The Whisperer Read Online Free Page B

painful.
    “He’s going to make us find them in bits,” said Chief Inspector Roche.
    “So that’s our task? Collecting corpses?” asked Boris with a hint of annoyance. A man of action, he didn’t want to see himself relegated to the role of gravedigger. He wanted a perpetrator. And so did the others, who quickly nodded at his words.
    Roche reassured them. “The priority is always an arrest. But we can’t avoid the heartrending search for remains.”
    “It was deliberate.”
    Everyone stared at Goran, pondering his words.
    “The Labrador scenting the arm and digging the hole: it was part of the ‘plan.’ Our man had his eye on the two little boys with the dog. He knew they took it into the forest. That’s why he put his little graveyard there. A simple idea. He completed his ‘work,’ and he put it on display.”
    “Do you mean we’re not going to catch him?” asked Boris, unable to believe his ears, and furious.
    “You know better than me how these things go…”
    “But he’s really going to do it? He’ll kill again…” This time it was Rosa who didn’t want to give up. “He’s got away with it so far, he’ll do it again.”
    She wanted someone to contradict her, but Goran had no reply. And even if he had had an opinion on the matter, he couldn’t have translated into humanly acceptable terms the cruelty of having to divide himself between the thought of those terrible deaths and the cynical desire for the murderer to strike again. Because—and they all knew this—the only chance of catching him would be if he didn’t stop.
    Chief Inspector Roche went on: “If we find the bodies of those little girls, at least we’ll be able to give their families a funeral and a grave to weep over.”
    As usual, Roche had put it in the most diplomatic manner possible. It was a rehearsal for what he would say to the press, to soften the story to the advantage of his own image. First mourning, grief, to take time. Then the investigation and the finding of the culprits.
    But Goran knew that the operation wouldn’t be successful, and that the journalists would hurl themselves on every scrap, greedily stripping the matter to the bone and spicing it with the most sordid details. And more than anything, from that moment the police would be forgiven nothing. Their every gesture, every word, would acquire the value of a promise, a solemn undertaking. Roche was convinced that he could keep the hacks at bay, feeding them a bit at a time with whatever they wanted to hear. And Goran left the chief inspector with his fragile illusion of control.
    “I think we’re going to have to give this guy a name…before the press does,” said Roche.
    Goran agreed, but not for the same reason as the chief inspector. Like all criminologists who present their work to the police, Dr. Gavila had his own methods. First and foremost that of attributing traits to the criminal, to transform a still rarefied and indefinite figure into something human. Because, faced with such fierce and gratuitous evil, we always tend to forget that the one responsible for it, like the victim, is a person, often with a normal life, a job and perhaps even a family. In support of his thesis, Dr. Gavila told his university students that almost every time a serial killer was arrested it came as a complete surprise to his neighbors and family.
    “We call them monsters because we feel they are far away from us, because we want them to be ‘different,’” Goran said in his seminars. “And instead they’re like us in every respect. But we prefer to remove the idea that someone like us is capable of so much. And we do so in part to absolve our own nature. Anthropologists call it ‘depersonalization of the criminal’ and it is often the greatest obstacle to the identification of a serial killer. Because a man has weak points and can be caught. Not so a monster.”
    For that reason, Goran always had on the wall of his lecture theater a black-and-white