“Oh, all right then, tough guy!” she teased. But she turned serious again, and came up close to him, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to look him in the eye. “I’ll tell you something else. He doesn’t even have a driver’s license. He doesn’t drive and he doesn’t have a license because he’s not able to. He’s probably tried, but it’s been one of his many failures. His unstable mind won’t allow it. How can I tell? From what he’s done to the victim and the way he’s done it. A man who can claw another man’s eyes out with his fingernails is bound to be affected by severe psychological disorders that would be impossible to disguise. He is not capable of successfully completing any kind of course of study—not even driving school. He can’t hold down a job. He is unable to commit to anything or to concentrate on anything.”

Massimo realized he’d been holding his breath. She handed him the marker.

“Go on then, write,” she commanded, and went on with her dictation without waiting to see how he would react. “He lives alone, only a few miles from the crime scene. We need to narrow the area down.”

Massimo acquiesced, though he remained doubtful.

“How can you be so sure he lives alone?” he asked.

“No one could bear to live with this type of individual; he will exhibit an alarming lack of personal hygiene and be unfamiliar with the concept of tidiness. The key word here is ‘psychosis,’ and the extent of his tells us a lot about him. What would you deduce from the fact that he killed with his bare hands and without using any means of ligature?”

“That the murder wasn’t premeditated.”

“Wrong. The murder wasn’t organized. There’s a difference. And yet there are a number of clues that would suggest the opposite. There are some inexplicable singularities. Contradictions. Something’s not quite right.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the staging. I mean the way he laid out the body—he didn’t just toss it away, he made a display of it—and the traps . . . So, Inspector Marini, equipped as you are with your degree in . . . ?”

“Law.”

“Christ . . . and with your experience of life in the big city, you tell us, you lift the veil: is our killer organized or disorganized?”

Silence.

The superintendent’s expression flattened into a line of commiseration.

“Just as I thought. You’ll have to start from zero—which is exactly where you are right now.”

-14-

-14-

Lucia woke up to a scrabbling noise above her head, the sound of claws scraping and scratching insistently at the flagstone roof until the tiles shook and clanged against each other.