Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [146]
ROSCANI: We don’t know where your daughter is, Signore Voso, but the killer very well might. If you know where she is, I beg of you to please tell me. For her sake…
DOMENICO VOSO: I don’t know where she is. I wish with the heart of all my family that I did. [His eyes flashed to Mother Fenti, pleading.]
MOTHER FENTI: Nor do I, Domenico. I have already said so to the ispettore capo. [She looked to Roscani.] If I hear, if either of us hears, you will be the first to know. [Now she stood.] I thank you for coming.
* * *
MOTHER FENTI KNEW where Elena Voso was. Domenico Voso did not. That was how Roscani felt as he sat at a desk in a back room of carabinieri headquarters in Siena twenty minutes later. She knew. And she denied it. Never mind that a father’s heart was torn out.
Amiable and sparkly-eyed as she was, at heart she was a tough and very savvy old bird, strong enough to let Elena Voso be killed to protect whomever she was answering to. And she was answering to someone, because as prominent a figure as she was, by no means was she powerful enough to be doing this on her own. A mother general in Siena did not flaunt her authority in both the faces of the Catholic Church and the nation of Italy.
And even though he was certain the anonymous patient admitted to the hospital in Pescara had to have been Father Daniel, he knew Sister Cupini would stand by her claim of not knowing about it because it was the story Mother Fenti had invented for her. Clearly it was Mother Fenti who was running things here. And she would not give in. What he had to do, and quickly, was find a way around her.
Sitting back, Roscani took a sip of cold coffee. As he did, a way, or, rather, a conceivable way, came to him.
111
EuroCity Train #55. 4:20 P.M.
JULIA LOUISE PHELPS SMILED LIGHTLY AT the man in the first-class seat across from her, then turned to the window and watched the rural land ease to cityscape. In a matter of a few miles, open land became apartment buildings, warehouses, factories. In fifteen minutes Julia Phelps, or rather Thomas Kind, would be in Rome. Then, a taxi from the station to the Majestic Hotel on Via Veneto. And then, a few minutes later, another. Taken across the Tiber to the Amalia, the former pensione on Via Germanico—which was small, homey, and discreet. And comfortably close to the Vatican.
Only one part of the trip from Bellagio to Rome had been troublesome—the killing of the young designer he’d met on the hydrofoil and coaxed into giving him a ride to Milan when he’d learned the man had a car in Como and was driving there. What should have been a short, simple late-night automobile trip suddenly turned onerous when the young man began making jokes about the seeming impotence of the police and their inability to catch the fugitives. He’d looked at Thomas Kind too seriously, studying his large hat, his clothing, his overdone makeup that covered the scratches on his face, then half playfully suggesting that one of the fugitives could be dressed just like him, pretending to be a woman. A killer who could slip away unnoticed, right under the noses of the police.
In times past, this was something Thomas Kind probably would have let go. But not in the mental state he was in now. That the designer could be a dangerous witness had been almost irrelevant; the thing that had jumped out foremost was the uncontrollable urge for killing that the suggestion of danger had aroused in him. And the intensely erotic gratification that went with it.
This sensation, which had once been vague and all but unnoticeable, had grown markedly in the last weeks; beginning with the murder of the cardinal vicar of Rome and increasing in passion and fervor with his acts in Pescara and Bellagio and then inside the grotto. How many had it been?—seven killed, within hours? One on top of the other on top of the other.
And now, here on this train entering Rome, he was desperately