Missing

by Monty Marsden

  “I’ll work hard, Aisha. Two days, two days and I’ll see your face.”

  Dr Portanova began to insert the measuring needles – in the meantime, Black Sabbath began to play ‘Paranoid’.

  *

  “LA… LAFoD dated the first… pit.”

  Claps had called into Sensi’s office. “Four years… the following year… the second pit.”

  “Then Ami, after three years.”

  “Yes, God knows… how many other… pits… hidden.”

  Sensi nodded gravely.

  “Do you have a better idea of the monster that we’re dealing with? Do you have a profile of him?”

  “I wrote… all… here.”

  Claps dropped a bunch of papers on the desk – they were filled with small handwriting. He made a quick gesture, almost to justify himself. “Read… it will be… easier… than… me… speaking.”

  In fact, writing wasn’t any easier than speaking for him. If anything, Claps struggled twice over, because as usual he struggled to find the words and he had to retrieve the shapes of the letters from his mind before eventually finding their shapes on the keyboard. This process could take an extremely long time on occasions. However, he was free to take as much time as he wanted – and didn’t have to contend with an audience’s impatience with, and wavering attention to, his slow and sloppy speech. He had worked late into the night to write that report.

  Sensi began to read.

  There are three known cases.

  The victims’ physical characteristics are recurring and similar to one another – they are all young girls of African origin in their pre-adolescent years.

  The killer’s methodology is constant – he kidnaps the young girls, he rapes them and then eventually strangles them to death (of course, for cases where only bones were found, it is impossible to establish the cause of death, but strangulation still remains a likely cause).

  The killer amputates the little finger from the victims’ left hand and eventually hides the bodies in pits he digs in small open areas in the vicinity of a forest or a wild area – woods, bushes or a natural park along a river.

  This organized, repetitive behaviour reveals the nature of the killer – he is not a simple killer, he’s not just a paedophile who gets carried away with sexual pleasure.

  He isn’t someone who kills out of temporary foolishness or a sudden delirium, which would be unrelated to what would be his main goal – sexual abuse.

  Rather, death is the real climax, the apex of the possession of the victim.

  Paedophilia is only one aspect – yet it is a fundamental one – to his personality.

  We are dealing with a serial killer.

  Sensi stopped reading.

  “A serial killer and paedophile. It sounds like the title of a terrible, cheap film. You know, a bad one.”

  “Statistics… demonstra-te… that… children… are the most… popular target… after women… but…”

  “But?”

  “The tag… serial… killer… sounds… inappro-priate… to me… to describe… what he is… best… to use… a popular term…”

  “That is?”

  “Ogre. He’s an ogre.”

  Before carrying on reading, Sensi glanced at Claps above his glasses. “Whatever we call him, we have to catch him.”

  His delirium is not limited to the hours during which he abuses the little victims and then kills them – it covers a much longer time span which covers the individualising of a victim and his fantasies about her. It doesn’t end with the final amputation and the hiding of the body – he will always keep a trophy to touch and glance at to relive his pleasure over time. The horrible crime that he perpetrates, the sexual abuse, needs time, at least a day, to be completed – that satisfies his eager, selfish needs. In order to do this, he needs a place to take and hide his victims.

  He has a sick mind, but is not a stupid man. He knows very well what he does and he is able to weigh its gravity and its implications. His extreme organization demonstrates how he feeds his pleasure in different ways at different times – firstly, the individualising of and the fantasies about the victim, with a dreamy pleasure that leads him to masturbate very frequently; secondly the organization of the kidnapping, where his desire to be powerful is gratified and pleased; thirdly, the adrenaline of action and, finally, once he is alone with the victim, the outburst of his bestiality – the complete possession of the body and the life of his victim. The hiding of the body in the wilderness is not only an attempt to make finding the remains difficult, if not impossible. It is a way for him to act with extreme calm, without the fear of being seen. It is possible that the burial of the victims represents for him not only a necessity, but is also an emotionally important moment in the framework of his behaviour.

  Sensi stopped reading once again. “Do you mean… kind of like a ritual? Why do you believe that?”

  “The… amputated… little finger.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “He would like… to keep… the body… with him… forever… he wants to be… able to… look at it… touch it… whenever he wants… but he can’t do… that.”

  “So he takes a small part that he can keep. Is that what you mean?”

  Claps nodded.

  “Separating himself from the body is a huge sacrifice for him, and he has to find a way to celebrate that, right?”

  “That’s… quite likely…”

  “My word,” Sensi sighed. Then he resumed his reading.

  He’s cautious. He doesn’t want to ruin his everyday life by getting busted. He has responsibilities, but I believe that he doesn’t have family – more likely, he’s single or divorced; no sons; I would suggest he’s devoted to his job, or some kind of gratifying activity. Quite certainly, he leads a self-satisfying life and doesn’t want to risk losing it. For this reason, he chooses victims whose relatives are unlikely to make a formal missing person report. He doesn’t want the police or the media to know about it.

  Ami is a different case, a challenge.

  He feels powerful, almost invincible. He needs something that satisfies him more fully, he needs a challenge. The challenge will give him more power, a step forward which will demonstrate his strength. However, he’s a sensible man. He acts only when he has an occasion to use a false identity and he does so far away from his own environment.

  The man will mostly likely be over thirty, probably nearer forty, quite tall, with a gratifying job or activity, single or divorced with no sons or daughters. He most likely owns paedophilic or paedo-pornographic material but doesn’t necessarily have previous criminal convictions for paedophilia. Perhaps he was a victim of sexual abuse in the past. He’s a hunter – he knows the wilderness very well and hunts down his victims. He’s a traveller. The choice of Ami had to be planned carefully – he mostly likely saw her multiple times, he familiarised himself with the place where she lived… for a job or any other reason. He’s far away now – he’s in Tuscany.

  “Do you believe that he still resides in Tuscany? Do you believe that Ami’s murderer is a man who lives far away from the town she was from?”

  “Ami was… a huge risk… for him… in comparison to… the previous cases… investigation immediate… and the media… He’s far away… there… he feels safe and above… suspicion… He’s still there… Tuscany… somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  *

  Yes, where?

  Claps was back home. He had been putting off the daily exercises that the speech therapist had recommended for him. He opened a large map of Tuscany and laid it on his kitchen table. He began to study it.

  He stared at the map for two hours.

  He was certain of the consistency of the ogre’s method – he had to have somewhere to hide for the previous two murders, a hide-out where he could carry on safely with his iniquities. The hide-out had to be fairly close to his home, his daily life.

  It may have been possible to attempt to guess the l
ocation. In the case of Ami, the place of kidnapping and the place of the burial had to be roughly equidistant from the hide-out – a few dozens of kilometres, in different directions. He probably followed a similar pattern for the previous murders. For the first two cases, the first pit was located south-west and the other one north-east of the line between the sea and Siena. It could be assumed that the murderer wanted to bury them in different places, roughly equidistant from his hide-out.

  When he had talked to Sensi about this, Sensi sounded very sceptical. “I’m sorry, Claps, I don’t understand the equidistance problems – you make him sound like an engineer rather than a killer.”

  “No… methodical… organized… he plans… a safe distance… for his risks… he must kidnap…. far away… from his env… environment… and he must bury equally… far away… but this also means… two journeys with…”

  “With the victim in his car – the first time, alive during the kidnapping…”

  “With her body… after.”

  “These two journeys are a risk for him – there’s always a margin of error. An accident, a spot check from the police.”

  “Ye… yes.”

  “Which is why he decides on a distance that allows him to kidnap and hide away from a distance, whilst still keeping reasonably close to his hide-out to minimise the risks.”

  “He’s organized… methodical.” Claps nodded.

  “Cautious.”

  He stared at the map for a few more minutes, this time using a compass. “Different directions, but more or less equidistant from the hide-out,” he thought, once again. Then he drew two circles on the map. He had circled ten kilometre radius areas, but there were many cities and villages in the area they overlapped, way too many.

  A third point was necessary to restrict the area where the ogre’s hide-out could be – the kidnapping spot.

  Had that woman from the Massa Marittima camp really cried for the kidnapping of her daughter?

  Claps decided to insert a third point on the map – the kidnapping area for victim number two, the Massa Marittima camp. He had decided not to draw that point until then – there was no evidence to support the idea that the young girl might have been kidnapped there. However, now that the third point was drawn on the map, the ‘hot’ area was much smaller. The area was so much smaller that Claps decided to extend the tolerance radium up to fifteen kilometres – within the circle, there were now only three towns and a handful of villages. Claps closed his eyes. “It’s only a few thousand people,” he thought. Assuming that Massa Marittima really had been the kidnapping site, anyway.

  6

  “Professor, I’m worried about Elisa.”

  Mr Cellini had come to pick up his daughter after her session with Trevis.

  “She woke up screaming last night and it took her a long time to calm down. It’s not the first time that this has happened during the last two weeks.”

  Trevis turned towards Elisa – she was sat neatly as always, her eyes as transparent and absent as usual. That morning hadn’t been productive at all – Elisa had zoned out for the whole time. No drawings, no signs of presence.

  “Did you give her some drugs to calm her down?”

  “I gave her some chlorpromazine, it wasn’t easy to give her anything.”

  Chlorpromazine. It was a powerful sedative – this explained why Elisa was completely absent now.

  After a few moments of silence, Trevis patiently addressed Elisa’s father. “You see, there’s a relation between your daughter’s improvement and the appearance of some old active signs of the disease. There can’t be one without the other.”

  Cellini look shattered – he smiled bitterly.

  “You talk about improvements… I only see drawings.” As he said this, he pointed to the wall where Trevis had hung one of Elisa’s drawings.

  “The drawing is important – it doesn’t necessarily suggest an improvement, but it demonstrates some effort from her to reach a state where I can actually help her. In other words, it’s necessary for your daughter to be more… what’s the word… present, for her to start therapy.”

  “Less sedated?”

  “That’s not all.” Trevis tried very hard to simplify the concept. “But that’s the overall meaning, yes. We have to make sure that Elisa gets to the point where she can talk to me and listen to me… with any kind of language, even one other than speech.”

  “Do you mean communicating through a drawing?”

  Trevis nodded. “To talk and to listen – that’s why I’ve slowly decreased the dose.”

  Cellini’s eyes were framed by deep bags. “Elisa is suffering from distress, sometimes I catch her standing still, with an expression of pure terror on her face – it’s almost as if she sees terrible things inside herself. It hadn’t happened for a long time.”

  “Mr Cellini, I can’t help your daughter until she begins to recognise a world external to herself. You have the faculty to decide for Elisa and you can interrupt the therapy that we’re carrying out for her, you can give her back all the medication she used to take before – your daughter won’t have any more distress and will fall back into oblivion. She’ll live in the cage that you so desperately wanted to free her from again.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt the therapy, Professor, I trust you. It’s just terrible to see her suffer and…”

  Cellini paused for a moment – he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to carry on talking.

  “Go on,” Trevis encouraged him.

  “I’m especially concerned about the possibility that she might hurt herself during these moments of distress. She could also hurt whoever’s around.”

  Trevis became a little worried – he had forgotten that Elisa’s health history described a tendency towards aggression.

  “Did she act violently during these moments of distress?”

  “No, not really.”

  After a few minutes of silence, Trevis replied. “Mr Cellini, I feel like we’ve talked about this before – it’s a long, difficult, uphill road. We have to be brave enough to follow it.”

  “Are we going to achieve anything?”

  “Again, as I’ve said before, there’s no guarantee of that.”

  Cellini lowered his eyes for a while, then looked back at Trevis. “Thanks for your honesty. See you tomorrow, Professor. We’ll be punctual, as always.”

  *

  Dr Manara opened the laboratory door and let Claps enter the room before her.

  “Claps, meet Dr Portanova – this is his kingdom. Portanova, meet Mr Claps.”

  The lab was fairly small, but very tidy – a long work table was attached to one of the walls and stretched to the centre of the room; computers and electronic tools were on one side of the lab and the rest of the perimeter was filled with shelves and wardrobes. There were no windows.

  The neon light made a light buzzing noise and the air was filled with a strange, unidentifiable odour.

  “Nice to meet you,” Dr Portanova said, and shook Claps’ hand. “Lovely to meet the person that I’ve been working day and night for two days in a row for.”

  Claps noticed immediately that the photos of the young girl’s remains taken on the day she was found were hanging on the wall.

  “That’s Aisha, when they found her.” Dr Portanova said, as he followed Claps’ eyes.

  “Aisha?”

  “That’s the name that I gave her – it’s easier for me to work on the victim if I have a name. Anyway, I’m sure you’re not here to waste time and you must know the photos already – let me show you something more… interesting.”

  Dr Portanova walked to a locker and opened the door – at least five heads were lined up on one of the shelves, inside transparent cases at constant temperatures. Claps couldn’t hold back a gulp of surprise.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Dr Manara said.

  “The third one from the left was identified less than a month ago. She was a Moldavian prostitute, her body was found by chance se
ven years after her death. The first one is an archaeological facial reconstruction. The skull belongs to a prehistoric man and was found in a glacier in the Alps.

  “He’s the oldest one that we have. And here…” Dr Portanova took a case covered by a cloth and laid it gently on his work table.

  With the same gentleness, almost respect, he pulled off the cloth. “Aisha,” he said, with a sad note in his voice.

  Claps was amazed – the head in the case didn’t look like an artificial reconstruction, it wasn’t the wax museum face he had expected.

  “Wow… it looks… real.”

  “In a way, it is. I mean, this is the real face of Aisha. As I’m sure Cristina has explained to you before, we can see the shape of the nose, the ears and her hair from the photos…”

  “I told him,” Dr Manara interrupted him. “Would you like to tell him about the photos?”

  Claps was hypnotised, he couldn’t take his eyes off Aisha’s face.

  “Sure, I took some photos – front, profile, three quarter and other angles. The results weren’t very satisfying though. As you can see, I gave Aisha a light expression of childlike awe, to avoid giving her a completely expressionless look like the head of a manikin. The results were quite good but photos steal most of the depth of her expression and the results are… flat. I can’t find a better word.”

  “So… what?”

  “So I used my computer eventually, an advanced professional piece of software. Kind of like Photoshop for professionals. I modified the photos to give Aisha different expressions: happiness, sadness, awe and fear. The results were a lot better and, in two of the photos, I’d say they were excellent.”