Jean Rizzo walked over to the window. Seville’s new police headquarters boasted spectacular views of the city, but today everything was dreary and gray. Traffic crawled sluggishly around the roundabout immediately below them. Like me, thought Jean. Going in circles.
“Señora Prieto mentioned the letter she found inside the case protecting the Holy Shroud. You knew about that?”
Dmitri bristled. “Of course.”
“She said she received a phone call two days prior—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Dmitri interrupted rudely, waving Jean away like a pesky fly. “I got a call myself, as it happens, from the same man. American, spouting all sorts of wild theories about the Santa Sábana being stolen.”
“You never reported this call?”
“Reported it to whom?” Dmitri grew even angrier. “I am the chief of police in Seville. I dismissed the call as nonsense and I was proven right. No attempt has been made to steal the Shroud. I’m afraid Señora Prieto has rather a feminine sensibility, prone to drama and conspiracy theories. I prefer to stick to facts.”
“So do I,” said Jean. “Let me tell you a few facts about Daniel Cooper.”
He filled Dmitri in on the bare bones. Cooper’s history as an insurance investigator, his obsession with the con artists Tracy Whitney and Jeff Stevens and his subsequent involvement in a string of art and jewelry thefts worldwide. Finally Jean told Dmitri about the Bible Killer murders. “Daniel Cooper is our prime suspect. At this point he’s our only suspect. I can’t stress strongly enough how important it is that we find him. Cooper is brilliant, deeply disturbed and dangerous.”
Comisario Dmitri yawned. “I daresay, Inspector, and I wish you luck. However, the fact remains, he is not in Seville.”
“How do you know?”
Dmitri smiled smugly. “Because if he were here, my men would have found him.”
JEAN’S MEETING AT THE Antiquarium was more productive. He found Magdalena Prieto to be reasonable, intelligent and polite, a welcome change from the obnoxious Dmitri.
“Is he always that much of a jerk?” Jean asked. He was seated in Magdalena’s office, sipping a much-needed double espresso that her secretary had kindly brought him.
“Always.” Magdalena Prieto sighed. “He’s furious with me for calling Interpol. Thinks it undermines his authority, which I suppose it does in a way. But I felt it was my duty to do everything I could to protect the Shroud. I can’t tell you how shaken I was, finding that letter.”
“I’m sure.”
“Whoever was in that case could have damaged the Sábana, or even destroyed it. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“But they didn’t,” Jean observed.
“No.”
“They didn’t try to steal it either. Or to extort money.”
“Exactly. I truly believe that the person who left the letter and telephoned me was trying to warn me. I think he was sincere. More than that, he was well informed. My staff confirmed that they’d seen the other man he told me about, the one posing as a policeman. You’ve seen the CCTV footage?”
Jean nodded. The hunched, dark-haired man in the parka was not familiar to him. If this was Daniel Cooper’s new accomplice, he was certainly very far removed from Elizabeth Kennedy, his former partner in crime.
“The way this guy broke in . . .” Señora Prieto continued admiringly. “It wasn’t just that he bypassed our alarms and cameras. That glass is bulletproof and the key codes supposedly impenetrable. He knew exactly what he was doing. He even ensured that the atmospheric balance of argon and oxygen was left intact. Who does that?”
“So he understood about the need to preserve the Shroud?”
“Yes. And how to preserve it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he must be a curator himself. Or an archaeologist.”
Jean Rizzo smiled. An American expert on antiquities who can crack codes and bypass alarms, with a flair for the dramatic . . .
Magdalena Prieto looked at him curiously. “Am I missing something?”
“The man who left you that note is called Jeff Stevens. And no, Ms. Prieto, you’re not missing something. Although I think I might be. And Comisario Dmitri certainly is.”
Magdalena waited for him to elaborate.
“If Jeff Stevens thinks Daniel Cooper’s in Seville to steal the Shroud, then Daniel Cooper is in Seville to steal the Shroud. Under no circumstances should you reduce your security.”
Magdalena blanched. “All right. We won’t.”
“And e-mail me the footage of the second man.”
“I’ll do it this afternoon. Do you think you’ll find him, Inspector? Because in all honesty, I don’t think Comisario Dmitri’s even trying.”
“I’ll find him,” Jean Rizzo said grimly. “I have to. Your Sábana Santa’s not the only thing at stake.”
JEAN RIZZO WALKED BACK to his hotel through Maria Luisa Park. The shrubbery glowed lush and green after the rain. Vivid pink laurel blossoms dazzled in the spring sunshine, in contrast to Jean’s gray, dour mood.
He thought about Jeff Stevens. About the showmanship and panache of his latest stunt, followed by the letter to Magdalena Prieto. A man would have to have serious glamour and charisma to attract a woman like Tracy Whitney, and clearly Jeff Stevens had it in spades. Equally clearly, behind the one-liners and the suave, James Bond exterior lurked an almost palpable loneliness. Like Jean, Jeff had loved deeply once and had lost the only woman he’d ever truly loved. Jeff blocked out the pain with hookers. Jean had never had it in him to do that. In a way, he wished he did. But both men had thrown themselves into work, into their respective passions, as a way to survive loss.
Jean wondered if the strategy was working better for Jeff Stevens than it was for him. At least I have my children. Without Clémence and Luc, Jean truly didn’t know how he would survive. Stevens has a son, a beautiful son, and he doesn’t even know it. The thought made Jean Rizzo profoundly sad.
After his meeting with Magdalena Prieto, he’d gone to see the Shroud for himself, listening to the same audio guide to the tour that Daniel Cooper’s mysterious accomplice had apparently taken some four times. It was fascinating, but gruesome. The idea that someone would torture to death an innocent man in order to fake Jesus’ burial cloth . . . that someone would go out and find an individual, abduct, beat and crucify him . . . it beggared the imagination. Even by medieval standards, that was some serious depravity. The fact that it had likely been done for money only made it worse.
Jean Rizzo thought, Am I wasting my time? Let’s say Daniel Cooper really is the Bible Killer, and I find him and stop him and punish him. Does it really matter in the long run? Won’t there be another serial killer after him, and another, and another? Isn’t mankind intrinsically, irredeemably cruel?
But then he answered his own question.
No. The world is full of goodness. It’s the freaks, the anomalies like Cooper, who go out there raping and slaughtering women. The fact that there were freaks back in the Dark Ages who liked to torture and kill to mimic some scene from the Bible doesn’t mean . . .
He stopped walking. A thought, a theory, something began to form in his head.
Daniel Cooper.
Torture and murder.
The Bible.
The Shroud of Turin wasn’t just a holy relic. It was evidence of a crime. Of a murder. A murder surrounded in mystery.
Jean Rizzo ran back to his hotel. Bounding up the stairs two at a time, he opened his laptop, tapping his feet impatiently until his in-box appeared.
Come on. Be there. Be there be there be there.
And it was. His most recent e-mail. Magdalena Prieto must have sent it as soon as he left the museum. Jean clicked open the attachment, zooming in closely on the image of the man’s face. The prominent forehead. The hooked Roman nose. The dark, springy curls of hair erupting out of the scalp like springs bursting out of an old mattress.
He zoomed in again.
And again.
Only on the third time were the seams of the wig visible. Or the tiny bumps in the latex where the prosthetic nose had been molded to the cheeks. Even with a trained eye and a state-of-the-art computer, Jean had to look so closely he felt like his eyes might cross. But once he saw, he knew.
That’s no accomplice.
THE MAN IN THE green jacket was back at his hotel. The Casas de la Judería was a strange mishmash of rooms and courtyards linked by subterranean tunnels in the old Jewish quarter of Seville. Wedged between two churches and set back from a pretty but dark cobblestone street lined with cafés and precariously leaning medieval houses, it was a throwback to an old, largely lost Spain. The interiors were gloomy and musty, with a preponderance of dark brown fabric, permanently drawn curtains and heavy mahogany furniture. A smell of beeswax polish mingled with wood smoke and incense from the church next door. The decor was simple, the rooms small. There were no televisions or other signs of the modern world beyond the beautifully carved, heavy wooden gates at the hotel’s entrance. In the courtyards, old men smoked pipes and sipped coffee and read novels by Ignacio Aldecoa. A widow in a black-fringed head scarf, frozen in time, said the rosary by an unlit fire in the salon.