Читать книгу: «Esoteric Crimes», страница 2

The men had been chosen among the most valid in force in the State Police of the Marche's various provinces. Each man was linked with a dog, as his handler. The men had to be not only experts in the same specialty as the animal but that they had to have the patience to train and take care of their dogs as if the latter were a child or part of them. I had some doubts about offering Inspector Santinelli to be my deputy. Usually, there is some difficulty in accepting to be subordinate to a person of which one was superior but he had accepted willingly, either for his passion for dogs or perhaps for a passion for me too, that I would never share back.

At the beginning of the summer of 1997, we were finally ready to begin. The inauguration of the detachment took place in the presence of important authorities, among whom there were the Prefect, the Mayors of Ancona and Falconara Marittima, and officials from the Ministry of the Interior. At the end of our demonstration of the work with the dogs, in simulated drug and explosives research and actions aimed at blocking criminals, the day ended with a performance by the Frecce Tricolori. To my great regret, the only sad note of the day was that I learned that that was the last public event that commissioner Ianniello would attend, as he was close to retirement.

In short, even at 26 years of age, I had a position of responsibility and great satisfaction. Stefano’s support, both as the doctor of our dogs and as a friend, has never failed. All the dogs chosen worked very well. Only concerning the Rottweiler, I did regret the choice.

«To keep the crowd in check,» Stefano had warned me, «you need dogs that make a scene, they need to inspire fear in those in front of them, whether they are the fans at the stadium or the demonstrators in a square. But dogs must never hurt people. The Rottweiler is a traitor. He looks like a good-natured, he’s there good and seated looking at you, he doesn’t seem to even care about you. But once you get within his range, without even warning you with a snarl, he is capable of tearing you alive. The strength of his jaw is superior to that of any other breed. Measured with the dynamometer, the force of its bite reaches 230 kg, against German Sheperd's 80 kg and Neapolitan Mastiff's 120 kg. He is basically a war machine. Never trust him!»

To my regret, after Thor, that was his name, had made himself responsible for a bad training joke against his conductor, it had been necessary to reform him. Usually, a dog is reformed at the end of his career, when he is too old to perform his duties and, in most cases, the handler, who by the time has developed a particular relationship with the dog, adopts it and keeps it close, considering that the animal has just a few years of life. If this does not happen, the reformed dog must be euthanized, because it is unthinkable for dogs trained like this to end up in the hands of untrusted people. I was aware that the end of Thor would be a lethal injection, and I could not give myself peace, but I looked at his handler, with his arm still bandaged, and I could not take responsibility for something like this happening again. Thor was soon replaced by another German Shepherd, this time chosen by me at a local farm. I raised him since he was a puppy, and I trained him up until the moment of assigning him to a conductor.

Aside from Thor’s unpleasant episode, the days went by fast. Every day the team was engaged in training for at least two or three hours, then there were the services, the drug control at the airport customs, the services during fairs and markets looking for possible pickpockets or drug dealers. Sometimes we were also called to distant places, for civil protection interventions, after earthquakes or other natural disasters, to recover any survivors from under the rubble, or to search for missing people in the mountains, not just after mudslides or avalanches, but just because maybe they got lost during an excursion. The fame of my team, over time, went beyond the Marche borders, and we were often called for services far away from our base. The team lacked a dog that could sniff a trail, follow one, and in short, help the policeman in an investigation, as well as in an action. It would arrive later, and it would have been my Furia, a Springer Spaniel, puppy of a dog of Inspector Santinelli.

The flow of my thoughts was, at that point, definitively interrupted by the braking of the plane on the runway and the consequent opening of the hold doors. A whole new chapter of my life was about to begin.

Chapter 2

I was trying to orient me in the arrivals lounge at the airport in order to understand where the conveyer belt on which my luggage would arrive was when a madman in perfect State Police summer uniform approached decisively. He was about one meter and ninety high, with a stubble haircut, blue eyes, and perfectly trimmed beard. His biceps were hardly contained by the uniform shirt’s half sleeve. He was about to make me the military salute but then rethought that and held out his hand instead.

«Doctor Ruggeri, I presume! I’m inspector Mauro Giampieri and from this moment I’ll be at your disposal. I have compulsory orders from the police commissioner, we need to get going right away to reach a crime scene. It is a crime that happened last night in Triora, a small village in Imperia’s inland. I already instructed an agent to collect your luggage and to take it to the police district. Follow me, we have no time to waste.»

I was a bit confused, and I followed him without any objection, even though I would have preferred to start everything in a different way, by taking a taxi to Imperia and settling in my new job after having at least refreshed myself in a hotel. When I saw the white and blue State Police car we were approaching in the parking lot reserved for the police, I could not help feeling a thrill: a brand new Gallardo Lamborghini. I knew about the existence of that marvelous car, that could reach 320 km per hour, equipped with an on-board computer with various functionalities, connected through a satellite system to the computer archives of the Criminalpol and Interpol, only because I’ve read something in the magazines.

«I thought this gem was reserved for the highway. Patrol,» I said, trying to break the ice with the Inspector, who kept his firm pace. As we closed to the car the hazard lights flashed, beeping.

«This car is different from the one at the disposal of the traffic police, what changes is not the model, but the equipment and performance. I’ll be able to explain some things along the way, take a seat!»

In the car, he inserted a card into a designated slot on the dashboard and entered a code on a numeric keypad. He was about to press the button to start the engine but stopped himself and started tinkering with a package.

«Your right forearm, Doctor! I’m going to insert you a microchip, containing some information about you, such as biodata, blood type, medication history, but it will also function as a satellite locator if needed. It will take a split second, and you won’t feel any pain. These are the orders, unfortunately. I’ve got one inserted too.»

His pseudo-military discipline was starting to get on my nerves and I was about to object.

«I’m not a dog that risks getting lost!»

With swift movements, he opened a sterilized bag containing a swab soaked in disinfectant, and then, from another one, he extracted an injector with a huge needle. Despite my protests, he grabbed my arm and carried out the procedure.

«Keep the pad pressed for a few moments and fasten your seat belt. We’re heading off.»

The speeding glued my back to the car seat. In just a few seconds the Lamborghini reached a speed well above the limit. He swiftly passed the toll gate and started driving at about 200 km per hour.

«You, Inspector, look a lot more like a soldier than a policeman. I do not know your CV, but I think I will study it with great attention. Anyway, since we have to work together and I’ve always hated formalities, I’d suggest getting on first name terms. I am Caterina.»

He answered, warming up a little.

«Mauro. I confess to you, Doctor...Caterina that in fact, until a few months ago, I was in the army. I followed the Italian contingent on missions abroad on various occasions and until last Christmas, I was stationed in Afghanistan. I was in Nassirya in 2003, during the massacre of the Italian soldiers, and I got out of that without a single wound. I have also been to Iraq and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am still very used to military discipline. Anyway, I’m an expert in explosives, fights against terrorism and organized guerrilla warfare, driving in extreme conditions... I believe that the police commissioner put us in pair to solve a really rough case, which I will later explain to you. Meanwhile, I’m going to show you the features of this car, which for now has no comparison in Italy. As you can see, here in the center on the dashboard we have a twelve-inch display, which looks like a GPS navigator, but which has many other features. It is an actual PC, which in addition to having internet access via a satellite connection, allows us to consult the police databases, not only the Italian ones but those all over the world. That is a small scanner, connected to the system, in which we can insert fingerprints, taken with pieces of scotch tape, and start a search in the databases to which we are connected. To the touch screen functionality, which is very interesting for working on the main menu, we can add the functions of a standard keyboard, which we can extract from that drawer below. Open the glove compartment, you will find there a gun, which has already been assigned to you, and a PDA. Both you and I have an identical PDA, with which we can interface with the car’s on-board computer. The PDA, like the microchip that we have inserted, allows the central unit, and one of us from the car, to find our exact location with the GPS. »

«Geez, judging from everything you’re telling me, the investigation they’ve assigned us seems to be very risky. Not even the mythical 007 agent has had all this technology at his disposal!»

«And in fact, you are not wrong. Strange events have happened in Triora for several years: people disappear in mysterious circumstances, without apparently leaving any trace. So far, the police have investigated but without getting on with anything. On the main suspect, a certain Aurora Della Rosa, whom the people of the country define as a sorceress, or rather, a witch, they have never managed to gather sufficient evidence, and therefore the investigations are still groping in the dark. A fire broke out in the woods near Triora tonight, which threatened Aurora’s home. At the end of the extinguishing operations, the firefighters found the burnt corpse of a woman. I believe that the coroner and the forensic scientist are already on the scene. This time no Carabinieri nor RIS, the investigation is ours. Precisely for your studies on esotericism and on sects, Imperia’s police commissioner has requested your presence, and this crime, who knows based on what randomness, was consumed just at the same time as your arrival. Now we have work to get done, and not a little!»

In fact, after a few years of intense work with the dog units, the team had become so trained and efficient that I had been able to give myself some personal space and even start attending again the Faculty of Law in Macerata. I knew that with my degree I could aspire to an important career advancement, but this was not what motivated me to study. It was my innate passion for criminology, which was second only to that for dogs. I was particularly interested in the crimes committed by the followers of the so-called esoteric sects. Starting from the episode of the Beasts of Satan, which occurred a few years earlier, in which the fools, to cover the murder of a girl and mislead the investigations, had staged black masses and satanic rites, I had begun to study the true esoteric sects. I tried to dig deep, to get an idea of what their origins were, but they were lost in the mists of time, to understand what was hidden behind their rites and what crimes their adepts had stained in the past, recent and remote. In Italy, Liguria was one of the places where it was known that some adepts still gathered and practiced their rituals in secret, which sometimes included sacrifices of animals or people. The Inquisition had fought sects until the late 17th century, condemning proselytes to death on charges of heresy or witchcraft. All this fascinated me in particular, so, with my thesis entitled “Esoteric sects and crimes perpetrated by their followers,” I graduated in July 2008 with the best results.

So, precisely by virtue of these studies of mine, now, not even a year after graduation, I had been called to hold the post of police chief in the police district of Imperia, exactly in that area where there was still an intense activity linked to the sects.

Through the window, I saw several highway toll gates, one after the other. In a few minutes, we were already past the Savona exit and continued at high speed towards Imperia.

«Why do the investigators see the shadow of the sects in all this?» I asked, emerging from my thoughts. «All in all, if we consider the Beasts of Satan, famous in these places, we can well understand that they are all frames and there is nothing related to esoterism.»

«In this case, however, there are well-founded elements that lead to thinking about a sect, even if the whole plot, which started several years ago, remains quite dark. Corpses have never been found, up until today, and, based on this new element, we can start to think that even the previously disappeared people were killed, but the crimes were covered, in due time, flawlessly. Maybe something unexpected happened tonight and the killer, or the killers, failed to hide the body, as in the previous cases. Perhaps they tried to set the victim’s body on fire, but a sudden change of wind, which is not uncommon in these parts, has triggered a fire that was no longer controllable. We think it was Aurora herself who called for help because her home was threatened by the fire.»

«What is her alibi? Do we know what she said?»

«She said she came home very late, because she has been to dinner in a restaurant downstream, and that, when she approached her home, she spotted the reddish light of the fire. She called 115 on her cell phone while she was still a couple of miles away.»

«Well, we’ll do the necessary checks. But tell me about the people who disappeared previously.»

«It would take a lot to tell everything in detail. I’ll try to keep things brief, then we will have the opportunity to go through all the material that has been sent to us by the police headquarters and the court. There is a nice file to study, and it’s already on your desk. The first person whose traces were lost is the one who lived in the same house as Aurora and who went by the same name. In 1989 this sixty-year-old lady, known as a fortune teller, herbalist, healer, seer, and sorceress, decided to go to the mountains of Nepal to reach a temple where she could regenerate her spirit, body, and soul. She reached Kathmandu with her follower, a young Romanian woman, a certain Larìs Dracu. The two women hired Sherpas, who accompanied them up to a certain extent. When they insisted on going to an unexplored area, barred to the Sherpas for their religious beliefs, the latter left them alone, saying that they would wait for them for three days, after which they would hold them for missing. Nothing was ever known about the two, but a few months later a twenty-year-old who claimed to be Aurora’s granddaughter showed up in Triora. Appealing to the homonymy, she claimed the right to take possession of her grandmother’s house. This young Aurora also seemed to have supernatural powers, but far more powerful than those of the alleged ancestor. The few locals, who had known Aurora in her youth, could not do anything else but notice the extraordinary resemblance of the young woman to the elderly one that disappeared, so much that many were convinced that the witch had found, on her trip to Nepal, an elixir for youth and has managed to rejuvenate her appearance until she became a girl again. But apart from that, strange episodes began to occur in the woods around Triora. It was said in the village that, on full moon nights, the witches had started practicing their Sabbaths, organized by the young Aurora. Aside from the Sabbaths, Aurora had many visits to her home. In addition to the postulants who requested herbal remedies for the treatment of sicknesses, or elixirs of various types to resolve love troubles, occasionally special people came, hosted by her as followers of an esoteric sect, whose name I do not remember now. These subjects, essentially women, reached the place in order to draw knowledge in the ancient library, which had always been jealously kept in Aurora’s home by her ancestors, and gradually enriched by them over the centuries. One of these young women, Mariella Carletti, called La Rossa, in 1997 left from a small town in Abruzzo, where she was already known as a healer and seer, leaving said that she would reach Triora in order to pass the arduous tests that would allow her to become an adept of the seventh level, one of the highest, and that she would return with powers that no one could ever imagine. She never went back. In Triora, this beautiful girl, tall, with flowing fiery red hair, light blue eyes, a pale complexion full of freckles, did not go unnoticed. At dusk on June 21, the day of the summer solstice, she headed for the woods where the Sabbaths were said to take place, after which she disappeared. An interesting detail is that there was a beginning of a fire that night, but very limited. Apparently, a long-disused truck had caught fire, but the fact could not be connected in any way to the girl’s disappearance. The burnt carcass of the truck is still there, it was never removed. The case, in its time, was dismissed as the work of thugs. In 2000, three journalists, two men, and a woman, from a well-known national monthly magazine which has its headquarters and editorial office in Genoa, wanted to carry out their own little investigation into the girl’s disappearance, which had taken place three years earlier. With the excuse of a reportage on witches and witchcraft in Triora, they placed themselves with a small tent right in the woods where the witches gathered, near the Fonte della Noce, with the hope of glimpsing some satanic ritual or something. For a few days, they collected information on the trial put in place against the witches of Triora towards the end of the 16th century. They also tried to get an exclusive interview from Aurora, who however did not grant it. On the night between the 20 and 21 August, the three journalists disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Inside the tent, found empty the following morning, some notebooks with the collected material were found. These notebooks were returned to the magazine which, to honor the three, published an eight-page article about the witches of Triora. The last sentence written in the notebook of one of the three journalists was in large capital letters and it was also underlined: “MY GOD!” Something or someone had definitely scared him to death. Nothing was ever heard again about the missing journalists.»

In the meantime, we had passed Imperia, left the highway at the Arma di Taggia toll gate, and took a provincial road that went up a beautiful valley floor, running parallel to the course of a river. It was the first time I was seeing places that would later become familiar. We were traveling through the Argentina Valley, crossed by the river of the same name, a narrow valley with few human settlements. The green of the luxuriant woods stood out against the intense blue of the clear sky on the warm day of early July and, within me, the old passion for the mountain was awakening. I was already dreaming of walking on the paths that went into those woods. We went up past a small town, Molini di Triora, to reach Triora, a village with medieval features, perched on the top of a summit. After passing the center, the road descended and, after a while, we stopped in an open space, where a couple of police cars, a jeep of the firefighters, and a truck of the forestry body equipped to put out the forest fires were parked.

«Well,» I said, «what you told me is very interesting and actually one can really glimpse the paw of the sects, besides that of something really thorny! It is now a question of how much esotericism has to do with all this and what is the responsibility of the followers in the disappearance of the people you mentioned and in the murder of this night if it was a murder and not a simple accident. »

«Caterina, please, caution is never too much here. Aside from witches, during this investigation, we may find ourselves faced with unscrupulous criminals. Take the gun and let’s memorize each other’s PDA’s number, so we can call each other if necessary. Let's go!»

I grabbed the PDA but left the pistol in the glove compartment of the car, as I thought I wouldn’t need it at the time.