Hannibal - Thomas Harris [41]
Tourists to Florence during the period will remember plastered everywhere the posters with the single watching eye that warned couples against the Monster.
Pazzi worked like a man possessed.
He called on the American FBI's Behavioral Science section for help in profiling the killer and read everything he could find on FBI profiling methods.
He used proactive measures: Some lovers' lanes and cemetery trysting places had more police than lovers sitting in pairs in the cars. There were not enough women officers to go around. During hot weather male couples took turns wearing a wig and many mustaches were sacrificed. Pazzi set an example by shaving off his own mustache.
The Monster was careful. He struck, but his needs did not force him to strike often.
Pazzi noticed that in years past there were long periods when the Monster did not strike at all - one gap of eight years. Pazzi seized on this. Painstakingly, laboriously dragooning clerical help from every agency he could threaten, confiscating his nephew's computer to use along with the Questura's single machine, Pazzi listed every criminal in northern Italy whose periods of imprisonment coincided with the time gaps in Il Mostro's series of murders. The number was ninetyseven.
Pazzi took over an imprisoned bank robber's fast, comfortable old AlfaRomeo GTV and, putting more than five thousand kilometers on the car in a month, he personally looked at -ninetyfour of the convicts and had them interrogated. The others were disabled or dead.
There was almost no evidence at the scenes of the crimes to help him narrow down the list. No body fluids of the perpetrator, no fingerprints.
A single shell casing was, recovered from a murder scene at Impruneta. It, was a .22 Winchester Western rimfire with extractor marks consistent with a Colt semiautomatic pistol, possibly a Woodsman.
The bullets in all the crimes were .22s from the same gun. There were no wipe marks on the bullets from a silencer, but a silencer could not be ruled out.
Pazzi was a Pazzi and above all things ambitious, and he had a young and lovely wife with an everopen beak. His efforts ground twelve pounds off his lean frame. Younger members of the Questura privately remarked on his resemblance to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.
When some young smart alecks put a morph program in the Questura computer that changed the Three Tenors' faces into those of a jackass, a pig and a goat, Pazzi stared at the morph for minutes and felt his own face changing back and forth into the countenance of the jackass.
The window of the Questura laboratory is garlanded with garlic to keep out.evil spirits. With the last of his suspects visited and grilled to no effect, Pazzi stood at this window looking out on the dusty courtyard and despaired.
He thought of his new wife, and her good hard ankles and the patch of down in the small of her back. He thought of how her breasts quivered and bounced when she brushed her teeth and how she laughed when she saw him watching. He thought of the things he wanted to give her. He imagined her opening the gifts. He thought of his wife in visual terms; she was fragrant and wonderful to touch as well, but the visual was first in his memory.
He considered the way he wanted to appear in her eyes. Certainly not in his present role as butt of the pressQuestura headquarters in Florence is located in a former mental hospital, and the cartoonists were taking full advantage of that fact.
Pazzi imagined that success came as a result of inspiration. His visual memory was excellent and, like many people whose primary sense is sight, he thought of revelation as the development of an image, first blurred and then coming clear. He ruminated the way most of us look for a lost object: We review its image in our minds and compare that image to what we see, mentally refreshing the image many times a minute and turning it in space.
Then a political bombing behind the Uffizi museum took the public's attention, and Pazzi's time, away from the case of II Mostro