“I believe so. Judging by the clotting in the capillaries here, the victim did not die immediately, but after a few hours. We will have to wait for the full autopsy to establish a definitive cause of death. In any event, it happened on the day he disappeared. I would rule out strangulation; the trachea appears undamaged and there are no bruises on the neck.”

“Wouldn’t wounds like those kill you anyway?”

The question had come from Marini.

“Is he new?” Parri asked Teresa.

“Indeed.”

“No, wounds like these wouldn’t kill you, young man.”

“If it took a few hours, the perpetrator will have stayed behind to watch over the dying victim,” Teresa murmured, lost in her conjectures. “Or perhaps he came back later to rearrange the body and set up the scene he’d planned in his head.”

“We found a fingernail fragment in one of the eye sockets,” the coroner resumed. “I’ve already sent it off to the lab for DNA testing.”

Teresa felt uneasy, and Parri noticed.

“What is it that bothers you?” he asked her.

“Everything. Nothing. I don’t know . . .” Teresa removed her glasses and used her sleeve to wipe furiously at the lenses. “It’s as if the murder was committed by two different people. One of them is lucid, methodical, and positioned the body carefully to send a message—though what message?—laying out traps to ensure it would remain intact until we found it, but hiding the car so that we wouldn’t find it too soon. The other one is completely disorganized, almost animalistic . . . the way he killed so close to a footpath, unconcerned about being seen, without using ropes or weapons, as if the murder were the result of a moment of uncontrollable fury . . . He left prints everywhere, failing to take even the most basic precautions.”

They resumed their examination of the corpse.

“No bite marks anywhere,” said Teresa.

“I noticed that too.”

“When an attack is motivated by sadistic intent, it is not unusual to find bite marks on the body,” Superintendent Battaglia explained for Marini’s benefit. “The killer loses control and surrenders to his most brutal instincts. But here we have no marks of that kind. Not even a scratch. He left the rest of the body untouched, as if the face were all he cared about.”

“That’s another thing that bothers you,” Parri guessed.

Teresa nodded.

“I can’t figure him out, and that’s never happened before. I can’t work out who it is I’m dealing with.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Marini interrupted. “Having no predetermined idea, I mean. It’s a little early to know what kind of guy the killer might be.”

Teresa looked at him. He’d had the same expression when he had arrived at the crime scene that morning: at once embattled and defiant. She couldn’t quite believe anybody could be this naive.