The Lost Girls of Rome by Donato Carrisi

carefully. But there was no time. It would be risky to stay here much longer. So he made do with a superficial examination, leafing through them rapidly.
    There were photographs, copies of police reports, evidence lists. These documents should not have been here. Together with notes of various kinds and personal reflections written by Raffaele Altieri himself, there were also reports from a private investigator. He noticed a business card from a detective agency.
    The name on it was Ranieri.
    It was a name Raffaele had mentioned last night: ‘Did Ranieri send you? You can tell that bastard I’m through with him.’
    Marcus slipped it into his pocket, then looked up again at the wall covered with articles and tried to take it all in at a single glance. It was obvious that a shrewd investigator could screw a lot of money out of a young man obsessed with a single, overriding idea.
    Finding his mother’s killers.
    The cuttings, the reports, the papers were all evidence of an obsession. Raffaele wanted to give a face to the monsters who had defiled his childhood. Children have enemies made of air, dust and shadow, Marcus thought, the Bogeyman, the Big Bad Wolf. These monsters live in stories and come out only when they throw tantrums and their parents want to scare them. But then they always disappear, going back to the darkness that generated them.
    Raffaele’s monsters, though, had remained.
    There was one last detail that Marcus had to check. He started looking for anything that might throw light on the symbol: the three little red dots at the bottom of the letter summoning Raffaele to Lara’s apartment.
    ‘What about the symbol, then?’ Raffaele had said. ‘Nobody knew about the symbol.’
    In the files, Marcus managed to find a document from the prosecutor’s department that mentioned it specifically, although there seemed to be some omissions. There was an explanation for that: the police often concealed certain details of a case from the press and the public. That helped to prevent false testimonies from the kinds of cranks who confessed to every crime, but also to make the guilty parties believe they were in the clear. In the case of the murder of Valeria Altieri, something important had been discovered at the scene of the crime. An element that the police, for some reason, had decided not to reveal.
    Marcus still didn’t know what any of this had to do with Jeremiah Smith or Lara’s disappearance. The crime was nineteen years old and, even if there had been clues not picked up by the police at the time, they would be impossible to recover now.
    The crime scene was gone for ever.
    He looked at his watch: twenty minutes had already passed, and the last thing he wanted was another close encounter with Raffaele.But he decided it was worth taking at least a quick look at the bedroom in which Valeria Altieri had been killed.
    When he opened the door, he realised immediately that he had been wrong about the crime scene being gone.
    The first thing he saw was the blood.
    The double bed with the blue sheets was drenched in it. There was so much of it, you could see exactly how the victims had been positioned during the murder. The mattress and pillows still bore the shapes of their bodies. Lying side by side, locked in a desperate embrace, unable to resist the homicidal rage unleashed on them.
    From the bed, the blood had overflowed like lava on to the white carpet, soaking the fibres, colouring them a red so glossy, so sumptuous, as to clash with the very idea of death.
    The blood had hit the walls, too, but what was most striking was how neatly and coherently the stains seemed to be arranged, as if that frenzied attack had produced a strange harmony.
    And some of the blood had also been used to write on the wall over the bed. A single word, in English.
    EVIL
    Everything now was fixed, motionless. But it was also startlingly vivid and real, as if the murders had just taken place. Marcus felt as though, merely by opening