To get there, they had to ask directions. They were absolutely unable to remember how they had gotten there the previous time.
In words of one syllable and choked off phrases, they’d done their best to put together a strategy. It was no easy matter. They possessed no incontrovertible proof that could put their target with his back to the wall, and they had no doubt that he possessed the knowledge and the tools to upset their plan. They needed to rely on his lack of cold-blooded confidence, the intrinsic instability of his personality, the tension that had built up deep inside him over the past few days.
His remorse.
They had very little in hand and only one opportunity before his mind started cooking up alibis and erecting defensive walls. Only one chance to ensure that the one who paid wasn’t an innocent man, a man who had just lost both his children.
That an ancient transgression not cast a shadow of guilt over an entire lifetime.
Alex carried in her heart a deep well of regret for having attributed, in her own personal mental process, the scarlet letter of guilt to Varricchio at the very instant she’d heard him speak, the night before. Transferring to the Calabrian family the subterranean injustices and secret dynamics of her own family, she had judged him guilty of murdering his own flesh and blood, by first depriving them of their happy adolescence, and then actually cutting off their lives, root and branch. Now that she knew what had actually happened, she was more determined than ever to see justice done.
Lojacono, too, was driven by a similar degree of determination. He was not willing to renounce, for his own advancement, the principles that had first convinced him to become a policeman, and truth be told, he’d never really been persuaded of the idea that Varricchio had killed his children. Sadly, it was something that happened: financial interests, sheer pettiness, and abject ignorance did sometimes lead to that sort of murder. But the man had left his home to ask his daughter to come back and live with him, because he didn’t want to grow old all alone in an open-air prison all too similar to the one in which he had been confined far too long. He simply couldn’t have committed such a cold-blooded murder.
In the very few hours he’d spent lying in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the restless sleep of Marinella, who had dropped off fully dressed, the lieutenant had plumbed the depths of his own immense love as a father, and he had realized that there was no room in it for any hypothesis of hatred, no matter what might happen. And his doubts about Cosimo’s guilt had only emerged reinforced, along with the determination to oppose a deduction that was too simplistic to be plausible, namely that the man had murdered Biagio and Grazia, the son in a fit of rage, the daughter out of premeditated animus.
Then Aragona had read the interview and the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle had fallen into place. The overall picture had come into focus in all its tragic harmony, explaining all the hows but especially the whys and wherefores. A picture that made perfect sense from square one but which was only fully visible now, and which supplied an answer to each and every question.
That however did nothing to solve the problem.
Before anyone noticed their presence, they observed the everyday activity of the laboratory through a soundproof plate glass window, which gave them the impression that they were watching a silent movie. The researchers moved back and forth around and through the instruments with skill and dexterity; it seemed impossible that they never bumped each other or broke anything. Every so often one of them would make a wisecrack and the others would laugh, or else they’d limit themselves to a brief exchange of glances; from time to time they’d exchange data that they read aloud off computer screens. Alex and Lojacono decided that, all things considered, collective workplaces tended to look the same everywhere, that in terms of human interactions, there was no difference between that laboratory and the squad room at the police station.
Renato Forgione was sitting off to one side. He was ashen-faced, and his eyes were wandering without concentration. No one was speaking to him, as if his colleagues were intentionally avoiding him.
Then the young man looked up and saw them. His eyelids fluttered as if he were trying to ward off a horrible hallucination, and Lojacono thought he’d detected a slight slumping of his shoulders underneath his lab coat, almost a reaction of dismay.
He emerged from the laboratory, walked over to them, and spoke to them in a monotone.
“Buongiorno. Did you need me? Is there any news?”
At first, the two policemen said nothing. Then Lojacono pulled several sheets of paper out of his overcoat pocket.
“Let me come straight to the point, Dr. Forgione. Were you aware of the fact that, last October 21st, Biagio Varricchio had submitted a request to the Trademark and Patent Office of Rome in his own name?”
Forgione shut his eyes and then opened them again, as if he’d just been slapped in the face.
“Me? No, how could I have—”
Alex drilled in.
“Isn’t that what you went to talk to Dr. Varricchio about after reading the interview with him in the university magazine?”
Renato took a step back.
“What are you talking about? I couldn’t have known anything about that. And when do you think I went to see Biagio, anyway?”
Lojacono dealt the blow.
“We happen to know that you were at his apartment late on Monday evening. You came in through the downstairs entrance using your own key, which you have because your father is the owner of several apartments in the building, and then you left several minutes after Grazia Varricchio’s return home, listening to music in the earbuds of her cell phone. There was no one else there, which means that the double homicide was committed in your presence. We’ve also found the murder weapon, and we’re in the process of taking fingerprints from it now.”
Alex held her breath.
Forgione replied instinctively, albeit with a shaking voice: “What are you saying? The statuette is at my house and—”
Alex breathed again. It was over.
Lojacono leveled his almond-shaped eyes into Renato Forgione’s.
“Stay calm,” he said. “It’s all going to be much easier, now. Please come with us.”