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into the locker room and then into his office. The smell of dead bodies saturated the place, overwhelming even the stink of the cigarette butts piled up in a couple of ashtrays on the desk. La Bella lit up a non-filter Nazionale Esportazione, a cigarette that was practically unfindable. A serious professional. Reggiani was impressed.
    ‘I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been in this line of work for thirty-five years now,’ he began. ‘When I put the scalpel into the wound it went in this deep,’ he continued, his fingers indicating a length of six or seven centimetres on a convenient pen. ‘No dog that I know of has fangs this long. The entire solar plexus was disarticulated, the upper ribs were torn from his sternum, the collar bone was snapped in two. Almost nothing remains of his trachea. I don’t even know if a lion or a tiger could do this kind of damage.’
    Reggiani looked straight into his eyes and spoke slowly. ‘There are no lions in the area, or panthers, or leopards. I’ve had half of the province inspected. I’ve alerted all our stations, the police, the traffic authorities, even the fire department. There are no circuses or Gypsy camps, no reports of private residences keeping exotic animals. I’ve gone down the list of animal food stores, butchers’ shops, slaughterhouses to check if anyone’s been buying suspicious quantities of meat. And I’ve turned up nothing.’
    La Bella lit another cigarette with the stub of the first, making the air in the little room unbreathable.
    ‘I know I’m not wrong,’ he insisted. ‘Find the animal that did this, Lieutenant, or I’ll soon be slicing into someone else here on my table.’
    ‘What about the time of death?’
    ‘There’s no doubt about that: between two and three o’clock last night.’
    ‘Aren’t there any other tests that could be done – I don’t know, the DNA of the animal’s saliva – so at least we know what we’re looking for?’
    La Bella put out the second cigarette and burst into a hacking cough that seemed to suffocate him while it lasted. When he could breathe again, he said, ‘You must have seen that in some American movie, Lieutenant. Before the file is closed, there won’t be anything but the bones left on this one. The kinds of tests you’re talking about cost a lot of money. They’re only done if there’s been a sexual assault, rape. This is just a poor tomb robber who no one could care less about.’
    ‘We’ll see,’ said Reggiani. ‘Have you already written a report?’
    La Bella opened a drawer and pulled out a folder. ‘Here you are, Lieutenant.’
    Reggiani thanked him, shook his hand and said goodbye. As he was leaving he turned, gripping the door handle. ‘You must have some idea, right?’
    ‘I do,’ replied La Bella. ‘If I had to picture it, I’d say an animal weighing at least a hundred, a hundred and twenty kilos, with powerful claws and fangs six or seven centimetres long, jaws strong enough to break a bull’s backbone. So . . . a female lion, for example, or a panther. Oh, by the way, I had the crime lab check for hairs, but they found nothing. Isn’t that incredible? Not a single hair. What about you? Did you sweep the site?’
    Reggiani shook his head in commiseration. ‘That’s the first thing I did. The ground was inspected over an area of four or five metres all around the spot where Ronchetti’s corpse was found and what we came up with was turned over to the lab.’
    ‘Well, then?’
    ‘Human hairs: Ronchetti’s. No trace of anything else, not even cat hair.’
    La Bella got up to accompany him out. ‘I don’t know what else to say, my dear Lieutenant. If it’s so important to you, I can see about a DNA analysis.’
    ‘Yes, please.’
    ‘But I’m not promising anything.’
    ‘Naturally.’
    Soon his Alfa Romeo pulled out, tyres squealing, and took off in the direction of Volterra. Once he was back in his office, Reggiani picked up the phone and dialled a