This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  As she knelt to feel for a pulse, the corpse abruptly came alive. Rearing up, the man grabbed Brand in a bloody hug. She tried to escape. One forearm gripped her around the neck. Her face came inches away from the wounded man’s. Something was wrong with his eyes. They stared blankly as Brand struggled to free herself.

  With a jolt of fear she saw the blade coming at her.

  10.

  Brand parried the stab of the knife. She quickly realized that the last-gasp attack had exhausted her opponent. His thrusts now resembled the feeble movements of an infant. She was able to relieve him of the weapon. She tossed the knife away. It clattered to rest beneath the bank of windows.

  The man collapsed heavily back down to the floor. He sighed out a long, rattling wheeze, then lay still. When Brand put two fingers to his neck, she felt an uncertain pulse fade and disappear.

  Silence returned to the scene. Brand had a momentary sense that her presence was intrusive. She had experienced the feeling before. In the company of the dead, the living are an insult. She rose to her feet. Blood now marked the front of the down vest she wore. She left the knife where it lay and moved to search the premises. To her relief she discovered no more torn apart bodies.

  She tried to parse out the footprints. Full and partials patterned the floor. Someone had evidently allowed a large animal into the room. A bear? A panther? A wolf? Were there big cats in the Swedish wilds?

  Brand thought that an attack dog employed as a weapon of violence was more likely. The size of the paw-prints indicated a bullmastiff or a boerboel, perhaps a Great Dane. She tried to remember what the fearsome red-eyed beast in “The Hound of Baskervilles” had finally turned out to be. A large dog of some sort. A wolfhound?

  On the job in New York City, Brand had encountered intentional, human-directed canine attacks. It happened only a few times, but those were memorable. In some neighborhoods pit bulls were virtually the only breed around. Naturally there were incidents. But what Brand saw in front of her rose to a whole different level.

  At the rear of the main room she entered an adjacent hallway. The polished wood flooring along the whole corridor remained clean and unbloodied. Brand gingerly opened a closed door. She expected the worst. It was only a small, empty, powder-room style bathroom.

  She stepped inside. The conventional white porcelain facilities appeared modern and ordinary. Several discarded tissues were piled beneath the mirror of the vanity, caked with some sort of heavy white paste. The doors to a small cabinet below the sink were open. The cabinet itself was empty. There was no blood in evidence anywhere.

  Brand moved forward and pulled aside the white plastic shower curtain. In the stall lay several items of discarded clothing. She took a pen from her pocket. Using it as a probe, she fished out a miniskirt, then another dress. Brand was surprised to see it was a wedding gown.

  Whoever had worn the garment had to have been in some kind of distress. There were tears and rips everywhere. Brand slid her finger into a small, specially made pocket torn open in the waistband. A place to hide a bride’s mad money? She understood nothing of what she was seeing.

  Witnessing the scene had worked a transformation in her. She hesitated before returning to the main room. She was no longer a suspended police detective visiting from NYC. All her on-the-job expertise prompted a new urgency. She became a detective again. An insistent, familiar urge kicked in, a determination to discover what had happened. It was the only way to quell the fear the killings had triggered in her. Somehow she felt this was the true, fundamental role of the police: to help beat back the natural terror that extreme violence triggers in the hearts of ordinary citizens. Cops worked to tease order from chaos.

  She stuffed both the discarded gown and the white-smeared tissues into the side pocket of her down vest. As she emerged from the bathroom hallway, Brand realized her breath had a ragged, uneven rhythm to it. She needed to clear her head. She crossed to the single unshaded window. She gazed out for a moment at the deserted, darkening yard. Something bothered her about the whole set-up, something beyond the deadly hurt which humans inflict on one another.

  Hammar had brought them here. He insisted on immediately heading up the driveway to the house. Why?

  Beyond the grounds, at the edge of the birch woods that skirted the property, Brand detected movement. A hallucination bloomed in the faded afternoon, a sight she could hardly credit. The light was becoming increasingly unreliable.

  A dark silhouette passed among the trees. Some sort of animal moved there. She caught a glimpse of a mottled coat of fur, a flash of sesame color. Brand had only a quick look. The form vanished among the trees so quickly she questioned if she had seen it at all.

  Perhaps, she thought, what had happened here was no human crime. The two victims had been upstairs, lounging around, perhaps asleep. Somehow a wild predator of some sort had crept in through an open door. A bear or wolf. Do such beasts climb stairs? Brand was uncertain on the subject of Swedish fauna. At any rate, the attack went down quickly. The bloody human footprints in evidence everywhere were simply the result of the terrified victims attempting to elude their fates.

  None of that seemed likely, but the prospect served to inflame her mind. The animal she had seen—if she had seen one—was fearsomely large. She imagined it bounding back over the snowy yard. Having tasted human flesh, perhaps it would be hungry for more. Her police partner in New York had once been forced to fire his service weapon in order to halt the charge of an attacking pit bull. The dog went down in a heap. The memory had plagued Brand ever since.

  She heard the scuff of footsteps crossing the landing. Brand wheeled around and automatically took up a shooting stance, training her sidearm at the doorway.

  Hammar.

  Seeing Brand standing with an automatic, posed to blast off his head, the man threw up his hands in surrender.

  “Stanna, Veronika!” Stop.

  “I told you to stay in the car,” Brand said, carefully lowering the pistol.

  They stood for a moment amidst the desecrated room, decorated for a child but yielding adult horror. Brand noticed Krister had rigged two plastic shopping bags like booties around his shoes. Both bags were stained red. The dying afternoon heightened the atmosphere of spent violence.

  Moving robotically, Hammar did the obvious thing, what anyone would do in this situation—he retrieved a cell phone from his pocket. Punching in numbers on the keypad, he raised the device to his ear.

  “Don’t do that,” Brand said. She crossed the distance between them quickly and snatched the phone away. She still held the Glock.

  "What are you about?” the man cried. “We must summon the authorities!”

  Brand’s private emergencies eclipsed all other concerns. She needed time to think. “Did you get connected? Krister! Did you reach 9-1-1?”

  He stared at her. “It’s not 9-1-1 here, it’s 1-1-2.”

  “Were you put through?”

  “No,” Hammar admitted. “But we must call the police, Veronika!”

  “Not yet,” Brand said. Hammar was right. Every element of Brand’s professional training told her to notify the authorities immediately. Simple humanity and respect for the dead demanded that they report the situation.

  But Brand was a fraught stranger in a strange land. She was badly frightened. A wrong move could prove disastrous. In the face of her determination, Hammar backed off. He followed her out of the room, down the stairs and out to the gravel driveway.

  Moving away from the manor house, they stopped in front of the Saab. Brand looked off toward the shadowy woods. No sign of her vision of a dog-like creature remained. The fog of darkness closed in on the property.

  Mentally, she tried to reverse roles, and think how she would react to the situation as a detective. She listed the elements. A deserted, isolated home. Wealthy owners. A gruesome scene of violence. A dead cop. A second victim. And a pair of strangers, one of them a foreign national, who had blundered into it all.

  None
of it was good. How would Veronika Brand and Krister Hammar appear to responding officers? Witnesses? Persons of interest? Suspects?

  Brand couldn’t shake the feeling that her presence at the scene had somehow been orchestrated. She possessed the natural suspicious reflexes of a cop. Her paranoia usually served her well during investigations. Distrustful of appearances, skeptical of the facts, she questioned everything.

  She tried to swallow a rising surge of anger. Somehow this Swedish immigration lawyer had led her into deep trouble. That she was a police herself might smooth things out. Professional courtesy demanded a certain soft touch. But she was not a cop. She was an ex-cop, Brand reminded herself. Still under investigation, on charges false and otherwise. A simple call to the States would open a whole can of worms. A can of snakes was more like it.

  Brand spoke without looking at Hammar. “Why’d you bring me here, Krister?”

  “I’m asking myself.”

  “You knew,” she said.

  Hammar sounded puzzled. “What? What did I know?”

  “You bring me here to see the Voss family setup, and somehow we encounter something else. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m going to find out. I’m thinking, wow, what a coincidence. But I’m a police, and I don’t much believe in coincidences. I always have to unpack them, check into what’s really happening.”

  “I had no idea…” Hammar began. Brand cut him off with a glare. His protest sounded weak.

  Fury rose in her. She paced, trying to fight it off. She had to think clearly. The sight of a subdued Hammar worked to enrage her further.

  “It was you,” she said. “I wanted to go slow, but oh, no, you pushed. You played me.”

  “No, Brand, no,” he said carefully, as if placating a lunatic.

  She waved the pistol. Hammar shrank from her. “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “Shut up! Is this even a Voss house?” Brand gave a sweep of her arm. “What is this set up? What did you want me to see?”

  “I don’t know what to say!”

  Brand paced some more, storming back and forth in front of him. She felt that her responses weren’t entirely logical. For one thing, her brain was in the midst of amphetamine withdrawal. Angry outbursts tended to come with the territory.

  “Okay, okay,” she muttered. She took a deep breath. Visions of the bloody room assailed her. Glock in hand, she tapped herself absently on the forehead a few times, hoping to dislodge a few fresh thoughts. Then she stopped, standing stock still.

  “It’s a— it’s a pipeline, isn’t it?” Brand said. “Some sort of transfer point. You were going to lure me up here—”

  “I didn’t lure you! You wanted to come. You asked!”

  She ignored Hammar’s objection. “You were going to get me up here, and you were going to draw me a picture. They’re running human flesh through this house, aren’t they? So you were going to be like, ‘Hey, Ms. Big City Dick, it’s so awful, won’t you help the poor exploited victims?’ Am I right?”

  “Yes. No!”

  “But it ran off the rails. You didn’t expect blood, did you, Counselor? Come on. We’ve got a few minutes. I don’t know response times around here, but Swedish police are said to be kind of slow on the uptake. Am I right? You knew!”

  Hammar’s face took on a gray tint, its color drained. “I didn’t know…all this.” He waved in the direction of the house. “How could I?”

  “I can’t believe I was so damned stupid.” Brand was talking to herself now. “Let’s head up the drive and find out, he says. What do I do? I do exactly like he says, like some—like a tool. I must be off my game. I’ve been in trouble ever since I pulled my duffel off the carousel at Arlanda. You played me. And I don’t like to be played.”

  “Veronika!” he wailed. “Vad gör du?” What are you doing?

  It was her fault, a fact which did not help with her feelings of betrayal. She had entered the manor house, acting like a cop instead of what she was, a tourist. Plus she had foolishly tampered with the scene. She extracted the torn dress and the wad of discarded tissues from the pocket of her down vest.

  She turned back to Hammar. “Have you any contacts in the local constabulary?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, our presence here is a little problematic,” she said. “You do realize that, don’t you? What are we up to? Why were we even here in the first place? Just taking a little tour of the great manor houses of Sweden? We need to decide what’s what. Then we make the call. ”

  She didn’t even mention one of the dead was police. Glancing at Hammar, she realized the man wasn’t even listening to her. Brand reacted with a flare of anger. She wanted to give him a shake. Hadn’t he heard her?

  He was staring at the balled-up wedding dress that Brand still held in her hand. “What’s that? Where did you get that?”

  “Jesus, what’s the matter with you?”

  Hammar reached out slowly, as if moving in a dream. He took the dress from Brand. The movement was so odd that she gave it up willingly.

  “Don’t tell me you recognize it?”

  “I need to—need to check—I’m not sure,” Hammar stammered. “I think I know whose it is.”

  “Come on,” Brand said, skeptical. “Out of all the wedding gowns on the planet, you’re telling me you can identify this one? They all look pretty similar, don’t they?”

  “No, no,” Hammar protested. He clutched at the fabric. “It is…very recognizable. I’ve seen it often. I know who wore it.”

  Part two: The blond beast

  At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory… // Nietzsche

  11.

  Brand sat alone at the local police station in the town of Ljusdal. For once she found herself on the other side of an interrogation table.

  There had been some preliminary questioning at the manor house. The responding officers had quickly established that the bearded man was not, in fact, a member of the police force. The ID was an obvious fake. The real police had responded out of a Gävleborg County headquarters in Ljusdal. They directed Brand and Hammar to follow along behind them as they drove the ten-kilometer distance to the station.

  The former market town was located on a single lane carriageway, and featured a mix of non-descript 1960’s detached housing with an eclectic collection of shops and cafes that wouldn’t know a latte from a milkshake. A welcome change to the endless flat fields of snow and farmhouses that dotted the landscape of the journey so far. In the station, the officers separated the two of them. She recognized the time-honored police practice of cooling out subjects and keeping them apart.

  The interrogation room where she sat reflected the Swedish preference for no-nonsense functionalism. The room was in stark contrast to the windowless, strip-light illuminated boxes she felt at home in. The setting almost felt like a new office; soft ceiling lights complemented the sun’s feeble rays which snuck in through a small window high up on the wall to her left. The light cast a warm glow on the clean white walls and the sleek wood table, glinting off the tell tale two-way mirror which took up most of the wall directly in front of her. Brand couldn’t help but feel slightly impressed that the stylish wooden chairs matched the table, an achievement she hadn’t managed in her own misshapen apartment. Brand sat on the side usually occupied by the assumed guilty, her hands clasped in front of her on the bare tabletop, gazing out of the window at a small spruce offering a shield from prying outside eyes.

  A cop often thinks along the lines of a criminal. Put the right type of prisoner in this snug room, Brand considered, leave them alone, and they’d have a weapon fashioned in five minutes. Her own weapon was safely hidden in the Saab. Brand stashing the pistol in his vehicle sparked another anxiety attack in Hammar. He demanded that she turn the Glock in.

  Held in limbo in separate rooms in the station house, they waited, each alone. The police hadn’t taken away thei
r cell phones. Brand looked at hers, and realized that for once she had a signal. She stood as if to stretch her legs, turning her back to the mirror, cradling the phone in both hands in front of her mouth in an attempt to conceal the call she was making to Hammar.

  “Veronika.” He sounded subdued.

  “It’s okay,” she said in a placating tone, the one she always employed to chill out tense situations.

  “We’re suspects, not witnesses,” Hammar said into the phone. “I mean, the other way around, not witnesses but suspects. No, no—”

  She interrupted. “I get the point. We’re witnesses.”

  Hammar had clearly been deeply shaken by the events of the afternoon. The bizarre crime scene collided with the image of a peaceful, safe Sweden. Brand realized she had shown lack of control in her treatment of Hammar earlier. Looking back, she thought the man had carried himself rather well. He had actually managed to stay steady in spite of, or maybe because of, the carnage around them.

  “I admire the way you kept cool out there, Krister,” she said. “That business was bad, real bad. I had a partner in New York, Willie Urrico. Great guy. He came out of a bloody crime scene one time and made a comment that afterwards turned famous. ‘I nearly shit my socks,’ he said, and we all laughed. Cut the tension perfectly, you know? Pretty soon everybody on the force was saying it whenever things went sideways. And I’ll tell you honestly right now, entering that room in the manor house, I nearly shit my socks.”

  “How do you do it?” Hammar asked. “How do you walk into scenes like that, day after day?”

  “I’m not sure,” Brand said. “All the good cops who I know, they cope. Cops cope. That’s what they do. Of course police also eat the gun at higher rates than any other profession apart from shrinks. So maybe coping will only get you so far.”

  They listened to each other breathe for a while. It had been only a few minutes since a low-ranking uniform had put Brand in the office, but the wait to be questioned felt overlong.