“How can you be so sure?”

Teresa didn’t reply. On another day, in another time, she would have been the first to doubt her own words. But not today.

“I’d like to call in a team of cavers,” she said instead. “I think he’s hiding underground.”

“In a cave? Like a bear?”

Teresa didn’t take the judge’s bait.

“Yes, exactly like a bear,” she replied. “But he won’t have picked any old hole in the rock. He knows it would be too easy to track him there. What I’m thinking of is something larger, like an underground cave system.”

The silence that followed her words was effectively a vote count of those who were prepared to follow her in this new mission—and those who thought she had finally gone insane.

“I think that’s an inspired suggestion,” said Ambrosini. “We must look into it.”

“I’m not fully acquainted with the geology of the area,” said Knauss. “But I think the mountain rescue team know some people who could help us.”

“Yes, we’ve done joint search and rescue drills with the speleologists in Burnberg, over in the next valley,” the head of the mountain rescue team confirmed.

“Call them,” said Teresa. “We’re not going to spend another night here doing nothing.”

-71-

-71-

There were no caves in the forest of Travenì. The only natural feature that fit with Teresa’s hunch was a cleft between two rock slopes that clung to the side of the mountain. The fissure, which reached all the way to the surface, was a forty-foot black hole emitting putrid vapors. Over time, it had been covered by creepers and filled with loose soil that now formed a steep, almost vertical path down. At its base was a more spacious chamber, embedded among limestone boulders and tree roots.

“Could he really have climbed into that with a baby in tow?” said Parisi.

Standing on the edge of that silent hole, Teresa had felt a sense of vertigo and had doubted her own conviction. But then the flashlights had illuminated the snow beneath a scattering of pine needles: there were footprints there that could be a match for those they had previously measured, and a number of branches in the leafy undergrowth had snapped. Someone had clearly been there recently.

“I guess we’ll have to go in and find out,” she replied, more for her own benefit than Parisi’s.

It hadn’t been easy to decide who should be the first to descend. They couldn’t rely on guns for this operation, and it was possible that there was a killer waiting at the bottom, ready to attack anyone who got too close. The only person Teresa would have no qualms sending down there was herself, but the limitations of her body made that impossible.