"The driver didn't see anyone else."

"Back in your day, he had a helper, Bodini. Maybe he has one now. Someone hiding by the side of the road. Or, more likely, in a car nearby. And that's where they had the corpse they switched out."

"Where'd they get the body?"

"I'm hoping they stole it from a morgue somewhere, or maybe they paid off a doctor. But I'm afraid that it was-"

"-another one of his victims. A prisoner who wouldn't obey, for instance . . . so young." Dante seemed to be about to explode. "We need to have the child's body exhumed," he said frantically. "We have to find out who he is."

"That would take an order from the magistrate. And we don't have anything to justify it but our theories. If we can find the Father, we'll get all the different pieces of the puzzle to slide into place. That child's in no hurry. And neither are his parents. If what we think is true, they already assume he's dead."

"Christ," muttered Dante. Then, just to drive home the point, he stuck a pill in his mouth, taking it without a glance and swallowing it without water. "In all these years he's just gone on kidnapping and murdering."

"We can't be sure of that. He might have just started up again recently."

"I am sure of it. He never stopped. And he's not going to stop until you put a bullet in his head. By the way, take your gun back."

She did. "I'm not a vigilante with a death wish, Dante. I'm a cop. I want him in prison."

"Not me. I want him dead. He needs to stop breathing the same air as the rest of us."

She could see he was trembling. "He'll never lay a finger on you again, I swear it," she told him.

"I still can't-" he started to say, then stopped and started again with a firmer voice. "I still can't control myself when I sense his presence nearby. I thought I'd be able to, sooner or later."

"You're doing fine. I'd be afraid if I were in your shoes. After everything he did to you."

"Doesn't he scare you?"

"No, he just makes me angry. And I don't know . . . maybe aghast is the right term. It seems inconceivable to me that a monster like him could really still exist. He's like an ogre out of a fairy tale, like Freddy Krueger. But I'm not going to go on pretending I don't believe in him. He exists, he's out there somewhere, and we have to find a way of convincing everyone else that he exists." Colomba put the car into gear. "Now we have to go see the Palladino family. Don't even dream of trying to stay in the car. I need your opinion."

"Even if I'm rude to the mother?"

"Just try it, and I'll lock you in the trunk."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Try me."

But it turned out that there was no need. Dante's bellicose impulses subsided in the presence of the sorrow they found in the home of the couple, surprised by their arrival just as they were finishing their frugal dinner. It was as if the two of them had been hollowed out from within by some disease, the kind that takes you apart bit by bit without ever finishing you off entirely. From what Colomba and Dante had learned, the father was forty and the mother thirty-five, but to look at them you'd say they were closer to retirement age: he had deep creases, thinning hair, and haggard cheeks; she had prematurely gray hair that dangled in long messy shocks over her eyes. Colomba realized that the woman had never ceased to blame herself for her son's death, denying herself even the minimum of grooming that would have dictated the occasional visit to the beautician and a touch of makeup when needed. And her husband's eyes seemed to be sinking away into their sockets. Though Colomba had never before encountered Fathers or serial kidnappers, she was thoroughly accustomed to couples like this one, with all the murders she'd investigated. Victim's relatives, murderer's relatives, or the murderers themselves. The latter, brought face-to-face with their guilt, had begun to understand that they'd ruined two lives: their victim's and their own, which could now be measured out by the yardstick of prison. And the Palladinos' single-family detached house showed the effects of the loss they'd suffered, with pictures of their son displayed everywhere, even in a sort of altar that occupied an entire living room wall, with crucifixes and images of the Madonna.

Under the onslaught of their grief, Dante as always took shelter behind a clinical analysis of their gestures as they spoke. From his position of safety, next to the large bay window in the living room that looked out onto a sickle moon, he understood that they had no doubts whatever about their son's fate and that they blamed themselves every day for having let him go without them on that excursion organized by the parish priest, whom they considered responsible for all that had happened.

"He was too old to be driving," said the man. "And he went everywhere in a van that was a rolling wreck. I should have taken my son there in my own car, if he really was that keen on seeing that fucking sanctuary."

"Carlo . . ." the woman admonished him under her breath.

Her husband looked at her with pity and not even a flicker of love. "She still believes in God," he told Colomba and Dante. "I don't. Would you go on believing after what happened? Now, exactly why are you here?"

Colomba gave them a slightly modified version of the story she'd told the warrant officer. That there was an investigation under way into the circumstances of the accident, under a Good Samaritan law, for failure to provide assistance, and she implied that she'd let them know in case of any further official developments. She had presented Dante as an expert on cases of this kind.

"Even if they'd stopped to help, what good would it have done?" the husband asked. "My son was killed instantly."

"Was that the finding of the autopsy?" asked Dante, opening his mouth for the first time.

"We didn't have an autopsy done," the mother replied. "He'd already been torn apart. They autopsied Don Paolo, who was driving. They wanted to see if he'd had an attack or a seizure."

"And had he?" asked Colomba.

The mother shrugged. "He was fine."

Colomba thought to herself that events always seemed to conspire to ensure that the Father's plans turned out successfully, while Dante, who didn't believe in coincidences, saw in this new development an added wrinkle of complexity, something he couldn't seem to decipher. How had the Father succeeded in covering his tracks so successfully? How had he erased the evidence?

Now that they'd broken the ice, Colomba went on to questions that had little to do with the details of the accident. Dante had assured her that they wouldn't be suspicious but that they might get angry at being forced to relive what had happened. Nonetheless, whatever anger might have been in them seemed extinguished now. Even when the husband cursed, there seemed to be no force or conviction behind it. "Was it the parish church that organized the trip?"

"No." The wife replied this time. "It was a personal project of Don Paolo's. He went there to pray whenever he could. He asked if we wanted to take part, too, or whether we'd prefer to let Ruggero go with him. We said yes and that we were glad to let him go . . ."

"How far ahead had he told you about the trip?" Dante asked.

"What does that matter?" the husband asked.

"I'm afraid my commanding officers might ask me questions I don't know the answer to. And I wouldn't want to have to bother you again," said Dante.

"A week in advance. He called me and asked," the mother explained.

This time, Colomba and Dante both thought the same thing, namely that a week wasn't much time to organize a kidnapping, unless you were already prepared to take advantage of the occasion. The Father had put their home under surveillance. But how had he selected his prey?

"And was anyone else involved in organizing the trip, aside from the victims?" asked Colomba.

"I don't think so," said the man.

"Didn't anyone get in touch with you in the days before the trip? Like a doctor? A new doctor?" Dante enquired.

This time the question was so bizarre that the boy's parents were astonished. "Why a doctor?"

"I was thinking of one of the doctors caring for him. For his special needs," Dante added, giving the mother a level look.

The woman lowered her head and blushed bright red, as if she'd just been slapped in the face. "Ah, so you know," she murmured.

"Yes," said Dante, continuing to stare at her even though she'd turned her eyes away.

"I stopped right away, the minute I found out I was pregnant," the mother tried to justify herself.

"These people don't care about that," said the husband, letting his anger show. "And anyway, it wasn't exactly right away."

"But almost right away. Almost," the mother said, looking around for understanding.

Dante sat impassive, while Colomba smiled at her, feeling a bottomless pity. "Tell us about the doctor, please," she said, trying to change the topic.

"There was his pediatrician. And then there was Silver Compass."

"What's that?" asked Colomba.

"It was a support center for children with problems."

"Why are you talking about it in the past tense?" asked Dante, antennae quivering.

They learned that the foundation had had offices all over Italy but that soon after the child's death it had closed because of serious financial problems.

Colomba and Dante asked a few more questions that led nowhere and then headed for the door.

On the patio, Colomba whispered, "Do you think he chose the child through Silver Compass?"

"Maybe he wasn't the only one. We need to acquire lists of the patients," Dante replied. But he said it distractedly, not only because he was focused on the pleasure of the fresh, open air-he'd suffered greatly indoors, though his internal thermometer had always remained under the "danger" notch-but also because his mind was occupied with grim thoughts that he couldn't dispel. The threads linking the various events he was investigating were now inextricably intertwined, but at the same time full of gaps and tatters. Gradually, as the investigation moved forward, instead of finding answers to his questions, he kept finding new questions that were increasingly difficult to answer. When he imagined the Father lurking in the dark, ready to pounce on him, he wasn't surprised in the slightest that no one had yet managed to track him down. First of all, no one aside from him even believed in the Father's existence, and-after all-Dante's respect for his kidnapper's intelligence was every bit as great as his contempt for the intelligence of the authorities. Now that he'd learned, however, that the Father had continued to operate, murdering without pity, he wondered just how he'd managed to cover his trail so thoroughly. How could it be that with all the things that could have gone wrong-for instance, a despairing parent demanding a DNA test on a child's remains-everything had worked out instead? Even if that hadn't resulted in his capture, such a wrinkle might have created a hint of suspicion, a tangle of interference that would have made the Father's "work" just a bit harder. Dante, who'd never had much good luck himself, didn't believe in it, and he certainly didn't think that the Father relied on it. Therefore, the Father must have developed a complex and sophisticated plan for survival that Dante was not yet capable of even glimpsing. And there was another thing that tormented him: Why had the police, the minute they'd glimpsed a snag in the Father's overarching strategy, turned to him of all people, to Dante, who had been one of the Father's victims? It was an enormous coincidence, too big for him to believe that that was all it was. But once again, now that he'd identified the problem, he'd been unable to find a solution to it. Or at least he'd been unable until the moment-as he was saying good-bye to the boy's mother, who had walked him to the door-his glance chanced to fall on a sort of small-scale monument adorning the house's front entrance. It consisted of a marble pedestal about a yard tall, atop which sat a bronzed pair of child's shoes. The click in his brain as several pieces of the puzzle finally slid into place was so loud that he assumed the others could hear it. He pointed to the statue with a trembling hand and asked the woman what it was, even though he was quite certain he already knew the answer.

"After Ruggero had his accident, someone left his shoes in front of our home. Maybe they found them on the road and brought them to us. My husband had them bronzed. At first, we thought about putting them on his grave but . . . they stayed here."

Dante seemed to be in the throes of some kind of delirium. As pale as he'd been before, that's how red-faced he was now. He was panting, and his breathing was labored.

"Are you all right, Dante?" Colomba asked him in a worried voice.

He gestured in a way that could have meant anything or nothing and then hurried after the boy's mother, even as she was waving good-bye and closing the door.

Colomba heard him say "Sorry. Just one more thing," as with his good hand he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and showed the woman, and then her husband, something on the screen. Colomba couldn't see what it was, nor did she hear what they said, but she saw the husband and wife nod their heads, and Dante become even more agitated, like a jack-in-the-box.

When he came out he was transfigured. The first solution to the enigma that had been tormenting him had torn through him like an orgasm.

"Dante, what is it?" Colomba asked. "I'm getting upset, and that's not a good thing, because I need to drive. And you don't like when I drive all upset."

Dante's mouth opened into the sarcastic grin, and then spread out from there into a thousand-watt smile. "Have you ever had a satori?"

"A what?"

"An illumination."

"About the Father?"

"Only marginally. I just figured out why you and I are actually working on this case. I don't know where it's going to lead, but it cleared some of the cobwebs off of my brain." He looked at Colomba, and then his smile faded. "You're not going to like what I figured out, I'm afraid."

"There's no part of this story that I like. Well?"

"Rovere," said Dante. "I know what he's hiding."

21.

What are you willing to lose? The words of that song had been stuck in Rovere's ears all day. They'd made their way into his head that morning when his clock radio had gone off, playing that song. He didn't know who the singer was, and he'd forgotten the rest of the lyrics, but he knew the answer to the question.

Everything. That was the answer. He was willing to lose everything, as long as it would put an end to his obsession.

The patrol car dropped him off in front of his apartment building, depositing him into nighttime darkness, and Rovere waved good-bye to the officer distractedly before trudging toward the front door.

Even though his parents had been fervent Catholics, Rovere had grown up with a lingering doubt, the same constant doubt and the same determination to understand that had helped him in his police career. God probably existed, but he was so distant from the world and from mankind that it didn't make much difference whether or not he believed in him. But when Elena had fallen sick, he'd started praying again, the way he had when he was a child. If there was even the remotest possibility it might help, he couldn't neglect it. He'd applied himself to prayer methodically, the way he did everything, splitting the day up into novenas and the short prayers called aspirations. And he'd kept it up even after Elena had died, taking comfort in it at times of torment, when loneliness was a lead weight dragging him down.

In the last week, though, he'd stopped, and he knew he'd never start again. If God had ever turned his gaze down upon him, there could be no doubt that he'd turned his back on him now, contemptuous of his error and his stupidity.

He lit a cigarette at the front door. The light from the atrium filtered through the tiny flowered pattern on the frosted glass, picking out his silhouette on the facade of the building across the street. He was astonished at the sight. He felt disembodied, devoid of substance.

What are you willing to lose?

He took the last drag and opened the door. That was when two hands emerged from the darkness, grabbed him, and hurled him against the wall. Rovere wasn't accustomed to violence. His career as a desk officer had always kept him clear of the street fights, the ugly arrests, the kicks, and the punches. He reacted all the same, trying to throw a weak elbow at whoever was behind him, aiming at his attacker's face. In the meantime, he cursed himself for the idiot that he was. He should have known it would happen, that the monstrosity acting under the name of the Father would understand sooner or later just how dangerous he was. His attacker seized his elbow in a painful grip and slammed him with even greater force against the cement.

"Hold still, goddamn it," said a woman's voice.

The instant he recognized it, Rovere stopped struggling. "Colomba!" he shouted.

It was she, furious and exhausted after the drive from Fano, with the accelerator pressed to the floor and Dante complaining much of the way, shouting and vomiting out the window until he collapsed, weak as a kitten. A horrible trip, with her fury building mile by mile, her thirst for blood, literally. She had never felt herself so betrayed, so used. "Try raising your voice again, and I'll shatter your teeth!" she roared. "Put your hands against the wall!"

"Colomba, I don't understand what's happening," said Rovere in a calmer tone.

Colomba kicked his left ankle to force open his legs. "Up against the wall, and don't move." She started searching him.

"You know I'm not armed."

"There are lots of things I thought I knew."

Out of the corner of his eye, Rovere saw Dante arrive. He seemed even paler than usual, but perhaps that was just the light from the landing. Dante lingered in the doorway, as if the building concealed who knew what dangers.

"Signor Torre, would you at least be so good as to explain to me . . ."

Colomba lost it. She grabbed Rovere by the collar of his raincoat and shook him violently, banging his chest against the wall over and over again.

"That's enough! Enough lies, enough trickery. Tell us the truth, you fucker!"

"You knew about the Father. From the very beginning," said Dante.

Rovere sighed, feeling a mix of pride for someone he considered his protegee and fear because of how she might react. "No, I didn't know!"

"Goddamn it, I told you to cut it out!" Colomba bellowed.

"I'm telling the truth. I only had"-here he broke off-"certain misgivings. Suspicions. I thought I was crazy just for thinking it."