Lazarus

by Kepler, Lars

  ‘So what?’ she sighs.

  Joona is about to say something, but a second, worse stab of the migraine hits him. A sharp pain behind his left eye, followed by a debilitating feeling of his ears being filled with water.

  ‘Dad? What’s happening?’

  He presses his hand to his left eye as the storm sweeps past and the pain eases.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ he explains, then stands up and goes to brush his teeth.

  When he returns to the bedroom Lumi is sitting on the edge of the bed with a watch in her hand.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks.

  ‘A present,’ she replies.

  ‘You’ll have to leave it behind.’

  ‘There’s nothing funny about it,’ she replies firmly, pulling it over her wrist.

  ‘Probably not, but the only rule that works is making a complete break.’

  ‘Fine, but I’m not leaving my watch – you can check it, it’s only a watch,’ she says, handing it to him.

  He takes it, turns the bedside lamp on to see better, turns it in the light, checks every link of the chain, and looks to see if any of the tiny screws on the back are scratched.

  ‘No secret microphones or transmitters?’ she asks, unable to hide the sarcasm in her voice.

  He hands the watch back to her without answering, and she puts it on her left wrist in silence. They pack their bags without speaking, get dressed as if they were about to leave, with their shoes on and pistols in their holsters, before lying down on either side of the bed.

  29

  Saga Bauer and Nathan Pollock have been sitting in the National Operational Unit with their phones and computers for fourteen hours now.

  The three windows look out onto the covered inner courtyard, the enclosed rest area of the prison, and roofs covered with ventilation units and satellite dishes.

  The walls of the room are covered with maps, satellite images, photographs and lists of names and telephone numbers for various contacts around Europe.

  On the table are pads full of notes and highlighted ideas. A crumpled napkin in a mug has turned dark and the only thing left on what was a plate of buns is some icing sugar and a few pieces of old chewing gum.

  ‘It isn’t Jurek, it’s a serial killer … and we’ve got one week to find him,’ Saga says, closing her stinging eyes for a few seconds.

  ‘What’s the next step? The pictures from Belarus are too poor – you can’t even see if he’s got a face.’

  ‘Six victims in six different countries, and the same thing everywhere. It’s crazy,’ she says. ‘No witnesses, no pictures, no matches in the DNA database.’

  ‘I’ll call Ystad again – there must be some sort of security cameras in an industrial estate, for God’s sake.’

  Exhaustion has made the lines in Nathan’s thin face deeper than ever, and his sharp eyes are bloodshot.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she sighs. ‘They’ll only say that their forensic examination is ongoing, and that they don’t need any help from Stockholm.’

  ‘We should go down there anyway.’

  ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘If we had just one reasonably sharp picture, a single witness, a name, anything at all, then we’d be able to find him.’

  Saga looks at the map of the industrial estate in Ystad again.

  A convicted double murderer was beaten to death in a workshop that he himself owned.

  His head was smashed to a pulp with a hammer, then severed from his body, which was then dangled from a hoist.

  His dog was killed and impaled on a railing outside.

  Several windows in the building opposite were smashed, and a motorbike in a neighbouring property was vandalised.

  Saga wonders if the perpetrator has abnormal levels of serotonin in his prefrontal cortex, and increased activity in his amygdala.

  ‘He’s extremely violent … But there’s another side to him as well,’ she says. ‘Seeing as the victims are so specific, he must have done a lot of research, hacking or somehow gaining access to a whole range of databases … He’s mapped the victims and probably established some form of contact with them well before the attacks.’

  Nathan’s phone rings on the desk and Saga has time to see a picture of his wife on the screen before he rejects the call and goes over to stand in front of the long list of countries, districts and names of detectives and other police officers.

  They’ve already crossed out four hundred names and eight countries.

  Saga opens a PDF of a Europol report and thinks about all the sacrifices Joona has made over the years. He let go of his family, missed years of his daughter’s life and based his entire life around trying to escape Jurek’s vengeance.

  It’s clearly become something of an obsession.

  The fact that the grave-robber in Oslo had Summa’s skull in his freezer was simply too much for him.

  Joona’s paranoia created a scenario in which the murders around Europe were committed by Jurek Walter, as he dispensed with candidates who hadn’t made the grade.

  But Jurek Walter is dead, and this killer has nothing to do with him.

  Nathan looks up from his computer and starts saying once again that the common denominator between all the victims is that they had all been found guilty of serious sexual or violent offences.

  ‘Without getting caught up on that … one plausible theory is that the perpetrator has some sort of warped moral motivation,’ Nathan says. ‘He thinks he’s on a mission to clean up society, maybe even make the world a better, safer place.’

  ‘A superhero … or the hand of God.’

  She and Nathan start searching the Internet for people advocating harsher punishment and purification of society, but the number of results is way too large to be any use.

  Predictable, perhaps.

  Hundreds of thousands of people declaring that the streets need to be cleaned up.

  There are plenty of police officers among them, complaining about the rules, about the courts, and politically correct colleagues, about excessive respect for the rights of criminals.

  The phone rings and Saga picks it up, sees that it’s a foreign number and takes the call. Superintendent Salvatore Giani in Milan. He tells her apologetically that the murder of Patrizia Tuttino outside the San Raffaele Hospital has gone cold.

  ‘We’ve examined the recordings from all the security cameras, we’ve talked to all the staff in the hospital … there are no leads, no witnesses, nothing,’ he says.

  ‘What about forensics?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’re no longer prioritising this investigation,’ Salvatore explains.

  ‘I see,’ Saga says. ‘Thanks for letting me know.’

  She puts her phone down, sighs and meets Nathan’s weary gaze.

  ‘I’ll have another go with Volgograd,’ he says, and is reaching for his phone when Veronica calls again.

  ‘Take it,’ Saga says.

  ‘She only wants to tell me I’m an idiot for ignoring her calls.’

  ‘So stop ignoring them, then.’

  He takes a sip of cold coffee, tosses the plastic cup in the bin, and picks the phone up.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  Saga can hear from Veronica’s voice that she’s upset.

  ‘I’m not ignoring you,’ Nathan says. ‘But I’ve got a job that … OK, Nicky, we don’t agree on that … Fine … but apart from that, was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about …?’

  He falls silent and puts his phone down.

  ‘Well, at least we’re friends again now,’ he says sardonically.

  Saga stands up and goes over to the wall with the blurred pictures from security cameras, and the photographs of the brutalised bodies.

  ‘This isn’t just going to blow over … because this superhero isn’t going to stop until he’s caught,’ she says.

  ‘Agreed,’ Nathan says.

  ‘If the quality of the Belarusian footage hadn’t been so poor, we might already have been a
ble to issue a description,’ she says. ‘I mean … he’s going to make a mistake sooner or later, if he hasn’t already.’

  Saga picks up her phone and weighs it in her hand. It’s warm, and the dark screen reflects the lights in the ceiling. She looks at the notes on the pad in front of her and decides to call their contact at the national police centre in Poland.

  Nathan has already had twenty-three conversations with various Russian authorities, the FSB, SVR, and regional police chiefs in all the federal districts.

  ‘I feel like I’m in telesales,’ Nathan mutters and he calls the Russian narcotics unit, Gosnarkokontrol.

  After several misunderstandings he is put through to an elderly superintendent named Jakov Kramnik, and quickly explains why he’s calling.

  ‘Yes, we received your request via Interpol,’ the Russian superintendent replies. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got back to you, but we still have some of our old bureaucracy left in certain areas.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Nathan says, rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Thanks for understanding, that’s good of you,’ he says. ‘It warms my heart … Because we do actually have one suspected murder that matches several of your criteria. On Monday an Igor Sokolov was found with his throat cut in a warehouse on the outskirts of St Petersburg. He’d previously served nineteen years in Kresty for narcotics offences, but was also suspected of four murders … It was an execution … one of his knees was broken, and the internal carotid artery severed. It looks like our special forces had done it … but they’d never attempt to remove his spine.’

  ‘His spine?’

  ‘Sokolov was subjected to extreme violence long after he was dead – I can send our report if you like.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who the perpetrator might be?’ Nathan asks, as Saga’s phone starts to ring.

  ‘Igor Sokolov fought for our country in Afghanistan, then got caught up on heroin addiction and serious crime … but he served his sentence and was rebuilding his life, and I respect that … We’ve got no leads on the perpetrator, but it looks like an old enemy from the underworld caught up with him.’

  Reflected in the window, Nathan sees Saga stand up so abruptly that her office chair rolls backwards and thuds into the wall.

  ‘You’ve checked the security cameras in the area around the warehouse?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ the Russian superintendent replies.

  Nathan ends the call with mutual expressions of thanks and hopes of continuing cooperation in the future.

  He puts his phone down on the table, watches as it spins round once, then turns to Saga.

  She’s standing with her phone pressed to her ear, and is leaning forward and scribbling something on the pad in front of her.

  ‘We’re on our way, we’ll be there as soon as possible,’ she says.

  30

  Two police cars are blocking one side of Regeringsgatan, and the entire pavement in front of the scaffolding and the workmen’s portacabin with its barred windows is cordoned off with blue-and-white tape that flutters in the wind.

  ‘I don’t know … it just sounded a lot like our perpetrator,’ Saga says.

  ‘We spend hours making calls to every corner of Europe, but we don’t even know what’s going on in our own fucking backyard,’ Nathan says as he pulls over to the kerb.

  ‘Because they’re convinced it’s to do with a protection racket,’ Saga says. ‘Apparently this bar has been the target of extortion attempts before.’

  ‘Everyone guards their own little patch like a bunch of squabbling kids.’

  ‘Look, we’re both tired, but we’re here now, so let’s try to be calm. I mean, this could be what we’ve been looking for,’ Saga says, opening the car door. ‘And as far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to think Black Cobra are behind this, as long as they let us in.’

  An older man is waiting on the pavement under an umbrella. Senior Prosecutor Arne Rosander from the Central Stockholm office.

  He has thinning hair and a neat beard, and is wearing silvery glasses and a wax-cloth raincoat over a check blazer.

  ‘I’ve heard about you, Saga Bauer, but I thought they were exaggerating,’ he says, holding the umbrella over her head.

  ‘Have the victims been identified?’ she asks.

  ‘Erica Liljestrand … twenty-eight years old, single … studying biotechnology at the Royal Institute of Technology … Niklas Dahlberg, also single, a bartender here at the Pilgrim Bar.’

  The dirty white nylon mesh covering the scaffolding is billowing like a sail.

  ‘We haven’t found any connection between the victims,’ the prosecutor goes on, shepherding them towards the crime scene. ‘All the evidence suggests that she was the last customer in the bar.’

  ‘Alone?’ Nathan asks.

  ‘She didn’t have a date, but she was supposed to be meeting a friend,’ Arne Rosander explains. ‘She probably got caught up in it by accident.’

  They walk into the passageway beneath the scaffolding. Rain is seeping through the makeshift plywood roof. Forensics have set up an airlock outside the entrance to the bar for people to put protective clothing on and write their names on a list before entering the crime scene.

  Well used to the procedure, Arne quickly slips into the protective outfit and waits patiently as Saga and Nathan sign the list.

  ‘What do you think happened here, Arne?’ Nathan asks, tucking his ponytail in before pulling the blue plastic hood over his head.

  The prosecutor’s warm eyes take on a despairing look.

  ‘It’s Black Cobra, you’ll see the excessive brutality used … but obviously it’ll be hard to put a prosecution together. We have to link the perpetrator to the organisation, then show that he was given explicit orders to do this.’

  They step into the blinding light of the floodlamps. Around a dozen forensics officers are working inside the bar in silence.

  ‘The bodies have been moved to the Institute of Forensic Medicine,’ Arne says quietly, ‘but apart from that I’ve kept the crime scene as intact as possible.’

  Saga inspects the locations where the bodies were found. All the evidence suggests an extremely violent incident. Blood has been trodden across the floor, the bodies were evidently dragged between the furniture, and in two places it looks like the bodies were at least partially dismembered.

  There is a strong smell of alcohol and sour wine in the air from the smashed bottles behind the bar. There’s broken glass everywhere, strewn amongst the shattered furniture and splintered wood. If it wasn’t for all the blood, you might have thought a tornado had blown through the room.

  They go further in and stop next to the bent metal frame of a table that’s lying beside a bloody wooden baseball bat.

  Saga looks out across the room and tries to reconstruct the course of events. The bartender seems to have been the primary victim, or at least the focus of the perpetrator’s aggression. The woman had her throat cut, and was then dragged several metres through the room before her body was dumped.

  ‘Is it our killer?’ Nathan asks in a low voice.

  Saga turns round slowly and looks at the smashed-up bar. It seems to her that it started with a fight, lots of punching and kicking, before it turned into an out-and-out assault with the baseball bat.

  She looks at a large pool of blood by the opposite wall, and notes that the blood sprayed out at considerable pressure, reaching the pink lampshades of the wall lights.

  That was where the most extreme violence started.

  Forensics have probably already found the knife.

  Several stabs to the heart and lungs.

  Then the body was dragged towards the door. She follows the trail of blood and heavy footprints with her eyes.

  The victims were still alive – one bloody hand tried to cling onto a pillar.

  ‘It’s him,’ she says.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Nathan nods.

  ‘Is there any indication of sexual violence?’ Saga asks.

>   ‘No,’ the prosecutor replies.

  ‘You’ve checked all the security cameras in the area?’ Nathan asks.

  ‘Unfortunately the only relevant ones are covered by scaffolding … but they probably wouldn’t have given us much, given that it was dark and the weather was so bad.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But we’ve got three witnesses who saw a thickset man in the street outside … shouting and acting aggressively.’

  ‘I’d like to read their statements,’ Saga says.

  ‘One of them was able to give a pretty good description,’ Arne says, searching for an audio file on his iPad.

  They move closer to him, he presses play, and they listen as an elderly woman starts to speak, in an attractive, slightly fragile voice.

  ‘At first I only heard shouting, a man screaming … which was obviously very unpleasant … but then I caught sight of him beneath the scaffolding. He was a big man, in his fifties, maybe two metres tall, broad shoulders … he was wearing a black raincoat, plastic, not nylon … and he was moving jerkily … When he reached Nalen the light hit him and I saw that he had blood on his face … he was acting extremely aggressively, shouting and kicking out at parked cars, then he picked up a stone and threw it at a group of youngsters on the other side of the street before he disappeared.’

  ‘Can you describe his face?’ the interviewer asked.

  ‘I don’t know, what struck me most was the blood, I thought he’d hurt himself … but he had a big head and a thick neck … I don’t know, it’s very difficult … I thought he looked like a Russian hooligan, but I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that.’

  The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Karolinska Institute is housed in an unassuming red-brick building on the northern outskirts of Stockholm. Advent stars and electric candelabra shine weakly from the windows behind the blinds.

  Rubbish from the overflowing bins has blown in amongst the bare rose bushes.

  Saga and Nathan pull into the car park and get out of the car.

  A white Jaguar is parked crookedly on one side of the entrance, and as they push their way past it Saga sees that there’s a black briefcase lying on the roof of the car.