Then Ercole saw motion from the hallway and noted Daniela standing nearby, head down, playing with a braid absently with one hand as she read from a thick folder held in the other.

She’s free…

For a solid sixty seconds Ercole Benelli wondered if there was some way he could credibly engage her in a conversation about police procedures and then smoothly—and cleverly—segue into the topic of his love for Eurovision.

He concluded that there was not.

But that didn’t stop him from excusing himself and stepping into the hallway. He nodded hello to Daniela and said, with a shy smile, that he’d heard she liked the contest and, he was just curious, not that it was important, what did she think of the Moldavian entry last year, which he considered to be the best competition song to come along in years?

Ercole was surprised, to say the least, when she agreed.

Chapter 31

Now, move.

Get going!

Huddling in his musty bedroom in this musty house, Stefan forced himself to rise and, as always, first thing, don latex gloves. Shaky-hand, sweaty-skin… He wiped his brow and neck, slipped the tissue into his pocket for later disposal. Then he slipped a pill into his mouth. Olanzapine. Ten mg. After much trial and error, doctors had determined that the drug made him as normal as he could be. Or, as he’d heard it described, behind his back: rendering him less fucking schizoid than anything else could. (For Stefan, treatment and maintenance were pretty much limited to drugs; psychotherapy was useless for someone who was far more interested in the sound of words than the content. “So tell me your feelings when you walked into the cellar, Stefan, on that day in April and saw what you saw” was nothing more than a series of spoken tones that, depending on the doctor’s voice, could be ecstatically beautiful, could downright thrill him or could induce a bout of anxiety thanks to the shrink’s vocal fry.)

Olanzapine. The “atypical”—or second-generation—antipsychotic worked well enough. But today, he was struggling. The Black Screams were nipping at the edges of his mind. And the desperation swelled. He had to move, move, move along the stations of his own cross, en route to Harmony.

Shaky-hand, sweaty-skin.

Had he been a drinking man, he would have taken a shot of something.

A ladies’ man, he would have bedded a woman.

But he wasn’t either of those. So he hurried to do the one thing that would keep him from surrendering to the Black Screams: find the next “volunteer” for a new waltz.

So. Move!

Into his backpack he placed the black cloth hood, the thin sealed bag of chloroform, duct tape, extra gloves, the gag. And, of course, his calling card: the cello string wound into a small noose. He pulled off his blue latex gloves, showered, dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, socks and his Converse Cons. He pulled on new gloves and peered out the window. No threats. Then he stepped outside, locked the bulky door and collected his old Mercedes 4MATIC from the garage. In three minutes he was on the uneven country road that would eventually lead to the motorway and the city.