• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 258 0

’s when we said good-bye. I went home, smoked a joint and had dinner but I can’t remember what I ate.” He also couldn’t remember Amanda being around, although she had told police, days earlier, that when Patrick Lumumba sent her a text message telling her not to come to work, she went straight over to Raffaele’s and spent the entire evening there. In Raffaele’s version, he was home alone around 11 P.M. when his father called on the mobile phone, as he did every night. But the police already knew from phone logs that neither this call, nor one his father made at 8:40 P.M. to the land line, had been answered.

“I remember that Amanda hadn’t come back yet. I surfed the net for another two hours after babbo called and only stopped when Amanda got back, at about 1 A.M.”

Raffaele didn’t offer up any of the details that Amanda had given police about their evening—that they had watched Amélie, made dinner, smoked a few joints, and had sex. That was the break the police were looking for. Raffaele had not corroborated Amanda’s alibi. And Amanda had not corroborated his. One or both were lying. The police asked Raffaele to remove his shoes, which they checked against a bloody footprint found in Meredith’s bedroom. The print appeared to match and, unbeknownst to Amanda, who was still in the waiting room, Raffaele was arrested and taken into custody.

BY NOW IT WAS AFTER 1 A.M., but with Raffaele sitting in a jail cell, Monica Napoleoni decided there was no time to waste in bringing Amanda back for questioning. Detective Napoleoni, forty-six, the head of the Perugia homicide squad, would make the perfect sex-flick dominatrix. She is a thin woman with long, jet-black hair that she wears in a sharp fringe just above her eyes, perfectly framing her oval face. Her perma-tan décolletage and heavy eye makeup are familiar sites in Perugia. In the winter, she tucks her tight blue jeans into black stiletto boots. During the summer, she wears white jeans, baby-doll blouses, and sandals, her toenails painted the same crimson red as her manicured nails. As her officers were booking Raffaele, Napoleoni went out to the vending machine in the hallway, worried that Amanda might hear Raffaele protesting his arrest and decide to leave.

“Who on earth could have killed her?” Napoleoni asked Amanda, her arms crossed as she leaned against the vending machine.

Amanda said that she didn’t know—that she had wracked her brain and come up with nothing. The two went back to an interrogation room, where Napoleoni and several other officers asked Amanda to check through her cell phone for names and ideas. Because Amanda was not then an official suspect or person of interest, her questioning was not taped. At 1:45 A.M., Napoleoni called in a translator and wrote in her police log that Amanda was also being questioned. At that point, she was an official suspect in Napoleoni’s eyes and the police should have started taping the interrogation and allowed Amanda to call a lawyer, but they didn’t. The interrogators asked Amanda to read the names and text messages on her phone. When she got to the message that she had written to Patrick Lumumba on November 1, she was asked to explain what it meant. She had written in Italian: “Ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata.” In English, the phrase ci vediamo means “see you later” and is nothing more than a friendly “see you around.” But in Italian, the same phrase generally suggests a fixed appointment. The interrogators would not let it go; they pressed Amanda to explain when she met Patrick and what they did together.

Amanda says that the police yelled at her and called her “a stupid liar.” She says they hit her on the back of the head twice and told her that she was protecting someone. Amanda says they threatened her with thirty years in jail and told her she would never see her family again. So, she says, she came up with a story. She told the interrogators that, yes, she had met Patrick that night at the basketball courts. She said that the two of them went back to via della Pergola to find Meredith because Patrick liked