The Whisperer

by Donato Carrisi

  “How did he get his orders to you?”

  “All by e-mail.”

  “And you never tried to trace them?”

  There was an answer to the captain’s question: Sarah Rosa was a computer expert. If she couldn’t do it, it meant it was impossible.

  “But I did keep all the e-mails.” Then she looked at her colleagues: “He’s very cunning, you know. And he’s smart.” She said it as if trying to justify herself. “And he’s got my daughter,” she added.

  Mila wasn’t moved by her plea.

  She had been hostile to her since the first day, putting her life in jeopardy, because she was really the only one capable of discovering the identity of the sixth child.

  “Was he the one who ordered you to get rid of Officer Vasquez as soon as possible?”

  “No, that was my initiative. She could have given him problems.”

  She had wanted to display her contempt once more. But Mila forgave her. Her thoughts went to Sandra, the girl who suffered from an eating disorder—as Goran had told her—and who was now in the hands of a psychopath, with one arm amputated, and prey to unspeakable suffering. For days she had been obsessed by her identity. Now she finally had a name.

  “So you followed Officer Vasquez twice, to frighten her and force her to abandon the investigation.”

  “Yes.”

  Mila remembered that after being followed in the car she had gone to the Studio, and there had been no one there. Boris had told her in a text that they were all at Yvonne Gress’s villa. And she had joined them. Sarah Rosa was there, getting ready by the mobile unit’s camper. Mila hadn’t wondered why she hadn’t been in the house with the others. Her lateness hadn’t aroused her suspicions. But just in case, Sarah Rosa had attacked her verbally so as not to give her time to think, sowing doubts about Goran.

  And by the way, he fooled you…because I voted against you.

  Except she hadn’t, because she would have risked drawing suspicion to herself.

  Terence Mosca wasn’t in a hurry: he wrote down Rosa’s answers in his notebook and thought about them before continuing with his next question.

  “And what else have you done for him?”

  “I sneaked into Debby Gordon’s room at the boarding school. I stole her diary from the tin box, tampering with the padlock in such a way that no one would notice. Then I took the photograph with my daughter in it off the wall. And I left the GPS transmitter that led you to the second discovery at the orphanage…”

  “Didn’t you ever think that someone might discover you sooner or later?” asked Mosca.

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “It was you who put the fifth girl’s corpse in the Studio…”

  “Yes.”

  “You got in with your key, and faked the damage to the armored door.”

  “So that no one would get suspicious.”

  “Yeah…” Then Mosca stared at her for a long while. “Why did you take that body to the Studio?”

  It was the answer they had all been waiting for.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mosca breathed deeply through his nose. That gesture meant that their conversation was over. Then the captain turned to Goran. “I think that might be enough. Unless you have any questions…”

  “None,” said the criminologist.

  Mosca turned back to the policewoman: “Special Agent Sarah Rosa, in ten minutes I am going to phone the Prosecutor, who will officially formulate the charges against you. As agreed, this conversation will stay between us, but I advise you not to open your mouth except in the presence of a good lawyer. One last question: is anyone apart from you involved in this business?”

  “If you’re referring to my husband, he doesn’t know a thing. We’re in the middle of a divorce. As soon as Sandra disappeared, I threw him out of the house using some excuse to keep him in the dark about everything. We’d also been arguing a lot lately because he wanted to see our daughter and thought I was stopping him.”

  Mila had seen them talking animatedly outside the Studio.

  “Fine,” said Mosca, rising to his feet. Then he turned to Boris and Stern, pointing at Rosa: “I will mandate someone immediately to formalize the arrest.”

  The two officers nodded. The captain bent down to pick up his leather bag. Mila saw him putting his notebook next to a yellow folder: on the cover she could see some typed letters: “W…on” and “P.”

  Wilson Pickett, she thought.

  Terence Mosca walked slowly towards the exit, followed by Goran. Mila stayed with Boris and Stern along with Rosa. The two men were silent, waiting to guard the colleague who hadn’t trusted them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I had no choice,” she repeated.

  Boris didn’t reply, barely able to contain his rage. Stern said only, “Fine, but stay calm now.” But he didn’t sound very convincing.

  Then Sarah Rosa looked at them imploringly: “Find my little girl, please…”

  Mila found Stern outside, sitting on one of the steel steps of the fire escape. He had lit a cigarette and brought it to his lips, balancing it between his fingers.

  “Don’t tell my wife,” Stern said to her as soon as he saw her coming out of the fire door.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be our secret,” Mila reassured him as she went to sit beside him.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “How do you know I’ve come to ask you for something?”

  Stern replied by raising an eyebrow.

  “Albert will never let himself be caught, you know that yourself,” Mila said. “I think he’s already planned his death: it too is part of his plan.”

  “I don’t care if he kicks the bucket. I know it isn’t Christian to say certain things, but that’s how it is.”

  Mila stared at him and grew serious. “He knows the team, Stern. He knows lots of things about you, otherwise he would never have put the fifth corpse in the Studio. He must have followed your cases in the past. He knows how you move, which is why he’s always able to get ahead of you. And I think he knows Gavila in particular…”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I’ve read one of his statements in the Tribunal about an old case, and Albert behaves as if he wants to prove his theories false. He’s a serial killer sui generis. He doesn’t seem to suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder because he prefers to draw attention to other criminals rather than himself. He doesn’t seem to be governed by an unstoppable instinct, he’s very good at controlling himself. He doesn’t get pleasure from what he does, he seems more attracted by the challenge that he has presented. How can you explain that?”

  “It’s simple: I can’t. And I’m not interested.”

  “How can you not care?” snapped Mila.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t care, I said I wasn’t interested. It’s different. As far as I’m concerned, we never took up his ‘challenge.’ He can only keep us on our toes because there’s still a child to save. And it isn’t true to say that he hasn’t got a narcissistic personality, because what he wants is our attention, not someone else’s: just ours, you understand? The press would be over the moon if he gave them a sign, but Albert doesn’t feel like it. Not for now, at least.”

  “Because we don’t know what finale he has in mind.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But I’m convinced that Albert is trying to draw attention to you at the moment. And I’m talking about the case of Benjamin Gorka.”

  “Wilson Pickett.”

  “I’d like you to talk to me about that…”

  “Read the file.”

  “Boris told me there was some kind of hitch…”

  Stern tossed aside what was left of his cigarette. “Boris sometimes doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “Come on, Stern, tell me what happened! I’m not the only one interested in this whole affair…” She told him about the card she had seen in Terence Mosca’s bag.

  Stern gr
ew thoughtful.

  “All right. But you’re not going to like it, believe me.”

  “I’m ready for anything.”

  “When we caught Gorka we started going through his life. He practically lived in his truck, but we found a receipt for the purchase of a certain quantity of food. We thought he’d realized that the circle was closing in on him, and that he was getting ready to hide away in a safe place, waiting for the waters to calm.”

  “But that wasn’t the case…”

  “About a month after he was captured we had a report of a missing prostitute.”

  “Rebecca Springher.”

  “Exactly. But the disappearance dated back to sometime around Christmas…”

  “When Gorka was arrested.”

  “You’ve got it. And the streets she walked fell within the area covered by the truck.”

  Mila drew a conclusion: “Gorka was keeping her prisoner, the supplies were for her.”

  “We didn’t know where she was, and how long she could survive. So we asked him.”

  “And obviously he denied it.”

  Stern shook his head. “In fact he didn’t. He admitted everything, and he agreed to reveal the place where she was imprisoned, but on one small condition: he would only do it in the presence of Dr. Gavila.”

  Mila didn’t understand. “So what was the problem?”

  “The problem was that Dr. Gavila couldn’t be found.”

  “And how did Gorka know that?”

  “He didn’t, the sadistic bastard! We were looking for Gavila, and meanwhile time was passing for that poor girl. Boris subjected Gorka to all kinds of questioning.”

  “And did he get him to talk?”

  “No, but listening to the recordings of the previous interrogations he noticed that Gorka had casually mentioned an old warehouse where there was a well. It was Boris who found Rebecca Springher, on his own.”

  “But she’d already died of starvation.”

  “No. She cut her veins with one of the box cutters that Gorka had left her along with the food supplies. But the most infuriating thing is something else…according to the medical examiner, she killed herself just a few hours before Boris found her.”

  Mila felt a chill run through her. Then she asked anyway: “And what was Gavila doing all that time?”

  Stern smiled, to hide his true feelings.

  “He was found a week later in a gas-station toilet. Some motorists had called an ambulance: he was in a drunken stupor. He had left his son with the nanny, and gone home to work through his wife’s desertion. When we went to see him in hospital he was unrecognizable.”

  That story perhaps included the reason for the unusual bond between the officers on the team and a civilian like Goran. Because it’s more often human tragedies than successes that unite people, Mila thought. And she recalled a phrase she had heard from Goran, when they had been at his place, after she had discovered that Roche had tricked her about Joseph B. Rockford.

  We think we know everything about people, when in fact we know nothing at all…

  It was absolutely true, she thought. Try as she might, she would never be able to imagine Goran in the state they had found him in. Drunk and delirious. And that thought at that moment troubled her. She changed the subject.

  “Why did you call the case Wilson Pickett?”

  “Good nickname, don’t you think?”

  “From what I’ve learned, Gavila usually prefers to give a real name to the criminal he’s after, to make him more three-dimensional.”

  “Usually, but this time he made an exception.”

  “Why was that?”

  The special agent stared at her: “There was a survivor.”

  You don’t survive a serial killer.

  Weeping, despairing, pleading, they’re all pointless. On the contrary, they feed the murderer’s sadistic pleasure. The prey’s only hope is flight. But fear, panic, the inability to understand what’s happening all play to the predator’s advantage.

  Still, in a few rare cases, the serial killer doesn’t manage to complete his killing. It happens because just as he is about to finish off the act, something—a brake suddenly activated by a phrase or gesture from the victim—stops him.

  That was why Cynthia Pearl was a survivor.

  “She said something to him…it came to her spontaneously, perhaps it was panic, I don’t know. She said, ‘Please, when I’m dead take care of my son. His name is Rick and he’s five years old’…She couldn’t believe she’d done it afterwards, but it saved her.”

  “It halted his rage.”

  “He dropped her off at a parking lot. As they walked, ‘In the Midnight Hour’ came on the radio…then she fainted and woke again in hospital: she didn’t remember a thing. We asked her how she’d got those injuries and she had no idea. Even when we showed her Gorka’s photograph, his face meant nothing…Until one Tuesday afternoon, she was at home alone and turned on the radio. They were playing the same Wilson Pickett song. It was only then that the memory came rushing back.” Stern threw down his cigarette and returned to the building.

  Mila understood that the team had given Gorka the nickname only after he had been caught. And they had chosen it as a warning and a reminder of all their mistakes.

  Goran Gavila’s team had fallen to pieces. And the investigation had collapsed with it. And the other thing that was shattered was the hope of saving little Sandra, who was now, somewhere, using up the last of the energy that still kept her alive. In the end she would have been killed not by a serial killer with a made-up name, but by the selfishness and shortcomings of other men and other women.

  This was the best finale that Albert could have imagined.

  As she was formulating those thoughts, Mila saw Goran’s face appearing in the glass door in front of her. He was behind her. But he wasn’t looking into the building. He was looking for her eyes in the reflection.

  Mila turned round. They looked at one another for a long time, in silence. They were united by the same discomfort, the same distress. It was natural to lean towards him, close her eyes and try to find his lips. To plunge her own into his mouth, and for him to respond.

  Dirty water poured down on the city. It flooded the streets, poured down the manhole covers, the gutters tirelessly swallowed it up and spat it back out again. The taxi had brought them to a small hotel near the station. The facade was blackened by smog and the shutters were always closed, because the people who stayed there had no time to open them.

  There was a constant bustle of people. And the beds were constantly being remade. In the corridors, sleepless chambermaids pushed squeaking trolleys of linen and pieces of soap. Breakfast trays arrived at all hours. Some people stopped there only to freshen up and change their clothes. And some came to make love.

  The porter gave them the key to room 23.

  They went up in the elevator, without saying a word, holding one another by the hand. But not like lovers. Like two people afraid of losing one another.

  In the room, mismatched furniture, spray deodorant and stale nicotine. They kissed again. More intensely this time. As if to shed their thoughts before they shed their clothes.

  He rested a hand on one of her little breasts. She closed her eyes.

  The light from a Chinese restaurant sign filtered through, gleaming with rain, and carved out their shadows in the darkness.

  Goran began undressing her.

  Mila let him do it, waiting for his reaction.

  First he revealed her flat belly, then rose, kissing her, towards her chest.

  The first scar appeared, level with her hip.

  He slipped off her sweater with infinite grace.

  And saw the others.

  But his eyes didn’t linger on them. That task was reserved for his lips.

  To Mila’s great surprise, he began to kiss those old wounds, very slowly. As if he could somehow heal them.

  When he slipped off her jeans, he repeated the operation on her legs. Where t
he blood was still flesh, or had just congealed. Where the blade had recently paused, before plunging into the living flesh.

  Mila felt again all the anguish she had felt when inflicting that punishment on her soul through her body. But along with that old pain, there was now something sweet.

  Like the tickle of a healing wound, at once stinging and pleasant.

  Then it was her turn to undress him. She did it as you take the petals from a flower. He too wore the signs of suffering. A thin ribcage, slowly dug from despair. And protruding bones where the flesh had been consumed by sadness.

  They made love with strange violence. Full of anger, of rage, but also of urgency. As if each of them, with that act, were trying to pour all of themselves into the body of the other. And for a moment they even managed to forget.

  When it was all over, they were left there side by side—separate but still united—listening to the rhythm of their own breathing. Then the question came, disguised as silence. But Mila could see it floating above them like a black bird.

  It concerned the origins of the pain, her pain and his.

  Which was first imprinted on her flesh and which she then tried to hide with her clothes.

  And inevitably, the interrogation was interwoven with the fate of a child, Sandra. As they exchanged that feeling, she—somewhere, near or far—was dying.

  Anticipating the words, Mila explained. “My work consists in finding missing people. Especially children. Some of them have been away for whole years, and then they don’t remember anything. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But perhaps it’s the aspect of my job that causes me the most problems…”

  “Why?” asked Goran, interested.

  “Because when I lower myself into the darkness to pull someone out, I always have to find a motive, a strong reason to bring myself back into the light. It’s a kind of safety rope to bring me back. Because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the darkness calls to you, it seduces you with its pull. And it’s hard to resist the temptation…When I come out with the person I’ve rescued, I’m aware that we’re not alone. There’s always something else that comes with us out of that black hole, stuck to our shoes. And it’s hard to get rid of.”