“God . . . It’s a human corpse!” she heard him say.

They saw before them an ancient, time-worn skeleton. Its bones were covered in dust and had blackened in certain spots.

Upon it were the body parts that had been taken from each of the victims. At its feet were the leftovers of a recent meal.

“That’s not quite accurate,” said Teresa, wishing for once that she didn’t have the kind of experience to know better. “It’s the corpse of a child.”

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Another child.

Two children whose stories we don’t know: one of them has grown up to be a killer, while the other has no name, only a skeleton. The third child has been taken from his mother and is somewhere in this forest right now, god knows where.

Children: they seem to be at the heart of this merry-go-round of death and hope. Children who survive, who fight back, who learn to love in spite of everything.

It is a celebration of life, a feeling that has spread through me since I first arrived in this valley.

A celebration of life and its ability to endure.

There is no force stronger than life, and we are at its service.

Antonio Parri was analyzing the skeleton and compiling a report on his findings. They had not yet moved the body from the position it had been found in.

Teresa stood to one side and watched the coroner at work. She knew that his inventory of the bones would be accompanied by detailed observations on the surrounding environment, a geographical and topographical analysis, and his conclusions on the nature of the remains. It would require him to spend hours studying the smallest parts of what had once been a human being.

But Teresa didn’t have that kind of time. Parri knew that, so as soon as he could, he would provide her with any information he was able to glean from a preliminary morphological examination.

Teresa doubted it would be of any great help in finding the missing child, but there was not much else she could do at that stage other than hope. It had been almost fifteen hours since the abduction, and though they continued to search with every tool at their disposal, they had yet to find any trace of the child or of Andreas Hoffman.

At last Parri turned around and invited her to come closer. Teresa did so, though she stopped at a good distance from the remains. She tried to picture the child they had belonged to. It was a painful exercise, but not one she wished to avoid, she needed that pain to keep her going, to continue the search.

“It is possible that the body was repositioned over time,” the coroner explained. “I doubt it was ever interred. The spinal cavity is clean. The longer bones present traces of animal bites that date to a time after the corpse was reduced to a skeleton.”