I am intrigued by the insights this particular angle might reveal, but considering the age of both subjects, I have begun to wonder whether it is appropriate to keep the experiment going, and if it is not, what might be the best way to terminate it.

-59-

-59-

The tin box lay on the table in the center of the room, its lid open and its contents visible to all those present. Nobody seemed able to look away from what was inside.

Teresa put on a pair of latex gloves and extracted the two objects. She placed the smaller one on the palm of her hand. It was a medal, gleaming beneath the neon lights. She turned it around: there was a carving on the back.

“W. Wallner,” Teresa read out. It had a date, too: 01/09/1936.

No one inside the meeting room of the police station in Travenì seemed prepared to say anything more. Even Hugo Knauss had lost the congenial expression that was his trademark.

“Are they meant for some kind of Satanic ritual?” said Parisi, frowning and running his hands over his bearded chin. He always fiddled with his goatee when he was nervous.

Teresa let slip a smile.

“No. This is the seal of Hippocrates, combined with the Rod of Asclepius. It’s the symbol of doctors,” she explained, pointing out the snake wrapped around a staff.

“Wallner,” Marini mused. “I feel like I’ve heard that name before.”

“It’s a fairly common surname in German-speaking countries,” she said. “But I doubt that finding the original owner would be of much help.”

Why give an object like this to the children? she wondered as she slipped the medal inside a plastic bag.

“What about the other one?” Parisi asked. “Is that a symbol, too?”

Teresa studied the second object. She wanted to believe it was completely innocuous, but could sense that that wasn’t the case. She couldn’t quite tell what it was for.

It was a simple white hood, a cone of cotton fabric with two holes for eyes covered by a thin mesh. It was dirty, and some of the stitches had come undone. It looked a little like the headgear that worshippers sometimes wore during Easter celebrations in certain villages in southern Italy. Or like the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.

That particular association made the object seem all the more disturbing.