Present Day The Morgue, Ospedale San Lazzaro, Venice In a large, heavily guarded room off the main morgue extra refrigeration and air purifiers have been plugged in and the area cleared of all unnecessary equipment.
Body parts are now unwrapped. Meticulous records drawn up of which part came from which sack and which sack came from which section of the lagoon. Details are computerised but also plotted on maps pinned to the walls.
Sylvio Montesano and his team are diligently ensuring that body-fluid samples are taken from each separate sack. Similarly, any traces of plankton or other debris are collected, tagged and rushed to the Carabinieri labs for analysis. Internal tissue, especially the scrappy remains of lungs and stomach, will be processed separately. Fingernails – assuming they ever find any – will be scraped for debris. What remains of the victims' clothing has been hung, dried and matched to the bodies before being sent off for analysis. None of Montesano's team is unclear about what his or her tasks are, or how precisely they're expected to perform them. If the professore had a middle name, it would be Precision.
The dual post-mortem examination is a gruelling job. Herculean efforts are needed to identify the two victims, and then find trace evidence that might link them to the locations where they were killed and the person – or persons – who killed them.
For anyone other than an ME it would be an unimaginable horror, but for the sixty-two-year-old it's one of the most exciting and challenging moments of his career.
Two separate bodies, both dumped in the same place, both bagged in the same way. He has no doubts about what he's involved in.
Something he's never experienced before.
Not once in his long and distinguished career as a forensic pathologist has the professore pitted his wits against the deadliest creature known to man and mortuary.
A serial killer.
His three assistants work slavishly on preparing and laying out all the severed limbs. Alongside them is Isabella Lombardelli, an investigator from RaCIS – the Raggruppamento Carabinieri Investigazioni Scientifiche, the specialist scientific unit – acting as a liaison officer between the labs, the mortuary and the murder incident room.
Montesano stands back and takes satisfaction in seeing everything in full swing. A well-oiled scientific machine. One that will miss nothing.
Soon it will get interesting.
Soon he will clean all the bones with good old domestic washing powder and look closely at how they were cut and brutalised, what was used to sever limb from limb. But even now, the corpses are telling him stories.
Both victims are male – one somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The other is at least double that age, most likely in his late sixties, early seventies.
The older body is in a greater state of decomposition, many months more advanced than the other.
And there are clear commonalities between the murders. Bones on both bodies have been sawn. Not carelessly chopped or bluntly bludgeoned. In his experience, it's unusual for a body to be dismembered. Most murderers he's come across simply dump and run, wisely choosing not to spend much time with their prey after death for fear it will increase their chances of getting caught. When dismemberment does occur, there's generally a pattern to it. Cuts are almost always made in the same places – the neck, armpits and tops of the legs. Five classic chop points.
Gang killings see the hands being severed too. Very often there are also more cuts at the back of the knees and elbows to reduce the victim's limbs to a size that can be easily wrapped, shifted and disposed of without attracting too much attention. Eleven cuts, in all. Sometimes thirteen or fifteen, if they go for the mid-arms and thighs, but that's much more unusual.
Here, however, with these bodies from the lagoon, there's something else going on.
Something strange.
In the first victim – the older man – all his fingers and toes have been separately severed: twenty cuts.
Then the torso has been sliced between many of the ribs, making at least another six.
In addition to this there is the gangland-style dismemberment of hands and feet. Another eleven cuts.
Montesano hasn't yet counted all the individual incisions, but he's guessing that in total there are dozens.
More than fifty separate dismemberments.
The second victim – the younger one – isn't as bad. It still has gangland overtones.
Eleven cuts – hands as well as torso.
But then the ribcage has been opened – sawn down the centre of the sternum. And it has unusual incisions across the mid-arms and thighs. The killer seems to have been more controlled, less frenzied. More evolved.
Or something else.
Montesano wonders if the murderer was trying to do something with the first victim and couldn't manage it. Perhaps his fantasy didn't play out in the flesh.
Or something else.
What?
The professore takes off his wire-framed glasses, peels back his blue latex gloves and steps outside the chilled room. He needs daylight. Fresh air. Time and space to process the worrying thought that's just jolted his brain.
He sits on a stone wall in the sun-dappled hospital courtyard and feels the warmth of the day strengthen his fridge-chilled bones and clear his mind.
Gradually the answer comes to him.
The killer was trying to cut his victim into hundreds of pieces.
Six hundred and sixty-six, to be precise.
But he couldn't.
Only a surgeon, a butcher – or perhaps himself – could have managed such a thing.
And then Montesano thinks of something that sends a shiver through him as surely as if he'd walked back into the cooler.
Something's missing.
Something he's sure the dive teams and his lab assistants won't find a trace of. Something decomposition may have masked, but not removed completely.
The victims' livers.
He knows they're not there. Blood pounds in his temples.
Why?
Why would anyone do such a thing?