Page 40 of A City of Hearts and Feathers (The Order of Anubis #1)

The wind was howling off the canal as Inspector Marco Dandolo wrapped his coat tightly around himself and lit a cigarette. He'd been trying to quit—his third time that year using Isabella's hypnotist—and it had been going well until he'd received a call about two distraught Americans.

The unfortunate students had been taking photos of the canal entrances when they had seen a body hanging inside.

"What do you think, ispettore ?" Beppe asked nervously. As one of the Polizia di Quartiere for Santa Croce, Beppe had been the first officer the Americans had alerted. They had been loud and hysterical, and by the time Marco had arrived, Beppe was pale with sweat, and breathing heavily.

"Your first body?" Marco asked.

" Si ," Beppe admitted. Marco passed him his packet of cigarettes, and Beppe lit one gratefully. "I never thought people could be so horrible to each other."

Marco grunted. "I've seen some terrible murders, but this…this is something else."

"A good thing they have Il Doge Cane on the case," Beppe said brightly.

Marco smiled weakly at him.

Il Doge Cane was a nickname he had acquired as much for his famous ancestor, Doge Francesco Dandolo, known as The Dog after he chained himself while petitioning the pope to remove Venice's excommunication, as for Marco's ability to focus on a case like a bloodhound. He hated it but did his best not to let the banter between officers get to him. As reputations went, it wasn't a bad one.

They finished their cigarettes in silence before ducking back under the police tape, walking along the narrow strip of stone and into the canal entrance of the palazzo.

"Have we found out who owns the palazzo yet?" Marco asked a nearby female police officer. She was young and pretty, and he always managed to forget her name.

"The Tintorettos, a celebrity couple," she replied.

"Are they here yet?"

"No, but their alibi is solid. They're in Milano where she's doing a photoshoot for Vogue ."

"Does anybody else have access to the house?"

"Only their sixty-year-old housekeeper who didn't see or hear anything."

" Grazie ," Marco replied, waving her on.

Steeling himself with a deep breath, he finally looked up at the body hanging in front of him.

The woman was naked, a bull's head pulled over her own. Her arms had been stretched out and tied above her head. In one hand she held a goblet, in the other an elaborate Greek urn painted with sea creatures.

An umbilical cord fell from her vagina, terminating at an amniotic sac with a calf fetus resting in a copper pan at water level. The victim's heart had been removed, but the wound had also been cleaned. On the stone wall behind the body were three massive symbols encircled by a script unlike any Marco had ever seen.

"It looks a little like Sanskrit, but it's wrong," a masked forensics officer commented. He and the rest of the forensics team were working quickly to beat the next high tide, due in two hours. "I studied some of it for my degree, but this looks too jagged, almost like a mutated cuneiform."

Marco pulled out his phone and took multiple photos of the wall. "I might know someone who can help."

It was midnight when Doctor Alessa Christiano's phone rang in her office at Sapienza in Rome.

" Pronto ?" she answered, barely looking up from her computer screen where she was composing a lecture on the Roman conquest of Egypt.

"Alessa, I'm glad you are awake," a painfully familiar voice said. "I should've known you would still be working."

"Says the man also still working. What do you want, Marco?" Her ex-lover's voice didn't sound drunk, but she detected a note of trouble in it.

"I need your expertise, dottoressa . I've emailed you some photos I need you to look at."

"Marco, I really don't have time?—"

"It's a case, Alessa," he insisted. "This is the Polizia di Stato asking, not Marco Dandolo the coglione . Per favore, bella . A woman is dead."

"Fine, fine, I'll take a look," Alessa sighed and clicked through the pages on her screen to bring up her emails.

"I need to warn you, the pictures—" Marco began, but she had already opened the first one.

" Mio Dio ," Alessa cried, crossing herself twice. "Who would do such a thing?"

"A sick bastard. Click on the other attachments. There is some script I'm hoping you can decipher. It might give me an idea who did this."

Alessa downloaded and scrolled through the other photos, zooming in on the graffitied wall.

"It's a hoax."

"What do you mean?" Marco asked.

"I mean apart from the three main symbols, which are alchemical, the rest of the script is completely made up."

"What do the three main symbols mean?"

"I don't know alchemy, Marco. Look them up. I've seen them before, but the rest is bullshit."

"How do you know?"

"A few years ago, a fragment of a stone tablet was found near Crete. It had a similar sort of disjointed cuneiform style of writing. Your wall looks like a fanatic has created a full alphabet from it and finger-painted it on his murder site." Alessa looked at the next picture. "It's all gibberish, Marco."

There was a long pause and then the sound of a metal lighter flicking open from the other line. They'd broken up years ago, but whenever Alessa smelled MS tobacco, she still thought of him. "I see your sister's hypnotist has failed again. You need to stop paying her."

"She's Isabella's wife's sister. If I don't let her hypnotize me, they will try and set me up on a date with her."

"If she were any good, she could just hypnotize you into sleeping with her."

"You said fanatic," Marco commented thoughtfully. "Why that word?"

"Only someone obsessed with the legends would go to that much effort to create a full alphabet over an artifact that doesn't prove a thing." She rubbed the lenses of her glasses before putting them back on. "Worse than a fanatic. I think you have a true believer."

"In what? What legend?"

Alessa couldn't hold in a snort. "The Lost City. Atlantis."

"And you say they found evidence of it?" Marco asked, sounding not at all phased by her revelation.

"No. I said they found a fragment of a stone tablet. The person who found it claimed it was evidence that Atlantis existed. She wanted funding to do an underwater dig at the site."

"What happened?"

"Nothing. No professional scholar would take Atlantis seriously. She is a pariah in her field." Alessa shook her head. "It's a shame. Both her parents are brilliant scholars. Anyway, there were some who believed her. They were more the New Age crowd, and a few mythologists hunting the dream."

"And you think one of them could be our killer?"

"I don't know, Marco. The only place I've ever seen anything like this was an attachment to the paper about the Tablet."

"Where can I get a copy of it?"

"I can email it to you." Alessa took one last look at the mutilated woman and shook her head. "Her contact details should be at the bottom of the paper if you want to talk to her yourself. I'm sorry I can't be more helpful, amico mio ."

"You have been an incredible help to me tonight. I knew you were the right person to call. Next time you are in Venezia , I will buy you the best meal of your life," he promised.

Despite their separation, they still ate together whenever she was in Venice, or he was in Rome. Inevitably, it always ended with them in bed together that night, and by morning, agreeing how it was better they had broken up.

"It's a deal. I hope you catch them soon, Marco," Alessa said solemnly.

" Grazie, dottoressa ." He hung up, and she sent him the paper as promised before heading out to midnight mass.

Alessa wasn't God's most pious servant, but after seeing the bull-headed woman, she couldn't shake the taint of evil from her mind.