Free Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox Page A

yelled into the speakerphone, “Amanda, get the hell out of the house, this instant!”
    While I was talking to them, Raffaele called his sister to see what she thought. She was a police officer in Rome.
    Raffaele dialed 112—Italy’s 911—for the Carabinieri, which was separate from—and more professional than—the Perugian town police.
    As soon as he hung up, I said, “Let’s wait for them outside.” Even without Chris’s insistence, I was too spooked to be in the house. On the way out I glanced from the kitchen into the larger bathroom. The toilet had been flushed. “Oh my God!” I said to Raffaele. “Someone must have been hiding inside when I was here the first time—or they came back while I was gone!”
    We ran out and waited on a grassy bank beside the driveway. I was shivering from nerves and cold, and Raffaele was hugging me to calm me down and keep me warm, when a man in jeans and a brown jacket walked up. As he approached us he said he was from the police. I thought, That was fast .
    Another officer joined him. I tried to explain in Italian that there had been a break-in and that we hadn’t been able to find one of our roommates, Meredith. With Raffaele translating both sides, I gradually understood that these officers were just Postal Police, the squad that deals with tech crimes.
    “Two cell phones were turned in to us this morning,” one said. “One is registered to Filomena Romanelli. Do you know her?”
    “Yes, she’s my housemate,” I said. “It can’t be Filomena’s, because I just talked to her. But I’ve been trying to reach my other roommate, Meredith, all morning. She doesn’t answer. Who turned these in? Where did they find them?”
    Later I found out that a neighbor had heard the phones ringing in her garden when I’d tried to call Meredith. They’d been tossed over the high wall that protected the neighbor’s house from the street—and from intruders. But the Postal Police wouldn’t explain or answer my questions.
    We went inside, and I wrote out Meredith’s phone numbers on a Post-it Note for them. While we were talking, we heard a car drive up. It was Filomena’s boyfriend, Marco Z., and his friend Luca. Two minutes later, another car screeched into the driveway—it was Filomena and her friend Paola, Luca’s girlfriend. They jumped out, and Filomena stormed into the house to scavenge through her room. When she came out, she said, “My room is a disaster. There’s glass everywhere and a rock underneath the desk, but it seems like everything is there.”
    The Postal Police showed her the cell phones. “This one is Meredith’s British phone,” Filomena said. “She uses it to call her mother. And I lent her the SIM card to the other one to make local calls.”
    The men seemed satisfied; their work was done. They said, “We can make a report that there’s been a break-in. Are you sure nothing was stolen?”
    “Not as far as we can tell,” I said. “But Meredith’s door is locked. I’m really worried.”
    “Well, is that unusual?” they asked.
    I tried to explain that she locked it sometimes, when she was changing clothes or was leaving town for the weekend, but Filomena wheeled around and shouted, “She never locks her door!” I stepped back and let her take over the conversation, Italian to Italian. The rapid-fire exchange stretched way past my skills. Filomena shouted at the Postal Police officers, “Break down the door!”
    “We can’t do that; it’s not in our authority,” one said.
    Six people were now crammed into the tiny hallway outside Meredith’s bedroom, all talking at once in loud Italian. Then I heard Luca’s foot deliver a thundering blow. He kicked the door once, twice, a third time. Finally the impact dislodged the lock, and the door flew open. Filomena screamed, “ Un piede! Un piede! ”—“A foot! A foot!”
    A foot? I thought. I craned my neck, but because there were so many people crowding around the door, I couldn’t see