by Lars Kepler
Joona continued on towards the locker room. Flashes of light from cameras burst through the propped-open door, and the forensic technicians had laid out stepping blocks around the entrance so as not to contaminate any prints during their initial crime scene investigation. An older colleague stood guard out front. His eyes were heavy with fatigue, and his voice was subdued. “Don’t go in if you’re afraid of having nightmares.”
“I’m done with dreaming,” Joona replied.
A strong scent of stale sweat, urine, and fresh blood permeated the air. The forensic technicians were taking pictures in the shower, their white flashes bouncing off the tiles, giving the entire locker room a strange pulsating feel.
Blood dripped from above.
Joona clenched his jaw as he studied the badly mauled body on the floor between the wooden benches and the dented lockers. A thin-haired, middle-aged man with greying stubble.
Blood was everywhere—on the floor, the doors, the benches, the ceiling. Joona continued into the shower room and greeted the forensic technicians in a low voice. The glare of the camera flash reflected on the white tiles and caught the blade of a hunting knife on the floor.
A mop with a wooden handle stood against the wall. The rubber blade was surrounded by a large pool of blood, water, and dirt, with wisps of hair, plasters, and a bottle of shower gel.
A severed arm lay by the drain. The bone socket was exposed, lined with ligaments and torn muscle tissue.
Joona remained standing, observing every detail. He registered the blood’s spatter pattern, the angles and shapes of the blood drops.
The severed arm had been thrown against the tiled wall several times before being discarded.
“Detective,” the policeman posted outside the locker room called out. Joona noted his colleague’s anxious expression as he was handed the radio.
“This is Lillemor Blom speaking. How soon can you come to the house?”
“What is it?” Joona asked.
“One of the children. We thought he was dead, but he’s alive.”
7
monday, december 7: evening
Joona Linna’s colleagues at the National Criminal Investigation Department will tell you they admire him, and they do, but they also envy him. And they will tell you they like him, and they do, but they also find him aloof.
As a homicide investigator, his track record is unparalleled in Sweden. His success is due in part to the fact that he completely lacks the capacity to quit. He cannot surrender. It is this trait that is the primary cause of his colleagues’ envy. But what most don’t know is that his unique stubbornness is the result of unbearable personal guilt. Guilt that drives him, and renders him incapable of leaving a case unsolved.
He never speaks about what transpired. And he never forgets what happened.
Joona wasn’t driving particularly fast that day, but it had been raining, and the rays of the emerging sun bounced off puddles as if they were emanating from an underground source. He was on his way; thought he could escape …
Ever since that day, he’s been plagued not only by memories but also by an unusual form of migraine. The only thing that’s proven helpful has been a preventive medicine used for epilepsy, topiramate. Joona’s supposed to take the medicine regularly, but it makes him drowsy, and when he’s on the job and needs to think clearly, he refuses to take it. He’d rather submit to the pain. In truth, he probably considers his punishment just: both the inability to relinquish an unresolved case, and the migraine.
The ambulance, lights blinking, rocketed past him in the opposite direction as he approached the house. Leaving a ghost-like silence, the emergency vehicle disappeared through the sleeping suburb.
Waiting for Joona, Lillemor Blom stood smoking under a streetlamp. In its glow, she looked beautiful in a rugged way. These days, her face was creased with fatigue, and her makeup was invariably sloppy. But Joona had always found her to be wonderful-looking, with her high cheekbones, straight nose, and slanted eyes.
“Joona Linna,” she said, almost cooing his name.
“Will the boy make it?”
“Hard to say. It’s absolutely terrible. I’ve never seen anything like it—and I never want to again.” She let her eyes linger awhile on the glow of her cigarette.
“Have you written up your report?” he asked.
She shook her head and exhaled a stream of smoke.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Then I’ll go home and go to bed.”
“That sounds nice,” he said with a smile.
“Join me,” she joked.
Joona shook his head. “I want to go in and look around. Then I have to determine whether the boy can be interrogated.”
Lillemor tossed the cigarette to the ground. “What exactly are you doing here?” she asked.
“You can request backup from National Murder Squad, but I don’t think they will have time, and I don’t think they’ll find answers to what happened here anyway.”
“But you will?”
“We’ll see,” Joona said.
He crossed the small garden. A pink bicycle with training wheels was propped against a sandpit. Joona headed up the front steps, turned on his torch, opened the door, and walked into the hallway. The dark rooms were filled with silent fear. Just a few steps in and the adrenaline was pumping through him so hard, it felt like his chest would explode.
Purposefully, Joona registered it all, absorbing every horrific detail until he couldn’t take any more. He stopped in his tracks, closed his eyes, felt back to guilt deep inside him … and continued to search the house.
In the bleak light of the hallway, Joona saw how bloody bodies had been dragged along the floor. Blood spattered the exposed-brick chimney, the television, the kitchen cabinets, the oven. Joona took in the chaos: the tipped-over furniture, the scattered silverware, the desperate footprints and handprints. When he stopped in front of the small girl’s amputated body, tears began to flow down his face. Still, he forced himself to try to imagine precisely what must have happened; the violence and the screams.
The driving force behind these murders couldn’t have been connected to a gambling debt, Joona thought. The father had already been killed. First the father, then the family; Joona was convinced of it. He breathed hard between gritted teeth. Somebody had wanted to annihilate the whole family. And he probably believed he had succeeded.
8
monday, december 7: night
Joona Linna stepped out into the cold wind, over the shivering black-and-yellow crime tape, and into his car. The boy is alive, he thought. I have to meet the surviving witness.
From his car, Joona traced Josef Ek to the neurosurgical unit at Karolinska University Hospital in Solna. The forensic technicians from Linköping had supervised the securing of biological evidence taken from the boy’s person. His condition had since deteriorated.
It was after one in the morning when Joona headed back to Stockholm, arriving at the intensive care section of Karolinska Hospital just past two. After a fifteen-minute wait, the doctor in charge, Daniella Richards, appeared.
“You must be Detective Linna. Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Daniella Richards.”
“How is the boy, doctor?”
“He’s in circulatory shock,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood. His heart is attempting to compensate for this and has started to race—”
“Have you managed to stop the bleeding?”
“I think so, I hope so, and we’re giving him blood all the time, but the lack of oxygen could taint the blood and damage the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys.”
“Is he conscious?”
“No.”
“It’s urgent that I get a chance to interview him.”
“Detective, my patient is hanging on by his fingernails. If he survives his injuries at all, it won’t be possible to interview him for several weeks.”
“He’s the sole eyewitness to a mu
ltiple murder,” said Joona. “Is there anything you can do?”
“The only person who might possibly be able to hasten the boy’s recovery is Erik Maria Bark.”
“The hypnotist?” asked Joona.
She gave a big smile, blushing slightly. “Don’t call him that if you want his help. He’s our leading expert in the treatment of shock and trauma.”
“Do you have any objections if I ask him to come in?”
“On the contrary. I’ve been considering it myself,” she said.
Joona searched in his pocket for his phone, realised he had left it in the car, and asked if he could borrow Daniella’s. After outlining the situation to Erik Maria Bark, he called Susanne Granat at Social Services and explained that he was hoping to be able to talk to Josef Ek soon. Susanne Granat knew all about the family. The Eks were on their register, she said, because of the father’s gambling addiction, and because they had had dealings with the daughter three years ago.
“With the daughter?” asked Joona.
“The older daughter,” explained Susanne.
“So there is a third child?” Joona asked impatiently.
“Yes, her name is Evelyn.”
Joona ended the conversation and immediately called his colleagues in the Reconnaissance Division to ask them to track down Evelyn Ek. He emphasised repeatedly that it was urgent, that she risked being killed. But then he added it was also possible that she was dangerous, that she could actually have been involved in the triple homicide in Tumba.
9
tuesday, december 8: morning
Detective Joona Linna orders a large sandwich with Parmesan, bresaola, and sun-dried tomatoes from the little breakfast bar called Il Caffè on Bergsgatan. The café has just opened, and the girl who takes his order has not yet had time to unpack the warm bread from the large brown bags in which it’s been delivered from the bakery.
Having inspected the crime scenes in Tumba late the night before, and in the middle of the night visited the hospital in Solna and spoken to the two doctors Daniella Richards and Erik Maria Bark, he had called Reconnaissance once more. “Have you found Evelyn?” he’d asked.
“No.”
“You realise we have to find her before the murderer does.”
“We’re trying, but—”
“Try harder,” Joona had growled. “Maybe we can save a life.”
Now, after three hours of sleep, Joona gazes out the steamed-up window, waiting for his breakfast. Sleet is falling on the town hall. The food arrives. Joona grabs a pen on the glass counter, signs the credit slip, and hurries out.
The sleet intensifies as he makes his way along Bergsgatan, the warm sandwich in one hand and his indoor hockey stick and gym bag in the other.
“We’re playing Recon Tuesday night,” Joona had told his colleague Benny Rubin. “We have no chance. They’re going to kill us.”
The National CID indoor hockey team loses whenever they play the local police, the traffic police, the maritime police, the national special intervention squad, the SWAT team, or Recon. But it gives them a good excuse to drown their sorrows together in the pub, as they like to say, afterwards.
Joona has no idea as he walks alongside police headquarters and past the big entrance doors that he will neither play hockey nor go to the pub this Tuesday. Someone has scrawled a swastika on the entrance sign to the courtroom. He strides on towards the Kronoberg holding cells and watches the tall gate close silently behind a car. Snowflakes are melting on the big window of the guardroom. Joona walks past the police swimming pool and cuts across the yard toward the gabled end of the vast complex. The façade resembles dark copper, burnished but underwater. Flags droop wetly from their poles. Hurrying between two metal plinths and beneath the high frosted glass roof, Joona stamps the snow off his shoes and swings open the doors to the National Police Board.
The central administrative authority in Sweden, the National Police Board is made up of the National Criminal Investigation Department, the Security Service, the Police Training Academy, and the National Forensic Laboratory. The National CID is Sweden’s only central operational police body, with the responsibility for dealing with serious crime on a national and international level. For nine years, Joona Linna has worked here as a detective.
Joona walks along the corridor, taking off his cap and shaking it at his side, glancing in passing at the notices on the bulletin board about yoga classes, somebody who’s trying to sell a camper, information from the trade union, and scheduling changes for the shooting club. The floor, which was mopped before the snowstorm began, is already soiled with bootprints and dried, muddy slush.
The door of Benny Rubin’s office is ajar. A sixty-year-old man with a grey moustache and wrinkled, sun-damaged skin, he is involved in the work around communication headquarters and the change-over to Rakel, the new radio system. He sits at his computer with a cigarette behind his ear, typing with agonising slowness.
“I’ve got eyes in the back of my head,” he says, all of a sudden.
“Maybe that explains why you’re such a lousy typist,” jokes Joona.
Benny’s latest find is an advertising poster for the airline SAS: a fairly exotic young woman in a minute bikini suggestively sipping some kind of fruit-garnished cocktail from a straw. Benny was so incensed by the ban on calendars featuring pin-up girls that most people thought he was going to resign, but instead he has devoted himself to a silent and stubborn protest for many years. Technically, nothing forbids the display of advertisements for airlines, pictures of ice princesses with their legs spread wide apart, lithe and flexible yoga instructors, or ads for underwear from H&M. On the first day of each month, Benny changes what he has on the wall. The variety of ways that he avoids the ban is dazzling. Joona remembers a poster of the short-distance runner Gail Devers, in tight shorts, and a daring lithograph by the artist Egon Schiele that depicted a red-haired woman sitting with her legs apart in a pair of fluffy bloomers.
Moving on, Joona stops to say hello to his assistant, Anja Larsson. She sits at the computer with her mouth half open, her round face wearing an expression of such concentration that he decides not to disturb her. Instead, he hangs up his wet coat just inside the door of his office, switches on the advent star in the window, and glances quickly through his in-box: a message about the working environment, a suggestion about low-energy lightbulbs, an inquiry from the prosecutor’s office, and an invitation from Human Resources to a Christmas meal at Skansen.
Joona leaves his office, goes into the meeting room, and sits in his usual place to unwrap his sandwich and eat.
Petter Näslund stops in the corridor, laughs smugly, and leans on the doorframe with his back to the meeting room. A muscular, balding man of about thirty-five, Petter is a detective with a position of special responsibility and Joona’s immediate boss. Everyone knows that Joona is eminently more qualified than Petter. But they know, too, that he is also singularly disinterested in administrative duties and the rat race involved in climbing the ranks.
For several years Petter has been flirting with Magdalena Ronander without noticing her troubled expression and constant attempts to switch to a more businesslike tone. Magdalena has been a detective in the Reconnaissance Division for four years, and she intends to complete her legal training before she turns thirty.
Lowering his voice suggestively, Petter questions Magdalena about her choice of service weapon, wondering aloud how often she changes the barrel because the grooves have become too worn. Ignoring his coarse innuendoes, she tells him she keeps a careful note of the number of shots fired.
“But you like the big rough ones, don’t you?” says Petter.
“No, not at all, I use the Glock Seventeen,” she replies, “because it can cope with a lot of the defence team’s nine-millimetre ammunition.”
“Don’t you use the Czech?”
“Yes, but I prefer the M39B,” she says firmly, moving around him to enter the meeting room. He follows, and they both sit and gree
t Joona. “And you can get the Glock with gunpowder gas ejectors next to the sight,” she continues. “It reduces the recoil a hell of a lot, and you can get the next shot in much more quickly.”
“What does our Moomintroll think?” asks Petter, with a nod in Joona’s direction.
Joona smiles sweetly and fixes his icily clear grey eyes on them. “I think it doesn’t make any difference. I think other elements decide the outcome,” he says.
“So you don’t need to be able to shoot.” Petter grins.
“Joona is a good shot,” says Magdalena.
“Good at everything.” Petter sighs.
Magdalena ignores Petter and turns to Joona instead. “The biggest advantage with the compensated Glock is that the gunpowder gas can’t be seen from the barrel when it’s dark.”
“Quite right,” says Joona.
Wearing a pleased expression, she opens her black leather case and begins leafing through her papers. Benny comes in, sits down, looks around at everyone, slams the palm of his hand down on the table, then smiles broadly when Magdalena glances at him in irritation.
“I took the case out in Tumba,” Joona starts.
“That’s got nothing to do with us,” says Petter.
“I think we could be dealing with a serial killer here, or at least—”
“Just leave it, for God’s sake!” Benny interrupts, looking Joona in the eye and slapping the table again.
“It was somebody settling a score,” Petter goes on. “Loans, debts, gambling …”
“A gambling addict,” Benny says.
“Very well known at Solvalla. The local sharks were into him for a lot of money, and he ended up paying for it,” says Petter, bringing the matter to a close.
In the silence that follows, Joona drinks some water and finishes the last of his sandwich. “I’ve got a feeling about this case,” he says quietly.
“Then you need to ask for a transfer,” says Petter with a smile. “This has nothing to do with the National CID.”
