The Whisperer

by Donato Carrisi

  “Well—no, miss…”

  “I understand,” and she hadn’t said anything else, merely looked at the captain’s stripes on his uniform. A rank as fake as his function. The guards who should have been guaranteeing the safety of the residents were really just uniformed bodybuilders. Their only training consisted of a three-month paid course held by retired police officers at the offices of the company that had taken them on. Their equipment consisted of a hands-free connected to a walkie-talkie and a pepper spray. So it hadn’t been too hard for Albert to get round them. A breach a meter and a half across had also been made in the perimeter barrier, hidden by the hedge that covered the whole of the surrounding wall. That aesthetic whim now made Capo Alto’s one true security measure look ridiculous.

  Now it was a matter of working out why Albert had chosen this particular place and this particular family.

  The fear of facing a new Alexander Bermann had led Roche to permit all kinds of investigation, even the most invasive, into Kobashi and his wife.

  Boris had been given the task of quizzing the dentist.

  The man probably had no idea of the special treatment reserved for him over the next few hours. Being questioned by a professional interrogator isn’t the same as the methods in police stations over most of the world, where everything is based on the process of wearing down the suspect through hours and hours of psychological pressure and forced wakefulness, answering the same questions over and over again.

  Boris hardly ever tried to catch out the people he was interrogating, because he knew that stress often produces negative effects on the deposition, which then becomes vulnerable to attacks from a good attorney in the courtroom. Neither was he interested in half-confessions or attempts at negotiation that the suspects often brought into play when they felt they were on the ropes.

  No. Special Agent Klaus Boris only tried to get a full confession.

  Mila saw him in the Studio kitchen, preparing to come onstage. Because that, in the end, was what it was all about: a performance in which the parts are often reversed. By using lies, Boris would break down Kobashi’s defenses.

  His shirt sleeves were rolled up, he held a little bottle of water in one hand and walked back and forth to stretch his legs: unlike Kobashi, Boris would never sit down, always intimidating the other man with his build.

  Meanwhile Stern was updating him about what he had so far managed to discover about the suspect.

  “The dentist evades part of his taxes. He has an off-shore account to which he sends the untaxed income from his clinic and the prizes from the golf tournaments that he plays almost every weekend…Mrs. Kobashi, on the other hand, has a different kind of hobby: every Wednesday afternoon she meets a well-known lawyer in a hotel in the center. Of course the lawyer plays golf with her husband every weekend…”

  That information would constitute the key to the interrogation. Boris would measure it out, using it at the right moment to bring the dentist down.

  The interrogation room in the Studio had been set up a long time ago, next to the guest room. It was narrow, almost suffocating, with no windows and only one doorway that Boris would lock as soon as he had gone inside with the suspect. Then he would slip the key into his pocket, as he always did: a simple gesture that assured him of his position of strength.

  The neon light was powerful, and the lamp gave off an irritating hum; that sound was also one of Boris’s tools. He would mitigate its effects by stuffing cotton wool in his ears.

  A fake mirror separated the room from another, with a different doorway, so that the others could witness the interrogation. It was very important that the man under questioning was always positioned in profile with regard to the mirror and never head-on: he had to feel he was being observed without ever returning that invisible gaze.

  Both the table and the walls were painted white: the monochrome effect meant that he had no point to concentrate upon so that he could reflect on his answers. One leg of his chair was shorter than the others, and it would rock constantly to irritate him.

  Mila came into the other room as Sarah Rosa prepared the Voice Stress Analyzer, or VSA—an apparatus that would allow them to measure the stress in the variations of the man’s voice. When someone lies, the amount of blood in their vocal cords diminishes as a result of the tension, consequently reducing the normal vibration. A computer would analyze the micro-variations in Kobashi’s words, revealing his lies.

  But the most important technique that Klaus Boris would use—the one in which he was practically a master—was observation of behavior.

  Kobashi was led into the interrogation room after being politely invited—albeit with no preliminary warning—to help the police with their inquiries. The officers whose task it was to escort him there from the hotel in which he was staying with his family had made him sit on his own on the backseat of the car and taken a longer route than usual to bring him to the Studio, to intensify his state of doubt and uncertainty.

  Given that this was only an informal discussion, Kobashi hadn’t asked for the presence of a lawyer. He was afraid that such a request would expose him to suspicions of guilt. That was exactly what Boris was hoping for.

  In the room, the dentist looked drawn. Mila studied him. He was wearing yellow summer trousers. They were probably part of one of the golfing suits he had brought with him on his trip to the tropics, which now constituted the entirety of his wardrobe. He had on a fuchsia-colored cashmere sweater and, poking from its collar, a white polo-neck.

  He had been told that an investigator would shortly be arriving to ask him some questions. Kobashi had nodded, putting his hands in his lap in a defensive position.

  Meanwhile Boris watched him from the other side of the mirror, allowing himself a long wait to study him properly.

  Kobashi noticed a file on the table, with his name on it. Boris had put it there. The dentist would never touch it, just as he would never look in the direction of the mirror, even though he knew very well that he was being observed.

  The file was actually empty.

  “It looks like a dentist’s waiting room, doesn’t it?” joked Sarah Rosa, staring at the unfortunate man behind the glass.

  Then Boris announced: “Right: let’s get started.”

  A moment later he entered the interrogation room. He greeted Kobashi, locked the door and apologized for his lateness. He made it clear once again that the questions he was going to ask him were only requests for clarification, then took the file from the table and opened it, pretending to read something.

  “Dr. Kobashi, you’re forty-three, is that right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “For how long have you been working as a dentist?”

  “I’m an orthodontic surgeon,” he explained. “But I’ve been doing that for fifteen years.”

  Boris took some time to examine the invisible papers.

  “Can I ask you what your income was last year?”

  The man started slightly. Boris had delivered his first blow: the reference to income was an indirect allusion to taxes.

  As predicted, the dentist lied shamelessly about his financial situation, and Mila couldn’t help noticing how naively he went about it. The conversation was about a murder, and any fiscal information that might emerge would have no relevance, and couldn’t be passed on to the tax office.

  The man also lied about his personal details, thinking that he could easily control his replies. And for a while Boris let him get on with it.

  Mila knew Boris’s game. She had seen other old-school colleagues doing something similar, although the special agent practiced it at indubitably higher levels.

  Whenever Kobashi relied upon his own imagination, Boris knew straightaway. The increase in anxiety generates anomalous micro-actions, like bending one’s back, rubbing one’s hands, massaging one’s temples or wrists. These actions are often accompanied by physiological alterations like an increase in sweating, a rise in the tone of the voice and uncontrolled eye movement
s.

  But a well-trained specialist like Boris also knew that these are only suggestions of lies, and they must be treated as such. To prove that the subject is lying he has to admit his own responsibility.

  When Boris sensed that Kobashi felt confident enough, he moved into the counterattack, insinuating into his questions clues to do with Albert and the disappearance of the six little girls.

  Two hours later, Kobashi had been worn out by a barrage of increasingly intimate questions. By now the dentist had abandoned any notion of calling a lawyer, he just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. He was in such a state of psychological collapse that he would have said anything just to have his freedom back. He might even have admitted to being Albert.

  Except that it wouldn’t have been true.

  When Boris realized that, he left the room, on the pretext of getting a glass of water, and rejoined Goran and the others in the room behind the mirror.

  “He has nothing to do with it,” he said. “And he doesn’t know a thing.”

  Goran nodded.

  Sarah Rosa had recently come back with the results of the analyses of the computers and the use of mobile phones owned by the Kobashi family, which had not provided a shred of evidence. And there were no interesting leads to be found among their friends and acquaintances.

  “Which means it must be the house,” the criminologist concluded.

  Had the Kobashis’ house been the scene—as in the case of the orphanage—of something terrible that had never come to light?

  But that theory didn’t work, either.

  “The villa was the last to be built on the only free lot of the complex. It was finished about three months ago, and the Kobashis have been its first and only owners,” said Stern.

  But Goran refused to give up: “The house hides a secret.”

  Stern immediately understood and asked, “Where do we start?”

  Goran thought for a moment, then issued the order: “Start by digging up the garden.”

  First the corpse dogs were brought in, capable of sniffing out human remains to a great depth. Then came special radar equipment to scan under the ground, but nothing suspicious appeared on the screens.

  Mila watched the various attempts take place; she was still waiting for Chang to give her the identity of the child found in the house by comparing her DNA with that of the parents of the victims.

  They started digging at about three in the afternoon. The little diggers shifted the earth in the garden, destroying the masterly external architecture that must have cost a great deal of trouble and a great deal of money. Now it was carried away and dumped carelessly on the trucks.

  The noise of the diesel engines disturbed the peace of Capo Alto. As if that weren’t enough, the vibrations produced by the diggers constantly set off the alarm on Kobashi’s Maserati.

  After the garden, the search moved inside the villa. A specialist company was called in to remove the heavy marble slabs from the sitting room. The internal walls were sounded for gaps, which were then brought to light with picks. The furniture also suffered an unhappy fate: dismantled and dissected, now fit only for the rubbish dump. There had also been digging in the cellar and the foundations.

  Roche had authorized that destruction. The Department couldn’t afford to fail again, even at the cost of causing millions worth of damage. But the Kobashis had no intention of coming back and living there. Everything that belonged to them had been irredeemably polluted by horror. They would sell the property at a lower price than they had paid for it, because their gilded life would never be the same with the memory of what had happened.

  At about six p.m., the nervous tension of the people in charge of work on the crime scene was palpable.

  “Could somebody turn off that damned alarm?” Roche yelled, pointing at Kobashi’s Maserati.

  “We can’t find the car remotes,” Boris replied.

  “Call the dentist and tell him to give them to us! Do I have to tell you everything?”

  They were going around in circles. Rather than uniting them, the tension was turning them against one another, frustrating them with their inability to solve the problem that Albert had devised for them.

  “Why did he dress the child as a doll?”

  The question was driving Goran mad. Mila had never seen him like this. There was something personal in this challenge. Something that perhaps even the criminologist wasn’t aware of, which was interfering with his ability to reason lucidly.

  Mila kept her distance, unnerved by the wait. What was the meaning of Albert’s behavior?

  At midnight Kobashi’s car alarm still marked the passing of time, inexorably reminding everyone that their attempts so far had been pretty well useless.

  Nothing new had emerged from under the ground. The villa had been practically gutted, but the walls had revealed no secrets.

  As Mila had been sitting on the pavement in front of the house, Boris had come over, holding a mobile phone.

  “I’m trying to make a call but there’s no signal…”

  Mila checked her phone as well. “Maybe that’s why Chang still hasn’t called to give me the outcome of the DNA test.”

  Boris gestured around him. “Well, it’s some consolation to know that rich people lack something too, don’t you think?”

  He smiled, put his phone back in his pocket and sat down next to her. Mila still hadn’t thanked him for the present of the parka, so she did so now.

  “It’s nothing,” he replied.

  At that moment they noticed that the private guards of Capo Alto were arranging themselves around the villa to form a security cordon.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The press are coming,” Boris told her. “Roche has decided to authorize pictures of the villa: a few minutes for the television news to show that we’re doing everything possible.”

  She watched the fake policemen taking up position: they were ridiculous in their blue and orange uniforms, made to measure to display their muscular physiques, with hard expressions on their faces and their walkie-talkies that were supposed to give them a very professional appearance.

  Albert made you look like idiots by blowing your cameras with a simple short-circuit! she thought.

  “After all this time and still no answers, Roche will be foaming at the mouth…”

  “He always finds a way to come out smelling of roses, don’t worry.”

  Boris took out his papers and a packet of tobacco and started silently rolling himself a cigarette. Mila had the distinct sense that he wanted to ask her something, but not directly. And if she stayed silent she wouldn’t help him.

  She decided to give him a hand: “What did you do with the twenty-four hours of freedom that Roche allowed you?”

  Boris was evasive. “I slept and thought about the case. Sometimes you need to clear your head…I know you went out with Gavila last night.”

  Hey, he’s finally said it! But Mila was wrong in thinking that Boris’s reference was motivated by jealousy. His intentions were quite different, as she discovered from what he said next.

  “I think he’s suffered a lot.”

  He was talking about Goran’s wife. And he did so in such a sad voice that it made her think that whatever had happened to the couple, it had indirectly involved the team as well.

  “I really don’t know anything about it,” she said. “He didn’t talk to me about it. Just a hint at the end of the evening.”

  “Then perhaps it’s better if you know now…”

  Before going on, Boris lit the cigarette, dragged deeply on it and breathed out the smoke. He was searching for words.

  “Dr. Gavila’s wife was a fantastic woman, not just beautiful but nice, too. I’ve lost count of the times we all ate at their house. She was part of us, as if she was on the team as well. When we had a difficult case on our hands, those dinners were the only relief after a day among blood and corpses. A reconciliation with life, if you know what I mean…”
r />   “And then what happened?”

  “It happened a year and a half ago. With no warning, without so much as a hint, she walked out.”

  “She left him?”

  “Not just Gavila, but Tommy too, their only son. He’s a lovely boy, he’s lived with his father since then.”

  Mila had guessed that the criminologist was weighed down by the sadness of a separation, but she’d never imagined anything like that. How can a mother abandon a son? she wondered.

  “Why did she leave?”

  “No one ever worked it out. Perhaps she had someone else, perhaps she got tired of that life, who knows…She didn’t leave so much as a note. She just packed her bags and left. End of.”

  “I wouldn’t have given up without knowing why she did it.”

  “The strange thing is that he never asked me to find out where she was.” Boris’s tone changed, he looked around before going on, checking that Goran was nowhere around. “And there’s something that Gavila doesn’t know and mustn’t know…”

  Mila nodded to show him that he could trust her.

  “Well…a few months later, Stern and I tracked her down. She was living in a town on the coast. We didn’t go to her directly, we just let her spot us in the street in the hope that she might come over and talk to us.”

  “And did she?”

  “She was surprised to see us. But then she just waved, lowered her eyes and walked on.”

  This was followed by a silence that Mila couldn’t interpret. Boris tossed his cigarette butt away, careless of the furious glance from one of the private security guards who immediately came and picked it up off the lawn.

  “Why did you tell me that, Boris?”

  “Because Dr. Gavila is my friend. And so are you, although I haven’t known you as long.”

  Boris must have understood something that neither she nor Goran had yet managed to get into focus. Something about them. He was only trying to protect them both.

  “When his wife walked out, Gavila kept going. He had to, especially because of the boy. Nothing changed with us. He still seemed exactly the same: precise, punctual, efficient. He just stopped dressing quite so smartly. That wasn’t important, it was nothing to worry about. But then came the ‘Wilson Pickett’ case…”