Flowers over the Inferno, page 20
She looked around in confusion, and it took her a while to figure out where she was; the meeting room of the police headquarters in Travenì was empty, and the lights had been turned down. She recognized Chief Knauss’s hat on the coat rack and Marini’s thick jacket on a hanger next to it.
She looked at her watch in alarm. It was a few minutes past 10 p.m. and she’d been asleep for almost half an hour. Someone had draped her coat over her shoulders.
She was furious with herself for showing such inexcusable weakness and felt deeply ashamed. What would her men think of her? Glancing at the open pages of her diary, she blushed; if anyone were to read it and work out her true physical and psychological state, the damage would be irreparable. She was relieved when she realized that the page it was open to held only a few hurried notes on the case.
She ran her hands over her face with a sigh, and noticed her cheeks were damp. She realized with a jolt that she’d been crying. Remembering the nightmare that had woken her up, she felt a wave of nausea and the onset of fresh tears.
“Oh God . . .” she murmured, exhausted.
Her hands moved to her belly, heeding that primal pull that had never really faded and still pleaded with her to remember.
And how could she forget?
In her dream, she had felt her baby’s delicate movements inside her womb; he had responded to her touch and curled up against her warmth. It had been a tangible sensation, as if somebody had really been there. She would have given anything for it to be true.
But the dream had turned into a nightmare when she’d sensed someone wanted to take her baby away from her. That was when she’d woken up screaming.
Teresa stood up. The pain was still too raw to allow her to breathe properly. She dried her tears with the palm of her hand and took a couple of deep breaths to try and steady herself. This was not the time to allow her past, and the memory of the tragedy that cursed it, to overcome her.
She noticed then that there was some sort of commotion going on in the corridor outside—a tense exchange followed by the sound of someone crying—that swept away the last scraps of sleep from Teresa’s eyes.
She knew whose voice it was, made hoarse by despair: the mother of the abducted child.
Teresa rested her forehead against the wall and closed her eyes. Every one of those wails tore into her heart and left her defenseless; they were exactly the same as the ones she had emitted in her nightmare.
Only then did she realize that there was a bandage around one of her hands. She looked at it in disbelief. She had no idea how she’d been injured, and that blindness made her blood run cold.
There was a knock. The door opened slowly, and Marini’s head appeared. He seemed relieved when he saw that she was awake.
“The deputy public prosecutor is here, Superintendent.”
-54-
“Lucas Ebran’s profile is a perfect match for the killer’s,” said Deputy Prosecutor Gardini as he skimmed Teresa’s report. He’d come down to Travenì as soon as he’d heard about the arrest and the kidnapped baby.
Teresa elected to say nothing for the time being, knowing that her own words in that report implied they had as good as solved the case.
Ebran knew how to set animal traps because his own father had taught him. He knew how to skin an animal and had been seen lurking around other people’s homes, spying on little girls and their families. He was an outcast. He had probably always nursed a deep frustration, exacerbated by poverty and by a physical disfigurement that he was now desperately trying to hide by keeping his hands beneath the table. Teresa suspected he must suffer from some form of psychosis, but she would need a full psychiatric evaluation to know for sure.
The boys who’d crashed their car in the woods had said he could be the stranger who had assaulted their friend. But it wasn’t a straightforward match: the stranger’s face had been painted, the clothes he’d been wearing had concealed his physical build, and the teenagers’ minds had been clouded by alcohol when they’d encountered him.
David Knauss hadn’t been able to hide his uncertainty or his disappointment when they’d shown him Ebran’s mug shot.
“These aren’t his eyes,” he’d said, though even he was aware that there was no way he could know for sure. He couldn’t recall the details, couldn’t clearly picture in his mind the moment he had—quite possibly—evaded death. But as Teresa had discovered when she’d spoken to him again, what really bothered him was something else: the realization that his attacker might not be the mythical warrior David had imagined him to be. She suspected the boy had developed a form of Stockholm syndrome. He was grateful to his assailant for having “brought him back to life” and felt indebted to him.
“Lucas Ebran’s profile matches the killer’s, but he is not the killer,” Gardini murmured as he read through Teresa’s concluding remarks, a look of dismay and consternation crossing his features.
“It’s not him. It’s clear. He’s nothing more than a misfit,” Teresa confirmed.
Ebran’s hands were disfigured by scars caused by the fire he’d started in his school when he was a teenager. That was why they hadn’t found his fingerprints in the house: he didn’t have any. The skin on the tips of his fingers was smooth and swollen, hardened by time and wear.
They had wasted time, and there was still no trace of the child. No one had seen the person who’d picked him up from the stroller and taken him away, though they had found a clue on the baby’s blanket: some white marks. The day had taken a turn for the worse when they’d heard the news that Abramo Viesel had died.
Teresa was looking at the millennial forest that surrounded the village.
“He doesn’t use the roads,” she noted. “So roadblocks are useless.”
“We’ll start searching the woods,” Gardini assured her.
Teresa closed her eyes and let her thoughts run their course. She could see stretching before her thousands of acres of forest, traversed with gorges and crevasses. That was where he was, with the baby boy. Not inside a house, not in Travenì.
Now what do I do?
She felt the shiver of a private fear. The parents and brother of the abducted child were in the room next door. Teresa had put off meeting them in person until she’d read their statements. But their presence in the building was like having a white-hot branding iron almost touching the skin. Even from a distance, she could feel the burn, and she worried it might compromise her ability to think clearly. The only thing worse than hunting a killer was hunting a child abductor.
“Teresa, are you all right?” Gardini called out to her.
He’s still alive, she told herself. She had to believe it, though she’d never in her life relied upon hope. She hardly noticed that her hand had come to rest on her stomach again, on the spot where she had, in her dream, felt life moving beneath her skin, and where her scar still stung sometimes. It wasn’t possible, and yet the bond that had been severed before it could come to life, now refused to break, defying logic, time, the laws of the universe.
She looked at Gardini.
“I need more men,” she said.
“You’ll get them.”
“And the army. We need to search the mountains.”
Gardini nodded.
“I’ll get right on it,” he assured her. “Let me give Ambrosini a call. And we’ll contact the district judge.”
Once she was alone again, Teresa took a deep breath. The next few hours were crucial.
Marini walked in. “I’ve got the maps. They show every mountain shelter this side of the border.”
He spread the papers across the table. Teresa didn’t need to look at them to know it would take the search parties several days to comb through the vast area they would have to cover.
They needed a clue that would steer the search in the right direction—otherwise it was like throwing a penny into the ocean and expecting to retrieve it with a fishing net.
“How many?” she asked.
“Just over a hundred.”
“What about the vacant ones? Let’s concentrate on those.”
“That’s most of them.”
“We need drones. See what they say back at headquarters, when they can send them down.”
“I’ll give them a call.”
They spoke as if all these questions were not quickly eroding their faith in what they had to do. But they both knew they had to set their misgivings aside. If even a single member of the team were to express any uncertainty about their chances of success, their doubt would spread like a disease and weaken the chain that was meant to stretch all the way across the valley and over the mountains, until it reached the child and brought him home. And Teresa needed every single link in that chain to hold.
She turned to Marini.
“We’ll find him,” she said.
He gave her a brisk, decisive nod. He understood.
Teresa picked up her diary. She had to keep taking notes, even though it felt like a hindrance sometimes—a waste of time, even. If she wanted to understand how her mind was deteriorating and at what rate, she had to be methodical about things, set herself rules and stick to them. It was only thanks to those notes that she’d managed to remember how she’d hurt her hand. But she refused to believe she could already be at the stage where she was forgetting her own life, and she desperately tried to convince herself that it was all down to how exhausted she was.
She held the notebook in her hands, her eyes scanning the last few things she’d written. They were little more than scribbles jotted down in the moments between wakefulness and sleep.
She couldn’t remember them. She had no memory of those words. It felt strange to read them now, as if they belonged to someone else who lived inside of her. But that person was trying to help her.
“Is something wrong?” Marini asked her.
“Many things, but not what’s in here,” she replied, feeling a smile forming on her face. Her heart was beating faster. For the first time, she did not feel scared of what was happening to her.
“The children,” she said. Those were the last words she’d written down before falling asleep.
“I don’t understand.”
She hadn’t either, at the beginning, but now she felt like she could see what had finally clicked in her mind right before she had fallen asleep.
“Looks like I’ve been working a few things out in my sleep,” she told him as she closed the diary. “The first victim is Diego Valent’s father. The second is Lucia Kravina’s mother. I imagine Diego and Lucia must be classmates.”
“There can’t be more than one class per grade, in Travenì. Do you think there’s a link? But the kid who was attacked in the forest isn’t connected.”
“Abramo Viesel was the janitor of the school. Diego told us he was mean to his friend.”
“The baby that’s been kidnapped has an older brother. His name is Mathias. He’s the same age as Diego and Lucia, too,” said Marini.
“A coincidence, perhaps? It could be, in a town this small.”
“On second thought, I suppose David Knauss also has a connection of sorts with the school. We saw him and those other boys outside the entrance; they almost ran some of the children over.”
That was true, though Teresa didn’t think it was the connection they were looking for.
“The attacker maimed the first, second, and fourth victim’s sense organs,” she noted. “Clearly his encounter with Knauss’s son was an accident. It wasn’t part of his vision.”
She went to the window, opened the notebook, then closed it again. Her mind was working frenetically.
“A serial killer can lie dormant for years. But then one day, he might get fired from a job, or feel abandoned by someone, or suffer some sort of humiliation—any of these things can trigger his homicidal fury. It’s never down to just a momentary loss of control,” she mused. “It’s always a process, but in this case it’s difficult to see it because the motive is not one we are used to but has a psychopathological component.”
“So maybe, in our killer’s case, we should figure out what it was that triggered his homicidal spree,” Marini reasoned.
Teresa turned to him, a surprised smile on her face.
“At long last you’re talking like a cop, Inspector,” she teased him. “Have you been studying?”
De Carli called out to them from the door.
“Superintendent, we have Lucia Kravina’s father. He tried to cross the border. They’re bringing him in now.”
Dante Kravina was a mountain lad with all the bad habits of a city boy. In his interrogation, he told Teresa that he ran away because of his prior drug dealing convictions. “I didn’t want to risk going to jail for a bit of dope,” he said—as if the fact that he’d left his daughter behind wasn’t a much more serious offense.
“Did you make Lucia clean the house to get rid of any traces of drugs?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“And you did the same yourself with your wife’s car.”
“Yes.”
“Weren’t you worried about her?”
He shrugged, his gaze empty.
“What could I have done?”
Plenty, thought Teresa. You could have gone looking for her, saved her having to wander in the forest alone and in shock. You could have looked after your daughter, protected her.
“Tell me about the man who came to your door that night,” she said instead.
“I was high. I didn’t really know what was going on. I saw that he was holding Melania’s necklace. I thought she must have been in an accident and then I thought of how there was some dope in the house and in the car. I had to get rid of it.”
“Do you think it could be someone you know? Someone with a score to settle, perhaps about some dope you haven’t paid off?” Teresa asked, purely out of habit.
“No, it’s got nothing to do with drugs. That man was . . . I don’t know how to put it. He looked like he came from another world.”
“Describe him.”
“I told you, I wasn’t myself. All I know is that he was pale, and he was staring at me with his eyes wide open. I’ve never seen a face like that; it had no expression at all. It was completely frozen, like the face of a dead person.”
Those words sparked something inside Teresa.
“Like a ghost?” she asked him.
“Yes. He looked like a ghost.”
Teresa thought back to all the people that populated this case. Their faces whirled in her mind now, paired to words that were slowly beginning to form an intelligible pattern. She replayed everything that had happened in the past few days, as if she were watching a film, and thought of the various characters involved, how, consciously or unwittingly, they were all interacting with each other in some way—and moving the story to its still unwritten epilogue.
The victims. The school. The community. The forest. The stranger with the painted face. And them. Teresa instructed De Carli to draw up the interrogation report and took Marini aside.
“His daughter Lucia is always talking about the ghost in the woods,” she said.
“Do you think she knows him?”
Teresa thought it went a lot further than that. She had finally discovered the link between the killer and the victims. It had nothing to do with motive, nor with a psychopathology of any sort. It was something she hadn’t come across before and could only describe, for now, as “pack behavior.”
“I think I know what all the victims have in common,” she said.
-55-
The child was crying. His wails were desperate and relentless, like those of a blackbird chick fallen from its nest. Featherless, wearing nothing more than his own skin, he kept his soft, pinkish beak wide open. Nothing could divert him from his mission. Though he was only a newborn, he instinctively knew that somewhere in the world his mother was doing exactly what he was doing—she was looking for him, and if he stopped crying, she would never find him. His tiny face was flushed with the effort and with the atavistic terror of being separated from that which had given him life.
The man was admiring the most remarkable battle for survival he had ever witnessed. He caressed the round, soft cheeks of the creature before him, touched the drops of water that fell from its eyes, and recognized something of himself in it. He removed his horned and bristled headdress and rubbed at his face until he’d scrubbed it clean of paint. The baby watched him, still sobbing, still inconsolable, but now with a spark of curiosity in its eyes.
He wrapped it in lambskin and held it against the warmth of his chest. Gently, he touched the baby’s hand and saw it open in response. Its tiny fingers wrapped around one of his own. For a creature so small, it had a fierce grip.
The child started shrieking again, and when the man copied it, it opened its eyes wide and stared at him. They exchanged sounds for a while, both wanting to know who the other really was.
Slowly, the child’s sobs subsided, and it was overcome by sleep. The man kept watch over it, listening to its breathing and to the little heart beating fast against his own.
For the first time in a long while, he was no longer alone.
-56-
Diego and Lucia were sitting side by side. Oliver was sitting to Diego’s right. Mathias stood between them and the door.
He’s the leader, Teresa thought. He was protecting them, putting himself between them and the unknown. He felt responsible for the whole group, even now that his little brother had been taken. He’d been crying, and perhaps he was ashamed of that, but he wasn’t going to renounce his role. Nearly all of them had suffered some kind of horrific trauma over the past few days, yet now that they had gathered together, they looked like they would cope somehow; they were hurting, but they weren’t lost.
