The Fire Witness

by Lars Kepler

  They walk out to the sidewalk and into the glare of the setting sun. Tobias stops to look at Joona. He scratches one of his eyebrows and then starts sliding away while peering down the street.

  “You were about to tell me where she could be hiding,” Joona says.

  “I don’t even remember his name,” Tobias says, shading his eyes with his hand. “He’s the stepfather of a girl I used to know, Mickan. I know she used to sleep on a sofa bed at his place, near Mosebacke Square. Don’t know why I’m going on and on.”

  “You know the address?”

  Tobias shakes his head and pulls at the heavy suitcase.

  “A little white house across from the theater,” he says.

  Joona watches him disappear around the corner with his stolen goods. He thinks about driving to Mosebacke Square and knocking on doors, but something is holding him to this place. A rising sense of unease chills him. It’s evening, and it’s been a while since he ate or slept. It’s getting more difficult to hold his headache at bay and to keep thinking. Joona starts to walk toward his car but then stops. He’s just figured out what didn’t fit.

  He has to smile to himself.

  How could he have missed it? He must be very tired not to realize it until now. Perhaps it was too obvious, like the missing link in a classic detective novel.

  Tobias said he’d followed the case in the tabloids, yet he talked to Joona as if Vicky were alive. Journalists throughout the country have been writing and broadcasting since Wednesday that Vicky and Dante drowned in the Indal River. They’ve been howling about the thoughtlessness of the police in aggravating the mother’s suffering by categorizing Vicky’s file as a missing person report.

  Tobias knows that Vicky is alive.

  This brings to mind an earlier observation.

  Joona is sure he has recently seen something without realizing its significance, so instead of following Tobias, he turns around and returns to Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 9.

  He remembers the pink balloon that fell from the door and rolled weightlessly across the marble floor of the foyer. There were a number of footprints made by children. They’d been playing and running back and forth from the inner courtyard.

  Joona thinks that Vicky could be barefoot since she’d lost her shoes in the river. He opens the front door and scrutinizes the floor and sees that his mind did catch something correctly.

  One pair of the bare footprints leads directly from the front to the basement door but not back again.

  116

  Joona follows the footprints to the metal door and takes out the keys he stole from Tobias’s apartment. He unlocks the door and finds the switch for the ceiling light. The heavy door shuts behind him. It’s dark for a moment and then the ceiling lamp flickers on. The walls stream cool air and the putrid odor from the garbage room reaches him from one of the vents. He stands still and listens before he keeps walking down the stairs.

  He reaches the bottom and sees an overflowing bike-storage area. He squeezes past bicycles, sleds, and baby strollers and starts down a long hall lined on one side with wire-mesh cages that serve as storage lockers. Insulated pipes run directly below the ceiling.

  There’s a loud rumble as the elevator motor starts up. The odor of urine permeates the still air.

  He hears someone move at the far end of the basement.

  Joona remembers the photograph of Vicky, which was used for the general alarm. It’s hard to imagine that shy, blushing face contorting with uncontrollable rage. The only way for her to be able to swing that hammer would be with twice her natural strength. He tries to imagine her standing in front of him, swinging the hammer and rubbing blood from her eyes before striking again.

  Joona tries to breathe quietly while he uses his left hand to unbutton his jacket and pull out his weapon. He’s not yet used to its heft and balance.

  In one of the storage cages, there’s a brown rocking horse with its nose pressed against the wire. Behind it there are steel-edged skis, poles, and a brass curtain rod.

  He shudders as he realizes that Vicky could have hidden among the heap of sleds he’s already walked past and could be sneaking up behind him.

  There’s a rustling sound and Joona turns.

  The hall is empty.

  The sewage pipes rattle in their place against the ceiling.

  As he turns back, the ceiling light goes off automatically. He can see nothing and reaches out with his hand until it touches the wire mesh of a storage locker. Farther away, he sees a small light glow against the plastic case of the circuit breaker. It’s a yellow flicker, just enough light for someone to find the button for the ceiling light.

  Joona waits for his eyes to adjust to the dark and then starts to walk.

  The light disappears. Joona stands still and listens. It takes him a moment to realize that someone has walked in front of the yellow light.

  He squats down to make himself a smaller target.

  The elevator machinery kicks in. Then the switch is visible again.

  Joona moves back and at the same time hears someone shuffling down the hall toward him. Someone is there. Someone is at one of the storage lockers in front of him.

  “Vicky,” he says into the darkness.

  The door is opened to the basement and voices are heard from the top of the stairs. Someone is heading for the bicycle-storage area while the ceiling light flickers.

  Joona uses the moment. He takes a few quick strides to the end of the hall and aims his gun at a huddled figure.

  The light comes on and stays on. The basement door closes and the voices fade in the distance.

  Joona holsters his pistol and kicks the door to the storage locker open. He hurries inside.

  The figure inside is much smaller than he’d thought. The bent back heaves with her breathing.

  Vicky Bennet is the girl huddling there.

  Her mouth has been taped shut and her arms are tied to the wire mesh behind her back.

  Joona reaches her and tries to loosen the ropes. Her head is bent and she’s breathing hard. Her matted hair is hanging in front of her face.

  “Vicky, I’m going to get you free—”

  She kicks him hard in the forehead just as he bends forward.

  The kick is so hard he stumbles backward. She keeps kicking him in the chest. Her shoulders are going to be dislocated by the force she’s using. She kicks again, but this time Joona blocks her kick with his hand. She’s screaming underneath the tape and throws her body forward. An entire section of wire mesh gives way. Vicky is pulling with both arms and is trying to reach a sharp steel lathe when Joona knocks her to the cement floor.

  He holds her still with one knee and puts handcuffs on her before he unties the ropes and rips off the tape from her mouth.

  “I’m going to kill you!” screams Vicky.

  “I’m a detective at—”

  “So rape me, go ahead, I don’t care, I’ll find you and kill you and all you—”

  “Vicky,” Joona repeats in a louder voice, “I’m a detective inspector and I need to know where Dante is!”

  117

  Vicky Bennet is panting through her half-open mouth and staring at him with her dark eyes. There are patches of dried blood and mud on her face and she seems exhausted.

  “If you are a police officer, you have to stop Tobias,” she says hoarsely.

  “I just talked to him,” Joona says. “He was on his way to sell some tablets which he—”

  “That son of a bitch!” she says, still panting.

  “Vicky, you realize I have to take you to the police station.”

  “Yeah, whatever, I don’t give a fuck.”

  “First, please, tell me where the boy is.”

  “Tobias took him. I trusted Tobias,” Vicky says, and looks away. Her body starts to shake. “I shouldn’t have trusted him again.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “You’re not going to listen,” she says as she looks at Joona with tears in her eyes.

/>   “I’m listening.”

  “Tobias promised to take Dante back to his mother.”

  “He hasn’t done that,” Joona says.

  “I know. I trusted him. I’m such an idiot … I …” Her voice breaks and panic glitters in her dark eyes. “Don’t you get it? He’s going to sell the boy! He’s going to sell him!”

  “What are you—”

  “Don’t you get it? You let him go!” she screams.

  “But what do you mean by ‘sell him’?”

  “Tobbe’s selling the boy to someone who will sell him again, and you will never be able to find him!”

  Now they’re both running through the bicycle-storage area and up the steep stairs. Joona is holding one hand around Vicky’s thin lower arm while he takes out his cell phone and starts calling the county communications center.

  “Send a car to Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 9 to pick up a murder suspect,” he says quickly. “I need help to catch a kidnapping suspect …”

  They head through the entrance and out onto the sidewalk. Joona points out the direction toward his car and says to the duty officer who answered the phone, “The kidnapping suspect is Tobias Lundhagen and … wait—” Joona turns to Vicky. “What kind of a car does he have?”

  “A big black one. I’d recognize it if I saw it.”

  “What make?”

  “No idea.”

  “Do you know if it’s—”

  “What the hell!” Vicky screams. “Sorry.”

  Joona ends the call and takes both of Vicky’s shoulders. “Who is he planning to sell Dante to?”

  “I don’t know. God, I don’t know.”

  “How do you know that they’re planning to sell him? Did he say so?” Joona looks into her frightened eyes.

  “I know him. I …”

  “What is it?”

  Vicky’s voice is weak as she says, “The slaughterhouse area. That’s where we need to go. The slaughterhouse area.”

  They run to his car. He opens the door to the front passenger seat and she gets in, her handcuffed arms behind her. Joona slams the door and sprints to the driver’s side, throws himself in, and hits the gas. Gravel spews from the spinning tires. Vicky falls sideways as Joona turns sharply onto Timmermansgatan.

  In one fluid movement, Vicky pulls her handcuffed hands beneath her bottom and feet and rests them in her lap.

  “Put on your seat belt,” Joona says.

  They’re doing one hundred kilometers an hour when Joona touches the brakes. The car’s tires squeal as it swings into Hornsgatan. A woman is standing in the middle of the street looking at her cell phone.

  “Idiot!” Vicky screeches.

  Joona passes the woman on the wrong side of the median and almost collides with a bus head-on but manages to swing back into his lane. He drives past Maria Square and speeds up. Near Maria Church, a homeless man is digging through a garbage can and then walks into the street without looking, his sack thrown across his back.

  Vicky holds her breath and shrinks down. Joona steers up the curb into the bike lane and down again. An oncoming car honks, but Joona increases his speed after he’s passed the long wall across from the church and ignores the traffic lights as he turns right into the Söder Tunnel.

  Lights along the walls pulse monotonously into the car as they race through the tunnel. Vicky’s dirty face is frozen. Her lips are cracked.

  “Why the slaughterhouse area?” asks Joona.

  “That’s where Tobias sold me.”

  118

  The traffic is light in the Söder Tunnel and Joona is able to drive extremely fast. There’s a crackle on Joona’s radio as he requests backup from the police as well as an ambulance. He says he’s heading for the slaughterhouse area in Johanneshov, but explains he does not yet have a specific address.

  Beside him, Vicky gnaws on her nails.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he says as his car thumps over the remains of a truck tire.

  The long tunnel ends in a curve between concrete walls, forcing Joona to slow down. The sun has now set and the yellow light from lamps strung overhead across the street flash like a strobe over Vicky’s pale face. The car speeds up.

  “Drive faster,” she says, although she’s bracing herself against the glove compartment as if it would protect her in a crash. “I said I’d pay double if he’d get money and a passport for me. He promised he’d return Dante to his mother, and I believed him. Can you believe it? After all he’s done to me.”

  She starts hitting her head with her fists.

  “How can anyone be as stupid as me?” she says. “All he wanted was Dante. He whacked me with a pipe and locked me up. I was so stupid. I shouldn’t even be alive.”

  On the other side of Hammarbyleden’s water, they pass beneath the viaduct of Nynäsvägen and around the Globen Arena. The arena looks like a dirty white celestial body next to the soccer stadium.

  They drive toward a large enclosed area with industrial buildings and parked trailers. Neon signs hang over both lanes of traffic. White letters on a red background tell them they’re in the slaughterhouse area. The booms are up, so they drive straight in, tires squealing.

  “Where to now?” asks Joona as they pass a gray warehouse.

  Vicky is biting her lip as she looks around.

  “I don’t know.”

  119

  The sky is dark, but neon signs and streetlights illuminate the maze of the industrial area. Almost all work has ended for the day, but on a cross street deep in the maze, a crane is lifting a blue container. The machine is making a grating, scraping noise.

  Joona drives past a dirty building with a bent sign advertising steaks and is coming up to some green sheet-metal buildings next to a turnaround. The steel gates are closed.

  They drive past a yellow-brick building with a loading dock and rusty containers and turn at the meat center.

  They haven’t seen a single person.

  They pass a less well-lit street. Garbage cans, old trucks, and large blower ducts fill the space. By the parking lot under a billboard that reads HAVE OUR HOT DOGS! there’s a van with a pornographic picture painted on the side. There’s loud grinding as they drive over a well grid. Joona turns to the left around a crooked railing. A few seagulls fly up from a stack of wooden pallets.

  “There! There’s his car!” Vicky yells. “It is definitely his! I recognize the building. I bet they’re inside!”

  A black van with a Confederate flag pasted in its back window is parked in front of a large building as brown as liver. On the other side of the road, four cars are parked in a row along the sidewalk.

  Joona drives past the building, turns left, and parks in front of a brick building. Three vertical flag signs are flapping in the wind.

  Joona says nothing, but he takes his key and unlocks Vicky’s right hand. He fastens the free handcuff to the steering wheel before he leaves the vehicle. Her dark eyes land on him, but she does not protest.

  She watches him run back, his figure illuminated by a streetlight. Sand and dust whirl around him. He turns right and disappears.

  Between the closed buildings, there’s a small alley with loading docks, iron staircases, and containers for slaughterhouse waste. Joona approaches the door Vicky pointed out. He looks back for a moment and takes in the deserted location. Far away, there’s a forklift moving around inside a huge building with an open front wall, like an airplane hangar.

  He walks up a metal staircase, opens the door, and enters a hall with cracked vinyl flooring. He walks silently past three offices with thin walls. One has a plastic lemon tree inserted into a white pot filled with LECA balls. There are traces of Christmas glitter on its branches. Behind it on the wall there’s a framed slaughterhouse license from 1943, issued by the Crisis Committee of Stockholm.

  There’s a steel door at the end of the hallway and on it is a laminated poster showing the rules and regulations of slaughterhouse hygiene. Someone has scribbled “Rules for Care of Cocks” over the top. Joo
na pushes the door open a few centimeters to listen. He hears voices in the distance.

  He pushes the door farther open so he can look in. He sees a large machine hall for slaughter lines and automated hog splitting. The yellow tiled floor has a slight shine. The stainless-steel counters glisten. A bloodied plastic apron hangs over the edge of a garbage can.

  Joona pulls out his gun and his heart leaps when he smells the gun grease.

  120

  Gun in hand, Joona sneaks inside, bending low behind the large machinery. He can smell the sweet odor from the rinsed floor and the rubber mats. He realizes that he didn’t stop to give the county communications center an address. They have probably reached the slaughterhouse area by now, but it might take them some time to find Vicky.

  A memory flashes through his mind, a merciless memory of seconds during which lives change and time compresses. Joona is eleven years old and the school principal has come to his classroom, taken him out into the hall, and told him what happened. The principal’s cheeks are wet with tears.

  Joona’s father was a policeman and was on patrol. He’d gone into an apartment and had been shot in the back. His father had been on his own. Against regulations.

  Joona has no time to wait for reinforcements.

  In front of him, pneumatic knives and casing pullers covered in dirty membranes are hanging from a rack above a stainless-steel roller conveyor. He keeps moving forward. He can hear the voices more clearly.

  “No, he has to wake up first.” A deep, wheezing male voice.

  “Give him a minute.”

  Joona recognizes Tobias’s voice with its innocent, boyish tone.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Another voice, also male.

  “I wanted to keep him quiet,” Tobias replies.

  “He’s practically dead,” says the wheezing voice. “I won’t pay until I know he’s all right.”

  “We can only stay two more minutes,” says a third male voice. He is serious.