Author's notes: This tale, penned by me, Nachtsider, is based on the excellent anime/manga known as 'Gunslinger Girl', which is the brainchild of Yu Aida. In this story, the Social Welfare Agency puts closure on several of Italy's most notorious murder mysteries – including one closer to home than anyone could have thought. Bearing in mind that all original concepts, characters, their distinctive likenesses and related elements featured in this publication are my property and may not be used without my express permission, enjoy the composition, and feel free to drop this author a line at the relevant electronic mail address (nachtsider at yahoo dot com)!
JUSTICE SERVED
CHAPTER ONE: CHAOS
It was half-past two in the morning when a rapping at Henrietta's bedroom door awoke her from a fitful slumber. She was grateful for the interruption, for she had been visited by a strange and fantastic dream in which she seemed to be stalking a young couple down a darkened, dreary street, dagger in hand. From such unwelcome phantoms even the rudest awakening comes as a welcome relief. At the door she discovered Giuseppe, already clad in his work clothes.
"There's a squad car waiting downstairs, Henrietta," he said. "Enzo's sent for us – another double murder's just taken place."
Henrietta swiftly dressed, fetched her weapons and hurried down. But it soon seemed that she had shaken off her dreams only to enter a world equally spectral and oppressive. The car bucked and swayed through deserted streets. A chill wind had laid waste to the city. How many of the millions who toil daily in Rome have ever seen its other face? It is an eerie reflection of that brash and bustling metropolis – all being the same, and yet not the same. No doubt it sounds fanciful, but when seen through Henrietta's eyes from that madly dashing vehicle, the city bore the aspect of a skull. The very streets seemed terrible; a fit area for the most sordid crimes.
They had struck five times that law-enforcement knew of, had the psychopathic pair who dubbed themselves 'Nightfall' and 'Sundown'. At least five times and probably more over the past ten months they had prowled the Umbria region's lovers' lanes after dark in search of human prey, creeping up on young couples as they embraced in their automobiles or in the undergrowth. Giuseppe remembered how his eye had raced down the autopsy protocols to confirm the fiends had finished the poor souls off before they performed the gruesome remainder of their diabolical deeds.
They left each body where it lay when they were done with it. Neither rape nor sexual abuse was part of their agenda, but what they did have in mind was far more terrible. All the victims were discovered arranged in grotesque tableaux; the corpses strewn and garlanded with flowers, their genitals lewdly exposed. Worse still, it was in their habit to excise anatomical trophies – uteri in some cases, viscera and breasts in others. Though the ghastly mutilations were initially conducted with near-surgical precision, the ferocity with which the murderers committed these appeared to be increasing with every passing attack, and the intervals between assaults were growing distressingly short.
A further notable characteristic of Nightfall and Sundown's crimes was an alarming lack of useful evidence. The sole survivor to their atrocities – still hospitalized and in critical condition – was only able to describe her assailants as ghoulishly masked, hooded phantoms ala Kathryn Beaumont of Mask of the Phantasm infamy. Investigators were never able to develop any meaningful forensic data when probing the murder scenes. They were meticulous, leaving no fingerprints, no trace evidence of hair or fiber.
And then there were the letters, all plastered with excess postage and mailed on a semi-regular basis to the police and press – creatively macabre pop-up greeting cards, elaborately decorated with morbid illustrations and featuring text written in a loopy, childlike scrawl. Threats and taunts peppered these dispassionate, soulless messages (a 'box-score' feature that presented the killers' current body count alongside a figure of zero for the police was common), these invariably including details of the murders that only the perpetrators could have known. Enclosed occasionally were intricate, inscrutable cryptograms that supposedly contained hints to the killers' identities and locations. The latest missive came with a piece of skin flayed from a victim's thigh, along with ludicrous demands for appeasement – orders for plush toys in the murderers' garishly-costumed likenesses to be marketed nation-wide, no less – on pain of children being randomly shot after having their school bus disabled.
The result of this unfettered mayhem was a virtual panic in Umbria. In many counties, school buses were accompanied by patrol cars, or officers rode along with the kids on bus routes. The publication of Nightfall and Sundown's confessions and threats and the subsequent barrage of subjective, speculative press articles threw the populace into unprecedented fear. This media frenzy undermined the ongoing investigation, not to mention the fact that it obviously fed the murderous miscreants' compulsion for widespread attention.
To say that public pressure on the law-enforcement community to catch the killers was intense would be an understatement, and they worked on the case like men possessed. Now that the scare was at its height, some lovers' lanes had more plainclothesmen than sweethearts sitting in pairs in cars. There were not enough women officers to go around. In hot weather, male couples took turns wearing longhaired wigs and many mustaches and beards were sacrificed.
These sting operations invariably came to nothing, and it completely horrified everyone how everything always seemed to conspire to further Nightfall and Sundown's schemes. They were constantly at the right place at the right time, whilst their pursuers could do naught but trace the trail of gore and state, "The bastards have been here, and here." When the police finally decided that such extraordinary circumstances would require extraordinary measures to resolve, they contacted the Social Welfare Agency for assistance, thus setting into motion the chain of events that led to Giuseppe and Henrietta's involvement.
The young officer commandeering the vehicle had said only that the killings had occurred in the city's wealthy quarter. "The boss wouldn't let me near the bodies," he murmured with some uneasiness. "Said it was no fit sight for a rookie." They tore down roads and alleys, past the riverbank and into a district of lavish apartments and houses. Here at last the driver checked their furious progress, as they turned off down a narrow lane to the left. Some distance along they turned again, and drew up. "You're here," the cop said bluntly.
A cut opposite debouched into a small square where a group of persons were gathered under a lamp. As the pair approached, a familiar figure emerged from the shadows. It was Enzo, who greeted his old allies with grim cold courtesy.
"Horrible to think that increased police surveillance of the countryside has only spurred the bastards to make a gory debut here in the capital," he remarked. "I have no real idea how extensive your service has been, Giuseppe, but I shall be very surprised if you have seen anything like this before."
He led Giuseppe and Henrietta across the square to a dark corner. On the flagstones lay a shapeless mass. The veteran detective shone his flashlight on it, and bent to turn back the tarpaulin that covered the thing. It was a dead boy and girl – a local teenage couple, probably home late from some party or other. Their throats had been slashed in a most vicious manner, and their faces had been brutally disfigured. Pieces of gory tissue were heaped about their necks. Then Enzo pulled the sheet back all the way, exposing the lower bodies to view.
For a moment, Giuseppe was in danger of disgracing himself before a fellow professional. And yet the corpses presented nothing new to eyes that had witnessed countless violent deaths. It was not the injuries themselves that were so shocking – the gaping abdomens, the entrails torn asunder, the pools of drying blood – but rather the terrible cruelty with which they had been inflicted. Nothing that was said in subsequent press reports could begin to suggest the impression that was immediately burned upon the mind of everyone who saw the poor youngsters' corpses. The murder weapons – sharp, serrated blades – had been jabbed with tremendous force into their abdomens and then dragged upwards through the torsos until the sternums stopped them.
All those present with the fratello team at that ungodly hour were with law-enforcement, and by profession inured to grisly scenes, and yet they all conspicuously avoided the ground where the bodies lay, and huddled together on the other side of the outlook as if for protection. Giuseppe knew that each man had felt as he had upon gazing on that obscene spectacle, that some dark power had risen out of the swamps of history, some atavistic freaks come to unleash horrors they had thought to meet only in old books and country tales, and with which they were hard pressed to deal. But he also knew better than to let such feelings become the masters of him – the perpetrators of this senseless violence were of flesh and blood, and the responsibility of bringing them to justice now fell squarely upon the shoulders of himself and his protégée.
"Find them, Henrietta," said Giuseppe, the softness of his voice belying the considerable determination and anger seething beneath his cool exterior. "Make them pay."
It was only like a little girl in a dream and after a gentle notion from her supervisor that Henrietta knelt down to perform her examination of the crime scene; Giuseppe had never seen such behavior on the part of his ward throughout the three years they had worked together, and it worried him tremendously. The look she wore was one he could not quite put his finger on – was it fear that danced behind her limpid brown eyes, or something else? He had no time to postulate at present, though, and spurred Henrietta on with quiet words of encouragement, urging her to focus on the job at hand and do it right.
As mentioned previously, Nightfall and Sundown were experts at masking their tracks. But their skill was, of course, limited only to what they could spot. The military surplus split-toe jungle warfare boots that the murderous twosome always wore had hobnailed soles, and the heads of these nails left infinitesimal scratch marks – discernible only to enhanced vision like Henrietta's – wherever they trod. It did not take long for her to ascertain a trail. "This way," she finally said in an uncharacteristic, hesitant monotone, indicating a passage leading south out of the square before hurrying down it, followed closely by Enzo, his men and a still-troubled Giuseppe.
The ungodly luck of Italy's most feared murderers since the Monster of Florence had finally run out, and their hateful lives had less than an hour to run.
END OF CHAPTER ONE
