Keith accompanies Robert to Rome to investigate Damien's birth parents. They learn a fire destroyed maternity records in the hospital years prior, and that the fire killed most of the staff on duty. They eventually trace Father Spiletto to a monastery in Subiaco, where they find him mute, blind in one eye, and partly paralyzed. Spiletto writes the name of an ancient Etruscan cemetery in Cerveteri, where Damien's biological mother is buried. Robert and Keith enter the cemetery at night, and find a jackal carcass in Damien's mother's grave; in the plot next to it is a child's skeleton with a shattered skull. Robert realizes that the jackal is Damien's inhuman mother, and that the child in the plot next to her is his own murdered son, killed so Damien could take his place.