The Sandman

by Lars Kepler

  Her body is radiating warmth.

  He strokes her thigh softly, a gesture that he tells himself any doctor might make. His fingers reach the waistline of her underwear.

  His hands are cold, and he’s far too nervous to be sexually excited.

  It’s too dark for the camera in the ceiling to be able to register what he’s doing.

  He lets his fingers slip cautiously over the underwear and in between her thighs, feeling the heat of her genitals.

  Gently, he presses a finger into the cotton fabric of her underwear, running it along the lips of her vagina.

  He’d like to stroke her to orgasm, until her whole body is crying out for penetration, even though she’s asleep.

  His eyes have gotten used to the darkness, and now he can make out Saga’s smooth thighs and the perfect line of her hips.

  He reminds himself that she is fast asleep. He knows that. He pulls her underwear down without ceremony. She groans in her sleep but is otherwise completely still.

  Her body is glowing in the darkness.

  The blond pubic hair, sensitive inner thighs, her flat stomach.

  She’ll stay asleep, no matter what he does.

  It makes no difference to her.

  She won’t say no. She won’t shoot him a look that’s pleading with him to stop.

  A wave of sexual excitement crashes over him, filling him, making him pant for breath. He can feel his penis swelling, straining against his clothes. He adjusts it with one hand.

  He can hear his breathing and the thud of his heartbeat. He has to get inside her. His hands fumble with her knees, trying to part her thighs.

  She rolls over, kicking gently in her sleep.

  He slows down, leans over her, pushing his hands between her thighs and trying to spread them.

  He can’t do it—it feels like she’s putting up resistance.

  He rolls her over onto her stomach, but she slips to the floor, sits up, and looks at him with wide eyes.

  Anders hurries out of the room, telling himself that she wasn’t properly awake. She won’t remember anything. She’ll think she was only dreaming.

  139

  Veils of snow are blowing across the highway outside the roadside café. The vehicles thundering past rattle the windows. The coffee in Joona’s cup trembles with the vibrations.

  Joona looks at the men at the table. Their faces are calm, if a little tired. After taking his phone, passport, and wallet, they seem to be waiting for instructions. The café smells of buckwheat and fried pork.

  Joona looks at his watch and sees that his plane out of Moscow departs in nine minutes.

  Felicia’s life is ticking away.

  One of the men is trying to solve a sudoku puzzle, while the other is reading about a horse race in a broadsheet newspaper.

  Joona goes over his conversation with Nikita Karpin.

  The old man acted as if they had all the time in the world, until they were interrupted. He smiled to himself and wiped the condensation from the jug of cordial with his thumb. He said that Jurek Walter and his twin brother had stayed in Sweden for only a couple of years.

  “Why?” Joona asked.

  “You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man had run his finger over the gray file. He said that the highly trained engineer had most likely been prepared to sell what he knew.

  “But the Swedish Aliens Department was only interested in whether or not Vadim Levanov could work. They didn’t understand anything. They sent a world-class missile engineer to work in a gravel pit.”

  “Maybe he realized you were watching him and had enough sense to keep quiet about what he knew,” Joona said.

  “It would have been more sensible not to have left Leninsk. He might have gotten ten years in a labor camp, but—”

  “But he had his children to think of.”

  “Then he should have stayed,” Nikita said, meeting Joona’s gaze. “The boys were extradited from Sweden, and Vadim Levanov was unable to trace them. He contacted everyone he could, but it was impossible. There wasn’t a lot he could do. He knew that we’d arrest him if he returned to Russia, and then there was absolutely no way he’d find his boys, so he waited for them instead. That was all he could do. He must have thought that if the boys tried to find him they’d start by looking in the place where they’d last been together.”

  “And where was that?” Joona asked, as he noticed a black car approaching the house.

  “Migrant workers’ accommodations, Barrack Number Four,” Nikita replied. “That was also where he took his own life, much later.”

  Before Joona had time to ask the name of the gravel pit where the boys’ father had worked, Nikita had more visitors. A shiny black Chrysler turned in and pulled up in front of the house, and there was no doubt that the conversation was over. Without any apparent urgency, the old man replaced all the material on the table concerning Jurek’s father with information about Alexander Pichushkin, the so-called Chessboard Killer—a serial killer in whose capture Joona had played a small part.

  The four men came in, walked over to Joona and Nikita, shook their hands politely, and spoke for a while in Russian. Then two of them led Joona out to the black car while the other two stayed with Nikita.

  Joona was put in the back seat. One of the men, who had a thick neck and little black eyes, asked to see his passport in a voice that was not unfriendly, then asked for his cell phone. They went through his wallet and called his hotel and the car rental company. They assured him that they would drive him to the airport, but not just yet.

  Now they’re sitting at a table in a café, waiting.

  Joona takes another small sip of his cold coffee.

  If only he had his phone, he could call Anja and ask her to do a search for Jurek’s father. There has to be something about the children, about where they lived. He suppresses an urge to overturn the table, run out to the car, and drive to the airport. They have his passport, as well as his wallet and phone.

  The man with the thick neck is tapping the table gently and humming to himself. The other one, who has close-cropped ice-gray hair, has stopped reading and is sending texts from his phone.

  There’s a clatter from inside the kitchen.

  Suddenly the gray-haired man’s phone rings, and he gets up and moves away a few steps before answering.

  After a while, he ends the call and tells them that it’s time to go.

  140

  Saga is uneasy after the doctor’s nocturnal visit. Her medication is making her feel oddly cut off from reality, but she has a very strong sense that she’s in over her head and that her cover is about to be blown.

  That doctor would have raped me if I’d really been asleep, she thinks. I can’t let him touch me again.

  She just needs a little more time to complete her mission. She’s so close now.

  She’s going to save the kidnapped girl.

  The rules are simple. Under no circumstances can she let Jurek escape. But she can plan the escape with him. She can show interest and ask questions.

  The most common problem with escapes is that people have nowhere to go once they’re out. Jurek won’t make that mistake. He knows where he’s going.

  The lock on the door to the dayroom clicks open. Saga gets up from her bed, rolls her shoulders as if preparing for a fight, then walks out.

  Jurek Walter is standing by the opposite wall, waiting for her. She can’t understand how he could have gotten out into the dayroom so quickly.

  There’s no reason to stay close to the treadmill now that the cord is gone. She just hopes the range of the microphone is wide enough.

  The television isn’t turned on, but she goes and sits on the sofa.

  Jurek is standing in front of her.

  She feels as if she doesn’t have any skin, as if he has a strange ability to see straight into her bare flesh.

  He sits
down beside her, and she discreetly passes him the tablet.

  “We only need four more,” he says, looking at her with his pale eyes.

  “Yes, but I—”

  “And then we can leave this terrible place.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  When Jurek Walter reaches out his hand and touches her arm she almost jumps. He notices her fear and looks at her blankly.

  “I have a place I think you’d love,” he says. “It’s not that far away from here. It’s just an old house behind an old brick factory, but at night you could go outside and swing.”

  “A real swing?” she asks, trying to smile.

  She needs Jurek to keep talking to her. His words are little pieces that will form a pattern in the puzzle Joona is putting together.

  “It’s just an ordinary swing,” he says. “But you can swing out over the water.”

  “What, a lake, or—”

  “You’ll see. It’s lovely.”

  141

  Saga’s heart is beating so loudly it seems to her that Jurek must be aware of it. If the microphone is working, then her colleagues will be identifying every abandoned brickworks. They might even be on their way already.

  “It’s a good place to hide until the police give up the hunt,” he continues. “And you can stay in the house if you like it there—”

  “But you’ll be moving on?” she says.

  “I have to.”

  “And I can’t come with you?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Depends where you’re going.”

  Saga is aware that she might be pushing him too far, but right now he seems keen to involve her in his escape attempt.

  “You have to trust me,” he says curtly.

  “It sounds like you’re planning on dumping me at the first house we come to.”

  “No.”

  “Sounds like it,” she persists, sounding hurt. “I think I’ll stay here until I get discharged.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you sure they’re going to let you out?”

  “Yes,” she replies honestly.

  “Because you’re a good little girl who helped your sick mother when she—”

  “I wasn’t good,” Saga interrupts, pulling her arm away. “Do you think I wanted to be there? I was only a child. I was just doing what I had to do.”

  He leans back on the sofa and nods.

  “Compulsion is interesting.”

  “I wasn’t forced into it,” she protests.

  He smiles at her. “You just said you were.”

  “Not like that. I mean, I was able to do it,” she explains. “She was only in pain in the evenings, and at night.”

  Saga thinks of one morning after a particularly difficult night, when her mother made breakfast for her. She fried some eggs, made sandwiches, and poured two glasses of milk. Then they went outside in their pajamas. The grass in the garden was damp with dew, and they took the cushions from the dining chairs with them down to the hammock.

  “You gave her codeine,” Jurek says, in a strange tone of voice.

  “It helped.”

  “But those pills aren’t very strong. How many did she have to take that last night?”

  “A lot. She was in terrible pain.”

  Saga rubs her hand across her forehead and realizes that she’s perspiring heavily. She doesn’t want to talk about this. She hasn’t thought about it for years.

  “More than ten, I suppose?” Jurek asks lightly.

  “She used to take two every night, but that evening she needed much more. I spilled them on the rug, but…I don’t know, I must have given her twelve, maybe thirteen pills.”

  Saga feels the muscles in her face tighten. She’s afraid she’s going to start crying if she stays, so she gets up quickly to go to her room.

  “Your mother didn’t die of cancer,” Jurek says.

  She stops and turns toward him.

  “That’s enough,” she says.

  “She didn’t have a brain tumor,” he says.

  “I was with my mom when she died. You know nothing about her. You can’t—”

  “The headaches,” Jurek interrupts. “The headaches don’t subside the following morning if you have a tumor.”

  “That’s how it was for her,” she says firmly.

  “The pain is caused by the pressure on brain tissue and blood vessels as the tumor grows. That doesn’t pass. It just gets worse.”

  She looks into Jurek’s eyes and feels a shiver run down her back. “I…”

  Her voice is no more than a whisper. She feels like shouting and screaming, but she’s powerless.

  If she’s honest with herself, she’s always known that there was something odd about her memories. She remembers yelling at her father when she was a teenager, saying he lied about everything, that he was the biggest liar she’d ever met.

  He had told her that her mother hadn’t had cancer.

  She’d always thought he was lying to her in an effort to excuse his betrayal of her mother. Now, standing here, she’s no longer sure where the idea that her mother had a brain tumor came from. She can’t recall her mom’s ever saying she had cancer, and they never went to the hospital.

  But why did Mom cry every evening if she wasn’t sick? It doesn’t make sense. Why did she make me call Dad all the time and tell him he had to come home? Why did Mom take codeine if she wasn’t in pain? Why did she let her own daughter give her all those pills?

  Jurek’s face is a somber, rigid mask. Saga turns away and starts walking toward the door. She wants to run. She doesn’t want to hear what he’s about to tell her.

  “You killed your own mother,” he says calmly.

  142

  Saga stops abruptly. Her breathing has become shallow, but she forces herself not to show her feelings. She has to remind herself who’s in charge of this situation. He may believe that he’s deceiving her, but in fact she’s the one deceiving him.

  Saga adopts a neutral expression, then turns slowly to face him.

  “Codeine,” Jurek says, smiling joylessly. “Codeine-Meda only comes in the form of twenty-five-milligram tablets. I know precisely how many it takes to kill a human being.”

  “Mom told me to give her the pills,” she says.

  “But I think you knew she’d die,” he says. “I’m sure your mom thought you knew. She thought you wanted her to die.”

  “Fuck you,” she whispers.

  “Maybe you deserve to be locked up here forever.”

  “No.”

  He looks at her with terrifying gravity in his eyes, with metallic precision.

  “Maybe it’ll be enough if you get just one more sleeping pill,” he says. “Because yesterday Bernie said he had some Stesolid wrapped in a piece of paper, in a crack under his sink. Unless he only said it to buy time.”

  Her heart races. Bernie hid sleeping pills in his room? What’s she going to do now? She has to stop this. She can’t let Jurek get hold of the sleeping pills. What if there are enough for him to carry out his escape plan?

  “Are you going into his room?” she asks.

  “The door’s open.”

  “It would be better if I did it,” she says quickly.

  “Why?”

  Jurek is giving her a look that seems almost amused, while she tries desperately to come up with a reasonable answer.

  “If they catch me,” she says, “they’ll just think I’m addicted and—”

  “Then we won’t get any more pills,” he retorts.

  “I think I’d be able to get more from the doctor anyway,” she says.

  Jurek considers this, then nods.

  “He looks at you as if he were the captive.”

  She opens the door to Bernie’s room and goes inside.

  In the light from the dayroom, she can see that his room is an exact copy of hers. When the door closes behind her, everything goes dark. She walks over to the wall
, feeling her way around, picking up the smell of stale urine from the toilet. She reaches the sink, the edges of which are wet, as if it’s recently been cleaned.

  The doors to the dayroom will be closing in a few minutes.

  She tells herself not to think about her mother, just to concentrate on the job at hand. Her chin starts to tremble, but she manages to pull herself together, stifling the tears. She kneels down and runs her fingers across the cool underside of the sink. She reaches the wall and feels along the silicone seal but can’t find anything. A drop of water falls on her neck. She reaches farther down and touches the floor. Another drip falls between her shoulder blades. She notices that the sink is sloping slightly. That’s why the water at the edges is dripping onto her instead of draining back into the bowl.

  She feels along the underside of the sink, where it joins the wall. Her fingers find a crack. There it is. A tiny package, tucked inside. The sink creaks as she tries to grab the package. Carefully she manages to pull it out. Jurek was right. Pills. Tightly wrapped in toilet paper. She’s breathing hard as she crawls out, tucks the package in her trousers, and stands up.

  As she feels her way to the door, she dreads having to tell Jurek that she didn’t find anything, that Bernie must have been lying about the pills. But she can’t let him escape. She reaches the wall and moves along it until she finds the door and emerges into the dayroom.

  Blinking hard against the bright light, Saga looks around. Jurek isn’t there. He must have returned to his room. The clock behind the reinforced glass tells her the doors to the dayroom will be locked in a few seconds.

  143

  Anders Rönn taps lightly at the door of the surveillance room. My is sitting there reading a copy of Expo, paying no attention to the large monitor.

  “Are you coming to say good night?” she asks.

  Anders smiles back at her, sits down next to her, and watches Saga leave the dayroom and go into her room. Jurek is already lying on his bed, and of course Bernie’s room is dark. My yawns and leans back in the swivel chair.

  Leif is standing in the doorway, draining the last drops from a can of Coca-Cola.