In fact, after a few years of intense work with the dog units, the team had become so trained and efficient that I had been able to give myself some personal space and even start attending again the Faculty of Law in Macerata. I knew that with my degree I could aspire to an important career advancement, but this was not what motivated me to study. It was my innate passion for criminology, which was second only to that for dogs. I was particularly interested in the crimes committed by the followers of the so-called esoteric sects. Starting from the episode of the Beasts of Satan, which occurred a few years earlier, in which the fools, to cover the murder of a girl and mislead the investigations, had staged black masses and satanic rites, I had begun to study the true esoteric sects. I tried to dig deep, to get an idea of what their origins were, but they were lost in the mists of time, to understand what was hidden behind their rites and what crimes their adepts had stained in the past, recent and remote. In Italy, Liguria was one of the places where it was known that some adepts still gathered and practiced their rituals in secret, which sometimes included sacrifices of animals or people. The Inquisition had fought sects until the late 17th century, condemning proselytes to death on charges of heresy or witchcraft. All this fascinated me in particular, so, with my thesis entitled “Esoteric sects and crimes perpetrated by their followers,” I graduated in July 2008 with the best results.
So, precisely by virtue of these studies of mine, now, not even a year after graduation, I had been called to hold the post of police chief in the police district of Imperia, exactly in that area where there was still an intense activity linked to the sects.
Through the window, I saw several highway toll gates, one after the other. In a few minutes, we were already past the Savona exit and continued at high speed towards Imperia.
«Why do the investigators see the shadow of the sects in all this?» I asked, emerging from my thoughts. «All in all, if we consider the Beasts of Satan, famous in these places, we can well understand that they are all frames and there is nothing related to esoterism.»
«In this case, however, there are well-founded elements that lead to thinking about a sect, even if the whole plot, which started several years ago, remains quite dark. Corpses have never been found, up until today, and, based on this new element, we can start to think that even the previously disappeared people were killed, but the crimes were covered, in due time, flawlessly. Maybe something unexpected happened tonight and the killer, or the killers, failed to hide the body, as in the previous cases. Perhaps they tried to set the victim’s body on fire, but a sudden change of wind, which is not uncommon in these parts, has triggered a fire that was no longer controllable. We think it was Aurora herself who called for help because her home was threatened by the fire.»
«What is her alibi? Do we know what she said?»
«She said she came home very late, because she has been to dinner in a restaurant downstream, and that, when she approached her home, she spotted the reddish light of the fire. She called 115 on her cell phone while she was still a couple of miles away.»
«Well, we’ll do the necessary checks. But tell me about the people who disappeared previously.»
«It would take a lot to tell everything in detail. I’ll try to keep things brief, then we will have the opportunity to go through all the material that has been sent to us by the police headquarters and the court. There is a nice file to study, and it’s already on your desk. The first person whose traces were lost is the one who lived in the same house as Aurora and who went by the same name. In 1989 this sixty-year-old lady, known as a fortune teller, herbalist, healer, seer, and sorceress, decided to go to the mountains of Nepal to reach a temple where she could regenerate her spirit, body, and soul. She reached Kathmandu with her follower, a young Romanian woman, a certain Larìs Dracu. The two women hired Sherpas, who accompanied them up to a certain extent. When they insisted on going to an unexplored area, barred to the Sherpas for their religious beliefs, the latter left them alone, saying that they would wait for them for three days, after which they would hold them for missing. Nothing was ever known about the two, but a few months later a twenty-year-old who claimed to be Aurora’s granddaughter showed up in Triora. Appealing to the homonymy, she claimed the right to take possession of her grandmother’s house. This young Aurora also seemed to have supernatural powers, but far more powerful than those of the alleged ancestor. The few locals, who had known Aurora in her youth, could not do anything else but notice the extraordinary resemblance of the young woman to the elderly one that disappeared, so much that many were convinced that the witch had found, on her trip to Nepal, an elixir for youth and has managed to rejuvenate her appearance until she became a girl again. But apart from that, strange episodes began to occur in the woods around Triora. It was said in the village that, on full moon nights, the witches had started practicing their Sabbaths, organized by the young Aurora. Aside from the Sabbaths, Aurora had many visits to her home. In addition to the postulants who requested herbal remedies for the treatment of sicknesses, or elixirs of various types to resolve love troubles, occasionally special people came, hosted by her as followers of an esoteric sect, whose name I do not remember now. These subjects, essentially women, reached the place in order to draw knowledge in the ancient library, which had always been jealously kept in Aurora’s home by her ancestors, and gradually enriched by them over the centuries. One of these young women, Mariella Carletti, called La Rossa, in 1997 left from a small town in Abruzzo, where she was already known as a healer and seer, leaving said that she would reach Triora in order to pass the arduous tests that would allow her to become an adept of the seventh level, one of the highest, and that she would return with powers that no one could ever imagine. She never went back. In Triora, this beautiful girl, tall, with flowing fiery red hair, light blue eyes, a pale complexion full of freckles, did not go unnoticed. At dusk on June 21, the day of the summer solstice, she headed for the woods where the Sabbaths were said to take place, after which she disappeared. An interesting detail is that there was a beginning of a fire that night, but very limited. Apparently, a long-disused truck had caught fire, but the fact could not be connected in any way to the girl’s disappearance. The burnt carcass of the truck is still there, it was never removed. The case, in its time, was dismissed as the work of thugs. In 2000, three journalists, two men, and a woman, from a well-known national monthly magazine which has its headquarters and editorial office in Genoa, wanted to carry out their own little investigation into the girl’s disappearance, which had taken place three years earlier. With the excuse of a reportage on witches and witchcraft in Triora, they placed themselves with a small tent right in the woods where the witches gathered, near the Fonte della Noce, with the hope of glimpsing some satanic ritual or something. For a few days, they collected information on the trial put in place against the witches of Triora towards the end of the 16th century. They also tried to get an exclusive interview from Aurora, who however did not grant it. On the night between the 20 and 21 August, the three journalists disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Inside the tent, found empty the following morning, some notebooks with the collected material were found. These notebooks were returned to the magazine which, to honor the three, published an eight-page article about the witches of Triora. The last sentence written in the notebook of one of the three journalists was in large capital letters and it was also underlined: “MY GOD!” Something or someone had definitely scared him to death. Nothing was ever heard again about the missing journalists.»
In the meantime, we had passed Imperia, left the highway at the Arma di Taggia toll gate, and took a provincial road that went up a beautiful valley floor, running parallel to the course of a river. It was the first time I was seeing places that would later become familiar. We were traveling through the Argentina Valley, crossed by the river of the same name, a narrow valley with few human settlements. The green of the luxuriant woods stood out against the intense blue of the clear sky on the warm day of early July and, within me, the old passion for the mountain was awakening. I was already dreaming of walking on the paths that went into those woods. We went up past a small town, Molini di Triora, to reach Triora, a village with medieval features, perched on the top of a summit. After passing the center, the road descended and, after a while, we stopped in an open space, where a couple of police cars, a jeep of the firefighters, and a truck of the forestry body equipped to put out the forest fires were parked.
«Well,» I said, «what