Authors: The Sacred Cut
"No,"
Leapman replied. "We don't have copies here. Besides, I don't
see the point."
"Maybe--"
she began.
"The
answer's no. Next."
It
could almost have been the same building, except for the window in the portico,
which had now changed shape.
"This
is Jefferson too," Emily Deacon explained. "The University of
Virginia just around the corner. The Rotunda is effectively a half-size copy of
the Pantheon. Just four days later. A man's body in the centre of the
hall, and this is pretty much what we saw today. The killer's got the
pattern he wants now and he doesn't shift from it."
She
keyed up the corpse. The arms and legs were at the selfsame angle as those of
the woman in the Pantheon. A second photo showed the cadaver turned onto its
front.
"His
scalpel work is improving," Leapman said.
"Plus,"
Deacon interjected, "he's getting picky about the way he positions
the body. The head faces due south. He kept to that afterwards. From now on,
too, he alternates the position of the limbs. Sometimes angled like this.
Sometimes with the feet together and the arms at ninety degrees to the torso.
"The
point about facing south is particularly odd," Emily continued,
"because in most of those buildings there was no obvious reason. They
weren't aligned in any particular direction. We only picked up on this
later. In the Pantheon itself the entrance and the high altar do face
north-south. You could see why he'd lay the body that way. All these ones
before--it's as if he was planning for what happened last night. As
if the Pantheon was some kind of final destination."
"How
hard is it?" Costa said.
"What?"
Leapman asked.
"What
he's doing to their back."
Leapman
looked at his colleague. He seemed out of his depth once he went beyond purely
procedural matters.
"It's
not simple and it's not that difficult either," she said. "I
can give you the summary of the psychological profiling later. We're not
done here yet."
Another
photo, a tiny circular building almost hidden in a wood, but still with an
obvious ancestry. "We were on the case by this time but he wasn't
making it easy for us. There was another hiatus now, until the middle of July. Perhaps
he was worried he was pushing his luck. This is a folly in Chiswick, west
London. Again, an American visitor. This time a woman."
Now
another Pantheon copy, this time by a lake. "Ten days later, Stourhead in
Wiltshire, southwest England. By now he's stretching out the miles. Maybe
he knows we've seen something. Maybe he
wants
us to see
something."
A
familiar facade from Venice filled the wall. "End of August. Il
Redentore. By Palladio, which has clear echoes of the Pantheon. The
killer's playing games and earning a lot of air miles. The victim's
a man this time."
"How
many?" Falcone asked. "In all?"
"Seven
that we know of, excluding last night," she said. "There's
nothing to suggest we have them all, though. This guy's clever. He hops
countries. He kills at unpredictable intervals. It's only over the last
few months that we've managed to collate the information to prove
there's a pattern that goes beyond those first killings in the States. All
we know for sure is that he's murdered five men and three women. All
American. All Caucasian. All middle class. All unexceptional. For all we know
they were picked at random to prove a point."
"Which
is?" Costa asked.
She
played with the remote and pulled up a composite shot, seven scarred backs,
each with the flesh marked in a similar fashion, then moved on to a graphic.
"This
is the pattern from one of the later deaths. Probably the closest he got to
what he was trying to achieve."
She
turned on the room light, picked up a printout of the composite of the wounds,
and placed it on Leapman's desk. Then she reached into a drawer and took
out a thick black pencil, a ruler and a compass and drew a square on the sheet,
almost to the edges.
"The
pattern's actually a subset of a more complicated idea."
Very
quickly, with the kind of skill Costa associated with an architect or an
artist, she marked four straight lines inside the square, running from the
point where the arms of the cross met the perimeter. Finally, she used the
compass to join the points where both the curving lines and the straight ones
met at the edge, describing a perfect circle.
"This
is what's called the sacred cut," she told them. "With the
first couple of victims you can even see the marks he used to align it
properly."
She
pulled up two morgue shots, early versions of the shape. "If you look
closely, you can see he drew a couple of lines in felt-tip to help him get the
hang of things. The other pointer to suggest a link is the way he alternates
the position of the limbs. This is a direct reference to the Vitruvian Man. A naked
man, arms and legs outstretched, vertical and horizontal. Drawn within both a
square and a circle. It's the same concept."
She
exchanged a brief glance with Costa. He understood the prompt.
"Like
the body in the Pantheon," he said. "I get it."
"Good
for you," Leapman muttered, making a point of looking at his watch. "So,
Agent Deacon. You're the architect here. What does it mean?"
"I
have a degree in architecture," she replied. "It doesn't make
me an expert." She struggled to form the right answer, then looked at
each of them in turn, as if to make sure they understood: she wasn't too
sure of all this herself. "On one level it's a construct used to
explain the geometry behind ancient architecture. On another it's a
metaphor for perfection, kind of a mystical symbol. It's supposed to
represent a faultless union between the physical world and the spiritual one. Remember
the way the body was laid out in the Pantheon?"
She
sketched out a copy of the familiar da Vinci sketch, rapidly and with some
skill. "The Greeks were the first to set down in writing the idea that
great buildings depended upon precise geometric proportions, though they
probably stole it from Asia and the Middle East because you see the same theory
in earlier buildings there. The Romans picked up the belief that those
proportions came directly from the Gods through the shape of a human being. Vitruvius
was a soldier under Julius Caesar before he became an architect. He wrote ten
books that became the bible on the subject. They got lost for some centuries,
until the Renaissance, when Vitruvius again became the primary source for most
of the architects we respect today. Michelangelo drew Vitruvian bodies
constantly, with limbs in both positions along the perimeter, trying to get
inside the idea, and he wasn't the only one."
Emily
Deacon placed both drawings side by side on the desk. "Vitruvius used the
human body--a holy vessel as far as he was concerned--as the starting
point for the proportions needed to create the perfect building."
Her
slim fingers traced the outlines of the shapes. "The Vitruvian Man
squares the circle, just as the making of the sacred cut does. This had a
religious importance. It symbolized the marriage of the earthly, the physical
fact of the square, with the ineffable perfection of the celestial, the circle.
It was about..." She looked across at Leapman, who was beginning to
get restless with the explanations. "Finding some kind of truth, God
even, inside a shape. The shape of a human body. The shape of a building. The
proportions are the same. Look at these."
She
indicated the outlines of the sacred cut. "There you have just about
every shape and proportion you are going to find in a great building. Even the
rectangles the cut creates fit a classically correct, arithmetic rule an
architect calls the golden mean. It's the way things are meant to
be."
Costa
tried to remember some of his old art lessons. They'd talked about the
golden mean. It permeated everything: architecture, sculpture, painting,
mathematics, even music.
Deacon
wasn't done. "When this man, whoever he is, places a body in the
centre of the Pantheon, or a place like it, what he's doing is making
some kind of statement. Laying down a piece in a puzzle, trying to complete the
picture. The Pantheon is simply a larger version of the geometric pattern
he's describing with those dead limbs. A circle cut by a square. The
woman lay where Hadrian must have once stood himself, looking out from the
focus of an artificial cosmos, through the eye of the oculus, out to what he regarded
as heaven. She was at the epicentre of this structured view of the universe he
created. Equally, the real universe was looking back at her. Whoever this man
is, he knows all this. He's not just some... nut."
"Really?"
Leapman sighed. "So where does this get us? Profiling has got us nowhere
so far."
"I
don't know yet," she half snapped in reply. "Maybe it makes
him feel he's holy somehow. Maybe he's looking for something,
trying to get order back into his world. But we've no data, so it's
just guesswork. There's a missing piece here. This man is smart, educated
and very, very capable. Something started him on this path. If we could find
out what that is--"
"But
we haven't," Leapman interruped. "And the odds are we
won't. Why do we keep going over this? I don't want to understand
the bastard. I want to catch him. This guy's killed at least eight people
now, maybe more. All Americans. If we get the chance to ask him why once
he's in jail, fine. But I'm not going to lose any sleep if
he's just plain dead either. We're not going to nail down this
animal by profiling or mumbo jumbo. We get him through work."
He
glared across the desk at Falcone. "If we're lucky, we get him
through you."
A
hint of a smile crossed the inspector's face. "I'm not a
great believer in luck, Agent Leapman. And by the way, it's nine victims.
We lost a photographer last night, if you recall. He was Italian, but all the
same."
Leapman
cursed under his breath, then glowered at the images of the dead, scarred
backs.
"I
do believe in detail, though," Falcone continued. "Why don't
you just turn over everything you have and let us go through the material to
see if there's anything you've missed?"
"We
don't miss things," Leapman snarled.
"Let
me rephrase," Falcone said, correcting himself carefully. "Perhaps
there's a fact, an event in there that means something to us and nothing
to you."
To
Costa's surprise, Leapman didn't throw the idea straight out of the
window into the snow. "It's got to work both ways," he said
eventually.
"Meaning?"
Falcone wondered.
"Meaning
a quid pro quo. Deacon works with you from now on. She reports back to me on
what you find. In return, you get some files and she fills me in on anything
you discover."
The
woman looked up from the desk, her face suffused with sudden anger. "Sir--"
Leapman
interrupted, waving a dismissive hand in her direction. "I can spare you.
Saves me hearing all this shit about profiling and numbers and stuff."
Falcone
nodded and smiled at her. "Agreed," he said. "Welcome on
board."
Leapman
dragged the keyboard of his PC towards him. "I'll e-mail you some
documents. Let me say this again: these are confidential. If you copy them
outside the loop to anyone else, we'll know and I will personally drag
your ass to the Palazzo Chigi for a serious kicking. If I see them reported in
the press you'll be writing parking tickets in Naples before the
week's out."
"You
seem to have such influence," Falcone said with a faint smile.
"If
you like," Leapman replied, "you can test me."
"No,"
Falcone demurred. "But you could tell me one more thing."
"What's
that?" Leapman answered without looking up.
"How
long you've been here in Rome, waiting for this man to turn up. How he
sent you here in the first place. And--"
Falcone
reached over and pushed the keyboard out of Leapman's reach, making sure
the American had to look him in the face.
"--why
the hell we had to wait for two people to die before you got around to telling
us we had this monster on our streets."
Leapman
glowered at him. "Deacon?"
She
blinked, hesitating, then punched the remote. Costa could feel the hatred
rolling off her. A new photo came on the screen: an oriental temple, red-walled
with three roofs, set behind rows of white marble steps.
"The
Temple of Heaven, Beijing," she explained. "A Chinese Pantheon, if
you like. The cosmology, the proportions, are virtually identical. It was a
sacrificial altar once too."
"Still
is for the man out there," Leapman said quietly, almost to himself.
Emily
Deacon was struggling to keep her composure. "This is the last we know of
before Rome. In September another body was found there. It took us a little
while to get on the case. We never expected to see him outside North America or
Europe. And"--she flicked the remote and pulled up more tourist
shots of the temple--"there were other reasons."