4.

Colomba went back to Dante's apartment three hours later, exhausted from the adrenaline surge and annoyed at the stories she'd had to make up for her colleagues at the local police station.

When Dante opened the door, he was wearing a pair of black jeans and a spandex shirt, also black, which made him look skinnier and even more like an alien; Colomba could count his ribs.

Alberti was stretched out on the sofa with an iced compress on his forehead.

"You don't look happy," said Dante, mixing together coffee beans for his umpteenth espresso of the day. He picked them out of three different bags, counting them out like a pharmacist.

"He wasn't an al-Qaeda terrorist."

"So I imagined."

"Did you also imagine that he was a divorced father just trying to see his son?"

"Even though he wasn't supposed to, right?"

"There was a restraining order, forbidding him from approaching the child or the mother."

"Because he'd abused one or the other, I imagine. Just be proud you've done a little justice." Dante started the machine and watched as a stream of coffee filled the cup. He stopped the machine when the cup was only one-third full. "To savor this variety, you need to make it a very short black," he explained. He smelled the coffee, then took a sip. "The child will have a better shot at a decent life without a violent father around."

"Unless his mother turns out to be worse than the father or he meets someone on the street who splits his head open."

"I don't claim to be God. I just want to take care of problems in my own backyard."

"By sending me out to trade punches in the street."

Dante cracked his sarcastic grin. "You got off lighter than your partner."

"Hey, he caught me off guard," said Alberti in a Donald Duck voice.

"Of course he did." Dante lit a cigarette using his bad hand. He moved the only two working fingers adroitly, grabbing the lighter like a pair of pliers. "I'm afraid I can't turn down your requests now."

Colomba pulled a file folder out of her bag and handed it to him. "Don't you dare try."

Dante sat down at the table, opened the folder, and began leafing through the reports. "Naturally." He sighed disconsolately when he saw the quantity of paper. "You're still using paper? You do know there's such a thing as flash drives and the Internet, don't you?"

"Quit grumbling," said Colomba, sitting down across from him.

"Are you planning to stare at me the whole time?"

Colomba put her forefinger to her lips. "Sssh. Just read."

Dante obeyed with a smile on his lips.

For twenty minutes or so, the only sound was Alberti's rasping breath and the sound of pages turning. Dante separated them into small stacks, giving some of them only a cursory glance.

After checking to make sure that Dante was really reading, Colomba let her gaze wander around the living room. A few details caught her attention. The DVDs piled on the television set, for instance. They were all movies from the seventies, of various types but all of them low quality. She knew it because, to pay her way through college, she'd worked as a clerk at Blockbuster and she knew that stuff wasn't worth the plastic it was manufactured out of. And he must have really searched for them, because one of the open cases displayed the label of an American distributor who sold by correspondence. Another package delivered by courier, this one also half-opened and forgotten in a corner, contained a handful of toy figures that were surprise gifts in chocolate eggs sold many years ago. Colomba speculated that Dante was a passionate collector of pop culture trash, or perhaps he used them in some obscure research project of his.

Dante's voice made her jump. "Is this supposed to be a murder on impulse?" he asked.

"Premeditated. He took her to that isolated spot."

"Which is a rational act. But he decapitated her, which is a demented act. And he didn't cut her body into bits, which is rational. Just as it's rational to get rid of the dirty clothing and pretend to be worried. But at the same time only an idiot would discard the weapon no more than a few yards away. Contradictory, our little friend. The same thing occurred to you, didn't it?"

"People aren't always rational."

"But they aren't intermittently irrational, either. The boy. Don't you have anything from school? Notebooks, drawings?"

"No."

"Do you at least know the name of his pediatrician?"

"I know that he was contacted for information about the child's state of health."

"Well?"

"We don't believe there were any particular problems," said Colomba.

Dante snorted in disgust. "Oh, really? Look at this."

He took the stack of photographs of the Maugeris' son that had been printed out by the investigators at the VCU and laid them out on the table. They depicted the boy in various settings from the apparent age of one year to the age of six. The last one seemed to have been taken outside his elementary school.

"Notice anything?" asked Dante.

Colomba was about to say no. Then she was struck by the seriousness of the boy's expression in the last picture. Serious and sober. She scanned the pictures, going backward in time. It was as if the child had gradually lost any desire to smile. From the first picture, which showed him running into his mother's outstretched arms, delirious with joy, to the last one, serious and sober, there was no mistaking the change. "He turned sad."

"He's not just sad," said Dante. "Look at his posture, too. In the next-to-last picture. His father wants to hug him, but he doesn't seem to care."

"Maybe it's because of the family climate. Maybe it's different in other pictures."

"No. It's too systematic. You know what autism is, I imagine."

"I know that it manifests itself in much younger children."

"Not always. In some cases, the first symptoms of what's known as Heller's syndrome can appear as late as four or five years of age."

"And you think the Maugeris' son might be suffering from that?"

"Maybe. I'd have to talk to the father about it."

"I don't think that's going to be possible."

Dante let himself slump back in his chair. "Whatever you say. This is all I can tell you. Who do I invoice?"

"At least take a look at the initial reconstruction put together by my colleagues. There's a complete transcript of the interviews."

"I've already read it. Maybe the father's lying, maybe he isn't." He shrugged.

Colomba looked straight into his eyes. Dante discovered that when Colomba's green eyes hardened, it took an effort to stare at them. "Try again," she told him.

"What'll happen if I don't find anything?"

"I hope that my colleagues have better luck," she replied.

"But not you. You'll just throw in the towel. And maybe that's what you really want, isn't it? Just to get out of it entirely," Dante said.

"I'm not the one throwing in the towel right now."

Dante gave her a hard look, as if the air around him had suddenly turned chilly. Colomba felt herself shiver. "I can't obtain anything else from photographs," he said in irritation. "To find out more, I'd have to take a walk around the scene of the crime."

"No problem," Colomba replied.

"Yes, there is a problem." Dante looked around. "I haven't left this apartment in two months. I hope you're a patient person, because it's going to take a while."

"I'm in no hurry."

"And you're not worried, either," Dante pointed out with a smile.

"About what?"

"You see, if the father is innocent, then someone's staged a murder to frame him and then be able to have their way with the child by making it look like an impulse murder. But they were unsuccessful, and you know why?"

"No."

"Because the killer's hand was too firm. It took him a couple of chops to take the head off, but he only hit the neck. There's not so much as a scratch on the woman's face. The murderer's hand never trembled." Dante smiled, and Colomba felt a shiver go up her back. "Whoever it was, he's used to killing."

5.

Dante let Colomba and Alberti precede him out of the building, leaving him alone; then he prepared himself spiritually for the descent. His claustrophobia wasn't constant. When he was in a state of grace, he could force himself to face such difficult challenges as going into a supermarket for short periods, as long as there were very few people in the place and the store had lots of plate-glass windows. If he was tired or emotionally drained, it was practically impossible for him to leave his home.

His first psychiatrist had recommended that he rate his symptoms on a numerical scale, from one to ten. At one, he could do almost anything, but when he dropped to ten, he needed to be sedated because he completely lost control.

Right now, Dante was at level seven, at the verge of code red. He blamed it on the unusual day, but also the fact that he cared so much about making a good impression on the sad-seeming policewoman. And so it took all the willpower he possessed to face the six flights of stairs. Six stories without windows, with sharp corners and low ceilings, with other tenants who could appear without warning and fill up the already limited space, consuming his oxygen.

He knew there was no real danger on the stairs, any more than there was in an enclosed building or a dark closet, but the rational part of his mind couldn't conquer the frightened animal that was shivering inside him. Sometimes he'd break out in a cold sweat just at the sound of the winch hoisting the elevator car up the shaft on the other side of the wall: he could imagine himself inside, pounding on the walls.

He'd chosen to wear a raincoat and a pair of hiking boots that were suitable for muddy ground, and he'd put in his earbuds and set his iPhone to play a symphony of ocean waves. He set his respiration to their rhythm, then started his descent, banging the door behind him.

The first two floors went off without a hitch. He descended quickly, one hand on the railing, the sound of the ocean filling his ears and his mind. When he got to the third floor down, he made the mistake of looking up. He saw the underside of the stairs above his head, so close that it appeared to be crushing him. For a good solid minute, he stood frozen on the step; then he turned his head and looked up the stairwell, where a skylight let in a sliver of sky. He kept descending, face upturned, hand on the railing. At the fifth floor down he bumped into somebody and felt his heart leap into his mouth. He took a quick look: it was a woman, one of his neighbors, and her lips were moving as she said something to him. His immediate impulse was to return home and lock the door behind him. Once again, it was the thought of Colomba that drove him to keep going. He smiled tight-lipped at his neighbor and continued down the stairs. There was only one floor left to go when his cell phone rang, cutting off the music. He answered the phone, one hand gripping the railing.

"How is it going, Signor Torre?" asked Colomba.

"Everything's fine, I'm almost there. How long has it been?" he inquired, doing his best to maintain a normal tone of voice.

"Forty minutes."

To Dante it had seemed like five minutes at the most. Or five years. "Be there soon," he said and hung up.

One more floor. Just one more. He took a deep breath as if he were about to dive underwater and then went down the last flight of stairs. He went through the front door almost without realizing it.

He was outside. He leapt for joy on the sidewalk, filling his lungs with fresh air.

Colomba leaned against the hood of the squad car, watching him with her arms crossed. "Was it hard?"

"A little. But being outside is so intoxicating . . ." Dante said, dancing around a little more. He looked like he was spring-loaded.

"Have you ever thought of seeing a therapist?" Colomba asked.

"Have you?" Dante retorted.

Colomba didn't answer, but her green eyes turned darker and greener still. She opened the rear door of the squad car for him. "Take a seat," she said icily.

"I'm sitting in front. And I don't give a damn if there's some regulation against it. I'm not putting on a seat belt, and I'm keeping the car window open, even if it's raining. Okay?"

"Don't you own a car of your own?" Colomba asked. "You might feel more comfortable."

"I only use it in the summer. It doesn't have a top."

It was a long drive. Going fast had a disastrous effect on Dante's nerves, and Alberti was forced to pull over a dozen times or so to let his passenger get out. Each time, Dante did a few push-ups and jumped in place, then got back in, promising that would be the last time, but punctually, after a few minutes, he would turn pale and feverish again.

Still, they did finally manage to reach the stables. With the operational base dismantled, the lines of vehicles jamming the roads were gone and a couple of horses were trotting around the track. In that new and surreal quiet, Alberti managed to requisition one of the Defenders made available to the investigators, and they drove on to the scene of the crime.

Energized by the drive, Dante insisted on walking the Via Sacra on his own. Alberti stayed behind to keep an eye on the vehicle, and Colomba followed Dante, trailing a few dozen yards behind. Dante seemed fascinated by everything he saw, brimming over with energy. He poked at leaves and rocks and often left the trail to look downhill. During the hike, Colomba called Rovere to brief him. "I warned you it wouldn't be easy," he said.

"But you didn't tell me he was a complete nutcase. You should see the place where he lives."

"Is what he told you just as nutty?"

Colomba didn't answer. She hadn't entirely made up her mind. "Any news on the boy?"

"Nothing. Relatives and friends have been contacted, without results. But the first laboratory findings are reinforcing De Angelis's idea. The blood in the car trunk is the boy's, and the pruning hook definitely comes from Maugeri's home. He'd bought it himself last month, to prune a tree in the yard, but he said he's never used it."

"The only thing missing is a confession."

"There's no confession, but he's still being held."