Chapter 32: An Investigation Riddled With Doubts
After a long pause, Martina’s husband stepped aside and let the officer in.
He muttered sothing under his breath as Raphael passed. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a welco.
The apartnt had its own weather system. Tobacco, stale alcohol, the background notes of mildew and unwashed fabric all competing for the sa airspace. Raphael’s hand moved toward his face on instinct.
The husband caught it and seed to rember himself, he crossed to the window and pulled it open, the first ti it had been opened in a while judging by the resistance in the fra.
Fresh air ca in. Sunlight followed, and with it every particle of dust that had been invisible in the dimness.
The table held a half-empty cigarette pack, an ashtray overflowing with butts, and a collection of empty beer bottles arranged in no particular order.
Beside them, a small amount of white powder that nobody had bothered to explain.
Clothes were distributed across every available surface, shirts, trousers, socks, several of them on furniture that had already sustained damage of the kind that happened when sothing heavy had been thrown at it or into it.
The man who had done all this sat down across from Raphael and looked like what he was: soone who had lost the things that made the rest of it bearable, and was getting through the days because the days kept coming regardless.
Raphael found a chair that was clean enough and sat with his body tilted slightly forward, the posture of soone with authority who intends to use it.
The husband exhaled through his nose and started talking.
The account ca out fragnted. He’d stop mid-sentence and contradict what he’d just said, then double back, then trail off.
The rhythm of it was wrong in a specific way, the way a person sounds when they’re trying to reproduce sothing from mory rather than simply rembering it. He was reciting a previous version of himself.
"A week ago, my son Peter didn’t co ho when he was supposed to. I didn’t think much of it at first. Then dinner ca and I tried calling him several tis and got nothing.
My wife and I split up and searched, we were at it until after two in the morning. Nothing."
He grabbed his own head with both hands.
"That damn kid. Always off causing trouble with that group of his, the ones with the dyed hair, never studying, always starting fights. I should have known.
I should have, it’s my fault. If I’d broken his legs and locked him in the house he’d still be..."
He stopped himself. Sat with that for a mont.
"...The police ca to have
identify the body. It was him. Barely recognizable."
His voice had gone flat in the way voices go flat when the alternative is falling apart completely.
"Whatever did that to him did it slowly. Burns across most of his body. Multiple injections of things that had no business being injected, air, liquids, I don’t want to know what else."
He wiped his face with the back of his hand and kept going, pulling the words out one at a ti.
"The official determination was robbery and murder. His phone and wallet were both gone, the footprints at the scene were too disturbed to get an accurate count of perpetrators."
He shook his head. "But that doesn’t explain what was done to him before he died. He was nineteen years old. Nineteen."
Raphael didn’t respond. He waited.
"Martina and I ca ho that night. And then she got a ssage."
He pressed his lips together.
"From Peter’s stolen phone. The ssage said she was next."
The rest of it Raphael could reconstruct without help. Martina had a secret serious enough that she’d t a stranger in an alley at midnight rather than let it surface.
The eting had ended with her dead, and what had killed her had kept going after she was gone, the damage to the body suggested sothing that hadn’t finished being angry when the dying was done.
The husband sat in the quiet of his ruined apartnt and looked like a man waiting for the one thing that would give him a reason to still be here.
Not living so much as enduring, buying ti until the day he could watch whoever did this get put sowhere permanent.
Raphael stood.
"Thank you for your ti, sir. I’m genuinely sorry for what you’ve been through." He kept the register even, not clinical, not performatively warm.
"I have one more question. It’s about your wife."
The husband looked up, face a ss of grief and stubble and inadequately suppressed feeling.
"If it helps find whoever did this, ask whatever you want."
Raphael set the handkerchief on the table between them.
"This was recovered from the cri scene. We believe your wife was protecting a significant secret, sothing related to her professional life, serious enough that she was willing to et soone despite knowing it was dangerous. Do you recognize the handkerchief, or the handwriting?"
The husband looked at it. He picked it up carefully.
Then his expression changed.
"No... no, that’s not... how would..."
Sothing there. Raphael kept his voice level.
"What is it?"
He held the cloth for another second, then pushed it back across the table quickly, the gesture of soone trying to return sothing hot. He stared at the wall for a mont.
"I don’t know what secret she was keeping. But I know this handkerchief." He exhaled slowly.
"This was Martina’s. Her favorite one. I gave it to her years ago, before I had any money, it was the best thing I could afford at the ti." A pause. "It was how I told her I loved her."
He didn’t look at Raphael when he said the next part.
"That handwriting is Peter’s. The spacing between words, that short, tight style, nobody else writes like that. I would know it anywhere. That’s my son’s handwriting."
Raphael looked at the cloth in his hands and felt the shape of the case he’d been building shift without warning.
Peter, who had been murdered before his mother, whose body had been found in pieces, had used his parents’ keepsake to threaten his own mother. Had set the eting. Had sent sothing to kill her.
He turned it over and couldn’t make it lie flat.
Outside the window, a young man in grey casual clothes walked past on the pavent. He was walking a Doberman on a lead. As he passed the house, he glanced in.
The Doberman’s flank, just below the ribline on the left side, showed a slight indentation, the outline of a missing rib, the muscle sinking inward where the structural support should have been.
As though the rib had never existed at all.
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