Teresa didn’t allow his lack of enthusiasm to discourage her. She was used to seeing this kind of attitude in new recruits who found themselves facing, for the first time in their lives, a number of unpalatable truths.

“Our hero lives in a small, remote village,” she began. “No more than a few hundred souls in all. He begins his life of crime as a grave robber. He is obsessed with the feet of corpses, he collects them. Some people dream of having a walk-in closet full of shoes; his is full of feet. I know it sounds funny now, but that’s not what you would think if you’d seen it.”

“Superintendent . . .”

“As a child, he was fascinated by women’s shoes, but whenever his mother caught him trying on some of hers, she would punish him by dipping his feet in boiling water. As an adult, he wanted to change sex, but instead he settled for buying dozens of pairs of women’s shoes. He stopped desecrating graves and began killing young women. He picked his victims during the summer, when he could see their feet. He would cut them off and fit them inside the shoes he kept at home. The police came close to catching him several times, but I guess you could say he was always one step ahead. So, what do you think—good story?”

“It would make a great film.”

“Yes, except that it actually happened, and not so far from here. It was in the nineties, the guy was called Igor Rosman, and his victims were real.”

Marini’s smirk had disappeared.

“How did the story end?” he asked.

“I arrested him.”

He didn’t reply. Teresa held his puzzled gaze.

“It’s only by studying the minds of criminals like Rosman and hundreds of others like him that we have been able to learn what we now know about the way a murderer’s psyche works,” she told him. “We know how he thinks and what he thinks about, and we even know where to look for him. That’s why it’s important that we figure out what kind of killer he is. If he’s disorganized, we need to look for a clouded mind, a misfit who lives on the fringes of society.”

“And if he isn’t disorganized?”

“Then we’ve got a problem, because people like that tend to hide behind seemingly perfect lives. Do you understand what I mean? It could be that teacher who’s handsome and a little bit shy, or the prim and proper next door neighbor, a guy just like you.” Teresa rose to her feet. “Come on. We’ve got a two-hour drive ahead of us.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to the crime scene. He’s left a message.”

Marini looked at her in confusion.

“Who?”

Teresa threw the car keys at him.

“The killer.”

-16-

-16-

“Do you think he wanted to mark out the house?”