A provincial town, too small to be entertaining, large enough to allow a serial killer to strike and vanish without a trace. Three murders at the onset of autumn, always carried out under cover of darkness and always following the same, cold-blooded method: a single gunshot to the heart. The new Commissioner, a young woman fighting to earn the respect of her superiors and colleagues. The senator, a cunning, selfish, and unfaithful man, often away from home due to the important positions he holds. The crime boss, who bribes officials and invests in the construction of a bypass road where none should exist. The crime boss's spokesperson, a young and attractive man who turns up at the least predictable times and places. The bodyguards, the prosecutor with no leads, the frightened people, and the city closing in on itself. The unsolved murder of a young prostitute, committed a few years earlier, coming to light just days after the new Commissioner takes office. Few clues and not a single piece of evidence. No one has the faintest idea who the killer might be — someone who could be hiding anywhere...
The sleeve caught on the thorns.
They cut into the skin of her arm and held a blue strip of fabric.
It was a dense bush, grown beside a road sign warning drivers to slow down for animals.
The stylized deer appeared swallowed by the leaves. The plate below, bent by some vandal's show of force, indicated that the hazard would continue for at least a kilometer.
Blood soaked the intact part of the sleeve, trickled down to the leather strap of the small watch, and fell in wide warm drops onto the uncertain edge of the roadside.
One direction led deep into the woods, the other would have seen the vegetation gradually thin out, giving way to the houses that preceded the town proper. Miriana stood there, surrounded by the smell of damp earth and trampled grass. Indecision eroded her small advantage like a storm over sand.
To get away from the damned bastard who had beaten her with the butt of his pistol, she had run, cutting like the wind through the uncertainties of a forgotten wood: a succession of trees fallen to the ground, branches tangled like barbed wire, and treacherous ditches camouflaged by dead leaves. She had leaped over the stream while a stabbing pain in her chest spread down to her bare legs. She had risked her heart bursting, and now her shoes — so flat and flimsy they would have struggled on a poorly maintained pavement — were torturing her wounded feet.
Her socks alternated mud stains with purplish blotches, and the laces had collected the sticky little burrs that cling like hedgehogs.
The short socks, together with the brief skirt now reduced to a rag, had allowed grass, thorns, and nettles to reduce her bare legs to a lunar landscape. The tendril of a weed had wound itself into the dark, unkempt tangle of her dishevelled hair.
She looked left.
The road seemed to narrow where the tall grass met the asphalt. The summer-heavy branches bent until they reached their twins on the opposite side. The late afternoon sun filtered through the boughs in a thousand blinding blades of light. To the right, a mirror image of that same view, with a slight rise breaking the monotony a few hundred metres ahead.
Right.
The hard surface of the asphalt accepted no negotiations. Every step was an ordeal.
Miriana listened to the sounds behind her. She could hear water flowing and birds singing. She could hear the sound of the wind harmonising with millions of leaves, and the distant croaking of a frog.
Right.
She heard footsteps — heavy and deliberate — and the birds fell silent.
She moved to the centre of the road and asked her exhausted body for more. Her breath, reduced to a thread, began to wheeze like the brakes of a car at the bottom of a hill. A sickly warmth took hold of her neck.
She looked back and saw the road sign from behind, beside the sharp branch that had kept the scrap of fabric and a little of her skin.
She tried to run but the adrenaline was no match for the pain. Her feet felt as though they had been through a press; her knees creaked like an old boat on the open sea. The rise, distorted by a play of light, shadow, and heat, gave the impression of having moved further away.
The stretches of asphalt where the sun had managed to break through burned like hell beneath her thin soles, and a thirst of a thousand years and a thousand miles added itself to the foul taste in her mouth. Miriana did not know it, but a thick white foam had clotted at the corners of her mouth, making her look even more wretched. The bruise beneath her now-swollen eye had filled with a yellowish fluid and forced her mouth into a grotesque grimace.
When she realised that the rolling blur of light and reflections was a car, she threw her mouth open in a cry and found the strength to wave her arms.
She planted herself in the centre of the road and prayed to God that whoever was driving might help her. The car swerved and bounced, preceded by a shriek of tyres and metal, grazed her with its wing mirror inside a foul-smelling rush of air, and disappeared accelerating beyond the road sign. She watched it regain its line and dissolve into the shadow.
Left.
The footsteps following her struck the edge of the road without hesitation.
Six full minutes passed, and who knows how many cars.
Her heart struggled not to abandon her; her blood completed its circuit at least ten times. Fear crept under her skin, corroded her nerves, confused her senses. She saw a windscreen explode with reflected light, wheels lock up before her only to pull away the moment her face — ravaged by violence and exhaustion — came into focus. There were imperious swerves, engine roars, the smell of burning clutch. Sneering grilles bearing down on her, forcing her to jump aside.
She could feel her killer's eyes on her.
A few metres before the rise — deemed impossible to clear — she chose the woods.
After all, the woods had protected her, and she was certain they would do so again.
Before stepping in she caught her breath, leaning against the concrete pole of an old power line. She breathed, rubbed her hands over her face, and freed herself of the watch that was now torturing her swollen, bleeding, wounded wrist. She unclasped it and it fell on the edge of the asphalt together with the small gold case.
It broke the moment it touched the ground.
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