The Abomination Read online

  Leaving the technicians to finish scraping samples from the blood spray, Kat and Piola took the boat back to Campo San Zaccaria. Malli, the Carabinieri’s lead IT technician, dusted the key card for fingerprints before placing it inside a card-reader.

  “Most of the room keys we see here aren’t actually used for opening hotel rooms,” he explained. “Because the magnetic strip is compatible with credit card readers, thieves use them to store stolen card details. You think your card’s still in your pocket, but actually that waiter you handed it to after lunch cloned it to a blank key card at the same time as he debited your bill.” He typed some instructions on his keyboard, and some lines of data appeared on the screen. “You’re in luck. This is just your standard-issue MagTek room key.” He pointed. “The Europa Hotel, in Cannaregio. Room 73. Key 1 of 2, active from December 22nd through January 18th. In other words, she hasn’t checked out yet.”

  The Europa was a small, inexpensive place not far from Stazione Santa Lucia. It wasn’t where Kat would have chosen to stay if she were coming to Venice. The cheap, shiny armchairs in the foyer, and the cheap shiny suits worn by those sitting in them, pecking at laptops or muttering into cell phones, suggested that this was strictly a businessman-on-a-budget place. She guessed most of the guests would only be staying a night or two.

  A good place to remain anonymous, she thought.

  A female desk clerk, squeezed into a polyester uniform two sizes too small, looked indifferently at their IDs and nodded them upstairs. More polyester underfoot, and a maid who looked considerably more alarmed to see them than the desk clerk had. She was probably an illegal, Kat thought. Most of the cheap labour in Venice was provided by migrants from the former Eastern Bloc these days.

  Room 73 was a featureless corporate box identical to a million other featureless corporate boxes around the world. Only the view outside the window would differ – and this window, rather surprisingly, overlooked a quiet rio, a pretty backstreet canal about eight feet wide. Opposite, an old warehouse crumbled gracefully into the water, its window ledges colonised by buddleia and moss.

  Clothes were piled up on the twin beds. “Looks like she was preparing to leave,” Kat said.

  Piola pointed to a damp patch on the wall. “What do you suppose that is?”

  The patch had a faintly pink tinge. Now that she looked at the room again, Kat realised there was something odd about it. Possessions had been heaped up on every available surface, as if someone had made a desultory attempt to sort them into piles. A laptop power cable was draped over the back of the chair. Suitcases lay in one corner, empty, as though tossed aside. In the small, functional bathroom, two washbags spilled their contents across the sink.

  “Capitano?”

  She turned. Piola was holding up a pillow from one of the beds. It had a hole right through it.

  “We need to talk to the maid,” he said. “And the manager. Now.”

  The manager was younger than Kat, a spotty youth from Slovenia whose name badge identified him as Adrijan. The maid, whose name was Ema, looked even more terrified than before, though whether because of the Carabinieri’s presence or her manager’s Kat couldn’t tell.

  Gradually, with Adrijan translating, it became clear what had happened. Just after 3 p.m., Ema had entered the room and found it in a terrible mess. There was blood on one wall, in the shower and on a sheet, and the contents of the drawers had been tipped onto the floor. She’d tidied up as best she could, but she wasn’t sure where everything was meant to go.

  Piola stared at the two hotel employees with a mixture of disbelief and fury. “She tidied up? What did she think the blood was?”

  Adrijan passed the question on, and the maid mimed someone clutching their nose. “Perhaps a nose bleed,” he said helpfully.

  “And this?” Piola demanded, holding up the pillow with a hole in it. The maid shrugged helplessly.

  Piola sighed. “Tell her she almost certainly interfered with a crime scene.” He turned to Kat. “What do you think?”

  “I’m wondering who the crime was against. If our. . .” She hesitated, not wanting to use the word “priestess” as Piola had done earlier. “If our victim was killed on Poveglia, who was attacked here?”

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “Two washbags, two suitcases. And according to Malli, two key cards were issued. When they finally get round to printing out the ledger, I’m sure we’ll find there were two guests in this room.”

  “Two women.”

  Piola raised an interrogative eyebrow. “No male clothes,” she explained. “And the washbags both contain make-up remover.”

  “But how did the killer get the body out?” he mused. Turning back to the hotel employees, he said, “Ask her – when she tidied up, was the window open?”

  The maid nodded, keen to be of help now. “Si,” she said in broken Italian. “I close.”

  Both carabinieri crossed to the window and peered down. Beneath them, the brown waters of the rio lapped against the hotel’s back wall.

  “Call in the divers,” Piola said to Kat. “Tell Allocation we need them here right away. And get a second forensic team over here, to search this room.”

  For the second time that day Kat donned a paper suit and covered her shoes with elasticated bags. The hotel ledger had indeed yielded two names, but better still, the room safe had yielded two passports. One was Croatian, in the name of Jelena Babić. The photograph matched the corpse in Hapadi’s morgue. The other was American, in the name of Barbara Holton. The photograph showed a middle-aged woman with short grey hair.

  “Better inform their embassies,” Piola said.

  “We can’t be certain Holton’s dead yet, sir.”

  “I give the divers about five minutes.” He grimaced with frustration. “If only we’d got here a few hours sooner.”

  “Sir?” Kat said hesitantly.

  “Yes, Capitano?”

  She indicated the laptop power lead. “There’s a lead but no laptop. Either our killer took it or—”

  “Or it’s in the water too? I’ll speak to the divers. They won’t like it – finding a body in that pool of shit’s one thing, but looking for a laptop could take days.” He nodded. “Good work, Kat.”

  As he went off to talk to the divers she found herself noting that it was the first time he’d called her by her first name.

  While she waited for Piola to return, Kat looked through the evidence bags the technicians were putting to one side. One caught her eye. It contained a lock of long black hair inside another bag.

  “Why’s this been double-bagged?” she asked, curious.

  The technician shook her head. “It was in that bag when we found it. So we put the whole thing inside one of ours.”

  “Strange.” She held it up to examine the hair more closely. It was a woman’s, she guessed from the length, coiled into a loose circle that had partially unwound to fill the sides of the bag. “Both our victims have short hair, according to their passport photographs.”

  “Want us to run some tests on it?”

  “Yes. It can’t be usual to take something like this away with you.”

  Moving along, she found a bag containing pages torn from La Nuova Venezia. The pages were all from the back section, where prostitutes’ small ads jostled with chat lines, dating agencies and boats for sale. Some of the prostitutes’ ads had been crossed out with a biro.

  “Also curious,” she murmured to herself.

  She moved along the line. The problem for the search team was knowing what should be bagged for analysis and what was irrelevant, so to be on the safe side they had bagged almost everything, from the women’s sweaters and coats right down to the contents of the wastepaper basket. Kat looked at the latter. It had contained some empty toiletry bottles and a supermarket receipt. According to the receipt, the two women had bought Pop-Tarts, bottled water and tinned chickpeas from Billa on the Strada Nuova two days before, with a credit card. She made a note to ask the card company for all the othe
r transactions they’d made.

  The technician brought over a document.

  “Looks like she rented a topetta while she was here,” he commented, showing her a hire form made out in the name of Jelena Babić. “Sure she wasn’t suicidal?”

  It always amazed Venetians that tourists were allowed to rent small boats by the day, subjecting themselves to the vaporetti’s klaxons and the curses of gondoliers as they tried to dodge the goods barges and even cruise liners that plied Venice’s cluttered waters. It was, most agreed, a wonder that more weren’t killed.

  Kat looked at the hire form. “From Sport e Lavoro in Cannaregio. I’ll give them a call.”

  She was still on the phone to the hire company – as she’d expected, their boat had been found drifting in the lagoon by a fisherman and returned to them: no, they hadn’t thought of contacting the police, or indeed of calling the number they had for the customer on the rental form – when she heard a shout from outside. She hurried downstairs.

  Piola had been right: it had taken the divers only a few minutes to locate the second body. Barbara Holton had also been shot in the head, and quite recently – the wound was still fresh. There was a laptop wedged into the hotel bathrobe she’d died in.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” the lead diver warned them as they waited for an ambulance boat. “We’ve retrieved laptops from the canals before. This water isn’t kind to them.”

  “Excuse me for a minute, sir,” Kat said, struck by a sudden thought.

  She went back inside to the check-in desk, where Adrijan had been replaced by a grown-up in a proper suit, doubtless called in from head office as soon as it became apparent a murder had taken place.

  “Do you charge for internet access?” she asked.

  The manager nodded warily. “Of course.”

  “So you make your guests log on via a network?” she persisted. Again he nodded. “That means your rooms are connected via a hub. Which in turn means you can monitor your guests’ internet activity. And I’m guessing that, in a corporate chain like this, it’s standard policy to do just that.”

  “We can’t discuss—” he began automatically, before remembering who he was dealing with.

  “Just get me a printout,” she said, turning away before he could argue.

  “So now we have two murders,” Piola said. “Connected, definitely. But the same killer? Possibly, possibly not.”

  They were in a little restaurant a hundred yards from the Carabinieri HQ. It was 11 p.m.: they’d been reviewing the evidence for hours in the operations room before her boss had decided that they needed to eat if they were to keep going any longer. When they’d arrived at the restaurant, the owner had exchanged a few quiet words with Piola, then brought them cicchetti, small plates piled high with an assortment of tasty morsels to snack on: tiny fried chicken livers; big, fat sardines from the lagoon, served with tangy vinegar-soaked onions; a dish of olives; and some balls of sweet, milky mozzarella; all sharing space on the table with a heap of papers from the investigation.

  Kat was almost drunk with exhaustion. Her eyes felt dry and scratchy, as if they’d been sandblasted open. But she was also strangely elated. The last twenty-four hours had thrown more challenges her way than she’d faced in her entire career to date, and she knew that so far she was dealing with them pretty well.

  “Father Cilosi called back,” she said, chewing on an olive and dropping the stone on the side of her plate. “He’s given me the contact details for that expert in the occult he was talking about. A Father Uriel.”

  Piola raised an eyebrow. “Another priest?”

  “Sounds like it. Though the place he works at sounded more like a hospital of some kind. The Institute of Christina Mirabilis, over towards Verona – I’ve got an appointment with him first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “So that should confirm whether we’re really dealing with some kind of Satanic Mass. But even if we are, it may be tangential to the murders. Both our victims were shot, which doesn’t sound like a ritual killing to me. Knives, strangulation, drowning perhaps, but I’ve never heard of a Satanist using a gun.” He drew a sheet of paper out of a file. “The autopsy on the first body – Jelena Babić, that is – has been completed. Seems you were right, Capitano. They found an American manufacturer’s label in her robes. R. J. Toomey, just as you predicted. And something else. Ballistics have taken a first look at the bullet. It’s a little misshapen from the entry into the skull but they’re fairly sure it’s a. . .” He glanced at the page, finding the place, and she noticed how he had to hold the paper away from him to focus on it. So he needed glasses but was too vain to get them, she thought. “A 6.8 millimetre Remington SPC.”

  “American?”

  “Yes. It says here it was developed for US Special Forces. Oh, and it was fired through a Remington silencer. Also developed for Special Forces.”

  There was a silence as they both considered this information.

  “Of course, these American connections may just be a coincidence,” he added. “We still believe in those, don’t we?”

  He poured them both more wine, a light Garganega bottled by the restaurant owner’s brother. “What about the printout of internet traffic from the hotel? Anything useful there?”

  “Malli wasn’t sure.” She located the list in her folder. “The hotel doesn’t distinguish between websites visited by one guest and another. Mostly they’re porn sites, plus a few escort agencies and Google Maps, which is pretty much what you’d expect given the sort of hotel it is. But I think we can assume this was accessed from Room 73.” She showed him. “When I googled Barbara Holton, this website came up. Womenunderwar.com. And we can see whoever accessed that site went on to access this one, here.” She pointed again. “Carnivia.com. After that, nothing.”

  “Carnivia? That’s something to do with the Barbo kid, isn’t it? The boy who got kidnapped by the Red Brigades?”

  “Exactly. But I don’t understand the connection. From what I’ve read in the papers, Carnivia’s some kind of gossip site. You know, schoolkids saying who’s got a crush on who, that kind of thing.”

  There was another silence. Kat realised she was actually swaying with tiredness.

  Piola noticed it too. “Time for you to go home, Captain. There’ll be many more late nights over the coming weeks, and I don’t need you exhausted.”

  The owner chose that moment to come over with two glasses of grappa. “For me, definitely,” Piola said, taking one. “But she’s going.”

  Kat was too tired to argue, but she took the second grappa from the owner anyway. “Ten more minutes.”

  It was another hour before she dragged herself away, and then another hour after that before she was back in her apartment. But despite her fatigue, she wasn’t ready for sleep.

  She felt the irresistible momentum of a big investigation, the thrill – there was no other word for it – of the pursuit. She’d heard senior officers say that the pressure of a homicide, the race to gather evidence while it was still fresh, was as addictive as crack cocaine, and just as destructive of family life, normality, sleep. She could understand that now. Exhaustion and excitement battled in her brain.

  And something more, too: there was something nagging at her, something she’d forgotten.

  As she took off her make-up, she mentally ran through her to-do list. Chase Malli to see if he could get anything from the soaked laptop. Ditto with Barbara Holton’s cell phone. Try to follow the dead women’s information trail into Carnivia. Check their names with Interpol and their respective embassies, to see if either of them had records and to start the task of contacting next-of-kin. See whether the bullet that killed Barbara Holton matched the one from Jelena Babić’s autopsy. Go through the statements of the other hotel staff, in case any of them saw anything. Follow up those crossed-out prostitutes’ adverts in the paper – what was that all about?

  And something else, something that was still eluding her.

  Piola. She’d told Piola
she would do . . . something. She could see him now, nodding with that thoughtful, engaged expression he had. He wasn’t like most senior policemen, abrupt, cynical and sneering. There was something academic about him, but also something a little debonair. Somehow they added up to a quality that made her want to earn his praise.

  The pressure she felt, she realised, wasn’t just the pressure to gather evidence. It was the pressure to retain Colonel Piola’s respect.

  Then it came to her. She’d told him she’d find someone who took a different theological position from Father Cilosi on women priests.

  Going to her laptop, she typed “women priests” into Google and skimmed quickly through the resulting sites. Some seemed rather sad, filled with lengthy justifications of why the writers would reluctantly accept the Pope’s position but continue to speak out against it “from a position of respectful conscience”. Some were angry, pointing out that the Bible was full of misogynistic references to the ritual uncleanness of women.

  In Leviticus 15:19 – 30, it says, “When a woman has a discharge of blood, and blood flows from her body, the uncleanness of her monthly periods shall last for seven days . . . Anyone who touches her bed must wash his clothing and wash himself and will be unclean until evening.” That’s the real reason they don’t want us to be priests, and why priests have to be celibate. They hate and fear our genitals.

  Others were wistful, citing examples of other faiths which had previously refused to countenance women priests but now accepted them. And through it all ran a recognition that the current Pope was never going to change his mind. A hardliner who had spoken out against the evils of liberalism, who wrote approvingly of the “traditionalism and vigour” of congregations in emerging countries, he quoted time and time again Canon Law 1024: “Only a baptised man validly receives sacred ordination.”

  On one site she came across a blog post headed “Why illegal ordinations are wrong”. The argument was the by-now familiar one, that those who believed in the right of women to be ordained should try to change the Church from within. But the writer went on to add: