Lucas Ebran was different from the photograph Teresa had found in his house. He did not possess any of the characteristics of the ectomorphic somatotype: he wasn’t the tall, lanky figure she’d been expecting to see, moving awkwardly among the crowds. Time had dilated his flesh, though it had left his face unaltered; his body looked swollen, rather than overweight. It was a strange combination of youthfulness and decay. His dirty hair fell over smooth cheeks, and he had an almost translucent complexion. His tattered coat stretched tight over his abdomen and across his shoulders and seemed to be getting in his way.

Ebran was anxious. Teresa could tell from the lack of composure in his gestures, and the febrile glances he kept throwing at his surroundings. Something was undermining his self-control—perhaps the arousal produced by the presence of all those bodies around him, and the rising urge to kill once more.

He was pacing between the stalls in the square, tracing the same route over and over again—there was something systematic in his behavior, as if he were looking for something or someone.

Teresa was watching him from the steps that led down to the little square by the medieval clock tower. She could see him studying people’s faces, scrutinizing their expressions.

“What is he doing?” said Marini next to her.

“He’s choosing.”

The parade of the Krampus reached its climax when the demons tried to catch and strike the bolder kids who came close enough to confront them. In the ensuing chaos and crush, it became harder to keep track of Ebran’s movements.

“I’m going to move closer,” said Teresa. “You stay here and make sure you don’t lose sight of him.”

She began tailing Ebran at a few yards’ distance. She kept catching glimpses of his face in the crowd, but then he would momentarily vanish, only to emerge a few steps from where he’d been before. Teresa wondered how long this dance would last.

There was a sudden panic when a series of deafening bangs went off somewhere in the crowd. People started shoving and yelling at each other, trying to find a way out of the square. Teresa was swallowed by the sudden chaos and found herself pushing against the tide.

“Someone’s set off a bunch of firecrackers,” De Carli reported through the radio.

Marini pushed his way into the crowd and tried to restore order, explaining the source of the noise, but it still took a few minutes for the panic to subside.

Meanwhile, Teresa had lost sight of the suspect.

“I can’t see him,” she radioed, with a curse or two thrown in.

“I think I can,” Marini radioed back. “He’s walking toward the church. He’s leaving. I think he’s stolen something. There’s a bulge in his coat, he’s got his arms wrapped around it.”