Dante shook his head. "No, it's okay. We'll watch it."

Santiago sat down at the console while the other two stretched out on a sofa. When he moved from one machine to the other, even his physical demeanor changed. His motions became almost delicate. "Con mucho gusto."

He typed rapidly, and the moving progress bar of the video appeared on the screen. At first he only saw a black screen seething with other, darker patches, then the image was tinged green: whoever was shooting the video had made use of a night-vision video camera. The lens focused from above on a boy, little more than a child, who was washing himself with a rag. The boy dipped the rag into a bucket brimming over with water that stood on a wooden bench; then he scrubbed his body. He scrubbed meticulously, running it over his genitals and between his butt cheeks, and perhaps that was the part that most excited the buyer. Hard to say. When he ran the rag over his neck, Colomba saw that he was keeping his eyes closed. He had an oval face without much of a chin and wavy black hair.

"The details of the room have been blanked out. We tried to clean it up, but there was no way," said Santiago. "Zardoz did an excellent job."

Colomba nodded, understanding now why it was possible only to see the area around the boy, like a faded circle.

"Every centimeter twice. Every centimeter," murmured Dante. "Every centimeter twice."

Colomba took her eyes off the screen and realized that Dante was imitating the boy's every action as if in a trance, rubbing his good hand over his neck and face. "Every centimeter twice," he said again. His eyes were glued to the screen.

"Turn that gadget off," Colomba ordered Santiago, then dragged Dante over to the sofa and forced him to sit down. "Don't you have anything here to drink?"

Dante was now immobile, but he was still staring into the void.

Santiago brought a bottle of whiskey and placed it against Dante's lips. "Get this down."

He gulped, coughed, then took another, more substantial gulp.

"Take it easy, with all the pharmaceuticals you've downed," said Colomba. "How are you?"

Dante's internal thermometer dropped a couple of notches, so he could speak. "It caught me off guard," he murmured.

"The boy in the video? You've seen worse."

"But this is the first time I've seen someone who was just like me." He wiped away the tears brimming over in his eyes. "A prisoner."

16.

Santiago made a copy of the video and a number of color printouts. In exchange, Dante used his computer to transfer what struck Colomba as an outrageous sum of money to a foreign bank account. The sheer number of criminal offenses she was committing in order to investigate this case was proliferating from one day to the next, but she realized that by this point she didn't much care. She'd never been much of a stickler about rules, but unlike many of her fellow cops, she'd never crossed the line between the unorthodox and the criminally actionable, however fine that line might be. Not out of fear of the consequences but rather out of respect for what the uniform that still hung in her armoire represented, a barrier between all the good that existed in the world and the chaos that threatened it and undermined it around the edges. As she gradually sank into the morass of this case, though, she realized that she cared less and less about the violations. She only wanted to lay her hands on the Father, while all the rest sank into the background. At that moment, after having watched the video, she felt herself filled with a white-hot rage that was only waiting for the chance to burst forth.

On the way back down, they retraced their steps without an escort; Santiago and his men had stayed behind to snort coke on the roof terrace. Before getting back in the car, Dante made her take a stroll into the field of brush. Even if no one came near them, much less tried to bother them in any way, Colomba felt she was being watched from every lit window in the facade behind them.

Dante smoked a couple of cigarettes without speaking.

"You can't be sure he's a prisoner," Colomba said once she thought he was capable of replying.

"The way he washed himself . . . It was the same way he taught me. The same movements. I still repeat them sometimes when I'm in the shower. Only water was a scarce commodity in the silo."

"If the Father already has a prisoner, why would he kidnap the Maugeris' son?"

"One is not enough. Nobody believed me when I told them, but there was another boy along with me. And now there's another one with Luca."

"Don't call him by his name."

Dante dismissed the objection with a luminous wave of the glowing cigarette ember. "Cut it out. For what he does, the Father needs money. Selling videos to dirty old men is the best way to get it. They won't talk, and if they do, there's no way to track back from them to him or the victim. The boy in the video could have been filmed anywhere in the world. We're the only ones who even know he's Italian."

"We just think we know. But maybe the Father took a little trip overseas."

"I already told you: he's too old to change his ways. If we need proof, we have Luca's kidnapping. If he wanted to go to Thailand, he'd have gone by now. And he'd have saved money by doing it."

Colomba stopped to think. "He sold the video five months ago, just before he started looking into the Maugeris' son."

"Funds for the new operation," Dante pointed out sadly.

Colomba sat down on a piece of cement the size of a bollard, waving away a buzzing insect. "It could be anyone."

"Santiago's video is five months old. How old do you think the boy in it could be?"

Colomba took another look at one of the pictures by the light of her cell phone. "Seven, maybe. But considering the conditions he's living in, he could certainly be older."

Colomba saw a red dot bobbing up and down in the darkness: Dante was nodding with the cigarette in his mouth. "I would agree with you. Somewhere around seven or eight. No older. If he was taken when he was six or so, he'd have been a prisoner for one or two years before this video was shot."

"So he was kidnapped sometime between 2011 and 2013, unless we're completely off track. We can check the missing-children reports."

"There's no point," said Dante.

"How do you know that?"

Dante heaved a sigh. "This is my area of expertise, don't you remember? There were roughly one hundred fifty minors reported missing in those three years, but there were very few actual children among them, and everyone remembers their names. In most of the cases, moreover, it was one of the parents who took their child out of the country."

"Well, couldn't it be one of those cases?"

"The age and the face don't match up. No matter how much they might have changed."

"Have you seen all the pictures?"

"Of course I have."

From the apartment house behind them came the sound of breaking glass and two male voices arguing in Arabic. I'll read all about that in the newspaper tomorrow, Colomba thought bitterly to herself. "So you're suggesting it would be a kid that nobody thinks of as having been kidnapped?" she asked, after a minute. "And how could that be?"

"Consider my case."

"They assumed you were dead."

"Bingo."

"And you're saying he did the same thing with the boy we saw in the video?"

"Why not? They'll think that Luca's dead, too, sooner or later, unless we find something. That his father murdered him and buried him in the woods."

Just a few days ago Colomba would have dismissed that hypothesis as implausible. Now she would have laid odds on it as the likely explanation. And why not, after all? If someone was crazy enough to be a serial kidnapper of children, he was certainly likely to have an equally deranged plan for making ends meet. "A child that everyone assumes is dead but whose corpse has never been found . . . I can't think of such a case anytime recently."

"Not necessarily a murder. It could have been a car crash. A car that wound up at the bottom of a river would work just as well."

"There must be quite a list," said Colomba.

"Up until 1994, at least a hundred children died in car crashes every year in Italy; the number might be a little lower nowadays, with seat belts and car seats required by law, but we don't have any reliable statistics."

"Because if we did, you'd know about them, right?"

"Sorry if I'm good at my job . . . Then there are the cases of children drowning at sea or falling into some fucking crevice or ravine in the mountains. But in most cases, the body is found."

"We'd need to get records from the highway patrol, the national park rangers . . . It's a hell of a lot of work."

"Don't you have a central database?"

"We only just got one recently for murders."

Dante blew out his cheeks in exasperation. "I'm amazed you still occasionally arrest people. Can you ask Rovere?"

"No. He's decided that he no longer requires our assistance."

Dante stopped short, just as he was about to light another cigarette. "When were you planning on telling me that?"

"Why, what's it change for you?" Colomba barked, angry at being caught in the wrong.

"I never trusted him. And I trust him even less now that he's cut us out of the investigation."

"He says that he's worried about me."

"Bullshit. He cares about you, but that's not what's driving him. He has other motives, it's just that I can't seem to figure them out. That's why I'm worried."

I'm starting to see things the same way, Colomba thought, but she kept it to herself. Instead, she shrugged her shoulders; even Dante couldn't see her. "But he's not the only person I can ask. Let's head back to the city. Tonight I'm planning to drink so many of those cocktails of yours that I won't know my own name."

17.

Colomba had one other source of information, and that was Lieutenant Carmine Infanti, who seemed even unhappier to receive a phone call from her than he had been to see her anywhere near the car containing Montanari's corpse. He could certainly have refused to help her, but he was accustomed to taking orders from her and he still respected her, and those factors pushed him in the opposite direction. After ending the conversation with her, he started reaching out to contacts, asking for favors and promising others in exchange. An unexpected source of assistance came from the Italian National Clearinghouse on Traffic Safety, which had recently completed a detailed study on the deaths of minors over the previous five years, and also from an old carabiniere friend who'd climbed the ranks and was now a senior officer.

He took a whole day to gather a sufficient quantity of data, and during that day Colomba actually drank very little, while Dante smoked constantly, staring up at the ceiling of his room where he'd taped up the photos taken of the video of the child. He listened to music at such high volume that for the first time, the hotel management complained.

They talked little, as if each of them were processing what they'd discovered in their own way, and the only news for Colomba was a phone call from the police personnel office, asking her to come in as soon as possible. The person on the phone was polite, but Colomba had no doubt that this was just the first step toward a definitive dismissal from the force. It might have been the fact that she'd kicked Santini in the face, or else maybe Anzelmo had reported her presence at the search of the local health clinic, but it was inevitable in any case that sooner or later her extracurricular activities would start to come out. She wondered whether it had been a direct action on the part of the chief of police, as Rovere had feared. To ward off her nervousness, after making Dante promise not to leave the suite, she went home to get a change of clothes and sort through her mail. The book lying abandoned on the armrest of her chair threw her into a terrible depression. She didn't know whether she missed her old life or was just regretting the time she'd spent living like a hermit while a monster was at large, harvesting children. To drive the sadness away, she got into her tracksuit and gym shoes and went for a run along the Tiber embankment, at sunset for once, sweating out bad dreams and stress. When she got back, she saw that she'd missed Infanti's call to her cell phone. She called him back, and they agreed to meet at the end of the second shift.

At eight that evening she swung by to get Dante and dragged him off with her, ignoring his protests, to the Momart Restaurant Cafe in the Nomentana district, which had a nice outdoor patio for smokers. That meant Dante wouldn't be forced to wait in the car.

Infanti was already there with a beer on the table in front of him, and he stood up to greet them. "We've already met," he said to Dante.

"Did you find the condom in the end?" Dante asked him, sarcastically.

"Have you heard of pretrial secrecy, by any chance?"

Dante smirked. "So you didn't find it."

They sat down at the outdoor table, and Dante ordered his usual Moscow Mule, while Colomba asked for a mineral water. She'd felt out of shape on her run, and she decided it was time to lead a healthier life than she had been lately. It was a pleasant evening; Dante decided for the millionth time that the weather in Rome was one of the few good reasons he stubbornly continued to live there.

Colomba and Infanti exchanged a few conversational gambits about nothing at all while Dante explained in maniacal detail to the waitress exactly how the cocktail ought to be made. Then Colomba nonchalantly asked about Rovere.

"I haven't seen much of him lately," Infanti said cautiously. "But he seems sort of down."

"Down how?"

"Unshaven, rumpled clothes. Do you remember what he was like after his wife died?"

"Not really; most of the time I was in the hospital. But I get what you're talking about."

"Yesterday he didn't come out of his office, and he didn't answer the phone either. Today he skipped the meeting with the chief of police . . . the chief went off on him because he said Rovere had been avoiding him for the past week. Maybe he needs a vacation."

Colomba mulled over the information. If what Infanti was saying was true, Rovere and the police chief hadn't met in the past few days. The decision to cut her out of the investigation had been Rovere's alone and once again reinforced Dante's view and his suspicions.

"Rovere is a widower?" asked Dante.

Infanti nodded. "It's been a year. His wife, Elena, had a grim struggle before dying."

"Any children?" Dante inquired.

"No." Infanti opened his bag and pulled out a laptop to change the topic. He didn't like talking about his boss in front of a stranger, especially one who seemed morbidly interested. "I have what you asked for, Colomba."

"You found everything?"

"All the fatal car crashes and all the murders involving minors. As far as the murders are concerned, I'm sure I have them all. It's forty or so."

"Forty-three," Dante corrected him.

Infanti nodded. "Yes, that's right. Well done." He opened the computer, which started up with a whoosh. "When it comes to the crashes, I doubt I have absolutely everything. But I did the best I could."

"Do the reports include the state of the corpse?"

"Not always, but once again . . ."

"You did the best you could," Colomba finished his sentence for him. "I know you did, thanks."