Spider - Michael Morley [25]
18
Sofitel Hotel, Florence, Tuscany
From the moment Jack awoke, he was chasing time.
He stumbled to the bathroom, nursing the mother of all hangovers. He’d badly overslept and had less than two hours in which to meet Orsetta, find out about the case she wanted help with and then catch a train back to Siena. It was going to be tight.
Showering and shaving took fifteen minutes and he arrived in the restaurant with his skin still stinging from aftershave. Orsetta was sitting in a corner, sipping a cappuccino and reading a newspaper.
‘Morning. Anything good in there?’ he said, taking a seat opposite her.
‘Buon giorno,’ she replied, without looking up. ‘Unfortunately there is never anything good in Italian newspapers.’
Jack knew what she meant. He used to read the crime-packed American papers solely as a means of keeping track of ‘the enemy’.
A waiter appeared and he ordered black coffee, juice and some chopped fruit and yoghurt. It wasn’t what he wanted, but he knew that he’d reached the age when he could no longer eat a cooked breakfast and not expect it to show up somewhere on his waistline.
Orsetta folded her newspaper and was putting it down when she noticed printing ink on her fingers. ‘Looks like I’m being processed,’ she joked, holding up her hands.
‘Always good to have a set of dabs on file,’ said Jack.
Orsetta rubbed her hands on a napkin, then dipped into a black calfskin document bag at her feet. She produced a weighty A4-sized Jiffy bag and then folded her arms over the top of it and looked intently across the table.
‘What?’ asked Jack, sensing her hesitation.
‘Yesterday, you said you might need persuading to help us. Do you still feel that way?’
Jack was dry-mouthed and when he spoke his voice was as rough as gravel. The booze had left him dehydrated and he hoped the juice and coffee would come quickly. ‘And yesterday you admitted you were checking me out to see that I wasn’t a “cabbage case”. Do you still think I might be?’
The word ‘cabbage’ made her laugh again. ‘Touche,’ she said and slid the package across the white linen tablecloth.
‘Heavy,’ he said, weighing it in one hand. ‘Okay if I read this on the train and call you later?’
You need to call Massimo,’ she answered. ‘He’s put a personal letter in there for you. As I said last night, he really wanted to come in person, but is out of the country.’
Jack’s coffee, juice, fruit and yoghurt arrived. Within seconds he’d drained half the orange, letting the waiter move away before picking up the conversation. ‘BRK’s victims are always women on their own. Their typical age is mid-twenties and his MO is always to be “subtle” rather than “snatch”. Believe me, this guy probably has charm. We’ve never had sightings of him abducting his victims, or trying to abduct them. We presume he grooms the women, maybe even seduces them. We suspect he lures them into an area where they feel safe with him, and then he strikes.’
‘Premeditated and organized.’
Precisely. He’s an organized killer, a planner, never taking unnecessary risks, never making foolish mistakes. He’s the kind of guy that measures twice before cutting wood. Probably measures three times before cutting flesh.’
Orsetta drank her cappuccino, noting the seamless way he’d lapsed into the lexicon of murder, while mundanely mixing plain yoghurt into his chopped fruit. ‘We only have one victim, a young woman from Livorno, a town on the western shoreline of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In this case there is also no evidence of the victim being forcefully abducted. We also believe our offender falls into the organized category, but it is too early in the investigation for us to say that he has not made mistakes