She reached Federal Police headquarters and became aware of a certain euphoria in the corridors. The officers were slapping one another on the back, many of them were returning from the crime scene still wearing their swat team uniforms and passing on the latest news. Then the report passed from mouth to mouth, increasingly enriched by new details.
Mila was intercepted by an officer who told her that Chief Inspector Roche urgently wanted to see her.
“Me?” she asked, startled.
“Yes, he’s waiting for you in his office.”
As she climbed the stairs, she thought that Roche had summoned her because they had noticed that something didn’t square with the reconstruction of events. Perhaps all that excitement that she could see around the place would soon settle or subside.
There were only a few plainclothes officers in the Department of Behavioral Sciences, and none of them were celebrating. The atmosphere was the same as any working day, except that it was nighttime and they were all still at work.
She had had to wait for a long time before Roche’s secretary called her into his office. Outside the door, Mila had been able to catch some of the words of the chief inspector, who was probably having a telephone conversation. But when she stepped inside, she discovered that he wasn’t alone. Goran Gavila was with him.
“Come in, Officer Vasquez.” Roche waved her over. He and Goran were standing on opposite sides of the desk.
Mila stepped forward, approaching Gavila. He turned slightly towards her, with a vague nod. The intimacy they had shared only an hour earlier had completely disappeared.
“I was just telling Goran that I’d like you both to attend the press conference that will be held tomorrow morning. Captain Mosca agrees with me. We would never have caught him without your help. We need to thank you.”
Mila couldn’t contain her surprise. And she saw that Roche was just as confused by her reaction.
“Sir, with the greatest respect…I think we’re making a mistake.”
Roche turned back to Goran: “What the hell’s she saying?”
“Mila, it’s all OK,” the criminologist said calmly.
“No, it isn’t. This guy isn’t Albert, there are too many incongruities, I…”
“You’re not going to say that at the press conference?” the chief inspector protested. “If that’s how things are, you can’t take part.”
“Stern will agree.”
Roche waved around a piece of paper from his desk. “Special Agent Stern has resigned with immediate effect.”
“What? What on earth’s going on?” Mila couldn’t believe it. “This guy Vincent doesn’t match the profile.”
Goran tried to explain, and for a moment she saw in his eyes the same gentleness with which he had kissed her scars. “There are dozens of corroborations that tell us he’s our man. Exercise books full of notes about kidnapping children and where to put their corpses, diagrams of the security system at Capo Alto, a plan of Debby Gordon’s boarding school and electronics and computer manuals that Clarisso had started studying when he was still in jail…”
“And have you also found all the links with Alexander Bermann, Ronald Dermis, Feldher, and Rockford?” Mila asked, exasperated.
“There’s a whole team of investigators at work in that house, and they’re still finding clues. Something will come out about those links, you’ll see.”
“It’s not enough, I think that—”
“Sandra has identified him,” Goran interrupted her. “She has told us that he was the one who kidnapped her.”
Mila focused on this for a moment. “How is she?”
“The doctors are optimistic.”
“Happy now?” Roche broke in. “If you want to cause some kind of trouble for me, you should go home right now.”
At that moment, the secretary’s voice from the intercom told the chief inspector that the mayor urgently wanted to see him, and that he should get a move on. Roche took his jacket off the back of a chair and set off, after saying to Goran: “You tell them that the official version is this: either you agree, or you fuck off!” Then he left, slamming the door.
Mila hoped that Goran would tell her something different when they were on their own. But instead he said: “Unfortunately all the mistakes were ours.”
“How can you say that?”
“It was a total failure. We created a false trail and followed it blindly. And I was the one chiefly responsible: all those conjectures were mine.”
“Aren’t you wondering how Vincent Clarisso knew about all those other criminals? He was the one who let us catch them!”
“That’s not the point…The point is how it took us so long to find out about them.”
“I don’t think you’re being objective at the moment, and I think I can guess why. In the days of the Wilson Pickett case, Roche saved your reputation and helped you keep the team going when his bosses wanted it to disband. Now you’re returning the favor: if you accept this version of events, you’ll take some of the glory away from Terence Mosca, and save his job as chief inspector!”
“That’s enough!” Goran exploded.
For a few seconds, neither of them said a word. Then the criminologist headed for the door.
She was left alone in the room, fists clenched at her sides. Cursing herself and that moment. Her eye fell on Stern’s letter of resignation. She picked it up. In those few formal lines there wasn’t a trace of the real reasons for his decision. But it was obvious to her that the special agent must have felt somehow betrayed, first by Sarah Rosa and now by Goran as well. This was all wrong. She had to get into the monster’s lair.
39.
The taxi wheels splashed up the water that had accumulated on the tarmac, but luckily it had stopped raining. The streets glittered like the stage of a musical; it seemed that at any moment brilliantined dancers in dinner jackets might appear.
“This is as far as you’re going to get,” the taxi driver said, turning towards her.
“That’s OK, I’m there.”
She paid and got out of the car. Ahead of her was a cordon of policemen and dozens of cars with flashing lights. The vans of various TV channels were lined up along the street. The cameramen had set up their equipment so that they always had a good view of the house.
Mila had reached the place where it had all started. The crime scene that went under the distinctive name of site zero.
Vincent Clarisso’s house.
She still didn’t know how she would get past the police checks and into the house. She just took out her pass and hung it around her neck, in the hope that no one would notice that she wasn’t under their jurisdiction.
As she came forward, she recognized the faces of the colleagues she had seen in the Department corridors. Some of them were holding improvised gatherings around the boot of a car. Others were taking a break to eat snacks and drink coffee. She also spotted the medical examiner’s van: Chang was writing a report, sitting on the running board, and didn’t look up when she passed in front of him.
“Hey, where are you going?”
She turned and saw an overweight policeman panting towards her. She didn’t have a ready excuse; she should have thought of one before she came, and now she’d probably flunked it.
“She’s with me.”
Krepp walked towards them. The scientific expert had a plaster on his neck, from which the head and claws of a winged dragon appeared, almost certainly his latest tattoo. He turned to the police officer: “Let her in, she’s authorized.”
The officer accepted his assurance and turned on his heels to go back where he had come from.
Mila looked at Krepp, unsure what to say. The man winked at her, then continued on his way. In a way it wasn’t that strange that he had helped her, Mila thought. Both—albeit in different ways—wore part of their personal history imprinted on their skin.
The path leading up to the front door of the house was on a slope. On the gravel there were still cartridge cases
from the shoot-out that had cost Vincent Clarisso his life. The front door had been slipped off its hinges for easier access.
As soon as she stepped inside, Mila was struck by a very strong smell of disinfectant.
The sitting room was furnished with seventies-style Formica furniture. A swirly-patterned sofa, still in its plastic covering. A fireplace with a mock fire. A mobile bar that harmonized with the yellow carpet. The wallpaper had a pattern of huge brown stylized flowers that looked like snapdragons.
Instead of halogen lamps, the room was lit by table lamps. That too was a sign of the new course taken by Terence Mosca. No “scene” for the captain. Everything had to be kept sober. Old-school policing from a long time ago, Mila thought. And in the kitchen she glimpsed Mosca, holding a little summit with his closest collaborators. She avoided going in that direction: she had to remain as unobserved as possible.
They all wore shoe covers and latex gloves. Mila put them on and then started to look around, mingling with the others.
One detective was taking out the books from a library. One at a time. He picked them up, quickly flicked through them and set them down on the floor. Another was rummaging in a chest of drawers. A third was classifying the ornaments. Where the objects had not yet been moved and examined, everything seemed to be obsessively tidy.
There wasn’t a speck of dust, and everything could be cataloged just by looking round, as if everything had been assigned a precise place. She felt as if she was in a completed jigsaw puzzle.
Mila didn’t know what to look for. She was only there because it was the natural place to start. She had to see if this really was Albert. She had to know why the fifth corpse was found at the Studio.
Mila worked out the source of the smell of disinfectant when she saw the room at the end of the short corridor.
It was an ascetic room, with a hospital bed wrapped in an oxygen tent. There were large quantities of drugs, sterile overalls and medical equipment. It was the operating theater where Vincent had performed the amputations on his little patients, then turned into the room where Sandra had been kept alive.
As she walked by another room, she noticed a police officer watching a plasma screen with a digital video camera plugged into it. In front of the screen was an armchair with audio-surround speakers around it. On either side of the television was a whole wall of mini-DV cassettes, classified only by data. The detective slipped them into the video camera one by one to view their content.
Right now they were running through the images of a playground. Children’s laughter on a sunny winter’s day. Mila recognized Caroline, the last little girl to have been kidnapped and killed by Albert.
Vincent Clarisso had studied his victims meticulously.
“Hey, could someone come and give me a hand with this thing? I don’t know a thing about electronics!” the policeman said as he tried to pause the film. When he noticed her in the doorway, for a moment he had the happy sensation of having had his wish granted, even though he then realized that he had never seen her before. Before he could say anything, Mila continued on her way.
The third room was the most important.
Inside there was a steel table and the walls were covered with noticeboards full of notes, Post-its of various colors and other things. That material set out in detail Vincent’s plans. Street maps and timetables. The blueprints of Debby Gordon’s boarding school, and of the orphanage. There was Alexander Bermann’s number plate, and the stages of his business trips. The photographs of Yvonne Gress and her children, and a picture of Feldher’s dump. There were cuttings from society magazines dealing with the fortunes of Joseph B. Rockford. And, obviously, snapshots of the kidnapped girls.
On the steel table there were other diagrams, with confused annotations. As if his work had suddenly been interrupted. Hidden among those pieces of paper—perhaps forever—was the finale that the serial killer had imagined for his plan.
Mila turned and froze. The wall that had been behind her until that moment was completely papered with photographs showing the members of the violent crimes investigative unit while they were at work. She was there too.
Now I’m really in the belly of the monster…
Vincent had always kept a close eye on their movements.
“Shit! Could someone give me a hand here?” came the voice of the officer in the next room.
“You all right, Fred?”
At last someone came to his aid.
“How can I tell what I’m looking at? And how can I classify something if I don’t know what it is?”
“Let me see…”
Mila drew away from the wall of photographs, preparing to leave the house. As she passed by the television room, she noticed something on the screen. A place that the officer called Fred and his colleague couldn’t identify.
“It’s an apartment, what else am I supposed to say?”
“Yes, but what do I write in the report?”
“Write ‘unknown apartment.’”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Someone else can work out where it is.”
But Mila knew where it was.
It was only then that they noticed her and turned to look at her, while she couldn’t take her eyes off the film on the TV.
“Can we help you?”
She didn’t reply, and walked away. As she hurried through the sitting room, she looked in her pocket for her mobile phone. She called Goran’s number.
By the time he replied she was on the path outside.
“What’s happening?”
“Where are you now?” Her voice was alarmed.
He didn’t notice. “I’m still at the Department, I’m trying to organize a visit by Sarah Rosa to her daughter in hospital.”
“Who’s at your place at the moment?”
Goran started to get worried. “Mrs. Runa is with Tommy. Why?”
“You’ve got to get there right now!”
“Why?” he repeated, full of concern.
Mila passed by the group of policemen. “Vincent had film of your apartment!”
“What does that mean?”
“That he’d searched your place…what if he had an accomplice?”
Goran fell silent for a moment. “Are you still at the crime scene?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re closer than me. Ask Terence Mosca to give you a few officers and go to my place. In the meantime I’ll call Mrs. Runa and tell her to shut herself in.”
“Fine.”
Mila hung up, then turned back towards the house to talk to Mosca.
And let’s hope they don’t ask me too many questions.
40.
Mila, Mrs. Runa isn’t answering the phone!”
It was dawn.
“Don’t worry, we’re nearly there, it won’t be long.”
“I’m on my way, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
The police car stopped with a screech of rubber in the quiet street of the affluent district. The tenants of the surrounding buildings were still asleep. Only the birds had started greeting the new day, perched among the trees and on the rooftops.
Mila ran towards the front door. She rang the entry phone several times. There was no reply. She tried a different bell.
“Yes, who is it?”
“It’s the police, sir: open up, please.”
The lock clicked open electronically. Mila pushed the door open and dashed towards the third floor, followed by the two officers who had come with her. They didn’t use the goods lift that served as an elevator, but took the stairs to get there as quickly as possible.
Please let nothing have happened…let the boy be all right…
Mila was invoking a divine being that she had stopped believing in a long time ago. Even though it was the same God that had freed her from her tormentor through Nicla Papakidis’s gift. Because she had encountered children less lucky than herself too often to keep her faith.
Please don’t let it happen again, let it n
ot happen this time…
Reaching the third floor, Mila started knocking insistently on the closed door.
Maybe Mrs. Runa sleeps deeply, she thought. Now she’ll come and open the door and everything will be all right.
But nothing happened.
One of the officers stepped towards her. “Do you want us to knock it down?”
She didn’t have enough breath to reply, she just nodded. She saw them taking a brief run up and then delivering a kick. The door burst open.
Silence. But not a normal silence. An empty, oppressive silence. A lifeless silence.
Mila drew her pistol and walked in ahead of the police officers.
“Mrs. Runa!”
Her voice rang out through the rooms, but no one answered. She nodded to the two officers to split up. She walked towards the bedrooms.
As she walked slowly down the corridor, she felt a tremor in her right hand, gripping the handle of her pistol. She felt her legs growing heavy and the muscles in her face contracting as her eyes still stung.
She reached Tommy’s room. The door was ajar. She pushed it with her open hand until she revealed the room. The shutters were closed, but the clown-shaped lamp on the bedside table rotated, casting the figures of circus animals on the wall. In the bed resting against the wall, a little body could be seen.
It was curled up in a fetal position. Mila walked gently over.
“Tommy…” she said in a low voice. “Tommy, wake up…”
But the little body didn’t move.
As she reached the bed, she set her pistol down beside the lamp. She felt bad. She didn’t want to move the blankets aside, she didn’t want to uncover what she knew already. In fact she wanted to give the whole thing up and leave the room straightaway. Not to have to face this along with everything else, damn it! She’d seen it happen too many times, and now she was afraid that it would end like this every time.
But she forced herself to move her hand towards the edge of the blanket. She gripped it and pulled it away in a single tug.
She stood there for a few seconds holding the corner of the blanket raised, looking into the eyes of an old teddy bear smiling up at her with a beatific and immutable expression.
The Whisperer Page 39