The Whisperer Read online

  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.

  “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…”

  13.

  The 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.” Whe
n 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.