“Do you think it could be someone you know? Someone with a score to settle, perhaps about some dope you haven’t paid off?” Teresa asked, purely out of habit.

“No, it’s got nothing to do with drugs. That man was . . . I don’t know how to put it. He looked like he came from another world.”

“Describe him.”

“I told you, I wasn’t myself. All I know is that he was pale, and he was staring at me with his eyes wide open. I’ve never seen a face like that; it had no expression at all. It was completely frozen, like the face of a dead person.”

Those words sparked something inside Teresa.

“Like a ghost?” she asked him.

“Yes. He looked like a ghost.”

Teresa thought back to all the people that populated this case. Their faces whirled in her mind now, paired to words that were slowly beginning to form an intelligible pattern. She replayed everything that had happened in the past few days, as if she were watching a film, and thought of the various characters involved, how, consciously or unwittingly, they were all interacting with each other in some way—and moving the story to its still unwritten epilogue.

The victims. The school. The community. The forest. The stranger with the painted face. And them. Teresa instructed De Carli to draw up the interrogation report and took Marini aside.

“His daughter Lucia is always talking about the ghost in the woods,” she said.

“Do you think she knows him?”

Teresa thought it went a lot further than that. She had finally discovered the link between the killer and the victims. It had nothing to do with motive, nor with a psychopathology of any sort. It was something she hadn’t come across before and could only describe, for now, as “pack behavior.”

“I think I know what all the victims have in common,” she said.

-55-

-55-

The child was crying. His wails were desperate and relentless, like those of a blackbird chick fallen from its nest. Featherless, wearing nothing more than his own skin, he kept his soft, pinkish beak wide open. Nothing could divert him from his mission. Though he was only a newborn, he instinctively knew that somewhere in the world his mother was doing exactly what he was doing—she was looking for him, and if he stopped crying, she would never find him. His tiny face was flushed with the effort and with the atavistic terror of being separated from that which had given him life.