decided not to have lunch. He left Mr. Benincasa and hurried to the Parc Guell gardens.
He wanted to be alone and ponder on what to do. He sat on a sunny bench, far from the voices of a group of men, who were discussing governmental fiscal matters. His attention fell on a newspaper abandoned on the bench. It was the third page of El Pais, dedicated to yet another assassination in Barcelona. It was the sixth young man who had been stabbed in the back. In all cases reported by the newspaper, they were all young men of a high social status who, after death, had their skull shaved and the tip of their tongue cut off, in a macabre ritual that had already been repeated six times.
At the office, they had talked about this distractedly. The investigators had failed to find anything useful that could relate those atrocious deaths to each other, nor did they have any clues or evidence that could be traced back to a serial murderer, with the exception of his telephone claims.
That detail caught his attention. The murderer had always claimed his crimes with a recorded message, sent, perhaps as a challenge to the police offices, twenty-four hours after the murders. A shiver ran down his back.
Would he have been able to draw the face of the murderer by listening to the few but atrocious words he had spoken in his message?
That night, he was very shaken up. All Alberto could think of was a whirlwind of faces, which turned into each other in an endless pinwheel; then he appeared, the man still without a face, the serial murderer. A cup of hot verbena lulled him to sleep, but only in the early hours of the morning.
CHAPTER III
He decided to get straight to the point. He could not afford to be laughed at or mistaken for a crazy man but, at the same time, he had to try. He asked for an urgent meeting with Kemen Garreca, the Chief of Police.
He was received the same afternoon at two pm. After going through an identity check at the entrance of the Police building, he was accompanied through a narrow corridor, with numerous very dark and bare office doors. The last door on the right led to a hallway, furnished with old prints and a dusty blue fabric sofa. He was invited to sit down, and the Chief was informed of his arrival. After only five minutes, the Chief came to meet him and greeted him coldly, giving him a once over from head to foot.
He was eager to listen as that case was becoming his nightmare, and anyone who could provide him with useful information to solve that case was welcome. Alberto introduced himself and after some preambles about his work, he came to the point. "Chief, he exclaimed, I think I can help you identify the serial killer if I could hear the recorded message." And from there he started talking about the faces he had imagined and drawn during the hours of telephone calls at the Company, meetings with people, and the surprising matching details. He opened a folder and showed the Chief his drawings.
The policeman was very skeptical. Quite a few crazy people had shown up those days at the police headquarters, to report that they had seen the serial killer, that they had dreamed about it, or even blamed themselves for those horrible crimes. This time, something told him he had to try. He had to give that young man at least the chance to do the drawing and then, to follow up. It wouldn't have cost him much in terms of lost time and waste of taxpayers’ money. He accompanied young Alberto to the basement through a wide staircase, which started about halfway along the long corridor. He slipped his identification card into a reader, and a sharp metallic click opened the armored door that led to the Police Forensic Department.
He had Alberto sit in a small room with a desk and two upholstered dark chairs.
"Major Fernando Messi, said Garreca, is the Head of the Forensic Police for this District.” The two shook hands, and the Major placed a digital reader with headphones on the desk.
"There you go, he said, these are the phone calls made by the alleged murderer." Alberto placed his earphones tight on his ears and the Major started the recording. It did not last more than three or four minutes. Alberto was upset, he could hear the voice well, but it was disguised with a digital voice filter, which made it sound like that of a laryngectomy patient. "Impossible, he said, impossible, it's not his real voice, I didn't think .... "
He stood up quickly, very embarrassed; he didn't know what to say and he regretted having gone there, why in the world, he said to himself.
Captain Garreca explained to Alberto that camouflaging the voice was a common technique, which could perhaps be partly dealt with through computer filtering techniques. The attention of the investigators had concentrated above all on the content of the phone calls and not on the timbre of the voice, as there was no chance to reply.
Major Messi thanked Alberto and promised him they would meet again after a few days.
In those days spent working absent-mindedly, Alberto couldn't think of anything else but that guttural voice he had listened to for those few minutes in the Police offices. As much as he tried to remember it, he could not even imagine how to begin to draw the unconvincing face of the killer. Perhaps he overestimated himself, perhaps he had dared too much, and now he was afraid.
That evening, he received a phone call. It was his father, whom he had not talked to for over six months. The tired voice of his elderly father filled him with nostalgia and made him think of his home in Torredembarra and his friends. He thought of the sunny beaches, the blue sea and the long days spent doing nothing, racing with Zeb, the white Labrador, who had been with him throughout his youth, and the love snatched away from an American tourist.
He received an unexpected invitation to the marriage of his cousin Pedro, who wanted him as his best man. "I will be there, Alberto told his father, it will be a great joy for me to hug my friends again."
He did not need to go to the police station, because that morning at eight o'clock, a dark car picked him up at the house and took him just outside the city.
It was a Provincial Police district. A new building of glass and concrete that did not fit well with the remaining architecture of the poor outskirts of the city. He quickly reached the sixth floor, where Major Fernando Messi was waiting for him, in a room completely covered by a layer of insulating material and a huge wall, on which the images coming from the city's television cameras alternated with geographic satellite maps.
Carmen, the Major’s assistant, was a beautiful dark-haired girl, very thin, with very sweet features and fleshy red lips. She brought him a cup of coffee and explained that he would soon hear the cleaned-up version of the killer's phone calls; he was simply mesmerized.
For a long time, his interest in women had been practically non-existent and he had limited himself to some boring evening outings with a colleague from the Telephone Company. But his thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the voice of the Major, who introduced him to the filtered version of the phone calls: "Listen to it and get inspired; let's see if you wasted our time unnecessarily. " Alberto put on his large and soft black headphones and, after absently meeting beautiful Carmen’s gaze, he motioned for the recording to start.
Compared to the first version, now the voice was clear and clean, and immediately some images began to fill his mind. He interrupted the cleaned up recording and confidently opened his sketch pad.
The recording started again, and, at the same time, his hand began to move quickly on the sheet, starting to trace the features of a human face.
The people in the room approached curiously the long desk where Alberto was drawing. Someone made obvious jokes about Alberto being likely crazy, and someone else whispered that perhaps time would have been better spent doing something more productive.
As he kept
