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strange Etruscan devil. They kidnapped the Frascas, killed them, and then a few days later …”
    He touched the computer keyboard. “See for yourself.”
    Another photo. Black-and-white. A remote, ramshackle two-story house in a bleak field. Carabinieri cars parked in the rough drive. Officers standing around looking lost and miserable.
    Palombo took over.
    “Five days after the Frascas were found dead, the Carabinieri got a phone call from someone at the Villa Giulia suggesting Petrakis was involved. The staff there hadn’t liked him. He hung around when he wasn’t wanted. They’d found him in the museum after hours.” He grimaced. “Rome sent two officers to the parents’ house. Both of them were dead, shot in bed. A good week before the Frascas. The couple were such recluses that no one knew, except Andrea, I guess.”
    More photographs that seemed to be from the same landscape. A tiny shack in an uncultivated field strewn with tall weeds.
    “They found material in the house that led them to an abandoned farm the parents owned two kilometers away. No road. No electricity. They weren’t expecting anything. There was a local
carabiniere
with them to help.”
    Costa could recall the story from later reconstructions on TV crime shows. One dead officer. Three supposed extremists killed. The loss of the
carabiniere
was a national tragedy, a moment when the country’s heart skipped a beat, waiting to see if the nightmare of urban terror was about to return.
    Palombo clicked the keyboard and brought up a picture of a small arsenal, scattered around a grubby stone floor: automatic rifles, revolvers, small handguns.
    “These kids started shooting the moment they knew they were cornered. The local officer went down almost immediately. After that they turned their guns on themselves. They were all as high as kites. The place was full of drugs. LSD. Speed. Dope. Pure Afghan opium most of all—so much Petrakis had to be dealing it.”
    The photograph changed to an interior one. Three bloodied corpses, faces down, arms outstretched. The pretty girl wasn’t pretty anymore. She had a revolver in her right hand.
    “Nadia Ambrosini,” the Italian security man told them. “The daughter of a bank manager from Treviso. The ones from a middle-class background are always the worst. She shot the other two, then turned the gun on herself.”
    Then one final image.
    It was a poster on the wall of the shack, above a contorted corpse: a lithe and naked devil with a pale blue face. He wore an expression of pure hatred, his muscular arms outstretched, a writhing snake, fangs exposed, in each hand. Blood dripped from his sharp, spiky teeth. An enormous and unreal erection, more that of a beast than a man, rose from his loins. The photograph of Andrea Petrakis they saw earlier was stuck to the poster with tape, as if identifying him with the monster.
    Below were the words, scrawled maniacally in tall capital letters, IL DEMONE AZZURRO .
    The Blue Demon.

6
    PERONI LISTENED TO THE QUIRINALE CAMPANILE START to chime the quarter-hour. The house was midway down the hill, next to a small restaurant with tables on the narrow pavement. The ground-floor windows were cloudy with dust, as if the place had been empty for years.
    Mirko Oliva walked up, scrabbled at the glass with his elbow, and peered inside.
    “This is no one’s home,” the young officer declared. “It’s a mess in there. Looks like they had the builders once upon a time.”
    There were just two nameplates on the door. One was for a marquetry business, an enterprise Peroni felt sure had long departed, judging by the faded card and some newspaper clippings in the window praising the quality of its work. On the bell above was a single word in scrawled handwriting:
Johnson
.
    Oliva peered at it. He glanced at them, serious suddenly. “Wasn’t there somebody famous called Moro too?”
    “Once upon a time,” Peroni answered patiently.
    “Well, if the Moro who called said he