Black Run (14 page)

“What are you doing?” asked Italo.

The deputy police chief worked away with the mouse. “I'm arranging the photos so we can compare them. Let's see if we find something. Do you know that brain teaser they have in the weekly puzzle magazines: Sharpen Your Eye?”

“Of course! Discover the twenty details that are different in the two drawings.”

“Exactly, Italo. Concentrate.”

The blue light from the computer screen lit up Rocco's and Italo's faces, so focused on what they were doing that they were blinking only occasionally, and slowly. Reflected on their pupils were dozens of photographs. All identical.

They couldn't find any differences. Always the same thing. The snow. The snowcat garage. The ski instructors' school. The base of the cableway. The beginners' slopes. The hill behind which Cuneaz lay hidden. Not a shadow. No one going by.

“Here!” Rocco suddenly shouted, making Italo jump.

“What?”

Rocco went back to the photos from the day of the murder: Thursday, February 5, 6:00
P.M.
There was something that didn't add up in that picture. He compared it with the photo from Wednesday. Again, from 6:00
P.M.
He put them one next to the other. No difference. The garage, the cableway . . .

“They all look the same to me,” said Italo.

“The ski school. Look closer!” And Rocco pointed to it with the cursor of the mouse. “You see?”

Italo leaned in. On the photo from the day of the murder, the door of the ski school was open. “It's open!”

“Right,” said Rocco, “and now look at the photo for Wednesday.”

The door of the ski school was closed.

“Now I'm going to open the photos from the previous days.”

All of them at 6:00
P.M.
All of them framed identically. And the door of the ski school was always closed.

“You see it? At 6:00
P.M.
the door is closed. Except for the day of the murder.” Then Rocco stretched out in the chair. He put both arms behind his head and smiled. “I'd like to take these photos with me to police headquarters.”

“That's no big deal. I'll go buy a flash stick and I'll copy them to it,” said Italo, getting to his feet.

With the usual noise of jangling hardware, the snowcat pulled up at the base of the cableway, snorting smoke and snow.

“There it is!” said Italo.

“I'd noticed,” Rocco replied.

Luigi Bionaz got out, waved to the policemen, and gestured for them to come closer.

No comparison. Walking with those two kayaks on his feet instead of the Clarks desert boots was a decided improvement to his lifestyle. Now Rocco was practically having fun crushing the piles of snow underfoot, the same piles that until today he'd avoided as if they were his mortal enemies.

“Buon giorno
, Commissario!
”

Rocco didn't bother to correct him. He was sick and tired of the whole thing. And for that matter, decades of literature and television series, from Maigret to Cattani, had driven that word into the minds of the Italians:
commissario
. What it made him think of was the show trials in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He climbed up into the snowcat, followed by Pierron. Luigi put the machine in gear and started uphill, along the main piste.

“Where are we going?” asked Luigi.

“Where we found Leone.”

“Got it,” he said and took a curve, clenching the usual dead cigarette butt between his teeth.

Rocco looked at Italo. “I'm going to need to talk to you later.”

Italo nodded, with a worried look in his eyes. “Did I fuck up?”

“No. The reason I need to talk to you is that I've noticed that you tend
not
to fuck up.”

“You've lost me.”

“You wouldn't be able to follow me. Because you don't know what I need to talk to you about.”

Luigi had taken an interest in the conversation between the two cops. “And now you've got me curious,” he said, shifting gears as he drove.

“What the fuck!” Rocco replied. “Just do your best not to turn this thing over and I'll be happy.”

Luigi Bionaz burst out laughing, banging his hand down on the steering wheel. “You Romans are just too much fun!”

“You think?”

“Yes. You seem like rude, nasty people—instead here you are making jokes all day long.”

“If that's how you see it,” said Rocco.

Someone had strung a white-and-red-striped tape around the whole area where the body had been found. There was a man bent over the snow, picking something up. He was wearing a white jumpsuit and overshoes. A woolen cap on his head kept off the cold.

Italo looked at him intently. “Is the forensics team still at work?”

“Yeah.”

The man in the white jumpsuit turned around. Rocco waved his hand, and from a distance the man nodded his head in response. Then he went back to searching for who knows what. Rocco and Italo went around the tape while Luigi waited by the snowcat, relighting the cigarette butt.

The deputy police chief went over to the exact spot where the body had been found. The snow was still stained with brown blood. He looked around. Before him, at the top of a small hill, was Crest, the village with six houses and a hut. The shortcut was clear and visible, running down toward them and continuing on past to the large piste that ran to town. On his right, trees. On his left, trees and an abandoned hovel. In the distance, the roof of a house. The chimney was emitting smoke.

“Down there, an old woman lives alone. She's eighty,” Italo started up, as if he'd read Rocco's thoughts. “We talked to her, but she's half-deaf and it's a miracle if she can remember her own name.”

“Why was Leone here?”

Rocco's words vanished into the air, along with the puffs of his breath. “If he was heading to town along the big piste down there, why on earth would he have come up here?”

“Maybe he went down by way of Crest.”

“Did anyone see him?”

“No one. There are six guests staying at the hut, along with the waiter, the cook, and two young people who work there. No one saw him that night. And all the houses are abandoned.”

“To go to Crest, he'd have had to make a detour. So if he had gone, he would have had to have a reason. And he had no reason. So I say he came down from his house straight down along the main run. But I don't understand why he was here, in the middle of the shortcut, far from the piste. It makes no sense.”

“No. It makes no sense. Unless someone carried him there.”

“But there are no signs of a body being dragged. Does that mean he was alive when they brought him?”

“And then they killed him there?”

Rocco looked down at the wide groomed section once again. The marks of the snowcat that had run over Leone's corpse on Thursday night were unmistakable. He measured the distance with his eyes. “Between here and the big piste is about forty yards. It would be hard to drag someone through the fresh snow for forty yards. A footprint, at least one, ought to be there, no? It's not like the guy fell out of the sky!”

Italo had nothing to say. Rocco nodded a couple of times. “He came up here of his own volition. There was someone up here that he knew. Someone who had called him or with whom he had an appointment, even. They smoked a cigarette together, and probably that person killed him. I don't have any real doubts on this case.” He took a deep breath and felt the cold, clean air penetrate into his lungs. “All right, let's go join Luigi. I'm going to go pay a little call on the ski school. You wait for me at the terminus of the cableway.”

He was walking toward the large structure that served as a garage for the tracked vehicles, at the far end of which, behind a glass door, stood the ski school. Women wrapped in fur coats sat waiting for their skiing children. They looked like turtles, each woman's head almost entirely retracted into its furry carapace and their hands shoved into their pockets. They looked like they had fox terriers wrapped around their ankles. Rocco took a quick look behind him. He saw the station of the cableway that was transporting people up the mountain from the town. Italo had lit a cigarette and was enjoying a little sunshine. Above the station, set on a terrace that everyone was avoiding like the plague because of the icy cold, there was a bar. Concealed behind a flagpole that flew the Italian flag was the webcam. The deputy police chief waved at the lens, secretly hoping that at that moment the camera might have snapped the half-hourly weather photo, capturing him for posterity. Then he headed for the ski school.

One of the instructors was sprawled out on a lounge chair with a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans on his face and his arms behind his head. His face was dark from the sun. Rocco walked past him and went into the office. He was immediately knocked back on his feet by a whiff of stale
vin brulé
, or mulled wine. There were two instructors, a man and a woman. The man was in his mid-twenties, a good-looking, curly-haired athletic type. The woman was sitting behind the desk. As soon as she saw the deputy police chief, she stood up. She was considerably overweight.

“Buon giorno
,
”
she said.

“Buon giorno
,
”
Rocco replied.

“Did you want to schedule a lesson?” the tanned whale asked politely.

“No. I'm here for another reason.”

“If it's to get information, go right ahead and ask.”

The young man, in his mid-twenties, was about to move off, but Rocco stopped him with a gesture. “No, hold on, please. I'd like you to stay, too. You could be useful. In fact, as long as he's here, why don't you go get your co-worker from outside.” The young man knit his brow. Rocco smiled at him. “Deputy Police Chief Schiavone, mobile squad of Aosta. Police.
Compris?
”

The young man nodded rapidly and went to summon his co-worker, who came in, immediately bringing with him from outdoors the cocky attitude of someone who's not afraid of anyone or anything. “What's this about?” he asked. “What happened Thursday night?”

“
Bravo
. You're good. You should come work for us,” Rocco said, shutting him down. Then he stood face-to-face with the three instructors and stared hard at them for ten seconds or so. Ten seconds that to those three wizards of the ski slopes must have seemed like an eternity. The woman was the one who broke the metaphorical ice. “What can we do for you?”

“What time do you close?”

“Four in the afternoon. The lessons last an hour, and at 4:45 they close the slopes and the cableways, so the last slot to schedule a lesson is at 3:30.”

“Who locks up?”

“That depends. We take turns.”

“Who locked up Thursday?” Schiavone asked.

“Day before yesterday, I locked up,” replied the twenty-five-year-old.

“At four forty-five?” asked the deputy police chief.

“Yes, more or less. Actually, a little earlier than that, because when I left, the cableway was on its last run.”

Rocco took a quick look around. He looked at the poster of that season's full team of instructors. There were at least twenty people there. All of them smiling. “Is the person who locks up at night the same person who opens up the next morning?”

“Yes. It's always the same person,” said the young man. “In fact, yesterday, Friday, I opened up.”

“And how did you find the office door?”

“Locked. Why?”

Rocco pointed to the group photo. “Who else out of this crowd would have the keys to the place?”

“The one whose shift it is to lock up and Omar, who runs the school.”

“Omar Borghetti, right?”

The arrogant ski instructor took off his mirrored Ray-Bans. He was cross-eyed. It was all Rocco could do not to break out laughing right in his face. “Do you know him?” asked the instructor.

“I've heard about him. Where is he?”

“He's teaching a group.”

Rocco turned his gaze to the younger instructor. “After you locked up, what did you do?”

“I put on my skis and I went down the mountain.”

“On the piste, or did you take the Crest shortcut?”

“Are you crazy, Dottore? On the piste! On that shortcut, with all the rocks it has, I'd ruin my surface and my edges. When my workday is done, I take my own skis to go home, not the ones they give me here.”

“And then?”

“And then nothing. I went home. Took a shower, smoked a cigarette, went out for dinner. When I left the pub at ten, I ran into all that mess.”

“So we can say that from four thirty to seven you were at home. Is there anyone who can verify the fact?”

The young man looked at the policeman with some embarrassment and looked down just as the big woman raised her hand. The cross-eyed instructor burst out laughing.

“What are you laughing at?” Rocco barked at him.

“Sorry, it's just that this is a new one on me.” Then he looked over at his co-workers. “How long has this been going on?”

“What the fuck do you care? Mind your own damned business,” said the big woman, who had turned redder than her team jersey.

“Can you call this Omar Borghetti for me?” Rocco interrupted.

“Sorry, Dottore, he's with a group of Swedish skiers at Gressoney, which is on the far side of the valley. He won't be back for at least a couple of hours.”

Rocco shook his head. “My bad luck, eh? As soon as he returns to base, tell him to get in touch with police headquarters in Aosta. I need to talk to him. You all be well.” He gave them a half smile, then looked at the curly-haired young man. “So long, Ahab.” And, leaving the kid to mull over that strange farewell, Schiavone left the three instructors.

As soon as he got off the cable car that had taken him and Italo back into town, Rocco pulled out his cell phone. “Inspector Rispoli, this is Schiavone.” The clear-timbred voice of the police functionary rang out from Rocco's cell phone: “Right here, Dottore . . .”