The Whisperer (13 page)

S
now had fallen heavily during the night, settling like silence on the world.

The temperature had grown milder, and a pale breeze swept the streets. While the long-awaited meteorological event slowed everything down, a new frenzy had taken hold of the team.

They had a purpose, at last. A way of making up for all the evil that had occurred, if only partially. Find the sixth girl, save her. And save themselves at the same time.

“As long as she’s still alive,” Goran kept on repeating to himself, somewhat dampening the enthusiasm of the others.

After the discovery, Chang had been hung out to dry by Roche for not reaching the same conclusion before. The press still hadn’t been informed of the existence of the sixth abducted child, but in anticipation the chief inspector was coming up with an excuse for the media, and he needed a scapegoat.

In the meantime, Roche had called together a team of medics—each with a different specialization—to answer a single, fundamental question.

“How long could a child survive in those conditions?”

There had been no unequivocal answer. The more optimistic maintained that with appropriate medical treatment and without the development of infections, she would be able to survive between ten and twenty days. The pessimists thought that in spite of her young age, with an amputation like that her life expectancy would inevitably diminish by the hour and in fact it was very likely that the girl was already dead.

Roche wasn’t satisfied, and decided to go on maintaining publicly that Alexander Bermann was still the main suspect. Even though he was convinced that the sales rep had nothing to do with the disappearance of the girls, Goran would not deny the chief’s official version. The truth wasn’t the issue. He knew that Roche couldn’t afford to lose face by taking back his previous declarations about Bermann’s guilt. It would be damaging to him, but also to the credibility of their investigative methods.

The criminologist’s conviction, however, was that the man had been somehow “chosen” by the real perpetrator.

Albert was suddenly at the center of their attention again.

“He knew that Bermann was a pedophile,” said Goran when they were all in the operations room. “We underestimated him for a moment.”

A new element had entered Albert’s profile. They had first guessed as much when Chang had described the lesions on the recovered arms, using the word “surgical” for the precision with which the murderer had inflicted the fatal blow. The use of drugs to slow the blood pressure of the sixth child confirmed their man’s clinical abilities. Finally, the fact that he was probably keeping her alive led them to think that he had a remarkable knowledge of reanimation techniques and the protocols of intensive therapy.

“He could be a doctor, or perhaps he used to be one,” Goran reflected.

“I’ll do some research into the professional registers. He might have been struck off,” Stern said suddenly.

It was a good start.

“How would he get hold of the medicine to keep her alive?”

“Excellent question, Boris. Let’s check the pharmacies, the private ones and the ones in the hospitals, to see if anyone’s requested those drugs.”

“He might have got hold of them months ago,” Rosa observed.

“Especially antibiotics: he might need them to avoid infections…what else?”

Apparently there was nothing else. Now it was just a question of finding out where the little girl was, dead or alive.

In the operations room everyone looked at Mila. She was the expert, the person to consult to reach the goal that would give a meaning to their work.

“We have to find a way of communicating with the family.”

Everyone looked at each other, until Stern asked, “Why? Now we have the edge over Albert: he doesn’t yet know that we know.”

“Do you really think a mind capable of imagining all this wouldn’t have predicted our actions long ago?”

“If our hypothesis is correct, he’s keeping her alive for us.”

Gavila had intervened in support of Mila, bringing her the gift of his new theory.

“He’s the one controlling the game, and the girl is the final prize. It’s a competition to see who’s the more clever.”

“So he’s not going to kill her?” Boris asked.

“He isn’t going to kill her. We are.”

The statement was hard to digest, but it was the essence of the challenge.

“If we take too long to find her, the girl will die. If we irritate him in any way, the girl will die. If we don’t stick to the rules, the girl will die.”

“The rules? What rules?” asked Rosa, her anxiety ill concealed.

“The ones he has established, and we unfortunately don’t know. The tracks along which his mind works are obscure to us, but very clear to him. In the light of which, every one of our actions can be interpreted as breaking the rules of the game.”

Stern nodded thoughtfully. “So going straight to the family of the sixth child is a bit like playing along with his game.”

“Yes,” said Mila. “That’s what Albert expects of us right now. He has taken it into account. But he’s also convinced that we’ll fail, because the parents are too scared to come out into the open or they would have done so already. He wants to show us that his force of persuasion is more powerful than any attempt on our part. Paradoxically, he’s trying to come across as the ‘hero’ of the story in their eyes. It’s as if he was saying to them, ‘I’m the only one who can save your child, you can trust no one but me’…Do you realize how much psychological pressure he can exert? If we can persuade those parents to contact us we will have scored a point in our favor.”

“But there’s a danger of causing him offense,” protested Sarah Rosa, who didn’t seem to agree.

“That’s a risk we have to take. But I don’t think he’ll hurt the girl because of that. He’ll punish us, he may make us lose some time. He won’t kill her now: first he has to show us the finished job.”

Goran thought it was extraordinary the way Mila had mastered the mechanisms of the investigation so quickly. She was good at setting out precise guidelines. Still, even if the others were listening to her at last, she wouldn’t find it easy to be accepted once and for all by her colleagues. They had immediately identified her as an alien presence, one that they didn’t need. And their opinion certainly wouldn’t change quickly.

At that moment Roche decided he had had enough and decided to intervene: “We’ll do as Officer Vasquez suggests: we’ll spread the news of the existence of a sixth abducted girl and, in the meantime, we’ll publicly address her family. Christ! Let’s show some balls here! I’m tired of waiting for things to happen, as if this monster was really making all the decisions!”

Some people were startled by the chief inspector’s new attitude. Not Goran. Without noticing, Roche was merely using their serial killer’s technique of reversing roles and, consequently, responsibility: if they didn’t find the child, it would only be because her parents hadn’t trusted the investigators, and had stayed in the shadows.

And yet there was a hint of truth in what he was saying: the time had come to try and anticipate events.

“You heard those quacks, didn’t you? The sixth girl has ten days at the most!” Then Roche studied the members of the unit one by one and announced in a serious voice: “I’ve decided: we’re reopening the Studio.”

At dinnertime, on the evening news, the face of a famous actor appeared on the screen. They had chosen him to announce the appeal to the parents of the sixth child. He was a familiar face, and he would bring the right dose of emotional involvement to the subject. The idea had plainly been Roche’s. Mila thought it was just right: it would discourage time wasters and compulsive liars from calling the superimposed number.

More or less at the same time as the public found out, with a mixture of horror and hope, about the existence of the sixth still-living child, the team took possession of the “Studio.”

It was an apartment on the fourth floor of an anonymous building near the center. It was mostly home to secondary offices of the Federal Police, the ones that dealt with administration and accounts, and the outmoded paper archives that hadn’t yet been digitized for the new databases.

The apartment had previously been used by the witness protection program to accommodate people who needed to be hidden. The Studio was set perfectly between two other identical apartments. That was why it had no windows. The air conditioning was always running and the only means of access was the front door. The walls were very thick and there were various security devices. Given that the apartment was no longer used for its original purpose, the devices had been deactivated. All that remained was a heavy armored door.

Goran had been the one who had wanted this place, since the establishment of the violent crimes investigation unit. It hadn’t taken much for Roche to make him happy: he had simply remembered that safe house that hadn’t been used for years. The criminologist maintained the need to live shoulder to shoulder while the case continued. That way ideas could circulate more easily, and be shared and processed instantly. Their forced cohabitation would yield cooperation, and that in turn would serve to feed a single pulsing brain. Dr. Gavila had borrowed from the “new economy” the methods for setting up the work environment, made up of common spaces and with a “horizontal” distribution of functions, as opposed to the vertical division that normally prevails in the police, linked to divisions of rank, which often generates conflict and competition. In the Studio, on the other hand, differences were erased, solutions evolved and everyone’s contribution was requested, listened to and considered.

When Mila crossed the threshold, she thought immediately that
this
was the place where serial killers were caught. It didn’t happen in the real world, but in here, between these walls.

At the center of it all there was a simple manhunt, but also the effort to understand the motive behind an apparently incomprehensible sequence of horrific crimes. The distorted vision of a sick mind.

Mila was aware that that step would be the harbinger of a new phase of the investigation.

Stern was carrying the brown fake leather bag that his wife had prepared for him, and stepped aside to let the others in. Boris, with his rucksack on his back. Then Rosa and, last of all, Mila.

Beyond the armored door there was a booth covered with bulletproof glass that had once housed the security guards. Inside, the dead monitors of the video system, a few revolving chairs and a rack for weapons, empty. A second security threshold, with an electric gate, separated that passageway from the rest of the house. Once the guards had had to activate it, but now it was wide open.

Mila noticed that it smelled stuffy in there, a smell of damp and stale smoke, and the incessant hum of the air conditioning. It wouldn’t be easy to sleep; they would have to get hold of some earplugs.

A long corridor cut the apartment in two. On the walls, sheets of paper and photographs from a previous case.

The face of a girl, young and beautiful.

From the glances the others were exchanging, Mila understood that the case hadn’t ended well, and that they probably hadn’t set foot in that place since then.

No one spoke, no one explained anything to her. Only Boris exploded, “Fucking hell, they could at least have taken her face off the walls!”

The rooms were furnished with old office furniture, from which wardrobes and sideboards had been fashioned with a great deal of imagination. In the kitchen, a desk acted as a dining table. The fridge was the old-fashioned kind that uses CFCs and damages the ozone layer. Someone had had the sense to unplug it and leave it open, but they hadn’t freed from it the blackened remains of a Chinese meal. There was a common room, with a few sofas, a TV and a place for plugging in notebooks and peripherals. In one corner there was a coffee machine. Here and there, dirty ashtrays and all kinds of rubbish, especially cardboard cups from a fast-food restaurant. There was only one bathroom, small and malodorous. Next to the shower someone had put an old filing cabinet, on which lived half-empty bottles of liquid soap and shampoo, and a pack of five toilet rolls. Two closed rooms were reserved for interrogations.

At the end of the apartment was the guest accommodation. Three bunk beds and two camp beds against the wall. A chair for each bed, to put suitcases or personal effects on. They were all sleeping together. Mila waited for the others to take possession of the beds, imagining that each of them had had their own for some time. As the last to arrive, she would take the one that remained. In the end she opted for one of the camp beds. The furthest away from Rosa.

Boris had been the only one to take the top bed of one of the three bunks. “Stern snores,” he warned her under his breath as he passed her. The amused tone and the smile with which he had accompanied this impertinent confidence made Mila think that perhaps his rage with her had subsided. Better that way: it would make it less difficult for them to live together. She had shared spaces with colleagues before, but in the end socializing with them had always been rather awkward. Even with members of her own sex. While a natural camaraderie had soon established itself among the others, she remained aloof, unable to close up the distance between them. At first it was very difficult for her. Then she had learned to create a “bubble of survival” around herself, a portion of space that sounds and noises, including the remarks of the people who stayed outside it, could only enter if she allowed it.

Goran’s things were already arranged on the second camp bed in the guest accommodation. He was waiting for them in the main room. The one that Boris had, on his own initiative, christened the “Thinking Room.”

They entered in silence and found him behind them, busy writing on the board:
familiar with reanimation techniques and protocols of intensive therapy: probable doctor
.

Stuck to the walls were the photographs of the five little girls, the snapshots of the graveyard of arms and Bermann’s car, as well as copies of all the reports on the case. In a box placed in a corner, Mila recognized the face of the beautiful young girl: the criminologist must have taken those pictures down from the wall to replace them with the new ones.