Spiro stood nearby, each on his own mobile, speaking quietly and quickly, the inspector’s face animated, the prosecutor’s stony. Sachs, pulling on booties and latex gloves, headed into the back of the house.