Remi froze. The man looked in his thirties, with unkempt hair and wild, bloodshot eyes. He had a stocky build and thick, hairy arms.
She felt panic rise up in her. She tried to scream for Daniel, but the words caught in her throat.
But it was the man who backed away first.
“Don’t!” he said in the Italian of a native speaker, raising his hands. “Take whatever you want! Just don’t kill me.”
Remi blinked, unsure of herself. The Italian paused too.
The sound of running feet made him jerk his gaze in the direction from which Remi had come. As Daniel rushed into the room, the man bolted down a side hallway.
Daniel took one look at the man dead on the floor, who Remi now recognized as Pier Paolo Manetti, and took off after him.
Remi shook herself out of her stunned inaction and followed.
The Italian led them down a short hallway to a kitchen. He opened a window above the counter and climbed up to it.
“Oh no!” Daniel shouted. “We’ve had enough parkour for one case!”
Daniel grabbed him by the leg and hauled him back in. The man hit the counter, rattling the dishes in the drainer, and then landed hard on the tiled floor. His bathrobe flapped open, and Remi got an unwelcome view of a white pot belly and dirty underwear.
“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” the man said, waving his arms and legs in the air like an overturned cockroach.
“What’s he saying?” Daniel asked as he flipped him over and pulled out the cuffs.
“He’s saying for you not to kill him.”
“That’s rich, coming from someone like him.”
Remi watched as Daniel slapped the cuffs on and helped the man up. The prisoner trembled all over.
“We’re not going to kill you,” Remi told the prisoner. “This is Daniel Walker of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m Remi Laurent, his civilian advisor. He is detaining you on suspicion of murder.”
“I didn’t kill Pier Paolo!”
“What are you doing here?” Remi demanded.
“I’m a house guest. I’m staying with Pier Paolo to advise him on a documentary series he’s filming.”
“On what?”
“Astrology.”
Remi blinked. That was interesting.
Daniel looked at her. “Um, translation please?”
“He says he’s a house guest helping Manetti with a documentary on astrology. He says he’s innocent.”
“Don’t they all,” Daniel studied him a moment. “You speak English?”
The man shook his head and said in slow, heavily accented English. “No, I speak very little of the English.”
“Looks like you get to be translator again,” Daniel said. “I told you that you’d be useful on this case.”
“I think I was the one who told you.”
“Whatever. Ask him what he knows. But first let’s go back to the study. I want him faced with the body as he answers our questions.”
They took him back out to the study. Remi winced as she saw Pier Paolo Manetti lying dead in a pool of his own vomit. The suspect winced as well.
Remi turned to him. “So you say you’re a house guest. Tell me what happened.”
“My name is Francesco Costa. I’m the most famous astrologer in Sicily.” Remi stifled a chuckle. “We are working on a series for Italian television together. Pier Paolo was kind enough to let me stay at his house. I’ve been here for a couple of days. You can check the guest room upstairs and you will find my things. Call the station if you don’t believe me. I know nothing of this!”
“Did you hear anything? See anyone?” Remi asked, unsure what to think of this strange little man. She hadn’t had much experience with murderers in her career as a historian. That was beginning to change, though.
“No.” Francesco gave a fearful look at the body. “I was out late last night and slept late. My village in Sicily is very small, so I don’t often get to enjoy the pleasures of a big city. I didn’t get back until four in the morning. I didn’t hear Manetti, although I assumed he was asleep in the house. I went to the rooftop to observe the stars until dawn, and then I went to bed. Just as I was drifting off, I heard my host get up and go to the kitchen.”
“What then?” Remi asked.
Francesco Costa shook his head. “Then I woke up, just half an hour ago. I went to the bathroom, took a shower, came downstairs, and found him. Not one minute later you came in.”
Remi relayed all this to Daniel, who walked over to the body.
“I don’t think he’s been dead long. The vomit isn’t dry, although it’s not entirely liquid anymore either.” He bent down and reached out. Remi’s stomach did a backflip because she thought he was going to touch the vomit. Instead, he put a hand on Manetti’s hand, and then the back of his neck. “Extremities are a bit cool, but the core body still retains a fair amount of warmth. He was killed quite recently. The hands might be cool because of poor circulation and lying here on the floor. I don’t think he’s been dead for more than an hour or so.”
Remi turned to the suspect and pointed to the easel. “What was there?”
“A painting. It was covered. I didn’t get to see it.”
Remi frowned. Up until now she had been inclined to believe him. She suspected a lie now, though. Why wouldn’t he show a guest his prize purchase? Unless he wanted to hide it, in which case he wouldn’t have kept it in the living room.
“Manetti didn’t show it to you? Didn’t talk to you about it?”
“He didn’t show it to me, but he planned to. He said it was a recent acquisition that he had cost him a great deal of money and trouble. He wanted my opinion on it but first wanted to know some more about astrology.”
“More about astrology?”
“Yes, and not for the series. The planning for that was very basic. Astrology is a complex and ancient science, and for a television audience you are only explaining one-thousandth of the information. Manetti knew more than enough to do that himself. He didn’t need my advice for the show’s content; he needed me to help organize the material and act as a talking head.”
“So what was he questioning you about?” Remi asked.
“Very specialized information. It’s difficult to explain to a layperson.”
“Explain it anyway,” Remi said, slightly annoyed at the man’s superior tone.
She glanced at Daniel, who was always impatient when she was speaking a language he didn’t understand. He had decided to spend his time examining the room. She was surprised that he hadn’t call the police yet, but considering how they had failed to protect Manetti, perhaps he wanted to examine the scene before they arrived.
“May I sit?” Francesco Costa pleaded. “This has all been too much for me.”
“Go ahead,” Remi said.
He moved to an armchair.
“Don’t touch anything!” Daniel snapped at him. “This is a murder scene for Crissake!”
Francesco launched off the armchair as if pins were sticking out of the cushion.
“What did he say?” Francesco asked.
“He got mad at you touching the chair,” Remi said, shooting an apologetic look at her frustrated partner. He had already gone back to investigating the room and didn’t notice. “All right, Signor Costa, what did Manetti ask you about astrology?”
“He wanted to know about the use of astrological symbols in the early modern times, especially in the Low Countries in the 17th centuries. He asked about specific constellations and their symbolism.”
“Such as?”
Francesco shrugged, the handcuffs around his wrists rattling.
“Everything. We talked for hours. I got a strange impression from it all. It was like he didn’t want to ask what he was really interested in, so he asked about a wide range of subjects. At times he looked distracted, listening with only half an ear while thinking about other things. At other times he was on the edge of his seat.”
“And when were those times?”
“When I spoke to him about the apocalyptic traditions in astrology, and how people in the past looked to the stars to determine the future, much like we do today.”
Remi felt her skin prickle. That was it! The Second Coming, heralded by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She had begun to sense that might be the answer, and now she had confirmation.
Each of the paintings featured stars. Together those stars would indicate constellations at certain times of the year. That would create a horoscope, and that horoscope would predict the End Times.
The killer needed all four paintings in order to cast that horoscope.
And once he had that information, then what?
Another prickle of Remi’s skin. What had Daniel said on the plane? Once someone became a serial killer, they didn’t stop killing until they were stopped.
He doesn’t just want to know the date of the End Times; he wants to be part of it.
Daniel’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts.
“Look at this,” he said from over at the bookshelf. “There’s an entire library here of books on everything from Atlantis to reincarnation. What a nut. But the biggest and newest section is on astrology. See how many of these books are older editions that have been thumbed through over the years? No so much with the astrology books. Many are new, and I’ve found three so far where he was using the receipt as a bookmark. All bought in the last couple of months. Those paintings all had stars. You think he was trying to read something off the painting of Pestilence?”
Remi looked at her partner with new admiration.
We really do work well together, she thought. I hope this gets to continue.
She took a glance at poor Pier Paolo Manetti, still lying face down in a pool of vomit.
Maybe without so many corpses.
Turning back to Daniel, she said, “He needs all four paintings to cast a horoscope. Manetti brought in Sr. Costa here to learn more about the astrology of the period. I think the documentary was an excuse to hide his real motives.”
Daniel’s face fell. “Oh, damn. He’s going to use that for the mother of all slaughters.”
“Maybe the horoscope will say the End Times start a hundred years from now,” Remi said, more hoping than believing.
Daniel shook his head. “That’s not how these nutcases work. Either he’ll read the horoscope to predict the Apocalypse starts next week, or he’ll decide that even if the world is supposed to end in 2100, that he needs to set the groundwork by killing a bunch of people.”
Remi’s throat went dry. “We need to find that fourth painting. Now.”
Daniel gave Francesco Costa a dismissive glance and turned back to Remi.
“To do that we need to up our game. He’s been a step ahead of us the entire time. And if he gets the fourth painting before we do, a whole lot more people are going to die.”
Remi nodded. “And that means I have a lot more work to do. And I know just where to do it.”