The Whisperer (3 page)

So Mila had not been surprised when Elisa Gomes’s parents had given her that particular photograph when she had asked for a recent picture. It certainly wasn’t the most suitable photograph, because Elisa’s expression was unnatural and that made it almost unusable for re-creating the ways in which her face might change over the course of time. Her other colleagues who had been put on the investigating team had complained. But Mila hadn’t cared, because there was something in that photograph—an energy. And that was what they should have looked for. Not a face among others, one child amongst so many. But
that
girl, with
that
light in her eyes. As long as no one had managed to extinguish it in the meantime…

Mila grabbed her just in time, clinging to her legs before the rope could take her weight. She kicked out, struggled, tried to scream. Until Mila called her by name.

“Elisa,” she said with infinite gentleness.

And the girl recognized herself.

She had forgotten who she was. Years of prison had erased her identity, a little piece every day. Until she had become convinced that this man was her family, because the rest of the world had forgotten her. The rest of the world would never save her.

Startled, Elisa looked Mila in the eyes. She calmed down and let herself be rescued.

S
ix arms. Five names.

With that mystery, the squad had left the clearing in the middle of the forest and joined the task force waiting on the highway. Snacks and fresh coffee seemed to clash with the situation at hand, although they did provide a semblance of control. But no one on that cold February morning touched the buffet.

Stern took a box of mints from his pocket. He shook it and slipped a few into his hand before throwing them straight into his mouth. He said they helped him think. “How is it possible?” he asked, more to himself than anyone else.

“Fuck…” Boris muttered, shaking his head. But it came out so quietly that no one heard him.

Rosa concentrated her attention on a spot inside the camper. Goran noticed. He understood—she had a daughter the same age as those girls. It’s the first thing you think about when you find yourself faced with a crime against minors. Your own children. And you ask yourself what would happen if…But you don’t get to the end of the sentence, because even the very thought is too painful.

“He’s going to make us find them in bits,” said Chief Inspector Roche.

“So that’s our task? Collecting corpses?” asked Boris with a hint of annoyance. A man of action, he didn’t want to see himself relegated to the role of gravedigger. He wanted a perpetrator. And so did the others, who quickly nodded at his words.

Roche reassured them. “The priority is always an arrest. But we can’t avoid the heartrending search for remains.”

“It was deliberate.”

Everyone stared at Goran, pondering his words.

“The Labrador scenting the arm and digging the hole: it was part of the ‘plan.’ Our man had his eye on the two little boys with the dog. He knew they took it into the forest. That’s why he put his little graveyard there. A simple idea. He completed his ‘work,’ and he put it on display.”

“Do you mean we’re not going to catch him?” asked Boris, unable to believe his ears, and furious.

“You know better than me how these things go…”

“But he’s really going to do it? He’ll kill again…” This time it was Rosa who didn’t want to give up. “He’s got away with it so far, he’ll do it again.”

She wanted someone to contradict her, but Goran had no reply. And even if he had had an opinion on the matter, he couldn’t have translated into humanly acceptable terms the cruelty of having to divide himself between the thought of those terrible deaths and the cynical desire for the murderer to strike again. Because—and they all knew this—the only chance of catching him would be if he didn’t stop.

Chief Inspector Roche went on: “If we find the bodies of those little girls, at least we’ll be able to give their families a funeral and a grave to weep over.”

As usual, Roche had put it in the most diplomatic manner possible. It was a rehearsal for what he would say to the press, to soften the story to the advantage of his own image. First mourning, grief, to take time. Then the investigation and the finding of the culprits.

But Goran knew that the operation wouldn’t be successful, and that the journalists would hurl themselves on every scrap, greedily stripping the matter to the bone and spicing it with the most sordid details. And more than anything, from that moment the police would be forgiven nothing. Their every gesture, every word, would acquire the value of a promise, a solemn undertaking. Roche was convinced that he could keep the hacks at bay, feeding them a bit at a time with whatever they wanted to hear. And Goran left the chief inspector with his fragile illusion of control.

“I think we’re going to have to give this guy a name…before the press does,” said Roche.

Goran agreed, but not for the same reason as the chief inspector. Like all criminologists who present their work to the police, Dr. Gavila had his own methods. First and foremost that of attributing traits to the criminal, to transform a still rarefied and indefinite figure into something human. Because, faced with such fierce and gratuitous evil, we always tend to forget that the one responsible for it, like the victim, is a
person,
often with a normal life, a job and perhaps even a family. In support of his thesis, Dr. Gavila told his university students that almost every time a serial killer was arrested it came as a complete surprise to his neighbors and family.

“We call them
monsters
because we feel they are far away from us, because we want them to be ‘different,’” Goran said in his seminars. “And instead they’re like us in every respect. But we prefer to remove the idea that someone like us is capable of so much. And we do so in part to absolve our own nature. Anthropologists call it ‘depersonalization of the criminal’ and it is often the greatest obstacle to the identification of a serial killer. Because a man has weak points and can be caught. Not so a monster.”

For that reason, Goran always had on the wall of his lecture theater a black-and-white picture of a child. A chubby, defenseless little man-cub. His students saw it every day and always grew fond of the picture. When—more or less towards the middle of term—a student summoned the courage to ask him who it was, he challenged them to guess. The answers were extremely varied and fantastical. And he was amused by their expressions when he revealed that the child was Adolf Hitler.

After the war, the leader of the Nazi movement had become a monster in the collective imagination, and for years the countries that had emerged victorious from the conflict had been opposed to any other vision. That was why no one knew the photographs from the Führer’s childhood. A monster couldn’t have been a child, he couldn’t have had any feelings other than hatred, or a life like that of his contemporaries who would later become his victims.

“For many, humanizing Hitler meant ‘explaining’ him in some way,” Goran would tell his class. “But society insists that extreme evil cannot be explained, it cannot be understood. Trying to do so means trying to find some kind of justification for it.”

In the task force van, Boris suggested that the creator of the arm cemetery should be called “Albert,” after an old case. The idea was welcomed with a smile by everyone there. The decision was taken.

From that point onwards, the members of the unit would refer to the murderer by that name. And day after day, Albert would acquire a face. A nose, two eyes, a life of his own. Everyone would imbue him with his own vision, rather than seeing him only as a fleeting shadow.

“Albert, eh?” At the end of the meeting, Roche was still weighing up the name’s media value. He moved it around on his lips, he tried to catch its flavor. It could work.

But there was something else that tormented the chief inspector. He mentioned it to Goran.

“To tell you the truth, I agree with Boris. Holy Christ! I can’t force my men to pick up corpses while a crazed psychopath is making us look like a bunch of idiots!”

Goran knew that when Roche talked about “his” men he was really referring to himself. He was the one afraid of coming away without a result. And he was always the one who feared that someone would talk about the inefficiency of the federal police if they couldn’t arrest the culprit.

And then there was the question of arm number six.

“I thought I wouldn’t disseminate the news of the existence of a sixth victim for the time being.”

Goran was disconcerted. “But how will we find out who it is?”

“I’ve thought of everything, don’t worry…”

In the course of her career Mila Vasquez had solved eighty-nine missing-person cases. She had been awarded three medals and a great deal of adulation. She was considered to be an expert in her field, and was often called in to help, even by other forces.

That morning’s operation, in which Pablo and Elisa had been freed at the same time, had been called a sensational success. Mila had said nothing. But it annoyed her. She would have liked to admit all her mistakes. Entering the brown house without waiting for reinforcements. Underestimating the environment and the possible traps it contained. She had put both herself and the hostages at risk by allowing the suspect to disarm her and aim a gun at the back of her neck. Finally, not preventing the music teacher’s suicide.

But none of that had been mentioned by her superiors, who had instead stressed her merits as they were immortalized by the press in the ritual photographs.

Mila never appeared in those snaps. The official reason was that she preferred to protect her own anonymity for future investigations. But the truth was that she hated having her photograph taken. She couldn’t even bear to see her image reflected in a mirror. Not because she wasn’t beautiful, quite the contrary. But at the age of thirty-two, hours and hours of training had stripped her of every trace of femininity. Every curve, every hint of softness. As if being a woman were an evil to be eradicated. Even though she often wore male clothes, she wasn’t masculine. There was simply nothing about her that suggested a sexual identity. And that was how she wanted to appear. Her clothes were anonymous. Jeans that weren’t too tight, worn trainers, leather jacket. They were clothes, and that was that. Their function was to keep her warm or cover her up. She didn’t waste time choosing them, she just bought them. Lots of them were identical. She didn’t care. That was how she wanted to be.

Invisible among the invisible.

Perhaps that was also how she was able to share the district changing room with the male officers.

Mila had spent ten minutes staring at her open locker as she ran through all the day’s events. There was something she had to do, but her mind was elsewhere at the moment. Then a stabbing pain in her thigh brought her back to herself. The wound had opened up again; she had tried to staunch the blood with a tissue and sticky tape, but it hadn’t worked. The flaps of skin around the cut were too short and she hadn’t been able to do a good job with needle and thread. Perhaps this time she really would have to consult a doctor, but she didn’t want to go to hospital. Too many questions. She decided she would put on a tighter bandage, in the hope that the bleeding would stop, then try again with new stitches. But she would have to take an antibiotic to avoid contracting an infection. She would get a fake prescription from one of her contacts who gave her information every now and again about the new arrivals among the homeless at the railway station.

Stations.

It’s strange,
thought Mila. While for the rest of the world they’re only a place you pass through, for some they’re a terminus. They stop there and they don’t leave again. Stations are a kind of ante-hell, where lost souls congregate in the hope that someone will come and collect them.

An average of twenty to twenty-five individuals disappear every day. Mila knew the statistic very well. All of a sudden these people vanish without warning, without a suitcase. As if they had dissolved into nothing.

Mila knew that most of them were misfits, people who lived off drugs and dodges, always ready to sully themselves with crime, individuals who were constantly in and out of jail. But there were also some—a strange minority—who at some point in their lives decided to vanish forever. Like the mother who went shopping at the supermarket and didn’t come home, or the son or brother who boarded a train never to reach their destination.

Mila’s belief was that each one of us has a path. A path that leads to home, to our dear ones, to the things we are most bound to. Usually the path is always the same; we learn it as children, and each of us follows it for the whole of our lives. But sometimes the path breaks. Sometimes it starts again somewhere else. Or, after following a series of twists and turns, it returns to the point where it broke. Or else it remains hanging there.

Sometimes, however, it is lost in the darkness.

Mila knew that more than half of those who disappear come back and tell a story. Some, though, have nothing to tell, and resume their lives as before. Others are less fortunate; all that remains of them is a mute and silent body. Then there are the ones you never hear about again.

Amongst those there is always a child.

There are parents who would give their lives to know what happened. Where they went wrong. What act of negligence produced this silent drama. What happened to their little one. Who took their child, and why. There are those who question God, asking what sin they are being punished for. Those who torment themselves for the rest of their days in search of answers, or who die pursuing those questions. “Let me know at least if he is dead,” they say. Some end up wishing it was so, because they want only to weep. Their sole desire is not to give up, but to be able to stop hoping. Because hope kills more slowly.

But Mila didn’t believe the story of “liberating truth.” She had learned that by heart, the first time she had found a missing person. She had felt it that afternoon, after bringing Pablo and Elisa home.

For the little boy there were cries of joy in the district, festive car horns and parades of cars.

Not for Elisa; too much time had passed.

After saving her, Mila had brought her to a specialist center where social workers had taken care of her. They had given her food and clean clothes. For some reason they’re always one or two sizes too big, Mila thought. Perhaps because the people they were meant for wasted away during those years of oblivion, and had been found just before they vanished away entirely.

Elisa hadn’t said a word all that time. She had allowed herself to be looked after, accepting everything they did to her. Even when Mila had told her she would bring her home, she had said nothing.

Staring at her locker, the young officer couldn’t help seeing in her mind the faces of Elisa Gomes’s parents when she had turned up with Elisa at their door. They were unprepared, and even a little embarrassed. Perhaps they thought she would be bringing them a ten-year-old child, and not that fully grown girl with whom they no longer had anything in common.

Elisa had been an intelligent and very precocious little girl. She had started talking early. The first word she had said had been “May”—the name of her teddy bear. Her mother, however, would also remember her last one: “tomorrow,” the end of the phrase “see you tomorrow,” uttered in the doorway before she went off for a sleepover at a friend’s house. But that tomorrow had taken too long to arrive. And her yesterday was a very long day that showed no sign of coming to an end.