The Whisperer (15 page)

“But there must be something!” Goran pressed her. “We’re right about this.”

“I looked in every corner of that room and nothing attracted my attention.”

“It must be something obvious, you can’t have missed it!”

But Mila shook her head. Stern decided they would all go back to the place for a more accurate examination. Boris picked up the phone to tell the boarding school they were on their way, while Sarah Rosa instructed Krepp to join them as soon as possible to take prints.

It was at that moment that Mila had her little epiphany.

“That’s why I didn’t see it,” she announced, finding all the confidence that she seemed to have lost a little while before. “Whatever it is, it isn’t in that room anymore.”

When they got to the school, Debby’s classmates were gathered in the hall that was normally used for assemblies and the official award of diplomas. The walls were covered with carved mahogany. The severe faces of the teachers who had made the school illustrious over the years looked down on the scene from their gilded frames, their expressions frozen in the portraits that imprisoned them.

It was Mila who spoke. She tried to be as nice as she could because the girls were already scared enough. The headmistress had assured them all of complete impunity. And yet, from the fear that flickered across their faces, it was clear that they didn’t much trust her promise.

“We know that some of you visited Debby’s room after her death. I’m sure you did it mostly because you wanted to own a memory of your friend who died so tragically.”

As she said it, Mila met the eyes of the student she had surprised in the bathroom with her hands full of things. If that hadn’t happened, it would never have occurred to her to do what she was doing.

Sarah Rosa watched her from a corner of the room, certain that she wouldn’t get anything. But both Boris and Stern trusted her. Goran merely waited.

“I’d really rather not ask, but I know how fond you were of Debby. So I need you to bring those things to me here, now.”

Mila tried to be firm about her request.

“Please don’t forget anything, even the most insignificant object could turn out to be useful. We’re sure that among those things there’s a clue that our investigations have missed. I’m sure that each of you wants Debby’s murderer to be caught. And since I also know that none of you would risk being charged with removing evidence, I trust that you will do your duty.”

Mila had used that last threat, which was impossible given the young age of the girls, to stress the gravity of their actions. And also to give a small revenge to Debby, so little valued in life, but suddenly the focus of so much attention after her death just because of some ruthless looting.

Mila waited, gauging the length of the pause to give each of them the chance to think. Silence would be her best instrument of persuasion, and she knew they felt more awkward with each passing second. She noticed some girls swapping glances. None of them wanted to be the first, which was normal. Then a couple of them agreed with a gesture to leave the ranks, which they did almost simultaneously. Another five did the same. The rest remained motionless in their places.

Mila let another minute pass, studying the girls’ faces in search of an individualistic vulture who might have gone against the herd. No luck. She hoped the seven who had left were the ones responsible.

“Fine, the rest of you can go.”

The girls took their leave without delay, and ran off. Mila turned towards her colleagues and met Goran’s impassive eye. But suddenly he did something that caught her off guard: he winked. She wanted to smile at him, but she didn’t, because all eyes were fixed on her.

After about quarter of an hour, the seven girls came back to the hall. Each one brought several objects. They laid them down on the long table where the cloaked teachers usually sat during ceremonies. Then they waited for Mila and the others to examine the items.

Most of them were clothes and accessories, childish objects like dolls and cuddly toys. There was a pink MP3 player, a pair of sunglasses, some perfume, some bath salts, a makeup bag shaped like a ladybird, Debby’s red hat and a video game.

“I didn’t break it…”

Mila looked up at the chubby girl who had spoken. She was the youngest of them all, she couldn’t have been more than eight. She had long blond hair in a plait and sky-blue eyes barely holding back tears. The policewoman smiled to comfort her, then looked more closely at the console. Then she took it and passed it to Boris.

“What is it?”

He turned it around in his hands.

“It doesn’t look like a video game…”

He turned it on.

A red light started flashing on the screen, making a brief sound at regular intervals.

“I told you it was broken. The game doesn’t do anything,” the chubby girl hurried to explain.

Mila noticed that Boris had suddenly turned white.

“I know what this is…fuck.”

Hearing Boris’s swear word the chubby girl opened her eyes wide, incredulous and amused that someone could have desecrated that austere place.

But Boris didn’t even notice her, he was so intent on the working of the object in his hands.

“It’s a GPS receiver. Somewhere, someone is sending us a signal…”

T
he appeal to the family of the sixth little girl wasn’t bearing any fruit.

Most of the calls were from people expressing their sympathy and, in fact, merely blocking the lines. An anxious grandmother of five grandchildren had called seven times asking for “news of the poor little girl.” When the umpteenth call came in, one of the officers on duty asked her as politely as possible not to call back and, by way of reply, had been told to go to hell.

“If you try and tell them they’re not being helpful, they tell you you’re insensitive,” Goran observed when Stern told him what was happening.

They were in the mobile unit, tracing the GPS signal.

In front of them, the armored vehicles of the special unit, who were in the driver’s seat this time—as Roche had colorfully put it a little while earlier.

They still didn’t know where Albert was taking them. It could have been a trap. But Goran was of an entirely different opinion.

“He wants to show us something. Something he’s plainly very proud of.”

The GPS signal had been narrowed down to a vast area of several square kilometers. At that distance you couldn’t identify the transmitter. They would have to go there in person.

The tension in the mobile unit was palpable. Goran swapped a few words with Stern. Boris took out his gun to check its efficiency, then checked again that his bulletproof jacket fitted closely to his ribs. Mila looked out the window at the area close to the motorway junction, a tangle of bridges and tarmac tongues.

The GPS receiver had been given to the captain of the special unit, but on her computer screen Sarah Rosa was able to follow what their colleagues in the car ahead were seeing.

A voice announced via radio: “We’re getting close to it. The signal seems to be coming from a point a kilometer ahead of us. Over.”

They all leaned in to look.

“What kind of place is this?” Rosa wondered.

In the distance Mila saw a massive red brick building, made up of several interconnecting blocks arranged in the form of a cross. The style was the reinvented gothic of the 1930s, grim and severe, typical of the church-run buildings of the period. A bell tower emerged from one of the sides. Beside it, a church.

The armored vehicles drove in single file down the beaten-earth drive leading to the central body. Reaching the area in front of it, the men prepared to break into the building.

Mila got out with the others and looked up at the imposing facade, blackened by time. Above the door were some words in bas-relief.
Visitare Pupillos In Tribulatione Eorum Et Immaculatum Se Custodire Ab Hoc Saeculo.

“Help the orphans in their tribulation and remain uncontaminated by this world,” Goran translated for her.

It had once been an orphanage. Now it was closed.

The captain nodded and the operative units split up, entering the building by the side doors.

They waited for about a minute, then Mila and the others entered by the main door, along with the captain.

The first room was huge. Ahead of them were two interlinking stairways leading to the upper floors. A high window filtered a foggy light. The only owners of the place now were a few doves which, frightened by the alien presence, stirred and flapped their wings around the skylight, casting fleeting shadows on the ground. The building echoed with the noise of the boots of the men from the special units inspecting room after room.

“Empty!” they called each time a room was secured.

Taking in the unreal atmosphere, Mila looked round. Once again a boarding school was part of Albert’s plan. But very different from Debby Gordon’s exclusive institution.

“An orphanage. Here at least they had a home and a guaranteed education,” Stern remarked.

But Boris explained: “This is where they sent the ones who would never be adopted: the children of prisoners, and the orphans of parents who had killed themselves.”

They were all waiting for a revelation. Anything to break the spell of horror would have been welcome. As long as it finally revealed the reason that had brought them all there. The echo of the footsteps suddenly stopped. After a few seconds, a voice broke through on the radio.

“Sir, there’s something here…”

The GPS transmitter was in the basement. Mila found herself running in that direction with the others, through the school kitchens with their big iron cauldrons, then a vast refectory, with chairs and tables covered with blue Formica. She went down a narrow spiral staircase until she found herself in a wide, low-ceilinged room whose light came from a row of air vents. The floor was made of marble and sloped towards a central corridor where the drains appeared. The huge basins along the wall were also made of marble.

“This must have been the laundry,” said Stern.

The men from the special units had thrown up a cordon around the basins, keeping a good distance away so as not to contaminate the scene. One of them slipped off his helmet and knelt down to vomit. No one wanted to look.

Boris was the first to break through the barrier, and he stopped sharply, bringing a hand to his mouth. Sarah Rosa looked away. Stern said only, “May God forgive us…”

Dr. Gavila remained impassive. Then it was Mila’s turn.

Anneke
.

The body lay in a few centimeters of murky liquid.

Her complexion was waxy and already showed the first signs of post-mortem decay. And she was naked. In her right hand she gripped the GPS transmitter, still pulsing, an absurd ray of light in that square of death.

Anneke’s left arm had been severed as well, and its absence dislocated the posture of the torso. But it wasn’t that detail that disturbed them all, or the state of preservation of the corpse, or the fact of being confronted by the display of an innocent obscenity. The reaction had been provoked by something quite different.

The corpse was smiling
.

H
is name was Father Timothy. He looked about thirty-five. Soft, blond hair, parted at the side. And he was shivering.

He was the place’s sole inhabitant.

He lived in the priest’s house next to the little church: the only buildings in the vast complex that were still used. The rest had been abandoned years before.

“I’m here because the church is still consecrated,” the young priest explained. Even though Father Timothy now served mass exclusively for himself. “No one comes here. The edge of town is too far away, and the motorway has completely cut us off.”

He had been there for just six months. He had taken the place of a certain Father Rolf when the priest had retired and, obviously, he knew nothing about what had happened in the institute.

“I never set foot in there,” he admitted. “Why would I?”

Sarah Rosa and Mila had told him the reason for their raid. And what they had found there. When he had learned of the existence of Father Timothy, Goran had preferred to send the two of them to talk to him. Rosa pretended to take notes in a notebook, but it was obvious that she didn’t care in the slightest what the priest had to say. Mila tried to reassure him by telling him that no one expected anything from him, and that he wasn’t to blame for what had happened.

“That poor unfortunate child,” the priest had exclaimed, before bursting into tears. He was devastated.

“When you feel you’re ready, we’d like you to join us in the laundry,” said Sarah Rosa, reigniting his dismay.

“Why?”

“Because we might need to ask you some questions about the location: this place is like a maze.”

“But I just told you I’ve hardly ever been in there, and I don’t think—”

Mila interrupted him: “It’ll only take a few minutes, and we’ll have removed the corpse.”

She made sure that she reassured him on this point, because she had worked out that Father Timothy didn’t want the image of the tortured body of a child to be imprinted on his memory. After all, he had to keep on living in that gloomy place.

“As you wish,” he finally agreed, with a nod of his head.

He walked them to the door, repeating his promise to remain available.

Returning to the others, Rosa deliberately remained a few steps ahead of Mila, to stress the distance that existed between them. At any other time, Mila would have reacted to the provocation. But now she was part of a team and had to respect different rules if she wanted to take her work to its conclusion.

I’ll sort you out afterwards,
Mila brooded.

But as she was formulating that thought she realized she had taken it for granted that there would be an end. That in some way they would put the horror behind them.

It’s part of human nature,
she thought. You’ve got to carry on with your own life. The dead would be buried, and over time everything would be absorbed. All that remained would be a vague memory in their souls, the waste left by an inevitable process of self-preservation.

For everyone. But not for her, because that very evening would render that memory indelible.

It’s possible to get lots of information from the scene of the crime, both about the dynamic of events and the personality of the murderer.

While in the case of the first corpse, Bermann’s car couldn’t be considered a proper crime scene, in the case of the second you could work out a lot about Albert.

In spite of Sarah Rosa’s attempts to keep her out of the meeting, Mila had finally won a place in that chain of energy—as she had christened the team’s gathering after the finding of Debby’s body—and now even Boris and Stern thought she was one of them.

Once they had dismissed the special forces officers, Goran and his men had taken over the laundry.

The scene had been frozen by halogen lights planted on four tripods and connected to a generator, since there was no electricity in the building.

They hadn’t found anything yet. Dr. Chang was already at work on the corpse, however. He had brought a strange piece of equipment in a little case, consisting of test tubes, chemical reagents and a microscope. Right now he was taking a sample of the murky water in which the corpse was partially immersed. Soon Krepp would be coming too, for the prints.

They had about half an hour before leaving the field open to the scientists.

“Obviously we aren’t looking at a primary crime scene,” Goran began, meaning that this was a secondary scene because the death of the child had clearly happened elsewhere. In the case of serial killers, the place where the victims are found is much more important than the place where they were killed. Because, while the killing is always an act that the murderer reserves for himself, everything that comes afterwards becomes a way of sharing the experience. Through the corpse of the victim, the murderer establishes a kind of communication with the investigators.

From that point of view, Albert was certainly no slouch.

“We have to read the scene. Understand the message that it contains, and who it’s meant for. Who’d like to start? I should remind you that no opinion will be rejected out of hand, so please feel free to say what’s going through your mind.”

No one wanted to go first. There were too many doubts piling up in their heads.

“Maybe our man spent his childhood in this institute. Maybe this is where his hatred, his rancor come from. We should look through the archives.”

“Frankly, Mila, I don’t think Albert is trying to give us information about himself.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think he wants to be caught…at least for now. After all, we’ve only found the second corpse.”

“I could be wrong, but don’t serial killers sometimes want to be caught by the police because they can’t stop killing?”

“That’s bollocks,” said Sarah Rosa with her usual arrogance.

And Goran added: “It’s true that often the ultimate aspiration of a serial killer is to be stopped. Not because he can’t control himself, but because when he’s captured he can finally come out into the open. Especially if he has a narcissistic personality, he wants to be recognized for the greatness of his work. And while his identity remains a mystery, he can’t reach his goal.”

Mila nodded, but she wasn’t entirely convinced. Goran noticed, and turned to the others.

“Perhaps we should recapitulate how we’re going to go about reconstructing the relationship that exists between the crime scene and the serial killer’s organizational behavior.”

This was a lesson for Mila’s benefit. But she wasn’t annoyed about it. It was a way of putting her on a par with the others. And from Boris and Stern’s reaction, it seriously looked as if they didn’t want her to be left behind.

It was the oldest of the officers who spoke. He did so without looking directly at Mila, not wanting to embarrass her.

“According to the state of the crime scene, we subdivide serial killers into two major categories: ‘disorganized’ and ‘organized.’”

Boris continued: “A member of the first group is, as you might think, disorganized in all aspects of his own life. He is an individual who has failed in his human contacts. He is reclusive. His intelligence is lower than the average, he has a limited education and pursues a job that doesn’t require any particular skill. He isn’t sexually competent. From this point of view he has only had hasty and clumsy experiences.”

Goran continued: “Usually he’s a person who was severely disciplined in childhood. For that reason, many criminologists maintain that he tends to inflict the same amount of pain and suffering on his victims that he received as a child. For that reason, he hides a feeling of rage and hostility that isn’t necessarily manifested externally to the people he normally consorts with.”

“The disorganized serial killer doesn’t plan: he acts spontaneously,” said Rosa, who didn’t like to be excluded.

And Goran clarified: “The lack of organization of the crime makes the killer anxious at the moment of its perpetration. For that reason he tends to act close to places familiar to him, places where he feels at ease. Anxiety and the fact that he doesn’t travel far lead him to commit errors, for example leaving clues that often betray him.”

“His victims, generally speaking, are just people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he kills because that is the only way he knows of having relationships with other people,” Stern concluded.

“And how does the organized one behave?” asked Mila.

“Well, first of all he’s very cunning,” said Goran. “It can be extremely hard to identify him because of his perfect disguise: he looks like a normal, law-abiding individual. He has a high IQ. He is good at his work. He often occupies an important position within the community that he lives in. He didn’t suffer any particular traumas in childhood. He has a family that loves him. He is sexually competent and has no problems getting on with the opposite sex. He just kills for pure pleasure.”

This last assertion made Mila shiver. She was not the only one to be struck by these words because, for the first time, Chang took his eyes away from his microscope to look at them. Perhaps he too was wondering how a human being can derive satisfaction from the pain he inflicts on his fellow man.

“He’s a predator. He selects his victims accurately, generally looking for them in places far from where he lives. He is astute and prudent. He is capable of predicting the development of the investigations into him, thus anticipating the movements of the investigators. That’s why it’s hard to catch him: he learns from experience. The organized killer tails, waits and kills. His actions can be planned out for days, or weeks. He chooses his victim with the greatest care. He observes them. He slips into their lives, collecting information and carefully recording their habits. He’s constantly trying to find a contact, faking certain types of behavior or certain affinities to win their trust. To gain control over them, he prefers words to physical force. His work is one of
seduction
.”

Mila turned to look at the spectacle of death that had been staged in the room. Then she said: “His crime scene will always be clean. Because his watchword is ‘control.’”

Goran nodded. “You seem to have given us a portrait of Albert.”

Boris and Stern smiled at her. Sarah Rosa carefully avoided her eye and pretended to look at her watch, snorting at this pointless waste of time.

“Gentlemen, ladies, we have some information…”

The silent member of that little assembly had spoken: Chang rose to his feet, holding a slide that he had just taken from the eye of his microscope.

“What is it, Chang?” Dr. Gavila asked impatiently.

But the legal examiner wanted to savor the moment. His eye burned with the light of a small triumph.

“When I saw the body, I wondered how it could have been submerged in those two inches of water…”

“We’re in a laundry,” said Boris, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Yes, but like the electrical system in this building, the water supply hasn’t worked for years.”

The revelation took them all by surprise. Especially Goran.

“So what’s that liquid?”

“Brace yourself, doctor…it’s
tears
.”