The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi Read Free Book Online

carabinieri, dressed in a natty jacket of gray leather buttoned to his neck to keep out the autumn chill, chain-smoking American cigarettes. The colonel had in his hand a stone that he had found twenty meters from the murder scene. In the form of a truncated pyramid, it was about three inches on a side and made of granite. Spezi recognized it as a doorstop of a type often found in old Tuscan country houses, used during the hot summers to hold open the doors between rooms to aid in the circulation of air.
    Turning the stone over in his hands, the colonel approached Spezi. “This doorstop is the only thing I’ve found at the site of any possible significance. I’m taking it back as evidence, since it’s all I’ve got. Maybe he used it to break the car window.”
    Twenty years later that banal doorstop, collected by chance in a field, would become the center of a new and bizarre investigation.
    “Nothing else, Colonel?” Spezi asked. “Not a trace? The ground is soaking wet and soft.”
    “We found the footprint of a rubber boot, of the Chantilly type, on the ground next to the row of grapevines that run perpendicularly to the dirt track, right next to the Golf. We’ve inventoried the print. But you know as well as I do that anyone could have left that bootprint . . . just like this rock.”
    Spezi, remembering his duty as a journalist to observe with his own eyes and not report secondhand, went with great reluctance to look at the female victim. Her body had been dragged more than ten meters from the car and worked on in a place that was, as in the previous homicides, surprisingly exposed. She was left in the grass, her arms crossed, with the same mutilation as before.
    The victims were examined by Medical Examiner Mauro Maurri, who concluded that the cuts to the pubic region had been made with the same notched knife that resembled a scuba knife. He noted that, as in the previous killings, there was no evidence of rape, no molestation of the body or presence of semen. The mobile squad collected nine Winchester series H shells from the ground and two more inside the car. An examination proved that all had been fired by the same gun used in the previous two double homicides, with the unique mark on the rim made by the firing pin.
    Spezi asked the chief of the mobile squad about the apparently anomalous fact that a Beretta .22 can only hold nine rounds in its magazine, and yet there were eleven shells at the scene. The chief explained that a knowledgeable shooter can force a tenth round into the magazine and, with another preloaded in the chamber, turn a nine-shot Beretta into an eleven.
    The day after the killing, Enzo Spalletti was released.
    It would not be an exaggeration to use the word “hysteria” to describe the reaction to this fresh double homicide. The police and carabinieri were swamped with letters, anonymous and signed, which had to be followed up. Doctors, surgeons, gynecologists, and even priests were among those accused, along with fathers, sons-in-law, lovers, and rivals. Up to this time Italians had considered serial killers a northern European phenomenon, something that happened in England, Germany, or Scandinavia—and, of course, in America, where everything violent seemed to be magnified tenfold. But never in Italy.
    Young people were terrified. The countryside at night was utterly deserted. Instead, certain dark streets in the city, especially around the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte above Florence, were packed with cars, bumper to bumper, the windows plastered with newspapers or towels, young lovers inside.
    After the killings, Spezi worked nonstop for a month, filing fifty-seven articles for
La Nazione
. He almost always had the scoop, the breaking news first, and the newspaper’s circulation skyrocketed to the highest point in its history. Many journalists took to following him around, trying to discover his sources.
    Over the years, Spezi had developed many devious tricks for prying