Into the Killer Sphere by Stefania Mattana

his head raised blood spatters like these, here.” He pointed out a white cloth hanging on the wall, stained by some kind of paint strokes.
    “So, what’s the good news?” Angelo urged.
    Cangi lifted his eyes up and sighed.
    “Is it the sphere or not?” Angelo asked impatiently.
    Cangi snorted. “You’ve been created without any theatrical sense. You just want to cut to the chase.”
     
    Chase met up with Angelo and Matteo Cangi in the car park outside the police station, because of Chase’s reclutance to going inside. Even though Angelo had tried several times to convince Chase to set foot inside the station, there was no way to persuade him. Chase’s most extreme step forward was entering the lab where Cangi worked, but using the back door of the underground level only.
    Chase was leaning on the bonnet of Angelo’s car while Matteo was playing with a sheet of paper.
    “Your glass sphere supports our hypothesis,” Angelo said to Chase. “There was a missing fragment on the wooden base which matches with the splinter Matteo found on Galli’s head. No fingerprints along the entire item, apart from yours and Matteo’s.”
    “Who else has touched the sphere apart from you and me this morning?” wondered Matteo.
    “The forensic guys and Gloria,” said Chase, “but they wearing gloves, and so was Gloria.” Chase remembered Gloria’s outfit and the gardening gloves she hadn’t taken off inside the villa, like her hat and gardening boots.
    “The murderer probably wore gloves as well, or cleaned everything up afterwards. I’d go for the first scenario, since cleaning everywhere would make the murderer lose a lot of valuable time,” Cangi concluded.
    “What do you say, Chase?” Angelo asked, lighting another cigarette.
    Chase replied with another question, and a grin.
    “Do you think the murderer is a man or a woman, based on what we have so far? I mean, according to Matteo’s report that you haven’t showed me yet”. Chase emphasised the last few words and tried to reach the file Angelo was holding, but he was faster than Chase and moved his hand back.
    “The reports are for police personnel only,” he winked. “Anyway, I don’t think , I know : science is never wrong,” Angelo said, turning to Cangi and waving a hand at him, like he was passing the speech baton to him.
     
    “ Ecco .” Matteo began explaining by rolling the paper into a ball. “I’m the murderer and you are Galli, ok? And the ball of paper is the glass sphere,” he said to Angelo. “If the murderer was a man, he would probably have struck Galli this way,” Cangi feigned the motion of throwing the ball of paper at Angelo, “hitting his head in the parietal lobe . Moreover, the impact would have been powerful enough to shatter the ball into a thousand pieces.”
    Angelo touched his head, imagining the pain. Chase wrinkled his lips, feeling satisfied that his previous suspicions were well founded. The glass ball had all the credentials to be an excellent casual murder weapon: quite large, with a massive base and sharp corners to pierce the flesh.
    Matteo finished his reasoning.
    “Now, a man would have hit Galli from a higher or equal height. The blood spatter pattern would have been different from the one we found at the crime scene. In fact, I simulated the gesture I’ve just shown you at the lab and the blood traces don’t match with the crime scene ones.”
    Angelo looked at Cangi with a dazed expression: it was now clear that the murderer hadn’t hit Galli with the sphere, otherwise they wouldn’t have found it intact.
    Ballistic stuff bored Chase, so he started leafing through Matteo’s coroner’s report, which he had finally got his hands on when Angelo volunteered to act as Signor Galli.
    According to the file, the victim had been hit in the occipital area of the skull and in the neck. The impacts were so vicious as to deeply injure Galli and break his axis and atlas vertebrae.
    “So what? Bello , I will