The pathologist moved her head out from under the shadow of the car, nodded at Di Capua to keep going, then walked over to them. “Did you find her?”

“Not yet,” Costa said quickly. “We got called here instead. She didn’t say anything…?”

“No,” Teresa began. “I’m sorry, Gianni…”

“Me too,” Peroni mumbled. “It’s just so… inadequate.”

There were tears starting to work their way into Teresa Lupo’s eyes, something Nic Costa realized he’d never witnessed before.

Peroni spotted them, put his hand on her arm, briefly kissed her cheek and mouthed, “It’s OK.” He cast a vicious glance at the buzzards leering at them from behind the crime scene tape: photographers, reporters and a whole bunch of spectators with nothing better to do.

“I guess you’ve been asked this a million times,” Peroni said when she’d got her act together again, “but how’d this one die?”

Teresa shrugged, regaining her old self. “This is all preliminary, understood? I’m just telling you what I told your boss, with the same reservations. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, not out here. Also, unless someone tells me otherwise, I get to take this lady home. That American bastard isn’t playing body snatchers this time around. Even if she is one of his, there’s no way of knowing yet.”

“How?” Peroni asked again.

“Still working on the method. Let me put this delicately. She’s not exactly complete.”

There was something she didn’t want to say, probably for Peroni’s sake. “She’s naked. Not a scrap of clothing on her. The tags have been taken off the suitcases. I’ll hand them over to forensic once we’re done here. They don’t look like a common make to me. Expensive too. Maybe…”

They looked at each other and knew what each of them was thinking. Work of that nature took a long, long time.

“You haven’t asked me yet,” she said. “That question.”

“He’d marked the skin?” Costa asked.

“Kind of.” She shrugged again. “It’s the same man. But it’s not like the others, though. If you want to look, I can…”

Both men had their hands up before she’d finished the sentence.

“Understood,” she continued. “The honest answer is I don’t know if the cuts were made by the same instrument. Ask me when I’ve cleaned her up a little back in the morgue. There are a lot of cuts on this woman. But there are marks on her back that aren’t just… practical, if I can put it that way. They could be made by a scalpel. Maybe.”

Costa thought of Emily Deacon drawing the pattern, so easily, so naturally, in the American embassy the previous day. “And the shape?”

“I’m sorry. But if you want something concrete, look at this.”

She reached round into the depths of the boot and came back with a hank of bloodstained material encased inside an evidence bag like a dead insect.

“It’s the cord,” she told them. “He’d removed it from the neck this time. It was in one of the suitcases. This is the same material that he used on the woman in the Pantheon. Not a scintilla of doubt.”

Costa didn’t know what to make of the thing. “But it’s not a cord.”

Teresa frowned. “Leo didn’t tell you, huh? I guess he’s had other things on his mind. No, it isn’t a cord. It’s a piece of very tough fabric cut in that exact same shape we all know so well, then wrapped tightly to make a cord. At first I thought he must have done it himself, though it would have taken a hell of a long time. Still, he’s a gentleman with an obsession, no?”

Peroni was getting interested. “But?”

She handed the bag to Costa, then picked up her briefcase and shuffled through the mess of papers in it until she found what she wanted.

“Silvio had this report waiting for me from forensic when I got here. Fastest piece of work those people have ever done.”

Costa took the single page. Peroni joined him and read it simultaneously.

“Has Falcone seen this?” Nic asked.

“Oh yes,” Teresa continued. “I didn’t dare hold back on that one, not that he seems to know what to do with it right now. Your American friend over there doesn’t have a clue, though. Or an inkling that I still have the original cord from that poor cow in the Pantheon. In fact, from what I’ve heard of his bullshit already, if you were to talk to him you would find he doesn’t think this is part of the same game at all. Not directly, anyway. He’s got a theory.”

Peroni blinked, bewildered. “A theory?”

“Oh yes,” Teresa added. “And guess what? It’s one that lays all the crap at our door.”

“ ”Our door“?” Costa repeated.

“You bet,” she said with a smile. “Now would you boys like to borrow that report for a little while? Maybe you can give Leo some ideas.”

“Yes,” Gianni Peroni replied, and began walking towards Leo Falcone and Joel Leapman with a look of pure fury on his face.

THERE WAS TOO LITTLE TIME and too much information. It was like being lost in a forest of unreadable signs and signals. She’d typed in the name Nic had mentioned, “Henry Anderton,” and got a brief uninformative report on the attack that had triggered the alert over security for American visitors. It seemed routine, unconnected to the present case. The dead man was simply an academic who’d been the victim of unprovoked street violence in a small square in the ghetto, the Piazza Mattei. The name rang a bell. It had a tortoise fountain in the centre. Her father had shown it to her a couple of times, taken her picture standing beside it on one of their many walks around Rome. However, nothing connected that assault with the current investigation. The victim had been badly beaten. According to the records, he’d been flown back to America by his health insurer and hospitalized in Boston. A short search on the Internet proved that Costa’s suspicions were unfounded. Henry Anderton was a famous professor, now retired. There was only one item of minor interest in what she could glean of his background from the Net. One academic paper he’d published, on the structure and funding of Islamic terrorist groups, acknowledged the assistance of several FBI officers in the provision of advice and information. It was a tenuous link, but hardly earth-shattering.

Then she tried “Bill Kaspar” and got nothing, not a damn thing, which was surely odd. Grateful as she was for Fielding’s covert help, she understood it had its limitations. Fielding hadn’t taken her into the very heart of the FBI’s internal network, its mother lode of precious intelligence, brought up to date each minute of every day, collated from around the world by systems that never went anywhere close to a piece of public cable. She guessed he’d set some parameters himself, a cutoff date of some fifteen years earlier, judging by the dates on the material her searches found. Other parameters had been set for him. There was another raft of security clearances still above her that brought down the shutters the moment she went near them. That made sense. Fielding was senior, but he was only an embassy official working in the field. There were many doors he couldn’t open.

Yet there was a mine of precious intelligence here, if only she could find the right way to track down what she wanted. That required hitting the correct keywords-the terms that would take her straight to the relevant material. Without them, it was impossible to hope to read more than a fraction of what lay on the network. Instead, she had to prioritize. And if she did find anything, there was the problem, too, of what to do with it. Ordinarily she could have marked the documents she wanted and set them up as a set of reference points for future retrieval. Ordinarily, however, she wouldn’t be using a phoney identity to hack the Bureau’s database in a way that doubtless broke the terms of her contract and probably put her in jeopardy of criminal action to boot.

It was impossible to print a thing without leaving a record. She couldn’t e-mail material out of the system either. There were bars in place to prevent that. She couldn’t even cut and paste items into another document and get them out that way, or, because the hardware prevented it, copy a thing to a floppy or pen drive. It was simply too dangerous to take notes, written or dictated. All she could hope to do was track down some key documents and, as best she could, memorize as much of the broad content as possible. Or… take a bigger risk.