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that.”
    “I’d like to talk to Debby’s parents too, if possible.”
    “Sure, do what you see fit.”
    Before the chief inspector could continue, there was a knock at the door. Three quick taps. Immediately afterwards a short man in a white shirt made his entrance, even though no one had invited him in. He had bristly hair and unusual almond eyes.
    “Ah, Chang,” said Roche by way of welcome.
    The man was the medical examiner dealing with the case. Mila realized almost immediately that he wasn’t actually oriental. His name was Leonard Vross, but everyone had always known him as Chang.
    The little man came and stood next to Roche. He carried a dossier that he opened straightaway, even though he had no need to read its contents because he knew them by heart. Probably keeping those pages in front of him gave him a sense of security.
    “I’d like you to listen carefully to what Dr. Chang has discovered,” said the chief inspector. “Even though I know that it might be difficult for some of you to understand certain details.”
    The reference was to her, Mila was more than sure.
    Chang put on a pair of glasses that he kept in his shirt pocket, cleared his throat and began to speak. “The state of preservation of the remains, in spite of their having been buried, was excellent.”
    This confirmed the idea that not very much time had passed between the making of the arm graveyard and its discovery. So the pathologist expanded on a number of details. But when Chang finally had to illustrate the method by which the six little girls had been killed, he got straight to the point.
    “He killed them by cutting off their arms.”
    Lesions have a language of their own, and they use it to communicate. Mila was well aware of that. When the medical examiner turned the page of the file to the enlargement of the photograph of one of the arms, she immediately noticed the reddish halo around the cut and the break of the bone. The seepage of blood into the tissue is the first indication of whether the lesion is lethal or not. If it has been inflicted on a corpse there is no activity from the cardiac pump, so the blood flows passively from the torn vessels, without settling in the surrounding tissues. If, on the other hand, the blow is delivered when the victim is still alive, the heart is pushing the blood into the injured tissues in a desperate attempt to scar them. In the little girls, the lifesaving mechanism had stopped only when the arm had gone away.
    Chang went on: “The lesion occurred halfway down the brachial biceps. The bone isn’t shattered, the break is clean. The killer must have used a precision saw: we haven’t found any iron filings along the margins of the injury. The uniform section of the blood vessels and the tendons tells us that the amputation was completed with what I would call surgical skill. Death was caused by bleeding.” Then he added: “It was a hideous death.”
    At this phrase, Mila felt an impulse to lower her eyes in a sign of respect. But she immediately noticed that she would have been the only one.
    Chang went on: “I would say he killed them straightaway: he had no interest in keeping them alive longer than necessary, and he didn’t hesitate. The methods of killing are identical for all the victims. Except for one… ”
    His words hung in the air before raining down on his listeners like a shower of icy water.
    “What do you mean?” Goran asked.
    Chang pushed his glasses back from the tip of his nose and stared at the criminologist. “Because for one of them it was even worse.”
    Absolute silence settled on the room.
    “The toxicological examinations have revealed traces of a cocktail of pharmaceuticals in the blood and the tissue. In this case: antiarrhythmics like disopyramide, ACE inhibitors and atenolol, which is a beta-blocker…”
    “He reduced her heart rate, lowering the pressure at the same time,” added Goran Gavila, who had already understood everything.
    “Why?”