The Lost Girls of Rome (7 page)

He knew for certain that he had been there and that Devok, his best friend, the person who would have done anything for him, had been there, too. Devok had struck him as afraid and confused. He could not have said why, but it must have been something pretty dire. He remembered a sense of danger. Perhaps Devok had been trying to warn him.

But they had not been alone. There was a third person with them.

He was still an indistinct shadow. The threat came from him. It was a man, of that he was certain. But Marcus did not know who he was. Why was he there? He had a gun with him, and at a certain point he had taken it out and opened fire.

Devok had been hit. He had fallen, in slow motion. The eyes that had stared at him during the fall were already empty. His hands pressed to his chest, at the level of his heart. Gouts of black blood between his fingers.

There had been a second shot. And almost simultaneously, he had seen a flash. The bullet had hit him. He had distinctly felt the crack, the bone shattering, that foreign body penetrating his brain like a finger, the blood oozing, hot and oily, from the wound.

That black hole in his head had sucked everything out. His past, his identity, his best friend. But above all, his enemy’s face.

Because what really tormented Marcus was his inability to remember the appearance of the person who had shot him.

Paradoxically, if he wanted to find him he had to avoid looking for him, because in order to see that justice was done it was necessary for him to go back to being the Marcus he once was. And, to succeed in that, he couldn’t allow himself to think of what had happened to Devok. He had to start over from the beginning, and find himself again.

And the only way was to find Lara.

Shattered windows
. He set aside the information and thought again about Clemente’s last words. ‘From now on, you’re on your own.’ There were occasions when he doubted that there was anyone else apart from the two of them. When Clemente had found him in that hospital bed – half dead and deprived of memory – and had revealed to him who he was, he hadn’t believed him. It had taken time to get used to the idea.

‘Dogs are colour blind,’ he repeated, to convince himself that it was all true. Then he picked up the file on Jeremiah Smith –
c.g. 97-95-6
– sat down on the bed and started studying the contents in search of anything that might lead him to the missing student.

He started with the potted biography of the killer. Jeremiah was fifty years old and unmarried. He came from a well-to-do middle-class family. His mother was Italian and his father English, both of them now dead. They had owned five draper’s shops in the city, but had given up their commercial activities some time in the 1980s. Jeremiah was an only child, and had no close relatives. Having been provided with a respectable income, he had never worked. At this point, information about him petered out. The last two lines of the profile reported laconically that he lived in complete isolation in his villa in the hills outside Rome.

Jeremiah Smith struck Marcus as a fairly unremarkable person. Nevertheless, all the conditions were there for him to become what he was. His solitude, his emotional immaturity, and his inability to relate to his fellow men all worked against any desire he might harbour to have someone near him.

You knew that the only way to get a woman’s attention was to kidnap her and keep her tied up, didn’t you? Of course you did. What were you trying to gain, what was your purpose? You didn’t take them to have sex with them. You didn’t rape them, and you didn’t torture them.

What you wanted from them was a sense of family.

These were attempts at forced cohabitation. You tried to make things work, to love them like a good little husband, but they were too scared to give you anything in return. You kept trying to be with them, but after a month you realised it wasn’t possible. You realised that it was a sick, twisted kind of relationship, and that it existed entirely in your mind. And then – let’s admit it – you were eager to put a knife to their throats. So in the end you killed them. But all the same, what you were searching for was love.

However coherent the idea might be, most people would have found it intolerable. Marcus, on the other hand, had not only grasped it but had even managed to accept it. He asked himself why, but couldn’t give himself an answer. Was that also part of his talent? Sometimes, it scared him.

He went on to analyse Jeremiah’s modus operandi. He had worked undisturbed for six years, killing four victims. Each had been followed by a lull, during which the memory of the violence perpetrated was sufficient for the murderer to keep the urge to kill again under control. When this beneficial effect faded, he started to hatch a new fantasy that led to a new kidnapping. It wasn’t a plan, it was a genuine physiological process.

Jeremiah’s victims were young women, aged between seventeen and twenty-eight. He sought them out in broad daylight. He approached them on some pretext or other, offered to buy them a drink, then put a drug in it: GHB, the date-rape drug. Once they were in a dazed state, it was easy to persuade them to follow him.

But why did the girls agree to have a drink with him?

That was what Marcus found strange. Someone like Jeremiah – a middle-aged man, far from handsome – should have made his victims suspicious of his real intentions. And yet the girls let him approach them.

They trusted him.

Perhaps he had offered them money or an opportunity of some kind. One of the techniques of luring women – much favoured by perverts and their kind – was to promise them a chance to earn some easy money, or to take part in a beauty contest, or to audition for a part in a film or a television programme. But such stratagems required a definite ability to socialise. That didn’t tally with what was known of Jeremiah, who was antisocial, a hermit.

How did you trick them?

And why had nobody noticed him as he was approaching them? Before Lara, four young women had been abducted in public places and there had not been a single witness. And yet his courting of these women must have taken time. But maybe the question already contained the answer: Jeremiah Smith was so insignificant in other people’s eyes as to be invisible.

You moved among them undisturbed. But you felt strong, because nobody could see you.

He thought again of the words on Jeremiah’s chest.
Kill me
. ‘It’s as if he’s telling us to look beyond appearances,’ he had said to Clemente. ‘The truth is written on the skin, it’s within everyone’s reach, hidden and yet close.’

You were like a cockroach scuttling across the floor during a party: nobody notices it, nobody’s interested. All it has to do is take care not to be crushed. And you became good at that. But with Lara you decided to change. You took her from her own apartment, from her own bed.

Just thinking again about Lara, Marcus was assailed by a series of painful questions. Where was she now? Was she still alive? And if she was, what was she feeling? Was there water or food in her prison? How much longer could she hold out? Was she conscious or drugged? Was she injured? Had her captor tied her up?

Marcus cleared his head of these emotional distractions. He needed to remain lucid, detached. Because there had to be a reason why Jeremiah Smith had radically modified his own modus operandi when it came to Lara. Referring to Jeremiah, Clemente had expounded the theory that some serial killers change their methods
as they go along, adding elements that increase their pleasure. So the abduction of the student could be considered a kind of variation on a theme. But Marcus didn’t believe that: the change had been too drastic, too sudden.

Maybe Jeremiah had tired of resorting to that complex chain of deceptions to reach his goal. Or perhaps he knew that little game wouldn’t work for much longer. One of the girls might have heard about the previous victims and could have unmasked him. He was becoming famous. The risk was increasing exponentially.

No. That’s not why you modified your tactics. What makes Lara different from the others?

What complicated things was the fact that the four girls who had preceded her had nothing in common: neither their ages nor their looks. Jeremiah didn’t seem to have a specific taste in women. The word that came to Marcus’s mind was random. He had trusted to fate in choosing them, otherwise they would all have resembled one another. The more he looked at the photographs of the murdered women, the more convinced he was that the killer had chosen them simply because they were in an exposed position, which made them easier to approach. That was why he had taken them in broad daylight from public places. But he didn’t know them.

Lara, though, was
special
. Jeremiah couldn’t risk losing her. That was why he had taken her from her own home and, above all, why he had acted at night.

For a moment Marcus put down the file, got up from the camp bed, and went to the window. When evening fell, the uneven roofs of Rome were a turbulent sea of shadows. It was the time of day he preferred. A strange calm took possession of him, and he felt at peace. Thanks to this calm, Marcus realised where he was going wrong. He had visited Lara’s apartment in daylight. But he ought to do it in the dark, because that was how her abductor had worked.

If he wanted to understand the man’s mental processes, he had to reproduce the exact conditions in which Jeremiah had acted.

Marcus picked up his raincoat and rushed out of the attic. He had to go back to the building in the Via dei Coronari.

The hunter knew the value of time. His prime gift was patience. He knew how to wait, and in the meantime he prepared for the moment, savouring the anticipation of victory.

A sudden breeze lifted the tablecloth, making the glasses tinkle on the next table. The hunter lifted his pastis to his lips, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. He watched the cars pass in front of the bistro. The hurrying pedestrians paid no attention to him.

He was wearing a blue suit with a blue shirt and tie, loosened in such a way as to make him look like an office worker stopping off for a drink on the way home. Knowing that solitary people attract attention, he had a small paper shopping bag on the seat next to him. A baguette, a clump of parsley and a tube of coloured sweets stuck out from the top of it. He would be taken for a family man. He was even wearing a wedding ring.

But he didn’t have anyone.

Over the years he had reduced his needs to a minimum, and led a frugal life. He thought of himself as an ascetic. He had quashed every aspiration that was not useful to his one purpose, avoiding the distraction of desire. He needed only one thing.

His prey.

After all that time spent following him in vain, he had received information that suggested he was in Paris. Without waiting for confirmation, he had moved here himself. He needed to know his prey’s new territory. He had to see what his prey saw, walk the same streets, experience the curious sensation that he might meet him at any moment, even if he didn’t recognise him. He needed to know that they were both under the same sky. This excited him, made him think that sooner or later he would manage to flush him out.

To keep a low profile, he had changed accommodation every three weeks, always choosing smaller hotels or rented rooms, covering an ever broader area of the city.

For a while now he had been staying at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, in the sixth arrondissement. In his room he had piles of newspapers that he had accumulated during that long period, all underlined feverishly in search of a clue – however remote – that might open a breach in that terrible wall of darkness and silence.

He had been in Paris for almost nine months, but had not made any progress. His confidence had wavered. But then, unexpectedly, the event he had been waiting for occurred. A sign. A clue that he alone could decipher. He had never given up, he had kept to the rules he had set himself, and now he was rewarded.

Twenty-four hours earlier, workers digging on a building site in the Rue Malmaison in Bagnolet had uncovered a body.

Male, aged around thirty, no clothes or personal objects. Death was believed to have occurred over a year earlier. While waiting for the results of the autopsy, nobody had asked too many questions. Given the amount of time that had elapsed, the police regarded it as a cold case. Any evidence – if there had ever been any – was now faded or compromised.

The fact that the discovery had been made on the outskirts of the city suggested a settling of accounts between drug gangs. In order not to draw the attention of the police, the perpetrators had taken the precaution of getting rid of the body.

The police were so used to that kind of thing, it didn’t get them too excited. Even the one truly macabre aspect of the case, which should have set alarm bells ringing, hadn’t aroused any suspicions.

The body didn’t have a face.

It had not been an act of pure cruelty, or the final outrage visited on an enemy. All the muscles and bones of the face had been meticulously broken. Anyone taking so much care must have had a reason.

That was the kind of detail the hunter was always on the lookout for.

Since the day he had arrived in Paris, he had kept an eye on the bodies arriving at the morgues of the large hospitals. That was how he had learned of this discovery. An hour later, he had stolen a white coat and broken into the cold room of the Saint-Antoine hospital.
With a pad, he had taken the corpse’s fingerprints. Back at the hotel he had scanned them and then hacked into the government databases. The hunter knew that every time a piece of information is put on the internet, it can’t be removed. It’s like the human mind: all it takes is one detail to reawaken the synapses and bring back things we thought we had forgotten.

The web never forgets.

The hunter had sat in the dark, waiting for the response, praying and thinking again about how he had got here. Seven years had passed since the first disfigured corpse in Memphis. That had been followed by Buenos Aires, Toronto and Panama. Then Europe: Turin, Vienna, Budapest. And finally, Paris.