Massimo didn’t even bother replying. He had figured out by now that this was what she needed; some tense, snappy repartee to help release tension. He let her finish the coffee.

“I was wondering why you’ve been drawing up a profile for a serial killer when all we have is a single homicide,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me the other day.”

Teresa Battaglia was impressed. For once, she didn’t look at him as if she thought he was an idiot but seemed genuinely intrigued. She eased herself against the back of her chair.

“I see you’ve been studying,” she muttered, picking out a sweet from her desk drawer. She threw it at him.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Massimo replied, catching it.

She started laughing.

“I don’t want anything. I can solve the case myself. I was just giving you some advice on how you could get better at this.”

“Yes, and I took your advice. Now, can you please answer my question?” he insisted.

She made a vague motion with her hand.

“Ritualism. Mutilation. Staging. Need I continue? It looks . . . it looks like the start of something.”

“The start of what?”

She looked at him as if it were obvious.

“A trail of death,” she said.

Massimo sat down in front of her.

“Do you think he’ll kill again?”

She seemed to hesitate.

“I do,” she finally answered. “That’s why I haven’t been sleeping and I jump every time I hear the phone ring. It will happen.”

Massimo had expected that reply, but there was still something sinister in hearing her say it out loud.

“Then what are we still doing here?” he said.

“What would you have us do? Comb through twenty thousand hectares of woodland? Search hundreds of homes and question thousands of people? Because that’s what we’d have to do, you know.”

“So there’s no way to prevent it,” he said.

“There might be, if he makes a mistake.”

“Will he?”

“Now you’re asking me to look into a crystal ball and take a guess.”

“I’m asking you how good he is.”

She shook her head.

“He isn’t good, he’s savage. But is there really much of a difference between the two? I don’t know. Would you call a wolf that catches its prey good, or would you say it was just being itself?”

Massimo remembered the conversation they’d begun in the woods behind the Kravina home.

“You’re saying that’s the way he is, and he can’t do anything about it,” he said. “You realize how wrong that sounds, don’t you?”

She smiled. She looked tired, or perhaps she was just bored of listening to someone she regarded as a novice, and not even a particularly talented one at that.