maybe the question already contained the answer: Jeremiah Smith was so insignificant in other people’s eyes as to be invisible.
You moved among them undisturbed. But you felt strong, because nobody could see you.
He thought again of the words on Jeremiah’s chest.
Kill me
. ‘It’s as if he’s telling us to look beyond appearances,’ he had said to Clemente. ‘The truth is written on the skin, it’s within everyone’s reach, hidden and yet close.’
You were like a cockroach scuttling across the floor during a party: nobody notices it, nobody’s interested. All it has to do is take care not to be crushed. And you became good at that. But with Lara you decided to change. You took her from her own apartment, from her own bed.
Just thinking again about Lara, Marcus was assailed by a series of painful questions. Where was she now? Was she still alive? And if she was, what was she feeling? Was there water or food in her prison? How much longer could she hold out? Was she conscious or drugged? Was she injured? Had her captor tied her up?
Marcus cleared his head of these emotional distractions. He needed to remain lucid, detached. Because there had to be a reason why Jeremiah Smith had radically modified his own modus operandi when it came to Lara. Referring to Jeremiah, Clemente had expounded the theory that some serial killers change their methodsas they go along, adding elements that increase their pleasure. So the abduction of the student could be considered a kind of variation on a theme. But Marcus didn’t believe that: the change had been too drastic, too sudden.
Maybe Jeremiah had tired of resorting to that complex chain of deceptions to reach his goal. Or perhaps he knew that little game wouldn’t work for much longer. One of the girls might have heard about the previous victims and could have unmasked him. He was becoming famous. The risk was increasing exponentially.
No. That’s not why you modified your tactics. What makes Lara different from the others?
What complicated things was the fact that the four girls who had preceded her had nothing in common: neither their ages nor their looks. Jeremiah didn’t seem to have a specific taste in women. The word that came to Marcus’s mind was random. He had trusted to fate in choosing them, otherwise they would all have resembled one another. The more he looked at the photographs of the murdered women, the more convinced he was that the killer had chosen them simply because they were in an exposed position, which made them easier to approach. That was why he had taken them in broad daylight from public places. But he didn’t know them.
Lara, though, was
special
. Jeremiah couldn’t risk losing her. That was why he had taken her from her own home and, above all, why he had acted at night.
For a moment Marcus put down the file, got up from the camp bed, and went to the window. When evening fell, the uneven roofs of Rome were a turbulent sea of shadows. It was the time of day he preferred. A strange calm took possession of him, and he felt at peace. Thanks to this calm, Marcus realised where he was going wrong. He had visited Lara’s apartment in daylight. But he ought to do it in the dark, because that was how her abductor had worked.
If he wanted to understand the man’s mental processes, he had to reproduce the exact conditions in which Jeremiah had acted.
Marcus picked up his raincoat and rushed out of the attic. He had to go back to the building in the Via dei Coronari.
The hunter knew the value of time. His prime gift was patience. He knew how to wait, and in the meantime he prepared for the moment, savouring the anticipation of victory.
A sudden breeze lifted the tablecloth, making the glasses tinkle on the next table. The hunter lifted his pastis to his lips, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. He watched the cars pass in front of the bistro. The hurrying pedestrians paid no attention to him.
He was wearing a blue suit with a blue shirt
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