The Turin Shroud Secret (21 page)

Carlotta turns back to him. ‘Signore Gatusso has no idea what bank the Craxis are now with.’ She reaches across him into the
file and searches for a moment. She finds a copy of a final statement. ‘This is the bank’s last link. When the Craxis closed
their accounts, they took all their money in cash.’

77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

Sergeant Bobby Sheen has been expecting the call. He just hopes Mitzi isn’t mad at him. He’d prayed Alfie Fallon would get
prison time but it was always going to be a long shot. With a spiralling state deficit, first-time offenders are pretty much
given a telling off and a free ride home these days. ‘Hiya, Mitzi, how you doin’?’

She’s stood in the ladies’ restroom at work. ‘I’m holding up, Bobby. Holding up. Connor rang me – said you told him to.’

‘I did. Look, I’m sorry they were so chicken-assed. I
hoped the judge would have been a bit tougher, you know?’

She leans in the corner against the cold white tiles near the hand dryers, ‘No need to say sorry. Who was it?’

‘Kent. Justice Joe Kent. Should have retired the useless bastard ten years ago.’

‘Should have been a woman.’

‘Kent
is
a woman. He certainly doesn’t have any balls.’

Mitzi smiles. Bobby’s always been a hardliner, ever since she first met him. ‘What was Alfie charged under? Two-seven-three
or two-four-three?’

‘Seven-three. The photographs we took of you were sufficient to prove physical injury.’

She has an embarrassing flashback of Bobby leading her down to the doctor after she’d seen her husband in the bullpen and
all her injuries being noted and snapped.

‘You okay, hon?’

‘Not yet, but I will be when all this is over.’

‘Soon. At least this is out of the way now.’

‘I know. Bobby, thanks for pushing things through. I realise you were looking out for me. Don’t go feeling bad about the sentence.’

‘You’re a star, Mitzi. Rise above this crap and shine again. Call me if I can help with anything.’

‘Will do.’ She clicks off the phone and glances in the rest-room mirror as she heads to her desk. ‘You’re a star, Mitzi –
just you remember that.’

TURIN

Confession is good for the soul.

Admitting your mistakes. Repenting. It’s how Ephrem has been raised. And right now he fully accepts his failings and is trying
to make up for them. He was vain and conceited. Thought he had the better of the man he had been following – and he hadn’t.

Pride before a fall.

He knows the teachings, the proverbs –
when pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.

Ephrem looks at the empty train platform and mentally chastises himself. When his mission is complete he will inflict agonising
pain on his vain body to ensure today’s lesson is learned and never forgotten. The only thing comforting him is the knowledge
that no matter how frail and fallible he is, his opponent will have inadequacies at least equal to his own. Right now he is
sure the man he is tracking will be feeling confident, safe, sure of his actions.

Pride before destruction.
The monk abandons the chase and returns to the target’s car. There’s a chance that his enemy has abandoned it but that would
be a big sacrifice for someone in his position, especially as this man has others to
protect. No, Ephrem feels sure he’ll come back here. All he has to do is wait.

Before his downfall a man’s heart is proud.

CORONER’S OFFICE, LOS ANGELES

Amy Chang spends the morning working a routine overdose case. A seventy-five-year-old woman living on her own decided to take
a month’s worth of anti-depressants and check out of Hotel California once and for all. Who can blame her? The City of Angels
is hell on earth for anyone who isn’t young, beautiful and hooked up with someone who loves them.

She scrubs her hands and arms, changes from morgue greens into a brown Peter Pan tunic top over comfortable black Jersey skinny
trousers. Back at her office desk she opens up mail from Mitzi containing high-def pics of the Shroud of Turin. She’s seen
some of the photographs before but never really paid much attention to them. The big close-up of the face is the most recognisable
of all. Even through the grey-black haze it’s unmistakably an image of Christ that people recognise the world over – beard,
long hair and the crown of thorns. She flicks through them until she finds a larger and more interesting body shot.

There’s something about the image that instinctively feels wrong to the ME. Her eyes are drawn to the hands, especially the
right one and its fingers. In proportion to the rest of the body they just seem too big. She types out a memo, attaches the
print and sends it to Gunter Quentell at the FBI.
He’s a world expert in photogrammetry – the forensic practice of determining the geometric properties of objects from photographic
images.

Before Amy makes her own scientific evaluations she seeks some artful insight into the mysteries. She searches the online
databases and the best she can come up with is the sixteenth-century oil by Giovanni Battista depicting how the body could
have been wrapped. It shows the linen loosely looped over the head with the open end at the feet.

She glances again at the body print made on the Shroud and the two don’t seem to tally. To leave such definite marks around
all areas on the corpse would be impossible unless it had been bound tightly, not covered flimsily as painted by Battista.

Amy hits zoom on her monitor and examines the Shroud section by section, top to bottom. It takes an hour. Her findings are
fascinating and frustrating. The body parts seem out of proportion to each other. They seem more like they’ve been drawn than
traced. And the more she stares at the face the more she is both enchanted and confused.

The forehead looks too short for the rest of the skull. Remembering that the victim was supposed to be lying on his back,
his hair should also be hanging away from, not over his head and face. She looks again at the full-length shot of the corpse.
The man has no neck. At least she can’t see one
in the print. She searches for signs of the cloth having been cut and reattached, so possibly excluding part of the neck,
but can’t find any.

Another aspect of the Shroud worries her. Wrap linen around a corpse and it gets creased – deeply creased. But not in this
case. There’s no evidence of any twists in the cloth, only the lines where it’s been folded for storage.

Amy searches police files and forensic image banks on wounds and torture marks. There’s nothing comparable. A case in Canada
in which a serial killer crucified his victims looks promising but it turns out he used execution methods totally unlike those
performed by the ancient Romans. She turns her attention once again to the Shroud’s positive and negative plates. The difference
between the two is astonishing. In the positive plate the body image is virtually invisible. In the negative one, it jumps
right out at you. It’s like spraying Luminol at a scene that looks wiped clean only to see blood appear in all its glorious
chemiluminescence.

The phone rings and makes her jump. ‘Doctor Chang.’

‘Guten tag, schöner mediziner.’

‘Gunter!’ She’s genuinely delighted he’s called her. ‘Fantastic to hear your voice. How are you?’

‘Me? I am very happy because you send me a note. Even if it is only to pick my giant German brain.’

She laughs. ‘If I picked anything else, your giant German wife would have me roasted for dinner in her very fine restaurant.’

He sighs. ‘She would indeed. But in another life we will
be lovers, of this I am sure. Now why are you looking at the Turin Shroud and asking crazy questions?’

‘Are they crazy?’

‘Of course they are. You ask are the hands and head proportionate to the body. The answer is no. Nor is the length of the
corpse appropriate. This man would have been way over six feet tall – nearer seven feet. Jesus may have been the son of God
but he wasn’t a giant. Or if he was, no one ever bothered to comment on it.’

Amy inspects one of the shots that Mitzi sent her. She sees what he means. ‘How do you know all this, Gunter? Did you do your
own studies?’

‘No need. There has already been a lot of work done. There are no external coordinates to compare the corpse with but the
dimensions of the Shroud itself are good baselines. Another thing, if you measure the length of the image on the back of the
cloth, it is two inches longer than on the front.’

‘Maybe it stretched and distorted the image? That would also explain the over-large hands.’

‘Good to see you are still so open-minded. There is an English professor you should talk to. I will go through my files and
ask that he call you.’

‘Is he an open-minded believer or non-believer?’

‘Believer. Very big believer. Even though I am not, it is important that you talk to him and also to STURP, the Shroud of
Turin Research Project. Speak to them, then use your own intelligence to decide that it’s a fake – a fakety-fake-fake.’

She laughs. ‘So I guess what you’re saying is that you think it’s a fake, then?’

‘I have no doubts. No questions at all. I can even tell you who the faker was.’

‘Go on.’

‘Not so quickly. It will cost you dinner next time I am in LA.’

‘Sure – but I get to call Astrid and tell her where I’m taking her husband.’ ‘An unnecessary offer.’ ‘So who faked it?’ ‘Open
your email. I just sent you a document.’

TURIN

By 6 p.m. Nic’s had it. He’s done with Carabinieri inefficiency. With struggling around a foreign city where it’s impossible
to park. With the whole damned Tamara Jacobs case.

For the past two hours he’s chased down addresses linked to Craxi’s logged calls and all he’s got for his troubles are a pounding
headache and enough dead ends to fill a road atlas. Fredo drives them back to the station house parking lot in Via Beato Sebastian
Valfré. From there, Carlotta walks Nic
to the hotel and tries to make peace. ‘I am sorry things didn’t work out – that we didn’t find Craxi.’

He’s too angry to respond.

‘I will make some more enquiries when I go back to the office. You should get some rest, you look tired. Tomorrow we will
find Roberto Craxi, I am sure.’

He seriously doubts she could find milk in her own fridge.

‘I pick you up at nine again in the morning, okay?’

‘Fine.’ He tries to be nice. ‘I hoped for more – something quick, a strong lead to build on. I’m sorry if I’ve been gnarly.
I know you’ve been trying to help.
Grazie.’

She smiles at his first stab at Italian,
‘Prego.
You have my numbers. Don’t forget, if you want anything, call me.’ She waits a beat then adds, ‘If you feel better a little
later and want to see some of Torino, I will be in the office. Like I said to you, I still have other crimes on my desk.’

‘Thanks again.’ He turns away, feeling a little guilty. He knows what a pain it is to babysit a cop from another country and
do all the ferrying around and legwork on a case that isn’t yours.