The Sandman

by Lars Kepler

  Now she’s limping along a corridor at Karolinska Hospital, where Reidar and Mikael were taken by helicopter. Her clothes are dirty and wet, her face is streaked with blood, and all she can hear in her right ear is a loud buzzing.

  Reidar and his son are in Emergency Room 12. She opens the door and sees the author lying on a hospital bed.

  Mikael is standing beside him. He won’t let go of his father’s hand.

  Reidar is telling the male nurse over and over that he has to see his daughter.

  The moment he sees Saga, he falls silent.

  The nurse takes clean compresses from the trolley and gives them to Saga. He points at her forehead, where blood has once again started to trickle from the blackened wound on her eyebrow.

  “I’m a police officer,” Saga says, feeling for her ID.

  “You need help,” the nurse tries to say, but Saga interrupts him and asks to have the three of them taken to Felicia Kohler-Frost’s room in the infectious-diseases unit.

  “We have to see her,” she says gravely.

  The nurse makes a call, gets the go-ahead, and wheels Reidar’s bed toward the elevator.

  The bed’s wheels squeak on the vinyl floor.

  Saga follows, feeling an overwhelming urge to cry.

  Reidar is lying with his eyes closed, and Mikael is walking alongside, still holding his father by the hand.

  A young nurse meets them and shows them into an intensive-care room with subdued lighting. The only sound is the slow wheezing and ticking of the monitors.

  In the bed lies an extremely slight woman. Her long black hair is spread out over her pillow. Her eyes are closed, and her small hands rest by her sides.

  Her breath is shallow, and her face is covered with beads of sweat.

  “Felicia,” Reidar whispers, trying to reach her with his hand.

  Mikael leans his cheek toward his sister and whispers something to her with a smile.

  Saga stands behind them, staring at Felicia, the captive girl who has now been rescued from the darkness.

  EPILOGUE

  Two days later, Saga is walking through the park toward the headquarters of the Security Police. There are birds singing in the bushes and snow-covered trees.

  Her hair has started to grow out again. She has twelve neat stitches on her temple and five across her left eyebrow.

  Yesterday her boss, Verner Zandén, called and told her to report to his office at eight o’clock this morning to receive the Security Police Medal of Honor.

  The ceremony strikes her as rather odd. Three men died at Råcksta Manor, and Jurek Walter’s body was washed away, deep under the ice covering the river.

  Before she was discharged, she managed to visit Joona in the hospital. He patiently answered her questions about why Jurek and his brother had done what they did.

  Vadim Levanov fled from Leninsk with his two sons, Igor and Roman, after the disastrous accident in 1960, when an intercontinental missile exploded on the launch pad. He eventually reached Sweden, was granted a work permit and given a job at the quarry in Rotebro, with accommodations in the migrant workers’ barracks. His children lived with him in secret. He would homeschool them in the evenings and keep them hidden during the day, hoping that he would eventually be granted Swedish citizenship and the opportunity for a new life for him and his sons.

  Joona had asked for a glass of water, and when Saga leaned forward to help him drink, she could feel him shaking as if he were freezing, even though his body was radiating heat.

  Saga recalls Reidar’s account of how he met the twins by Rotebro. The twins had taken Reidar back to the quarry, where they played in the great mounds of sifted sand. One evening, Reidar was caught by one of the foremen. He was so scared of reprisals that he blamed everything on the older boys and pointed out where they lived.

  The twins were taken into the custody of the Child Welfare Committee, and because they weren’t listed in any Swedish registries, the case was passed to the Aliens Department.

  Joona explained to Saga that Jurek’s brother had pneumonia and was being treated at a hospital when Jurek was extradited to Kazakhstan. Because Jurek didn’t have any family there, he ended up in a children’s home in Pavlodar.

  From the age of thirteen, he worked on the barges trafficking the Irtysh River, and during the troubles in the years after Stalin’s death, he was forcibly recruited by a Chechen militia group. They took the fifteen-year-old Jurek to a suburb of Grozny and turned him into a soldier.

  “The brothers were sent to different countries,” Joona said in a low voice.

  “That’s crazy,” Saga whispered.

  Sweden had little experience with immigrants in those days, and had no effective way of dealing with them. Mistakes were made, and Jurek’s twin brother was sent to Russia as soon as he was well enough. He ended up at Children’s Home 67, in the Kuzminki district of southeastern Moscow, and was written off as mentally handicapped as an aftereffect of his illness. When Jurek, after many years as a soldier, left Chechnya and managed to track down his brother, the brother had been transferred to a mental hospital, the Serbsky Institute, and was a complete wreck.

  Saga is so absorbed in her thoughts about the twin brothers that she doesn’t notice Corinne Meilleroux walking toward the security doors. They come close to colliding. Corinne’s hair is tied up and she’s wearing a black trench coat and high-heeled boots. For once, Saga is conscious of the way she’s dressed. Maybe she should have chosen something different from her usual jeans and thick parka.

  “Very impressive,” Corinne says, smiling, and gives her a hug.

  * * *

  —

  Saga and corinne get out of the elevator and walk side by side down the corridor leading to their boss’s office. Nathan Pollock, Carlos Eliasson, and Verner Zandén are already waiting for them. On the table is a bottle of Taittinger and five champagne glasses.

  The door closes, and Saga shakes hands with the three men.

  “Let’s start with a moment of silence in memory of our colleague Samuel Mendel and his family, and all the other victims,” Carlos says.

  Saga lowers her head and has trouble maintaining a steady gaze. In front of her, she can see the first pictures of the police operation in the industrial complex where the old brick factory used to be. Toward morning, it had become clear that no victims would be found alive. In the muddy snow, the forensics officers had begun placing numbered signs by the fourteen graves. Samuel Mendel’s two sons had been found tied together in a shaft, covered by a sheet of corrugated metal. Rebecka’s remains were found buried ten meters away, in a drum fitted with a plastic air tube.

  The voices are drowned out by Saga’s tinnitus. She squeezes her eyes closed and tries to understand.

  The traumatized twins made their way to Poland, where Roman killed a man, took his passport, and became Jurek Walter. Together they caught a ferry from Swinoujscie to Ystad, in Sweden, and then traveled up through the country.

  Middle-aged by that point, the brothers returned to the place where they had been separated from their father, to Barrack 4 in the migrant workers’ accommodations at a quarry in Rotebro.

  Their father had spent decades trying to trace the boys but couldn’t travel to Russia himself because he would’ve been sent to the Gulag. He had written hundreds of letters in an effort to find his children, and had waited for them to return, but just one year before the brothers arrived in Sweden, the old man had given up and hanged himself.

  Learning of his father’s suicide had wrecked what little was left of Jurek’s soul.

  “He started to draw up a circle of blood and revenge,” Joona said.

  Everyone who had contributed to the breakup of his family would experience the same fate. Jurek would take their children from them, their grandchildren and wives, sisters and brothers. The guilty parties would be left alone, just as their father had been in the quarry. They would have to wait, year after year. Only after they had killed themselves would those of the
ir relatives who had survived be allowed to return.

  That was why the twins didn’t kill their victims. It wasn’t the people who were buried whom Jurek wanted to punish, but those left behind. The captives were placed in coffins or drums with air tubes. Most of them died after a few days, but some lived for years.

  The bodies that were discovered in Lill-Jan’s Forest and in the vicinity of the industrial complex in Albano cast a cruel light on Jurek’s terrible revenge. He was following a ruthless logic, which was why his actions and his choice of victims didn’t seem to fit the pattern set by other serial killers.

  It was going to take the police a while to fill in all the details, but it was becoming apparent how the victims were connected. Apart from Reidar Frost, who revealed the existence of the boys to the foreman in the quarry, they included those responsible for the family’s fate at the Child Welfare Committee, and the case officers at the Aliens Department.

  Saga thinks of Jeremy Magnusson, who was a young man when he dealt with the twins’ case at the Aliens Department. Jurek took his wife, son, and grandson, and then finally his daughter, Agneta. When Jeremy hanged himself in his hunting cabin, Jurek went to the grave where Agneta was being kept alive to let her out.

  It dawns on Saga that Jurek actually had been in the process of disinterring her, just as he’d claimed to Joona. He had opened the coffin, sat by the graveside, and watched her blind fumbling. In Jurek’s mind, she was a version of him, a child doomed to return to nothing.

  Joona explained that Jurek’s brother was so psychologically damaged that he lived among their father’s old possessions in the abandoned barracks. He did everything that Jurek told him to do, learned to handle sedatives, and helped his brother seize people and watch over the graves. The shelter that their father had built in anticipation of a nuclear war acted as a sort of holding cell before the victims could be placed in graves.

  Saga is torn from her thoughts when her boss breaks the silence and taps a glass. With great solemnity, he fetches a blue box from the safe, snaps it open, and takes out a gold medal. A wreathed star on a blue-and-yellow ribbon.

  Saga feels her heart clench unexpectedly when she hears Verner say that she has demonstrated remarkable courage, bravery, and intelligence. Carlos’s eyes are moist, and Nathan smiles at her with a serious look in his eyes.

  Saga takes a step forward, and Verner affixes the medal to her chest.

  Corinne claps her hands and grins. Carlos pops the champagne, firing the cork at the ceiling. Someone makes a toast, and Saga receives their congratulations.

  “What are you going to do now?” Pollock asks.

  “I’m on sick leave, but after this…I don’t know.”

  She knows there’s no way she can sit around in her dusty apartment with its withered plants, with her guilt and memories.

  “Saga Bauer, you have done a great deed for your country,” Verner says, then goes on to explain that, unfortunately, he’s going to have to keep her medal locked in the safe, seeing as the whole case is confidential and already erased from all public records.

  He carefully removes the medal from Saga, puts it back in its box, and closes the safe door.

  The sun is shining in a hazy sky when saga emerges from the subway station.

  After they arrested Jurek, Samuel Mendel and Joona Linna ended up on his revenge list. His twin brother seized Samuel’s family and was closing in on Summa and Lumi when they were killed in a car crash.

  Mikael and Felicia were kept in the capsule. Maybe Jurek never had a chance to give his brother orders about where to bury them. It’s not exactly clear why Mikael and Felicia were held captive for all the years that Jurek was in solitary confinement in the secure psychiatric unit. His brother gave them scraps of food and made sure they couldn’t escape. Perhaps he was waiting for orders from Jurek, as usual.

  Presumably, Jurek hadn’t foreseen how restrictive the verdict from the Court of Appeal would be: a life sentence and no contact with the outside world.

  Jurek bided his time and formulated a plan as the years passed. The brothers had probably each been trying to work out a solution when Susanne Hjälm chose to give Jurek the letter from a lawyer. It’s impossible to know now what the encrypted letter said, but the evidence suggests that Jurek’s brother was telling him how to get in touch with him and giving him a status report about Joona Linna and the two surviving captives.

  Jurek needed to get out, and he realized that he could create an opportunity if he could only smuggle a letter out to the PO box address given in his brother’s letter.

  Jurek managed to make his letter look like a plea for legal help. In fact, it was an order to release Mikael. Jurek knew that the news would reach Joona, and that the police would engage him to find Felicia. He didn’t know at that point what form this mission would take, but he was convinced it would give him the opening he had been waiting for.

  Because no one had attempted to negotiate with him about finding the girl, he suspected that one of the unit’s new patients might be an undercover police officer. When Saga tried to save Bernie Larsson, he knew for certain that she was a cop.

  Jurek had been watching the young doctor, Anders Rönn, as he overstepped his authority and enjoyed the power he wielded in the secure unit. When Jurek understood that the young doctor was fascinated with Saga, he knew how his escape could be accomplished. All he had to do was lure the young doctor—with his keys and pass card—into Saga’s cell. There was no way the doctor would be able to resist this sleeping beauty. Jurek spent several nights wetting toilet paper, drying it against his face, and creating a head that would make it look as if he was asleep in his bed.

  * * *

  —

  Saga stops outside the bakery in the cold wind. She recalls what Joona had said about Jurek’s lying to everyone. Jurek listened and pieced together everything he found out, using it to his own advantage and mixing lies with truth to make his lies stronger.

  Saga turns and makes her way across Maria Square.

  She didn’t want to kill her mom. She knows that. It wasn’t intentional.

  Saga walks slowly, thinking about her dad. Lars-Erik Bauer. A cardiologist at Sankt Göran Hospital. She hasn’t spoken to him since she was thirteen years old. Yet Jurek made her remember how he used to push her on the swing at her grandparents’ when she was little, before Mom got sick.

  A shiver runs down her neck and through her arms.

  A man walks past, pulling a little girl on a sled.

  Jurek lied to everyone.

  Why does she think he was telling her the truth?

  * * *

  —

  Saga sits down on a snow-dusted park bench, takes her phone out of her pocket, and calls the Needle.

  “Nils Åhlén, Forensic Medicine Department.”

  “Hello, Saga Bauer here,” she says. “I’d like—”

  “The body from the car crash has been identified now,” the Needle interrupts. “His name’s Anders Rönn.”

  A short silence follows. “That wasn’t what I wanted to ask.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Saga watches the snow blowing off the statue of Thor raising his hammer against the Midgard Serpent. She hears herself ask, “How many Codeine-Meda pills would it take to kill someone?”

  “Child or adult?” the Needle asks, without seeming remotely surprised.

  “Adult,” Saga replies, swallowing hard.

  She hears the Needle breathe through his nose as he taps at his keyboard.

  “It would depend on size and tolerance, but between thirty-five and forty-five pills would probably be a fatal dose.”

  “Forty-five?” Saga asks. “But if she was only given thirteen, could that kill her? Could she die from thirteen pills?”

  “Not likely. She’d fall asleep and wake up with—”

  “So she took the rest herself,” Saga says under her breath.

  She can feel tears of relief in her eyes. Jurek was a liar. That was a
ll he did. He destroyed people with his lies.

  All her life, she’s hated her father for leaving them. For never coming home. For letting her mom die.

  She has to find out the truth. There’s no other way.

  She calls the operator and asks to be put through to Lars-Erik Bauer in Enskede.

  Saga walks slowly across the square as the phone rings.

  “This is Pellerina,” a child’s voice says.

  Saga is rendered speechless and ends the call without saying anything. She looks up at the white sky above Sankt Pauls Church.

  “Christ,” she mutters, and dials the number again.

  She waits in the snow until the child’s voice answers a second time.

  “Hello, Pellerina,” she says. “I’d like to talk to Lars-Erik, please.”

  “Who may I say is calling?” the girl asks.

  “My name’s Saga,” she whispers.

  “Oh! I have a big sister named Saga,” Pellerina says. “But I’ve never met her.”

  Saga can’t speak. There’s a lump in her throat. She hears Pellerina pass the phone to someone and say that Saga wants to speak to him.

  “This is Lars-Erik,” a familiar voice says.

  Saga takes a deep breath. It’s too late for anything but the truth.

  “Dad—it’s me. I have to ask…when Mom died…were the two of you married?”

  “No,” he replies instantly. “We’d gotten divorced two years earlier, when you were five. She never let me see you. I had a lawyer who was going to help me to…”

  He falls silent. Saga closes her eyes and tries to stop shaking.

  “Mom said you’d abandoned us,” she says. “She said you couldn’t deal with her illness and that you didn’t want me.”

  “Maj was ill. She was mentally ill, bipolar and…I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  “I called you that night,” she says.