She gave a start when she heard the phone ring. Ola, she thought automatically. He wanted to keep messing with her, take the kids away from her. But it wasn’t her ex-husband; it was Danielsson on his cell.
“Did you learn anything new?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Possibly. Can we meet?”
“When?”
“Preferably in the evening . . . tomorrow.”
He wanted to sleep with her. She could hear it in his voice; she knew he had an erection as he sat there with the phone to his ear.
“Where?”
“Maybe at your place. The walls have ears around here.”
She had to find every loose thread in this investigation, she thought as she hung up: the fact that both Klingberg and Katz had been specially chosen for the interpreter academy, the fact that Klingberg’s company had been accused of being involved in transferring fifty million kronor to the Virgin Islands and that the guy had later vanished into thin air—could that just be a coincidence? She didn’t believe in coincidences, so she had to get to the bottom of this, find Katz, prove that he was innocent. She owed it to him. And she owed it to herself.
Katz had no idea what time it was when he woke up. It could be the middle of the night or early morning; the room he was in was pitch black. He fumbled for his phone, which was next to the mattress, and looked at the screen: 2:30.
Cop paranoia, he thought. Or general paranoia, his subconscious reminding him that he was being pursued. Or maybe he had woken from a dream he couldn’t remember.
He heard the faint sound of cars on Essingeleden two hundred meters away, the lulling rush of the nighttime truck traffic, and he felt his heart pounding in his chest, faster than usual. The sudden tension, as if something electric were running through his limbs. His body was a step ahead of him; it was trying to tell him something.
He resisted the urge to get up. He focused instead.
The rush of traffic . . . and something else, something his senses were still fumbling to grasp.
Then he realized what it was: someone’s breathing.
He held his own breath in order to hear more clearly. Yes, there was no doubt, there was someone on the other side of the wall, a few meters away.
Jorma? He had gone out earlier that evening, and Katz hadn’t wanted to ask what he was up to—business, or maybe meeting a woman. Probably business.
Light pressed in under the baseboard. He watched it subside, come back and vanish once more. The beam of a flashlight.
The steps grew more distant, disappearing down the hall.
The cops? he thought, as his pulse increased again. Had Julin’s phone been bugged after all?
No. He would have heard them earlier. There would have been half a dozen officers in bulletproof vests breaking down the door and coming in with weapons drawn.
More steps out there, but now they were farther away in the apartment. Someone with unfinished business? But Jorma would have said something if people were after him.
The sound of traffic on Essingeleden grew louder. A window was open somewhere, or maybe it was the balcony door.
He lay there, not moving, thinking that he should wait out the situation until whoever it was had gone. At least his hiding spot hadn’t been revealed.
Then it struck him that Jorma might be there, too, that he had come home and something had happened to him.
A truck honked on the highway. Katz acted on reflex, using the sound to mask the low click as he pressed the lock mechanism and allowed the wall to slide open until there was enough room for him to get out.
The blinds were closed.
He carefully sneaked along the wall to the kitchen.
It was empty. Light filtered in from the streetlights outside. He was naked, he realized, and he suddenly felt vulnerable, almost prudish.
He took shelter behind the refrigerator. He heard steps again, from the room where the piano was. Katz fished a knife out of the dish rack. It would have to do for now.
He crouched down and peered into the hallway. Pitch black.
He held his mouth to his elbow to muffle the sound of his breathing. He weighed the odds. He had the element of surprise on his side. The person didn’t know he was there. But it was too risky, he thought. Whoever it was, he would probably be armed.
Someone flushed the toilet in the apartment above. Katz took two quick steps across the hallway and arrived at the smaller hall.
He sank down, his back against the wall, hidden by the clothes that hung from a coat rack.
He sat completely still. No one had noticed him.
A closet-like door led from the recess in the hallway to the living room.
It wasn’t completely closed. He opened it a millimeter at a time until the gap was large enough for him to peek through.
A man was standing on the opposite side of the room. He could tell the man was nervous; he kept moving, looking at his watch, peering anxiously toward Jorma’s bedroom. Katz couldn’t see his face because the man’s back was to him.
The varnish on the piano gleamed in the dim light. The balcony door was wide open. So that was how he had got in.
Katz looked at the man again. Just over average height. No hood or mask. No intention of leaving a witness behind.
Then he realized that there wasn’t one person in the apartment, but two. He heard another sound, the creak of the parquet from Jorma’s bedroom.
Katz drew back into the darkness of the hall again. Was Jorma there? Had they hurt him? He looked around for a better weapon than the knife in his hand. An object he could use to strike, hard, very hard, at a moment when no one expected it.
Then he forced the thought aside, forced away the aggression, because it wouldn’t help him.
Were they looking for something Jorma had hidden? Stolen goods? Katz didn’t think so.
A car drove by on the street. He cautiously leaned forward. He used the hall mirror to see into Jorma’s bedroom. The other person was in there, standing perfectly still by the bed, breathing very calmly. He couldn’t tell if Jorma was in there.
The person was dressed in a dark tracksuit. White gym shoes. The hood of the jacket hid his face. A piece of steel wire dangled from his right hand.
It took a few seconds for him to realize what it was: a garrote.
The same man who had been standing outside his hidden room. Unnaturally calm. He had to be on something.
It’s not a person, he thought then, without having any idea where the thought came from. He just felt it instinctively—there was something inhuman about the person by the bed with a loop of wire in his hand.
The man from the parking garage—was it him? And, in that case, he wouldn’t be looking for Jorma; he was looking for Katz . . .
The rage again, that cold, hard seed inside him, the inheritance from Benjamin.
The apartment was totally silent. He could hear only the very calm breathing from inside the bedroom. The man was standing stock-still in there, as if every joint and muscle in his body was locked in place.
Then he suddenly backed out.
He was two meters from Katz. His face was still shadowed by the hood; there was just a sort of cold flash from his eyes. A faint scent of insect repellant.
The man vanished into the living room, to join his accomplice, the person who was keeping watch or who was there as a backup. Neither of them said anything. Katz heard them walk out to the balcony; they were in no hurry. He heard them climb over the railing and jump; heard them land on the gravel behind the building.
He walked into the bedroom and was startled by someone’s rapid breathing and gasping, until he realized that he was making the sounds himself.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He didn’t have to turn on the lights to see. Jorma was curled up at the head of the bed. The fear was still evident in his lifeless face. He hadn’t had time to defend himself. The garrote had been pulled so tight it had torn the skin on his neck.
Katz felt for a pulse that wasn
’t there, turned him on his back, crossed his palms over Jorma’s chest, pressing and pressing in a frantic tempo. He stopped, bent over, performed CPR. He thought about how strange it was to feel Jorma’s lips against his own, to hear his own bestial whimper as he started again, massaging his heart, giving him air, massaging his heart, hoping it wasn’t too late.
She didn’t know why she had slept with him. The last thing she needed right now was more problems.
He was still lying in her bed, whistling cheerfully as he browsed through a magazine. She was already up and fully dressed.
She looked at the clock: 8:30. She needed to get more information out of him and then to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
On the way to the kitchen she passed the children’s room. She stopped and looked in. Arvid’s green Bakugan was still lying on the bottom bunk. Lisa’s soccer cards were spread out on the floor. All their things in there—the dolls, cars, stuffed animals, loose parts from Barbies and Bratz, a veritable massacre of detached limbs and decapitated heads in little piles on the rug. She closed the door with a vague sense of shame.
Danielsson’s briefcase of information about the murder was still in the hallway. Witness statements, lab reports, reports from the scene of the murder, the crime-scene techs’ summary. And a copy of Klingberg’s hard drive, which he’d promised she could take a look at. She let him think that her interest was because of what had happened in the Virgin Islands.
From across the apartment she heard him get up and go to the bathroom. Good-natured steps. A jolly mood. The shower started as he sang an idiotic Schlager song.
She could still taste him in her mouth. The head of his penis, like velvet, like the skin on a horse’s muzzle.
Had she had sex with him to get back at Ola? That was completely pointless, since she would never tell Ola about it.
Or had she done it because it was about time? Because her body had needed it.
The worst part was that he might become annoying. Clingy. Looking at her with puppy-dog eyes. Confusing love and sex.
She turned into the hall. The postman had been there. There was a single envelope on the floor. She picked it up, walked into the kitchen, and opened it.
It was a summons to the family support division at social services, on Ola’s request. A meeting to discuss the children and the custody arrangements—which place was better, with a single mother, or at home with a stable father with a partner and a new sibling. Ola had decided to raise the stakes.
Nine years earlier, when they’d met at a conference about administrative law, he had idealized her; he’d seen a conscientious girl from the suburbs who had managed to make it in this world, a cheerful careerist who dreamed of a bourgeois life with a husband and children, a dog, and a place in the country. But, in the long term, she had never fit in. Her background, which he thought at first was exotic, suddenly didn’t suit his needs. She spoke a little too loudly and badly; she drank a little too much and made small breaches of etiquette that after a while could no longer be notched up under “charming.” She had tried to adapt, but she was who she was. And then things had gone downhill, until their divorce was a reality.
She felt a twinge of pain at the thought of Lisa and Arvid. Two days had gone by since she had last spoken to them on the phone—or, more precisely, to Lisa, since Arvid had been playing Minecraft on a tablet and didn’t want to talk. Lisa had sounded brusque, talking only about the puppy Ola had promised her; she hadn’t even asked when they would see each other again.
“I want to live with Dad for the rest of the spring,” she finally said. “Can I, Mom? It’s fun here . . . we might get a dog.”
She placed the letter on the kitchen table, walked back to the bedroom, glanced through the window at the tender green of spring in Vasaparken, and kept walking into the living room.
The bottle of Jack Daniel’s that she and Danielsson had shared the night before was still on the coffee table. Half empty or half full, depending on how you looked at it. His underwear was on the floor in front of the TV. She had taken him by surprise. She’d put her hand on his cock midsentence, outside his jeans, and felt him grow hard. She’d pulled off his jeans and his underwear and taken him into her mouth, rubbing his anus with her index finger at the same time. It had taken fewer than fifteen seconds for him to come. He’d exploded in her mouth like a teenager. He’d looked a bit bewildered when she went back to her glass of JD as if nothing had happened.
And then he had stayed the night.
Why the hell did I let it happen? He doesn’t even turn me on. Just like what happened last Easter . . . the last straw for Ola.
Her cellphone was on the coffee table. Three missed calls from the director general’s office, and then there was a criminal-profits case she’d promised to help the legal division with.
She’d have to catch up on work later, just as she’d have to catch up on her relationship with the children. Right now, Katz was the most important thing.
At least things had started looking up in the last twenty-four hours.
She had spoken to the guard at the parking garage again, putting the pressure on when she realized he was hiding something, and she finally figured out what it was. Apparently, a witness had seen the man driving Klingberg’s car. The guard had him on a personal tape. Katz, he told her, had also seen it. But the police hadn’t.
She hadn’t told Danielsson about it. She might do that later, once she knew more.
Why would Katz go to all that trouble and pretend to be searching for Klingberg if he was the one who had kidnapped him and even had plans to murder his wife?
She had identified the boy through a contact on the drug squad. He was a seventeen-year-old heroin addict named Jonas Åkesson. The weird thing was that he had been in the morgue for a few days, dead of an overdose. He had been found in the backseat of a car in Märsta, the needle still in his arm.
Odd, she thought. The kid had been clean for almost two months. And then he had suddenly had a fatal relapse.
She looked over toward the bathroom door. Danielsson was taking his time.
She went back to the hall and peeked in his briefcase to see if there was anything else of interest in it. She fished out a copy of materials that had been printed from Klingberg’s GPS. If Danielsson noticed it was missing, she would just say that he had left it here.
Fifty million kronor, she thought as she went back to the kitchen. She had asked the police unit at work to contact Interpol and check on every large transaction between Sweden and the Virgin Islands during the past year. That would take time, she learned, depending on the local banks’ secrecy laws.
By the time Danielsson came out of the bathroom—dressed, she was relieved to see—the coffee was already on the table.
“How does it feel?” he said.
“What?”
“Does it feel okay . . . what happened yesterday?”
She poured him a cup of coffee, making an effort to seem friendly.
“Let’s just forget it,” she said. “It never happened. Tell me about the investigation instead. Is there anything else you haven’t told me yet?”
He looked wounded.
“I don’t think so. I’ve given you everything we have.”
“You said that the computer was on when Angela Klingberg was found.”
“Yes, there was a slideshow.”
“What kind of pictures were there?”
“Family portraits. Vacation pictures.”
“Randomly chosen?”
“No idea.”
“And you think that the perpetrator started the slideshow?”
“Or the victim. In any case, it was on after the murder was committed. Like I said, I made a copy of the hard drive in case you need to look for information about Klingberg Aluminum on it. You’ll find his private photos there, too . . . in case you’re curious.”
The sarcastic overtone in his voice told her that she was about to go too far. And yet she couldn’t help but ask, “Ar
e you sure that you’re looking for the right man?”
“God, Eva, we found that guy’s fingerprints everywhere—on the murder weapon, in the car, on the keys he used to lock the door to the apartment from the inside. Plus, he was found guilty of the exact same sort of assault in the ’80s. What more do you want?”
They hadn’t made the connection between them yet. She was grateful for that.
“Have you found the person who called in the emergency yet?”
“No.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“We couldn’t do our jobs without anonymous tips. It’s not illegal, you know that, and we can’t force people to give evidence.”
“You’re assuming that the call came from one of the neighbors, who heard her screaming?”
“There are seventeen households in the building. The person called from a prepaid phone that can’t be traced. It’s probably someone who doesn’t want anything to do with the police. All sorts of people live in Östermalm these days. And, like I said, we’re still working on getting hold of the informant.”
Danielsson disappeared into the hall and came back with his briefcase; he opened it and took out the hard drive.
“How are things going your end?” he said. “Have you got any further on the fifty-million-kronor transaction?”
“Just waiting for people to be scared into breaking bank secrecy by a call from Interpol. The Virgin Islands are a tax haven, of course, so they’ll try to get out of it and delay giving up the information as long as they can. By the way, you mentioned something about a stolen car yesterday before I . . . how shall I put it? . . . interrupted you.”
A brief smile. At least he had a sense of humor.
“Yes. We found a car that the suspect stole in the vicinity of his home shortly after the murder.”
“Where did he leave it?”
“In Alviks Strand. All traces of him end there.”
“And his old boss, has anyone contacted him?”
The Boy in the Shadows Page 12
