“I heard the cops talking in the parking lot, before they went in to look for your mother,” Viesel whispered, as if sharing a secret. “Do you want to know what they were saying?”

Diego kept his eyes fixed on the janitor and didn’t reply. Oliver thought he looked like he’d been hypnotized.

“Do you want to know how he died?”

Now all three boys were listening, transfixed.

Abramo Viesel raised his hands, curled his fingers like talons, and brought them slowly toward Diego’s face.

“They took him into the woods and ripped his eyes out. Like this!”

His tale was interrupted by the voice of a teacher calling out for them from the hallway. Oliver felt Mathias pulling him away and saw that he was dragging Diego out, too.

Behind them, Abramo Viesel was now complaining forlornly about how tired he was, with all his aches and pains, of being subjected to the pranks of these spoiled brats while he tried to clean the toilets. Oliver didn’t look, but he could picture the janitor standing there, waving the eraser about in one hand and supporting his back with the other.

He did look at Diego, though, and almost didn’t recognize him. Diego’s face had gone so pale that he looked dead. Just like his father.

-6-

-6-

In the half-lit room, a projector beamed photographs from the crime scene.

There were close-ups of parted, cyanotic lips, and details of capillaries spreading beneath the epidermis like river deltas. A pale sternum. Black craters where the eyes used to be.

These images were the raw materials of their work, lumps of clay they would mold into the face of the killer, a face to which they would then attach a name. It was always a killer’s profile—the portrait of his psyche—that led investigators to his identity, never the other way around.

Slouched in her chair, Teresa considered the slides, with Ambrosini, the regional chief of police, and Gardini, the deputy public prosecutor, sitting on either side of her. She regarded them as friends, though their friendship had no bearing on their professional relationship. Behind them sat the rest of her team.

They had just returned to the police station having spent hours examining the crime scene and collecting evidence until the cold had seeped into their bones. But their work had only just begun, and the day was sure to blend seamlessly into night.

Teresa’s eyes, though stinging with exhaustion, were fully focused.

More images now, scenes from a natural landscape untamed by man. The vegetation was dotted with the forensics team’s markers signalling every piece of evidence they’d found: traces of blood, prints, and branches snapped by the fury of a beast with human features.

And finally, the culmination of that morbid repertoire: an effigy made out of the victim’s bloodied clothing.