“Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “In case the police start looking. Maybe it would be better to leave the city for a while.”
“Where would you go? And, officially, it’s been over twenty-five years since we were listed in the same registry. The cops couldn’t have connected us yet.”
Katz stood up and walked over to the balcony door, which stood ajar; he looked at the cars going by on the street, at the streetlights reflecting in the puddles, like lights from the underworld.
“I have to make a call,” he said. “I need help if I’m going to manage this.”
As he walked into the kitchen he heard the intro of another Hoagy Carmichael song: “Stardust.” He closed the door behind him and dialed Julin’s number. It rang half a dozen times before he answered: “Katz, is everything all right?”
“It’s under control. Have you checked to see if the police found anything at the place where Kristoffer Klingberg was abducted?”
“Yes. Nothing. That was over forty years ago. All that’s left of the official report are the transcripts of the interrogations with the father, and there’s no mention of any particular evidence found at the scene. Katz, listen, the police have been here asking about you. I said that I haven’t seen you or heard from you in six months, but that I considered it to be out of the question that you’d be behind a murder and a kidnapping.”
“Are you absolutely certain?”
“I know it’s not you. But the problem is that you’re hiding out, and that’s not helping you. They’re going to find you. They’re putting resources into it. And it doesn’t look good. All the newspaper reports, all the new information that’s come out . . .”
“So what do you think I should do?”
“Give yourself up. You’re a wanted man, and you’re running out of room to maneuver. Do you even have anywhere to sleep?”
“For a few nights. With an old friend.”
“Where?”
“In Kransen.”
He regretted it the second he’d said it. But why would Julin’s phone be bugged?
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes. Check out Pontus Klingberg. Where he was the day Angela was murdered.”
He heard Julin sigh heavily on the other end of the line. “Do you think it was him?”
“No, but I have to start somewhere. Angela opened the door to someone she knew.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. Is there a number I can reach you at?”
“I’m going to switch SIM cards after this conversation. I’ll call you again within twenty-four hours.”
When he came back to the living room, Jorma had brought his bag in from the hallway.
“You knew I was going to show up?” said Katz.
“The way I see it, you had nowhere else to go. Another day out there and they would have found you.”
“Nothing ever happened with Thailand?”
“No, I had to earn money other ways. Times change. Working alone used to be enough. But now . . . you have to be part of an organization, be loyal to the leaders. I’m thinking of quitting. Starting to work with my hands again. I’m good at construction.”
Katz gave a start as he heard the elevator begin to move out in the stairwell, but Jorma shook his head dismissively.
“The neighbors,” he said. “A retired police commissioner, among others. It’s fine, Katz. What do you think of my apartment, by the way? I received it as a gift, including the piano. I did time in Norrtälje Prison for three years, and I helped a guy get the other prisoners to leave him alone. He was very generous afterward. Come on, I’ll show you your room.”
Katz took the bag and followed him to the kitchen and then into a larger room, which was completely devoid of furniture. They stopped in front of a bare wall.
“You’re planning on getting to the bottom of this?” said Jorma.
Katz nodded.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Don’t worry. First you have to sleep. I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror, but you look like a corpse.”
He pressed the baseboard with his foot. The whole wall slid silently a meter to the side. There was a hidden room on the other side; it was furnished with a reading lamp and a mattress that was already made up.
“This was the first thing I did when I renovated the apartment,” he said. “Could be good to hide things in, I thought. Stolen goods. Or friends on the run.”
She had always thought of her office as a cloister cell, squeezed between the chamber commissioner’s office and the economic auditor on the other side of the wall. The linoleum floor, shades of yellow and orange from the early ’90s. The view of Kungsholm Church. She liked to see the cemetery in the different seasons, from the delicate greens of spring to the shadows the large, bare trees cast on the snow in winter. There was a filing cabinet full of folders next to the door. The project cases in one section; the particularly demanding cases in another. A desk with a computer. Hanging on the wall in front of her were portraits of Lisa and Arvid, from when they were babies up to the present. All the children I’ll have, she thought.
She looked down at the desk as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone line. Two sheaves of paper lay in folders before her. The verdict against Katz twenty-eight years earlier in one. The investigation of the same matter in the other.
“So what are you planning on doing?” she said to Ola.
“Exactly what I said. In the worst case, I’ll contact a lawyer.”
“You’re a lawyer yourself.”
“I’m exceptionable in this case. We’ll take this to court if you’re not prepared to compromise. This is going to be a custody battle, and the way I see it there’s a good chance you’ll lose. We’re going to offer you something along the lines of Thursday to Sunday every other week.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Come on, this isn’t working anymore. It’s not good for the kids.”
“That may be, but that’s not just my fault.”
“You left them here on Monday and we haven’t heard from you since, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Lisa says she wants to live here for the rest of the spring.”
She heard a clatter from the canteen down the hall. Laughing colleagues. She recognized their voices: Samson, the tax expert from the second economic chamber, and Jelenik, who worked with criminal intelligence in the operational police unit. How long had she worked here? Twelve years, with a short break when she worked the on-call job at the office of the public prosecutor. She had a brain for numbers rather than violent crime. The nose of a truffle pig for financial irregularities, accounting crimes, money laundering.
“You’re the one who got her to say that . . . you’re the one who made her think that.”
“Erika is in complete agreement with me, especially after what happened at Easter.”
Easter? She didn’t want to think about it. That was already history.
“Erika doesn’t give a crap about Lisa and Arvid. For God’s sake, she looks ill whenever she’s in the same room as them.”
“She loves them.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come on, Eva, can you think of a better alternative? The kids are more secure here. They have their own rooms. There are functional adult relationships, routines, definite times for picking them up and dropping them off, two incomes. You don’t even show up to get them when you say you will. You break promises, just like always, and it’s been like that ever since we got divorced.”
Was that true? Had she let them down, just as her own parents had let her down? She remembered coming home in the middle of the night, thirteen years old, and no one even reacted. Her father in the easy chair in front of the TV, a half-smoked joint in his hand. If he wasn’t in the slammer. Her mother, knocked out on pills in the bedroom. Or off in some drunks’ hangout somewhere. Pigs, the both of them; she didn’t have contact with them anymore, didn’t even know if they were
alive. Was she the same? Not on the surface, but fundamentally? All the times she had shown up late to preschool and to school. That sort of thing had happened too often . . . when a crying Lisa had called Ola from school and he had to pick her up instead, because she herself had gotten so caught up in her work that she lost all sense of time and place. Not a great track record, she knew.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening, but please, Ola, I promise things are going to change. I’m working on something right now that I can’t drop. All I need is a week. Take care of the kids until then, and tell them I’ll be back to our usual schedule soon. Tell them I’ll call tonight.”
“Let’s do this: the kids can stay with us until the end of the school year. Then we’ll see what happens.”
“You’re not the boss here. We have joint custody. I want my kids every other week.”
“Just not this week?”
“Exactly.”
Someone was calling on the other line. Oskar Danielsson, according to the screen. He was taking risks by giving her an insight into an investigation that didn’t concern her. He wanted to sleep with her, she assumed, although she didn’t understand why.
“I’m warning you, Eva: if you fuck this up one more time I’m going to a lawyer. A colleague who never loses a family court case.”
“So you’re threatening me?”
“It’s not a threat, my dear, it’s a promise.”
She ended the call with a swearword and accepted the incoming call. A dial tone: Daniel had already hung up.
The laughter in the canteen had stopped. The door to her office was ajar; she walked over and closed it. The best thing about Ola was his lack of imagination. It made him predictable and gave her an advantage every time they argued. But she hadn’t expected this.
She looked at the folders on her desk: the investigation and the sentence where she herself was the victim. Since she no longer went by her maiden name, the investigators hadn’t linked her to Katz yet. The investigation was more than a quarter of a century old, and the scars on her neck were no longer visible. For the time being, they had no reason to dig deeper into the old information, but sooner or later they would, and then she would have to answer their questions.
There was another folder at the top of the pile in her left-hand desk drawer. The file from the National Intelligence Service, or NUC, on Katz’s military career. The only thing she had managed to get out of the EBM’s operational police unit. There was more, she knew, but it was classified. That was damned strange, she thought as she called Danielsson back—this whole military thing bothered her. The answering machine told her that he had gone to lunch and wouldn’t be available again until after two o’clock.
It had come as a surprise to her that Katz had done his military service along with Joel Klingberg. She was astonished that he had been selected for special training and then became an interpreter and computer expert for the intelligence service before ending up on the street. But, apparently, they had ignored his background because he was extremely gifted. Just as the office of the public prosecutor had once overlooked her own background, instead choosing to see it as an advantage.
According to the documents she had managed to get hold of, Katz and Klingberg had been recruited at the request of top-ranking military officers within what had once been called the armed forces’ Office of Intelligence and Security, or USK, which was the predecessor of MUST, the Military Intelligence and Security Service. As she understood it, they had gone behind the backs of the National Service Administration, which in Katz’s case had demanded he be rejected. But USK had gotten its way. When it came to Klingberg, the interpreter academy hadn’t had any objections; his merits as a bookworm at boarding school in Sigtuna were impressive.
And yet . . . both of them were handpicked. The only ones in their class who were.
And, twenty-five years later, one of them would kidnap the other and then murder his wife.
Lisa and Arvid observed her skeptically from the wall. With good reason, she thought: a workaholic is another sort of addict.
Katz—where was he now?
A nationwide alert had gone out, yet several days had gone by without a single trace of him. This didn’t surprise her. He was used to life on the street. According to the excerpts from the registry, he had been homeless and addicted to drugs for most of the ’90s. Street smart. He had been even back when she knew him. He knew all sorts of tricks to stay out of sight.
Was he with Jorma? The only west-side thug ever who could, in theory, have gotten into the Royal College of Music. He’d shocked all her friends at the time by playing piano sonatas at the youth center. He came from a broken Finnish family where people either became musicians or alcoholics, because that was all society expected of them. Did they still have contact with each other? Once upon a time, they had been like brothers. But, if she understood correctly, no one had put their names together.
They had taken a sample of Katz’s DNA during his time in the intelligence service, so it was possible to link him to the scene of the crime by way of hair, left-behind clothes, and a puddle of vomit that had been on the floor a few meters from the body. Oddly enough, they hadn’t found any traces of saliva in the bites on Angela Klingberg’s neck. No DNA at all, aside from the victim’s. The forensics team thought this was because the wound had been cleaned with alcohol afterward; the killer’s DNA would have evaporated. It didn’t really matter, since everything else pointed to Katz. His fingerprints were in the apartment and he had been found guilty of a similar crime before.
She turned on the computer and read through the latest document Danielsson had emailed to her: a short summary of the suspect’s relationship to the victim. According to what was known, Angela Klingberg had hired Katz to try to find her missing husband. He had gone to the Royal Library to find information, he had visited Klingberg Aluminum’s main office and spoken to Joel Klingberg’s uncle, and he had visited the same parking garage as she had in order to look at the surveillance tapes. He had been at Angela Klingberg’s home at least once before the murder occurred.
But the theory Danielsson’s team was operating on was that Katz had first kidnapped Klingberg and then murdered his wife. His motive was as yet unknown. As was the question of where Klingberg was, if he was still alive. When it came to the kidnapping, there were a couple of things that pointed to Katz: Klingberg’s car had been in the vicinity of his building the day he disappeared, and a raincoat that apparently belonged to Katz had been worn by the man who was seen in the tape from the garage. A person who, in her world, could be anyone at all, since his face wasn’t visible.
Or was she wrong? Was it Katz? Had it been him that time in Hässelby too?
She looked at the crime-scene photos that Danielsson had emailed: Katz’s clothes spread across the floor, hair that belonged to him, the pools of blood, the kitchen knife with his fingerprints, the body with its bite marks and strangulation wounds.
She felt the nausea coming. The memories, as if from a horror film. Would he have done all those things?
For the past few days, since she had started researching this case, it had felt as if she had taken a time machine back to those days. Pandora’s box, she thought, impossible to put things back once it had been opened. The sense memories of how in love she had been, the way you can be only at that age, on the threshold of the adult world, a child’s capacity for devotion still intact, how insanely in love she had been with that dark-haired Jewish boy with his inscrutable brown eyes and his strange last name. She remembered the joy she had felt, the butterflies in her stomach every time she saw him; she even remembered the scent of his hair and armpits, the way he kissed her, the taste of his tongue.
What had really happened that night? Jorma and Katz had burgled a yacht. She had been standing in a nearby grove of trees, watching them swim out to the boat. They had been back an hour later with a thousand kronor in cash.
And then?
They had g
one to a party in the nearby high-rise development; they’d met people from the same gang but had gotten bored and moved on to central Hässelby. She recalled that they had felt as if they were being followed, but that had been normal back then; in their circles there was always a certain amount of paranoia. They had bought drugs from a dealer they didn’t know but who seemed trustworthy. She didn’t remember his face. How could she, almost three decades later?
After that they had gone to the bike storage room.
She had been there several times before; she had gotten her hands on a key to the room and she slept there when things were particularly bad at home. She had been fourteen years old, a child who had already seen and heard too much. They had shared a needle as a sort of testament to love, to show that they trusted each other in a world where everyone else had let them down. The risk of HIV or hepatitis B—they hadn’t given a damn about that back then. She could still picture the crease of Katz’s elbow, that slight resistance as the needle punctured the skin. Then it was her turn. An overdose, she had time to think before it all went black.
She remembered the period after the incident as if in a fog: the hospital stay, the police interrogations, the trial. Social services had intervened and sent her to a treatment home outside Vilhelmina. Even then she had thought that something didn’t add up. It couldn’t be Katz; he wasn’t a madman. The fact that his whole face was covered in her blood didn’t prove anything. Someone had taken advantage of the fact that they had been defenseless after taking H that was too strong. And then that person carried them to Grubbholmen, assaulted her, bit her, and arranged the crime scene so that everything would point to Katz.
But who? And why?
She paged through the investigation report. Thirty measly pages. No DNA test, naturally. Those hadn’t been done at the time, and even if it had been possible they wouldn’t have considered it necessary: Katz had been doomed from the start.
She had quit heroin that same autumn. She had seen a psychologist. Life had turned around. She finished school in Vilhelmina and realized how bad her life had been up until then. But it took time for her to forget Katz, several years, until she was finished with school and was accepted as a law student.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 11
