The Sacred Cut

“So what do you think I was like when I was your age?”

Laila thought about it. “Normal.”

“Hah! How wrong can you get? I’m not normal now, kid. You want to know what they call me? In the Questura?”

“What?”

“ ”Crazy Teresa.“ The lunatic pathologist. Mad as they come.”

Laila shook her head, refusing to accept a word of it. This seemed, to Teresa Lupo, dreadfully unfair.

“It’s true,” she asserted, “whether you believe it or not. And I am crazy. Crazy enough to buy you some stuff just because I want to. Just because all that black gear drives me nuts. Why be pretty and hide it?”

Laila didn’t think of herself as pretty. Pretty didn’t exist in Laila’s world. She probably didn’t think of herself at all. A flicker of anxiety crossed her face. “When will they make me go?”

“Nobody’s making you do anything, Laila.”

She didn’t believe that either. Teresa couldn’t blame her. It was a particularly vague answer, one full of holes even a thirteen-year-old street kid could see.

“Gia

“Sure. For a while. But he’s a cop. He’s got work to do. Lots of work. You’re not his…”

Teresa checked herself, horrified at the words ru

“It’s not his job, Laila. We’ll work something out. But Gia

The girl threw her ski

“I didn’t see anything,” she mumbled. “I just…”

You didn’t threaten in a situation like this. That couldn’t work. Yet they’d spent hours trying to pull out the facts of what happened, piece by piece, from Laila’s head, and it was all so… meagre. The address had come easily. The rest was a jumble. She had followed the man because he looked “interesting.”

Really. How, Laila? The kid didn’t explain. She merely shrugged. This was what she did. Follow people. Maybe, Teresa thought, offer them something-she didn’t want to think what-then take their money and their wallets, too.

They’d got Laila to talk as far as she wanted to. Then she’d clammed up, however subtly Peroni tried to find a way past her defences. Every understated question just walked straight into a brick wall.

Teresa Lupo tried to imagine what it was like for her that night. You sneaked into an old temple because someone left the door open. So what were you thinking?

It’s warm in there.

OK. And what do you think when you get there and see two people, a man and a woman, close up to each other, something going on?

They’re going to make out and I can watch.

OK too. She knew she’d have done that at thirteen.

I can steal stuff. God knows what.

And that was OK as well, except nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. The two didn’t make out. Probably not, anyway, from what Teresa had seen of the body.

The man had strangled her with his special piece of cord, the one he kept for such occasions. Then he took off all her clothes, pulled out a scalpel, looked around the room, flipped her over so that her dead face bit into all that ancient stone, did his work (which he’d know by heart by now, without the need for templates, because he’d done it-how many?-eight times before already), then flipped the poor mutilated bitch back and let her blank, unseeing eyes stare at the oculus, pulled out her arms like that, cold fingers pointing out at some hidden magical points in space.

Teresa looked at Laila and a hidden i

Laila had done what any sane person would have done in the circumstances. She’d hidden in the shadows, just where she was when Nic came into the place, cowering, shivering, stifling the scream in her throat, refusing to look because seeing would make those noises she was hearing take on another dimension, let them climb straight into her brain and stay there forever.

Teresa put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and smiled. “Just tell me the truth, Laila. Then we’ll leave it. You really didn’t see anything, did you? It was just too… bad. Too scary to look. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’d all have done the same.”

“I told you,” the girl said with a pout.

No, you didn’t, she wanted to say. Even Gia

She wished to God Peroni had been awake and standing there then. Because Teresa Lupo knew this kid was telling the truth, and knew, too, she was hiding something. No amount of street life, no big, shadowy pre-history, could explain the shifty expression in her eyes. There was a secret there. Maybe it was too personal-thirteen-year-olds could do things for a man too. Maybe…

You haven’t a clue, Teresa told herself. Quit guessing. Either she tells or she doesn’t.

Teresa thought about Falcone and how he would have handled an interview like this. He and Peroni were so different, used such dissimilar tactics to reach the same end. Temperamentally she was closer to Falcone. She didn’t like fishing, didn’t care for walking around a problem, looking for its weaknesses. You plunged in, asked the right questions, then stood there, arms crossed, tapping your feet loudly on the floor until the answers came. It was one reason she liked Peroni so much. Loved him even, though she wasn’t quite sure exactly what that meant. Gia

But Peroni had gone as far as he could. It was time to lean on Falcone’s tactics a little. Besides, all she was doing was telling Laila the truth, juiced up a little.

“Do you know what it means to get fired?” Teresa asked sotto voce, casting an eye into the living room, making sure Peroni was still asleep.

Some emotion flickered in Laila’s eyes. “I’m not stupid.”

“I know that. I just wanted to make sure you understood.”

“Understood what?”

Teresa hesitated, as if she’d overstepped the mark. “It’s nothing. It’s about Gia

“I know what being fired means,” the girl repeated.

“When that other man came, the inspector,” Teresa continued, “he asked us to go outside. Remember?”

Laila took Falcone’s banknote out of her pocket, rolled it in her fingers and almost smiled.

“Quite,” Teresa said evenly. “You heard the inspector and Gia

“No,” she replied, puzzled.

“Typical.” It would have been, too. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Laila. I shouldn’t, but you two seem to get along so maybe you ought to know. Gia

She let that sink in, waited for the moment, hoped she wouldn’t come to hate herself too much along the way.

“The inspector came to tell Gia