On the little desk there was a science diorama: the scale reproduction of a nineteenth-century telegraph station. It consisted of a little wooden board with two dry batteries connected, through electrodes and copper wire, to a perforated disk that rotated on a sprocket at regular intervals—three dots, three lines, three dots. The whole thing had then been linked by a small cable to a walkie-talkie in the shape of a dinosaur. The diorama bore a bronze plate bearing the inscription FIRST PRIZE.
That was where the signal had been coming from.
The eleven-year-old boy had turned his homework into a transmitter, evading the checks and restrictions of the man who was keeping them prisoner.
Mila moved the beam of the torch over the unmade bed. Under it was a dirty plastic bucket. She also noticed signs of rubbing at the edges of the bed head.
On the opposite side of the corridor was the room of the sixteen-year-old girl. On the door, colored letters composed a name: Keira. Mila quickly glanced at the room from the doorway. The sheets were piled up on the floor. An underwear drawer had been tipped up on the floor. The mirror from the chest of drawers had been moved in front of the bed. It wasn’t hard to imagine why. Here too there were signs of rubbing on the struts.
Handcuffs, thought Mila. He kept them tied to their beds during the day.
This time the dirty plastic bucket was in a corner. It must have been used for bodily functions.
A few yards away was Yvonne’s room. The mattress was grimy, and there was only one sheet. There were stains of vomit on the carpet, and tissues were scattered around the place. On one wall there was a nail which might once have held a painting, but from which a leather belt now hung in full view, a reminder of who was in charge and how.
This was your games room, you bastard! And I expect you paid the little girl a visit every now and again, too! And when you tired of them, you went into the eleven-year-old’s bedroom, even if it was just to beat him…
Anger was the only emotion she had been granted in this life. And Mila took advantage of it, greedily drinking from that dark well.
There was no way of knowing how many times Yvonne Gress had forced herself to be “nice” to that monster, just to keep him with her in that room, and avoid him taking it out on her children.
“Guys, there’s something moving.” Stern’s voice was alarmed.
Boris and Mila turned simultaneously towards the corner at the end of the corridor. There was no more time to inspect the place. They aimed their guns and torches in that precise direction, waiting to see something appear at any moment.
“Don’t move!” said Boris.
“It’s coming towards you.”
Mila moved her index finger on the trigger and began to exert light pressure on it. She heard her heart thumping in a crescendo in her ears.
“It’s behind the corner.”
The presence announced itself with a faint groan. A hairy muzzle appeared, and looked at them. It was a Newfoundland dog. Mila raised her weapon and saw Boris doing the same.
“All OK,” she said to the radio. “It’s just a dog.”
Its fur was rough and sticky, its eyes red, and it was injured in one paw.
He didn’t kill it, thought Mila, approaching it.
“Come on, boy, come here…”
“He’s survived on his own here for at least three months: how did he do that?” Boris wondered.
As Mila stepped towards him, the dog retreated.
“Careful, he’s frightened, he might bite you.”
Mila paid no heed to Boris’s suggestions and went on slowly approaching the Newfoundland. She knelt down to reassure him, and called to him. “Come on, boy, come to me.”
When she was close enough, she saw that he had a nameplate hanging from his collar. She read his name in the torchlight.
“Newfie, come to me, come on…”
At last the dog allowed her to reach him. Mila held a hand in front of his muzzle, so that he could sniff it.
By now Boris was impatient. “OK, let’s stop checking the map and then bring the others in.”
The dog lifted a paw towards Mila, as if trying to show her something.
“Wait…”
“What?”
Mila didn’t reply, but got up and saw that the Newfoundland had gone back towards the dark corner of the corridor.
“He wants us to follow him.”
They walked behind him. They turned the corner and saw that the corridor ended a few yards further on. At the end, on the right, there was one last room.
Boris checked on the map. “It faces towards the back, but I don’t know what it is.”
The door was closed. Some things were piled up in front of it. A quilt printed with a pattern of bones, a bowl, a colored ball, a lead and the remains of some food.
“That’s who’s been raiding the larder.”
“I wonder why he brought his things up here…”
The Newfoundland approached the door as if to confirm that this was now his bed.
“Are you saying he brought everything up here all by himself? Why?”
As if to answer Mila’s question, the dog started scratching the wood of the door and whimpering.
“He wants us to go in…”
Mila took the lead and tied the dog to one of the radiators.
“You be good, Newfie.”
The Newfoundland barked, as if he had understood. They shifted the things from the doorway, and Mila gripped the handle as Boris leveled his gun at the door: the thermal sensors hadn’t revealed any other presences in the house, but you never knew. But they were both convinced that this thin barrier concealed the tragic epilogue to what had been happening there for so many months.
Mila lowered her hand to click the lock open, then pushed. The light from the torches pierced the darkness. The beams moved from one side to the other.
The room was empty.
It was about twenty feet by ten. There was no carpet on the floor, and the walls were painted white. The window was closed with a heavy curtain. A lamp hung from the ceiling. It was as if the room had never been used.
“Why has he brought us here?” Mila asked, more to herself than to Boris. “And where are Yvonne and her children?”
She avoided the real question: Where did the bodies end up?
“Stern.”
“Yes?”
“Bring in the scientists, we’ve finished here.”
Mila went back to the corridor and freed the dog, which ran away from her, into the room. Mila watched him settle in a corner.
“Newfie, you can’t stay here!”
But the dog didn’t move. Then she approached him with the lead in her hand. The animal barked again, but didn’t seem threatening. Then he started sniffing the floor by the skirting board. Mila bent down beside him, pushed his muzzle aside and moved her torch to get a better view. No, there was nothing there. Then she saw it.
A brown stain.
It was less than three millimeters across. She came closer and saw that it was rectangular and with a slightly puckered surface.
Mila had no doubt what it was. “This is where it happened,” she said.
Boris didn’t understand.
Then Mila turned towards him: “This is where he killed them.”
“We actually had noticed someone going into the house…but, you know, Yvonne Gress was an attractive woman living on her own…so she sometimes received visits from men in the neighborhood late in the evening.”
The commander of the security guards gave a meaningful nod, to which Goran reacted by standing on tiptoe to stare him in the eyes.
“Don’t you dare insinuate anything of that kind.”
He said it in a neutral voice, but one which contained a threat.
The security chief should have been trying to justify this serious breach on the part of himself and his underlings. But he’d been briefed by the lawyers of the Capo Alto complex. Their strategy consisted in making Yvonne Gress look like an easy
woman, just because she was single and independent.
Goran remarked that the creature—because he could think of no other name for him—who had come and gone from her house for six months had taken advantage of the same excuse to do as he pleased.
The criminologist and Rosa viewed lots of the film from that long period of time. They had to speed up the recording, but more or less the same scene was repeated over and over again. Sometimes the man didn’t come, and Goran imagined that those nights were the best for the segregated family. But perhaps, too, they were the worst, since it meant they couldn’t be untied from their beds, and they couldn’t get any food or water if he didn’t look after them.
Being raped meant surviving, in the perennial quest for the lesser evil.
The films also showed the man by day, working on the building site. He always wore a cap with a visor, which prevented the cameras from recording his facial features.
Stern questioned the owner of the building firm that had taken him on as a seasonal worker. They said the man’s name was Lebrinsky, but the name turned out to be false. That often happened, mostly because foreign workers without residence permits were taken on at the building sites. By law, the employer was only obliged to ask them for their papers, not to check that they were genuine.
Some laborers who had worked at the Kobashis’ villa during that time said “Lebrinsky” was a taciturn character who kept himself to himself. They gave remembered descriptions of him to create an identikit. But in the end the reconstructions were too different to be useful.
When he had finished with the head of the security guards, Goran joined the others inside Yvonne Gress’s villa, which was by now the exclusive domain of Krepp and his men.
The piercings of the fingerprint expert jangled cheerfully on his face as he moved around the place like an elf in an enchanted wood. The house had a surreal look: the carpet had been completely covered with plastic sheets and there were halogen lamps set up around the place to highlight various areas or even just a detail. Men in white overalls and protective Perspex goggles dusted every surface.
“OK, our man isn’t very clever,” Krepp began. “Apart from the mess that the dog has made, he’s left all kinds of rubbish around here: cans, cigarette stubs, used glasses. There’s enough of his DNA to clone him!”
“Fingerprints?” asked Sarah Rosa.
“Tons! But he has never been a guest of our prison system, sad to say, and there’s no record of him.”
Goran shook his head; a pile of clues like that and still it wasn’t possible to find a suspect. Certainly the parasite had been much less cautious than Albert, who had taken care to black out the security cameras before getting into the Kobashis’ house with the girl. Precisely for that reason, there was one thing that didn’t make sense to Goran.
“What can you tell me about the bodies? We’ve viewed the films and the parasite has never taken anything out of the house.”
“Because they didn’t leave by the door…”
They all looked at each other, trying to work out what the sentence could mean. Krepp added, “We’re going through the drains, I think he got rid of them like that.”
He had chopped them up, Goran concluded. That maniac had acted out the part of the loving husband and the adored dad. And then one day he had tired of them, or maybe he had just finished work on the house opposite, and come in for the last time. Perhaps Yvonne and her children had had a sense that the end was approaching.
“But I’ve saved the strangest thing till last…” said Krepp.
“What might that be?”
“The empty room on the floor above, the one in which our policewoman friend found that small bloodstain.”
Goran saw Mila stiffen, on the defensive. The expert had that effect on lots of people.
“The room on the second floor will be my ‘Sistine Chapel,’” Krepp stressed. “That stain suggests to us that it was there that the massacre took place. And that afterwards he cleaned everything, although he missed that detail. But he did more than that: he actually repainted the walls.”
“Why would he do that?” asked Boris.
“Because he’s stupid, that much is obvious. After leaving such a mess and so many clues, and flushing the remains down the sewer, he had already earned himself a life sentence. So why bother to freshen up a room?”
For Goran, too, the motive was obscure. “So how do you proceed from here?”
“We’ll take off the paint and see what’s underneath. It’ll take us a while, but with new techniques we can recover all the bloodstains that that idiot tried to hide so childishly.”
Goran wasn’t convinced. “All we have for now is false imprisonment and the concealment of bodies. He would get jail, but that doesn’t mean justice will have been done. To get the truth out, and arrest him for homicide, we need that blood as well.”
“You’ll have it, Dr. Gavila.”
For the time being they had a very brief description of the subject they were looking for. They compared it with the data gathered by Krepp.
“I’d say he’s a man between forty and fifty,” Rosa began. “Well-built, and about five foot eleven.”
“The shoe prints on the carpet are a size nine, so I’d say that’s about right.”
“A smoker.”
“He rolls his own cigarettes with tobacco and papers.”
“Like me,” said Boris. “I’m always glad to have something in common with guys like that.”
“And I’d say he likes dogs,” Krepp concluded.
“Just because he left the Newfoundland alive?” asked Mila.
“No, my dear. We’ve found some mongrel hairs.”
“But who says the man brought them into the house?”
“They were in the mud of the shoe prints that he left on the carpet. Obviously there was material from the building site—cement, gums, solvents—which acted as glue for the rest. Including the stuff that the guy brought in from his own house.”
Krepp looked at Mila like someone who has been unwisely challenged, and who has finally prevailed with dazzling brilliance. After that brief interval of glory, he looked away from her and went back to being the cold professional they all knew.
“And there’s one more thing, but I haven’t yet worked out if it’s worth mentioning.”
“Tell us anyway,” broke in Goran. He knew how much Krepp liked being asked.
“In that mud under his shoes there was a high concentration of bacteria. I asked the opinion of my most trusted chemist…”
“Why a chemist and not a biologist?”
“Because I guessed that they were ‘refuse-eating’ bacteria, which exist in nature but are used for various purposes, such as devouring plastic and petroleum derivatives.” Then he became specific: “They don’t eat anything, in fact, they just produce an enzyme. They’re used for cleaning up former dumps…”
At those words, Goran noticed that Mila had suddenly glanced towards Boris, and that he had done the same.
“Former dumps? Holy shit…we know this guy!”
24.
Feldher was waiting for them.
The parasite had withdrawn into his cocoon, at the top of the hill of refuse.
He had all kinds of weapons, which he had been piling up for months in preparation for the final showdown. He hadn’t actually done very much about hiding. He knew that sooner or later someone would come to ask him for explanations.
Mila arrived with the rest of the team, followed by the special units which placed themselves around the property.
From his lofty position, Feldher could check the streets leading to the former dump. He had also cut down the trees that blocked his view. But he didn’t start firing straightaway. He waited until they were in position before beginning his target practice.
First he aimed at his dog, Koch, the rusty mongrel that wandered about the scrap iron. He killed it with a single shot, to the head. He wanted to show the men out there that he was serious. And perhaps
spare the animal a worse death, thought Mila.
Crouching behind one of the armored vehicles, the policewoman observed the scene. How much time had passed since the day she had set foot in that house with Boris? They had gone there to ask Feldher about the religious institution he had grown up in, while he himself concealed a secret much worse than Ronald Dermis’s.
He had lied about lots of things.
When Boris had asked him if he had ever been in jail, he had answered in the affirmative. And in fact it wasn’t true. That was why they hadn’t found a match for the prints left in Yvonne Gress’s house. But he had been able to use that lie to be certain that the two officers knew almost nothing about him. And Boris hadn’t noticed anything, because you don’t usually lie to give a negative image of yourself.
Feldher had done it. He had been quite crafty, Mila thought.
He had sized them up, and he had started playing with them, certain that they would have no clues to link him to Yvonne’s house. If he had suspected the opposite, they probably wouldn’t have left that house alive.
Mila had been tricked for a second time by his presence at Ronald’s nocturnal funeral. She had thought it was a gesture of pity, when in fact Feldher was checking out the situation.
“Come on, you bastards, come and get me!”
Machine-gun bullets rattled through the air, some thudding dully against the armored vehicles, others echoing off the scrap metal.
“Sons of bitches! You won’t get me alive!”
No one replied, no one tried to strike a deal with him. Mila looked round: there was no negotiator anywhere around with a megaphone, ready to tell him to drop his weapons. Feldher had already signed his own death warrant. None of the men out there was interested in saving his life.
They were only waiting for one false move to wipe him off the face of the earth.
A few snipers were already in place, ready to fire as soon as he moved. For the moment, they were letting him rant. That made it more likely that he would make a mistake.
The Whisperer Page 26