The Nightmare (13 page)

The boy’s screams are even higher when the heat ignites his hair.

The man walks calmly away. He crosses the train tracks again and then stands by the industrial buildings to watch the torch that had once been an old shed. A few minutes later, a freight train arrives from the north, rolling slowly along its tracks, wheels now scraping and creaking as the row of brown wagons passes the high flames. As the man disappears along Stenby Road, the wind catches his suede jacket, lifting it high behind him. Underneath, he is completely dressed in black.

23

the forensic technicians

Although it’s the weekend, the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department is in his office. He’s never been particularly welcoming to unexpected visitors. There’s a
BUSY
sign in red, lit up on his door, which is shut.

Joona knocks on it as he pushes it open.

“I have to know the minute the maritime police find anything,” Joona says.

Carlos Eliasson pushes a book across the desk. “Both you and Erixson have been attacked. That’s traumatic. You need a break. You need to take care of yourselves.”

“We do take care of ourselves.”

“They’ve finished the helicopter search,” Carlos says.

Joona stiffens.

“Finished! How much area did they cover?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’s in charge of the operation?”

“We have nothing to do with it,” Carlos says. “It’s under the direction of the maritime police.”

Joona says sharply, “It would be awfully nice to know whether we’re dealing with one murder or three.”

“Joona, you’re not on this. I’ve handed it over to Jens Svanehjälm. We’re putting together a team with Säpo. Petter Näslund and Tommy Kofoed will be on it from our side and—”

“What’s my job?”

“To take the week off.”

“No.”

“Then you get to teach a week at the Police Training Academy.”

“No.”

“Don’t be so obstinate,” Carlos says.

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck
me
?” Carlos Eliasson exclaims. “I’m your
boss
.”

“Maybe Penelope Fernandez and Björn Almskog are still alive,” Joona argues roughly. “
His
apartment is burned out;
hers
would have been if I hadn’t gotten there on time. I believe the killer is looking for something they have and I believe he drowned Viola trying to get it out of her—”

“Thank you very much,” Carlos barks. “Thank you for your input. We have … no, give me a minute here. I know that you’re finding this hard to accept, but there are other police officers than you, Joona. And most of them are highly competent, I assure you.”

“I agree,” Joona says slowly, a sharp edge to his voice. “And you ought to look out for them, Carlos.”

Joona studies the brown spots on his shirtsleeves. Erixson’s blood.

“What are you implying?”

“I’ve met the killer. I think we’ll lose some men before this is done.”

“I know he surprised you,” Carlos says more softly. “And I know this has been tough.”

“All right, then,” Joona says gruffly.

“Tommy Kofoed will be in charge of the investigation and I’ll call Brittis at the Police Training Academy. She will welcome you as a guest teacher all next week,” Carlos concludes.

*   *   *

As Joona leaves the police station, the heat hits him hard. Pulling off his jacket, he senses someone coming up behind him. Someone has emerged from the shadows of the park. Joona turns and sees that it’s Claudia Fernandez.

“Joona Linna,” she calls in a tense voice.

“Claudia, how are you doing?” he asks gravely.

Claudia Fernandez’s eyes are bloodshot and her face looks tortured.

“Find her. You must find my girl,” she says, and thrusts a thick envelope at him.

Joona opens it. It’s stuffed with money. He pushes it back to Claudia, but she refuses.

“Please, take my money. It’s everything I have,” she says. “But I’ll find more. I’ll sell the house. Just find her.”

“Claudia, I can’t take your money,” he says quietly.

“
Please
.”

“We are already doing everything we can.”

Joona puts the envelope back in Claudia’s hands. She holds it away from her body. She murmurs that she will return home and wait next to the phone. Then she holds him back and tries to explain. “I told her that she was no longer welcome in my home … she won’t call me.”

“You had an argument. That’s not the end of the world, Claudia.”

“But how could I ever have said such a thing?” She hits her forehead with her fist. “What kind of a person says that to her own child?”

“Sometimes words just slip out…”

Joona’s voice dies away. He forces away fragments of memory that have been stirred up.

“I can’t stand it,” she says quietly.

Joona takes Claudia’s hand in his and repeats that he’s doing everything he can.

“Of course you must get your daughter back,” he whispers to her.

She nods, and they break apart to walk away in different directions. Joona hurries down Bergsgatan and squints at the sky as he heads to his car. It’s sunny, but also hazy and still extremely humid. Last summer he would have been sitting at the hospital, holding his mother’s hand. They spoke to each other in Finnish, as they usually did. He told her that they’d take a trip to Karelia as soon as she was feeling better. She had been born in a small Karelian village, one of the few not burned down by the Russians during the Second World War. His mother had replied that Joona ought to go to Karelia with someone special instead.

Joona buys a bottle of Pellegrino at Il Caffè and drinks it all before he climbs back into his overheated car. The steering wheel is hot to the touch and the seat almost burns his back. Instead of heading over to the Police Training Academy, he returns to Sankt Paulsgatan 3 and to Penelope Fernandez’s apartment. He recalls the remarkable speed and precision of movement, as if the knife his assailant had used had come alive.

The entrance is cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape marked
DO NOT CROSS
and
CRIME SCENE
in bold letters.

Joona flashes his badge to the uniformed officer on duty, then shakes his hand. They’ve met before but never worked together.

“Hot today.”

“You’re telling me,” the officer replies.

“How many technicians on the scene?” Joona asks, nodding toward the stairwell.

“One of our guys and three from Säpo,” the officer answers cheerfully. “They’ve trying to find DNA from the perp.”

“They’re not going to find any,” Joona says, almost to himself, as he starts up the stairs.

Standing in front of the apartment door on the fourth floor is Melker Janos, an older officer whom Joona remembers from his own training days as a stressed and unpleasant superior. At that time, Melker was rising in his career, but then came a bitter divorce and periodic alcohol abuse, which resulted in his step-by-step demotion until he landed back on patrol.

When he sees Joona, he greets him sourly and opens the door for him with an exaggeratedly servile gesture.

“Thanks,” Joona says. He doesn’t wait for a response.

Tommy Kofoed is just inside the door, moving around hunched and morose. He doesn’t even reach Joona’s chest anymore, but when their eyes meet, Kofoed’s face breaks into a wide grin.

“Joona, great to see you. I thought they were sending you over to the Police Training Academy.”

“I took a wrong turn.”

“How wonderful!”

“Have you found anything?”

“We’ve secured all the shoe prints in the hallway,” Tommy replies.

“Yes, they’ll all match my shoes.” Joona grins as they shake hands.

“And the attacker’s,” Kofoed protests. “He was moving around in an awfully peculiar way, wasn’t he?”

“Right.”

There are mats all over, protecting the floor from evidence contamination. A camera has been set up on a tripod and the lens is focused on the floor. A strong lamp with an aluminum reflector lies in the corner, its cord wrapped around the base. The technicians are scanning for invisible shoe prints using raking light, a kind of light which shines parallel to the floor, then they lift the prints electrostatically. They’ve marked the intruder’s path from the kitchen through the hall.

Joona doubts they will connect these prints with his assailant. The man would have certainly destroyed any shoes, gloves, and clothes he was wearing. He’s probably burned them.

“Tell me, how did he run, exactly?” asks Kofoed as he points to the markings. “There … there … across there … and then nothing before here … and here.”

“You’ve missed a shoe print,” Joona says with a small smile.

“What the hell?”

“There.” Joona points.

“Where?”

“On the wall.”

“What the fuck!”

A faint shoe print can be seen about seventy centimeters above the floor, outlined on the light gray wallpaper. Tommy Kofoed calls another technician over and asks him to take a gelatin print.

“Can I walk on the floor now?” Joona asks.

“Sure. Just keep off the walls,” a frustrated Kofoed replies.

24

the object

In the kitchen, there’s a man wearing jeans and a light brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He’s stroking his blond mustache, talking loudly and pointing at the microwave oven. As Joona walks inside, he observes a technician in a mask and protective gloves pack the misshapen spray can into a paper bag, wrapping the open end of the bag twice. Then he tapes the bag shut and writes on it.

“Joona Linna, right?” the man with the mustache says. “If you’re as good as they say, you ought to come work for us.”

They shake hands.

“Göran Stone, Säpo,” the man says contentedly.

“Are you in charge of the initial investigation?” asks Joona.

“Yes, I am. Or rather, formally, it’s Saga Bauer. For the sake of statistics,” he adds and grins.

“I’ve met her. She seems capable—”

“Isn’t that right?” Göran Stone laughs out loud and then snaps his mouth shut.

Joona glances out the window. His mind is back to the drifting boat. What kind of contract had the killer been given, and why? He knows it’s much too soon to draw any type of conclusion, but still, a tentative hypothesis is not a bad thing. Joona leaves the kitchen and heads for the bedroom. The bed is made. The cream bedcover is smoothed. Saga Bauer from Säpo is standing in front of a laptop on the windowsill while also talking on her cell phone. Joona remembers her from a counterterrorism seminar.

Joona sits down on the bed and tries to reorder his thoughts yet again. Three people on a boat. He visualizes Penelope and Viola standing before him and in his mind he places Björn next to them. All three of them could not have been on the boat when Viola was killed, otherwise the killer would have gotten the right person. At sea he would have just killed all three, put them on their beds, and sunk the boat. So they were not at sea. They’d docked the boat somewhere.

Joona stands up again and walks into the living room. He lets his eyes wander over the flat-screen TV on the wall, the red plaid blanket folded over the arm of the sofa, the modern table with copies of
Ordfront
and
Exit
fanned on top.

He walks over to a bookshelf that covers an entire wall. He stops and thinks about the boat. He visualizes the apparently crimped cables in the engine room, which were supposed to have generated an electric arc within a few minutes; the seat cushion stuffed behind the cables in order to catch fire more easily; the loop in the rerouted fuel line. Why hadn’t the boat sunk? They had probably not run the engine long enough.

These were not coincidences: Björn’s apartment is set on fire. The same day, Viola is murdered, and if the boat had not been abandoned, there would have been an explosion in the fuel tank. Then the killer tries to ignite a gas explosion in Penelope’s apartment.

Björn’s apartment. The boat. Penelope’s apartment.

He’s searching for something either Penelope or Björn possesses. He started by searching Björn’s apartment and when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he set the apartment on fire. Then he followed the boat and when he’d searched it and couldn’t find what he was looking for, he tried to force Viola to talk. When she couldn’t reveal anything useful, he headed to Penelope’s apartment.

Joona borrows a pair of latex gloves from a box and goes back to the bookshelf. He peers at the layer of dust in front of the books and sees there is none in front of some of the volumes. He concludes that someone has pulled out those books recently, perhaps sometime during the past several weeks.

“I don’t want you here,” Saga Bauer says behind him. “This is my investigation.”

“I’ll be going,” he says softly, “but there’s one thing I have to find first.”

“Five minutes,” she says.

He turns to look at her. “Can you have these books photographed?”

“Already done,” she snaps.

“From above so you can see the dust,” he says, not troubled at all.

She realizes what he’s getting at. She doesn’t change her expression, but simply takes a camera from a technician and photographs every shelf she can reach before she tells Joona that he can look at the books on the five lower shelves.

Joona takes out Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
and looks inside. Flipping through it, he notices the underlined passages and notes written in the margins. He looks at the gap between the books but sees nothing. He replaces the book. Then his eyes range over a biography of Ulrike Meinhof, a worn-out anthology called
Key Texts of Political Feminism
, and the collected works of Bertolt Brecht.

Joona looks at the next shelf down. Three books have obviously been taken out of the bookshelf recently since there’s no dust in front of them. One of them,
The Cleverness of Antelopes
, is a collection of witness reports from the genocide in Rwanda. Another is Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection
Cien sonetos de amor
. The last is
The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas.