The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi Page B

struggle. They were all right-handed except for one: she had ink stains on the side of her index finger, she was left-handed.”
    Boris was impressed, Rosa startled. Mila was a river in full spate. “One last thing: number six, the one whose name we don’t know, knew the one who vanished first, Debby.”
    “How the hell do you know that?” asked Rosa.
    Mila took the pictures of the arms out of the folder one by one. “There’s a little red dot on the tips of both their index fingers. They’re blood sisters .”
     
    The Department of Behavioral Sciences of the Federal Police dealt chiefly with savage crimes. Roche had been head of it for eight years, and he had been able to revolutionize its style and methods. He had been the one, in fact, to open the doors to civilians like Dr. Gavila who, with his writing and research, was unanimously considered the most innovative amongst current criminologists.
    In the investigative unit, Agent Stern was the information officer. He was the oldest and the most senior. His job involved collecting data that would then be used to construct profiles and trace parallels with other cases. He was the “memory” of the group.
    Sarah Rosa was the logistics officer and computer expert. She spent much of her time studying new technologies, and she had received specific training in the planning of police operations.
    Finally there was Boris, the interrogating officer. His responsibility was to question the people involved using the most appropriate method, and to make the possible culprit confess. He was a specialist in all kinds of techniques that would achieve that goal. And usually he reached it.
    Roche issued the orders, but he didn’t materially direct the unit: it was Dr. Gavila’s intuitions that guided investigations. The chief inspector was a politician more than anything else, and his choices were often dictated by his career. He liked to appear in public and take the merit for investigations that were going well. In the ones that were unsuccessful, however, he divided responsibility around the whole group or, as he had called it, “the Roche unit.” This method had brought him the dislike and often the contempt of his subordinates.
    They were all in the meeting room on the sixth floor of the building that was home to the midtown Department headquarters.
    Mila sat down in the back row. In the bathroom she had treated the wound in her leg again, closing it up with two layers of sticking plaster. Then she had changed her jeans for another identical pair.
    She looked around, setting her bag on the floor. She immediately recognized a gangling man as Chief Inspector Roche. He was talking animatedly to an unassuming man with a curious aura about him. A gray light. Mila was sure that outside that room, in the real world, the man would have vanished like a ghost. But in here his presence had a meaning. He was plainly the Dr. Gavila that Boris and Rosa had been talking about in the car.
    There was something about the man that immediately made you forget his crumpled clothes and untidy hair.
    It was his eyes, huge and piercing.
    As he went on talking to Roche, he shifted them onto Mila, catching her in flagrante. She looked away, awkwardly, and after a while he did the same, going to sit down not far from her. From that point onwards he ignored her completely, and a few minutes later the meeting officially began.
    Roche stepped onto the platform and began to speak with a solemn gesture of his hand, as if talking to an enormous audience rather than an auditorium of five people.
    “I have just heard the scientific report: our Albert has left no clues behind. He really knows what he’s doing. Not a trace, not a fingerprint in the little graveyard of arms. He just left us with six little girls to find. Six bodies…and a name.”
    Then the inspector invited Goran to speak, but Goran didn’t join him on the platform. Instead he stayed in his place, with his arms crossed and his legs