The Abomination by Jonathan Holt

I’m going to ask for a team of twenty officers. Double shifts, overtime, all the bells and whistles. And I want every single person warned not to speak to the press, or they’ll have me to answer to. Would you see to it?”
    â€œOf course.” She hesitated. “Does that mean you want me to run the operations room?”
    â€œNo,” he said thoughtfully. “I think I want you to stick with me.”
    Once again she hoped he didn’t notice how pleased she was. “I’ll speak to Allocation.”
    â€œColonel?”
    They turned. One of the forensic team was holding up a small leather case. “I think you’ll want to see this, sir.”
    Even though he was already wearing gloves, Piola took the case from the technician by the edges, opening it carefully to avoid disturbing any prints. Inside, in separate compartments clearly designed for the purpose, were wafers and three phials of liquid. The liquid in one phial was red, in the next clear, and in the third golden-green.
    â€œWine, water, and holy oil,” Piola said.
    â€œI believe that’s what they do. For a black Mass . . . they use a consecrated host.” Kat couldn’t help being shocked. “To defile it.”
    Piola gazed thoughtfully at the symbols scrawled on the walls. “It certainly looks that way.”
    â€œThere’s this too, sir,” the technician added. She held up a credit-card-sized piece of plastic, encased in another evidence bag.
    â€œA hotel room key,” Piola said. “Well, well. I think we may be about to find out who our mysterious priestess is, Capitano.”
    Leaving the technicians to finish scraping samples from the blood spray, Kat and Piola took the boat back to Campo San Zaccaria. Malli, the Carabinieri’s lead IT technician, dusted the key card for fingerprints before placing it inside a card-reader.
    â€œMost of the room keys we see here aren’t actually used for opening hotel rooms,” he explained. “Because the magnetic strip is compatible with credit card readers, thieves use them to store stolen card details. You think your card’s still in your pocket, but actually that waiter you handed it to after lunch cloned it to a blank key card at the same time as he debited your bill.” He typed some instructions on his keyboard, and some lines of data appeared on the screen. “You’re in luck. This is just your standard-issue MagTek room key.” He pointed. “The Europa Hotel, in Cannaregio. Room 73. Key 1 of 2, active from December 22nd through January 18th. In other words, she hasn’t checked out yet.”
    The Europa was a small, inexpensive place not far from Stazione Santa Lucia. It wasn’t where Kat would have chosen to stay if she were coming to Venice. The cheap, shiny armchairs in the foyer, and the cheap shiny suits worn by those sitting in them, pecking at laptops or muttering into cell phones, suggested that this was strictly a businessman-on-a-budget place. She guessed most of the guests would only be staying a night or two.
    A good place to remain anonymous , she thought.
    A female desk clerk, squeezed into a polyester uniform two sizes too small, looked indifferently at their IDs and nodded them upstairs. More polyester underfoot, and a maid who looked considerably more alarmed to see them than the desk clerk had. She was probably an illegal, Kat thought. Most of the cheap labour in Venice was provided by migrants from the former Eastern Bloc these days.
    Room 73 was a featureless corporate box identical to a million other featureless corporate boxes around the world. Only the view outside the window would differ – and this window, rather surprisingly, overlooked a quiet rio , a pretty backstreet canal about eight feet wide. Opposite, an old warehouse crumbled gracefully into the water, its window ledges colonised by buddleia and moss.
    Clothes were piled up on the twin beds. “Looks