Vico Secondo Egiziaca was, in fact, just a short distance from the police station. It took less than three minutes for Lojacono and Di Nardo to walk over there, hugging the walls to ward off the chill in the air, overcoat collars turned up, eyes narrowed to defend against the cutting wind, breath billowing out in clouds of vapor.
Alex inhaled deeply.
“What can I say, Lojacono, I just like the cold. If you want to warm up, all you need is to get out and move a little. Whereas when it’s hot out, there’s nothing you can do: you can strip down to your underwear, but it’s hot all the same, so there’s nothing to be done but shut the windows and turn on the air conditioner, and everybody knows how bad that is for you.”
“I don’t see what there is to like about a wind that’s strong enough to tear your ears off. Di Nardo, you’re just trying to provoke me. When it’s cold out where I come from, it’s the same temperature as when it’s hot out here. It’s like Lapland this morning. Getting out from under the blankets was straight-up trauma. Well, here we are.”
It hadn’t been necessary to look for the street number: outside one of the apartment house doors stood a squad car with its emergency lights flashing, and next to the car a young man in uniform hopping from foot to foot to keep from freezing.
Lojacono walked over to him: “We’re from the Pizzofalcone police precinct.”
The young man in uniform tilted his head in the direction of the stairs, while cupping both hands in front of his mouth: “Look who finally decided to show. Ciccolletti, police headquarters. Upstairs. Third floor. Guy and a girl. No doorman, just in case you thought of looking for one. My partner’s upstairs, expecting you. We put in a call for forensics, by the way.”
His excessively casual manner rubbed Lojacono the wrong way; the Bastards of Pizzofalcone, an indelible stain of infamy. Staring into the officer’s eyes, he hissed: “Ciccoletti, you’re speaking to a lieutenant. So get your fucking hands away from your mouth and stand still and at attention, or I’ll warm you up with a hail of fists. You read me?”
“Sorry, lieutenant. It’s just that it’s so damned cold this morning, and the wind is blasting down here. We’ve been waiting for you, we got here first thing, and—”
Lojacono turned away and strode through the front door. Alex followed him, but only after giving the uniformed officer a look that betrayed a blend of sympathy and further reproof.
The apartment building, like nearly all the other buildings in the neighborhood, had seen better days. It was an old building, subject to strict zoning requirements, and therefore intact in its crumbling façade while at the same time victim to horrible attempts at modernization of the interiors. As they climbed the stairs, Lojacono noticed the flaking walls, the ceramic tiles that had been replaced by other tiles of an entirely different color, the occasional crack that had been repaired amateurishly with raw mortar, unplastered and unpainted. The wooden apartment doors were all different, and here and there anodyzed aluminum front doors with several doorbells hinted at the subdivision of old apartments that had once been much larger and occupied by a single family. That description applied to the doorway on the third floor where they were headed. The main doorway led into a sort of entryway flanked by two interior front doors, at the moment both open.
Waiting for them on the landing was a second uniformed officer. He was older than the one waiting down in the street, and perhaps that was why he took a more formal attitude. He raised his hand to his visor.
“Good morning, my name’s Stanzione. Are you the officers from Pizzofalcone? They alerted me by radio.”
Alex nodded: “Right, that’s us. I’m Officer Di Nardo, he’s Lieutenant Lojacono. What can you tell us?”
The man turned and spoke directly to Lojacono. Certainly, in part because of his rank. But also because he’s a man, Alex decided resentfully.
“The murder took place here, in the apartment on your right. Two kids, a man and a woman: she’s on the bed, he’s sitting at the desk in the next room.”
Alex insisted, in a flat tone: “Who found the bodies?”
Hesitantly, Stanzione replied to Lojacono again, as if the lieutenant were some sort of ventriloquist and Di Nardo nothing but his puppet: “One of the young man’s colleagues, and he’s pretty upset. He’s in the neighbors’ apartment . . . two . . . two people who live next door. They made him an espresso, the lucky guy.”
Without taking his hands out of the pockets of his overcoat, Lojacono examined first the aluminum door facing the landing and then the door that the uniformed officer was pointing to; no sign of breaking and entering in either case. He took a step into the apartment: the interior was illuminated by the light coming in from the window of one of the bedrooms and from a naked lightbulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling.
Alex, beating the lieutenant to the question, asked Stanzione: “Did you turn on the light?”
“No, why would I? I didn’t touch a thing. I walked in, looked around, and left. I’m not some green rookie, you know.”
Lojacono concealed a half smile, picking up on Di Nardo’s unmistakable and justifiable hostility, and then took the opportunity to ask: “What about the doors, how were they when you arrived? Open, ajar, shut . . . ”
“Open, lieutenant, both of them. And so was the door to the other apartment.”
Alex had stepped into the first room, lit up by the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Lojacono caught up with her and found her standing by the bed, which filled almost the whole room.
Sprawled on her back on the mattress was a young woman, her legs spread slightly. She was wearing an open jacket and a torn blouse, which partly left her flesh uncovered. She wore no bra. A very skimpy pair of panties were rolled down to the height of her left knee. A pair of jeans lay on the floor.
Though gray and in disarray, the young woman’s body was very beautiful.
Lojacono leaned over to observe more closely: the face was swollen around the nose and mouth; on the neck there were a couple of reddish stripes. When he turned to look at his partner, he saw that she was staring at something on the wall. In a photograph blown up to large scale, the victim was smiling happily in bright sunlight, wearing a swimsuit, with a clear blue sea stretching out behind her. The contrast was horrifying and grim: a photograph, an inanimate object, full of life; a body, made of flesh and blood, drained of life.
The lieutenant walked out of the room, leaving Alex frozen to the spot.
Opening onto the tiny front hallway was another door that led to a larger room, at the center of which was a second corpse, slumped over a desk. A man, seated. His torso was pitched forward, one arm dangling loose, while his head and the other hand, still gripping a pen, rested on the desktop.
Lojacono stepped closer, taking care where he put his feet. The corpse was displaying the nape of its neck to him. The shirt collar had turned dark, drenched in blood as it was; the cranium presented a deep depression at the base. The man’s clothing must have soaked up all the blood, because there wasn’t a spot of it on the floor.
The policeman circled around the desk and found himself face-to-face with the victim. The dead man was young, not much older than twenty, maybe in his mid-twenties. Death had stamped an odd expression on his face, something approaching a taut, strained smile, which revealed his upper teeth; his eyes were partway open and staring into the empty air. There were no signs of a struggle, he must have been caught off guard.
In the front hall, the lieutenant found Alex squatting down to look at something on the floor, beneath a small side table. The woman looked up and pointed downward.
“What would you say that is?”
Lojacono crouched down beside her.
“It looks like a cell phone with a pair of earbuds. Hard to see clearly.”
Alex started to extend her hand, but Lojacono stopped her: “Leave everything where it is for now. The forensics squad will be here any minute, and we can let them get it out. That’s when we can examine closely. For now, let’s go talk to the people who found them.”