The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi

something scattered about on the ground outside, pages ripped up from a glossy pornographic magazine entitled
Golden Gay
.
    A dim light filtered into the interior. The two seats in front were empty: immediately behind was the body of a young man with a thin mustache, his eyes glazed over, lying stretched out on a double mattress, his feet toward the rear of the van. The second body was in the back of the van, in the corner. It was still crouching as if to make itself as small as possible, petrified with terror, its hands clenched, its face covered by a cascade of long blond hair. The hair was streaked with blood, black and congealed.
    “Looks like a girl, don’t you think?” came the voice of Sandro Federico, shaking Spezi out of his surprise.
    “At first we were fooled, too. But it’s a man. It seems our friend made the same mistake. Can you imagine how he felt when he discovered it?”
    On Monday, September 12, the papers screamed out the news:
    TERROR IN FLORENCE
    The Monster Chooses His Victims at Random
    The two victims, Horst Meyer and Uwe Rüsch, both twenty-four years old, had been traveling around Italy together and had parked their VW bus in this place on September 8. Their almost nude bodies had been discovered around seven o’clock the evening of September 10.
    By this time, Francesco Vinci had spent thirteen months in jail, and the public had come to believe he was the Monster of Florence. It seemed that once again, as with Enzo Spalletti, the Monster himself had demonstrated the innocence of the accused.
    The Monster of Florence was now international news. The
Times
of London devoted an entire Sunday section to the case. Television crews arrived from as far away as Australia.
    “Even after twelve victims, 1 all we know is that the Monster is free and that his .22 caliber Beretta could kill again,” wrote
La Nazione
.
    Now that the Monster had killed while Francesco Vinci was in prison, his release seemed imminent. But as the days went by, Vinci remained incarcerated. Investigators suspected that the double homicide had been “made to order.” Perhaps, they theorized, someone close to Vinci wished to demonstrate that he couldn’t be the killer. The crime of Giogoli was anomalous, improvised, different. It seemed strange that the Monster would have made such a grave mistake, given their assumption that he took his time watching the couple having sex before killing them. And then he had killed on a Friday night, not a Saturday, as was his custom.
    A new examining magistrate had arrived in Florence shortly before the crime and was now in charge of the Monster investigation. His name was Mario Rotella. He chilled the public with one of his first public statements, in which he said, “We have never identified the so-called Monster of Florence with Francesco Vinci. For the crimes committed after the 1968 homicide he is only a suspect.” And then he added, causing a furor, “He is not the only such suspect.”
    One of the prosecutors, Silvia Della Monica, aroused even more confusion and speculation when she said, “Vinci is not the Monster. But neither is he innocent.”

CHAPTER 13
    A few days following the Giogoli killings, there was a tense summit meeting in the prosecutor’s offices, on the second floor of a Baroque palace in Piazza San Firenze. (The palace is one of the few seventeenth-century edifices in the city—disparaged by Florentines as “new construction.”) They met in the small office of Piero Luigi Vigna, the air as thick as a Maremma fog. Vigna was in the habit of breaking his cigarettes in two and smoking both pieces, under the illusion that he was smoking less. Silvia Della Monica was there—small, blonde, herself surrounded by a self-generated cloud of smoke; also in attendance was a colonel of the carabinieri, who had brought two packs of his favorite Marlboros, and Chief Inspector Sandro Federico, who never ceased torturing a withered “toscano” cigar between his teeth. An