The Fire Witness

by Lars Kepler

  The rain keeps beating down. Mirja picks up the radio and calls her colleague Lasse Bengtsson.

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  “Raining like hell, but otherwise not much. Not a single car,” he says. “Wait, now I see a truck, a huge tractor-trailer. On Highway 330.”

  “He’s the driver who placed the call,” she says.

  “Then where the hell is the Toyota?” asks Lasse. “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes and I haven’t seen it. Unless the car is a UFO, it should reach you in less than five minutes.”

  “Just a minute,” Mirja says quickly, and cuts off communication. She can see headlights in the distance.

  26

  Mirja Zlatnek leaves the squad car and peers through the curtain of rain at the approaching car. She places one hand on her holstered gun as she walks toward it and motions for it to stop. Water runs over the road and puddles in the grass at the bottom of the ditch. Her own shadow cast by the rotating blue light behind her leaps around on the asphalt.

  Mirja sees that the car is slowing down just as she hears a call come through on her radio. She stays on the road. It sounds as if the voices on the radio are coming from inside a can. There’s hiss and crackle, but she can tell what’s being said.

  “There’s blood everywhere,” a voice says. Another body has been found at Birgittagården. A woman in her fifties.

  The vehicle swings to the shoulder as it comes to a stop. Mirja Zlatnek walks over to the driver’s side. The vehicle is a Mazda pickup truck. The driver’s door opens and a huge man in a green hunting vest gets out. He has shoulder-length hair, a powerful nose, and narrow eyes. He’s smiling broadly.

  “Are you the only person in the vehicle?” asks Mirja, wiping water from her face.

  He nods and looks away toward the forest.

  “Move aside,” she says as she reaches the vehicle.

  The man takes a small step back and Mirja leans forward to look inside the truck’s cab. Her hair is soaked and water runs down her back. It’s hard to see anything through the windshield. A newspaper is spread out on the driver’s seat. She can tell he was sitting on it. She walks around and peers into the tiny backseat compartment. Nothing but a thermos and an old blanket.

  There’s another call on her radio, but she can’t make out the words.

  The huge man’s hunting vest is already turning dark green from the rain. She hears a scratching sound, something scraping against the metal. She turns to look at the man. He’s come closer, or perhaps she’s just imagining it, she’s no longer sure. He’s taking a good look at her, neck to knee, and his fleshy forehead wrinkles.

  “Do you live around here?” she asks.

  She rubs the mud off the license plate with her foot and writes down the number. Then she walks around the front of the vehicle.

  “No,” he says slowly.

  There’s a pink sports bag on the passenger seat. Mirja keeps going around the truck. There’s a tarp held down by bungee cords over the flatbed and something’s underneath it.

  “Where are you headed?” asks Mirja.

  The man doesn’t move but he follows her with his eyes. Suddenly she spots a trickle of blood running out from beneath the tarp in one of the grooves otherwise filled with mud and pine needles.

  “What’s this?” she asks.

  When he doesn’t answer, Mirja reaches over the side of the flatbed. It’s not easy to reach—she has to press against the wet truck. The man moves to the side. She can just reach the tarp with her fingertips, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the man. He’s licking his lips as she begins to pull the tarp away. She unsnaps the holster of her gun and then turns quickly to look at the flatbed, where she sees the slender hoof of a young deer, a fawn.

  The man stops moving, but Mirja still puts her hand on her gun as she walks away from the pickup truck.

  “Where’d you shoot the deer?”

  “It was roadkill.”

  “Did you mark the spot?”

  He spits on the ground between his own feet.

  “Please show me your driver’s license,” she says.

  He doesn’t reply and shows no indication that he is going to comply.

  “Your driver’s license,” she says again, and she can hear the insecurity in her voice.

  “I’m through with you,” the man says and gets into his truck.

  “It’s the law to report any animals which have been hit—”

  The man is in the driver’s seat and slams the door. He starts the truck and drives around the squad car, even though two wheels dip into the ditch. As he swings back up onto the road, Mirja thinks that she should have inspected the vehicle more carefully. She should have removed the entire tarp and checked to see if anything else was underneath it.

  She can hear a crow cawing from a perch in the treetops. Then she hears the noise of a vehicle coming up behind her. She whirls around with her pistol out, but she can’t see anything in the downpour.

  27

  Mads Jensen is on his radio, being told off by his manager. He’s doing his best to explain the situation while his boss is yelling about missed times and ruined logistics.

  “But—” Mads keeps trying to break in. “Don’t you have to help other peo—”

  “The only help you’ll get from me is a cut in your pay!”

  “Well, thank you very much, then,” Mads says, and breaks off communication.

  The rain thunders on the roof of the cab. Pia is staring into the side-view mirror, looking at the trailer and watching the trees fade into the distance. Mads takes out a piece of nicotine gum. He’s staring straight ahead at the road. The rumbling from the motor and the hiss of heavy tires on wet asphalt fills the cab.

  Pia glances at the calendar, which is swinging with the movement of the truck. A curvy woman in a swimming pool holding a plastic swan. Beneath the picture is the date, August 1968. The road is sloping downhill and the weight of the load of bar iron is making the tractor-trailer speed up.

  In the distance, a blue light flickers through the gray sheet of rain. A squad car is blocking the road.

  Pia’s heart begins to pound. She stares at the police car and the woman in her dark blue sweater waving for them to pull over. Even before the tractor-trailer has come to a complete stop, Pia is opening the door. The sound of the engine is overwhelming.

  She feels dizzy as she climbs down and runs over to the waiting policewoman.

  “Where’s the car?” asks the policewoman.

  “What are you saying?”

  Pia reads the woman’s wet face and is frightened by the look. She feels as if her legs are about to give way beneath her.

  “Did you see the car as you passed it?” the policewoman asks.

  “Passed it?” says Pia in confusion.

  Mads joins them.

  “We haven’t seen anything on the road,” he says. “You must have put up the roadblock too late.”

  “Too late? I drove up here on this road from the other direction!”

  “So where the hell is the car, then?” asks the trucker.

  Mirja Zlatnek runs back to the patrol car and radios her colleague.

  “Lasse?” she asks, out of breath.

  “I’ve been trying to get you,” said Lasse. “You weren’t answering—”

  “I was—”

  “Did you get him?”

  “Where the hell is the car?” She is practically screaming. “The truck is here, but no car has come past!”

  “There aren’t any other roads,” he says.

  “We have to put out a bulletin and close Highway 86 in the other direction.”

  “I’m on it,” he says and breaks off.

  Pia leans into the squad car. The rain has soaked through her clothes. Mirja Zlatnek is sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open.

  “You told me you’d get him,” Pia says.

  “Yes, I—”

  “I believed you.”

  “I know. I don’t understand
it, either. It’s impossible to drive at high speed on this road, and there’s no chance the car could have reached the bridge before Lasse did.”

  “But it has to be somewhere,” Pia says. She pulls off her pastor’s collar.

  “Wait a minute,” Mirja says.

  She contacts the central station.

  “This is car 321. We need a roadblock immediately, before Aspen. There’s a small road there. If you know where the road is you can drive from Kävsta up to Myckelsjö. That’s right. Who’s going there? Good, I imagine it’ll take him eight to ten minutes.”

  Mirja gets back out of the car and stares down the road as if she still expects the Toyota to appear.

  “Where’s my boy?” Pia asks her.

  “There’s no other place for them to go,” Mirja says, trying to be patient. “I understand your worry, but we will get them. They must have turned off the road somewhere, but there’s nowhere for them to go.”

  She wipes the rain from her eyes. “We’re closing the last road and then we’ll get the helicopter from the rescue station.”

  Pia unbuttons the top button of her shirt and then leans on the front of the squad car. She’s breathing much too heavily and it feels as if her chest has burst open. She thinks she should be making demands, but she can’t think clearly. She is desperate and afraid.

  28

  A large white command bus is parked in the middle of the yard between the buildings at Birgittagården. Command Central is inside. A group of men and women sit around a table covered in maps and laptops, analyzing the investigation, until a bulletin comes in about a kidnapped boy and they stop.

  Roadblocks have been thrown up on Highway 330 and Highway 86 going north, as well as at the bridge south of Indal. It should be doable, their colleagues say, to stop the kidnapper—but they hear nothing more for the next ten minutes at least. Then the radio breaks in again.

  “It’s gone!” a policewoman reports breathlessly. “The car should have been here, but it hasn’t shown up. We’ve closed each and every damned road. It’s just gone. I don’t know what to do.” Mirja sounds exhausted. “The mother is sitting in my car. I’m going to try to talk to her.”

  The police in the bus listen silently; then they all turn to the map spread out on the table. Bosse Norling traces the route of Highway 86 with his finger.

  “If they’ve blocked here and here, then the car can’t just disappear,” he says. “Obviously, the kidnapper could have driven it into a garage in Bäck or Bjällsta, or onto a logging road, but that would be a damned strange thing to do.”

  “And there’s nowhere to go,” Sonja Rask says.

  “Am I the only one who’s thinking that Vicky Bennet could have taken this car?” asks Bosse.

  The rain is starting to ease up, but water is still washing down the bus’s windows.

  Sonja turns back to her computer and starts to go through lists of pedophiles and custody disputes via the police intranet.

  “Nine times out of ten,” Gunnarsson begins as he leans back and starts peeling a banana, “these kinds of events solve themselves. I think she had a guy with her in the car. They fought and he took off, leaving her at the side of the road.”

  “She’s not married,” says Sonja.

  “According to our statistics,” Gunnarsson says, keeping his pedagogic tone of voice, “most of the children born in Sweden are born outside marriage and—”

  “Here we go,” said Sonja. “Pia Abrahamsson requested sole custody of her son, Dante, and the father tried to contest it.”

  “So we’re going to drop the possible connection to Vicky Bennet?” asks Bosse.

  “Look for the father first,” says Joona.

  “On it,” says Sonja. She heads to the back of the bus.

  “What did you find beneath Vicky Bennet’s window?” Joona asks one of the technicians.

  “There wasn’t anything on the ground. We found prints and some coagulation traces on the windowsill.”

  “And what did you find near the edge of the forest?”

  “Nothing, and then it started to rain.”

  “But apparently Vicky Bennet headed directly into the forest,” Joona says thoughtfully. He watches Bosse Norling, who is leaning over the map, place a pin on Birgittagården and then draw a circle around it with a compass.

  “Vicky didn’t take the car,” says Gunnarsson. “It doesn’t take three whole damn hours to get from the forest to Highway 86 and then go—”

  “On the other hand, she was running at night. It’s not easy to find your way in the dark. She could have walked all the way there,” Bosse says. He jabs the map to the east of a forested area and then traces a line going north.

  “The timing would work,” Joona says.

  “Dante’s father is in the Canary Islands right now,” Sonja calls from the back of the bus.

  Olle Gunnarsson swears, then picks up the radio to call Mirja Zlatnek.

  “Gunnarsson here,” he says. “Has the mother given us her statement?”

  “Yes, and I—”

  “Can she describe the suspect?”

  “It wasn’t easy. The mother is emotional and the picture of the suspect is somewhat unclear,” Mirja says. “The mother is obviously in shock. She’s talking about a skeleton with rags hanging down coming out of the forest. A girl with a bloody face and twigs instead of arms.”

  “But she says it’s a girl?”

  “I’ve recorded her testimony, but it’s really odd. She keeps saying the strangest things. She’ll have to calm down before we can get a decent—”

  “But she says it’s a girl?”

  “Yes. Over and over.”

  29

  Joona stops his car at the roadblock on Highway 330. He greets one of the policemen on duty, shows his ID, and then keeps driving along the road, paralleling the Indal River. He’s been told that the students from Birgittagården are being housed at the Hotel Ibis in Sundsvall; Daniel Grim has been checked into the psychiatric ward of the provincial hospital; the housemother, Margot Lundin, is now at her home in Timrå; and Faduumo Axmed, who works part-time as an assistant, is with his parents in Vänersborg.

  When they heard Mirja Zlatnek tell them that Pia Abrahamsson insisted she’d seen a small girl with rags on her hands, everyone understood that Vicky Bennet had taken the car with the little boy in the backseat.

  “It’s a mystery how she didn’t get caught in the roadblocks,” Bosse Norling said.

  They’d put a helicopter up, but the pilot could not see the car anywhere. Not in Indal and not on any of the logging roads.

  It’s not much of a mystery, Joona thought. The logical explanation is that she managed to find a hiding place before she reached any of the roadblocks. But where? She must know someone who lives in the village, someone who owns a garage.

  Joona asked to speak with the girls at the hotel and agreed that there should be a child psychologist and a support person from the Office of Victim Services in the room with him.

  He’s been thinking over the girls’ behavior when they were in the small house. Gunnarsson had returned with the two who’d run into the forest. The little red-haired girl had been watching television while banging the back of her head against the wall. The girl named Indie had said putting hands over her face was a game Vicky played. Then everyone realized Vicky had disappeared and had started screaming and carrying on. A couple of the girls had been sure she was still sleeping off a heavy dose of Stesolid. The girl called Almira had spat on the floor and Indie had rubbed her eyes so hard that she’d smeared blue eye shadow over her hands.

  Joona thinks that the red-haired girl, Tuula, was onto something. Tuula was so pale even her eyelashes were white. She wore shiny pink sport shorts. She’d said something while the others were all jabbering away.

  She’d said that Vicky must have run off to meet the guy she likes to fuck.

  30

  The two-star Hotel Ibis is on Trädgårdsgatan not far from the police station in Sundsvall
. When Joona pulls the front door open, he is greeted by the smell of vacuum cleaners, musty carpets, and cigarette smoke. There’s a dish at the reception desk filled with stale candies. The police have assigned the students from Birgittagården to five adjacent rooms and placed two uniformed officers in the hallway. Joona strides over the worn wooden flooring.

  The psychologist, Lisa Jern, is waiting for Joona outside one of the bedrooms. Her dark hair is streaked with gray. Her mouth is narrow and nervous.

  “Is Tuula here already?” asks Joona.

  “Yes, but wait,” she says as Joona lays his hand on the door handle. “From what I understand, you are an observer from the National Police—”

  “A little boy’s in danger,” Joona says.

  “Tuula is hardly speaking, and my recommendation as a child psychologist is that you wait until she starts speaking about it on her own initiative.”

  “No time for that.” Joona pushes down the handle.

  “Wait. It’s really important that you keep yourself on the same level as the children. They must not feel as if they’re sick or—”

  Joona is already in the room. All the furniture has beech-wood veneer and the floor is covered in green wall-to-wall carpet. Tuula Lehti is sitting with her back to a row of windows. She’s a tiny girl, just twelve years old, and she’s still dressed in her pink shorts and tennis shoes.

  Between the slats of the venetian blinds, Joona can see the parked cars in the street. Standing in the farthest corner of the room, there’s a man wearing a blue flannel shirt, with his hair combed back. He’s tapping the screen on his cell phone. Joona assumes he is the support person for the students.

  Joona sits directly across from Tuula and studies her. She has light blond eyebrows and her red hair is straight and needs washing.

  “We met briefly this morning,” Joona says.

  Tuula crosses her freckled arms over her chest. Her lips are narrow and almost colorless.