It was like a fever. From that moment, time seemed to accelerate, as if someone had pushed the “fast-forward” button on their day.
Lojacono explained his theory to Aragona, discovering as he put it into words that all the tiles of the mosaic were fitting into place, every element now had an explanation, each individual incongruence had been ironed out.
The young man was delighted, as if he’d just been given a priceless gift.
“Fantastic. Fantastic. And it was all right in front of our noses. Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s wrap this case up!”
Lojacono shook his head: “No. Not yet. We still have a few things to check out first. Let’s get to work.”
And they split up, each going his own way.
Lojacono went back to the barracks where the forensic squad was headquartered.
He was drying off in a waiting room when he was greeted by an out-of-breath Bistrocchi, who—the memory of the brutal humiliation he’d been subjected to last time still fresh—didn’t hesitate to put himself at the detective’s complete and entire disposal.
Lojacono immediately asked after the information that interested him. The man in the white lab coat threw his arms out wide: “Unfortunately, lieutenant, there too we have no prints. Clearly someone was wearing a pair of gloves there too. It’s also true that only rarely do we find clear prints on that type of item; there’s almost never a direct contact with the fingertips . . .”
Lojacono interrupted him; he didn’t have time to sit through a lesson on the detection of fingerprints.
“Listen, sir, all I want is to examine the object. Would that be possible?”
Disappointed, Bistrocchi left the room and returned with a transparent plastic bag. He put on a pair of latex gloves and carefully extracted its contents.
Another plastic bag. A shopping bag
“Here you are, the stolen silver was found in this. As you can see, there’s a rip in the side, possibly caused by one of the objects either while they were being transported, or when they were tossed into the dumpster.”
But that’s not what Lojacono was interested in. On one side of the plastic bag there was a logo of some kind. He spoke to Bistrocchi: “Excuse me, but could you turn it toward me, so that I can get a better look at what’s written on it?”
He leaned forward and read.
The first confirmation.
Aragona, heading over to the notary’s offices and, as usual, driving at breakneck speed, was hosing pedestrians down, sending tidal waves of rainwater onto the sidewalks as he fiddled with his cell phone: he needed to get in touch with Ottavia Calabrese immediately.
Luckily, she was the one who answered: “Ah, ciao, Aragona. I would have called you later: you remember the report you asked me to do on Adrian Florea, the notary’s housekeeper’s boyfriend? Well, he’s clean. No priors, no evidence of any contact with ex-convicts, or . . .”
Aragona sighed loudly: “Of course, just what I expected. I only wanted to run the check to make sure, I saw when I met him that he was a stand-up guy. And after all, we have to stop assuming every immigrant is necessarily a criminal! Tell me something else, though: by any chance did the official report come in from the IT department?”
Ottavia chuckled: “Not yet, they’re taking their time. What is it you need, though?”
“I need the date and time that the email reserving the trip to Whatchamacallit was sent from the notary’s office. Can you help me out?”
By the time he reached the firm, he had the information. He asked to see the notary, who immediately led him into his private office. Aragona had to force himself not to lock eyes with any of the employees, which Lojacono had so often warned him against.
Once inside, after making sure that the door was securely shut, he asked the notary for what he needed.
The legal professional was baffled: “That’s very, very confidential information. It’s not the sort of thing I can share with just anybody, we have fiduciary responsibilities to safeguard the secrecy . . .”
Lieutenant Lojacono had warned him of this possible, last-ditch evasion, but time was running out; he wasn’t about to be thwarted by propriety. So Aragona said exactly what he and his partner had agreed on: “Notary Festa, if you want to get out of this situation in one piece, there’s no alternative. If you can’t do it for your wife’s memory, do it for yourself.”
And, after thinking it over briefly, the notary picked up his phone and, in a brusque and decisive voice, summoned the signora Lina Rea to his office.
Lojacono caught a taxi, and was refreshed by the experience of crossing the city while not gripped by the horrifying certainty that either he or a dozen innocent citizens were about to die.
The rain was falling incessantly and the traffic, already tangled, was only getting worse; the streets were starting to flood. The lieutenant asked the taxi driver how long he thought it would take, and received an eloquent shrug in reply. At that point he tried to call Marinella; he hadn’t heard from her since their last, stormy conversation, in the aftermath of her screaming fight with her mother. The girl’s cell phone, however, seemed to be off.
Then he called Laura Piras, to bring her up-to-date on the case. The woman answered on the second ring: “Hey, ciao! What’s going on, do you have news?”
“I believe I do. If you ask me, we’ve cracked it.”
“Really? Tell me everything. Spare me no detail.”
Lojacono told her the whole story, starting with his visit to the notary’s office, and then moving on to his meeting with Russo. And he told her, specifically, how it had been Aragona’s chance phrase that had torn the veil from his eyes, showing him a new theory that he was now in the process of checking out.
Piras listened intently, breaking in now and then with brief questions and monosyllabic sounds of confirmation. Then she said: “Incredible. Really incredible. The thing that surprises me most is that Aragona actually seems to have justified his existence. And just what do you intend to do now?”
Lojacono told her about the things that were still being checked out, by Aragona at the notary’s office and by him, after his recent trip to forensics.
She asked: “And now you’re heading over to the store, is that right? To check out the logo on the bag. You know, it really does add up. And I won’t lie to you, it would be a blessing, a spectacular success to throw in everyone’s face, everyone who said that Pizzofalcone should be shut down immediately. But if I were you, I’d move cautiously: you need to obtain a full and complete confession; otherwise, any two-bit lawyer will be able to dismantle your whole theory in seconds. You have a series of clues, but not a single piece of solid evidence.”
Lojacono objected: “What do you mean, clues? I explained everything to you clearly, that’s the only way it could have happened! We’ve got it, we know who it was, and we presumably have the motive as well.”
“Sure, but I could never authorize you to make an arrest on this basis. You can’t just work by a process of elimination, and you know that: we need proof, certainty, and right now you have no solid evidence. And no certainty either, believe me. Which means you have just one option: you need to obtain a full confession, which is, as you know, the hardest thing. And I can’t help you get that from here.”
Lojacono reached the store filled with a new anxiety; in the space of just a few yards, walking from the taxi to the front door, he got thoroughly drenched. He asked the shop clerk a few questions, and she directed him to the section he was interested in, which was downstairs. In a corner, at the end of an aisle that boasted a wide selection of dishes and glasses adorned with wedding announcements, there was a display case that looked exactly like the shelves at the scene of the crime.
He walked over to it, hands in his pockets, rivulets of water dripping off his raincoat, creating a small puddle on the gleaming floor. Behind two layers of glass, a dancer with a ukulele looked up at him, smiling sweetly. He didn’t smile back.
A few minutes later, he was leaving the store with a bag in hand that was in every detail identical—except for the rip on the side—to the one now being held in the forensic squad’s laboratory.
At the same time, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket: it was Aragona. His partner, jubilant, told him that he’d just found the confirmation that they needed at the notary’s office.
Now they just needed to wrap the case up, as Aragona had put it.
Which was the hardest thing, as Piras had told him.