The Viper (13 page)

The words spurted out in angry gasps, so loudly that the voice in the receiver was distorted to a grotesque croaking. Ricky felt how the cordless phone became sweaty in his hand. He looked at Elin, but she didn’t meet his gaze. She had sunk back in the couch and was staring vacantly at the ceiling.

“Hello?” Was all he managed to say.

“He won’t get away. If the police don’t get him, then I will. He’s gotta die!”

The last bit came out as an almost unintelligible howl that caused Ricky to move the receiver two inches away from his ear.

Strange waves of heat billowed up through his body. He felt weak, paralyzed, and terribly afraid. A feeling he had never experienced before. It was an unpleasant combination that quickly caused his fear to surge into panic.

“And if you try to protect him, then I’ll fucking kill you, too! You hear me? You don’t stand a chance.”

A click, and then the receiver was silent.

Ricky’s heart was pounding so hard that his chest hurt, his tongue was gummed up in his mouth. He felt like he wasn’t getting enough air even though he was actually panting as if he had just run a marathon.

“Ricky?”

Elin had sat up in the couch and looked at him, worry flickering in her eyes. Ricky gestured with the receiver. What could he say? How did you go about describing what just happened? What did just happen?

“He said he was going to kill me,” he gasped between his heavy breaths.

“Who did? What do you mean?”

Ricky took a staggering step toward the couch and wobbled. His vision flickered, small colorful circles danced and spun around in a background that moved further and further away. His face had gone gray.

“Ricky!” shouted Elin, threw off the checkered blanket and leaped from the couch.

Quickly reaching her brother, she grabbed hold of his arm with both hands.

“Come and sit down. Sit down and listen to me.”

She got him to the couch. His knees gave way when she gave him a gentle push and he fell backward with a heavy thud.

“Now you listen to me Ricky, listen to me.”

*   *   *

FIVE MINUTES LATER
she had managed to get him to calm down. His breathing was almost back to normal again.

“Worse comes to worst, we’ll have to get you a paper bag to breathe into, but I think you’re going to be all right,” she said.

“What?”

“Take it easy, you’re in good hands,” she said and patted his leg, “I know all about panic attacks.”

Her grimace made it abundantly clear that she hadn’t come by this knowledge from studying psychology.

“But forget about that now,” she said, “I want you to tell me who it was that called.”

She sat at the very edge of the couch, turned toward him. Her eyes were dark and firm, and her cheeks flushed. A moment ago she had been lying under a blanket staring at the ceiling, but the grief and shock had at least temporarily been swept away by something much more powerful.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He recounted as best he could the threats that had been yelled at him over the phone.

She looked at him for a long moment without saying anything, her brow furrowed like a washboard.

“And that was it?”

Ricky nodded.

“He just started out like that, just straight off?”

“Yes. ‘I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch father of yours.’”

“You didn’t recognize the voice?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Jesus Christ, how scary.”

Elin had to try hard not to show how shaken she was, but she knew that it was impossible to stop a panic attack in someone else, if you weren’t calm yourself. Or at least appeared to be.

“Must be somebody who thinks Father is involved in…”

Maybe she ought to talk about something completely different, but she couldn’t. She felt that she had to get to the bottom of this right away, if she wasn’t going to freak out herself.

“Maybe we ought to call the police,” she said.

“They gave me a card. Two actually. I was supposed to give one of them to you. Where did I put them now?”

“A card?”

“From the police who were here.”

20.

The high beams punched a hole in the dense blackness and lit up the reflectors at the side of the road.

“Do you think we can get anything useful out of that Rune character? He made it sound like this Arvid Traneus was some kind of devil,” said Gustav.

“Maybe he’s senile,” said Fredrik who was driving.

“Probably just in shock.”

“Or senile and in shock.”

Lena, Ninni, and the children had eaten dinner without them hours ago. Ninni had called and said that they weren’t going to wait.

“I’m hungry,” said Gustav.

As soon as Gustav said that, Fredrik felt his stomach growl, too. They had wolfed down a quick lunch after questioning Inger Traneus, but that was two hours ago now.

They had tried to sum it all up on the way back. There was a lot pointing toward Arvid Traneus being the killer they were looking for. A witness had intimated that he beat his wife. He had been abroad for an extended period, his wife had some hanky-panky going on with his cousin, Arvid caught them at it and couldn’t control his anger, especially not toward the cousin, whom he butchered beyond recognition. Then he ran off. Maybe he was even back in Japan by now. A country of almost 130 million inhabitants, 20 million in Tokyo alone, a city that that Arvid Traneus knew well after spending all those years there. Furthermore, he had virtually inexhaustible financial resources.

If he had made it that far, it wouldn’t be easy to find him, but of course they had put out a nationwide APB, and alerted Interpol.

“But if the cousin was having an affair with Kristina Traneus, wouldn’t he have stayed away from there once Arvid was back?” asked Fredrik. “What was he doing in the house?”

Gustav moved around in his seat and adjusted his shirt beneath his jacket.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but maybe something happened. Maybe Arvid Traneus started going after his wife, beat her or threatened her, and she called Anders for help.”

“And he jumps into his car, drives over there, and then things don’t turn out too well?”

“Yes. Or else Arvid invited his cousin over under some pretext, with the intention of confronting him.”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t really fit with how the body looked. I mean, would he really be so calculating at first and then totally lose control and make mincemeat out of him?”

“No, that’s a good point.”

“Beside which, it seems like they really didn’t have any contact to speak of. Anders would have seen through him.”

Fredrik turned off Road 142 and drove familiarly the last winding miles through the darkness back to his house. They bounced gently onto the grass in front of the old farm. There was an inviting glow in the windows and a flickering from the TV on the upper floor. They climbed out and slammed the doors shut behind them.

They felt both hungrier and more tired now that they were so close to their destination.

But then there were the footprints outside the window and the black strands of hair, thought Fredrik as he walked past the kitchen window with an outdoor glass thermometer that Ninni had recently put up. Neither the shoe prints, nor the hair matched Arvid Traneus. Of course they might not have anything to do with the murder. It could have been anyone, maybe one of the many visitors from the mainland searching for a summer sublet by shamelessly slipping ridiculous offers through people’s letter boxes.

Fredrik felt the door. It was locked. It was always the same. They usually never locked the door until they went to bed, but with the start of every new murder investigation, Ninni would bolt the door until the killer was caught. Not so strange considering what happened to her their first summer on the island. It was more surprising that she hadn’t had an alarm installed and put bars on the windows.

“Hello!” he shouted once he’d unlocked the door and stepped into the hall.

“We’re in here,” Ninni called out from the kitchen.

*   *   *

GÖRAN EIDE OPENED
a bottle of Ramlösa mineral water and poured it into a Duralex glass he had taken from the cupboard. He felt the soda bubbles spray against his chin as he raised the glass to his mouth. He downed it in a few gulps and refilled it with what was left in the bottle.

Sonja was already asleep. She had lain there with a book in her hand, glasses on her nose, and a sixty-watt lightbulb shining right onto her face when he had come home five minutes ago.

He had switched out the light and removed the book and the glasses.

Quaffing the last of the mineral water but still feeling thirsty, he took out another bottle from the fridge and grabbed two round cheese crackers from the top cupboard that he started munching on.

He looked out through the window, out into Ekeby’s autumn darkness. He was having a hard time shaking off the image of the two murder victims. He had seen many unpleasant things in his years as a police officer. He had learned how to handle the feelings of discomfort and disgust a long time ago. What still badly affected him were the traces of the murderer’s rage, madness, and sometimes suffering. That this life could deform people to such an extent that they became capable of doing this kind of thing to their fellow human beings. Committing murder was one thing, often it was an accident, or at least wasn’t altogether intentional, but sometimes it was more than that. In some cases the murderers were driven by seething hatred and a desire to cause injury and inflict as much pain and suffering as possible.

He sat down at the kitchen table, set the glass and bottle down. The dark wood surface was wiped spotlessly clean. Not a single bread crumb or coffee stain. He had never thought that it would happen, but he could miss the crumbs sometimes. It was as if his life with Sonja had been wiped just as spotlessly clean. Two weeks ago their youngest child had turned thirty. She was grown up now. Of course he still thought of her mostly as a teenager, but he had to admit that she wasn’t and hadn’t been for eleven years. A strange feeling. His son had taken a break from studying to become a teacher. Göran understood him. It’s difficult to find the energy when you’re studying for a career you don’t really want.

He ran his hand over the table. In time your eyesight fades and your hands begin to shake, he thought, then the crumbs will come back. But life won’t.

His cell phone began to vibrate on the crumb-free tabletop. Göran picked it up and answered.

“Hi, my name is Elin Traneus,” said an anxious voice.

*   *   *

“THEN IT MUST
be the husband, Arvid—isn’t that almost always how it is?” said Lena more as a declaration than a question.

They remained sitting in the kitchen downstairs. An old country kitchen with deep window niches and floors of thick pinewood that forced you to wear rag socks or slippers when the weather turned cold. Lena leaned forward with her elbows propped on the table and looked at Fredrik and Gustav with curious blue eyes. She had recently shocked everyone around her by cutting off her long, blonde hair to a more manageable brush cut. At the care home where she worked she had been given the nickname “Self-confidence Now” because of a certain resemblance to a celebrity therapist who had published a number of books on the subject.

“Yes,” Fredrik agreed, “unfortunately that is how it almost always is.”

Lena replaced her pouch of smokeless tobacco, pressed the used pouch into the lid of the
snus
box and slipped a fresh one in under her lip.

“And he’s taken off, too; it’s gotta be him,” she said after having adjusted the pouch exactly where she wanted it.

“Just bear in mind now,” said Gustav, “that that’s your theory. We didn’t say that.”

Lena made a face at her husband.

“I know the routine.”

They were used to always talking to Ninni and Lena about new cases, at least if it was something spectacular enough to raise questions anyway. But they never said more than Göran Eide would be telling the press anyway. More or less. And they never told them about any theories or speculations that were being discussed down at the station.

Fredrik cleared the plates that were still on the table and set them down on the counter next to the sink.

“Traneus. Didn’t they have a daughter who died?” said Lena and looked at Gustav and then at Fredrik.

They in turn looked at each other, but no one looked especially enlightened.

“Not that we know of,” said Fredrik.

“I’m almost sure about it,” said Lena and looked at Ninni this time.

“Don’t look at me. When it comes to village gossip I don’t have much to contribute.”

They hadn’t had a progress meeting with the rest of the team that day, and the next one wasn’t scheduled until eight o’clock the following morning. Lennart Svensson had been in Visby checking through databases. He was sure to have a solid grasp of all the family constellations and any children that may have died.

“I think Karin knew her a little. Or maybe it was a friend of a friend of hers. But it must have been some time ago,” said Lena.

Fredrik felt exhilarated, almost unnaturally awake despite the long day. A feeling that was familiar from the first days of an investigation, a kind of euphoria brought on by the challenge of solving the case. Completely different from the gray fatigue that would take over in four to five days if no perpetrator had been brought in.

He walked back and sat down at the table.

“How did she die?”

“I don’t know,” said Lena and fingered the box of smokeless tobacco, “there was something mysterious about the whole thing, a lot of talk, very hush-hush. I know that she was brought into the hospital on a number of different occasions. It may have been cancer, or else something psychological that made her commit suicide.”

Lena threw her arms out in a quick gesture.

“But I really don’t know. It all feels very distant now, but I remember my sister telling me about it at some point.”

“How long ago was this?” asked Gustav.

“Seven, eight years ago, maybe more. She wasn’t quite grown up yet, I don’t think.”