Viper - Michael Morley [127]
An hour later he found Franco. His cousin was sitting alone in the necropolis. Milky light played on the side of his face. Most of his body was hidden in the darkness of night. He was throwing sticks for a wild dog that was so thin you could see every rib in its body.
‘Ciao, Franco.’ His tone was as casual as if it had been only a few hours since he’d last seen him.
Franco looked up. ‘Ciao, Paolo. You got the cops with you?’ He sounded croaky. It was the first time he’d spoken in days.
‘Like I’m that stupid.’
‘You are that stupid.’ Franco slowly got to his feet and the two cousins embraced.
‘Come stai?’
‘Not so good. I’ve been puking my guts out. I had some water, though, and a little food. But my stomach still hurts like fuck.’
Paolo held his arms. ‘Cops had me and Grandpa in. They’ve got your face plastered up in windows, mail offices, every-fucking-where. They think you killed some people on the site.’
Franco pulled away. ‘Well, I didn’t. They can think what they want.’
They talked in hushed voices, their backs turned against the wind, their conversation constantly interrupted by the feral dog that wanted its stick throwing. Paolo told the whole story about him and his grandfather being arrested. Franco told everything – well, almost everything – about Rosa Novello, her boyfriend, and what was left of another woman in his fire pit.
The dog returned and Franco wrestled the stick in its mouth, pulling the mutt backwards and forwards. The two cousins chatted for nearly an hour before Paolo left. It had felt like old times. Batting the breeze. Talking about something or nothing. There weren’t many people in life either of them felt that easy with.
Paolo climbed back out of the ruins and trudged home, lost in his own thoughts.
If he’d been more attentive, he may have seen the grey-faced man hiding in the slim shadow of a doorway opposite the campsite entrance.
The Don had asked Sal to find leverage with old man Castellani. The veteran Camorrista reckoned he’d done just that.
93
Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio
The bones were almost entirely intact. The hands seemed to be the only parts that had been dismembered. And to make matters even easier, the victim had been buried in his suit and shoes. No doubt about it, stiff number eight was male. And by the cut of his clothes, he’d been buried several fashion generations ago.
Luella Grazzioli hadn’t even needed to go back to the laboratory to make a skeletal assembly. The plastic sheeting that he’d been buried in had been lifted out of the grave and laid alongside the mound of lava rocks. Jack and Sylvia watched the scene, illuminated by arc lights, as Luella unpeeled the full horror of the sheet’s contents. All manner of creatures had fed on the flesh, fat and ligaments but the plastic had preserved much of the clothing. Jack thought it ironic that many years ago the sheeting had probably been used to prevent evidence being left at the murder scene, and now here it was, hopefully presenting them with their clearest clues to date.
The skull was a little broken up, but still held together. There was a glaring hole in the right cheekbone and another through the forehead. Everyone guessed they were bullet wounds. The skull showed bigger but corresponding holes in the temporal and occipital bones. The rotted remains of a grey jacket and a shirt were opened up.
The guy’s ribcage had been caved in.
‘Is that the work of the ground, or his killer?’ asked Jack.
‘Most likely the ground,’ said Luella. ‘He wasn’t lying flat in the hole. He was all scrunched up. Almost foetal. I expect the weight of the earth and rocks heaped on top of him would have broken his ribcage.’
‘What about that?’ Sylvia pointed at the left side of the chest, close to the heart. ‘Is that rounded nick at the bottom of that rib consistent with a bullet wound?’
Luella looked up from her work. ‘I’m sorry, you know that I’m really new to this. I helped