The Whisperer (27 page)

“You’ll have it, Dr. Gavila.”

For the time being they had a very brief description of the subject they were looking for. They compared it with the data gathered by Krepp.

“I’d say he’s a man between forty and fifty,” Rosa began. “Well-built, and about five foot eleven.”

“The shoe prints on the carpet are a size nine, so I’d say that’s about right.”

“A smoker.”

“He rolls his own cigarettes with tobacco and papers.”

“Like me,” said Boris. “I’m always glad to have something in common with guys like that.”

“And I’d say he likes dogs,” Krepp concluded.

“Just because he left the Newfoundland alive?” asked Mila.

“No, my dear. We’ve found some mongrel hairs.”

“But who says the man brought them into the house?”

“They were in the mud of the shoe prints that he left on the carpet. Obviously there was material from the building site—cement, gums, solvents—which acted as glue for the rest. Including the stuff that the guy brought in from his own house.”

Krepp looked at Mila like someone who has been unwisely challenged, and who has finally prevailed with dazzling brilliance. After that brief interval of glory, he looked away from her and went back to being the cold professional they all knew.

“And there’s one more thing, but I haven’t yet worked out if it’s worth mentioning.”

“Tell us anyway,” broke in Goran. He knew how much Krepp liked being asked.

“In that mud under his shoes there was a high concentration of bacteria. I asked the opinion of my most trusted chemist…”

“Why a chemist and not a biologist?”

“Because I guessed that they were ‘refuse-eating’ bacteria, which exist in nature but are used for various purposes, such as devouring plastic and petroleum derivatives.” Then he became specific: “They don’t eat anything, in fact, they just produce an enzyme. They’re used for cleaning up former dumps…”

At those words, Goran noticed that Mila had suddenly glanced towards Boris, and that he had done the same.

“Former dumps? Holy shit…we know this guy!”

F
eldher was waiting for them.

The parasite had withdrawn into his cocoon, at the top of the hill of refuse.

He had all kinds of weapons, which he had been piling up for months in preparation for the final showdown. He hadn’t actually done very much about hiding. He knew that sooner or later someone would come to ask him for explanations.

Mila arrived with the rest of the team, followed by the special units which placed themselves around the property.

From his lofty position, Feldher could check the streets leading to the former dump. He had also cut down the trees that blocked his view. But he didn’t start firing straightaway. He waited until they were in position before beginning his target practice.

First he aimed at his dog, Koch, the rusty mongrel that wandered about the scrap iron. He killed it with a single shot, to the head. He wanted to show the men out there that he was serious. And perhaps spare the animal a worse death, thought Mila.

Crouching behind one of the armored vehicles, the policewoman observed the scene. How much time had passed since the day she had set foot in that house with Boris? They had gone there to ask Feldher about the religious institution he had grown up in, while he himself concealed a secret much worse than Ronald Dermis’s.

He had lied about lots of things.

When Boris had asked him if he had ever been in jail, he had answered in the affirmative. And in fact it wasn’t true. That was why they hadn’t found a match for the prints left in Yvonne Gress’s house. But he had been able to use that lie to be certain that the two officers knew almost nothing about him. And Boris hadn’t noticed anything, because you don’t usually lie to give a negative image of yourself.

Feldher had done it. He had been quite crafty, Mila thought.

He had sized them up, and he had started playing with them, certain that they would have no clues to link him to Yvonne’s house. If he had suspected the opposite, they probably wouldn’t have left that house alive.

Mila had been tricked for a second time by his presence at Ronald’s nocturnal funeral. She had thought it was a gesture of pity, when in fact Feldher was checking out the situation.

“Come on, you bastards, come and get me!”

Machine-gun bullets rattled through the air, some thudding dully against the armored vehicles, others echoing off the scrap metal.

“Sons of bitches! You won’t get me alive!”

No one replied, no one tried to strike a deal with him. Mila looked round: there was no negotiator anywhere around with a megaphone, ready to tell him to drop his weapons. Feldher had already signed his own death warrant. None of the men out there was interested in saving his life.

They were only waiting for one false move to wipe him off the face of the earth.

A few snipers were already in place, ready to fire as soon as he moved. For the moment, they were letting him rant. That made it more likely that he would make a mistake.

“She was mine, you bastards! Mine! I just gave her what she wanted!”

He was provoking them. And to judge from the faces staring at him, the attempt was successful.

“We’ve got to take him alive,” said Goran eventually. “It’s the only way we’ll find out the link between him and Albert.”

“I don’t think the guys in the special units agree with you, Doctor,” said Stern.

“Then we’ve got to talk to Roche: he has to give the order to call in a negotiator.”

“Feldher isn’t going to be taken: he’s already predicted everything, including his own death,” observed Sarah Rosa. “He’s trying to think up a coup de théâtre so that he can go out with a bang.”

She wasn’t mistaken. The pyrotechnicians who had just arrived had identified some variations in the terrain surrounding the house. “Land mines,” one of them said to Roche, coming over to join him.

“With all the shit that’s under there, this could be the end of the world.”

A geologist was consulted, and she confirmed that the dump forming the hill could contain tons of methane produced by the decomposition of refuse.

“You’ve got to get out of here straightaway: a fire could be devastating.”

Goran insisted that they should at least try to negotiate with Feldher. In the end, Roche allowed him half an hour.

The criminologist thought about using the phone, but Mila remembered that the line had been cut off for nonpayment because when he and Boris had tried to contact Feldher some days before, they’d got a recorded voice. The phone company took seven minutes to reestablish contact. They only had twenty-three to persuade the man to give himself up. But when his home phone started ringing, Feldher reacted by firing at them.

Goran didn’t throw in the towel. He picked up a megaphone and planted himself behind the armored vehicle nearest the house.

“Feldher, it’s Goran Gavila!”

“Fuck off!” Followed by a shot.

“Listen to me: I despise you, like all the other people here.”

Mila understood that Goran didn’t want to barter with Feldher by making him believe things that weren’t true, because there would be no point. The man had already chosen his own fate. That was why the criminologist had immediately put his cards on the table.

“You piece of shit, I don’t want to listen to you!” Another shot, this time a few inches away from where Goran was standing. Although he was well protected, Goran gave a start.

“But you will, because I’ve got something to tell you!”

What kind of offer could he make him when they’d reached this point? Mila had no sense of Goran’s strategy.

“We need you, Feldher, because you probably know who’s keeping the sixth child prisoner. We call him Albert, but I’m sure you know his real name.”

“I don’t give a fuck!”

“You do, because there’s a price on the information right now!”

The reward.

So that was Goran’s game. The ten million offered by the Rockford Foundation to anyone who provided information useful to the rescue of child number six.

Some might also have wondered what advantage the sum might hold for a man who was sure he was going to jail. Mila understood. The criminologist had been trying to plant in Feldher’s mind the idea that he might get away with it, that he might be able to “screw the system.” The same system that had persecuted him all his life, making him what he was. A miserable wretch, a loser. With that money he could afford a big lawyer, who might be able to reduce the charge on the grounds of diminished responsibility, a legal option usually reserved for wealthy defendants because it was difficult to sustain and demonstrate without adequate funds. Feldher could have hoped for a lower sentence—maybe as little as twenty years—to be spent not in prison but among the patients of a judicial psychiatric hospital. Then, once he was out, he would enjoy the rest of his wealth. As a free man.

Goran had hit the target. Because Feldher had always wanted to be something more. That was why he had gone into Yvonne Gress’s house. To know, at least once, what it feels like to live a privileged life, in a rich area, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children, and beautiful things.

Now he had the chance of getting a double result: winning that money and getting away with what he’d done.

He would walk right out of that house, smiling his way past a hundred police officers who wanted him dead. But above all, he would come out a rich man. In many ways as an actual
hero
.

There were no insults, no shots from Feldher in reply. He was thinking.

Goran took advantage of that silence to add to his expectations.

“Mr. Feldher, no one can take away what you’ve earned. And even though I don’t like to admit it, a lot of people will have to thank you. So put down your weapons now, come outside and give yourself up…”

Once again, evil in the service of good,
Mila thought. Goran was using the same technique for good.

A few seemingly interminable seconds passed. But Goran knew that the more seconds passed, the more hope there was that his plan might succeed. From behind the armored vehicle that sheltered him, he saw one of the men from the special units extending a pole with a little mirror to check Feldher’s position in the house.

A moment later he spotted him in the reflection.

They could only see his shoulder and the back of his neck. He was wearing a camouflage jacket and a hunting cap. Then for a moment he had a glimpse of his profile, his chin and his untended beard.

It took only a split second. Feldher raised his rifle, perhaps to shoot or as a sign of surrender.

The muffled whistle passed quickly over their heads.

Before Mila realized what was happening, the first bullet had already struck Feldher in the neck. Then came the second, from another direction.

“No!” cried Goran. “Stop! Don’t shoot!”

Mila saw the elite marksmen of the special units emerging from their hiding places, the better to take aim.

The two holes that Feldher had taken to his neck sprayed vaporized blood to the rhythm of his carotid artery. He was dragging himself along on one leg, his mouth wide open. With one hand he tried desperately to plug his wounds, while with the other he tried to hold the rifle raised to return fire.

Goran, careless of the danger, came out into the open in a desperate attempt to stop time.

At that moment, a third shot, more accurate than the others, struck its target in the neck.

The parasite had been exterminated.

S
abine likes dogs, did you know that?”

She’d said it in the present tense, thought Mila. That was normal: that mother had not yet come to terms with her grief. Soon it would begin. And for some days she would have neither peace nor sleep.

But not now, it was too soon.

Sometimes in cases like this, for some reason, grief leaves a space, a barrier between you and the information, an elastic barrier that stretches out and shrinks in again, without letting the words “we’ve found your daughter’s body” bring their message to its destination. The words bounce off that strange sense of tranquility. A brief pause of resignation before the collapse.

A few hours before, Chang had given Mila an envelope containing the results of the DNA comparison. The child on the Kobashis’ sofa was Sabine.

The third to be abducted.

And the third to be found.

It was now a consolidated program. A modus operandi, Goran would have said. Even though no one had ventured any hypotheses on the identity of the corpse, everyone had expected it to be her.

Mila had left her colleagues to wonder about the sudden defeat of Feldher at his home, and try to search that mountain of refuse for possible clues that might lead to Albert. She had asked the Department for a car and now she was in the sitting room in the house of Sabine’s parents, in a part of the countryside inhabited chiefly by horse breeders and people who had chosen to live close to nature. She had traveled almost three hundred miles to get there. The sun was setting and she had been able to enjoy the wooded landscape crisscrossed with streams that fed into amber-colored pools. She thought that for Sabine’s parents, receiving a visit from her, even at such an unusual time of day, might be reassuring, a sign that someone had taken care of their daughter. She wasn’t mistaken.

Sabine’s mother was tiny and lean, her face covered with little lines that emanated a sense of strength. Mila looked at the photographs that the woman had put in her hands, listened to her talking about the first and only seven years of Sabine’s life. Her father stood in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall with his eyes downcast and his hands behind his back: he was swaying back and forth, concentrating only on his breathing. Mila was sure his wife ruled the roost in this house.

“Sabine was premature: eight weeks early. We told ourselves it had happened because she had this crazy desire to come into the world. And there’s some truth in that…” She smiled and looked at her husband, who nodded. “The doctors told us straightaway that she wouldn’t survive, because her heart was too weak. But contrary to all predictions, Sabine survived. She was the size of my hand and weighed barely a pound, but she fought tenaciously in the incubator. And week after week, her heart grew stronger and stronger…Then the doctors had to change their minds, and told us she would probably survive, but that her life would be one of hospitals, medicine and operations. All in all, that we would have been better off if she had died…” She paused for a moment. “At one point I was so convinced that my daughter would suffer for the rest of her days that I prayed that her heart would stop. Sabine was even stronger than my prayers: she developed like a normal child and, eight months after she was born, we brought her home.”

The woman broke off. For a moment, her expression changed. It got ugly.

“That son of a bitch wrecked all her efforts!”

Sabine was the youngest of Albert’s victims. She had been taken off a merry-go-round. On a Saturday evening. In front of her mother and father, and in front of the eyes of all the other parents.

Everyone was looking at their own child,
Sarah Rosa had said at the first meeting in the Thinking Room. And Mila remembered her adding,
People don’t care, that’s the reality.

Mila hadn’t gone to that house just to console Sabine’s parents, but also to ask them a few questions. She knew she had to take advantage of those moments before suffering crashed into their temporary refuge and erased everything once and for all. She was aware of the fact that the couple had been questioned dozens of times about the circumstances of the little girl’s disappearance. But perhaps her questioners didn’t have her experience of missing children.

“The fact is,” she began, “that you are the only ones who might have seen or noticed something. All the other times, the kidnapper acted in isolated places, or when he was alone with his victims. In this case he took a risk. And it’s also possible that something went wrong.”

“Do you want me to tell you everything from the start?”

“Yes, please.”

The woman collected her thoughts, then began: “That was a special evening for us. You must know that when my daughter turned three, we decided to leave our jobs in the city to move here. We were drawn by the landscape and the chance to bring up our daughter far from the noise and smog.”

“You said the evening of your daughter’s abduction was a special one for you…”

“That’s right.” The woman tried to catch her husband’s eye, then continued: “We won the lottery. A large sum. Not enough to make us rich, exactly, but enough to give Sabine and her children a comfortable future…I’d never really done it before. But one morning I bought a ticket and it happened.”

The woman forced a smile.

“I bet you’ve always wondered what you would do if you won the lottery.”

Mila nodded. “So you went to the fair to celebrate, right?”

“Right.”

“I’d like you to reconstruct the exact moments when Sabine was on that merry-go-round.”

“We’d chosen the blue horse together. During the first two turns her father stayed with her. Then Sabine had insisted on doing the third on her own. She was very stubborn, so we let her do it.”

“I can see that, it’s quite natural with children,” said Mila to absolve her in advance of any sense of guilt.

The woman raised her eyes to her, then said confidently: “There were other parents on the merry-go-round, each beside their own child. My eyes were fixed on mine. I swear I didn’t miss a single second of that turn. Except for the moments when Sabine was on the opposite side to us.”

He made her disappear like a conjuring trick,
Stern had said in the Thinking Room.

Mila explained: “Our hypothesis is that the kidnapper was already on the merry-go-round: one parent among many others. That made us think that he must look like an ordinary man: he managed to pass for a father, immediately making off with the little girl and vanishing into the crowd. Sabine might have cried or protested. But no one paid any attention because in everyone’s eyes she just looked like a little girl throwing a tantrum.”

Probably the idea that Albert had passed for Sabine’s father hurt more than anything else.

“I assure you, Officer Vasquez, that if there had been a strange man on that merry-go-round, I would have noticed. A mother has a sixth sense for these things.”

She said it with such conviction that Mila didn’t feel like contradicting her.

Albert had managed to give himself a perfect disguise.

Twenty-five police officers, closed in a room for ten days, had carefully examined hundreds of photographs taken at the fair that evening. They had also viewed the amateur films shot on family video cameras. Not a single shot had immortalized Sabine with her abductor, not even fleeing. They didn’t appear in a single photograph, not even as colorless shadows in the background.

She had no other questions, so Mila took her leave. Before she left, Sabine’s mother insisted that she take away a photograph of her daughter.

“So you won’t forget her,” she said, unaware that Mila wouldn’t forget her anyway, and that in a few hours’ time she would bear a tribute to that death in the form of a new scar. “You’ll take it, won’t you?”

She wasn’t surprised by Sabine’s father’s question, in fact she expected it. Everyone asked it. “You will catch the murderer?”

And she gave the reply she always gave in such cases.

“We’ll do all we can.”

Sabine’s mother had wished her daughter dead. Her wish had come true seven years later. Mila couldn’t help thinking about it as she drove back to the Studio. The woods that had cheered her journey on the way there were now dark fingers that climbed towards the wind-stirred sky.

She had programmed her SatNav to take her back the shortest possible way. Then she had switched the display to night mode. The blue light was relaxing.

The car radio only picked up AM stations and, after wandering through the frequencies, she had found one that played old classics. Mila kept Sabine’s photograph on the seat beside her. Thank heavens, her parents had been spared the painful process of the identification of the body, when her remains were already prey to
fauna cadaverica
. For that reason she blessed the breakthroughs in DNA extraction.

That brief chat had given her a sense of incompleteness. There was something wrong, something that hadn’t worked, that had got in her way. It was a simple consideration. One day that woman had bought a lottery ticket and won. Her daughter had fallen victim to a serial killer.

Two unlikely events in a single life.

The terrible thing, however, was that the two events were linked.

If they hadn’t won the lottery, they would never have gone to the fair to celebrate. And Sabine wouldn’t have been abducted and brutally killed. The retribution for that stroke of luck had been death.

That’s not true,
she thought to herself.
He chose the families, not the children. He would have taken her anyway.

But the thought made her uneasy, and she couldn’t wait to get to the Studio to relax and chase it from her mind.

The road curved among the hills. Every now and again there were signs for horse ranches. They weren’t far away from one another, and to reach them you had to take secondary roads that often ran for miles through the middle of nothing. Throughout the journey Mila had seen only a few cars coming in the opposite direction, and a combine harvester with flashing lights to warn of its slow progress.

The station played an old hit by Wilson Pickett, “You Can’t Stand Alone.”

It took her a few seconds to link the artist with the name of the case that Boris had mentioned when talking about Goran and his wife.
It went badly. There were mistakes, and someone threatened to dissolve the team and dismiss Dr. Gavila. It was Roche who defended us and insisted that we keep our jobs,
he had explained.

What had happened? Perhaps it had something to do with the pictures of the beautiful girl she had glimpsed at the Studio? Had her new colleagues set foot in the apartment since then?

But these were questions she couldn’t have answered. She dismissed them from her mind. Then she turned up the heating a little: outside it was minus three, but inside the car it was fine. She had even taken off her parka before sitting down at the wheel, and waited for the car to warm up gradually. That passage from intense cold to heat had calmed her nerves.

She yielded pleasurably to the weariness that was gradually taking control of her. All in all, she was enjoying the car journey. In a corner of the windscreen, the sky, which had been covered by a thick layer of cloud for days, suddenly opened up. Like someone had cut out a scrap of it, revealing a multitude of scattered stars and letting the moonlight through.

At that moment, in the solitude of those forests, Mila felt privileged. As if that unexpected spectacle were only for her. As the road curved round, the tear of light moved over the windscreen. She followed it with her eyes. But when they settled on the rearview mirror, she saw a gleam.

The moonlight was reflected in the bodywork of the car that was following her with its lights out.

The sky closed over her. And it was dark again. Mila tried to stay calm. Once again, someone was copying her footsteps, as had happened in the gravel yard outside the motel. But if the first time she had accepted that it might be a figment of her imagination, now she was absolutely convinced of its reality.

I have to stay calm and think.

If she accelerated, she would reveal her state of alarm. And she didn’t know how skilled a driver her pursuer was: on those rough roads, roads that she didn’t know, an attempted escape could have proved fatal. There were no houses to be seen, and the first center of human habitation was at least twenty miles away. And besides, her nocturnal adventure at the orphanage, with Ronald Dermis and his drugged tea, had put her courage severely to the test. She hadn’t admitted it until then—in fact, she had insisted to everyone that she felt well and hadn’t suffered from shock. But now she wasn’t so sure that she could confront another dangerous situation. The tendons in her arms stiffened, her nervous tension rose. She felt her heart speeding up, and she didn’t know how to stop it. She was gripped by panic.

I must stay calm, I must stay calm and think sensibly.

She turned off the radio to help her concentration. She worked out that her pursuer was using her lights to guide him. After staring at the SatNav screen for a moment, she detached it from its fitting and put it in her lap.

Then she reached her hand towards the light switch
and turned them out
.

Suddenly she accelerated. In front of her there was nothing but a wall of darkness. Without knowing where she was going, she trusted only the trajectory indicated by the navigation device. Take a forty-degree bend to the right. She obeyed and saw the cursor on the display pointing out her journey. A straight line. Skidding slightly, she complied. She kept her hands firmly on the wheel, because without any bearings it would only have taken a tiny variation to send her off the road. A curve to the left, sixty degrees. This time she had to change down suddenly so as not to lose control, and steered into the bend. Another straight line, longer than the earlier one. How long could she go on without having to turn the lights back on? Had she managed to trick whoever was on her tail?

Taking advantage of the straight road ahead of her, she looked in the rearview mirror.