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of it, and that was also the only time there had been any form of physical conflict. No, he didn’t have another girlfriend now. No, he didn’t know whether Manuela was seeing someone else in Rome. He admitted that he had asked her, but she told him it was none of his business. Yes, they had met once, they’d had a cup of coffee together and chatted a while. This was in downtown Bari, in early August. No, there had been no conflict. They had said good-bye amicably.
    I found the transcript puzzling. Reading between the lines of the police report, you could see Cantalupi trying to make it all sound normal and peaceful, when, perhaps, it wasn’t completely peaceful, at least not according to Manuela’s girlfriends.
    On the other hand, the cell phone records seemed to rule out Michele Cantalupi’s involvement in Manuela’s disappearance. First of all, it was clear that for several days, his phone had been routed through foreign cell networks, so he really had been out of the country. Second, there was no contact—that Sunday or in the days before that—between Manuela and her ex-boyfriend.
    Manuela’s cell phone didn’t seem to get a lot of use. The cell phone records covered the week prior to her disappearance: only a few calls and a few text messages, all to girlfriends or to her mother. None of the numbers belonged to anyone outside of her small circle of friends. Nothing unusual, except perhaps for how few calls and messages there were. Taken alone, however, that was not particularly significant.
    That Sunday, Manuela had received only two phone calls, and she had exchanged text messages, again, with her mother and with a girlfriend. The last sign of life in the phone records was a text message she sent to her mother in the afternoon. After that, nothing. The cell phone went dead for good.
    Her friend was interviewed by the Carabinieri, but she’d been unable to supply any useful information. She’d called Manuela to say hello, since she had to go back to Rome and they hadn’t had a chance to get together in the previous few days. She had no idea what Manuela was planning to do that evening, how she would be getting back to Rome, much less what might have happened to her.
    The ATM records provided nothing useful, since the last withdrawal had been made in Bari on the Friday before she disappeared.
    In the days that followed, a number of photographs of Manuela, with a description of the clothing she was probably wearing that afternoon, were published in local newspapers and shown on the television program
Chi l’ha visto?
. Some of those photographs were in the file. I looked at them for a long time, searching for a secret, or at least an idea of some kind. Of course, I found nothing, and the only brilliant conclusion that I managed to draw from myexamination was that Manuela was—or had been—a very attractive young woman.
    After the photographs were published, as Fornelli had told me and as always seems to happen with disappearances, a number of people—nearly all of them of good candidates for psychiatric treatment—had phoned in and claimed to have seen the missing girl.
    The third report showed the effects that publishing the photographs had on an array of mentally unbalanced individuals. There were a dozen or so statements sent from Carabinieri stations all over Italy. They were all declarations from people who claimed, in varying tones of confidence, which in turn correlated exactly to how precarious their mental health was, that they had seen Manuela.
    There was the pathological liar Fornelli had mentioned to me who claimed he’d seen Manuela working as a prostitute on the outskirts of Foggia. Then there was a woman who noticed Manuela wandering absentmindedly through the aisles of a superstore in Bologna. There was a guy who swore he’d seen her in Brescia, flanked by two suspicious-looking men who spoke some Eastern European language. They had shoved Manuela into a car, which tore away, tires