Dante's Numbers (17 page)

C
APTAIN GERALD KELLY LOATHED PRESS CONferences. Particularly, he had come to realise, those press conferences that involved a police chief from another country, one who loved the limelight and seemed incapable of going anywhere in public without the presence of a similarly media-obsessed Canadian professor who never knew when to shut up. Kelly had looked at Leo Falcone's odd pair of sidekicks while bawling them out the day before, one huge and old and ugly, the other slight and dark and handsome, and wished, with all his heart, that they had been on this case with him. Gerald Kelly had long ago learned to live with the nagging sense of doubt and uncertainty that went with everyday police work, so much that, at times, he came to regard these feelings almost as friends, ghosts on the shoulder reminding him to ask the impertinent, awkward, important questions he might otherwise have forgotten. On occasion the science people came up with tangible proof—a blood or semen stain, a fingerprint or a string of genetic code. But when science failed them, the answers almost always lay in lacunae, what was missing or unknown. Kelly had lived with that slippery reality for years, as had Falcone's men, he was certain of it. Not so the artificially erudite Gianluca Quattrocchi, a man who seemed to harbour very few doubts about anything, himself most of all, shunning the interesting if difficult Falcone for the diminutive Bryan Whitcombe, who was constantly at his side, tossing out obscure and useless literary references at any opportunity.

If this strange, tangled, and seemingly impenetrable case went on much longer, Kelly decided, he'd tell Quattrocchi that he was bringing Falcone and his men on board, no matter how loudly the Carabinieri back in Rome howled. He could live with the squeals. This was San Francisco, not Italy. It was his call. The SFPD needed all the bright help they could get on this one, and Kelly's instincts told him Leo Falcone and his men could provide it.

Kelly grunted an inaudible curse as the TV men swarmed forward, raising their cameras. Nic Costa, who was more than Falcone's right-hand man, Kelly could sense that in the bond between them, was at that very moment the quarry of a thousand prying lenses. California's dread legions of showbiz hacks and cameramen were seeking photos and interviews with Maggie Flavier. Second best would be the man who had saved her life, not long after he had seemingly entered it in a way half the male population of America envied as they pored over the photos in that morning's papers. Maggie Flavier in her prime, Maggie Flavier in her agony. And gazing adoringly at some lowly Italian cop. This ravenous pack usually saved its activities for L.A.; now Kelly had them on his doorstep in San Francisco. It did nothing to improve his mood.

Kelly had seen enough of show business to understand that when stars and the movie trade came into play, every key aspect of an investigation had to be approved by the tin gods above him. Slowly, ineluctably, this homicide investigation was starting to follow the familiar path from a tight, w ell-ordered police case to a public circus, one played out daily in the papers and on the TV. He had seen this happen often enough to know there was no way of turning back the clock.

The conference room was packed. Standing room only. The event was, naturally, going out live, through the networks, and, he saw to his amazement, over the web, too. The crew at the very front wore bomber jackets bearing the logo of Lukatmi.

“Wait a minute,” Kelly whispered to the police public affairs officer who was watching her minions trying to keep some kind of order in a rabble of more than a hundred assorted newspaper, TV, radio, and web hacks. “Josh Jonah's got himself a TV station now?”

“Since last month,” the woman whispered back. “Don't you read the news?”

“Only the stuff that matters. Who the hell let his ponytails in here? And why are they sitting up front like they own the place?”

“I did. How am I supposed to keep them out? They're media. They've got an audience bigger than ten local news stations. Besides, Lukatmi is backing that movie. They're using this footage for some program on the ‘making of…' or something.”

Kelly stared at the woman in disbelief. “This is a homicide investigation. Not a reality show.”

“You have your job. I have mine. We both report to the commissioner's office. You want to sort this out there?”

“Listen—”

“No, you listen. Josh Jonah and Tom Black have been on all the networks, prime-time nationwide TV, telling the world what great pals they were with Allan Prime. They've delivered flowers by the truckload to Maggie Flavier. How do you think it's going to look if we throw their TV crew onto the street?”

“I don't care about how it looks…” Kelly was aware his voice was rising. The lights came up just then and he found himself stared at by a multitude of faces in a sea of shining artificial suns. “And frankly,” he muttered, “I am starting to care even less with every passing minute.”

“That's your problem,” the public affairs woman snapped, then thrust an envelope at him. “They asked me to give you that.”

“Who?”

She looked a little guilty. “The commissioner's office. After Bonetti and the Lukatmi people got in there. Via the mayor's office, I ought to add. The governor's been on the line, too.”

Kelly blinked. The public affairs woman added something he didn't quite catch, then waded into the audience, trying to instil some order. Gerald Kelly fervently wished he were anywhere else on the planet but in this room, with these people, knowing that, in between the crap and the prurience, there'd be a few good, decent, old-fashioned reporters who knew how to ask good, decent, old-fashioned questions. Ones he couldn't begin to answer.

He didn't have the time to look at the sheet of paper the infobabe had handed him. The room had exploded in a frenzy. The media was hungry and demanding to be fed. Besides, the first question was prearranged: some guy from the
Examiner
, primed to ask the obvious. Was there any proven connection with Allan Prime's death? Kelly liked to seed the openers. It gave him a slim chance to keep a handle on things. Normally.

“Any connection is supposition at this moment…” he began, after the plant rose to his mark. He faltered. He was astonished to see Gianluca Quattrocchi reaching over to take the mike from him, talking in his florid English, saying the exact opposite. Kelly sat, dumbstruck, listening to the stuck-up Italian blathering on about poetry and motivation and the damned movie that seemed to overshadow one bloody murder and now a near-fatality, too.

As he reached some obscure point about the relationship between the crimes and the cycle inside the book, the pompous Carabinieri man fell silent. He gestured to the Canadian at his side to finish the answer.

“The links are implicit, obvious, and ominous,” Whitcombe announced, in his weedy, professorial voice. “In Dante's Hell, the punishment fits the crime. Allan Prime died in the second circle, that of the wanton. He was led to his death by a woman, and the publicity we have since seen seems to indicate that Prime's private life merited this description. The third circle is that of the gluttonous. Ergo…”

Kelly muttered to Quattrocchi, “Ergo what? Maggie Flavier was eating an apple. This is not what we agreed.”

“Listen, please,” the Italian replied, shushing him, almost politely, “the man is a genius.”

“He's a frigging…” Kelly began, and then shut up.

The PR woman was actually pointing at him from the audience, her long finger erect in the bright lights of the camera, then running across her upper lip, as if to say “Zip it.”

In the front row, McGuire, the crime reporter for the
Chronicle
, had started to snigger.

Kelly picked up the envelope the infobabe had given him, ripped it open, and read the contents with growing disbelief.

T
ERESA LUPO WISHED THE AMERICAN POLICE woman hadn't asked about Maggie Flavier's poisoning. Teresa hated imprecision more than anything.

So she simply said, “The poor woman met her wicked stepmother. Or stepfather. Who knows? Unless your people find the man who gave her that poisoned apple.”

“Mobile caterers…” Catherine Bianchi sighed. “They're minimum-wage businesses. What do you expect?”

“Not much. The thing is…” She felt as if she were trying to analyse a scene from a movie, one that had been ripped out of context. Without knowledge of what preceded the event, she couldn't begin to pull some logic out of what might follow. “…it's a very strange way to try to murder someone. If that's what it was. Particularly given the way they killed Allan Prime. A crossbow bolt through the skull. A poisoned apple given to someone with a food allergy. It doesn't even sound like the same person to me. What they did to Maggie was horrifying. But…”

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. “If I were a betting person, I'd lay money against her being badly affected by a cruel stunt like that, much less killed. She spends most of her time near lots of people. She knows she has that allergy and she's prepared to deal with it. Yes, she was at risk in the woods, alone with Nic. But who could have predicted she'd be there? The chances of her dying should have been quite slim.”

Falcone finally took his attention away from the Lukatmi building. “You mean they
weren't
trying to kill her?”

“I don't know what I mean. I just think it was a very odd way to go about it if that's what they wanted. Perhaps they just planned to hurt her. They certainly managed that.”

She tried to put the problem succinctly. “What bothers me most of all is the style. Allan Prime had no chance of survival whatsoever. He died from violence of the most extreme sort, the kind of brute force we see ten, twenty times a year because that's the way the human race tends to go about eliminating one another. It's quick. It's easy. You don't have to do much in the way of preparation. But poisoning… it's rare. And tricky. I've only dealt with one case of willful poisoning in my entire career and that worked only because the victim was dying from heart disease already. Why now? Why here of all places?” One more thing bothered her. “Do they grow almonds in California?”

“Of course,” Catherine answered. “Millions of them. Merced County. About an hour south. I go at the end of February, when the blossom's out. You can do a tour. It's beautiful.”

“Farmed almonds? For sale?”

“Sure. But you don't need to go out and buy almonds to get almond essence. It's on sale in any grocery store.”

“Not this kind,” Teresa answered, wishing she had her lab and Silvio Di Capua. “Whatever was injected into that apple was homemade. There were traces of fibre. You don't get that in essence. Also, there was a small but noticeable amount of prussic acid.”

That silenced them.

“Cyanide,” she explained.

“Cyanide smells of almonds,” Peroni pointed out.

“Or almonds smell of cyanide, whichever way you want to look at it. The native wild almond contains a substance that transforms into hydrogen cyanide when the flesh is crushed or bruised. Domesticated varieties have had that mostly bred out of them, though they retain the smell. That's not what Maggie Flavier got. She was poisoned with the crushed fruit of a wild bitter almond. You can still buy bitter-almond essence in Rome. We use it, very carefully, in cooking. But it's banned in the U.S., except in medicine, which is why I guess he had to make it himself.”

“So she had cyanide poisoning, too?” Catherine asked, bewildered. “And you still think they weren't trying to kill her?”

“Not with cyanide. It was a minute amount. You can get exactly the same effect using standard almond essence from a grocery store. It was the allergic reaction that put Maggie in hospital. There wasn't enough cyanide there to do much of anything. I don't get it.”

Falcone yawned. Details that went nowhere always bored him.

The clock on the dashboard ticked over to one-fifteen. They were due inside Lukatmi.

“That supermarket over there,” he said, reaching into his wallet and pulling out a fifty-dollar bill. “We need some shopping.”

Teresa took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. “Are you going to do this to me every time there's someone interesting to talk to?”

“We scarcely have reason to be in that place,” Peroni said apologetically. “You certainly don't.”

“So I'm supposed to shop? While you question the Lukatmi guys?”

“A suggestion only,” Falcone cut in. “I would never presume to give you orders. It would be impertinent. And also…” He mulled over the words. “… somewhat counterproductive. You fare best left on your own. Think about old films and bitter almonds, please. Just do it out of my earshot.”

Muttering something obscene in which the phrase “stinking cops” was one of the milder rebukes, she got out of the car, slamming the door as hard as she could behind her.

It was a bright, cold summer day. The chill of the strong sea breeze soon began to make her teeth ache. She thought of walking out to Fort Point, a mile or so towards the bridge, and trying to find the exact location for the haunting scene in which Jimmy Stewart rescued Kim Novak from the ocean. Much, it seemed to her, as Nic had apparently saved the stricken Maggie Flavier. Life imitating art. Quattrocchi believed that was happening. So did she, but in a different way. While Leo Falcone…

Teresa Lupo wasn't sure she was right. But she was certain they were wrong, at least in part.

She walked back towards the Marina, thinking. Naturally, she'd keyed their number into her phone, under the single name HankenFrank.

“Pronto!”
said a voice on the other end.

“What the hell are you doing talking Italian, Frank?”

“What the hell are you doing being ignorant of caller ID?” the voice on the other end demanded. “And how did you know it was me, not zygote two?”

“Because you sound different, even if you don't know it. Can I buy you two coffee?”

“Only if you have some interesting questions with which to entertain us.”

“That,” Teresa said, pocketing Falcone's fifty-dollar bill, “I can guarantee.”