The Abomination by Jonathan Holt Page B

indicated the laptop power lead. “There’s a lead but no laptop. Either our killer took it or—”
    â€œOr it’s in the water too? I’ll speak to the divers. They won’t like it – finding a body in that pool of shit’s one thing, but looking for a laptop could take days.” He nodded. “Good work, Kat.”
    As he went off to talk to the divers she found herself noting that it was the first time he’d called her by her first name.
    While she waited for Piola to return, Kat looked through the evidence bags the technicians were putting to one side. One caught her eye. It contained a lock of long black hair inside another bag.
    â€œWhy’s this been double-bagged?” she asked, curious.
    The technician shook her head. “It was in that bag when we found it. So we put the whole thing inside one of ours.”
    â€œStrange.” She held it up to examine the hair more closely. It was a woman’s, she guessed from the length, coiled into a loose circle that had partially unwound to fill the sides of the bag. “Both our victims have short hair, according to their passport photographs.”
    â€œWant us to run some tests on it?”
    â€œYes. It can’t be usual to take something like this away with you.”
    Moving along, she found a bag containing pages torn from La Nuova Venezia . The pages were all from the back section, where prostitutes’ small ads jostled with chat lines, dating agencies and boats for sale. Some of the prostitutes’ ads had been crossed out with a biro.
    â€œAlso curious,” she murmured to herself.
    She moved along the line. The problem for the search team was knowing what should be bagged for analysis and what was irrelevant, so to be on the safe side they had bagged almost everything, from the women’s sweaters and coats right down to the contents of the wastepaper basket. Kat looked at the latter. It had contained some empty toiletry bottles and a supermarket receipt. According to the receipt, the two women had bought Pop-Tarts, bottled water and tinned chickpeas from Billa on the Strada Nuova two days before, with a credit card. She made a note to ask the card company for all the other transactions they’d made.
    The technician brought over a document.
    â€œLooks like she rented a topetta while she was here,” he commented, showing her a hire form made out in the name of Jelena Babić. “Sure she wasn’t suicidal?”
    It always amazed Venetians that tourists were allowed to rent small boats by the day, subjecting themselves to the vaporetti ’s klaxons and the curses of gondoliers as they tried to dodge the goods barges and even cruise liners that plied Venice’s cluttered waters. It was, most agreed, a wonder that more weren’t killed.
    Kat looked at the hire form. “From Sport e Lavoro in Cannaregio. I’ll give them a call.”
    She was still on the phone to the hire company – as she’d expected, their boat had been found drifting in the lagoon by a fisherman and returned to them: no, they hadn’t thought of contacting the police, or indeed of calling the number they had for the customer on the rental form – when she heard a shout from outside. She hurried downstairs.
    Piola had been right: it had taken the divers only a few minutes to locate the second body. Barbara Holton had also been shot in the head, and quite recently – the wound was still fresh. There was a laptop wedged into the hotel bathrobe she’d died in.
    â€œDon’t get your hopes up,” the lead diver warned them as they waited for an ambulance boat. “We’ve retrieved laptops from the canals before. This water isn’t kind to them.”
    â€œExcuse me for a minute, sir,” Kat said, struck by a sudden thought.
    She went back inside to the check-in desk, where Adrijan had been replaced by a grown-up in a proper suit, doubtless called in from head