The Golden Calf

by Helene Tursten

  “Who says we need to ask Sanna for permission?” Irene said, and smiled.

  Chapter 4

  IRENE HATED EARLY mornings. The earlier she had to wake up, the more she hated it. It was just “not her thing,” as the twins would say. In her next life, she’d be a nightclub star. Those working hours would fit her better.

  The early start was necessary today. She didn’t want to leave any chance that Sanna would get to the Askim house before she did. Sanna would probably hire a cleaning service, but Irene didn’t want to run the risk that Sanna would decide to clean the house herself.

  Neither Krister nor the girls had gotten up yet. After three cups of coffee and two cheese sandwiches, Irene felt up to driving. Should she take Sammie out for his morning walk first? A glance at the clock told her it was much too early. Her dog was the most sluggish member of the entire family. He was snoring along with Krister in the warm spot Irene had left in the bed.

  THE OUTDOOR LIGHTS were still on above the garage at the crime scene in Askim. Although the skies were clear and there was a hint of dawn in the east, the house loomed in shadows. Irene told herself this was just her imagination, knowing what had taken place inside its brick walls.

  She unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway. She took out a large plastic bag, put on plastic gloves she pulled from her pocket, and headed straight to the garbage can underneath the kitchen sink. She reached in and fished out a big wad of paper towels. They were the paper towels Tommy had used to wipe away the baby food Ludwig had burped onto her shoulder. Irene stuffed the wad into a small plastic bag and then put the whole thing into the larger bag.

  Her footsteps rang through the empty house as she walked to the bathroom where she’d changed Ludwig’s diapers. Irene noticed that the bottles and jars above the changing table had been disturbed, probably when Elsy was hastily packing what the boy would need for a few days.

  Irene stepped on the pedal that lifted the lid of the diaper pail. She took care of the used diaper the same way she had with the wad of paper towels: first popping it into a smaller plastic bag and then that into the bigger one. There we go. Now the lab has enough to work with. Honestly, she wasn’t really sure if the stuff in the diaper would yield any useful DNA, but she hoped so.

  Impulsively, she went into the glass-enclosed conservatory, not because she wanted to see the murder scene a second time but because she wanted to watch the sunrise. She climbed the spiral staircase and stood to look east. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, just the trail of a jet plane, which the first rays of the sun picked out in a golden shimmer. For a moment, the silhouette of the forest appeared to go up in flames, spreading rapidly across the tops of the trees. The sky changed gradually from lemon yellow to turquoise blue. Only a few minutes later, the color show was over, and Irene watched a normal sunrise that promised a fine day. She turned to look over the leaden sea heaving in great swells; the vista was like a lighthouse’s. I wonder if Sanna came up with this or whether it was the architect’s idea.

  As she headed down the winding steel staircase, she started to think about the money again. Who had paid for this house, Sanna or Kjell B:son Ceder? Even if Ceder wasn’t Ludwig’s biological father, he’d acknowledged paternity since he hadn’t officially denied it. Did Sanna inherit the whole lot, or was there a prenup? How much money were we talking about here? Irene realized that it wouldn’t be easy to find answers to these questions. Maybe they weren’t even relevant to the investigation. Sanna had an alibi. There was nothing to connect her to the murder of her husband.

  ÅHLÉN ARRIVED AT the station the same time as Irene, both slightly late to the “morning prayer.” She took the opportunity to hand him back the key to Sanna Kaegler-Ceder’s house, which she’d borrowed from him the evening before. Åhlén held the door open for her.

  Superintendent Andersson was already standing in front of his team and was showing slides on a screen. The screen rolled down from the ceiling, but something had gone wrong with the mechanism that kept it all the way down, and it kept unlocking and sending the screen straight back up. Andersson was characteristically frustrated.

  As usual, Irene looked for a seat next to Tommy, but changed her mind when she saw him sitting between the newly red-haired Kajsa and Birgitta Moberg-Rauhala. Instead, she slid onto a chair next to Fredrik Stridh. Fredrik was so absorbed in what he was seeing on the screen that he did not notice when she sat down.

  “… both bodies were in the kitchen. They were fully clothed. There are no signs that they’d been tortured or abused in any way before they were shot. As you can see in this picture—”

  The superintendent stopped mid-sentence as his pointer hit the cement wall instead of the soft screen.

  “That damned thing. Can we get someone in to fix this piece of crap?”

  “I’ll take care of it as soon as you’ve finished your run-through,” Tommy promised.

  “Why don’t you do it now?” growled Andersson. He tried to take several deep breaths to bring down his blood pressure. Andersson was supposed to retire this coming summer. He’d turned sixty, and he’d already had a one-year extension. Irene was always worrying about his health, since she knew he had asthma and high blood pressure. The fact that he was extremely overweight contributed to the severity of the conditions he already had.

  “I’ll need a ladder, and it’ll take some time for me to find one,” Tommy said patiently.

  “Fuck the screen and just show the slides on the wall,” Jonny Blom said.

  For once, Irene agreed with Jonny. It didn’t happen that often. They’d had a frosty relationship ever since they’d worked on the packing murder case that had taken them from Göteborg to Copenhagen. In recent months, though, their relationship had begun to thaw. There were signs that Jonny was actively trying to get his drinking under control. Rumor had it that Jonny’s long-suffering wife had made an ultimatum: the family or the bottle. It seemed there was something to the rumor. While nobody discussed it openly at work, Jonny was actually showing up on Fridays and Mondays, and he didn’t come to work hung over or reeking of alcohol as often as he used to. He had a lot to lose. With four children, he had the biggest family in the department. Only Åhlén beat him when it came to children, but he was a technician and not an investigator.

  Muttering to himself, Andersson tried to focus the slide-show images on the wall. The picture showed two men lying on a polished wooden floor. They could see a glimpse of a fireplace in one corner of the photo and the bases of some kitchen cabinets. One of the men was on his back. He had two shots in his forehead right above his nose, and he stared unseeingly into the camera. The other man was on his stomach. It looked like he’d fallen flat on his face. Blood had run onto his shirt collar and the floor. Both men looked fairly young. Andersson turned to Blom and said, “Why don’t you take over? You were at the crime scene.”

  “Sure.” Jonny stood up and took the pointer from the superintendent. “The bodies are lying two meters from each other. The man lying on his back owns the house. His name is Joachim Rothstaahl. We have not yet identified the second man.”

  “When were they shot?” asked Tommy.

  “Monday evening. Sometime between six and ten P.M. At least, that’s what forensics can say so far. They’d been lying there for over a day and a half by the time they were found.”

  “Who found them?” asked Tommy.

  “Rothstaahl’s father.”

  “What do you know about the owner?” asked the superintendent.

  “Joachim Rothstaahl is thirty-two-years-old, and he’s some kind of finance guy. He calls himself a consultant. The father informed us that Joachim had taken over his grandfather’s summer house. He was supposed to move into it with his girlfriend this weekend. She lives in Vänersborg. She was working during the day, and on Monday and Tuesday evening, she was at home packing for the move. Rothstaahl had already told her that he had an important meeting on Monday, and he wouldn’t be at home, so she didn’t call him that night.
But when she couldn’t reach him on Tuesday, she began to worry. She called a number of people, and finally she reached his father, who went out on Wednesday and found them both. There are no signs of a break-in at the crime scene. As I said, the bodies are two meters apart. We believe that Rothstaahl was shot first. The other guy was trying to run out the door between the kitchen and the bedroom when he was shot in the back of the head.”

  “Have you found the bullets?” asked Irene.

  “No. There were no exit holes, so they’re probably still in the bodies. Fired from a girly gun.” Jonny grinned.

  Irene studied the photograph of the two men. Jonny’s last comment raised the hair on the back of her neck. Could it be possible?

  “How many shots did each man receive?” she asked quickly.

  “Don’t you have your own case to work on? Why do you always interrupt—”

  “—because our case is connected to yours,” Irene said.

  “Your case? How?”

  “Just tell me how many shots were fired.”

  “Two. Two apiece, that is,” Jonny said sullenly.

  “Irene’s right,” Tommy said. “It does resemble the Askim murder.”

  “Stop right there!” said Andersson. “What makes you think the murders in Askim and Långedrag are related?”

  Irene hesitated. It was mostly a gut feeling. Before she could figure out how to put it into words, Tommy spoke.

  “Here’s how they are alike. There’s no sign of a break-in. All three men were shot at point-blank range with a small-caliber weapon. The murders happened within a twenty-hour time period, and neither of the two men we identified was ever involved in a crime. Both took place in areas of Göteborg that otherwise have low rates for murder and violent crimes.”

  “So who’s the third guy? Do we have any reports of missing persons that might match the body?” asked Birgitta.

  Jonny shook his head. “No one who looks like him has been reported missing. We turned him over and took his photo before he was taken to the morgue.”

  Jonny clicked for the next slide. The man in this photo was younger than the other one. He was blond with fairly long hair. Despite having been dead for some time, one could tell that he’d been rather good looking.

  Kajsa Berggren leapt out of her chair. She didn’t run out of the room this time, but pointed at the picture and waved her arms around excitedly. “I know him! I know who he is!” she yelled.

  “Who?” asked Andersson, confused by her excitement.

  “That guy is Philip Bergman!”

  “Who?” the superintendent asked again. Andersson did not like Kajsa’s strange outbursts. Usually she was so quiet and well mannered that he forgot she existed. And then, all of a sudden, she’d have an outburst and do something erratic.

  “Kajsa’s right,” Tommy said. “That really is Philip Bergman. Bergman-Kaegler. And that brings us back to Sanna.”

  This was too much for old Andersson. He slammed his palm on the table and roared so loudly that his voice echoed through the room, “What the hell is behind all this?”

  Irene could sympathize with her boss. There was something familiar about that combination of names: Bergman-Kaegler. Unlike her boss, she decided to wait and see how this would play out.

  Kajsa Birgersdotter made a valiant attempt to explain. “Sanna Kaegler and I are the same age. Maybe that’s why I follow her in the news.… Philip Bergman and Sanna Kaegler were old friends who started an IT company together. It became one of the largest in the industry. They all got really rich! The tabloids always wrote tons about them and their fancy apartments in London and New York and how successful their company was. And then the tech bubble burst, and their company went bust. And then that guy Bonetti went missing, too.”

  Andersson groaned loudly, but Irene was all ears. She and Tommy had been involved peripherally in the search for Thomas Bonetti.

  Witnesses had seen Thomas Bonetti in his Storebro Royal Cruiser 420 leave from the outermost dock at Långedrag one drizzling evening in September 2000, at about eight. Although there weren’t many people at the harbor at that time, the ones who were there couldn’t miss seeing the luxury motor yacht back out of its mooring. The ship was not built to be overlooked. That was three years ago, almost to the day, and it was the last time anyone had ever seen Bonetti alive.

  Bonetti had told his parents that he was heading over to the family’s summer cabin on Styrsö. He told them he had a few things he had to think through in peace and quiet.

  Neither Bonetti nor the boat had ever been found.

  Bonetti’s passport was still at his parents’ house, along with the clothes and personal belongings he’d brought with him. Since he also had an apartment in London, his parents thought he might have gone there to wait for the worst of the uproar around the bankruptcy to die down. However, they could not explain how he could have gotten to London without a passport. Only when an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent arrived did his parents realize that something was wrong. The apartment was in central London and extremely expensive. Thomas had been extraordinarily proud when he’d managed to snag it and never would have willingly risked losing it. Apparently, only then was his father, a celebrated lawyer, convinced that this was not one of his son’s usual episodes of minor mischief. The parents filed a missing person’s report, but by then, Interpol had already issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of serious white-collar criminal activity.

  Irene and Tommy had taken the ferry to Styrsö Island during a cold and windy day in December. Although it had been barely a few degrees below freezing, they felt frozen the minute they left the warm ferry. The biting, cold wind blew through their clothing, and snow whipped them in the face with small, hard pellets. It felt like they were fighting their way through polar regions—only the wolves nipping at their heels were missing. Irene had a wrinkled sheet of paper with the directions Thomas Bonetti’s mother had written.

  Head south past the bridge to Dansö Island. Go past Solvik Inlet. Continue to a yellow house with a glass veranda. The path divides; take the left. Follow the path along the shore, about 100 meters. Big dock with a boat house. Stone stairs to the right. There’s a low, red house with a sign saying Västerro, and that’s the one. The mother’s handwriting was elegant and clear. A key to the house was taped to the paper. When Bonnetti’s mother had handed it to them, she explained that no one had been to the cabin since Thomas had gone missing, not even Thomas’s older sister.

  By the time Irene and Tommy finally reached the house, they were numb with cold. It wasn’t much warmer inside, since the place wasn’t heated, but at least there was no wind. The cabin had low ceilings but was fairly spread out. It had been built high on a hill, nestled among rocks, and even on a day like this, the view was astonishing. The wind whipped the black water of the sea to froth as it hit rocks and reefs. They could get a glimpse through the driving snow of the other islands in the archipelago to the south and southeast.

  They had gone through the entire house meticulously, and there had been no sign that Thomas Bonetti had even been there, whether alone or with someone else. There were no signs of violence, and everything was in good order.

  They locked the door behind them and begrudgingly headed back out into the cold. The ferry home left from Styrsö Bratten, which meant that they had to walk even farther, this time against the wind. Coffee had never tasted as good as the cup they had when they finally reached the ferry café. Irene would have gladly ordered a barrel of it—not to drink, but to use as a warm bath for her feet.

  “Bonetti!” Andersson growled. “We checked up on him years ago, and he’s still missing! How could he be involved in these murders?”

  “Sanna Kaegler, Philip Bergman, and Thomas Bonetti were the founders of ph.com. They lost an incredible amount of money when the bubble burst. You remember the headlines,” Tommy said.

  So that was the connection. The light bulb lit, and Irene remembered the story of Bergman-Kaegler. They’d b
een a household name. When she and Tommy were taking a few days to investigate Thomas Bonetti’s disappearance, ph.com had been merely a background issue. The Internet bubble had burst in the spring of 2000. In September, by the time Bonetti disappeared, it was already history. Bonetti had been involved in a number of suspicious business affairs, and any one of them could have provided a good reason for him to lie low. That is, if he was lying low voluntarily. As time went by, and there’d been no sign of life from him, rumors began to circulate: he’d had plastic surgery and was seen by some tourists in Miami; he’d been glimpsed snorkeling in Egypt; he’d been on a luxury Mediterranean cruise, or seen at a sex club in Paris. One tipster said he’d seen him in Copenhagen pushing a twin stroller. None of the tips proved to be true. Thomas Bonetti’s description made it hard for him to hide, even if he’d undergone plastic surgery. He was thirty-one-years old and 155 centimeters tall. He weighed about 100 kilos. He had a pinkish tinge to his skin color. His hairline was receding, and he only had a few tufts of hair where bangs were supposed to be. His hair had natural red highlights, and his eyes were a watery light blue. He had thick round glasses in all the photographs that had been published. The rumor that he’d changed his appearance by wearing tinted contacts had been eliminated when his parents informed the police that Thomas couldn’t wear contacts of any kind. They also did not believe he was hiding in countries that were hot and sunny. Thomas couldn’t stand heat, and his skin couldn’t tolerate the sun.

  His bank accounts in both London and Sweden revealed that he’d taken all his money out the day after he disappeared. A sum of five million Swedish kroner had gone via Luxembourg to the Cayman Islands. There, all traces ended.

  Five million kroner would last a long time, but it costs money to stay in hiding. If Bonetti had continued to burn through money at the rate he’d done during his heyday, he should have gone broke by now.

  “At least a billion kroner went up in smoke in the bankruptcy,” Tommy pointed out.