The Whisperer Page 16

  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.

  14.

  His 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 s
erial 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.”

  15.

  Man is the only being in nature capable of laughter or tears.

  Mila knew that. What she didn’t know, on the other hand, is that the human eye produces three types of tears. Basal tears, which continuously moisten and feed the eyeball. Reflex tears, which are produced when a foreign body enters the eye. And psychic tears, associated with pain or emotion. These have a different chemical composition. They contain very high percentages of manganese and a hormone, prolactin.

  In the world of natural phenomena, every single thing can be reduced to a formula, but explaining why tears of pain are physiologically different from the others is practically impossible.

  Mila’s tears contained no prolactin.

  That was her unmentionable secret.

  She wasn’t capable of suffering. Of feeling the empathy necessary to understand other people and thus not feel alone amidst the human race.

  Had it always been that way? Or had something or someone eradicated that ability ?

  She had noticed it when her father died. She was fourteen years old. She was the one who had found him, one afternoon, lifeless on the sofa in the sitting room. He looked as if he was sleeping. At least that was how she told the story when people asked her why she didn’t immediately call for
help, instead staying by his side for almost an hour. The truth was that Mila had immediately understood that there was nothing to be done. But she was more startled by her inability to feel anything emotionally than she was by the actual death. Her father—the most important man in her life, the one who had taught her everything, her role model—would no longer be there. Forever. And yet her heart wasn’t broken.

  She had cried at the funeral. Not because the idea of the ineluctable had planted despair in her soul, but only because that was what was expected of a daughter. Those salt tears had been the result of an enormous effort.

  “It’s a block,” she said. “Just a block. It’s stress. I’m in shock. It must have happened to other people too.” She tried everything. She tortured herself with memories at least to feel guilty. Nothing.

  She couldn’t explain it to herself. Then she closed herself away in an impenetrable silence, without letting anyone ask her about her state of mind. Her mother, too, after a few attempts, had resigned herself to being cut off from that very private elaboration of grief.

  The world thought she was broken, destroyed. But Mila, closed away in her room, wondered why she felt only the desire to return to her normal life, burying the man in her heart as well.

  With time, things didn’t change. The pain of loss never came. There were other occasions to mourn. Her grandmother, a classmate, other relatives. In those cases too, Mila could feel nothing but a clean impulse to finish with death as quickly as possible.

  Who could she tell? They would look on her as a heartless monster, unworthy of membership in the human race. Only her mother, on her deathbed, had for a moment seen the indifference in Mila’s expression, and had slipped her hand from hers, as if she felt suddenly cold.

  Once the occasion for mourning in her family had passed, it had become easier for her to simulate with strangers things that she did not feel. Having reached the age when we begin to need human contact, especially with the opposite sex, she had encountered a problem. “I can’t start a relationship with a boy if I can’t feel empathy for him,” she told herself over and over again. Mila had started to define her problem after she had learned the dictionary definition of “empathy”: “ability to project one’s own emotions on a subject to identify with him.”