X Ways to Die

by Stefan Ahnhem

The only other camera left was the one in the living room.

  He’d examined the picture frames, the display cabinet, the curtains and the potted plants in the window with a magnifying glass, to no avail. He’d even gone over the brass chandelier in the ceiling twice. But there was a camera somewhere; he’d seen it on the screen in Molander’s basement. An eye placed somewhere high up and angled down towards the middle of the room.

  Maybe he should just give up and not bother. Almost everything had been said between Molander and him anyway. They’d searched each other’s houses and Molander had most likely gone through his office in the basement, so there was really nothing left to hide.

  More than anything, he needed to relax, if only for a few hours. Forget his worries and the guilt over Theodor. Forget Molander and Milwokh. And himself.

  He stepped off the ladder, went over to the record collection that covered one of the walls and let his eyes rove across the CD spines for something to take his mind off things.

  Other than Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, he hadn’t listened to anything for ages, and he suddenly realized how much he’d missed it.

  In front of him were countless albums he never had time to play. So many songs just waiting for their chance to fill the room. Together, they formed an almost impenetrable wall of choices so overwhelming he was unable to make a decision.

  Maybe that was why he closed his eyes and let his fingers roam across the spines and the hard, angular plastic. Whatever the reason, it felt good and he continued to let his hand wander along the rows of albums, some of which were broken and jaggedly sharp. When he suddenly came across something sticking out between two albums, he opened his eyes and saw the tiny camera squeezed in between the xxs’ debut album and their second, Coexist, in the electronic indie section.

  Relieved, he pulled the camera out and disconnected the battery cable. Then he pulled out the debut album, and after studying the stark white X against the black background for a while, he pushed the disc into the player and turned up the volume.

  57

  THE VERY LAST additional task was almost too good to be true. It was over a year since he’d written it down, but he remembered it like it was yesterday. It was the longest of the texts, and he’d never imagined it would become reality. But rolling twenty sixes had made the impossible possible.

  There could no longer be any doubt the dice had forgiven him and considered him worthy of a new challenge. But that it would be another X task and number 120, to boot, was so astoundingly amazing he’d had to go out for a big dinner at Charles Dickens to let it sink in.

  There had been enough people there for him to enjoy his steak and pints unnoticed. He’d even been able to read the evening paper, noting that the police were playing their cards close to their chest. There was no picture of him and his name wasn’t mentioned, and nowhere could he see anything about the events on Öresund and the murder on board the yacht. There was quite a lot of information about some bathtub murder, however, and at least they’d finally found the body in Klippan.

  Eventually, he went home, stuffed and slightly tipsy. But that was okay. Maybe it would even help him get the good night’s sleep he needed so badly before starting on the preparations.

  He stepped into the hallway, closed the front door behind him and realized immediately that something was wrong. When he got back from Öresund a few hours ago, the doors in the hallway had been closed. Now they were open…. Either the place was haunted or someone was having him on. Or…

  He popped his head into the bathroom. It looked untouched. It was highly unlikely the police technicians would come back this late. Unless the flat was under surveillance and his return had been noticed.

  The door to the walk-in closet was hard to close and sometimes opened of its own accord. But that didn’t explain the bathroom door. Maybe he’d left it ajar himself, after all.

  He went into the bathroom, turned on the tap to fill the bath and started to pull off his clothes. He had been looking forward to this. A steaming hot bath in which he could get some well-needed rest with the floating pillow under his neck. Then, without opening his eyes, he would make a mental list of everything that had to be done before he could leave.

  He would, for example, have to construct some kind of device to help him roll a dice while running. He didn’t have any ideas so far, but one would come to him. They always did. He also had to go through and make sure all his weapons were in good working order. Once he started, there would be no room for mistakes.

  That, in turn, meant he was going to have to repack his backpack from scratch. He had to make it several pounds lighter. Anything that wasn’t strictly necessary would have to go. Like the extra provisions he’d brought in the boat. His meal at Charles Dickens had been enough for several days; he’d have to get by on a bottle of energy drink.

  Being able to access as much of his equipment as possible without stopping was going to be crucial, too. Because that was the name of the game. To keep moving and finding the flow. A groove where he could pick off one person after another until the dice told him to stop.

  He pulled off his underwear, peed and tested the water in the bath. The temperature was perfect and the bath was almost full. He went back out into the hallway and continued into the living room to get a glass from the kitchen.

  But he never made it that far.

  Instead, he stopped in the middle of the room with his eyes fixed on the glow spilling out across the floor from the overhead light in the bedroom.

  58

  ‘SHE NEEDS TO DIE,’ intoned a male voice over the computer’s speakers. ‘She doesn’t deserve to live anyway. The only thing she deserves is you.’

  Lilja had found the audio file while going through the computer sitting on the small desk in the secret room, which could be no larger than about seventy square feet. It had been labelled Assar’s voices.

  ‘You can do what you want to her. Whatever you want. So long as it ends with her dying.’

  So that was how Pontus Milwokh had persuaded the mentally ill Assar Skanås to kidnap Ester Landgren from the playground in Slottshagen and molest her.

  ‘We know you want to.’

  By playing him recorded voices that Skanås, in his confused state, must eventually have assumed were in his head. I was just doing what the voices said, he’d told them in one interview. They told me what to do.

  ‘You’ve been waiting for this. Longing to finally let go of your inhibitions. You deserve it. You more than anybody.’

  To avoid doing the deed himself, Milwokh had dragged a paedophile into his sick game, enticing him with an opportunity to molest and rape.

  ‘You know she’s supposed to die. It’s only right.’

  But what was the point of bringing in someone else instead of just doing it himself? It must have been incredibly complicated and labour-intensive. Not to mention the increased risk of things going wrong, which is exactly what had happened when she’d finally found Skanås and stopped him from completing the rape.

  ‘You know what to do.’

  Maybe the idea had been to throw them off track. Set them running in the wrong direction. It had undeniably worked.

  ‘And you like children. No one likes children as much as you.’

  Or had the dice decided that, too?

  She looked down at the green felt next to the keyboard. The dice sitting on it were the same kind as the one Risk had found. Like that one, these were made of gleaming brushed metal and looked made for fateful decisions.

  For some reason, they were all sixes. Twenty of them, in all. Lilja could still remember the time when she was nine years old and rolled five sixes on her first try in Yahtzee. She’d never come close to anything like it again. Rolling twenty was unbelievable.

  Was that really what he’d done? As with so many other aspects of this investigation, both chance and probability seemed warped. But the question she should be asking herself was what the twenty sixes meant, if anything.

  S
he closed her eyes. Her brief burst of energy was fading now. She’d hoped to discover something that could move the investigation forward and possibly even put them a step ahead. But everything she’d found pointed back in time, to things that had already happened. Things they already knew. Sure, there were answers here to several of their outstanding questions, but not to the most important one of all.

  Where and when was Milwokh going to strike next?

  She looked up at the map of Skåne pinned to the wall in front of her. She’d already studied it once. But seeing the little notes and crosses corresponding to almost every murder Milwokh had committed over the past few months had made her burst into tears. This time, she was going to try to be more analytical.

  She started with the cross in column 6, row 3. It marked the town of Klippan. A note next to it read 25 May 2012, Evert Jonsson, cause of death: asphyxiation, which tallied with the autopsy report they’d had from Flätan.

  The cross in column 5, row 4 was similar. 13 June 2012, Moonif Ganem, weapon: machine of some kind. She was trying not to let her emotions get the better of her, but it was difficult. Despite the cold, factual tone of the notes, it still hurt to think of that morning when she’d received the call-out about the missing boy in Bjuv on her way in to work.

  She continued going through the crosses and their associated notes detailing the date of each murder, the name of each victim and which murder weapon or cause of death had been used.

  In some of the squares she also noticed smaller crosses accompanied by two-digit numbers. But she had no idea what they stood for. The absence of the bathtub murder of Mattias Larsson was conspicuous as well. There was no cross in the square just south of Helsingborg and no note referencing it.

  Maybe Fabian was right about Milwokh not being behind that one after all.

  Another thing that caught her attention was the square in the bottom left-hand corner, which was almost entirely taken up by Copenhagen. In it was a big cross, a small cross and the number 120. That was all. No date and no note about the weapon used or the cause of death. She hadn’t heard anything about a Danish murder as spectacular as the ones on the Swedish side of the sound.

  And then there was the cross in the middle of Öresund, just north of Ven Island, with the accompanying note 27 June 2012, Frank Käpp, weapon: sword.

  That was today’s date. Trails didn’t get any hotter than that. The murder had, for obvious reasons, taken place considerably further north than intended, but both the name and the weapon were right. That he’d known what weapon he was going to use was pretty much a given. But that the name was correct as well was actually a bit odd. Did that mean Milwokh had known who his victim was before he went out or had he somehow, after the fact… No, it probably just meant they still knew far too little about how he operated.

  She rubbed her temples to get the blood flowing. Anything to help her think.

  In front of her, the screensaver took over and she stared vacantly, wearily at the mesmerizing shapes. As though she were about to nod off. But she wasn’t. Somewhere deep inside her, something had stirred.

  She turned around in the chair and looked at the bed, which seemed to have been hastily made. There was still an indentation in the middle of the pillow from Milwokh’s head and the duvet was bulging and creased like when Hampus had made the bed. Except in one spot, where it looked as though there were something underneath it.

  Lilja got up, pulled the duvet aside and found herself looking at a yellow notebook with an X on the cover. Even though she couldn’t possibly be sure, she knew instantly this was what she’d been looking for all along. She picked up the notebook, carefully pulled off the rubber band and began to flip through the pages.

  On every page was a handwritten note, some filling as much as half a page. Most, however, were only a few sentences long and a handful consisted of just a few words.

  You have to be blindfolded, was, for instance, what the note on the page numbered 73 said. On page 11, she read: Also take the victim’s closest colleague, neighbour or friend. The dice decides whom and how much time must pass between the two tasks, as counted in hours.

  Tasks. So that’s how he saw it. Tasks that had to be completed at any cost. She turned the page.

  Frighten the victim before it’s time.

  Break into the victim’s home at night. Sedate the victim with hexane gas. Then let the dice choose one or several of the following alternatives:

  1. Rearrange the kitchen cabinets.

  2. Take a trophy from the victim’s body.

  3. Turn on the victim’s stereo, put the music of your choice on repeat and turn the volume up.

  4. Tattoo something on the victim’s forehead.

  5. Leave all the victim’s windows wide open.

  6. Take a picture of the victim using the victim’s phone, hack into it and set the picture as the new background picture.

  That was exactly what had happened to Molly Wessman. Milwokh had both cut her fringe and broken into her phone before poisoning her a day or so later. So this was some kind of addition to the main task.

  Lilja had an idea and went back over to the map to find the cross in column 3, row 5, where the note said 16 June 2012, Molly Wessman, cause of death: poisoning. But this time, she was more interested in the smaller cross and its associated number.

  X 97

  Back to the open notebook and sure enough, the number at the bottom of the page was 97.

  Maybe the note wasn’t another cross but an X.

  She located the square containing Hyllinge and the note 16 June 2012, Lennart Andersson, weapon: item from murder scene. That, too, had an X followed by a number.

  X 28

  She turned to page 28 of the yellow notebook.

  The task has to be executed in front of witnesses.

  That explained why he’d stabbed his victim in the middle of Ica Maxi instead of in some more secluded spot. It also explained why he’d been wearing a mask. There hadn’t been a racist or xenophobic angle. He’d wanted to hide his face, plain and simple.

  Why he’d killed both Molly Wessman and Lennart Andersson on 16 June was explained by the brief additional task on page 13.

  Start a new task and let it run in parallel with the original one.

  Even the bizarre involvement of Assar Skanås in the kidnapping of Ester Landgren was explained by reading page 47.

  This is not your task.

  Choose someone else, according to your own preference, and let that person complete the task in your stead.

  Whether guided by instinct or chance, she couldn’t say. But for some reason, her eyes were drawn to the dice on the desk. The twenty dice that somehow had all come up six and together totalled 120.

  120… She turned to the map and took a closer look at the tiny notation in the square that contained Copenhagen.

  X 120

  Then she checked how many pages there were in the yellow notebook and quickly realized there were considerably more than 120. But page 120 was the last one with an additional task. The last and by far the longest:

  FORGET EVERYTHING

  Time, place, victim, weapon and method.

  Forget everything. This is a task like no other.

  Time:

  A new time will not be given. Complete all necessary preparations, but don’t dawdle. Act as quickly and efficiently as you can. If possible, within the next few days.

  Place:

  Take the location of the discarded task as your starting point and choose the largest public space you can find in the vicinity. A place where as many people as possible can be found in a limited area.

  Preparations:

  Roll the dice to determine victim, weapon, appearance and position according to the criteria. Only then will you enter the designated area and execute the first sub-task. Each time a sub-task is completed, the dice is immediately rolled again. The outcome will determine which of the six criteria below will change for the next sub-task, which will commence without delay
.

  One:

  The task has been completed. Wrap up and retreat.

  Two:

  Change your location. Roll again.

  Keep moving

  Utilize a mode of transportation or something that is in motion

  Get to the highest point you can find

  Get to the lowest point you can find

  Find a secluded spot

  Push into the crowd

  Three:

  Change your weapon. Roll again.

  Knife

  Crossbow

  Rope

  Rifle

  Your own body

  Poison

  Four:

  Change the colour of the victim. Roll again.

  Red

  Orange

  Yellow

  Green

  Blue

  Purple

  Five:

  Change your appearance. Roll again.

  Wig

  Glasses

  Jacket

  Trousers

  Headwear

  Shoes

  Six:

  No changes. Keep going.

  Lilja put the book down. This was one of the sickest, most horrifying things she’d ever read. It was all just a game to him; he was playing. Like a videogame with VR glasses, with the crucial difference that this was real.

  These were real lives being taken. Real people, innocent and completely unaware they’d been reduced to being just bodies, prey to be selected, hunted and slaughtered for no other purpose than to give the player a kick.

  She was far from certain. And yet she felt no doubt when she looked back and forth between the dice, the open notebook and the map with a cross marking Copenhagen in the bottom left-hand corner.

  Everything added up.

  She’d seen it in the pictures in his photo album and been struck by it even then. The almost ecstatic joy in his eyes. The thrill and feeling that anything could happen. That was what he was trying to recapture. The feeling he’d had once as a child. That kick. Of course that was what this was about. So there was a motive, after all.

  But the only thing that mattered was that now she knew, because she did. She knew both where and how he was going to strike.