The Whisperer (37 page)

Department of Behavioral Sciences,
25 February

V
incent Clarisso was Albert. Or was he?

He had been out of jail for less than two months, after serving the remainder of a sentence for armed robbery.

Once he was free, he had started his plan.

No record of violent crime. No symptom of mental illness. Nothing to mark him out as a potential serial killer.

The armed robbery had been a “setback,” according to the lawyers who had defended Vincent in that trial. The stupidity of a young man with a serious codeine dependency. Clarisso came from a good bourgeois family, his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher. He had studied, graduating as a nurse. He had worked for a while in a hospital, as a theater nurse. It was probably there that he had acquired the knowledge necessary to keep Sandra alive after amputating her arm.

Gavila’s team’s hypothesis that Albert might be a doctor was not far from the truth.

Vincent Clarisso had allowed all those experiences to settle in an embryonic layer of his personality, before going on to become a monster.

But Mila didn’t believe it.

“It’s not him,” she went on repeating to herself as her taxi reached the Federal Police building.

After learning the news from the TV, Goran had spent about twenty minutes on the phone to Stern, who had told him of the latest developments. The criminologist had paced up and down the hotel room, beneath Mila’s anxious gaze. Then they had parted. He had called Mrs. Runa to ask her to stay with Tommy that night, and had immediately hurried to the place where Sandra had been found. Mila would have liked to go with him, but her presence would no longer have been justifiable. So they had arranged to meet later, at the Department of Behavioral Sciences.

It was after midnight, but the city was one big snarl-up. People were pouring into the streets, heedless of the rain, to celebrate the end of a nightmare. It was like the middle of a New Year’s party, with car horns sounding and everyone hugging everyone else. To complicate the traffic situation there were roadblocks to intercept any possible fleeing accomplices of Clarisso, but also to keep onlookers away from the area where the story’s epilogue had taken place.

As the taxi proceeded at a walking pace, Mila was able to hear a new report on the radio. Terence Mosca was the man of the hour. Solving the case had been a stroke of luck. But, as often happened, the only one to benefit directly had been the man in charge of operations.

Tired of waiting for the line of cars to move, she decided to confront the pelting rain and got out of the taxi. The Federal Police building was a few blocks away, so she had pulled up the hood of her parka and continued on foot, immersed in her reflections.

The figure of Vincent Clarisso didn’t coincide with the profile of Albert drawn up by Gavila.

According to the criminologist, their man had used the corpses of the six little girls as a kind of pointer. He had put them in specific places to reveal horrors that had never come to light, but of which he himself was aware. They had hypothesized that he was a secret associate of those criminals, and that they had all met him in the course of their lives.

They’re wolves. And wolves often hunt in packs. Every pack has a chief. And Albert is telling us this: he’s their leader,
Goran had asserted.

Mila had become even more convinced that Vincent wasn’t Albert when she had heard the serial killer’s age: thirty. Too young to have known Ronald Dermis as a boy in the orphanage, or indeed Joseph B. Rockford—in fact she and the team had deduced that he must be between the ages of fifty and sixty. And nor did he resemble the description given by Nicla after she saw him in the mind of the billionaire.

And, as she walked through the rain, Mila found something else that justified her skepticism: Clarisso was in jail when Feldher was slaughtering Yvonne Gress and her children in the villa in Capo Alto, so he couldn’t have witnessed the massacre, leaving his outline in blood on the wall!

It’s not him, they’re making a mistake. But Goran will have noticed, and he’s bound to be explaining it to them now
.

She reached Federal Police headquarters and became aware of a certain euphoria in the corridors. The officers were slapping one another on the back, many of them were returning from the crime scene still wearing their swat team uniforms and passing on the latest news. Then the report passed from mouth to mouth, increasingly enriched by new details.

Mila was intercepted by an officer who told her that Chief Inspector Roche urgently wanted to see her.

“Me?” she asked, startled.

“Yes, he’s waiting for you in his office.”

As she climbed the stairs, she thought that Roche had summoned her because they had noticed that something didn’t square with the reconstruction of events. Perhaps all that excitement that she could see around the place would soon settle or subside.

There were only a few plainclothes officers in the Department of Behavioral Sciences, and none of them were celebrating. The atmosphere was the same as any working day, except that it was nighttime and they were all still at work.

She had had to wait for a long time before Roche’s secretary called her into his office. Outside the door, Mila had been able to catch some of the words of the chief inspector, who was probably having a telephone conversation. But when she stepped inside, she discovered that he wasn’t alone. Goran Gavila was with him.

“Come in, Officer Vasquez.” Roche waved her over. He and Goran were standing on opposite sides of the desk.

Mila stepped forward, approaching Gavila. He turned slightly towards her, with a vague nod. The intimacy they had shared only an hour earlier had completely disappeared.

“I was just telling Goran that I’d like you both to attend the press conference that will be held tomorrow morning. Captain Mosca agrees with me. We would never have caught him without your help. We need to thank you.”

Mila couldn’t contain her surprise. And she saw that Roche was just as confused by her reaction.

“Sir, with the greatest respect…I think we’re making a mistake.”

Roche turned back to Goran: “What the hell’s she saying?”

“Mila, it’s all OK,” the criminologist said calmly.

“No, it isn’t. This guy isn’t Albert, there are too many incongruities, I…”

“You’re not going to say that at the press conference?” the chief inspector protested. “If that’s how things are, you can’t take part.”

“Stern will agree.”

Roche waved around a piece of paper from his desk. “Special Agent Stern has resigned with immediate effect.”

“What? What on earth’s going on?” Mila couldn’t believe it. “This guy Vincent doesn’t match the profile.”

Goran tried to explain, and for a moment she saw in his eyes the same gentleness with which he had kissed her scars. “There are dozens of corroborations that tell us he’s our man. Exercise books full of notes about kidnapping children and where to put their corpses, diagrams of the security system at Capo Alto, a plan of Debby Gordon’s boarding school and electronics and computer manuals that Clarisso had started studying when he was still in jail…”

“And have you also found all the links with Alexander Bermann, Ronald Dermis, Feldher, and Rockford?” Mila asked, exasperated.

“There’s a whole team of investigators at work in that house, and they’re still finding clues. Something will come out about those links, you’ll see.”

“It’s not enough, I think that—”

“Sandra has identified him,” Goran interrupted her. “She has told us that he was the one who kidnapped her.”

Mila focused on this for a moment. “How is she?”

“The doctors are optimistic.”

“Happy now?” Roche broke in. “If you want to cause some kind of trouble for me, you should go home right now.”

At that moment, the secretary’s voice from the intercom told the chief inspector that the mayor urgently wanted to see him, and that he should get a move on. Roche took his jacket off the back of a chair and set off, after saying to Goran: “You tell them that the official version is this: either you agree, or you fuck off!” Then he left, slamming the door.

Mila hoped that Goran would tell her something different when they were on their own. But instead he said: “Unfortunately all the mistakes were ours.”

“How can you say that?”

“It was a total failure. We created a false trail and followed it blindly. And I was the one chiefly responsible: all those conjectures were mine.”

“Aren’t you wondering how Vincent Clarisso knew about all those other criminals? He was the one who let us catch them!”

“That’s not the point…The point is how it took us so long to find out about them.”

“I don’t think you’re being objective at the moment, and I think I can guess why. In the days of the Wilson Pickett case, Roche saved your reputation and helped you keep the team going when his bosses wanted it to disband. Now you’re returning the favor: if you accept this version of events, you’ll take some of the glory away from Terence Mosca, and save his job as chief inspector!”

“That’s enough!” Goran exploded.

For a few seconds, neither of them said a word. Then the criminologist headed for the door.

She was left alone in the room, fists clenched at her sides. Cursing herself and that moment. Her eye fell on Stern’s letter of resignation. She picked it up. In those few formal lines there wasn’t a trace of the real reasons for his decision. But it was obvious to her that the special agent must have felt somehow betrayed, first by Sarah Rosa and now by Goran as well. This was all wrong. She had to get into the monster’s lair.

T
he taxi wheels splashed up the water that had accumulated on the tarmac, but luckily it had stopped raining. The streets glittered like the stage of a musical; it seemed that at any moment brilliantined dancers in dinner jackets might appear.

“This is as far as you’re going to get,” the taxi driver said, turning towards her.

“That’s OK, I’m there.”

She paid and got out of the car. Ahead of her was a cordon of policemen and dozens of cars with flashing lights. The vans of various TV channels were lined up along the street. The cameramen had set up their equipment so that they always had a good view of the house.

Mila had reached the place where it had all started. The crime scene that went under the distinctive name of
site zero
.

Vincent Clarisso’s house.

She still didn’t know how she would get past the police checks and into the house. She just took out her pass and hung it around her neck, in the hope that no one would notice that she wasn’t under their jurisdiction.

As she came forward, she recognized the faces of the colleagues she had seen in the Department corridors. Some of them were holding improvised gatherings around the boot of a car. Others were taking a break to eat snacks and drink coffee. She also spotted the medical examiner’s van: Chang was writing a report, sitting on the running board, and didn’t look up when she passed in front of him.

“Hey, where are you going?”

She turned and saw an overweight policeman panting towards her. She didn’t have a ready excuse; she should have thought of one before she came, and now she’d probably flunked it.

“She’s with me.”

Krepp walked towards them. The scientific expert had a plaster on his neck, from which the head and claws of a winged dragon appeared, almost certainly his latest tattoo. He turned to the police officer: “Let her in, she’s authorized.”

The officer accepted his assurance and turned on his heels to go back where he had come from.

Mila looked at Krepp, unsure what to say. The man winked at her, then continued on his way. In a way it wasn’t that strange that he had helped her, Mila thought. Both—albeit in different ways—wore part of their personal history imprinted on their skin.

The path leading up to the front door of the house was on a slope. On the gravel there were still cartridge cases from the shoot-out that had cost Vincent Clarisso his life. The front door had been slipped off its hinges for easier access.

As soon as she stepped inside, Mila was struck by a very strong smell of disinfectant.

The sitting room was furnished with seventies-style Formica furniture. A swirly-patterned sofa, still in its plastic covering. A fireplace with a mock fire. A mobile bar that harmonized with the yellow carpet. The wallpaper had a pattern of huge brown stylized flowers that looked like snapdragons.

Instead of halogen lamps, the room was lit by table lamps. That too was a sign of the new course taken by Terence Mosca. No “scene” for the captain. Everything had to be kept sober. Old-school policing from a long time ago, Mila thought. And in the kitchen she glimpsed Mosca, holding a little summit with his closest collaborators. She avoided going in that direction: she had to remain as unobserved as possible.

They all wore shoe covers and latex gloves. Mila put them on and then started to look around, mingling with the others.

One detective was taking out the books from a library. One at a time. He picked them up, quickly flicked through them and set them down on the floor. Another was rummaging in a chest of drawers. A third was classifying the ornaments. Where the objects had not yet been moved and examined, everything seemed to be obsessively tidy.

There wasn’t a speck of dust, and everything could be cataloged just by looking round, as if everything had been assigned a precise place. She felt as if she was in a completed jigsaw puzzle.

Mila didn’t know what to look for. She was only there because it was the natural place to start. She had to see if this really was Albert. She had to know why the fifth corpse was found at the Studio.

Mila worked out the source of the smell of disinfectant when she saw the room at the end of the short corridor.

It was an ascetic room, with a hospital bed wrapped in an oxygen tent. There were large quantities of drugs, sterile overalls and medical equipment. It was the operating theater where Vincent had performed the amputations on his little patients, then turned into the room where Sandra had been kept alive.

As she walked by another room, she noticed a police officer watching a plasma screen with a digital video camera plugged into it. In front of the screen was an armchair with audio-surround speakers around it. On either side of the television was a whole wall of mini-DV cassettes, classified only by data. The detective slipped them into the video camera one by one to view their content.

Right now they were running through the images of a playground. Children’s laughter on a sunny winter’s day. Mila recognized Caroline, the last little girl to have been kidnapped and killed by Albert.

Vincent Clarisso had studied his victims meticulously.

“Hey, could someone come and give me a hand with this thing? I don’t know a thing about electronics!” the policeman said as he tried to pause the film. When he noticed her in the doorway, for a moment he had the happy sensation of having had his wish granted, even though he then realized that he had never seen her before. Before he could say anything, Mila continued on her way.

The third room was the most important.

Inside there was a steel table and the walls were covered with noticeboards full of notes, Post-its of various colors and other things. That material set out in detail Vincent’s plans. Street maps and timetables. The blueprints of Debby Gordon’s boarding school, and of the orphanage. There was Alexander Bermann’s number plate, and the stages of his business trips. The photographs of Yvonne Gress and her children, and a picture of Feldher’s dump. There were cuttings from society magazines dealing with the fortunes of Joseph B. Rockford. And, obviously, snapshots of the kidnapped girls.

On the steel table there were other diagrams, with confused annotations. As if his work had suddenly been interrupted. Hidden among those pieces of paper—perhaps forever—was the finale that the serial killer had imagined for his plan.

Mila turned and froze. The wall that had been behind her until that moment was completely papered with photographs showing the members of the violent crimes investigative unit while they were at work. She was there too.

Now I’m really in the belly of the monster…

Vincent had always kept a close eye on their movements.

“Shit! Could someone give me a hand here?” came the voice of the officer in the next room.

“You all right, Fred?”

At last someone came to his aid.

“How can I tell what I’m looking at? And how can I classify something if I don’t know what it is?”

“Let me see…”

Mila drew away from the wall of photographs, preparing to leave the house. As she passed by the television room, she noticed something on the screen. A place that the officer called Fred and his colleague couldn’t identify.

“It’s an apartment, what else am I supposed to say?”

“Yes, but what do I write in the report?”

“Write ‘unknown apartment.’”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Someone else can work out where it is.”

But Mila knew where it was.

It was only then that they noticed her and turned to look at her, while she couldn’t take her eyes off the film on the TV.

“Can we help you?”

She didn’t reply, and walked away. As she hurried through the sitting room, she looked in her pocket for her mobile phone. She called Goran’s number.

By the time he replied she was on the path outside.

“What’s happening?”

“Where are you now?” Her voice was alarmed.

He didn’t notice. “I’m still at the Department, I’m trying to organize a visit by Sarah Rosa to her daughter in hospital.”

“Who’s at your place at the moment?”

Goran started to get worried. “Mrs. Runa is with Tommy. Why?”

“You’ve got to get there right now!”

“Why?” he repeated, full of concern.

Mila passed by the group of policemen. “Vincent had film of your apartment!”

“What does that mean?”

“That he’d searched your place…what if he had an accomplice?”

Goran fell silent for a moment. “Are you still at the crime scene?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re closer than me. Ask Terence Mosca to give you a few officers and go to my place. In the meantime I’ll call Mrs. Runa and tell her to shut herself in.”

“Fine.”

Mila hung up, then turned back towards the house to talk to Mosca.

And let’s hope they don’t ask me too many questions.