The eyelids were painted black, and the skin white. They looked like the eyes of a warrior—hostile and hypnotic. He felt his will to resist slipping away. He raised his hand to touch that face, and he knew then that it was real. The man’s mouth fell open, exposing a set of wide, sturdy teeth the color of ivory, like the jaws of a beast—a beast that now roared with fury.

The boy felt tears running down his cheeks. He knew that he was going to die, that this man who was holding him still, as if he were no heavier than a sprig, wanted to kill him.

Instead, the stranger loosened his grip on the boy’s throat and finally freed him. He shook the boy around as if he were a rag doll, but he didn’t hurt him.

The boy gasped for breath. As he coughed and coughed, with tears streaming from his eyes and blurring his vision, he dared to look once more at that face. The man was studying him. He seemed to have seen something that had made him change his mind. Something unexpected that had stopped him in his tracks.

-37-

-37-

The car that belonged to Melania Kravina, Lucia’s mother, was parked on a lay-by off the road that led from the Flais lakes down to Travenì, a snake-like ribbon of black asphalt in a glacial landscape. The temperatures recorded in that natural hollow between the Alps and the village were among the lowest in the entire country. Every animal and mineral form there was coated in crystals of ice.

The woman had dropped one of her colleagues home before disappearing, and the snow that had fallen overnight had covered her car. The head of the forensics team who were just finishing up on the scene had already told Teresa that they hadn’t found a single fingerprint. Which could only mean one thing: someone had wiped the car down.

“The husband?” Marini asked.

Teresa nodded, her eyes looking for the footprints the snow would have erased.

“He turned the house inside out and told his daughter to clean it,” she said. “Then he went out and did the same with the car. He knew where to find it because he knew which route his wife would take that night to drop her friend home. He was worried about something.”

“A secret.”

The snow that had piled up on the side of the carriageway was dotted with a variety of animal footprints. Deer, birds, rodents . . . When nobody was looking, the forest behaved like a single organism. Every form of life left a trace of its passage.

There were skid marks on the asphalt beneath the layer of ice that the forensics team had scraped off.