Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [123]
It was at a high point that he saw the flotilla to the north, maybe thirty or forty boats at anchor or cruising slowly back and forth, held offshore by three larger craft that looked like cutters or guard boats, and he knew the police had found the grotto. Then, as he was starting down, negotiating the hairpin, he saw a helicopter suddenly rise up to circle over the top of the cliff where he’d been less than twenty minutes earlier.
Abruptly the entire scene vanished as the truck slid forward on the loose gravel. Pumping the brakes wildly, Harry swung the wheel back toward the road. But it did no good. The truck continued to slide. The edge was coming up. After that there was nothing but air and the water below. And then the right front wheel caught in a rut. The steering wheel snapped out of his hand. And, as if it had suddenly been mounted on a track, the vehicle swung sharply back and followed the path of the road, dropping behind a steep ridge and in under an umbrella of trees.
For another five minutes Harry fought both the truck and road, and then he was at lake level, where the road went on for another twenty yards, then ended abruptly in a growth of brush and high trees at the water’s edge.
Parking on a hill behind a row of trees and making sure the truck couldn’t be seen from the lake, Harry got out and walked along the water’s edge, then pushed through the undergrowth to where he could see the dark shadow that was the entry to the cave. In the distance he could hear the helicopter circling. And he prayed that’s where it would stay.
94
The grotto. Same time.
ROSCANI STOOD ON THE LANDING, LOOKING into the motorboat. A man and woman lay dead inside it. The woman had been lucky he hadn’t used the razor—the way he’d used it on the man who lay beside her, or the way he’d used it on Edward Mooi, whose nearly headless body had been found floating in the inner channel.
Edward Mooi.
“Dammit!” he said out loud. “Dammit to hell!” He should have known he was the one who had hidden the priest. Should have gone back and pressured him the moment he’d found the engines on the outboard were still warm. But he hadn’t, because the call had come about the dead men in the lake and he’d gone there instead.
Turning from the landing, letting the tech people work, he walked back down the grotto’s main corridor past the ancient stone benches toward the room at the end where the priest had been kept, where Scala and Castelletti were now and where the body of a carabiniere had been brought from the maze of back passageways—another of the ice picker’s victims, the ice picker who they now knew was blond and had scratches down his cheek.
“Biondo,” the dying carabiniere had managed, his eyes glazed over, one hand grasping Scala’s, his other clawing feebly at his own cheek.
“Graffiato,” he’d coughed, his fingers still pulling at his cheek. Graffiato.
“Biondo. Graffiato.”
Blond. And strong. And quick. And, they surmised, the skin on his face scratched as well, most likely by the fingernails of the murdered woman, under which fragments of skin had been found. Fragments that would be sent to the lab for DNA analysis. New technology, Roscani thought. But useful only when they had a suspect, when they could take a blood sample and see if they had a match.
Entering the room, he moved past Scala and Castelletti and went again into the room where the nun’s personal belongings had been found.
Nursing sister Elena Voso, age twenty-seven, a member of the Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart; home convent, the Hospital of St. Bernardine in the Tuscan city of Siena.
Walking back to the main tunnel, Roscani ran a hand through his hair and tried