Voices To Images

Alberto spent a quiet night in his small white house in Barcelona.

The noises of the cars, which gradually receded as the night progressed, made him slowly sink into a very serene sleep.

CHAPTER IV

The next morning, things suddenly changed. While shaving, the local radio announced that, that same night, a young man had been killed near the Santa Eulalia Cathedral and that the murder modus operandi was similar to that of the serial killer.

The razor fell into the sink and Alberto remained motionless for a minute, thinking back to the previous evening and to the face of the man he had imagined and drawn.

Would they have been able to identify him with his portrait? When would this carnage end? And why did he feel doubtful? How could a seemingly common and non-aggressive man play the role of a serial killer?

Those questions he could not answer right at that time. After a few minutes, after shaving, he was already getting dressed to leave the house.

"It is a fact, said Professor Beniamino Pricca, it is easy for some individuals to lead a double life; tireless workers and fathers of families can hide a second existence, in which they become cruel executors of chilling rites. A little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, do you understand Alberto !? "

He was one of his few friends in Barcelona and that very morning Alberto invited him to breakfast, as he wanted to hear the opinion of an expert, who could help him understand more.

So, it was absolutely possible that the little man was the killer, as Professor Pricca, a retired professor of criminology, had explained to him.

He returned to the office with the sole certainty of having interpreted that voice well, of having grasped the nuances that had clearly reconstructed in his mind the killer’s well-defined traits, then drawn on paper by his automatic and well-controlled gestures. It was not up to him to ask himself now who that man really was and what kind of life he could live with absolutely no identity.

His thought was distracted by three simultaneous direct calls to his office, so he had to concentrate on those real situations he had to solve.

After that day, after the drawing of the alleged killer, Alberto began to devour the newspapers and television news, while waiting for the news of the arrest of the serial killer.

But the murderer seemed to have disappeared. Up to that moment, between one murder and the other, there were barely two weeks but this time, for over a month, there had been no news about him, and the media's attention had also proportionately diminished.

That afternoon, Alberto randomly decided to walk the long road of the Park to return home and, as if by magic, suddenly before his eyes, beautiful Carmen came into view, sitting on a park bench, intent on playing with her small puppy.

They immediately recognized each other, and he hoped to be at his very best at that moment.

He straightened the collar of his jacket and, with a quick gesture of his right hand, pulled back his black hair.

Carmen's eyes shone along with her smile in her sweet simplicity. It was like a punch in the stomach. Alberto managed to keep control of his emotions and invited her to continue the walk with him towards the Caffè Marsella at Carrer de Sant Pau. It was a pleasant and very long conversation, during which Alberto could not, even for a moment, detach his gaze from the woman's beautiful face. He learned that, after the completion of his drawing at the Police Department, hundreds of images had been reproduced with the face of the alleged killer, images that were now available to all police districts in the country. Carmen admitted that she was impressed by his skill and above all by his courage to make that decision without fear. At the end of the conversation, the two parted with a sweet kiss on the cheek and a strong handshake, which was a foreboding of what was to come.

After this meeting, finally, that night, Alberto rested peacefully. His sleep had been disturbed by nightmares for days and by the blurred images of the serial killer, superimposed on those of all the faces he had drawn during those long months at the Telephone Company.

The next day he used the trivial excuse to go to the Police Department to ask for news on the investigation to Major Messi, with the sole goal of meeting Carmen.

The Major received him coldly and gave him only a few minutes to him, making him understand that, despite the dissemination of the photographs of his portrait, there had been no new developments in the darned investigation, which was making him become the sneer of the city.

This time it was Carmen’s turn to invite him to the police bar for a quick aperitif before lunch. An incredible intimacy had already been established between the two, who, in just half an hour, managed to figure out that they were beginning to long for each other. This time, they left with the promise of a date for the evening of the following Saturday.

The three days that separated Alberto from that date seemed to last forever. It was the first time that he was probably falling in love.

At the very moment he was imagining his love encounter with Carmen, he was shaken up by the news. The evening news made an extraordinary connection, precisely with his city, with the discovery of the bodies of two young men, killed with the macabre ritual of the other murders.

They had been dead for a few weeks, but only now, by chance, had the bodies been found: one in the municipal dump, probably thrown into a rubbish bin, and another under the bridge of the Port Vell dock.

No claim this time, no phone calls, but the same modus operandi. They had been killed in two different circumstances and at different times, probably ten days apart. This updated the moves of the killer, who, therefore, had never stopped killing.

Alberto wanted to ask Major Messi why there were no claims right at that time, but after the last frigid meeting, he preferred to keep that question to himself.

His mind began to think improbable police scenarios at first plausible, then extremely imaginative, in which he appeared as the hero who captured the villain on a dark rainy night and was rewarded by beautiful Carmen’s long kiss. The ringing of his phone brought him back to reality. Major Messi wanted to see him immediately.

A dark police car with a blue flashing light picked him up in front of the house and took him directly to the central Police Department. In that short period of time spent in silence inside the car, he began to wonder if he would really be up to the task of facing such a complicated situation, or if it would have been better to just let it go and return to his anonymous simplicity.

The Major's request was accurate: a new message, this time recorded on a tape, had been delivered to the newspaper El Pais and he was asked to listen to it, to check at least if it was the same person he had thought of, as an initial electronic analysis interpreted it as different from the previous one.

He put on the large headphones and listened to the crude and arrogant words of the serial killer, who claimed the killing of those two men in about two minutes and challenged the police to find him.

The voice was distinctly different. He politely asked for a blank sheet of paper and, this time, he began nervously to draw a face. He appeared very decisive and his features became hard, as a great rage was building up in Alberto while, with unprecedented precision, he created the face of that person with his pencil. He too was amazed by the speed with which he finished the design of that oval face.

It was very clear; the features were shown with three-dimensional precision, and all the features of that face were highlighted, in a completely different fashion from the previous drawing.

It was a drawing of a younger man with very short black hair and thin arched lashes, a gaunt face, and eyes rimmed by deep circles with a look between madness and despair.

He turned to the Major asking him to confirm the reliability of the registration. The Major verified that the message stated precise details relating to the murders, details that could have been known only to the person who had committed them.

But then why, Alberto thought, is there a second voice and a second face?

No one, with the exception of the Police Investigation Department, was aware of the experiment of his ongoing drawings, so no one could have had an interest in confusing the investigations to protect the serial killer, with the exception of a possible accomplice. However, this hypothesis had already been discarded, as serial killers never act in association with other people.

Murderous madness always came from long-lasting isolation, which led these diverted subjects to hate the surrounding world, Even the hypothesis that there were two murderers was not supported by the psychological profiles of this kind of criminals.

Although Alberto was confused, he was still sure of his feelings and his drawings and therefore, at that moment, his attention was focused only on providing credibility to his talent as interpreter of that arrogant voice that still echoed in his brain.

All the recording tapes held by the investigators were again sent to the Forensic Police for re-evaluation, and all were dismissed.

CHAPTER V

Carmen accompanied him to the main exit of the building and he finally had the courage to kiss her, following his instinct and a desire that he had felt stirring for days.

The kiss was followed by a strong, but brief hug, then she slipped away from the prying eyes of her colleagues.

Before returning home that evening, Alberto walked down a narrow side street, which led him to Professor Pricca's old villa. His old friend was happy to chat with him.

Alberto asked him about the two voices and the two faces, in the hope of receiving a little help to free himself from what was becoming a truly complex matter.

Pricca confirmed that it was unlikely that there could be two killers, since a serial killer always acts alone and always claims his murders alone; so, either the first or the second voice had to have been forged or had been the result of the crazy mind of a mythomaniac.

However, Alberto could not explain the rich details regarding the two murders, present both in the first and in the second telephone message. The Professor could not answer his question.

Perhaps a mythomaniac thirsty for news had gotten ideas from the statements of the police and television commentators and had built a version so plausible as to mislead everyone. Alberto has a sip of cold milk and dropped on his still unmade bed with a thud. He then fell deeply asleep and slept for a really long time.

When something is not clear in the mind of a man, especially a highly intelligent man as Alberto, it is unlikely that it could be filed away simply as a fact. He was absolutely certain, the two voices belonged to two totally different people.

But who could have had an interest in tampering with the investigations and why? While his mind was absorbed in these thoughts, his phone rang, and Carmen’s name and number appeared on the display. She wanted to meet him that very same evening to be able to continue unfinished matters. Her voice was sweet and her laughter sketchy, with very long pauses.