The Golden Calf

by Helene Tursten

  “Really? She must be really rich.”

  “Her old man has got it made.”

  Irene pretended to write that down in her notebook. Then she asked, “So, were you home the rest of the evening? In this house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you with Tove and Sanna?”

  Irene realized that she’d implied something she hadn’t meant to. The boy stared at her. “What the fuck! I’m not with either of them!”

  “No, of course not. I just wanted to know if you knew where they were the rest of the day. Did they leave the house that afternoon or evening?”

  “No, don’t think they did. I heard them, like, laughing and shit.”

  “You weren’t with them when they had dinner in the kitchen?”

  “No, I ate in here. I was on the computer.”

  Irene looked toward the desk and noticed it was by the room’s only window. “Would you have noticed if the Mercedes drove away during the evening?”

  “Yeah, of course. It was right there, like, where your car is.” He nodded toward the window. She could see their police car beneath the circle of light from a streetlamp.

  “So what happened? Why is Tove crying?” Christopher asked abruptly.

  “Sanna’s husband Kjell is dead. He was shot—murdered.”

  Christopher stared at her for a long time. The gangly teenager showed no fear or sorrow, but rather curious interest, as if the murdered man had been a character from a television show and not a person he knew.

  “What did you think about Kjell B:son Ceder?”

  Christopher shrugged again. “Hardly knew him. I saw him, like, two or three times.”

  Perhaps this explained why the boy didn’t seem perturbed by the news.

  “Can you remember what Sanna was wearing last night?”

  He thought for a moment. “Some kind of brown pants and a blue T-shirt.”

  “No jacket?”

  “Nah.”

  “Was it the blue blouse cut low in front?”

  “Yeah.” The boy blushed. Irene realized that Sanna certainly could not have left the house without Christopher knowing about it. Irene couldn’t think of any more questions, so she thanked Christopher for his helpfulness.

  Back in the living room, Tommy stood by the doors to the deck talking to Dr. Fenton. Tove was on the sofa with her baby on her lap. Both of them had calmed down, and the baby was nearly asleep. Tove looked up at Irene.

  “So I see you talked to Christopher,” she stated flatly.

  “That’s right. He confirmed that Sanna was here from four thirty in the afternoon and on through the rest of the evening.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Tove said, content. She stood up and perched her baby on her hip. “I’m just going to give Robin another bottle and put him down for the night. Then I’m going to my mother’s to be with her and Sanna.”

  IN THE CAR, Tommy rehashed his conversation with Morgan Fenton.

  “Fenton told me that he’d known Ceder for quite a few years. He also told me that Sanna knew Ceder for a long time before they became a couple and decided to get married. They met while Sanna worked in the finance industry. If I understood him correctly, Fenton has a brother who worked for a London bank that had invested in Sanna’s high-tech business. Ceder also knew this brother, and the two were partners when Hotel Göteborg was built. It was all a little muddled, but I think I got the gist of it.”

  “Hmm. So there were a number of connections before Sanna and Ceder had their unexpected wedding—a bank in London where Fenton’s brother is employed, and the friendship between Morgan Fenton and Sanna’s soon-to-be husband, Kjell.”

  “So it appears.”

  “I bet Fenton put his sister-in-law in contact with his brother at the London bank.” Irene was thinking out loud.

  “That’s pretty obvious. But Fenton said he was surprised that Ceder had been shot at his home in Askim and not his apartment in the city. It sounds like Ceder was seldom at the house.”

  “Why not?”

  “According to Fenton, Ceder didn’t much care for the house. It was mostly Sanna’s creation. She wanted a more child-friendly place to raise her son.”

  “So Ceder had the house built for Sanna and her baby?”

  “That’s what I got from Morgan.”

  “Strange. That place is practically a mansion. It must have cost—” Irene stopped in the middle of a sentence as a thought hit her. “Do you think that they might have been thinking of a divorce?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Sanna would have been better off as the widow of a rich man than as a divorced single mother.”

  “Again, it’s possible.”

  “You said yourself that statistically she’s the most likely suspect. In that case, she must have shot him before she headed over to her sister’s place. Christopher had a good view of the car because it was parked right outside his window. And he said he heard the sisters laughing and chatting all evening.”

  “So where’s the weapon?”

  “No idea. We’ll have to search along the road between the two sisters.”

  “We still don’t know the exact time he was killed.”

  “No, we don’t, but I put my money on four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

  Chapter 3

  “STRIDNER CALLED YESTERDAY before I left. She told me that Ceder was shot sometime between five and nine at night. She is going to follow up with a more exact time of death once she’s done with the autopsy. Beyond that, we have to wait for test results—and we sure as hell know how long that takes.”

  Superintendent Sven Andersson stared over the top of his reading glasses. Four of his detectives were present for this “morning prayer,” as they liked to call their daily meeting. The others had been called to a double homicide in Långedrag. So far there were no details on that case. All they knew was that two men had been found shot to death in a single-family house.

  Irene, Tommy, and Birgitta Moberg-Rauhala were sitting around the table. Kajsa Birgersdotter was filling in for Birgitta’s husband Hannu, who was away on paternity leave. Kajsa worked General Investigations, just as Hannu had many years before. She’d been with Irene’s team for almost two months now. In the superintendent’s opinion, she wasn’t a real asset to the team. He thought two women were already more than enough, though he admitted that these two were pretty decent, for women cops. But Kajsa reminded him of his former Sunday school teacher—flat chested and colorless. Of course, most young women were like that nowadays. No curves and nothing for a real man to hold onto.

  Tommy and Irene exchanged looks. Hearing that the death had occurred at a later time undercut their theory. It would be hard to break Sanna’s alibi. Nor did things improve when Birgitta spoke.

  “I called Kjell B:son Ceder’s secretary yesterday. Ceder left his office at six thirty. The attendant in the parking garage confirmed the time. I’ve also had a chat with their head of security, Michael Fuller. The garage has a video surveillance, and at 6:29 exactly, the security camera recorded Ceder getting into his Jaguar and driving away.”

  “Did he tell his secretary where he planned to go?” asked Tommy.

  “I asked her, but she didn’t know. He didn’t mention anything to her.”

  “Sanna said that Ceder hadn’t told her anything, either. We’ll have to press her again to see if she remembers anything more today,” Irene said.

  “OK, you and Tommy can revisit the recently widowed, while Birgitta and Kajsa go chat with the restaurant and hotel employees,” said Andersson. “Touch base with their head of security again and see if we can’t get a copy of the video. I’ve already assigned two of our men to knock on doors in Askim. Perhaps they can give us a time frame for when Ceder arrived at the house.”

  “That’s possible,” Irene said. “It seems he drove the Jaguar into the garage. I didn’t see it, but Åhlén mentioned it when I ran into him in the hallway this morning. He’d taken a peek into the garage before he l
eft the house yesterday.”

  “Åhlén likes cars,” Tommy said. “Did you guys know that he has an antique MG?”

  “An MG? How does he fit a wife and seven kids into an MG?” asked Birgitta. She rolled her beautiful brown eyes—eyes that had managed to melt her husband, Hannu, the man of ice from the northern wilds of Finland.

  “I believe he can’t, and that seems to be the whole point.” Tommy grinned.

  “They must have another larger car,” Birgitta decided. She had become so much more practical since she’d become a mother. Over the past two months, Irene had not heard one word from her about scuba diving, skiing, or wild parties. Their conversations now revolved around homemade versus commercial baby food, the recently built house in Alingsås, and the shamefully high price of diapers. Come summer, Irene’s own daughters would be leaving the nest, each with a high school diploma in hand. Katarina had been talking about going to Australia to work for a year before going to college—with no idea what she wanted to study or do in the future. Jenny was focusing her efforts on her pop band, Polo, which had seen some success in the Göteborg area.

  “There’s one more thing Åhlén told me,” Irene said. “The alarm system at the house wasn’t activated. According to him, they hadn’t finished installing it yet.”

  “You can’t finish everything at once,” said Tommy.

  “Jonny and Fredrik will be back after lunch to report on the double homicide in Långedrag. We don’t know much right now,” said the superintendent.

  “Haven’t they been identified yet?” asked Birgitta.

  “No, not yet.”

  Irene downed the last of her cold coffee. She needed another. She definitely had not had enough coffee for this kind of morning. She needed all her focus for this case.

  “There are too many guns in this city,” she muttered as she headed toward the nearest coffee pot.

  WHEN IRENE TRIED calling the Vasastan apartment, she could only get Sanna’s mother, who apologized and told Irene that their doctor had prescribed Sanna some sleeping pills for the night and she was still asleep. It wouldn’t be possible to talk to her until later that afternoon. She and Irene agreed that the detectives would come over at around two o’clock.

  “So, what do we do now?” asked Tommy. He was busy cleaning his ears with a cotton swab, an unnerving habit. Irene kept pointing out that it was a dangerous one, telling him her doctor said you shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear. Tommy would agree, and then he’d turn the cotton swab around to work on the other ear. We’re just like an old married couple, Irene thought, though she never said so out loud. They had been students together at the Police Academy in Stockholm, where they’d been the only ones in their class from Göteborg, and had been good friends ever since.

  Tommy got up, the cotton swab still in his ear. “I wonder about the first Mrs. Ceder, the one who died in the sailing accident. Maybe we should look into that.”

  “What’s the connection? By the way, have you figured out what B:son stands for?”

  “It’s an abbreviation for Bengtsson. I checked it out yesterday. Now, back to the accident. No, I don’t really think that they’re related, but it’s odd they both died unnatural deaths. What are the chances that both partners of a marriage suffer violent deaths? Even fifteen years apart?”

  Irene thought about that. “You may be right. According to Stridner, Ceder inherited a lot of money from his wife. It’s never without cause that my police instincts go on alert.”

  “Always follow your instincts.”

  “Go ahead and investigate yours, too,” said Irene. “Meanwhile, I’m going to poke around Askim and see what I can find.”

  THE KAEGLER-CEDER FAMILY house sat upon a hill at the end of a long driveway. A path of flagstones led to the front door, but beyond that, the rest of the property was a dreary clay field: not a single bush or tree to obscure unwanted and dangerous visitors. An ideal situation for Irene and Tommy; someone must have seen something.

  But no one had seen a thing. The house was far from the closest neighbors, who were away on vacation to the Mediterranean. They were retired, according to a second, talkative neighbor, and weren’t expected home until the end of the month. The chatty informer had been gone herself the evening in question, attending an investment club meeting—“Mostly just to meet with friends, since the stock market isn’t doing much these days”—and didn’t arrive home until just before midnight. Her husband had been in Brussels on a business trip since Sunday evening.

  The third neighbor was not as pleasant or helpful. He was late-middle-aged, overweight, and bald. Irene had to ring the doorbell several times before he came to open the door. When he finally did, he wore a light-blue, plush bathrobe that, once upon a time, might have been elegant, but now wasn’t much more than a rag. It was hard to tell what stank more, the bathrobe or its owner, but the stench of stale alcohol probably emanated from the man’s very pores. He’d stuffed his bare feet into a pair of worn-out leather slippers. He hadn’t seen or heard a thing last night.

  “I don’t understand what you want from me. I was watching television all night. I didn’t see nothing.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but we have to ask a few more routine questions. Do you live alone?”

  “Yes,” he grunted.

  “Any cars come by and head up the hill?”

  “Not that I know,” he said, irritated. “So what happened?”

  “A man living in the new house has been murdered.”

  “Well, I hope they tear down the place—it’s ruining my view.”

  He shut the door in Irene’s face.

  A family of five lived at the last house. The girls ranged in age from eight to fifteen. They’d all left home at quarter to six yesterday evening. The mother had dropped off the eight-year-old at ballet lessons downtown and then gone directly with the eleven-year-old to figure skating. The fifteen-year-old had been at riding lessons and had to be picked up on the way home, since there were no buses after eight. They hadn’t gotten home until nine. Their father had been at a business dinner with an important client and didn’t get back until eleven.

  Strange, Irene thought. All these people live in some of the most expensive houses in Göteborg, but they’re never home to enjoy their luxurious surroundings. Most of the time, these houses are empty. Irene noticed shield signs in front of all the houses that warned presumptive thieves of top-grade security systems. Probably a good investment.

  LATER, IRENE RETURNED to the Ceder house. The police officer on guard duty let her in, and her steps echoed desolately as she walked over the tile floors toward the bedrooms.

  Ludwig’s room had a surprisingly pleasant color scheme. The walls were painted a warm, light yellow with a sky-blue border, along which various painted boats floated. There was a silky-soft, wall-to-wall carpet in the same beautiful sky blue. Shelves and tables were covered with a riot of stuffed animals in various sizes, and over the crib dangled mobiles in bright colors. On the wall next to the bed, a photograph of Sanna smiled down, holding newborn Ludwig in her arms. A small, bright red car stood in the middle of the floor—a toy that the little boy wouldn’t be able to use for another three years, until his feet could reach the pedals. But the boy’s room was not why Irene had come back.

  Sanna’s bedroom next door was large and bright, with sliding glass doors and a view of the ocean. A colossal round bed stood in the middle of the floor. On one side of the bed was a small panel with buttons. Irene pushed one at random, and heavy black curtains slid over the glass doors. The room was completely dark. With another button, the curtains slid back open, and the pale light shone through the outside rain again. Another button made a huge television screen on the wall spring into life. Irene sighed. She wasn’t here to admire interior decoration, and as luxurious and trendy as the room was, it all seemed too impersonal and cold.

  Irene experimented with the button panel until the mirrored glass closet doors opened. She
had never seen so much clothing in her entire life—at least not meant for one person. She scanned the closet and confirmed what she suspected—only women’s clothes were stored there. The single article of clothing meant for a man was a brand new, white velvet robe. Most likely the unused Scholl sandals in size twelve were also not Sanna’s, but everything else was. Irene read the labels on the items: Versace, Kenzo, Prada. There were other brands she didn’t recognize but she could tell they were of exquisite design and excellent quality.

  Slowly and methodically, she walked through all the rooms in the house. In Sanna’s bedroom and the hallway, there were pictures of mother and son, but Ceder didn’t appear in any of them. In fact, there was hardly a trace of him anywhere. However, Irene did find an unopened spray bottle of shaving cream and a package of disposable razors in the bathroom.

  Ceder may not have visited the house regularly, but male visitors were obviously still welcome.

  THE ONLY POTENTIAL witness was a man who lived near the villa. He explained he’d been outside walking his dog, despite the bad weather. Before he’d gotten all the way to the Ceder place, he’d seen the back of a jogger running away down a jogging path that ran along the coast to Billdal. However, the witness had been a hundred meters away and had seen the jogger only from the back. The man had been wearing a dark jogging outfit and a knitted wool cap. He was slightly above-average height and must have been in good shape, since he was running rather swiftly. That’s all the description the police could get.

  The neighbor had walked his dog to the driveway of the Ceder house and turned around. Although the road was narrow and hardly saw much traffic, the city had put in street lights all the way to where the path turned off to the bike trail. The witness thought he’d reached the Ceder driveway at 7:15 P.M. He could say with certainty that there hadn’t been a car parked in the driveway, and he was fairly sure there were no lights on inside the house, although the outdoor lights above the garage door and the front door had been lit.

  “And even this description doesn’t tell us much,” Irene said later. “The Jaguar was inside the garage. Or perhaps Ceder hadn’t arrived home yet. The outdoor lights could be the kind that turn on automatically as soon as it gets dark. Or maybe they leave the lights on twenty-four-seven. It’s a popular jogging route, although it was terrible weather for jogging.”