The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson

Author:David Hewson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Costa, Police Procedural, Police - Italy - Rome, Police, Mystery fiction, Mystery & Detective, Fathers and sons, Revenge, Nic (Fictitious character), Suspense, Archaeologists, Thrillers, Rome (Italy), Fiction, College teachers
ISBN: 9780385339568
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-07-31T09:23:38+00:00

THE PREVIOUS EVENING, whiling away the hours in the Questura intelligence office, she’d stolen a good look at the papers on LaMarca’s disappearance. It had taken a while to track down the boyfriend who’d been kidnapped by Giorgio Bramante as bait. A while, too, to persuade him to talk. When he did, he told them something interesting. Toni LaMarca had been taken two nights before his body turned up at Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not one night before, as they’d first thought. It was clear from the autopsy that he’d died soon after he was abducted, too, in the slaughterhouse, she supposed. The church had been visited by the woman caretaker the day before she found the body. She’d seen nothing unusual. That meant Bramante had stored LaMarca’s corpse somewhere—out of some unforeseen necessity?—before moving it to the final location. Then, some thirty-six hours after the killing, he’d left the clue to what he had done in Sacro Cuore.

There was dirt under LaMarca’s toenails, traces of earth on his body that forensic were looking at. But the kind of information she’d get from those sources meant something only with corroboration. Dirt wasn’t unique like DNA. If they had a suspect location, they could look for a match. But without a starting point, everything they had was like that stupid white worm. Information that lacked context, data floating on the wind with nothing concrete to make it useful. It could take weeks to track down, if ever.

“So where?” she wondered aloud.

Cristiano shrugged. “Like I told you. Near water. Near a drain maybe. Or a culvert. Underground, overground. You choose.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she grunted. “You can take your pet home. Provided…”—she prodded the worm nerd in the chest—“…you promise to name him Silvio.”

The biologist hesitated and risked a glance at his friend.

“You mean you don’t want me to work on him?” he asked. “Run a few tests? They’re fatal, naturally, but I don’t think the animal liberation people will start squealing. I mean, it’s not like he’s an endangered species.”

Her mind was already elsewhere. She wanted him out of there.

“Worm autopsies are not my field, Cristiano. Talk to Silvio about it.”

“But…”

“But nothing.”

“Tell her,” Silvio ordered his pal.

“Tell me what?”

“It’s the sex thing again,” Cristiano said. “You didn’t hear me out.”

She looked at her watch. “Thirty seconds.”

“It’s a question of allopatry or sympatry, whether they’re sexual or parthenogens…”

“I will, I swear, hit someone soon. Get to the point.”

“OK. Some populations of planarians overlap and mate with each other. Some stay apart and reproduce parthenogenetically. They develop female cells without the need for fertilisation. Some…kind of do a little of both.”

“I will…”

“In Rome we have sexual types and parthenogens, and they’re allopatric. Which means they live in geographically diverse communities and are basically slightly different versions of the same organism. It’s a big deal. We have underground waterways that have been untouched, sometimes unconnected, for two thousand years. What that means is that over the centuries we’ve come to have hundreds of communities of planarians and no two are exactly the same.

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