Good Blood (12 page)

“I’m afraid we spoiled one of the maids’ break times,” Julie said. “What do you say we take that stroll after all, and leave the tables to the staff?”

“You’re on,” Gideon replied. “Just let me gather my strength for a minute.”

But they were still gathering their strength five minutes later, when Vincenzo and Phil came out to find them. Vincenzo offered a curt, pro forma invitation to the three of them to stay for dinner, but they declined and went back to Stresa with Colonel Caravale in the police launch. Squalls were dancing over the lake, so they were inside, sitting knee-to-knee on the U-shaped, cushioned bench in the tiny cabin. After a little small talk about the weather, conversation flagged. Caravale was terse and preoccupied, and his glowering, thuggish looks hardly invited socializing. With his ostentatiously decorated military headgear, grim black uniform, epaulets, Sam Browne belt, and holstered sidearm, he could have been a corrupt police chief in some tinpot republic. If nothing else, he looked as if he’d be a good man with a rubber hose or an electric prod.

“You speak English extremely well, Colonel,” Julie said, searching for something to say.

He turned from the window he’d been staring through. “I’d better, signora. This is a tourist region. A lot of the people I have to deal with here don’t speak anything but.”

“Victims or perps?” Phil asked.

Caravale gave them a brief smile. “A little of both. There are English courses at the academy, signora.” He touched the brim of his cap and went back to looking out the window.

“But you speak it so idiomatically,” said Julie, who was hard to deter when she wanted to get someone talking. “Where did you learn? Surely not in a class?”

“No, I learned in Connecticut.” He turned toward them again, more fully this time, and with an air of resignation. Apparently these Americans weren’t going to let him think in peace.

“My father was a supply master in the Italian Army. He was captured in 1942 and spent the rest of the war at a POW camp in Colorado. He had a wonderful time, he couldn’t say enough about America. So after the war, before I was born, he went back and lived in New Haven with my aunt and her family for five years, until he came back home to get married. Later, he sent me back there every summer but one from the time I was twelve until I was seventeen. I still visit with my own children every few years. And so now I speak Italian with a Connecticut accent, and Connecticut with an Italian accent. Nobody understands what the hell I’m talking about.”

It was a joke-Caravale’s English was excellent-so everyone laughed, but then the conversation died again, until Phil spoke up with the air of a man who’d just come up with a terrific idea. “You know, Colonel, I was just thinking. Dr. Oliver might be able to help you out on this case.”

“Oh, really?” Caravale’s stiffened slightly, which Gideon, an old hand at this, correctly read as a danger sign.

Not Phil, however. “Oh, yeah, absolutely. He’s famous. They call him the Skeleton Detective, you’ve probably heard of him, he-”

“I’m a forensic anthropologist,” Gideon put in quickly. He knew enough about policemen to know that they did not always-well, just about never-welcome unsolicited “help” from unknown outsiders, particularly nonpolicemen, particularly nonpolicemen who were foreigners. Even solicited help wasn’t always gratefully received. Besides, that wasn’t what he was here for, and anyway, what did he know about kidnapping?

“I wouldn’t be of any use to you in something like this, I’m afraid,” he said to Caravale. “In forensic anthropology it’s mostly skeletal material that we deal with. We-”

“I’m aware of what forensic anthropologists deal with,” Caravale said shortly. “Believe it or not, we have them in Italy too. As a matter of fact, I myself worked with one on a case involving bones several years ago.”

“Really?” Julie prompted politely when he showed no sign of continuing.

“That’s right, a local doctor came upon the headless skeleton of a little girl in the woods near Baveno and contacted us. So I called our expert-our forensic anthropologist-in Rome and talked to her before doing anything. And at the site I took pains to have my men follow her instructions to the letter. We did everything: photographs, drawings, layered excavation with trowel and brushes, sifting the soil into buckets, everything. It took us six hours, but we recovered every scrap of bone there was and sent it off, numbered, bagged, and cross-recorded, to the criminalistics lab. They said it was the most thorough job they’d ever seen.”

“Did you ever catch the killer?” Julie asked.

“Unfortunately, no, but I have good reason to believe that the perp”-a quick, wry glance at Phil-“was a red fox that had been seen in the area.”

“A red-?”

“The skeleton was that of a rabbit,” Caravale said impassively. “I understand it was a source of amusement at the laboratory for some time and is now something of a legend there.”

Julie and Phil made sounds of commiseration but Gideon was annoyed at the undertone of reproach. Whose fault was it that the thick-jowled Caravale, let alone this Italian doctor of his, couldn’t tell the difference between a human child and a rabbit? To be fair, though, it was far from the first time he’d run across a physician who didn’t know animal bones when he saw them. It really wasn’t surprising. Differentiating human from nonhuman bones wasn’t part of any medical school curriculum that he knew of, and why should it be? But for cops it was a different story.

If you’d taken the session I put on at the International Conference on the Forensic Sciences when it was held in Rome a few years ago, Gideon thought but didn’t say, you’d have taken one look at the pelvis, or a scapula, or any long bone, and saved yourself five hours and fifty-nine minutes of work.

“There are some fairly simple ways to differentiate animal and human bones,” he contented himself with saying. “I can recommend a book or two if you’re interested.”

“I don’t think so, thanks, not today.” The launch thudded gently against the Stresa dock and came to a stop. Caravale was the first to stand. “However, if any further skeletons turn up, I’ll be sure to call upon you.”

“Do that,” Gideon said. “Just make sure it’s sometime in the next week.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Caravale. He made a formal little bow to the three of them, grunted his good-bye, and pulled himself up onto the pier.

“Well, that certainly went well,” Phil said brightly.

Gideon made a grumbling sound deep in his throat. “Let’s go get some lunch.”

The kidnappers’ answer came on Thursday morning, twenty-four hours after the advertisement had appeared. It was in the form of a padded envelope that had been slipped through the after-hours courier-delivery slot at Aurora Costruzioni’s field office in Intra during the night. The clerk who found it lying on the floor, seeing nothing on the front but VINCENZO DE GRAZIA in block letters-no business logo, no return address-was immediately suspicious. Following instructions from the carabinieri, she didn’t touch it, but called them at once.

Within minutes the envelope was dusted for fingerprints (none) and opened. Inside was a one-page letter folded around a cassette tape, both of which had also been wiped clean. The letter, envelope, and tape were placed in separate plastic sleeves for further examination and taken to carabinieri headquarters.

Half an hour later Vincenzo, working distractedly and intermittently at home on a proposal for a waste-water treatment facility near Bergamo, received a telephone call from Caravale.

“We’ve heard from them.”

“What?” Vincenzo put down the proposal. “How?”

“It came to your office in Intra. There’s a letter and an audiotape that’s supposed to be of Achille. Can you come in to headquarters to-”

“What do they say?”

“As far as we can tell, Achille is all right-”

“What do they say?”

Caravale took the last puff from his morning cigar and breathed out the smoke before answering. “They say ‘no.’”

Sitting opposite Caravale at carabinieri headquarters, Vincenzo mumbled his way through the brief message.

“‘ We are not interested in negotiating. Five million euros only. Do not waste our time by telling us this is not within your means or that you need more time. On the upper story of your villa, directly over the front entrance, is a window that is now kept shuttered. If you intend to cooperate, you will open those shutters as a signal, and we will then give you final instructions and tell you where to wire the money. As soon as we have the money, your son will be freed unharmed. If the shutters have not opened by noon on Friday, we will assume you do not wish to comply.’”

He looked up at Caravale. “Friday. Tomorrow.”

The colonel nodded. “Yes.”

Vincenzo flicked at the sheet of paper with his fingernails. “Shutters, shutters… but doesn’t this tell us that the kidnappers are right there, on Isola de Grazia? Either that, or they have an accomplice-”

“No, not necessarily. The front of your villa is visible from the shore here. With a pair of binoculars, they wouldn’t have any trouble seeing the shutters.”

“Oh. Of course, yes.” He seemed to drift away, thinking.

“You want to finish the letter, signore.”

Stiff-faced, Vincenzo went back to it.

“‘ In that case, your son will be killed at once. Preparations have already been made. This is our last message. You will not hear from us again.’”

He snorted and slid it back across the table. “I want to hear the tape.”

They were sitting in one of the interrogation rooms. A small tape recorder lay on the table. Caravale reached out and pressed a button. Vincenzo leaned in over it, shoulders hunched, head cocked. He had rushed over without slipping on a jacket, and with his shirtsleeves folded up over hairless, smooth forearms, he seemed to be vibrating with nervous energy.

“Papa?” The voice was tentative and frightened.

“Huh!” came from Vincenzo.

In the background they heard someone mutter, “Louder, kid.” There was a scraping sound; the recorder being moved closer.

“Papa?” Louder, much more intense.

Vincenzo nodded. “It’s him.”

“I’m all right… they gave me a Game Boy…”

They could tell Achille’s throat was clogging up, and a moment later he was bawling. “Papa, they’re going to kill me if you don’t pay them! I know they really mean it. I don’t want to d-”

That was all. Vincenzo listened for a few seconds longer to see if there was anything more, then threw himself angrily back against his chair. “You call that ‘all right’? I don’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

An uneven laugh. “I’m going to pay them, what else?”

“The entire five million? You have it?”

“I’ve made arrangements for it. A telephone call to Milan is all that’s needed.”

“Listen, Signor de Grazia…”

Vincenzo waved him off. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“Do you? I was going to say that Achille could already be dead.”

“The tape…”

“The tape could have been made days ago, right after they got him. My advice-”

“Your advice,” Vincenzo said through narrowed lips, “was to offer them a million euros, and we see how that worked out, don’t we? Will you stand in my way if I try to pay the ransom?”

“No, it’s up to you. But you’re operating in the dark. You’re liable to be out five million euros and still not get your son back.”

“Let me be frank, Colonel. I will be out nothing but the deductible and the interest on the loan. That I can afford. It’s my insurer that will be out the five million euros. Am I willing to risk Argos’s money on the chance of getting my son back alive? What do you think?”

“I think-”

“What would you think if it was your son, not mine?”

“I would-” Caravale stopped and dipped his chin. He knew what he’d think, all right.

“Good,” said Vincenzo, taking charge now. “May we go back to your office? With your permission, I’d like to use your telephone to tell my man to open the shutters.”

The call was made to Isola de Grazia at 10:22 A.M. At 10:24, Clemente opened the shutters. At 10:55, “Signor Pinzolo,” the name that Caravale had chosen for his role as negotiator, received his first, last, and only telephone call. The police technician who recorded it quickly ran the tape up to Colonel Caravale. “I think the call was made on one of those throwaway phones, Colonel. That’s not good.”

Vincenzo, in the act of leaving, sat down again and both men listened to the message, heads bent, ears pricked.

“Bank of Rezekne, Latvia,” the weird, gibbering voice said. “R, E, Z, E, K, N, E.”

“Damn,” Caravale muttered. Whoever it was had used an electronic voice distorter, one of the new generation that processed the sounds through an encoded chip and put them back out in a digital format. Next to impossible to trace. Voice prints wouldn’t work. Voice stress analyzers wouldn’t work. Chances were, they wouldn’t even be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Account number. One. Eight. Eight. Zero. Five. Two. Nine. Six. Two. Seven. By tomorrow.”

When it was clear that there was nothing else, Caravale turned off the machine.

Vincenzo was shaking his head, laughing again, this time in perplexity. “For God’s sake-Latvia?”

Major Massimiliano d’Este, deputy chief of the carabinieri ’s financial crimes unit, also laughed when Caravale called him after Vincenzo had left.

“Latvia?” he said over the telephone from Rome. “A numbered account? Well, they know their business, I have to give them that.”

“It’s going to be hard to trace?”

“It’s going to be impossible, Tullio. Compared to Rezekne, those banks in Liechtenstein or in the Cayman lslands-they’re open books.”

Latvia, he explained, was a recent entry in the anonymous banking field. In its all-out effort to attract business from persons interested in what it euphemistically referred to as “asset protection” or “tax optimization,” it had installed the strictest confidentiality laws in the world. The banks themselves often didn’t know their clients’ real identities. And unauthorized disclosure of information about accounts or account holders was a felony. Only on proof of a criminal act by the client could the records be opened up. The Latvian-”