Flowers over the Inferno, page 14
“Why not? Because of the statistics?”
Teresa heard the sarcasm in his tone, but she was so tired that when she replied, there was no inflection in her voice. “Because the subconscious travels along predetermined paths, Marini.”
“What if it didn’t this time? What if we’re dealing with a mind that is somehow different?”
Teresa was barely listening to him.
“Then it wouldn’t be a human mind, Inspector. Now if there was some common element here, an identifiable pattern . . .”
“He steals their senses.”
“What?”
“Sight. Smell. Hearing. That’s what he’s stolen from the victims.”
Teresa was taken aback. She hadn’t spotted that connection. She asked herself if Marini’s theory could really explain what was happening in Travenì, whether the monster—as the newspapers and the locals had begun to call him—could really be looking for something he didn’t have: the ability to feel.
If it was true, it was a frightening prospect: it would mean that there was a creature roaming among them capable of formulating a complex homicidal scheme with a specific objective in mind. And it would mean that he wouldn’t stop until he had achieved it.
Sight. Smell. Hearing. He rips them out and takes them away. What does he want to do with them? Why does he need the senses?
She looked at Marini.
“You might actually have stumbled on a half-decent idea there,” she said.
His eyes widened.
“Stumbled on it? What if it’s the result of some very complex logical reasoning?”
Teresa didn’t even hear him. Her mind was racing to put together a coherent picture using the latest fragments they had gathered.
“The senses. Parts of the face. Identification?” she mused—more to herself than to Marini.
“I still think ‘robber of senses’ is much more apt a description,” he replied peevishly.
“According to psychoanalytic theory, identification is the most primitive form of attachment. It’s the primordial form of love,” said Teresa.
Marini let out a bitter laugh.
“Makes sense. He loves his victims and that’s why he devours them,” he said.
“He doesn’t love his victims. That’s not how it works. He wants something. There are always two sides to identification: tenderness and the urge to obliterate.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Think of the oral stage in the development of infant libido: according to Freud, infants incorporate the object of their desire by eating it.”
Her explanation was interrupted by the return of Chief Knauss.
“Doctor Ian says the girl can talk now.”
Lucia was finding it difficult to trust them. It would take time for her to get to that point—but Teresa would make all the time that was needed. She didn’t want to ambush the little girl with questions that would scare her and cause her to retreat even further into her shell.
She sat Lucia on her lap and waited until the little girl’s body had stopped shaking. Then, she turned her around so they were face to face.
“Don’t worry. You can talk to me. It will be our secret,” she said reassuringly. She could tell that Lucia was worried about betraying her father.
“Swear it!”
Teresa didn’t hesitate.
“I swear,” she said, her hand on her heart.
So Lucia told her about the stranger who had rung their doorbell the night before, the blood that had appeared on the porch the next morning, and how her father had turned the house inside out in a frenzy.
Teresa hoped the child would never discover that the blood on the porch had belonged to her mother. It was likely that her father had instructed her to scrub the house clean to remove the traces of something he was concerned about.
“Who do you think hurt your mommy?” she finally asked.
Lucia had no doubt.
“The ghost who lives in the woods,” she said.
“Oh, yes, the ghost. Have you ever spoken to him?”
The girl shook her head.
“He watches me, but he never comes near. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk because he doesn’t know how to. Except for last night. He was the one who rang the doorbell.”
Teresa felt something surging inside her.
“So the ghost who watches you from the woods is the same one who came to your house yesterday?” she asked, wanting to be sure.
The girl nodded.
“What does he look like?” she asked. “Can you describe him to me?”
“He has a skull instead of a head.”
-36-
There was a new predator in the forest, charging through the trees with a fierce roar. Its coat was black and lustrous, with a skull and crossbones on each flank. It ripped off branches and shrubs and plucked rocks from the earth. Bird nests fell to the ground in its wake, breaking with the sound of frightened, flailing wings. From the belly of the beast came a shrieking, howling cacophony.
The SUV advanced in a mad dash along barely distinguishable paths. It carved its way through gaps that were too narrow, leaving petrol fumes in its wake. It forded a stream, raising waves of water and volleys of ice. In its progress through the woodland, it encountered occasional signs of human expansion: man-made clearings where the trees had been cut down and the undergrowth uprooted, and where excavator vehicles now stood, resting, like sleeping metal pachyderms. The new ski resort was beginning to take shape and that shape was deforestation.
Inside the vehicle, four boys were shouting and drinking beer, high on alcohol and a savage elation.
“Faster!” one of them yelled, raising his fist toward the sky through the open window.
He felt like a wrathful, destructive god, emboldened by his youth to abhor restraint and despise beauty.
The vehicle scrabbled furiously over a slope, slipping and hissing as it went. Its tires peeled the moss away and gripped at the soil beneath, but then it skidded, landing back on the dirt road with a thud.
The boys laughed, throwing squashed, empty cans outside the window. The driver scaled through the gears and the engine revved up. They drove at breakneck speed through the hairpin turns on the road that led up the mountain.
But just as they came out of a turn, they were forced to swerve to avoid an obstacle on the road. The car slammed against the side of the mountain. The boys screamed. The car bounced back onto the path, spun around by ninety degrees, and came to a standstill, the engine stopping.
Silence reigned once more, broken only by their heavy breathing.
“What the fuck was that?” said one of the boys as he tried to get out. The metal door panel had buckled, and he had to shove it free with his shoulder. He rolled out onto the road, drunk, but managing with some trouble to get back to his feet. He was bleeding from a tear in his jeans.
The others all laughed, with one exception.
“My dad’s going to kill me,” he slurred, reaching for another can of beer.
“I need to pee,” said another.
There was someone standing in the middle of the road, watching them. It had taken them a while to notice the dark, motionless figure on the edge of their field of vision. Somehow it looked imposing even in the middle of that majestic natural landscape. They remembered now what they’d seen in the moment before the crash: a man standing with his arms stretched out in front of him, as if to stop the advance of a runaway train.
He was wearing a kind of coat they had only ever seen in old photographs. His face, covered by a rag that was also wrapped around his head, was a dark smudge where the spark of human expression would normally reside.
The boys who were still inside the SUV managed to get the engine running again, and began honking the car horn, yelling at the man to get out of the way. The stranger covered his ears, as if startled by the sudden commotion.
The boy who was out on the road started to laugh.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, spitting in the man’s direction. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” He walked up to the man and tried to kick him.
The man grabbed him by the neck and squeezed. The boy gasped for air, his fingers curling around the man’s large, rough, ruthless hand. He could barely hear his friends’ screams. The arm that was holding him captive was strong, and so was the hand that was crushing his throat. It pressed unhesitatingly against his skin, blocking the passage of air.
The rag that concealed the stranger’s features slipped by an inch down the skin of his face and the boy came face to face with a skull.
The eyelids were painted black, and the skin white. They looked like the eyes of a warrior—hostile and hypnotic. He felt his will to resist slipping away. He raised his hand to touch that face, and he knew then that it was real. The man’s mouth fell open, exposing a set of wide, sturdy teeth the color of ivory, like the jaws of a beast—a beast that now roared with fury.
The boy felt tears running down his cheeks. He knew that he was going to die, that this man who was holding him still, as if he were no heavier than a sprig, wanted to kill him.
Instead, the stranger loosened his grip on the boy’s throat and finally freed him. He shook the boy around as if he were a rag doll, but he didn’t hurt him.
The boy gasped for breath. As he coughed and coughed, with tears streaming from his eyes and blurring his vision, he dared to look once more at that face. The man was studying him. He seemed to have seen something that had made him change his mind. Something unexpected that had stopped him in his tracks.
-37-
The car that belonged to Melania Kravina, Lucia’s mother, was parked on a lay-by off the road that led from the Flais lakes down to Travenì, a snake-like ribbon of black asphalt in a glacial landscape. The temperatures recorded in that natural hollow between the Alps and the village were among the lowest in the entire country. Every animal and mineral form there was coated in crystals of ice.
The woman had dropped one of her colleagues home before disappearing, and the snow that had fallen overnight had covered her car. The head of the forensics team who were just finishing up on the scene had already told Teresa that they hadn’t found a single fingerprint. Which could only mean one thing: someone had wiped the car down.
“The husband?” Marini asked.
Teresa nodded, her eyes looking for the footprints the snow would have erased.
“He turned the house inside out and told his daughter to clean it,” she said. “Then he went out and did the same with the car. He knew where to find it because he knew which route his wife would take that night to drop her friend home. He was worried about something.”
“A secret.”
The snow that had piled up on the side of the carriageway was dotted with a variety of animal footprints. Deer, birds, rodents . . . When nobody was looking, the forest behaved like a single organism. Every form of life left a trace of its passage.
There were skid marks on the asphalt beneath the layer of ice that the forensics team had scraped off.
“This is where the killer grabbed her,” Teresa muttered, picturing the scene in her head. “He came out from the dark. She braked to avoid him and ended up in the lay-by. That’s how he approaches his victims. There’s no wooing.”
Marini squatted to check the black marks on the road.
“Wooing?” he inquired.
“There’s always a plan, a pattern, in a serial killer’s dance with his chosen victim,” Teresa explained. “First there is the aura phase: the killer gradually withdraws from reality into a world of increasingly defined and elaborate fantasies that will eventually spur him into action. Then the trolling phase, which marks the beginning of his hunt; he has sighted his prey, and begins to desire it. After this there should be a third so-called wooing phase: the approach to the victim. But in this case, it’s missing. He’s gone straight to the next phase: the capture. Then the murder phase. And finally the totem phase, the killer seeking to prolong his pleasure for as long as possible.”
“How does he do that?” asked the inspector, standing up again and beating his heels against the ground to shake the ice off.
“He photographs the body. Or he dismembers it. He preserves it . . . He needs souvenirs, because when the delusions created by his fantasies begin to fade, he will realize that everything is just as it was before, and that temporary sense of omnipotence will be replaced by frustration. It’s an endless cycle. The only way to quell his inner torment is to kill again.”
“But he didn’t kill Melania Kravina,” Marini pointed out. “Technically, he’s not a serial killer.”
Teresa smiled.
“You’re wrong. He is. He’s just learning how.”
Among the trees, someone called for back-up. Teresa and Marini went up to him. For several moments, nobody spoke. Blood stained the snow where it had become trapped in the frozen pool of water at the mouth of an underground spring. This was where Melania had been devoured.
De Carli walked up to Teresa.
“We’ve had a call from Travenì, Superintendent. A group of kids showed up at A&E saying they’ve been attacked. They’re in shock.”
-38-
On the way to the village hospital, Teresa couldn’t speak. Her mouth was heavy with something that felt a lot like fear. The fear of being too late if the perpetrator decided to kill again. It was bound to happen, though it was difficult to predict when.
There had been an accident from which four boys had emerged virtually unscathed, blaming “some psycho.” One of the boys had been assaulted and claimed he’d been on the verge of dying; the stranger had apparently held him by the throat until he’d almost choked him—but then, for whatever reason, he’d let go. This young man’s name was David, and he was Hugo Knauss’s son.
When she reached the hospital Teresa decided to interview his friends, who were gathered in a waiting room under Knauss’s watchful eye.
Teresa went up to the chief.
“I’m sorry about your son,” she said. “How is he doing?”
Knauss nodded in acknowledgment.
“Right now it’s the shock that’s affecting him the most,” he said.
Teresa noticed that his customary smile was gone. She wondered if he was embarrassed as well as worried. He was the chief of the local police force, and his son was the village bully.
“If you’d rather be with him . . .” she suggested.
“I’d rather be looking for the culprit, Superintendent.”
Teresa nodded, and turned to face the kids. They were not much more than teenagers. She thought they looked terrified—they were used to being bullies, but today they had become victims. An entirely new and disconcerting experience. She looked at their faces, analyzing their expressions. Fear gave them a child-like appearance, dilating their pupils and turning the corners of their mouths downwards, but something else was affecting them, something that at first she couldn’t quite identify. Terror tended to paralyze people, but this was something different, something causing a restlessness in the boys, a lack of composure in their gestures, a constant wringing of the hands, an endless exchange of worried glances. The pack was in disarray, and it was trying to rally.
What was so troubling as to overshadow their fear? The answer came to Teresa of its own accord. She might have experienced it herself, in the past.
Guilt.
She recognized them from the incident outside Diego’s school when they had almost run over a little girl in their SUV. They had gone from bullies spoiling for a fight to a bunch of frightened little boys.
“I’m Superintendent Battaglia,” she told them. “This is my team.”
The boys looked at her pleadingly. Teresa knew why they looked so worried: they had been drinking all day, the alcohol levels in their blood way over the legal limit.
Yet they seemed sober now, subdued by fear.
She had already read the statements they had given while still in a state of confusion. She didn’t want to waste time with questions she already knew the answers to; the details of the accident were clear, and they were already being verified by a team of investigators on site. There was only one thing she was interested in.
“His face. What did it look like?” she asked.
The boys seemed bewildered. They had given contradictory statements on the matter, and now she was determined to get a conclusive response. She could have split them up and questioned each of them separately, but she suspected that this would be counter-productive. They needed to be surrounded by the rest of the pack; they would not be able to cope with the tension otherwise.
There was an art to interviewing witnesses; it required a degree of self-control to avoid planting ideas into people’s heads that would hinder rather than help the search for truth. Teresa waited patiently for someone to work up the courage to speak. She could sense Marini next to her vibrating with anticipation. If it were up to him, he would have gone right up to the boys, lifted them up by their collars, and shaken them like fruit trees until they dropped some nugget of information.
One of the young men finally spoke. “I didn’t see him,” he said. He sounded like a teenager, and the braces on his teeth clashed with his leather jacket, which was embroidered with the face of a demon.
