The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi Page A

disappearances for the past month?”
    “Don’t ask us…” said Rosa spicily.
    The dirty work, thought Mila. It was only too obvious that that was why she had been called in. Roche had wanted to give the thing to someone outside the unit, who wasn’t too close to him, to let them take the fall if the sixth corpse were left nameless.
    Debby . Anneke . Sabine . Melissa . Caroline .
    “What about the families of the other five?” asked Mila.
    “They’re coming over to headquarters too, for the DNA test.”
    Mila thought of those poor parents, forced to subject themselves to the DNA lottery to be certain that the blood of their blood had been barbarously killed. Soon their lives would change forever.
    “And what do we know about the monster?” she asked, trying to distract herself from that thought.
    “We don’t call him a monster,” Boris observed. “That would depersonalize him.” As he said it, Boris exchanged a meaningful glance with Rosa. “Dr. Gavila doesn’t like that.”
    “Dr. Gavila?” Mila repeated.
    “You’ll meet him.”
    Mila’s unease increased. It was plain that her scant knowledge of the case put her at a disadvantage over her colleagues, who would be able to make fun of her over it. But once again she didn’t say a word to defend herself.
    Rosa, on the other hand, had no intention of leaving her in peace and pressed her indulgently: “You see, my dear, you shouldn’t be surprised if you don’t understand how things stand. I’m sure you’re good at your work, but this is different, because serial killers have different rules. And that applies to the victims, too. They’ve done nothing to deserve it. Their only crime, most of the time, is that they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or they were wearing one particular color rather than another when they left the house. Or, as in our case, their crime was to be little girls, Caucasian, and to be aged between nine and thirteen…Don’t take this the wrong way, but you can’t know these things. Nothing personal.”
    Yeah sure, I believe that, thought Mila. Since the very moment when they met, Rosa had made everything personal.
    “I learn quickly,” Mila replied.
    Rosa turned and looked at her, her face hard: “Do you have children?”
    Mila was startled for a moment. “No, why? What’s that got to do with it?”
    “Because when you find the parents of the sixth little girl, you’ll have to tell them the ‘reason’ why their beautiful daughter was treated like that. But you will know nothing about them, about the sacrifices they made to bring her up and educate her, the sleepless nights when she had a temperature, the savings they’d put aside for her studies, to make sure she had a future, the hours spent playing with her, or helping her with her homework.” Rosa’s tone was getting increasingly angry. “And you will never know why three of those girls wore the same shiny polish on their nails, or that one of them had an old scar on her elbow because maybe she fell off her bike when she was five, or that they were all young and pretty and their dreams and desires of that innocent age have been violated forever! You don’t know these things because you’ve never been a mother.”
    “‘Hollie,’” was Mila’s brusque reply.
    “What?” Sarah Rosa stared at her without comprehension.
    “The brand of nail polish is called Hollie. It’s the shiny kind, coral dust. It was a freebie that was given away a month ago with a teenage magazine. That’s why all three of them had it: it was really successful. Also, one of the victims was wearing a charm bracelet.”
    “We haven’t found a bracelet,” said Boris, who was starting to get interested.
    Mila took one of the photographs out of the folder. “It’s number two, Anneke. The skin near her wrist is paler. A sign that she was wearing something there. The murderer might have taken it off, perhaps she lost it when she was being kidnapped or during a