The snow that had fallen overnight had covered any traces of human passage, but Teresa relied on what the drone had spotted not far from where they currently stood. She wondered what kind of man could live up there, among eagles and foxes and not much else, in a place where even deer rarely ventured and mountain goats thrived instead, where the howling of the wind was the sound that dominated over all others.

“We’re here,” she heard someone announce from the group that was leading the way. The column came to a halt, and Teresa walked to the front.

A clearing came into view through the trees. There was a derelict structure standing in the middle, half-blackened by an ancient fire. The wooden planks that formed the walls of the shelter had been eroded by time, and its pitched roof rested on a base of simple stone. It was an abandoned barn, the kind where people used to store hay after the summer reaping of the highland meadows.

“Back in the old days our elders knew the best time of the year to harvest timber for building homes. It will go hard and it will blacken, but it won’t burn,” said Hugo Knauss as he observed the ruin.

The building was not vacant. Rusty, mismatched objects sprouting through the snow were strewn all around it next to other, newer arrivals. This, Teresa realized, was where anything stolen from Travenì ended up. Whoever it was that lived in the shelter must be a regular visitor to the village, returning here with treasures he then left outside, exposed to the elements.

She had instructed the helicopters to stay away from the area for the time being, to avoid scaring Andreas Hoffman into doing something he might not have intended. They had to do the same, make sure their presence went undetected for as long as possible.

Surrounding the shelter, interspersed among the scraps, were low totems made out of animal skulls. Bones hung suspended from the branches of nearby fir trees, chiming as they swayed in the wind, like rudimentary dream catchers.

Knauss spat on the ground.

“You’re the expert, Superintendent. What the hell kind of killer is this?” he said.

“Would you call an animal who attacks because it feels under threat a ‘killer’?” Teresa snapped, stepping away from him.