“He doesn’t use the roads,” she noted. “So roadblocks are useless.”

“We’ll start searching the woods,” Gardini assured her.

Teresa closed her eyes and let her thoughts run their course. She could see stretching before her thousands of acres of forest, traversed with gorges and crevasses. That was where he was, with the baby boy. Not inside a house, not in Travenì.

Now what do I do?

She felt the shiver of a private fear. The parents and brother of the abducted child were in the room next door. Teresa had put off meeting them in person until she’d read their statements. But their presence in the building was like having a white-hot branding iron almost touching the skin. Even from a distance, she could feel the burn, and she worried it might compromise her ability to think clearly. The only thing worse than hunting a killer was hunting a child abductor.

“Teresa, are you all right?” Gardini called out to her.

He’s still alive, she told herself. She had to believe it, though she’d never in her life relied upon hope. She hardly noticed that her hand had come to rest on her stomach again, on the spot where she had, in her dream, felt life moving beneath her skin, and where her scar still stung sometimes. It wasn’t possible, and yet the bond that had been severed before it could come to life, now refused to break, defying logic, time, the laws of the universe.

She looked at Gardini.

“I need more men,” she said.

“You’ll get them.”

“And the army. We need to search the mountains.”

Gardini nodded.

“I’ll get right on it,” he assured her. “Let me give Ambrosini a call. And we’ll contact the district judge.”

Once she was alone again, Teresa took a deep breath. The next few hours were crucial.

Marini walked in. “I’ve got the maps. They show every mountain shelter this side of the border.”

He spread the papers across the table. Teresa didn’t need to look at them to know it would take the search parties several days to comb through the vast area they would have to cover.

They needed a clue that would steer the search in the right direction—otherwise it was like throwing a penny into the ocean and expecting to retrieve it with a fishing net.

“How many?” she asked.

“Just over a hundred.”

“What about the vacant ones? Let’s concentrate on those.”

“That’s most of them.”

“We need drones. See what they say back at headquarters, when they can send them down.”

“I’ll give them a call.”