"That didn't really get us anywhere," Nikki realized disappointedly when Mike and she had dropped Elizabeth and Katherine off at a restaurant. "What are we going to do now?"
"How about a big plate of pasta," Mike suggested, picking up a plastic bag.
Nikki slowed her pace and furrowed her eyebrows. "How can you think about food now?"
Mike set the bag down on the kitchen counter and lifted his shoulders. "Sorry, but I'm just hungry!" he defended himself. "Besides, we still have time until Adami gets in touch anyway. Who knows when we'll finally be able to talk to Donatella. So we can use the time until then to replenish our energy reserves. Or should I find three poor sinners to devour instead?"
"You're an idiot," the officer muttered as she took two plates from the cupboard. He grinned broadly. "What about the place where Ottavio's car broke down? Shall we have a look at that?"
Mike paused for a moment. "You want to go to the place where the car broke down?" he asked as he went into the master bedroom and pulled on a comfortable pair of jogging bottoms. Nikki peeled out of the black funeral dress there, too. "I think Adami will be in touch when they leave?"
Nikki pulled on a T-shirt and rolled her eyes. "We've been waiting for more than thirty minutes. And what else are we supposed to do?" She paused for a moment. "On the other hand, is this even our job?"
Mike looked at her closely. "Officially, I'm still on the board of my advertising agency, and you're officially suspended."
Nikki pursed her lips and nodded. Adami hadn't known much about Ottavio but said his men were on the case, whatever that meant. "What are we still doing here?" she asked. Somehow, Mike was right. "We could all just take a few more days off and forget about the case. This isn't our area of responsibility at all, and Adami isn't exactly pulling any punches."
Mike looked at her for a long time and took a deep breath. "But that disproves our theory that maybe he's just looking out for Donatella's interests and overlooking other things."
Nikki licked her lips. "You mean he'd be looking harder for Ottavio then?"
He pulled the corners of his mouth down and lifted his shoulders. "Exactly. After all, it's Donatella's son. Unless she wants to get rid of him too, and we don't know why."
"Or has already got rid of him." The officer looked around. "When Ma spoke to old Visconti, he acted as if it could have been a woman."
"But does she kidnap her son to do it? And does all the other horrible things before?"
Nikki took a deep breath and lifted her shoulders. "We'll probably find out soon. Possibly in another big production."
Mike looked over his shoulder and licked his lips. "Well, something about food. What do you think, Nikki? Could it be that we really have a reference to Satan devouring sinners?"
"Yes, Satan even appears twice. It's quite striking. In the cathedral and in the baptistery. In Bologna, they opened Dante's skull to see if he had a hotline to Satan."
"A bit like Lenin."
"Yes. As for the food ... I was talking about that with that journalist from The Dark Side the other day: Eating others also takes place in the Lord's Supper and in the Christian Eucharist. The body of Christ is eaten. It also happens in cannibalism. And you shouldn't assume that most people want to eat someone else. It's the other way around. Think of those weird slaughterhouse logos, Mike, where you always see cartoon-like creatures that look happy to be slaughtered. But humans would rather be eaten. There are even special interest sites on the dark web like Cannibal Cantina."
"The Cannibal Cantina," Mike drew in air through his nose. "That's great! And what does that tell us? Is it good or bad?"
Nikki pulled the corners of her mouth down and lifted her shoulders. "I don't know. Like Kate always says, considering overpopulation and food shortages, maybe not so bad."
He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, she does indeed keep repeating that tasteless joke. And you know what? It doesn't make it any better." He paused and raised his eyebrows. "So, sinners or pasta? What are we eating?"
Nikki heard a noise at the window but took no further notice. "So, something just crossed my mind. If Donatella really did have something to do with the big names in the local underworld, as Loco Lillo suspects, could she have pissed someone off? And this someone is now taking revenge on her and killing her children to see her suffer? Like the Guardian of the Death did back then?"
Mike paused, thought for a moment, and furrowed his brows. He was very familiar with Elizabeth's previous cases. "That wouldn't fit either. He couldn't finish writing the Divine Comedy. And it's the same here. So far, all the murders have been carried out in front of her eyes. The revenge being taken on Donatella is apparently such that the more loved ones around her die, the more she should suffer."
"Kind of like Ma's Guardian of the Death case a few years ago," Nikki said with wide eyes.
Before Mike could answer his girlfriend, he heard the noise at the window again. Louder than before.
Under the long curtain, she saw two huge shoes.
"The window's open," Mike said. He went forward to close the window.
"Watch out," said the officer, her eyes wide, "there's some --"
At that moment, the figure stepped forward. Tall, massive, with a face that looked as if it had been hit once with a sledgehammer and then patched up rather severely.
Nikki didn't know that it had been the same, and she didn't know that this man was called the monster, Il Mostro.
Just as Mike was standing at the curtain, the hand behind it came in front of it. The hand with a gun.
"Where is Ottavio?" the man asked.
"How should we know --" Mike asked back, but that was as far as he got.
The man struck with the barrel of the gun, and Mike went down. The man came closer.
Nikki backed away, feeling the adrenaline in her veins. The guy must have climbed up somehow. No idea, the officer thought, how he had done that. She saw her boyfriend lying unconscious on the ground, wavering between pure despair and the search for a solution.
She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She was always calm and controlled, but at that moment, she couldn't be. Would the intruder kill Mike? And then her? Would it all end here? Would she not see her little brother Ben grow up? Would she not have the pleasure of starting her own family, possibly with Mike? Would this be the end of her young career and her short life? In Marco's apartment in Florence, she was shot by some hitman who entered her apartment and simply gunned them both down while her mother and aunt were having dinner in a restaurant?
She couldn't run because she couldn't leave Mike here. But she couldn't fight either because she didn't have her service weapon with her; she had left her Glock with Jane herself, and the kitchen with the knife block was too far away. The man's weapon, a Uzi, had a silencer, so it wouldn't attract any attention if this man shot Nikki and Mike up. However, this man didn't seem to care about attention if he had entered Nikki's apartment from the outside via the facade or perhaps the floor below.
"Ottavio," the man hissed again and stepped away from the window. "Where is he? I won't ask again." He pointed the gun at Mike, who was lying on the floor. "I'll shoot him first and then you if you don't tell me."
Nikki didn't say a word.
"I count to three," the man said in broken English, "then you tell me where Ottavio is. If not, Signor Uzi will talk." He raised his gun. "One ... two --"
Something happened at that moment.
Nikki already believed that these two images of horror, firstly the man approaching her with the gun and secondly, even worse, her boyfriend lying unconscious on the floor, would be the last thing she would see in this life.
At that moment, the man went to the back to close the window.
At that moment, she felt as if the gears of reality had suddenly shifted down several gears. Everything—completely unreal—was happening in slow motion simply because it was unreal.
The tall man reached for the window handle, and suddenly, another hand emerged from behind the curtain, quick and sudden, like a snake biting.
A hand that grabbed the bulky guy's hand and pulled him outside with cruel force. Outwards and downwards. A shot discharged from the man's gun, which went into the ceiling, hissing, softened by the silencer. Then, the hand pulled again. And the gears of reality shifted up several gears again as the hulking man was pulled backward out of the window and fell screaming into the depths. A muffled crash abruptly ended the scream. Birds chirped excitedly, and then there was silence.
Nikki rushed to the window and looked down. The man who had just threatened her was lying dislocated between some garbage cans in the backyard. A pool of blood was forming under his head, slowly spreading and looking almost black from above.
She looked around. Ivy was growing up the walls. Below was the man's twisted body. The Uzi with the silencer a few feet beside him. There was no one in the courtyard.
But there was something else.
A face looking up at her from the window below her apartment.
The face that perhaps included the hand that had dragged the man down to his death.
The face with tattoos.
And long canine teeth.
She saw the face for a split second.
Then it was gone.