Anger Mode

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  Jonna looked at Walter with a pensive gaze. She did not know what he meant. Was it just coincidence? There were a lot of things that correlated with the Lantz incident.

  Walter noticed the doubt in Jonna’s eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That I’m either blind or stupid.”

  “No, I’m just wondering why you’re not taking the similarities more seriously.”

  “I am,” Walter said. “But these things take time. One can’t jump on every potential clue as soon as it appears. Eventually, you’ll be sitting with a big pile in your lap and get nowhere. Olof Palme’s murder is a good example of that.”

  Jonna took a deep breath. There was something in what Walter was saying. He had, after all, worked a number of years on the force but, even so, it did not mean that he was always right.

  “So what do we do now?” Jonna asked.

  “Give it a day to let things sink in. Making haste is never a good idea. This job requires reflection and deep thinking.”

  “Deep?”

  “Most people see only two dimensions,” Walter explained. “Then you solve problems routinely. But sometimes, routine is not enough. If you try to see things in another way – for example, from a murderer’s perspective – and put yourself in his or her situation, then you add an extra dimension to your thinking and make space for significantly more possibilities. Jump into the victim’s and murderer’s mindset and you’ll have a totally different view of things.”

  “Like a form of role play?”

  “Roughly speaking,” Walter said and nodded. “You’re yourself both the stage and the actors on it. The final scene is usually a life-or-death cliffhanger.”

  “And it’s applicable to this situation, you think?” Jonna looked sceptically at Walter.

  “It could be.”

  “But to do that, you must know all the pre-existing circumstances, a bit like the rules of the game,” Jonna said. “And we don’t have those yet.”

  “Exactly,” Walter nodded. “You’re answering your own questions. That’s why we’re letting things brew for a while. Think a little about it before you fall asleep tonight. That’s when the most inspired thoughts are born.”

  Jonna was not sure if Walter was playing with her. Such a reflective approach had not been taught at the police academy, not even at RSU.

  “And how do you attain this depth then?” she asked, with a cautious smile.

  “It’s not something that can be taught,” Walter said. “It either comes naturally or it doesn’t.”

  AFTER SPENDING SOME time in front of the commercial-free late-night news on TV, Walter picked up his mobile phone and dialled Swedberg’s number. An idea still remained untested, and he knew that he would not be able to sleep until he got it out of his head.

  “Do you have a few minutes at this late hour?” he began.

  “Not really, but, since it’s you, what do you want to know?”

  “Do you know if Malin Sjöstrand had any form of drugs in her?” Walter asked.

  Swedberg’s answer came quickly. “Actually, she had a little bit of everything. Among other things, there were traces of marijuana and morphine, as well as a substance we haven’t quite been able to identify yet. I put the report on the mess on your desk before I went home. If you lift up some papers, you might find it.”

  “I see,” Walter mumbled and wondered in which pile it could be hiding.

  He put on a CD and lay down on the sofa with his hands behind his head. Neil Young played “Fuel Line” while he tallied the books on Karin Sjöstrand. Suddenly, he became dizzy and nauseous. His field of vision narrowed and the room started to sway as if he were at sea. The first thought he had was that his sciatic nerve was pinched, since the sofa was well worn and saggy and his back had no support. But he felt no pain in his back or leg, which was what used to happen when an attack started.

  As quickly as it came, the sensation disappeared. Walter stood up and the room was as stationary as he was. His vision was restored and everything was as it should be. Perhaps the blood had rushed to his head when he lay down, or he was about to get sick. Even detectives got the flu.

  The flu did not materialize. The first thing Walter did the next morning, after getting his first cup of coffee, was to read through Swedberg’s preliminary post-mortem report for Malin Sjöstrand. He found it under the latest edition of the Law & Crime Journal. The post-mortem report gave him no more than he already knew. He would get the final report as soon as Forensics had completed the analysis of the unidentified substance. As the clock approached eight, the police station slowly became populated with staff. First to the CID coffee corner was Jonsson. He got a cup of tea as he passed and hurried to his office, next to the coffee machine, with his mobile phone glued to his ear as usual.

  Shortly afterwards, Cederberg appeared, panting. His doctor had prescribed a healthier diet and that he use the stairs instead of the lift as he moved around the police station. His bulky body mass had to be reduced at all costs, decreed his doctor.

  Cederberg accepted the stairs, but not the rabbit food.

  “We managed to pin her down good and proper, didn’t we?” gasped Cederberg, leaning on one of the chairs. Beads of sweat broke out on his high forehead.

  “Just spoke with the prosecutor,” Walter answered and continued reading the morning newspaper. “He’s going to raise charges against our pimp buddy. He doesn’t think that the girlfriend’s fake alibi will hold up in court.”

  “Yeah, at the end, she barely remembered her own name,” Jonsson laughed. “What a loser bimbo. One of the funniest interviews I’ve taken part in.”

  “Your rookie,” said Cederberg. “That little sidekick. She has a really sharp tongue. And she’s not completely empty upstairs. She could really become something too.”

  “Shall I tell her that?”

  “Don’t be silly, Walter,” Cederberg chuckled and reached for some biscuits on the table. “I just can’t understand why they insist on recruiting small, dainty girlies who can barely carry shopping bags from Konsum supermarket, much less cuff a collapsed drunk.”

  Walter glanced at Cederberg’s enormous belly and turkey neck, which wobbled as he munched his way through a buttery Danish. He wondered how many metres Cederberg could carry a shopping bag before his heart throbbed off its arteries, or if he was at all capable of bending down without asking for assistance.

  “Could it possibly be because of this?” Walter speculated and put his finger to his forehead.

  Cederberg shook his head.

  That it was Walter who, with some unexpected help from Jonna, had broken the pimp’s alibi was beyond all doubt. True to form, Cederberg and Jonsson had not contributed anything decisive. With nodding heads, they had backed up everything that Walter had said during the interrogation and when they actually said something, it was often clumsy.

  Cederberg definitely seemed on the way to losing his grip. It was perhaps time for the bottle again. It had been a while since the last time, and he often had difficulties with day-to-day life during his periods between drinking.

  Jonna had not performed badly. Without needing instructions from Walter, she had played the good cop and had won the woman’s confidence. Walter was almost impressed. Taking turns, they had managed to get the female witness for the alibi to contradict herself no less than three times in the space of ten minutes.

  “I heard that you were going down to Landskrona to take charge of the situation,” Walter joked and stood up out of his chair.

  “The Skåne Swedes are having a little grief with the immigrant gangs down there,” Cederberg said, with a serious tone to his voice. “Our colleagues have found a jungle bunny stuck in a barrel with a nine-millimetre hole in his forehead. They expect reprisals and more killings soon, since the guy with the hole in his skull belonged to one of the more violent gangs down there. There are some connections to satellite gangs in Södertälje as well. It could turn in
to a full-blown bloodbath in Landskrona. Could even make its way up here.” Cederberg wiped his brow and took another biscuit.

  “Well, then, it’s fortunate that you’re backing them up,” Walter answered with a restrained smile.

  Cederberg nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, but the National Crime Squad will want to stick their noses in soon. But as long as there’s a connection to Södertälje and no more crimes are committed, we should be able to handle it ourselves, according to Lilja.”

  “Good, hold the flag high in the face of the National Crime Squad.”

  Cederberg grinned appreciatively at Walter. “You can count on it.”

  CHAPTER 9

  CHIEF INSPECTOR DAVID Lilja had just sat down behind his desk with a cup of coffee when the telephone rang. He groaned irritably and let the phone ring a few times before picking up. It was Swedberg.

  “You have to come down to the Drug Analysis Unit at SKL immediately,” he began.

  Lilja had never heard Swedberg so agitated and was caught slightly off-guard.

  “I see,” he managed to respond and put down his coffee cup.

  “I know it sounds a little cloak and dagger, but I want you and Walter to come here as fast as you can. We have something that we’re anxious to show you, with regard to Karin Sjöstrand’s daughter,” Swedberg continued.

  Lilja was not the slightest bit interested in going to Linköping and the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, known as SKL. This would be a task that would take the whole day to complete and he had booked this Friday for personal errands.

  Lilja reluctantly conceded after further entreaties from Swedberg to accompany Walter to SKL. The weekly shopping at the Co-op and the cosy hour with the wife would have to wait until tomorrow, Lilja thought, and drained his coffee cup.

  “WHY WAS SWEDBERG so agitated?” Lilja said, after passing the Södertälje southbound lane on the E4 motorway.

  “She apparently had something in her body,” Walter reminded him. “He mentioned it to me yesterday, but he didn’t know a great deal.”

  “It will become clear what has made that man so excited for the first time,” Walter continued and looked in the side mirror at Jonna sitting in the back seat. She sat thinking hard about something and had not said much since the interview with Karin Sjöstrand. Slowly but surely, she had begun to realize that reality was a little different outside her glass bubble.

  Jonna had had difficulty shaking off her feelings after the interview with Karin. Her head had been full of questions after she had gone to bed the previous evening, and the advice to think things over before she fell asleep felt superfluous, to say the least.

  After twisting and turning until three in the morning, she gave up. She got up, made tea, and did not return to her bed again that morning.

  One thing was at least certain. She would do all she could to see that all the circumstances around Malin Sjöstrand’s death were uncovered. Even if the odds were microscopic, there was actually a possibility that Karin had confessed to the murder for someone else. Why Karin would do something like that, Jonna did not know. But such things did happen.

  Or else it was simply a straightforward accident, despite the hair in her hand. Even if Jonna lacked the instincts that Walter had after thirty years on the force, which had made him declare Karin as guilty as a fox in a chicken house, she knew that she was not completely misguided – deep thinking or not.

  Lilja swung into the site of the old garrison, where the SKL lab complex was located, and parked the car.

  The Drug Analysis Unit was situated in the middle building that was nicknamed The Ship. After spending fifteen minutes waiting in the reception, Lilja’s patience ran out.

  “Where the hell is he?” he exclaimed and looked over angrily at Walter, who had reclined his head backwards in the comfortable visitor’s chair. Jonna stood and browsed through an information folder from the medical institute.

  “Maybe he’s forgotten about us,” Walter answered, with his eyes closed.

  “It’s been at least a quarter of an hour since the girl called him,” Lilja exclaimed and pointed at the young receptionist behind the counter. Before Lilja could continue, Swedberg came out through the security doors with hurried steps.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he announced. “Just got some updated information – hence the wait.”

  “What’s really going on?” Lilja asked and got up from his chair. “First we have to come here urgently and then we have to sit here and wait.”

  “Come this way,” Swedberg said curtly.

  After they each had received their visitor’s badges, they walked through the security doors and then a smallish office floor, with Swedberg in the lead. Sparsely scattered white coats sat beside desks in the otherwise empty room. They passed some fortified doors with yellow warning symbols and, through small, round windows, could glimpse different types of lab, but they were immediately told by a tense Swedberg to hurry up. After having gone up a mini-stairway and through a glass door, they arrived at a large meeting room. The room had no windows, but had large, square screens fitted into the walls, which emitted a dimmed, almost convincing sunlight. In the centre, there was a big oval table and, above it, an enormous projector hung from the ceiling.

  A woman and two older men sat on the other side of the table, involved in a serious discussion as Swedberg came in and introduced his newly arrived guests.

  Swedberg opened the meeting by turning down the artificial sunlight and starting the projector. After a few seconds, an image appeared on the big screen. It resembled bubbles of different sizes, encased in a larger bubble that looked like a transparent melon. Around the melon, there were lots of objects that looked like small seeds. Walter, who thought the image looked comical, wondered if they were looking at genetically modified fruit. Judging by the looks of the others, he decided that this was not the case.

  A small, elderly and thin-haired man with a beard, who introduced himself as a professor of genetics, stood up and went up to the screen. He bent nimbly down and picked up a wooden pointer that stood resting against the wall.

  “This is a brain cell, also called a neuron,” he began, and pointed at one of the smaller bubbles. “A mature human brain is composed of approximately one hundred billion neurons. This specific brain cell is from a dead fifteen-year-old girl called Malin Sjöstrand.”

  Walter bit his cheek, regretting his premature amusement. Jonna looked at Walter and nodded in agreement, as if she had heard what he had thought. The professor continued. “As you can see, the neuron has been encased by a large nerve cell, known as a carrier. The carrier is, in this case, a synthesis – that is, a fake version of a normal nerve cell. What is remarkable about this synthesis is that it seems to control the real neuron’s synapse – in other words, the area where two nerve cells meet to exchange signals. As we understand it, the synthesis is derived from a very advanced component of an agent. The agent is, in this case, part of a compound that we found traces of in the girl’s body.” He paused.

  “If we can isolate the carrier and figure out which mechanisms it is controlled by, we will know how and why they react in the brain and especially which functions they control, even though we’re pretty certain which ones they are. Are we clear so far?” He turned towards his visitors.

  Walter mumbled an acknowledgment even if Lilja looked as if he had not understood a single word.

  The professor continued. “If this is a new illegal substance that we have found in Malin Sjöstrand’s body, it would be the most sophisticated to date. Its form greatly resembles adaptive medicines. But we can eliminate that since they are not on the market yet.”

  “Adaptive medicines?” Walter asked.

  “Have you heard about adaptive medicines?”

  Jonna nodded while Walter and Lilja shook their heads.

  “Let me explain,” the professor said. “You could compare it to an intelligent or, if you like, smart medicine. It adapts to the specific scale of damage or i
nfection in the body of each patient and acts with the necessary strength to eliminate the disease in the patient.” He paused for breath. “You could say that the adaptive substance first finds out what the body needs and then responds by making the body produce its own, shall we say, counter-measures, in the correct dose and in the correct form.”

  “However,” he said, holding up a warning finger, “it will be five to ten years from today before the first substances are available on the market in the form of pharmaceuticals.”

  “Obviously not,” Walter interrupted the professor.

  “It would have required vast resources to have developed this compound,” the professor continued as if he had not heard Walter. “The technology behind this can only come from one of the biggest pharmaceutical corporations or from a governmental organization. We suspect that it stimulates one function and inhibits another function in the brain.”

  “Which functions?” Jonna asked curiously.

  The professor looked at the young woman for a brief moment. “One function stops the production of the transmitter substance GABA in an area of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is the brain’s centre of fear and rage. GABA simply blocks aggression in human beings. The second function of the substance may even damage the amygdala; we can see a type of scar in certain areas that indicates that. We don’t think the girl had these scars before she had the compound in her body. Low or no levels of GABA, together with a damaged amygdala, would lead to the brain being overrun with aggression.”

  “Why don’t you think that she had the injury earlier?” Jonna asked.

  “Such a scar in the tissue would have been noticeable much earlier,” the professor said.

  “In what way?” Jonna continued to question and noticed that both Walter and Lilja had fixed their eyes on her.

  “She would have been a very aggressive person even without the compound’s effect. However, nowhere near as much as she must have been under the influence of this combination.”

  “How do we know she wasn’t that? Aggressive, I mean,” Jonna said and looked from Walter to Lilja and back again.