“Yeah, more than likely.”
“So they are less effective? Can brain features cause all this? Is that what you mean?”
“It’s not that straightforward of course – the malformation is peculiar and may favour the onset of the multiple personality disorder… the appearance of different people in one, basically.”
“Does Riondino have a similar problem in his brain?”
“Yeah, those areas of the brain are clearly smaller than they should be.”
“Why would this facilitate the multiple personality disorder?”
“Think about this – new-born babies don’t have a sense of their personality as one, their self. You develop that when you begin to grow up. In children that have that specific brain malformation, if they are victims of deep traumas, difficult to deal with and overcome, the development of their personality is hindered because the necessary areas of the brain are unable to cope. Many parts of what would normally merge into one personality re… remain distinct and become the basis for the existence of multiple personalities.”
“Kind of like a way to overcome the trauma, to heal themselves.”
“That’s right – do you remember what I said about Billy Milligan’s personalities? Da… David was the one that the others didn’t know and who felt the pain for everybody else.”
“An unusual form of amnesia? Where you leave your memories of pain in one personality and lift the burden from all the others?”
“It’s all very complicated… amnesia isn’t uniform in all personalities. What is unknown to one personality could be well known to another. Some personalities appear to know some of the others and interact with them in a fake, inner world. Other personalities may be kept unaware of everything, or even if they know that they exist, they are unaware of what they do and of their memories. It’s all very com… complicated.”
“Yeah, it’s overwhelming…” Greta remained thoughtfully silent for a while and held onto her glass. “So what do you think happened? Hannibal decided to rock up all of a sudden? Was there no way of knowing that Riondino could still be dangerous?”
“A lot of questions… to which I have no answers, unfortunately.” A moment of hesitation. “It’s strange…”
“What?”
“You see, if he was deemed unable to harm himself or anybody else, that means that the therapy had worked for him… do you know what psychotherapy aims to do in this case?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, it’s commonly known as merging. It means merging all of the personalities into one, grouping all of the memories together, overcoming the traumas that have caused the illness… in a nutshell, letting the patient acquire one personality by working on all of the others.”
“Do you mean letting the patient be fully aware of all of the other personalities and bring them all together by eliminating the others?”
Claps nodded. “One of Milligan’s personalities said something about all in one Billy during a psychotherapy session – he knows us and he’s destroying us; when he becomes fully aware of everything, we will disappear.”
“So in order for Riondino to be considered unable to harm anyone, this process must have happened and Hannibal should have been long forgotten? Is that correct?”
“Yeah, but things have clearly taken a wrong turn.”
“Somebody must have made the wrong decision.”
“Yeah, perhaps somebody should be blamed for this.”
Claps felt overwhelmed by uneasiness – he glanced at his watch. “It’s late… and maybe they have already found him now. Are you going to talk about this case in your blogs?”
“No,” Greta said and she stood up. “I just wanted to talk to you. Too many memories and you know what that means… I didn’t want to be all by myself. That’s it.”
*
It was past 1 a.m. when Sensi, unable to sleep, called Maiezza. “Any news? Did they find him?”
“No good news, I’m afraid… did you know Police Commissioner Gottardi?”
At the same time, not far away from the place where Sensi was making his phone call, Riondino was driving through Milan. The beams of the headlights illuminated the wet road.
“Come out, I know that you’re there. Do you remember your city?”
“Corso Buenos Aires…”
“I kept my word – now you keep your word and keep yourself asleep together with the others for at least two days. Try not to wake up.”
“How did you do it?”
“It doesn’t matter. Would you prefer to have stayed where we were?”
“We were there because of you.”
“Because of Hannibal, you mean. I got you all out of trouble. If you wish, you can drive to the first roadblock that we see and get yourself arrested.”
“No. You know I’m not talking just for myself.”
“Then shut your mouth. Tell me – will you remain asleep until I tell you otherwise?”
“Will we have the new life that you promised us?”
“We never lie to each other, you should know that. There will be another chance, a new life.”
“That’s all that we want.”
“Will you try to wake up earlier than I want you to?”
“No.”
1 The footage that Claps refers to here exists in real life and can be viewed on YouTube under the title “Billy Milligan 多重人格”
9
It was 4 a.m. when two policemen began to put on their bulletproof jackets and load their automatic weapons. It was pouring down with rain out on the road. The Audi that had been identified was about twenty metres away from them, parked in the service station. A man was asleep at the wheel, the seat slightly reclined for comfort. They walked towards the car, their weapons at the ready. One of them stopped a few metres away, pointing his automatic at the Audi; the other approached the door and knocked on the window with his left hand. His right hand held his weapon tightly.
The man inside the car didn’t react to the knocking. He looked fast asleep.
The policeman knocked harder. The sound echoed in the silence of the night and the thundering rain.
No reaction.
The policeman pointed the torch at the face of the sleeping man – then he realised that his eyes were wide open and a line of foamy saliva was coming from one side of his mouth.
*
Claps had woken up early after a difficult night where he had stayed awake most of the time, overwhelmed by an oppressive feeling that made breathing hard. He had been through too much darkness and he couldn’t help but be obsessed by nightmares. Morphy, the monster who kidnapped little girls; Riondino, the serial killer on the loose. How many more victims would there be?
Despite suffering from aphasia, Claps had decided to get back to work a year earlier to hunt down the man who had kidnapped the young Ami – he had chosen to take on this mission to demonstrate to himself that he was still alive, that he could think and act as well as his old self. It was as if he had used all of his energy to bear the pain during that time – and now the horror, the human foolishness and the wretchedness of crimes were almost unbearable for him. He felt like a veteran who didn’t want to go back into battle again – a war had burned him out.
He had forced himself not to think about Riondino – thinking that he couldn’t run far by himself and that it wasn’t his job to hunt him down anyway. He had avoided watching the news and focused on the daily exercises that were helping him to speak almost completely normally. That feeling of oppression, however – almost as though a tragedy were about to happen – still loomed over him and made him nervous.
In the end, he convinced himself that he might hear Riondino had been caught by the police if he watched the news – so he decided to turn on the TV. Wrong move. Riondino was on the news of course, but the official news was very sparse – they mentioned the fact that he had escaped the psychiatric hospital and killed two nurses; that he had gone to the house of somebody that he knew, perhaps an
accomplice, in Florence. They also said that Riondino had killed his accomplice and had then been visited by two policemen, who had also been killed.
Claps couldn’t detach himself from the TV now; he followed all the later news bulletins until early in the morning. While no more news was given about the case during that time, the discussion had shifted to the responsibilities of the psychiatric hospital and establishing appropriate security systems. In the early afternoon, Sensi called Claps on the phone and asked him to hurry over to his office – for Claps, this was confirmation that something dark and sinister had happened, just as he had been anticipating for a while.
*
“Riondino is here in Milan, Claps. We’re keeping the news secret because we don’t want the media to know, but he’s here.” Sensi had bags under his eyes and a weary demeanour. “He arrived here overnight.”
Claps tried to remain impassive, but his stomach was in knots.
“I knew Gottardi – we weren’t exactly friends, but I knew him – he had family.” Sensi tried to control his anger. He reconstructed all of the movements of the son of a bitch from the moment when he escaped from the hospital; “After killing the two policemen, he drove out of Florence using the car that had belonged to the man who let him stay over at his place. He managed to avoid the police patrols on the Autosole motorway. He stopped at the first service station and there he killed somebody else. He left the body of the man that he killed in Matteo Contri’s car and then took the man’s car to flee even further away. The documents found on the man who was killed at the service station told us more about the second stolen car, an Alfa Romeo with a remote toll payment system. The killer drove on to Milan. We found the car a few hours ago, in a car park near the train station.”
Sensi told Claps as much as he knew about Riondino’s flight.
“He’s been here since last night,” he concluded.
“Six victims…” Claps wished he was far away from that office, from Sensi, from Riondino, from all those dead people.
“We still have a lot to understand about his escape, but the man is in our area now.”
The knot in Claps’ stomach became even tighter. “He might not nec… necessarily still be here,” Claps said eventually.
“That’s true,” Sensi sighed. “But I have two good reasons for thinking that he’s still here. The first one – the Alfa Romeo was found near the train station, which means that he wanted us to think that he took a train to a different city; at the time when Riondino got there, though, there were no trains leaving until early in the morning… and the CCTV from the train station hasn’t recorded him anywhere near the station. There is no way that he spent the night at the station waiting to leave on the first train in the morning.”
‘Maybe he slept rough overnight and blended with the crowd in the morning,’ Claps thought. He decided not to say it out loud.
“The second… reason?” he asked instead.
“Why go back to Milan? He had a car – he could have gone anywhere. No, Claps, he’s here. This is his place – even after seven years of exclusion, he knows how to move around, where to hide.” Sensi’s voice became harsher. “He killed two of our people. We’ll find him, okay?”
Claps looked away. “You don’t need my help to… to do that.”
“Maybe… but only if I find him within the next twenty-four hours. If not, that will mean that he has found a safe place to hide. Hidden amongst two million people who live and work in this city every day. In that case, I will need your help to find him – how will he move? What will he think? How it is possible that he’s able to do all this after seven years of clinical care?” Sensi breathed deeply. “Not only that… I never believed the multiple personality disorder story. There’s only one man that I’m looking for – and that’s Riondino. I’ll have to consider every possible scenario, it’s true, and if he really was mentally ill, who would we be dealing with? Who should we be after when we try to interpret his movements and his thoughts? Hannibal? The Wimp? The Fox?”
Claps did his best to hide his emotions when he spoke. “I’m sorry, this is difficult to think ab… about right now. It has been seven years since he was arrested. During all this time he was treated and then deemed unable to harm anyone… I don’t know what happened, but I’m certain that he’s not the same man that we arrested seven years… ago.”
Sensi looked into Claps’ eyes, and Claps finally looked back into Sensi’s. “Find out who we’re looking for. Talk to those who saw him every day during these years, those who took care of him, his fellow inmates… talk to anyone you want and tell me what the hell happened that made him go crazy again. How you think he will behave, what he will do. Give me some hints to help me find him.”
Claps found replying particularly difficult for the first time in a while. “I… will.” he almost whispered eventually.
*
Claps had left the office a few minutes before Maiezza walked in to talk to Sensi.
“I’ve just finished talking to the IT experts from Florence.” Maiezza said, trying his best to hide his excitement. “They found something.”
“Go on then, tell me.”
“They found something on Uggeri’s notepad… ‘Liberty FB’.”
“And what does that mean?” Sensi asked, frowning.
“They thought a good while about that and they have an answer – Riondino had a Facebook profile, under the name Liberty. It was activated about six months ago and Matteo Contri was one of his friends online.”
“Riondino had been in touch with the outside world for six months? Fuck.”
“He used the computer at the psychiatric hospital almost every night – he went to the director’s office. The door could be unlocked very easily and there was no CCTV covering the area. They found the account details through the IP address of the computer that he used. The account was deleted yesterday at 8.22 p.m. Riondino must have deleted it when he was still at Matteo Contri’s place… Riondino’s fingerprints are still on Contri’s laptop keyboard.”
“Jesus.”
“He would log in for no longer than an hour, then he would delete his conversations and any traces of his log in from the Internet cookies. As I said, Matteo Contri was one of his friends online.”
“That’s why he went to his house… he knew where he was going. Is it possible to trace any conversations between the two?”
“Not on Liberty’s profile… Riondino’s profile, I mean. Matteo Contri also deleted his conversations regularly, but we have our hands on something… it’s from the day before Riondino escaped.”
“What were they saying?”
“Well…” Maiezza sounded embarrassed. “Sex. Cyber-sex.”
After a few seconds of silence, Sensi exclaimed. “Fuck… for a moment, I was almost convinced that he might have just had a relapse and that Hannibal had come back suddenly somehow. But no – that man had a plan and he was working on it for six months. There are no multiple personalities, no fucking Hannibal. If it had been a relapse, we would have found him in the first hours of his flight through the fields near Florence… or even here, as he was searching for a hideaway in Milan. He’s been working online for months to build his list of contacts. He knew what to do and he must have planned his hideaway in Milan carefully. For fuck’s sake!”
Sensi took a deep breath in an attempt to calm down. “How many friends did he have? How many of them were from Milan?”
“About forty friends in total, eight of whom are from Milan. Do you think that he’s going to get in touch with some of them?”
“Jesus, of course he is… he did exactly the same with Matteo Contri, right?” Sensi shouted.
“Listen,” he carried on talking, this time more rationally. “Let’s think like a detective – he deleted his conversations on Facebook. If it wasn’t for Uggeri’s note, we wouldn’t have known about his profile on the Internet. Why did he want to erase his traces online, if he didn’t want to use some of his friends to hide away?”
“Then why did he not get rid of Uggeri’s notepad that night?”
Sensi thought about it for a moment. “There’s only one answer to that – he forgot about it. Maybe Gottardi didn’t understand straight away who they were talking to. He thought that he was talking to Matteo Contri and he was asking about the phone call that Matteo had received while Uggeri was taking notes. Maybe Riondino didn’t see that Uggeri was taking notes.” Sensi paused for a moment and looked into Maiezza’s eyes, spelling out his words very clearly. “In other words, the motherfucker didn’t want us to know who he was in touch with.” Sensi leaned over towards Maiezza. “We know something now, though,” he hissed.
Maiezza replied after a few seconds. “Riondino doesn’t know that we have those contacts.”
“That’s right, we have to make use of this opportunity. I want to know everything about those eight people within the next twenty-four hours. Whether they’re single, married, what they use to log in on Facebook and at what time of the day.”
“Are we going to keep them under surveillance?”
“Yes, immediately – their telephone lines, both landlines and mobile phones. The Internet in particular. Let’s research their Facebook profiles, let’s find out more about their online activities, their conversations, their new friendships since yesterday. Riondino might have tried to get in touch with them with a new account – let’s see if we find anything that might be of use.”
“Are you not going to interrogate them straight away, then? They could tell us if Riondino was talking to them and what about?”
“Not yet – I don’t want to alert them right now. They could warn Riondino somehow if they knew our plans.”
“What if he’s already with one of them?”
Of course, Riondino could be somewhere already – whether the people who hosted him were doing so willingly or not, whether his accomplice was innocent or a murderer. “In that case, we’ll catch him soon. I want the contacts to be placed under surveillance twenty-four seven.” Sensi paused to think a little longer. “Not all of them for now – just those who log in overnight, during the same time that the motherfucker used to log in. Be careful though… and very discreet. Nobody has to suspect anything, especially Riondino, and especially if he’s trying to get in touch with some of his friends or if he’s already with one of them.”
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