Nic hit the key for the next window.

Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet.

The reply was dated that morning, signed, simply, “killthem@killthemall.com.”

“It could be Kaspar sending messages to himself,” Costa suggested. The language sounded like the kind of internal argument that might lurk inside the brain of someone who could dismember a woman, park her head in front of the TV to make a room look “normal,” then smear the walls with her blood in a strange, repeating pattern, over and over again. “He’s crazy enough.”

“Why wait more than three months before answering yourself? What’s more, consider this: at eleven this morning, just after Kaspar’s reply got posted, Leapman ordered a couple of the five security guys I never knew existed out onto the street. Want to bet where they’re looking? Net cafes, just to see if he can’t resist the bait second time round. You see what’s happening?”

He could and he wondered if they appreciated how futile it was likely to be. The city was full of places, large and small, where you could wander in off the street and buy fifteen minutes online. Five men couldn’t cover every last Net cafe, moneychanger and bookshop in Rome.

“Would Leapman write something like this?”

She shook her head slowly, deliberately, and he couldn’t stop himself watching the way her soft blonde hair moved. “No need to. We have specialists to do that. Someone from profiling maybe, who’s got access to files I don’t possess. The syntax is very deliberate and direct. Maybe Kaspar is a good ol” boy or something or maybe they just copied it from that first memo I showed you. Though I doubt it. If they knew that was still around on the system my guess is they’d have erased it.“

There were so many possibilities here. Costa wished his head were in better working order to consider them, to separate speculation from fact.

“We need to discuss this with someone. Your people. Mine. Maybe there’s something here. Or maybe we’re just seeing what we want to see.”

“Oh, Nic.” Her hand brushed his arm. There was a flash of a white smile. “You really don’t understand what we’re dealing with, do you? My people know. I think a good few of yours do, too.”

Not Falcone, though, Costa thought. He was sure of that. It just wasn’t the inspector’s style.

“Finish reading,” she ordered quietly. “Leapman’s man came back for a third try.”

He scrolled down and read the third message, posted at noon, again from “WillFK@whitehouse.gov.”

Well hang me high and stretch me wide. Just when you think you made somethin“ idiot-proof they come along and invent a better idiot. Can’t keep those fingers still, can you, Billy Boy? All this cuttin‘ has turned your mind, brother. Call home, brother. Reel yourself in. Nothin” smells worse than an old soldier gone bad. There’s mercy waiting here if only you got the sense to ask for it. Least that way you get to stay alive.

Oh and by the by. What did Laura Lee ever do to you, man? She took a bullet in all that mess back then. So how come she gets dead now and Little Em walks away without a scratch? You turn weakling when there’s a WASP around? Or are you just going soft in your old age?

Costa stared at the words on the screen. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

“Little Em…”

“That’s me,” she said.

AS GIANNI PERONI’S LUCK would have it, the same damn caretaker was on duty and sporting the same bad, red-faced mood he’d owned the night Mauro Sandri died.

The grumpy old bastard spent his time alone at the booth by the door of the Pantheon, checking his watch at regular intervals, wandering over to the centre of the building now and then to sweep away the flecks of snow spiralling lightly down through the oculus. Peroni had a seat in the shadows on the opposite side of the chilly circular hall. The place was a wonderful sight, timeless, even with the anachronistic illumination of the dim electric lights. The distant part of him that remembered school history lessons half imagined an ancient Roman emperor coming here, lord of his own realm, staring up through that open eye, wondering what was looking back at him from the greater kingdom of the heavens. Peroni felt more than a little awed by what he saw. It was wrong that a place like this had been sullied by what happened two nights before. That thought depressed him, that and the plain fact he was probably wasting his time. After he’d left the cafe in Trastevere with such high hopes, Peroni had driven the jeep across the river, parked discreetly in one of the side turnings off Rinascimento and made his way to the monument, taking the caretaker aside for a quiet talk when he arrived. There wasn’t a single sign he was in luck. Only a couple of people had walked through the door while he’d been there, and both of them were searching-in vain-for respite from the cold. The place would close in less than an hour. It was a dumb idea, but it was the only idea he’d got.

Besides, she’d so much time on him. She could have walked in, picked up anything she’d left behind and walked back out into the premature wintry darkness hours ago. But then what? Peroni clung to the belief Laila acted the way she did because, after Teresa’s invented story, the girl wanted to help him. She’d have made contact somehow, surely. He tried to draw some encouragement, too, from the fact the caretaker was adamant no lone, black-clad kid had been in. Given how few visitors the place was getting in this extraordinary bout of ice and snow, there ought to be some comfort in that.

His mind was wandering when the caretaker ambled over, picking snowflakes off the sleeve of his tatty uniform.

“Hey, mister,” he moaned, “seeing as how I seem to be doing you favours day in and day out around here, how about you do one for me?”

“What?”

He nodded at the booth and the small, private office down the same curving side of the building. “Cover for me. There’s supposed to be two of us around but the other guy’s sick and, what with the weather…”

He licked his bulbous lips and Peroni knew what was coming. “All you got to do is sit there and look important. You’re up to it.”

It wasn’t a big favour. The place was empty. Peroni had no intention of sweeping away the snow. Nor had he anything else to do. He’d checked in with Falcone, heard the news about the dead woman’s apartment and received not the slightest reprimand for his behaviour earlier with Leapman. He recognized the resignation in Falcone’s voice. The whole case was in stasis, buried under the weather and the search for something-anything-in the trail of places the elusive killer had abandoned along the way. The likelihood was that until the killer did something-something stupid, without spilling of blood preferably-they’d just be sitting around twiddling their fingers, waiting, not that Leo Falcone would admit as much.

“Where are you going exactly, friend?” Peroni demanded.

The man’s florid, wrinkled face squinted back at him. “It’s no big deal. I need a drink. I’ve been freezing my balls off in this place all day long. There should be a rule about working in weather like this. What am I? An Eskimo or something? Just half an hour. That’s all I ask. Here…”

He led Peroni over to the office by the side entrance, the one with the closed-circuit TVs and security systems that had been so carefully disabled two nights before.

“Everything’s working again now. All you need to know is where the circuit breakers are. If a bulb blows, it’ll throw the switch. You just throw it back and I change the bulb later. If I can be bothered. Also, I’m going to let you have a special treat for helping me. When I come back I’m gonna let you close the door, all on your own. I don’t allow civilians to do that ordinarily. Big privilege.”