Free The Crocodile by Maurizio de Giovanni Page B

in San Gaetano a few days earlier. The reporter wondered what links there might be between the two victims, and what the police were waiting for to arrest the guilty party and bring him to justice.
    The tone of the article wasn’t openly hostile, but it was clear that that was where it was tending. The article concluded with a striking image: a murderer waiting for his victims in the shadows, dropping tissues, wet with his tears, on the ground. A murderer’s tears: the tears of the Crocodile.
    In fact, the image had even inspired the headline:
Crocodile Killer Strikes Again
. Lojacono understood how angry Piras was, and why: her name was the only one mentioned in the piece.
    The newspaper was one of the most widely read local publications, and the other papers were likely to adopt the moniker. That in turn would capture the popular imagination, inevitably sensitive to the deaths of young people. As long as it was young Lorusso, the murder could be dismissed as a result of gang warfare; but laying hands on a girl from the upper reaches of the social hierarchy was sacrilege, pure and simple.
    Lojacono turned to look at Giuffrè, who had started swaying back and forth again.
    “As far as you know, were there any reports on the shell casings found on the scene?”
    The sergeant suddenly stopped. “No, and how would I know anything about that? If you want, I’d be glad to look into it though. Not now—Pontolillo’s already left for the day—but first thing tomorrow morning . . .”
    Lojacono had glimpsed a useful scrap of information at the end of the article.
    “Do me a favor: tomorrow, see if you can find out whether they found a shell casing and if it matched the one from Lorusso’s courtyard. And one more thing: cover for me tomorrow. I have to attend a funeral.”

CHAPTER 23
    His cheeks are burning. That’s always been the symptom, ever since he was a small child, as far back as he could remember: burning cheeks.
    And the sound of his pulse in his ears, as if his heart has climbed into his skull. Now, he’s well aware of the effects of stress, because he’s studied them, but that does nothing to diminish their scope and strangeness.
    Donato walks out into the open air and heaves a deep sigh. He considers how in life you can do your best to plan things out, examine every angle, take into consideration all the pros and cons, but in any case it’ll always turn out differently than you expected, some unforeseen factor will always spin things on to another trajectory.
    He knows that he didn’t skip over anything; he studied the way he usually does. In fact, better than usual. He knows he even managed to find the time, in the last few days before the final exam, to go over the material one last time, making sure there were no gaps in his preparation, no chinks in his armor. He knows that he calmly reviewed his state of mind the night before, trying to ascertain whether he really was as well prepared as he felt.
    In other words, he ran through every item on his usual checklist, and he even double- and triple-checked. So what went so horribly wrong?
    As he runs his eyes over the gardens that surround the teaching hospital, teeming with the usual crowd of students, nurses, professors, and assistants, some still in scrubs, others carrying their coats, straining to catch a few rays of pale sunlight after days on end of relentless, depressing drizzle, he starts to wonder whether his father might not have a point with that obsessive refrain of his. He always says that distraction and lack of commitment are subtle, treacherous adversaries: that they worm their way in and then hijack your mind before you even realize what’s happening.
    He thinks about his father. About how he had hoped that this exam, his successful completion of it, would lay the foundations for the whole speech he was planning to deliver to him.
    In his mind’s eye, he sees again the professor shaking his head in disappointment, toying with his exam