Free The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi Page A

Caroline. Predestined, but without their destiny.
    Priscilla, like number six. A faceless victim. But she at least had a name.
    Chang maintained that it was just a matter of time, that the identity of the sixth little girl would emerge sooner or later. But the idea that she had disappeared forever made it difficult to consider any other option.
    But now she had to be clear-minded. My turn, she thought, as she looked through the glass separating her from the parents of the little girls who already had a name. She studied the human aquarium, the choreography of those silent, grief-stricken creatures. Soon she would have to go in there to talk to Debby Gordon’s father and mother. And she would have to give those parents what remained of their grief.
    The morgue corridor was long and dark. It was in the basement of the building. It was reached by a flight of stairs or a lift that wasn’t usually working. There were narrow windows on either side of the ceiling, which let in a very small amount of light. The white glazed tiles covering the walls didn’t manage to reflect it, which had probably been the plan when they were put there. The result was that it was dark there even by day, and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling were always lit, filling the spectral silence of the place with their unceasing hum.
    What a horrible place to face the news of the loss of a child, Mila reflected, still studying those suffering parents. There was nothing to comfort them but some anonymous plastic chairs and a table of smiling old magazines.
    Debby. Anneke. Sabine. Melissa. Caroline.
    “Take a look,” said Goran Gavila, standing close behind her. “What d’you see?”
    First he had humiliated her in front of everyone. And now he was being familiar.
    Mila went on observing for a long while. “I see their suffering.”
    “Take a better look. There’s more.”
    “I see those dead children. Even though they aren’t there. Their faces are the sum of their parents’ faces. That’s how I can see the victims.”
    “And I see five nuclear families. Each one with a different social background. With different incomes and different lifestyles. I see couples who have, for various reasons, had only one child. I see women who are long past forty, and for that reason can’t biologically hope for another pregnancy…that’s what I see.” Goran turned to look at her. “ They are his true victims. He has studied them, he has chosen them. An only daughter. He wanted to strip them of any hope of overcoming their grief, of trying to forget their loss. They will have to remember what he did to them for the rest of their days. He has amplified their grief by taking away their future. He has deprived them of the possibility of passing on a memory of themselves to the years to come, of surviving their own death…and he has fed on that. It is the reward for his sadism, the source of his pleasure.”
    Mila looked away. The criminologist was right: there was a symmetry in the evil that had been done to these people.
    “A pattern,” Goran stated, correcting her thoughts.
    Mila thought again about girl number six. There was no one to mourn her yet. She had a right to those tears, like all the others. Suffering has a task to perform. It rebuilds the bonds between the things of the living and those of the dead. It is a language that stands in for words. That changes the terms of the question. It was what the parents on the other side of the glass were doing. Minutely rebuilding, with their pain, a scrap of the life that no longer existed. Weaving together their frail memories, binding the white threads of the past to the thin ones of the present.
    Mila summoned her strength and crossed the threshold. The parents’ eyes immediately moved to her and there was silence.
    She walked towards the mother of Debby Gordon, sitting beside her husband, who rested his hand on her shoulder. Her footsteps sounded grim as she stepped in front of the others.
    “Mr. and