Viper - Michael Morley [86]
‘And what did he say to that?’
‘Told me to fuck off. He used to keep their stuff in the van – our van. He’d hold them, sort of cuddle them and sleep with them. But after I told him it was sick he stopped doing it, or he kept them somewhere else.’
‘Like the pit.’
‘Guess so.’
Sylvia picked up Rosa’s picture and held the dead girl’s face in front of his. ‘So you’re telling me that he stole this girl’s underwear from her on the very night that she got murdered? Hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?’
Paolo shrugged. ‘Coincidences happen.’
‘Did he ever approach the girls – do anything to them?’
‘You’re joking. He was too chicken-shit scared to approach them. He’d shout things if I was with him, but he was frightened to death of women. He wanted one – wanted one really bad – but he was terrified of being alone with them. Scared of them saying anything about how he looked.’
‘Did that happen?’
‘Sometimes. A while ago – before he looked anything near as bad as he does now – he tried to hit on some girls, but they were horrible to him.’
‘Like how?’
‘They’d put their fingers in their throats to show he made them feel like throwing up.’
Sylvia felt a pang of sympathy for Franco. But at the same time she knew that such humiliation could easily engender thoughts of murder. The interview lasted another hour. By the end she was as sure as she could be that he’d been telling her the truth. ‘Do you know where he is, Paolo? He’s not well, and we have to find him. We have to help him and we have to make sure he hasn’t got anything to do with these deaths.’
Paolo didn’t hesitate. ‘He didn’t. I know Franco better than anyone and I know he didn’t kill anybody.’
‘You might be right. But we have to talk to him ourselves. You know we have to do that. Where could he be, Paolo?’
There was a long silence, then he shifted awkwardly on the hard interview chair. ‘I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did, but I really don’t know.’
Paolo shut his eyes and covered his face with his hands. He wanted to go home. Wanted to check his grandfather was okay. Wanted this nightmare to end. But more than anything, he wanted to clear his mind of the images of where Franco might be and what he might do with his grandfather’s Glock.
65
Grand Hotel Parker’s, Napoli
A few too many beers and far too little sleep conspired to give Jack an early morning headache. He’d been hoping for a gentle start to the day. A little low-volume news on the TV, then a longer than normal soak under a hot shower. But after being awake for less than ten minutes he was already compelled to run yesterday’s events through his head. What was still bugging him was the link between the killings at the pit and the murder of Francesca Di Lauro. He was still far from certain any of them were the work of the runaway Franco Castellani.
Jack used the bathroom, then padded over to the desk in the corner of his room and emptied out his thoughts. In that blurry moment when the killer at the pit had been disturbed, he’d shown that instinctively his weapon of choice was not fire, but a firearm. Fire was his fantasy, his pleasure, his turn-on. But when it came to split-second survival, then it was a gun that he turned to.
A shooter.
That’s what he was.
When the chips were down and he had to react rather than plan, when he had to get down to business rather than indulge his fantasy, he was a shooter.
And shooters were cold and deadly. Remote, unemotional and detached.
They had to focus their hunt on finding a man who regularly handled a gun. Someone who was a proficient shot, felt confident and comfortable enough to kill strangers without hesitation.
Was that really Franco Castellani? Could you get that sort of proficiency from shooting rats in a pit?
Sadly, today’s video game generation was proving to be among the world’s deadliest and youngest shooters. Pennsylvania State, Columbine, Iowa, Omaha, Virginia Tech, Dawson, the list went on and on. Stats showed that around a dozen kids a day died in the States from gunshot wounds – kids these days were made