“He paints his face white because identification is the most primitive form of love, and all he saw every day were the white ceiling of his room and a white hood. At first the different ways he’s interacted with people made me think he must suffer from some form of multiple personality disorder, but on the contrary—he has no personality to speak of, at least not in a clinical sense. He imitates the people he meets, in a sort of neonatal phase he’s never overcome. It’s his way of communicating.”

Teresa finally understood why Andreas’s psychological and behavioral profile had always seemed so incoherent: their basic assumptions had all been wrong.

“His case doesn’t follow set patterns because on a psychological level, it’s as if he’d never been born,” she said. “So our usual tools of psychological analysis won’t work on him.”

“He’s able to form relationships with children, though,” Marini noted.

“Yes . . . But to understand how and why he does that, we need to find out how he survived,” said Teresa. “Did he have a home? Someone to keep him company? What happened to his abductor?”

“Maybe Wallner ran away and left him behind. Or maybe . . . maybe he was here all along, hiding god knows where, for decades,” said Parisi. “He may well be dead now, but the result of his experiment has survived. But what do you think triggered Andreas Hoffman’s fury?”

Teresa thought of how the killer had stopped the teenagers in the forest, and the animals they had seen fleeing while they had been collecting evidence.

“His territory has been invaded, and that’s thrown his world off balance,” she said. “It has pushed him down the mountain, like the startled deer we saw the other day.”

“What invasion?”

Teresa studied the map on the wall and pointed at the area where the new ski resort was being built.

“This invasion. The machinery and the construction workers. The clearing of trees. The inspections. We need to limit the search to this area, starting from the northern side, which is harder to reach and more thickly forested. We’re looking for a shelter of some sort.”

“There’s only rocks to the north and north-west. I don’t think we’ll find him there. To the north-east you have the Osvan quarries. It’s a barren landscape there, with no trees and no cover. Only loose boulders,” said Knauss. “There’s nothing there.”

“What kind of quarries?”

“Rock, and lead and zinc mines. But it’s like a desert now. The vegetation hasn’t grown back yet.”

“We’ll use those markers as the perimeter for our search,” said Teresa.

“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” said Marini. “Why did he take the youngest of the Klavina kids, Markus, and leave his older brother at their father’s mercy?”

Teresa had her own theory about that.