The Sandman

by Lars Kepler

  Although a long time has passed since he left the military to study at the Police Academy, he still has dreams about his time as a paratrooper. He’s back on the transport plane, listening to the deafening roar and staring out through the hydraulic hatch in the rear of the aircraft. The shadow of the plane moves over the pale water far below like a gray cross. In his dream, he runs down the ramp and jumps out into the cold air, hears the whine of the cords, feels his harness jerk as the parachute opens. The water approaches at great speed. The black inflatable boat is foaming against the waves far below.

  Joona was trained in the Netherlands for effective close combat with bayonets, knives, and pistols. He was taught to exploit changing situations and to use innovative Krav Maga techniques.

  “Okay, we’ll take this situation as our starting point and make it progressively harder as the day goes on,” Joona says.

  “Like hitting two people with one bullet?” The tall man with the shaved head grins.

  “Impossible,” Joona says.

  “We heard that you did it,” the woman says with curiosity.

  “Oh, no.” Joona smiles, running his hand through his untidy blond hair.

  His phone rings in his inside pocket. He sees on the screen that it’s Nathan Pollock from the National Criminal Investigation Department. Nathan knows where Joona is, and would call only if it was important.

  “Excuse me,” Joona says, then takes the call.

  He drinks from the glass of water and listens with a smile that slowly fades. Suddenly all the color drains from his face.

  “Is Jurek Walter still locked up?” he asks.

  His hand is shaking so much that he has to put the glass down.

  17

  Snow swirls through the air as Joona runs out to his car and gets in. He drives straight across the large exercise yard where he trained as a young recruit. The tires screech as he takes the corner and leaves the garrison.

  Beads of sweat have appeared on his forehead, and his hands won’t stop shaking.

  He overtakes a convoy of semis on the E20 highway just before Arboga. He has to hold the wheel with both hands, because the drag from the trucks makes his car shake.

  He can’t stop thinking about the phone call.

  Nathan Pollock’s voice was calm as he explained that Mikael Kohler-Frost was still alive.

  Joona had been convinced that the boy and his younger sister were two of Jurek Walter’s many victims. Now Nathan was telling him that Mikael has been found by the police on a railroad bridge and taken to Södermalm Hospital.

  Pollock said that Mikael’s condition was serious but not life-threatening. He hadn’t yet been questioned.

  “Is Jurek Walter still locked up?” was Joona’s first question.

  “Yes, he’s still in solitary confinement,” Pollock replied.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the boy? How do you know it’s Mikael Kohler-Frost?” Joona asked.

  “Apparently, he’s said his name several times. That’s as much as we know. And he’s the right age,” Pollock said. “Naturally, we’ve sent a saliva sample to the National Forensics Lab—”

  “But you haven’t informed his father?”

  “We have to try to get a DNA match before we do that. I mean, we can’t get this wrong.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  18

  The car moves along the black, slushy road, and Joona Linna forces himself not to speed up.

  Mikael Kohler-Frost, he thinks.

  Mikael Kohler-Frost has been found alive after all these years.

  The name Frost alone is enough to make Joona relive the whole thing.

  He overtakes a dirty white car and barely notices the child waving a stuffed toy at him through the window. He is immersed in his memories.

  Thirteen years ago, Joona embarked on a preliminary investigation that would change his life entirely. Together with his colleague Samuel Mendel, he began to investigate the case of two people who had been reported missing in Sollentuna.

  The first case was a fifty-five-year-old woman who went missing when she was out walking one evening. Her dog had been found in a passageway behind a supermarket, dragging its leash behind it. Two days later, the woman’s mother-in-law vanished as she was walking the short distance between her retirement home and the bingo hall.

  It turned out that the woman’s brother had gone missing in Bangkok five years before. Interpol and the Foreign Ministry had been called in, but he had never been found.

  There are no comprehensive figures for the number of people who go missing around the world each year, but everyone knows the total is disturbingly large. In the United States, almost one hundred thousand go missing each year; in Sweden, around seven thousand. Most of them show up, but there’s still an alarming number who disappear. Only a very small proportion of the ones who are never found have been kidnapped or murdered.

  Joona and Samuel were both relatively new at the National Criminal Investigation Department when they started to look into the case of the two missing women. Certain aspects were reminiscent of the disappearance of two people in Örebro four years earlier.

  On that occasion, it had been a forty-year-old man and his son. They had been on their way to a soccer game in Glanshammar. They never arrived. Their car was found abandoned on a small forest road that was nowhere near the soccer field.

  At first it was just an idea, a random suggestion: What if there were a direct link between the cases, in spite of the differences in time and location? In which case, it wasn’t impossible that more missing people could be connected to these four.

  The preliminary investigation consisted of the most common sort of police work, the sort that happens at a desk, in front of the computer. Joona and Samuel gathered and organized information about every unsolved missing-persons case in Sweden over the previous ten years. The idea was to see if there were any similarities in these other cases that could not be chalked up to coincidence. They layered the various cases on top of each other, as if they were on transparent paper—and slowly something resembling a constellation began to appear out of the vague motif of connected points. The unexpected pattern that emerged was that, in many of the cases, more than one member of the same family had disappeared.

  Joona could remember the silence that had descended upon the room when they stepped back and looked at the results. Forty-five missing people matched that particular criterion. Many of those could probably be dismissed over the following days, but forty-five was still many more than could reasonably be explained by chance.

  19

  One wall of Samuel’s office in the National Criminal Investigation Department was covered by a large map of Sweden, dotted with pins to indicate the missing persons.

  Obviously, they couldn’t assume that all forty-five had been murdered, but for the time being they couldn’t rule any of them out.

  Because no known perpetrator could be linked to the timing of the disappearances, they started looking for motives and a modus operandi. There were no similarities to cases that had been solved. The murderer they were dealing with left no trace, and he hid his victims’ bodies very well.

  The choice of victim usually divides serial killers into two groups. One is organized killers, who always seek out an ideal victim who matches their fantasies as closely as possible. These killers focus on a particular type of person, exclusively seeking out prepubertal blond boys, for example. The other group consists of the disorganized killers; here it is the availability of the victims that counts. The victims primarily fill a role in the murderer’s fantasies, and it doesn’t particularly matter who they are or what they look like.

  But the serial killer that Joona and Samuel were starting to envisage didn’t seem to fit either of these categories. On the one hand, he was disorganized, because the victims were so varied, but, on the other hand, none of them was especially easy to get hold of.

  They were looking for a s
erial killer who was practically invisible. He left no evidence, no intentional signature.

  Days went by and the women from Sollentuna were still missing.

  Joona and Samuel had no concrete proof of a serial killer. They simply thought that there couldn’t be any other explanation for all these missing people. Two days later, the preliminary investigation was downgraded and the resources reallocated.

  But Joona and Samuel couldn’t let it go, and started to devote their free time during the evenings and weekends to the search.

  They concentrated on the pattern that suggested that if two people had gone missing from the same family, there was an increased risk that more family members would go missing in the near future.

  While they kept an eye on the family of the women who had vanished from Sollentuna, two children were reported missing from Tyresö. Mikael and Felicia Kohler-Frost. The children of the well-known author Reidar Frost.

  20

  He remembers talking to Reidar Frost and his wife, Roseanna Kohler, three days after their two children went missing. He didn’t mention his suspicions to the parents—that they had been murdered by a serial killer whom the police had stopped looking for, a murderer whose existence they could posit only in theory. Joona just asked his questions and let the parents cling to the idea that the children had drowned.

  The family lived on Varvs Drive, in a beautiful house facing a sandy beach. There had been several mild weeks, and a lot of the snow had thawed. The streets and footpaths were dark and wet. There was barely any ice along the shoreline, and what remained was gray slush.

  Joona remembers walking through the house, passing a large kitchen, and sitting down at a huge white table next to a window. But Roseanna had closed all the curtains, and although her voice was calm, her head was shaking the whole time.

  The search for the children was fruitless. There had been countless helicopter searches, divers had been called in, and the water had been dragged for bodies. The surroundings had been searched by chain gangs of both volunteers and specialist dog units.

  But no one had seen or heard anything.

  Reidar Frost looked like a captured animal. He just wanted to keep on searching.

  Joona had sat facing the two parents, asking routine questions about whether they had received any threats, if anyone had behaved oddly or differently, if they had felt they were being followed.

  “Everyone thinks they fell in the water,” the wife said, her head starting to shake again.

  “You mentioned that they sometimes climb out of the window after their bedtime prayers,” Joona went on.

  “Obviously, they’re not supposed to,” Reidar said.

  “But you did know that they sometimes take their bikes out to see a friend?”

  “Rikard.”

  “Rikard van Horn, number seven Björnbärs Drive,” Joona said.

  “We’ve tried talking to Micke and Felicia about it, but…well, they’re children, and I suppose we didn’t think it was dangerous,” Reidar replied, gently laying his hand over his wife’s.

  “What do they do at Rikard’s?”

  “They never stay for long, just play some Diablo.”

  “They all do,” Roseanna whispered, pulling her hand away.

  “On Saturday, they didn’t bike to Rikard’s, but went to Badholmen instead,” Joona went on. “Do they often go there in the evening?”

  “We don’t think so,” Roseanna said, getting up restlessly from the table, as if she could no longer keep her internal trembling in check.

  Joona nodded. He knew that the boy, Mikael, had answered the phone just before he and his younger sister had left the house, but the number had proved impossible to trace.

  It had been unbearable, sitting there across from the children’s parents. Joona said nothing but felt more and more convinced that the children were victims of the serial killer. He listened, and asked his questions, but he couldn’t tell them what he suspected.

  21

  If the two children were victims of this serial killer, and they were correct in thinking that he would soon try to kill one of the parents as well, they had to make a choice.

  Joona and Samuel decided to concentrate their efforts on Roseanna Kohler.

  She had moved out to live with her sister in Gärdet, in northeastern Stockholm. The sister lived with her four-year-old daughter in a white apartment complex at 25 Lanfors Lane, close to Lill-Jan’s Forest.

  Joona and Samuel took turns keeping watch on the building at night. For a week, one of them would park nearby and sit in his car until dawn.

  On the eighth day, Joona was leaning back in his seat, watching the building’s inhabitants get ready for bed as usual. The lights went off in a pattern that he was starting to recognize. A woman in a silver-colored padded jacket went for her usual walk with her golden retriever; then the last windows went dark.

  Joona’s car was parked in the shadows on Porjus Road, between a dirty white pickup and a red Toyota. In the rearview mirror, he could see snow-covered bushes and a tall fence surrounding a power station. The residential area in front of him was completely quiet. Through the windshield, he watched the static glow of the streetlights.

  He smiled to himself when he thought of dinner that night with his wife and little daughter. Lumi had been in a hurry to finish so she could continue examining Joona.

  “I’d like to finish eating first,” he had suggested.

  But Lumi had adopted her serious expression and talked to her mother over his head, asking if he was brushing his teeth by himself yet.

  “He’s very good,” Summa replied.

  She explained with a smile that all of Joona’s teeth had come in. Lumi put a piece of paper towel under his chin and tried to stick a finger into his mouth, telling him to open wide.

  His thoughts of Lumi vanished as a light suddenly went on in the sister’s flat. Joona saw Roseanna standing there in a flannel nightdress, talking on the phone.

  The light went out again.

  An hour passed, but the area remained deserted.

  It was starting to get cold inside the car when Joona caught sight of a figure in the rearview mirror. Someone hunched over, approaching along the empty street.

  22

  Joona slumped down slightly in his seat and followed the figure’s progress in the rearview mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of the face.

  The branches of a rowan tree swayed as he passed.

  In the gray lights from the power station, Joona saw that it was Samuel.

  His colleague was almost half an hour early.

  Samuel opened the car door and sat down in the passenger seat, which he pushed back so he could stretch out his legs; he sighed.

  “Okay, so you’re tall and blond, Joona, and it’s really lovely being in the car and everything. But I still think I’d rather spend the night with Rebecka. I want to help the boys with their homework.”

  “You can help me with my homework,” Joona said.

  “Thanks.” Samuel laughed.

  Joona looked out at the road, at the building with its closed doors, the rusting balconies, the black windows.

  “We’ll give it three more days,” he said.

  Samuel pulled out a silver-colored thermos of chicken soup, which he called yoich.

  “I don’t know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said seriously. “Nothing about this case makes sense. We’re trying to find a serial killer who may not actually exist.”

  “He exists,” Joona replied stubbornly.

  “But he doesn’t fit with what we’ve found out, he doesn’t fit with any aspect of the investigation, and—”

  “That’s why—that’s why no one has seen him,” Joona said. “He’s only visible because he casts a shadow over the statistics.”

  They sat next to each other in silence. Samuel blew on his soup, and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. Joona hummed a tango and let his eyes wander from Roseanna’s bedroom window to the icicles hanging fr
om the gutters, then up at the snow-covered chimneys and vents.

  “There’s someone behind the building,” Samuel suddenly whispered. “I’m sure I saw movement.”

  Samuel pointed, but everything was in a state of dreamlike peace.

  A moment later, Joona saw snow fall from a bush close to the house. Someone had just brushed past it.

  Carefully, they opened the car doors and crept out.

  The sleepy residential area was quiet. All they could hear was their own footsteps and the electric hum from the power station.

  There had been a thaw for a couple of weeks; then it had started to snow again.

  They approached the windowless end of the building, walking quietly along the strip of grass, past a wallpaper shop on the ground floor.

  The glow from the nearest streetlight reached out across the smooth snow to the open space behind the houses. They stopped at the corner and hunched over, checking for movement in the dense cluster of trees toward the Royal Tennis Club and Lill-Jan’s Forest.

  At first, Joona couldn’t see anything in the darkness between the crooked old trees. He was about to give Samuel the signal to proceed when he saw the figure.

  There was a man standing among the trees, as still as the snow-covered branches.

  Joona’s heart raced.

  The slim man was staring like a ghost up at the window where Roseanna Kohler was sleeping.

  The man showed no sign of urgency, had no obvious purpose.

  Joona was filled with an icy conviction that the man in the garden was the serial killer whose existence they had speculated about.

  The shadowy face was thin and wrinkled. The man just stood there, as if the sight of the house gave him a sense of calm satisfaction, as if he already had his victim in a cage.

  They drew their weapons but were unsure of what to do. They hadn’t discussed this in advance. Even though they had been keeping watch on Roseanna for days, they had never talked about what they would do if it transpired that they were right. They couldn’t just rush over and arrest a man who was simply gazing at a dark window. They might find out who he was, but they would probably be forced to release him.