“It seems Wallner practiced the same beliefs as his father. He did not possess a conscience in the way we understand it. We should look for his body, too, around here. His might have been interred. He lived in this area long enough to raise two children, though we still have to figure out how.”

Marini looked around.

“What kind of life would it have been?” he wondered aloud.

“A difficult one, without question, but still preferable to a trial and to prison,” Teresa replied. “He must have made the occasional trip to the village, though. To stock up, to get a hold of medicines . . . Wallner was bilingual, and he perfected his experiments here. Go and find out whether anyone remembers him, even vaguely. If anyone ever saw him. We need to find out whose skeleton that is in there. He’s three or four years younger than Andreas Hoffman.He can’t have come from the orphanage.”

“We’ve discovered some photographs of Wallner, but they’re all quite blurry.”

“It’s not the photos I’m worried about, but how the people of this valley understand the concept of cooperation.”

“Why would they care about protecting a criminal who might have made a few trips to the valley some thirty years ago?”

“That’s not it; they’re protecting themselves, the community, the group, its collective stability. Individuals don’t matter.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I’ve found out more.”

Teresa glanced at the sun; it had already begun to set. Parri’s assistant emerged from the building, carrying a metal box that held the skull they had just extracted.

From a distant point in the forest, on a slope that faced the clearing with the mountain shelter, several flocks of birds took flight in unison as if startled by the sound of a bullet, though none had been fired. The sky above the treetops briefly turned black.

Teresa couldn’t move. A familiar sensation held her rooted to the ground where she stood, her eyes fixed on that distant spot. She could feel that she was being watched, and she knew he was the one watching. Andreas was hiding up there and observing them all. Why was he still lingering there, where he risked getting caught?

The answer to her question was being carried out past her, sealed inside a small steel coffin.

She finally understood what Andreas was protecting from the advance of the outside world: not his lair, but the only human relationship he’d ever known. He had somehow sensed what was being taken away from him.

“He became violent because he felt threatened by the expansion of the construction site,” she said. “He was afraid they would take away his companion. That’s what drove him to kill.”

“But that little boy’s been dead for decades,” Marini protested.

Teresa looked at the spot on the mountain where the birds had flown from. That was where the baby was.