Taken: A gripping thriller full of twists you won't see coming...

By Monty Marsden

A gripping thriller full of twists you won't see coming... The next serial killer read from the author of Missing and Hunted. Perfect for the fans of Angela Marsons and Jeffrey Deaver.

It's been two years since mass murderer, Giacomo Riondino, disappeared after killing Greta Alfieri...

Dr Claps, devastated and guilt-ridden by Greta's death has been on a man-hunt for Riondino ever since.

Meanwhile, an American girl disappears on the 382nd step of the Cerro trail in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

No one saw her disappear. Who took her? And how?

When the US authorities contact Claps, he is certain that it must be Riordino. But, unlike Riondino's other victims, the girl has disappeared into thin air...

Will Claps solve the puzzle, or will he lose his mind in the process, blinded by his own obsession?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788543927

Monty Marsden

Monty Marsden, a Tuscan by birth, grew up in Milan, where he studied medicine and still works. He lives in the province of Bergamo, with his wife and four children.

Book preview

1

The Alitalia Boeing 747 had begun its final descent to Hartsfield International in Atlanta a few minutes earlier.

The passenger looked out from the window at the sea of white clouds below obscuring the ground. He had left Milan Malpensa over ten hours earlier after having exchanged a final email with the United States the day before. During the long intercontinental flight he hadn’t slept for a single minute, nor eaten or drunk anything, or looked at a book or a magazine. He had sat motionless, locked inside his thoughts and waiting for the journey to end. When, with a little turbulence, the Boeing began to pass through the clouds and for about fifteen seconds everything disappeared into a thick fog, he began to feel anxious. Or rather, he began to feel the vague fear that came over him with every take off and every landing. He could see the ground beneath him now. Green fields and trees broken up by roads and tracts of houses that became increasingly clear as the plane lost altitude. The sun and the blue sky above the clouds had vanished, replaced by rain, the real intensity of which he couldn’t assess.

The vibration of the undercarriage being lowered increased his anxiety.

The plane banked gently one last time to align itself with the runway, and the passenger closed his eyes and waited for the aircraft to make contact with the ground.

He finally reopened them and breathed a sigh of relief only when the reverse thrust of the jets was already slowing the Boeing’s progress along the tarmac.

As the plane taxied slowly along before eventually coming to a halt, he adjusted his watch to local time. 15:26: two minutes before the scheduled landing time…

Not long now and he would know if the journey had actually been worth making.

*

He’d always been one step ahead of us. Always, right up until that last damn day.

After several days of intense cold, it was unusually mild in Milan that evening. Commissioner Sensi and dottoressa Manara, the director of the LABANOF – the Forensic Anthropology and Dentistry Laboratory – sat in a crowded bar in the navigli area, a glass of Lagavulin on the table in front of each of them.

It had been two years and two months since Giacomo Riondino had disappeared, leaving behind him the charred corpses of his accomplice and of Greta Alfieri, and this was the first time since then that Sensi had talked to anyone about the whole atrocious story.

Two years during which Sensi had never forgiven himself for letting the man escape when he thought he’d him in his grip, for not having saved Greta, and above all for not managing, during all that intense manhunt, to understand. To see what was right in front of his face and would have allowed him to stop Riondino before he’d left that trail of blood behind him.

The commissioner took a deep breath. He always knew that sooner or later we’d catch up with him, but he had a plan, and every time we took a step forward, he’d already taken one himself. Sensi hesitated a moment before concluding bitterly, We’ve only got ourselves to blame. We always gave him enough time to make that step.

You did nearly catch him, though, said Manara.

Yeah… said Sensi, lowering his eyes. But only after he had killed eight more people in the space of a few days. He took another sip of his whiskey before continuing. We discovered that he had an accomplice who had been helping him – first to escape from the institution he was transferred to from the high security psychiatric hospital, then to find a safe hiding place in the city. An accomplice we’d had right in front of us from the start but hadn’t managed to pick up in time. Anyway, the long and short of it is that we discovered he was hiding Riondino and that he was holding Greta Alfieri hostage there.

Were you and Greta close? asked Manara.

Nowhere near as close as she and Claps were… replied Sensi slowly, emphasising each word. There’d been a very deep bond between them since the time he’d saved her life. He took another small sip. Claps was with me that night when we all went over there. But Riondino had already gone. It was probably only a matter of minutes, but we missed him. The house was empty and the accomplice’s car had disappeared. It was sighted in Como less than an hour later, with Riondino at the wheel and Greta lying on the back seat as though she were sleeping.

She was already dead… remarked Cristina Manara sadly. When I did the autopsy I didn’t find any trace of smoke in her lungs.

Sensi just nodded and turned his eyes away before continuing. "The sighting wasn’t coincidental: Riondino wanted to be recognised. He planned it all out. He stopped at a petrol station and only set off again when he was certain that the manager had recognised him and seen Greta apparently sleeping on the back seat. With cars already on his tail, he took a back road that went through the hills to Switzerland. A narrow road, full of bends, and the tarmac was slippery from the rain. It was pouring down that night. Sensi stopped for a moment to suppress the wave of emotion the memories were evidently causing. He was carrying the corpse of the accomplice he had killed only a few hours earlier in the boot. He fastened him into the driving seat and pushed the car off a cliff, making it look like they’d gone off the road, and then he set fire to the car. After that, all he had to do was walk across the border. Another brief pause, another deep breath. When we arrived, we found the two carbonised bodies, and we had no reason to think that the corpse at the wheel wasn’t Riondino… We only found out thirty-six hours later, thanks to you, when you did the autopsies. By which time it was too late. Sensi’s voice seemed no longer able to hold back his anger. Always one step ahead of us…"

As though it were actually there before her, Cristina Manara saw once again in her mind the x-ray of the teeth which had proved the burnt body she was examining was not that of Riondino. And in the meantime, he’d got to Liechtenstein and his ‘hoard’…

Almost five million euros in an encrypted account… And when we finally managed to get to that account ten days later, it had already been closed and the money had been withdrawn… With all that cash, it wouldn’t have been difficult for Riondino to disappear, maybe to some tropical paradise.

Without leaving any trace?

Sensi nodded. More blood, he said gravely. Of course, we were only able to reconstruct the chain of events afterwards, but a young Serbian woman disappeared in Walenstadt, a Swiss town on the lake of the same name just a few miles away from Liechtenstein and Vaduz. She was a stripper in a club in Mels, and occasionally pulled tricks with her clients. The day after Riondino’s escape, she was seen entertaining an Italian client.

Riondino?

The description of the man wasn’t very detailed, but it was compatible with him. Over the following days the girl didn’t show up at work, saying she was ill, but she was seen several times in town, spending more money than usual, as though she had a guest… She disappeared after a week without leaving a trace, and it took another week before the landlord of her apartment became alarmed enough to decide to use his copy of the keys to go inside: and few seconds later, as soon as he’d got over the shock of all the blood, he got on his phone and called the local police. When the fingerprints and DNA sequences found were run through the database, we were sure that it was Riondino.

The girl’s body?

It’s never been found.

The lake…? asked Cristina Manara, a light tremble in her voice.

Probably, said Sensi coolly. It’s not very big, but it’s over a hundred and fifty metres deep.

Speechless, Manara sat in silence for a few seconds.

And since then there’s been no news at all of Riondino…

"Nothing. Eighteen days passed between him escaping from Italy and the moment when his DNA was found in the apartment with the Serbian girl’s blood: more than enough time for him to get his money, get organised and disappear completely.

And you’ve got no idea where he might have gone? Aren’t there any other trails, any hypotheses?

He could be anywhere… said Sensi, glancing at his watch. In any case, he’s in the databases of police forces all over the world now. Photographs, fingerprints, DNA. As well as his modus operandi, the clinical records on his psychiatric condition…

You mean his identity disorder? Multiple personalities, right?

Exactly. Riondino has ten different personalities. The dominant one is Jack – the bloodthirsty one is Hannibal.

There’s a female one too, if I remember…

Julia. And a child, Little.

I can’t help wondering how a person with such serious psychiatric problems manages to hide. How is it possible that nobody notices him? That he manages to live an apparently normal life?

Sensi held out his hands resignedly. He did it for years right here in this city before Hannibal started murdering people and got him locked up for seven years in a high security psychiatric hospital. He knows how to do it – he has his own equilibrium.

It’s incredible… I find it hard to believe that it’s possible.

Professor Reti, who was responsible for him during his detention, has analysed everything we know about his behaviour during the escape. He believes that some personalities, including Hannibal, have begun to merge into that of the leader, Jack, to form a sort of super-personality that dominates all the others. In other words, it would be even easier for Riondino to behave, to use the professor’s words, in a ‘homogeneous and objective-based way’ today. Sensi took another look at his watch. It’s late, Cristina… and I’ve already talked about this story far too much.

Do you think he’ll kill again, wherever he is?

I’m not an expert, the commissioner replied almost abruptly after leaving a banknote on the table. I’m not a psychiatrist. It’s not for me to ask that question.

And what about Claps… Any news of him?

A bitter scowl appeared on Sensi’s lips as he rose from the table. I haven’t seen him for more than two years, he said, pulling on his Loden overcoat. Not since the day of Greta Alfieri’s funeral. I’ve tried to get in touch with him several times, but he’s never answered my calls. Strange that you would ask me about him, though: they told me that he’d been working with you lot at the LABANOF on the university’s criminology course.

He did on and off for the first few months, but it’s been quite a while since I last heard from him.

*

The passenger held out his passport and immigration form to the customs officer, a white guy with cold eyes and a sharp face. After reading his name on the document, the officer briefly looked him over and then pressed a buzzer. A few seconds later, an imposing black man clad in a dark suit appeared and politely invited the passenger to follow him into a small office in the airport police area.

As soon as he entered, Joseph E. Munro, the FBI man in charge of the NCAVC – the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, of which the Behavioural Analysis Unit was part – got up from his desk.

Welcome back to the US, Doctor Claps! he exclaimed with a wide smile.

Good to see you again, replied Claps seriously in good English. It’s been years, he added, accepting the man’s vigorous handshake and surprised at how naturally the words came out.

Munro had run the course on the behaviour of violent offenders that Claps – who had spent more than a year living in the FBI training centre at Quantico – had attended, and there was a great deal of mutual respect between the two. Since then, they had remained in regular contact, but over the last week the exchange of emails between them had become almost frantic.

Sheila Ross, said Munro, handing Claps a photograph. Twenty-six years old. She disappeared in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Her family is one of the most prominent in Atlanta, and her grandfather is a former state senator who is kicking up one hell of a fuss about it.

It was the standard posed college yearbook photo: the girl was smiling, showing a row of perfectly aligned white teeth. The beauty of her face, with its radiant smile and light blue eyes, was beyond question, but her posture was too mannered to be able to tell anything real about the person. After a few seconds, Claps set the picture down on the desk.

For months she’d been planning a vacation in the Galapagos with her friend, Alice Hartford, continued Munro. On their way back from the islands, they made a stopover at Guayaquil where they were planning to stay a couple of days before moving on to Quito. But they never got there. Sheila disappeared the night before they were due to leave. That was twelve days ago.

A long time. Almost certainly too long for her to still be alive.

"You already told me all this in your email. Tell me about the Italian. That’s why I’m here." Once again, the words came out smoothly: for some mysterious reason hidden in the folds of his neuropathology, speaking English instead of his own language meant that Claps’ speech was devoid of those hesitations and stutters which were the result of the aphasia which had struck him years ago.

That afternoon they went to visit Malecon, the neighbourhood along the river that runs through the city. At one point, Sheila decided to take a break at an open air bar while her friend visited the botanical gardens. As the friend was returning, she saw Sheila in the distance sitting at a table talking to a man who left just before she got there. Sheila was euphoric – she told her friend that she’d managed to speak to that nice man in Italian…

Wait a second, interrupted Claps, Sheila Ross could speak Italian?

Munro nodded. Her family has Italian origins, and she spent three years in Perugia studying comparative culture at the University for Foreigners.

Sorry, I interrupted you… Carry on.

She told her friend that it had been a bit of luck, and not just because she’d had the chance to speak Italian again: the man, who had said that he was from Milan but had been there in Guayaquil for work just over two years, was really nice and had told her all the places it was worth seeing in the few hours they would be in town, saying that they really should visit the Cerro de Santa Ana. It’s a hill with a view of the whole city.

Milan… The city Riondino was from. In Ecuador for two years… It had been two years since that bastard had disappeared. Claps didn’t let any of the excitement and anger that he began to feel humming beneath his skin show.

Do we have a description of the Italian?

It’s so generic that it’s not much use.

But it might—

This time it was Munro who interrupted him.

The physical description fits with the data we have about Giacomo Riondino. But also with millions of other people as well.

Didn’t he give her his name?

We don’t know. If he did, Sheila didn’t tell her friend.

Go on.

There’s another thing. That morning, the girls took dozens of photographs. You know what kids today are like with their phones: selfies and pulling weird face, and a few pictures of the place.

And…?

The Italian was wearing a hat, a panama. Well, in two of the photographs they took before Sheila met him, in the background, in the distance, you can see a man wearing a panama. We blew up the photos as much as possible: he’s turned towards them, but has his head and chest turned away, as though at the last moment he’d tried to stop his face appearing in the picture. And the clothes he is wearing also correspond to the description Hartford gave us: a light coloured linen suit.

Did the girl identify the man in the photo as the Italian?

She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t rule out that they might be the same person.

So he was following her… murmured Claps, as though to himself.

In reality, we can’t be certain that the man in the photos is the Italian, but we think there’s a very good chance that he was.

A half smile appeared on Claps’ lips: in Munro’s language, which he had learned to interpret during his time at Quantico, that ‘very good chance’ was a certainty.

Following the advice the Italian gave them, continued Munro, the two girls set off to climb the Cerro de Santa Ana that evening: it’s a stairway of 444 steps that pass between houses, bars and restaurants until it gets to the summit where there’s a church and a lighthouse and you can see the whole of Guayaquil. As they were going up, they separated for what was only supposed to be a few minutes – but when her friend got to the place where they were supposed to meet, Sheila wasn’t there. She’d vanished into thin air. Not a sign of her since then. Munro paused for a moment before continuing. The manhunt didn’t turn up anything, and the idea that the girl might have done something impulsive isn’t credible: Sheila Ross was abducted, and at this point the chances of her still being alive are very low. And let me be absolutely clear about one thing: the chances of the Italian – always given that he actually is the person responsible – being Riondino are even lower. Munro looked Claps straight in the eyes. But… like I wrote you, your help would be valuable.

There had been a time when Claps would have lowered his eyes – not from insecurity, but to seek sensations and to try and empathise with the victim. But since the events of two years ago, everything had changed. He held Munro’s gaze and waited for him to continue.

As I’m sure you know, since the Socialist leader, Correa, took power, relations between our administration and the government of Ecuador have not exactly been plain sailing…

Claps was well aware that Ecuador had been a thorn in the United States’ side for more than a decade – because of the country’s foreign debt of eleven billion dollars, cut by 70 per cent due to the bankruptcy of the state, its relations with Iran and Russia, the nine billion dollar environmental disaster fine it had given Chevron-Texaco, its friendship with Chávez… And then there was the case of Assange, who for years now had been a guest of the Ecuadorian embassy in London to escape the rape charges which were a certain prelude to his being extradited to the US for an espionage trial.

Consequently, Munro continued, even though we have offered our help to the local police, we’ve been given no opportunity to collaborate, and two private investigators hired by the Ross family were expelled from the country after a couple of days once they started asking questions. Basically we know little or nothing and our hands are tied. All this with ex-Senator Ross on our backs all the time.

What about your local intelligence officer? I imagine you must have somebody there.

Sure, but the number of undercover staff has been cut back to the bone and the administration has no intention of putting the ones who are left at risk over a missing person case: there are more important things to keep an eye on in that country.

And so you want me—

Munro finished his sentence for him. To go there for us and look for Sheila Ross, or her remains. He leaned forward slightly to peer into Claps’ eyes. And to look for the Italian for yourself, if it does turn out to be Riondino.

Claps remained silent for a long time. Thanks to the network of contacts and friendships he had built up over his years working in criminology, without informing Sensi or the Italian police, he had spent the last twenty-four months in Switzerland, Turkey and even Thailand looking for Riondino on the basis of leads which were less solid than the one in Ecuador appeared to be.

This Sheila Ross… he asked. Was she tall?

Quite the opposite. She was petite. Very well put together, though. The type of girl that wouldn’t go unnoticed, if that’s what you’re asking.

Petite… Like the victims that Riondino chose, so that he, with his less than impressive physique, could dominate them.

We can give you all possible logistical support from here: information, data analysis, money if you need it. But of course, there’ll be nothing official on paper, and as I’ve already said, no guarantee that this Italian is your Riondino, said Munro. Will you go?

Claps hesitated a moment. He didn’t care how slim the chances of the man being Riondino were, but before accepting he wanted to be sure that there were no details that meant it couldn’t be him. I want to study all the material you’ve collected first, he said rapidly. And I especially want to talk to the girl’s travelling companion.

Munro stared at him impassively. I thought you would – she’s here in Atlanta: I’ll arrange for a meeting tonight. With a quick gesture, he took a CD from a drawer and handed it to Claps: Here’s the whole file. I’ll have the driver take you to your hotel and I’ll come and pick you up later so you can meet Alice Hartford.

2

Claps had spent the last three hours in his hotel room studying the file on Sheila Ross’s disappearance.

Her family had distant Italian origins: the founder of the clan, who had landed in New York with little money but plenty of dreams in October 1892, exactly four hundred years after Columbus, had been Giuseppe Rossi. Giuseppe hadn’t been afraid of hard work, and wasn’t lacking in strength or business nous, so as soon as he’d started making money, he set up a small business, and forty years later his first grandson, Joseph Ross, was one of the biggest taxpayers in Atlanta. Sheila was now the fifth generation and had everything she needed – as well as much more besides – for a happy life. But then she had encountered a man… Could it have been Riondino?

Claps sighed. There was nothing that proved for certain that the man Sheila Ross had spoken to in Malecon was the one that had abducted her, much less that it had been Riondino…

But he didn’t want to overlook anything.

That Riondino was abroad was obvious, and from the moment he had disappeared, Claps had been certain that there would be other victims.

But there was another thing of which he had been certain: sooner or later he would find him, wherever he was.

He would have no peace until he had succeeded. He unscrewed the safety cap of a plastic tub and took out a pill which he swallowed. Maybe he wouldn’t even have peace after he found him.

Claps slowly closed his eyes. Greta Alfieri was dead because of him. He had used her – used her to find in himself the strength to follow Riondino when he escaped, right at the time when he, the great criminologist, the profiler, had wanted nothing more than to leave that kind of manhunt behind him. Greta too, had been keeping her distance from that type of horror story for a long time, but he had manoeuvred her back into the game.

And in the game, she had met her death.

What atrocious irony destiny had reserved for them… Many years before, in the Morphy case, he had saved her life, only to then cause her to lose it at Riondino’s hand.

Claps knew he would never find peace, but he wasn’t going to let Riondino find it either: he would follow him all the way to hell, if that was what it took.

All the way to hell. And there he would let him burn. That was all he cared about.

He opened his eyes again: in addition to a profile of Sheila Ross and her friend’s testimony, the file contained the official information the Ecuadorian police had given to the media as well as what little Munro had managed to find out from his confidential sources. At first, the local cops had not taken the disappearance of the girl too seriously, considering it the caprice of some impulsive spoilt American rich kid, and only later, under pressure from the US government, the web and the local press, had the hypothesis of a kidnapping for ransom been advanced. But the demand for ransom had never come… The investigation had widened its scope, but they had found absolutely nothing. As far as the Italian was concerned, they didn’t seem to be trying too hard to identify him among the residents of Guayaquil. The latest reports made it clear how the police efforts had progressively tailed off along with the decline in media interest in Sheila Ross.

Claps went to the window and opened the heavy curtains. In the darkness of the evening a dense, thin rain continued to fall on the lights of Atlanta.

If the clues in the dossier led him to think that the man who had taken Sheila Ross was the Italian, none of them suggested that he might be Riondino. But there was also nothing which excluded the idea.

Yes, he would go to Guayaquil.

The CD that Munro had given to him contained more photos of Sheila Ross in addition to the one he had already seen at the airport. He had looked at them for a long time, but without feeling any empathy.

Once, that would not have been the case: he would have immediately felt a kind of deep bond with the victim of a crime he was called in to handle. He would have been overcome by a kind of dizziness… would have imagined her way of moving, of talking, of smiling. He would have smelled her scent… And he would have worked as hard to get justice for her as if she had been he himself. Now, though, whether she was alive or dead, he was as indifferent to Sheila Ross as he would be to anybody else.

There was a slim chance that her disappearance might lead him to Riondino, though… And if not for her, it was for himself that Claps needed justice: after all, in his own way, wasn’t he, like Greta Alfieri, one of Riondino’s victims?

He was alive, yes, but wasn’t