The Whisperer (14 page)

In the middle of the room, five chairs arranged in a circle.

The
Thinking Room
.

Goran noticed the way Mila glanced at the sparse furniture and immediately explained: “It helps us to focus. We have to concentrate on what we’ve got. I’ve arranged everything according to a method that seemed right to me. But as I always say, if you don’t like it you can change it. Put them wherever you want. In this room we’re free to do whatever comes to mind. The chairs are a small concession, but coffee and the toilet will be a special reward, so we’ve got to deserve them.”

“Perfect,” said Mila. “What do we have to do?”

Goran clapped his hands once and pointed to the board where he had already started to jot down the characteristics of their serial murderer. “We have to understand Albert’s personality. Each time we discover a new detail about him, we’ll write it down here…Can you imagine what goes into the heads of serial killers, and try to think the way they do?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, forget that; it’s nonsense. You can’t. Our man Albert has an intimate justification for what he does, perfectly structured in his psyche. It’s a process constructed through years of experiences, of traumas or fantasies. That’s why we mustn’t try and imagine what he’s going to do, but force ourselves to understand
how
he came to do what he’s done. Hoping to get to him that way.”

Mila thought that in any case the path of clues traced by the killer had been interrupted by the Bermann discovery.

“He’s going to make us find another corpse.”

“That’s what I think too, Stern. But at the moment there’s something missing, don’t you think?”

“What?” asked Boris who, like the others, still didn’t understand where the criminologist was taking things. But Goran Gavila wasn’t a man for easy, direct answers. He preferred to reason with them up to a certain point and allow the rest to reconstruct itself.

“A serial killer moves in a world of symbols. He treads an esoteric path, begun many years before in the depths of his heart, and which he now pursues in the real world. The abducted children are only a way of reaching a destination, a goal.”

“It’s a search for happiness,” said Mila.

Goran looked at her. “Exactly. Albert is looking for a kind of payment, a retribution not only for
what he does,
but above all for
what he is
. His nature suggests an impulse to him, and he’s just following it. And with what he does he’s also trying to communicate something to us…”

That was what was missing. A sign was missing. Something that would take them
beyond
the exploration of Albert’s very personal world.

Sarah Rosa spoke: “There were no clues on the corpse of the first child.”

“That’s a reasonable observation,” Goran agreed. “In the literature on serial killers—including the film versions—it’s well-known that the serial killer always tends to “trace” his own journey, leaving investigators with some trails to follow…but Albert hasn’t done that.”

“Or else he has and we haven’t noticed.”

“Perhaps because we’re not able to read the signs,” Goran conceded. “We probably don’t know enough yet. That’s why the time has come to reconstruct the
stages
…”

There were five stages that criminologists used to mark out the action of serial murderers. The starting point is the assumption that the serial killer isn’t born that way, but passively accumulates experiences while incubating the homicidal personality that will later flow into violence.

The first stage of this process is “fantasy.”

“What is Albert’s fantasy?” Stern asked as he slipped his umpteenth mint into his mouth. “What fascinates him?”

“It’s the challenge that fascinates him,” said Mila.

“Maybe he was, or felt he was, underestimated for a long time. Now he wants to demonstrate to us that he’s better than the others…and better than us.”

“But Albert has gone further: he’s planned every move, predicting our reaction. He’s in ‘control.’ That’s what he’s telling us: he knows himself very well, but he knows us well too,” said Goran. “This phase is in the past.”

The second stage is “organization” or “planning.” When the fantasy matures, he moves on to an executive phase, which inevitably began with the choice of the victim.

“We already know that he doesn’t choose the children, but the families. The parents are his real target, the ones who wanted only one child. He wants to punish them for their selfishness…The symbolism of the victim isn’t apparent here. The girls are all different from one another, they’re different ages, although not very far apart. Physically they don’t have any features in common, like blond hair or freckles, for example.”

“That’s why he doesn’t touch them,” said Boris. “He’s not interested in them in that way.”

“Why girls, then, and not boys too?” Mila asked.

No one could answer the question. Goran nodded, pondering the detail.

“That’s occurred to me, too. But the problem is that we don’t know where his fantasy originated. The explanation is often much more banal than we can imagine. It could be because he was humiliated by a girl at school, who knows…It would be very interesting to know the answer. But there are no more clues, so we have to make do with what we’ve got.”

Mila was still convinced that the criminologist was annoyed with her. It was as if he were somehow frustrated that she didn’t know all the answers.

The third phase is “deception.”

“How are the victims lured away? What trick does Albert use to abduct them?”

“Debby, out of school. Anneke, in the woods where she’d gone on her mountain bike.”

“He took Sabine from a merry-go-round, from under everyone’s noses,” said Stern.

“Because everyone was looking only at their own children,” added Rosa with a sharp edge to her voice. “People don’t give a damn, that’s the truth of it.”

“At any rate he did it in front of lots of people. He’s tremendously skillful, the bastard!”

Goran nodded to Stern to calm down; he didn’t want his anger to take the upper hand.

“He abducted the first two in isolated places. They were a kind of dress rehearsal. When he became confident, he took Sabine.”

“And with her he raised the level of the challenge.”

“Let’s not forget that no one was looking for him at that time: it was only with Sabine that the disappearances were linked and the fear began…”

“Yes, but the fact remains that Albert managed to take her in front of her parents. He made her disappear as if in a conjuring trick. And I’m not convinced, as Rosa says, that the people there didn’t care…he tricked
those
people as well.”

“Well done, Stern, that’s what we’ve got to work on,” said Goran. “How did Albert do that?”

“Got it: he’s invisible!”

Boris’s joke got a brief smile from the others. But for Gavila it contained a grain of truth.

“That tells us that he’s like an ordinary man, that he has excellent camouflage qualities: he looked just like any other dad when he slipped Sabine off the merry-go-round horse to take her away. The whole thing taking what, four seconds?”

“He got away immediately, mingling with the crowd.”

“And the girl didn’t cry? She didn’t protest?” Boris snorted with disbelief.

“Do you know lots of seven-year-olds who don’t throw tantrums on merry-go-rounds?” asked Mila.

“Even if she cried, it looked like a perfectly normal scene to everyone there,” said Goran, picking up the thread of the discussion. “Then Melissa came…”

“There was already a state of high alert. She had been given a curfew, but she wanted to go out anyway, to meet her friends at the bowling alley.”

Stern got up from his chair and walked over to Melissa’s smiling photograph on the wall. The picture had been taken from the school yearbook. Even though she was the oldest, her still immature physique had preserved its childhood features, and she was not very tall. Soon she would have crossed the threshold of puberty, her body would have revealed unexpected softnesses and the boys would finally have noticed her. For now, the caption beside the yearbook photograph only praised her gifts as an athlete and her involvement with the student newspaper as chief editor. Her dream was to become a reporter, and it would never come true.

“Albert was waiting for her. The bastard…”

Mila looked at him: the special agent seemed upset by his own words.

“But he abducted Caroline from her bed, in her house.”

“All calculated…”

Goran walked over to the board, took a pen and began quickly jotting down some points.

“The first two he simply whisks away. The fact that dozens of children run away from home every day because they got a bad mark or argued with their parents works in his favor. So there’s nothing to link the two disappearances…The third must clearly look like an abduction, so that the alarm bells ring…In the case of the fourth, he already knew that Melissa wouldn’t have resisted the impulse to go and celebrate with her friends…And finally, for the fifth, he had spent a long time studying the places and habits of the family so that he could enter their house undisturbed…What do we deduce from that?”

“That he is using sophisticated forms of deception. Aimed less at the victims than their guardians: their parents, or the forces of law and order,” said Mila. “You don’t need stage directions to win the trust of little girls: you take them away by force, and that’s it.”

Mila remembered that Ted Bundy had worn a fake plaster to inspire trust in the students that he lured away. It was a way of seeming vulnerable in their eyes. He asked them to help him carry heavy objects and persuaded them into his VW Beetle. They all noticed too late that there was no handle on their side…

When Goran had finished writing, he announced the fourth stage. The “killing.”

“There’s a ritual in the bringing of death that the serial killer repeats every time. He can perfect it over time, but broadly it remains the same. It’s his trademark. And every ritual is accompanied by a particular symbolism.”

“For now we’ve got six arms and one corpse. He kills them by cleanly severing the limb, apart from the last one, as we know,” added Sarah Rosa.

Boris picked up the pathologist’s report. “Chang says he killed them all immediately after abducting them.”

“Why such a hurry?” Stern wondered.

“Because he isn’t interested in the girls, so there was no point in keeping them alive.”

“He doesn’t see them as human beings,” Mila broke in. “For Albert they’re just objects.”

Even number six,
they all thought. But no one had the courage to say so. It was plain that Albert didn’t care whether she suffered or not. She just had to stay alive until he had achieved his goal.

The last stage is the “arrangement of the remains.”

“First the graveyard of arms, then Albert puts a corpse in the boot of a pedophile’s car. Is he sending us a message?”

Goran looked quizzically at the others.

“He’s telling us that he isn’t like Alexander Bermann,” said Sarah Rosa. “In fact, he might be trying to suggest to us that he was a victim of abuse when he was young. It’s as if he was saying, ‘Look, I’m the way I am because someone turned me into a monster!’”

Stern shook his head. “He enjoys challenging us, giving us a show. But today the first pages of the newspapers deal only with Bermann. I doubt that he wants to share the glory with anyone else. He didn’t choose a pedophile for revenge, he must have had other motives…”

“There’s another thing that I find curious…” Goran was recalling the autopsy he had witnessed. “He washed and rearranged Debby Gordon’s body, dressing her in her own clothes.”

He made her pretty for Bermann,
thought Mila.

“We don’t know whether he did this with all of them, and whether it has become part of his ritual. But it’s strange…”

The strangeness to which Dr. Gavila was referring—and Mila, even though she wasn’t an expert, knew this very well—was that serial killers often take something away from their victims. A fetish, or a souvenir, to relive the experience in private.

Owning the object is the equivalent, for them, of owning the person.

“He didn’t take anything from Debby Gordon.”

As soon as Goran had uttered the words, Mila suddenly remembered the key dangling from Debby’s bracelet, which opened the tin box.

“That son of a bitch…” she exclaimed, almost without noticing. Once again, she was suddenly the center of attention.

“Do you want to tell us as well?”

Mila looked up at Goran. “When I was in Debby’s room at the boarding school, I found a tin box hidden under her mattress: I thought her diary would be in it, but it wasn’t.”

“So?” Rosa asked smugly.

“The box was closed with a padlock. The key was on Debby’s wrist, so it was natural to think that if only she could open it, the diary didn’t really exist…but I was wrong: the diary should have been there.”

Boris leapt to his feet. “It
was
there! The bastard went to the girl’s room!”

“Why would he have taken such a risk?” objected Sarah Rosa, who didn’t want to say Mila was right.

“Because he always takes risks. It excites him,” Goran explained.

“But there’s another reason too,” added Mila, feeling more and more confident about her theory. “I noticed that some photographs had disappeared from the walls: they probably showed Debby with child number six. He wants to keep us from finding out who she is at all costs!”

“That’s why he took the diary away too…and he closed the box with the padlock again…Why?” Stern was troubled.

But for Boris it was all clear. “Don’t you get it? The diary has disappeared but the box is locked, and the key is still on Debby’s wrist…He’s telling us: ‘Only I could have taken it.’”

“Why does he want us to know?”

“Because he has left us with something…something for us!”

The “sign” that they were looking for.

Once again the Thinking Room had borne fruit.

The criminologist turned to Mila: “You’ve been there, you’ve seen what there was in that room…”

She tried to concentrate, but she couldn’t think of anything that rang a bell.