The team was waiting for the signal to storm the shed, with more men stationed in the forest to block off any escape routes. Though they’d done several exhaustive run-throughs of the plan, and of the special measures they would take to ensure the child wasn’t harmed, Teresa was more afraid of this moment than she’d been of most things in her career. She had never been responsible for this young a life, and it surprised her to notice how the value of a creature’s existence seemed to be inversely correlated to the time it had spent on earth. Her hand gripped the romper in her pocket, as if she were holding on to a thread that mustn’t be allowed to break.

“Go,” she radioed.

Moving in silence, the men at the edge of the forest closed in on the building until they’d surrounded it. Then, in a series of synchronized movements, they broke in.

Teresa counted the seconds and began to wonder why it was taking so long to secure such a small space. But she couldn’t hear any gunshots or the sound of scuffling either. There must be something else in there that was giving the men pause. Teresa could only hope it wasn’t a scene of death.

Parisi emerged to signal that the coast was clear, and Teresa sprinted to the shed.

Somehow the inside of the shed was even more chaotic than the outside. Objects of various shapes and functions had been stashed haphazardly inside the largest room; she envisioned the master of that place collecting them all without really understanding what any of them were for. Perhaps it was his way of feeling closer to the inhabitants of the village who looked so much like him but were otherwise so different, so distant. She remembered how Roberto Valent’s watch had been strapped to the effigy’s arm; at first she’d thought it must signify something, but perhaps Andreas had only put it on the wrong way around because he simply did not know any better. To him the watch was nothing but an ornament, something he had seen on the wrists of the people who lived in the valley.

A barn owl roused from its sleep flew from the mezzanine to the door and soared toward the forest beating its wings forcefully. De Carli looked down from the attic.

“There’s nothing here apart from that bird and a rat. Just a bed of hay,” he said.

“I don’t think he lives here anymore,” Teresa murmured. “Something has driven him away. Probably the deforestation of the area toward the valley.”

Teresa knew that the people of the village would never understand the way she saw Andreas Hoffman. What they wanted was a monster they could abhor, a bogeyman they could set on fire to exorcise the evil that had descended upon them. And he was a perfect fit.