Spider - Michael Morley [57]
‘That’s right,’ said Orsetta. ‘Even bathwater in some places can contain them. Anyway, evidence that they were not absorbed while she was alive means she was not killed by drowning nor was she dismembered in the sea water, or any other water for that matter.’
‘Surely that would have been unlikely anyway?’ suggested Benito.
‘You’re right,’ Massimo agreed. ‘Unlikely, but not impossible. It has been known for a murderer to drown a victim in bathwater and then dismember the body in the same water, the logic being that there is only one crime scene for the killer to clean up, rather than a death site and a separate dismemberment site. We should always look for the unusual. If you can find it, then you have a sat nav guide to your murderer.’
Orsetta took a long drink of the cold cola. Massimo waited until she finished before he urged her to continue. ‘Now her head,’ said the Direttore. ‘What does Patologia say about the head of Cristina Barbuggiani?’
Orsetta flicked over a page of her notes. ‘The head…’
‘Her head, Cristina’s head,’ snapped Massimo. ‘It is not an object. We are dealing with a person here. Let’s remember that.’
‘Cristina’s head,’ Orsetta began again, ‘we can treat as a pure sample, in that it had not been exposed to any sea water. So fixing the time and date of death is more possible here.’ Her eyes dipped down to her notes, to find the pathologist’s exact wording. “‘The skin was easy enough to peel from the skull and the hair could be gently pulled out.” From this, they fixed the rate of decomposition at about two weeks.’
Roberto was pondering something. ‘How differently does a body decompose on land, compared to in water?’
‘Very differently,’ said Massimo. ‘Bodies decompose in air twice as quickly as they do in water, and eight times as quickly as they do in soil.’
‘And young people decay faster than old people,’ added Benito.
‘Why’s that?’ asked Roberto.
‘Because of the fat levels,’ explained Benito. ‘Fluid and fat accelerate decomposition. So if you want to hang around in life, or death, stay off the burgers and beer.’
‘Thank you, Benito,’ said Massimo, cutting off the start of his case coordinator’s streamof black humour. ‘Maggots, Orsetta. Jack will want to know about infestation. Were all the usual suspects present?’
‘Yes, they were,’ confirmed Orsetta. ‘Analysis revealed the presence of multiple fully formed Calliphora.’
‘Blue-bottle fly,’ explained Benito to Roberto.
Orsetta raised her eyebrows at him, making sure he’d finished with his interruptions, then carried on. ‘The larvae were mature, elderly, fat, indolent, third-stage maggots, not in pupa cases. The estimate was that they had been laid about nine or ten days earlier. The lab said we should allow an extra day or two for the original flies to have found the head. Sorry, Cristina’s head. So we’re back with the fourteen-day estimate.’
Massimo looked up from his desk top. ‘None of the progeny of the flies had themselves reached the breeding stage?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘I asked the same question. Apparently that would have taken about a month.’
‘So again the timing coincides?’ checked Roberto.
‘Yes,’ Orsetta confirmed. ‘In the summary, the notes concur again that the head was probably kept in a lukewarm place for between ten and fourteen days.’
Massimo scribbled some words on his pad and the team waited silently until he had finished. ‘We need to have a stab at a timeline. Let’s look…’
Roberto interrupted him. ‘Direttore, I think I have a rough one.’
‘Go on,’ said Massimo, pleased to see the youngster had been thinking ahead.
‘Cristina was last seen alive on the ninth of June and was reported missing on the tenth. From what we’ve been told by the pathology reports, it’s likely that she was killed somewhere around the twelfth to the fourteenth. We’re told the corpse was kept for six days before it was dismembered and disposed of. This takes us to the twentieth of June as probably the earliest that he started disposing of the limbs. We have our first public finding of remains two days later, on the twenty-second.