The Whisperer (34 page)

Apartment known as the “Studio,”
now renamed “site 5”
22 February

I
t would never be the same again.

With that shadow hanging over them, they had confined themselves to the guest room, waiting for Chang and Krepp’s teams to examine the apartment. Roche, who had been informed immediately, had been talking to Goran for over an hour.

Stern was lying on his camp bed, with one arm behind his neck and his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He looked like a cowboy. The perfect crease of his suit had been unaffected by the knot of his tie. Boris had turned onto one side, but he clearly wasn’t sleeping. His left foot went on nervously tapping the bedcover. Rosa was trying to contact someone on her mobile phone, but the signal was weak.

Mila regarded her silent companions one by one before returning her gaze to the laptop on her knees. She had requested the files with the amateur photographs taken at the fair on the evening of Sabine’s abduction. They had already been viewed to no effect, but she wanted to see them in the light of the theory she had already expounded to Goran, that the perpetrator might be a woman.

“I’d like to know how the hell he managed to get Caroline’s corpse in here…” Stern admitted, expressing the question that troubled them all.

“Yeah, I’d like to know that too…” Rosa agreed.

The office block that housed the Studio was no longer guarded as it had once been, when witnesses had been brought there for their own protection. The building was practically empty and the security systems had been deactivated, but the only access to the apartment was the front door, and it was armored.

“He came in through the front door,” Boris said laconically, emerging from his feigned lethargy.

But there was another thing that made them nervous more than anything else. What was Albert’s message this time? Why had he decided to cast such a heavy shadow over his pursuers?

“If you ask me, he’s just trying to slow us down,” Rosa suggested. “We’re getting too close to him, so he’s shuffled the cards.”

“No, Albert doesn’t do things by chance,” Mila cut in. “He has taught us that every move is carefully premeditated.”

Sarah Rosa fixed her eye on her: “So? What the hell are you saying? That one of us is a fucking monster?”

“That’s not what she meant,” said Stern. “She’s just saying that it must be a reason connected with Albert’s plan: it’s part of the game he’s been playing with us since the start. It might also have something to do with this place, and what it was used for in the past.”

“It might involve an old case,” Mila added, noticing that the suggestion had fallen on deaf ears.

Before the dialogue could resume, Goran came into the room, leaving the door ajar behind him.

“I need your attention.”

He sounded urgent. Mila took her eyes off her laptop. They all looked at him.

“In theory, we’re still in charge of the investigation, but things are getting complicated.”

“What does that mean?” Boris shouted.

“You’ll understand in a few moments, but for the time being I advise you to stay calm. I’ll explain afterwards…”

“After what?”

Goran had no time to answer before the door opened and Chief Inspector Roche stepped in. With him was a stoutly built man of about fifty, in a crumpled suit and with a tie too thin for his bull-like neck and an unlit cigar between his teeth.

“Sit down, sit down…” said Roche, even though no one had given any kind of greeting. The chief inspector wore a forced smile of the kind that is supposed to inspire calm and instead produces anxiety.

“Gentlemen, the situation is confused but we will come out of it: I certainly won’t let some psychopath cast doubts about my men!”

As always, he underlined the last phrase too emphatically.

“So I have taken some precautions entirely in your interest, and I’m adding an extra colleague to your investigation.” He announced this without mentioning the man standing beside him. “This is nothing short of embarrassing: we can’t find this Albert, and he comes and finds us! So, in agreement with Dr. Gavila, I have entrusted Captain Mosca here with the task of assisting you until the closure of the case.”

No one breathed, even though they had already understood what the “assistance” would consist of. Mosca would assume control, giving them only one option: to stand by him and try and regain a little credibility, or get out.

Terence Mosca was very well known in police circles. He owed his fame to an operation lasting more than six years, in which a drug-trafficking organization had been infiltrated. He was responsible for hundreds of arrests and various undercover operations. But he had never worked on serial murders or pathological crimes.

Roche had brought him in for only one reason: years before, Mosca had competed with him for the post of chief inspector. The way things were going, it had struck him as appropriate to involve his worst rival in the case to make him shoulder part of the weight of a failure that he now considered more than likely. A risky move, which showed the extent to which he felt he was on the ropes: if Terence Mosca now solved the Albert case, Roche would have to make way for him at the top of the command hierarchy.

Before Mosca began speaking, he took one step ahead of Roche as a way of stressing his autonomy.

“The pathologist and the scientific expert have not yet produced anything significant. The only thing we know is that to get into the apartment the subject tampered with the armored door.”

When he had opened the door on their return, Boris had not noticed any signs of a break-in.

“He’s very careful to leave no clues: he didn’t want to spoil your surprise.”

Mosca went on chewing on his cigar and staring at everyone with his hands in his pockets.

“I’ve instructed some officers to go around the neighborhood in the hope of finding a witness. We might even get a number plate…as to what it was that led the subject to put the corpse here of all places, we are obliged to improvise. If anything comes to mind, please let me know. That’s all for now.”

Terence Mosca turned on his heels and, without giving anyone a chance to reply or add anything, he returned to the crime scene.

But Roche stopped. “You haven’t much time. We need an idea, and we need it quickly.”

Then the chief inspector left the room as well. Goran closed the door and the others immediately came to stand around him.

“What on earth’s going on?” Boris asked huffily.

“Why do we need a guard dog now?” Rosa echoed.

“Calm down, you haven’t understood,” said Goran. “Captain Mosca is the most appropriate person right now. I was the one who requested his intervention.”

The others were startled.

“I know what you’re thinking, but it let me give Roche an escape route and I saved our role in the investigation.”

“Officially we’re still involved, but everyone knows that Terence Mosca likes to be a maverick,” Stern observed.

“That’s exactly why I suggested him: if I know him, he won’t want us under his feet, so he won’t care what we do. We just have to tell him how we’re getting on, that’s all.”

It seemed like the best possible solution, but it didn’t lift the burden of suspicion that weighed on each of them.

“They’ll all have their eyes on us.” Stern shook his head irritably.

“So we’ll let Mosca go after Albert while we dedicate ourselves to child number six…”

It seemed like a good strategy: if they found her alive, they would sweep away that atmosphere of suspicion that had formed around them.

“I think Albert left Caroline’s body here to trick us. Because even if nothing is ever proved against us, a doubt about us will always remain.”

Even though he was doing everything he could to seem calm, Goran was well aware that his statements were still not enough to lighten the mood. Because since the fifth corpse had been found, each of them had begun to look differently at the others. They had known each other a lifetime, but none of them could have ruled out the possibility that each of them had a secret of some kind. That was Albert’s true purpose: to divide them. The criminologist wondered how long it would be before the seed of mistrust began to germinate among them.

“The last child doesn’t have much time left,” he said confidently. “Albert has almost accomplished his plan. He’s just preparing for the finale. But he needed a free hand, and he has ruled us out of the competition. That’s why we have only one chance of finding her, and that’s through the only one of us who is free of all suspicion, since she didn’t join the team until Albert had already planned everything.”

Suddenly feeling their eyes upon her, Mila felt uneasy.

“You’ll be able to move much more freely than us,” Stern said encouragingly. “If you had to act entirely on your own initiative, what would you do?”

In fact Mila did have an idea. But she had kept it to herself until then.

“I know why he only chose girls.”

They had asked themselves that question in the Thinking Room, when the case was still in its early stages. Why had Albert not kidnapped boys as well? There was no sexual intent behind his behavior, since he didn’t touch the girls.

Mila thought she had come up with an explanation. “They all had to be girls because of number six. I’m almost convinced that he chose her
first,
not last as he wants to make us believe. The others were girls only to conceal that detail. But she was the first object of his fantasy. We don’t know why. Perhaps she has some special quality, something that distinguishes her from the others. That’s why he
has
to keep her identity secret from us until the end. It wasn’t enough for him to let us know that one of the kidnapped girls was still alive. No, we could absolutely on no account know who it was.”

“Because that could lead us to him,” Goran concluded.

But these were merely fascinating conjectures that were no help to anyone.

“Unless…” said Mila, guessing what the others were thinking, and repeated: “Unless there’s always been a link between us and Albert.”

Now they didn’t have much to lose, and Mila no longer had any qualms about telling everyone the story of how she had been followed.

“It’s happened twice. Even though it’s only the second time I’m absolutely sure about. While outside the motel it was more a feeling than anything else…”

“So?” Stern asked curiously. “What’s it got to do with anything?”

“Someone has followed me. It may have happened other times too, I couldn’t swear, I didn’t notice…But why? To check on me? What for? I’ve never had any information of vital importance and I’ve always been a bit of an outsider amongst you lot.”

“Perhaps to throw you off the track,” Boris ventured.

“That too: there’s never been a real ‘track,’ unless I really did get too close to something and became important to the case without being aware of it.”

“But when it happened at the motel you’d only just got here. And that rules out the hypothesis of throwing you off the track,” said Goran.

“Then there’s only one explanation left…whoever followed me wanted to
intimidate me
.”

“What for?” said Sarah Rosa.

Mila ignored her. “In both cases, my pursuer didn’t give himself away involuntarily. In fact I think he revealed himself deliberately.”

“Fine, we’ve understood. But why should he have done that?” Rosa insisted. “It makes no sense!”

Mila turned abruptly towards her, using their difference in height to her advantage.

“Because from the outset I was the only one among you who was capable of finding the sixth girl.” She looked at them all again. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the results I’ve got so far prove me right. You’re great at finding serial killers. But I find missing people: I’ve always done it and I know how to do it.”

No one contradicted her. From that perspective, Mila represented the most concrete threat to Albert because she was the only one capable of blowing his plans sky high.

“Let’s recapitulate: he kidnapped the sixth child first. If I’d found out straightaway who number six was, his whole plan would have collapsed.”

“But you didn’t find out,” said Rosa. “Perhaps you’re not as good as you think.”

Mila didn’t rise to the provocation. “By coming so close to me outside the motel, Albert may have made a mistake. We’ve got to get back to that moment.”

“How do we do that? You’re not trying to tell me he’s got a time machine!”

Mila smiled: without being aware of it, Rosa had come very close to the truth. Because there was a way of going back. Ignoring his nicotine breath once again, she turned towards Boris. “How good are you at questioning people under hypnosis?”

“Now relax…”

Boris’s voice was barely a whisper. Mila was lying on his camp bed, her hands along her sides and her eyes closed. He was sitting beside her.

“Now I want you to count to one hundred…”

Stern had put a towel over the lamp, plunging the room into a pleasant gloom. Rosa had taken up position on her bed. Goran was sitting in a corner, carefully observing what was happening.

Mila slowly articulated the numbers. Her breath began to assume a regular rhythm. By the time she finished counting she was perfectly relaxed.

“Now I want you to see things in your mind. Are you ready?”

She nodded.

“You’re in a big meadow. It’s morning and the sun is shining. The rays warm the skin of your face, and there’s a smell of grass and flowers. You’re walking and you’re barefoot: you can feel the cool of the earth under your feet. And there’s the sound of a stream calling to you. You walk over to it and lean down to the bank. You plunge your hands into the water, and then bring it to your mouth to drink it. It’s very good.”

The image was not chosen at random: Boris had evoked those sensations to take control of all of Mila’s senses. That way it would be easier to bring her back in her memory to the exact moment when she was crossing the area outside the motel.

“Now that you’ve quenched your thirst, there’s something I’d like you to do for me. Go back to a few evenings ago…”