A Quiet Provincial Town

CATERINA…

CATERINA…

On a freezing day in mid-December I presented myself to the Chief Police Commissioner of Ancona. Dr. Spanò was my old boss. I had returned to the base, but I was there just to deliver the envelope containing my request for maternity leave.

"I’m happy to have you back with us, Dr. Ruggeri. It’s better to have a precious individual like you here in the area on maternity leave, rather than knowing you were assigned to a Police District so far away. Thanks to your new rank, I have a special job in store for you. We don’t have a Homicide Section here in the Marche. Seeing how you fared in the investigation up in Triora, and because of the considerable increase in crime in our areas too, I’ve decided to open the Section here in Ancona, which will cover the entire region, and you’ll be the one running it, assisted by Inspector Santinelli.

No, it’s not possible! I said to myself. Him in my way again. But wasn't he supposed to manage the Dog Lovers Field Office in my place after I left? Has he managed to ruin all the work I did in ten years in such a short time? Is the Dog Unit in disarray and is the Field Office about to close down?

I didn’t even have the courage to ask my superior for enlightenment and he, in any case, interpreting my hidden thoughts, gave me some assurances.

"Don't worry, your beloved Dog Lovers Field Office is doing great even without you, but Inspector Santinelli was not able to manage it. During the summer, three dogs fell ill with leishmaniasis and two handlers asked to be transferred because of incompatibility with the Inspector. So, before arriving at the irreparable, I’ve replaced Santinelli with a very valid colleague, Chief Inspector Della Debbia, who moved here from Nettuno."

I breathed a sigh of relief and continued to listen to what else he had to tell me.

"But, getting back to us, I was telling you that this new section, with regional validity, will be devoted to investigations into murders and missing persons, and I really believe that you are the most suitable person to head it. Without neglecting your commitments as a future new mother, you can come when you feel like it to organize the office, and when you tell me you’re ready, we’ll get started."

I was enthusiastic, and ideas regarding the organization of the new team were already running through my mind.

"That’s all good, but do I really have to have Inspector Santinelli with me?"

"It seems you’re the only one who has always been able to handle him! I’d have to say yes!"

I nodded, not exactly satisfied with the prospect, and was about to hold out my hand to my superior to say goodbye.

"One last thing, Commissioner. In the coming days we’ll have some specialists here at headquarters who are going to hold a course on Body Language and Prosemics which should be very interesting. If you’d like to participate, even if you’re on leave, I think you could learn some really important notions in the management of interrogations."

Even though I knew that Stefano would not be at all happy, I accepted the invitation, as the course dealt with topics that had always fascinated me: to be able to understand what someone was thinking, whether they’re lying or telling the truth, from their behavior. They were notions that, once learned and combined with my new perceptive abilities, would make me an infallible detective.

So, despite my baby bump and despite the protests from my partner, I began to spend most of my time at Police Headquarters, partly to follow the course on Body Language, and partly to organize my new office and my new team. Inspector Santinelli followed me in a helpful and compliant way, and all things considered I could not complain about him. I couldn't ask to have a Lamborghini like the one we had in Imperia, but I did manage to have a computer like the one that had helped us so much in the Triora investigation mounted on an Alfa 159. I gave Santinelli a little instruction on using it and I also had him enroll in an advanced course in computer technology, although I was convinced that we couldn’t expect too much from him.

Christmas passed, New Year's Eve passed, and Carnival passed too. Time went by quickly, with many commitments, and my tummy was increasingly cumbersome; the little girl kicked inside it and made her presence felt more and more. So at the beginning of March, despite Mauro's predictions, I decided it was time to calm down, retire in good order and wait for the event.

But, so as not to detach myself from work completely, I installed a PC at home with a webcam and a powerful broadband connection. I quickly learned to start video chats with my friends, especially with Clara and Mauro, and long video conferences with Santinelli, to check how things were going in my new office. We now had a good organization. We had set up our section in a small wing of Police Headquarters, a few rooms, four in all, but equipped with all the most modern technologies. The interrogation room was acoustically isolated and equipped with video cameras and microphones that allowed you to follow what was happening in there from a remote room. My office was occupied by Santinelli for the moment, and I had obliged him to always keep the computer on with the webcam active so that I could check on his work. The team consisted of three other young and really smart colleagues. Superintendent Roberta Gualandi was the youngest, very determined and passionate about the job she had chosen. Inspector Andrea Rosati was good with computers for both online research and field work. The Elite Operative Gaetano Perrotta of Calabrian origin, who had only recently moved to Ancona, was extremely intelligent, a very attentive observer and had made good use of the notions learned during the course on Body Language and Prosemics. We were ready to take o any investigation and I found myself following our first case, concerning a missing boy, from my PC monitor, something that, until a few days before I would never have imagined.

One morning the parents of a nineteen-year-old boy named Thomas Vindici had shown up at Police Headquarters, worried because the young man had left home the night before and they had not heard from him since. His cell phone was turned off, and no one knew what had happened to it. I followed what Inspector Santinelli told them very attentively, hoping not to have to intervene with my voice coming from the PC speakers.

"The boy is of age and has only been missing from home since last night. I feel it’s a bit early to make a missing persons report. Have you tried at his friends’ homes or in the places he usually frequents?" began Santinelli.

"Yes, he's not at the home of any of the friends we know. He had an argument with his girlfriend last night at our house, and she too doesn’t know where he may have gone and what’s more she has clammed up and doesn’t even want to tell us the reason for their quarrel. Thomas slammed the door on the way out. Samantha, as the girl is called, tried to follow him but he got onto the scooter and disappeared before she could talk to him," said the boy's mother, while the father remained rather taciturn and let his wife do the talking.

"Well, a kids’ thing, maybe he went and had a few too many drinks so he could forget the quarrel and when he gets over the bender he’ll find his way home."

"No, Thomas is not the type, he doesn't drink alcohol, he's a good kid, and this is the first time he's behaved like this," his mother insisted.

"Let's do this, without making a missing persons report for now, let's start some low key investigation. Get me a recent picture of your son and I'll pass it on to the patrol cars. Rosati, you try to track the boy's cell phone. And you, Roberta, go to their house and take a peek at the PC, especially e-mail, saved Messenger conversations, in short, everything that could be useful for us to understand where this boy might be holed up. In addition, try to question the girl, Samantha, tactfully but don’t go too hard, she’s a minor."

All things considered, it seemed that Santinelli was managing quite well and I breathed a sigh of relief. At that juncture I couldn’t have done better and what he had proposed made sense.

A few hours later, the two colleagues appeared in the office again. Rosati had no reassuring news, Thomas' cell phone was not traceable, he had certainly removed battery and SIM card, which made it clear that the boy was not naïve. A bit more news came from Roberta.

"Nothing interesting in the boy’s PC partition. I also took a look at his f*******: profile, and I didn’t find anything there either. What I did notice, though, and it triggered an alarm bell in my head, is that on the user folders reserved for Mr. Vindici, the boy's father, there is one with the contents password protected. It was not difficult for me to bypass the protection and access the contents of the folder, where a series of images depicting women smoking have been saved, more than one thousand four hundred of them."

"Pornographic photos?" I intervened electronically, drawing the attention of my colleagues in the office.

"Not really. Yes, some nude images, but always and only young women, all beautiful and with cigarettes in their hands or mouths. Many are close-ups of these women, often inhaling or exhaling smoke, or enveloped by a bluish or whitish cloud."

"He's a fetishist. In all likelihood, relations with his wife are very sporadic or absent and he finds s****l satisfaction in front of these images. But so far, nothing wrong, I’d say, other than the portrait of a family that’s a bit 'disintegrated’."

"And you're right, commissioner. I tried to find out very discreetly what the relationship was between Giorgio Vindici and his wife Elisabetta. Basically they’ve broken up but are still living together; they sleep in separate rooms and haven’t had relations with each other for a long time. Five or six years ago, the woman was very sick and underwent major surgery, a liver transplant. The two hadn’t been getting along very well for some time, and the woman quickly took the opportunity to say that, since she was doing an immunosuppressive therapy, which was essential so as not to reject the transplanted organ, she had to stay isolated so as not to risk even catching a cold. She moved to another room at that time and no longer slept with her husband. He has never felt he could leave her and, out of respect, fear or because he is shy, he has never even found himself a lover. And therefore he must have found his natural release in front of the images he has saved on his PC."

"A somewhat complex personality. When it’s like that, there is also little dialogue in the family. But all this is of little help to us in finding Thomas."

"Agreed. Except that I discovered that the girl, Samantha, in addition to being rebellious, nonconformist and transgressive, is a heavy smoker for the age she is. How would you relate these things to the father’s little habit?"

"Do you think that Mr. Giorgio hasn’t been able to resist and has bothered the girl?"

"I think so. And I think maybe his son caught him in the act. And that's why he left slamming the door."

"Before we jump to hasty conclusions, I’d like to examine the profiles of Giorgio and Samantha for myself. We can call Mr. Vindici in. I want Perrotta to question him and I want to be at the interrogation. As for the girl, Roberta, go and have a chat with her in her home. Take your handheld and activate the video call so that I can do an analysis of her personality and hear what she has to say."

About three quarters of an hour later, Mr. Vindici was taken into the interrogation room. Perrotta left him alone for quite a while so he could study his attitudes in the video camera, based on what we had learned at the Body Language course. I could see the interrogation room on half of the screen of my PC and my office on the other half, currently occupied by Santinelli. Mr. Giorgio was apprehensive, very nervous, he was squeezing his eyes, lifting his eyelids, fiddling with whatever he had at hand, starting with his watch, and continuing with any object he found in the room. But what struck me most was that his feet were always facing the exit door or the only window in the room, meaning towards an escape route, as they had taught us at the course. He couldn't wait to get out of there. Perrotta skillfully kept him on edge for about twenty minutes, and then entered the room.

"Don’t worry, put yourself at ease, we will not tell your wife anything of what you say in here. The walls are soundproofed, no one is listening to us. Do you want a glass of water?" There was a fresh water dispenser in the room. Gaetano filled a plastic cup and handed it to him. "Well, there are some interesting photos on your PC. Shall we talk about it?"

Giorgio began to sweat and mumbled some kind of excuse.

"There is nothing illegal. They’re not pornographic photos and there are no minors in them. I'm not a pedophile."

"Of course, of course. Everyone has their own passions. I like to play soccer, you like women who smoke. By the way, do you want a cigarette?"

"N... no. I don't smoke."

"Oh really? So, how do you explain this passion?"

"I don't know, I can’t understand it myself either. The human psyche is sometimes uncontrollable. The fact is that when I see a woman smoking, especially when she uses the flame of a lighter or a match to light the cigarette, I can't help getting excited. It's been happening to me since I was a boy. I don't know what to do about it."

Meanwhile, Roberta had arrived at Samantha's house and had activated the video call from her handheld. So a third window opened on my computer, from which I could see what she looked like, a petite young girl, blonde hair in a series of thin braids, blue eyes, round face with rosy smooth skin marked here and there by some sporadic pimple. She looked even younger than her seventeen years, so she used a series of ruses to look older: first of all her makeup, quite heavy and carefully applied, then there were the piercings and the cigarettes. With the piercings, I noticed one on her nose and one under the lower lip. There was a continuous series of earrings of various types running down the side of her left ear, while the right ear had an earring on the lobe and a piercing on the highest part of the earcup. There were certainly others in areas of the body not visible at the time, navel and other more or less intimate areas. I saw her tinkering with a cigarette paper, a filter and some tobacco, then roll herself a cigarette and light it with a small red plastic lighter, much to Roberta's disappointment, who was a convinced health enthusiast and detested smoking.

"Can you tell us something about what happened last night at Thomas' place?" the superintendent asked.

"No, I don't want to say anything. I’m a minor, leave me alone, I know my rights and you can’t question me."

"It's not an interrogation. We're just trying to figure out what happened to your boyfriend. Don't you want to know too?"

The girl turned away and exhaled a puff of smoke from her nose.

"Uff!"

In the meantime, Giorgio was succumbing to Perrotta's increasingly relentless questions.

"If you don’t cooperate, we’ll have to report you for child molestation. We have sufficient elements in our hands."

"Okay, okay. I didn’t a***e the girl. She provoked me. She knew about my habit, because she had discovered that I looked at those photos on the computer, and she did it on purpose to provoke me. When we were alone for a few moments, Samantha pulled out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. She tried to light it several times, but the lighter just made sparks. Whether the gas has run out or if the girl was doing it deliberately to provoke me I don't know. I know that at one point she asked me if there were any matches in the house. I got the box, lit one and put the flame close to her cigarette. She knew very well that at that moment I was very excited, she snorted smoke in my face, then took my hand and guided it under her shirt, in contact with her bare skin. I was going crazy, my hand touched the piercing on her navel and I was fighting with myself not to go up higher in search of her breasts, which I would have found without encountering the obstacle of a b*a. Without even thinking twice, Samantha had already unfastened my pants and would have taken my p***s in her hand if Thomas hadn’t come into the room at that moment. I felt so ashamed. My son was furious, but before she ran after him, Samantha gave me a glance that had only one meaning: mum’s the word, I won’t say anything. I thought he would catch up to her and they would have sorted things out with each other, instead..."

At this point I asked Roberta to put the handheld closer to her ear and told her what had emerged from the interrogation of Thomas' father. Roberta nodded and turned to the girl again.

"Okay, Samantha. They’re telling me that Giorgio is spilling the beans about what happened between the two of you last night. If there is any suspicion that he has abused you, I will have to call the social worker and have you undergo a medical examination to ascertain if you have been r***d. A visit like that is usually not pleasant for a young girl like you. Then we should search your room to see if you also smoke something else, in addition to tobacco. If you want to avoid all this, tell us what you know."

Samantha made herself another cigarette, to buy time, and lit it. Then, with a resigned air, she spoke.

"Oh alright, meddling police b***h. Nothing happened between me and Giorgio. I like to provoke and that's how it went. I think I know where Thomas has gone to hide. Down at the docks, between the commercial port and the marina, there are some fishermen's huts that no-one uses at this time of year. We’ve been there a few times to make love, I think you'll find him in one of those huts."

I gave Roberta immediate instructions.

"I know the port well, there are hundreds of huts like that, and Thomas can be in any one of them. We have to be quick to find him. If the boy is sensitive he may attempt suicide. Stop by his house and pick up a garment that Thomas has worn and hasn’t been washed. Send someone here to my house to get Furia and have him sniff the garment. You will certainly find the boy."

Furia carried out his task very well. When my colleagues broke into the hut through the locked door which Furia had scraped with his paw, Thomas was already standing on a stool with a rope around his neck. When he heard them break the door down, the boy jumped and was hanging on the rope, but Roberta and Gaetano were quick to rescue him and the suicide attempt did not have tragic consequences. The boy was taken back to the police station, where his parents were waiting for him. Since from my pc I could see everyone, colleagues and Vindici family gathered in front of the webcam, I could not help but lecture them from the computer screen.

"Everyone, things went well this time and we are all happy. But please, solve your family problems. I want to tell you this from the heart, as a future mother. You, Thomas, don't deserve that girl, so either she changes her character or you change girlfriend."

The boy nodded, indicating that he understood.

"And you, Giorgio and Elisabetta, don’t feel compelled to stay together under the same roof just to save a façade behind which there is nothing. Better to be separated and serene than together but in conflict. A child is much happier knowing that his parents each live an independent life, than having to witness strange situations that take place in the home. In short, either you are fond of each other and live your married life, or you immediately think about separation and a possible divorce."

I never knew, and with all sincerity I don't even care, how the relationship between Thomas and Samantha and between Giorgio and Elisabetta ended. For me, the important thing was to have seen my team at work and to have ascertained that I could sleep peacefully and begin to think exclusively about my motherhood.

On the twenty-first of March I gave birth to a beautiful little girl: Aurora.