“You’re kidding.” Theodor looked up from his math book for the first time.
“No, I mean it. I remember this one time at a big New Year’s party in the early nineties. Your mom and I had been together for a year or so, and the DJ played Nirvana practically the whole time. They’d just had their breakthrough, and I think it was ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ he kept playing over and over.”
“Well, it’s amazing.”
“I know. But I didn’t get it at the time. So after a few too many drinks I went up to that poor DJ and got after him about how he should play more Michael Jackson and stuff like that. And he ended up letting me take over, which of course was a total disaster.”
“What happened?” Theodor sat up in bed; he seemed genuinely interested.
“I emptied the whole dance floor with the first song. So darned embarrassing. I completely panicked and did everything I could think of to save it, but I was screwed.”
“What song was it?”
“I don’t remember. But I can assure you, it was horrible.”
“Stop it. You totally remember. Come on.”
“Okay, but you can’t laugh. Madonna. ‘Papa Don’t Preach.’”
Theodor’s eyes met Fabian’s, and in the silence before the bass of “Lounge Act” started up, the two of them burst into laughter.
“Hey, it’s not that bad.”
“Dad, that’s like, total crap. At least compared to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’”
Fabian could only nod. Sure, it was still a good song, but the production was almost as hopelessly dated as a Roxette album.
“Yeah, yeah, but at least after that something just clicked and I started listening to everything from the Pixies to Sonic Youth.”
“Who are they?”
“What? You haven’t listened to them?”
Theodor shook his head, and he was the very picture of unspoiled curiosity, just like when he was little. Fabian could feel the exhaustion draining from his body as he took out his phone and brought up one of his favourite Pixies albums. Theodor helped him hook it up to the stereo, and then he selected “Where Is My Mind?” and turned up the volume just as much as the song deserved.
Theodor was immediately into it; he couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across his face. “Did you really listen to this?”
“Sure, why not?”
“It’s good.”
Fabian didn’t head to bed until one thirty. He and Theodor had continued to play music for each other until the lady next door threatened to call the police. But it was worth it several times over, Fabian thought as he turned out the light. The last time they’d had that much fun was when Theodor turned ten and they’d spent the entire weekend in pyjamas, building an X-wing fighter out of Lego.
He checked his phone one more time, but there was no message from Sonja. It would probably be a while before she got home. The deal was, he would take the kids back and she would stay out as late as she wanted to celebrate, which was okay with Fabian. He’d had a couple of nice hours with Theodor and, after all, he wouldn’t be able to keep his eyes open much longer. And if anyone deserved to have a night out, it was Sonja. He’d never seen her work so hard and with such purpose as during the past year.
Neither of them had said it out loud, but since the events of 2010 their relationship had been on hold; it wasn’t much more than a flimsy facade for Theodor and Matilda’s sake. According to Theodor’s therapist, nothing was more important, for the time being, than security and stability.
They still shared a bedroom, but they didn’t have sex anymore. He had made advances a couple of times, but she had so firmly rejected them that he’d decided to wait for her to take the initiative instead. Which didn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.
Yes, the thought of trying to find someone else had been in the back of his mind, but whatever it was that had happened between him and Niva, it hadn’t been worth it. The last thing he wanted was to end up in a similar mess again. Besides, despite the passionless dry spell and Sonja’s rejection, he had no doubt that he still loved her. And in some ways, their relationship was better now than it had been in a long time. They never fought, and they divided responsibilities equally. Beyond that, there were no expectations or demands.
Fabian turned over in a fresh attempt to fall asleep. He didn’t know how long he had been staring up at the ceiling, at the faint light from outside that filtered through the thin curtains. He never had trouble falling asleep. Most of the time he no sooner turned out the lights than it was time to wake up. Reading was out of the question.
But tonight was different. Although his whole body was throbbing with exhaustion, he was unable to find the calm he needed. The problem wasn’t that Sonja was out having fun, he was sure of that.
The problem was spelled Peter Brise. Fabian could not get his peculiar non-death, or whatever it was, out of his mind. The fact was, he had trouble finding a single thing that was even the tiniest bit normal in the whole sequence of events. And this, in turn, gave him the sense that this was only the beginning of something much larger. Something they had hardly scraped the surface of.
In all likelihood, this weekend would not go as planned.
Copenhagen would have to wait.
18
Fabian forced down another sip of the bitter hospital coffee and looked up from Hugo Elvin’s eighteen-month-old report to glance at the giant wall clock in the foyer. There was still some time left before it reached ten o’clock, when Lilja was due to join him. They couldn’t make an unannounced visit any earlier than that. Especially not when it was Braids they were going to bother. Braids was a master of recalcitrance.
It didn’t help that they were there to challenge his conclusions. But there was nothing they could do about that. Most signs indicated that he had made one or more mistakes somewhere along the line, and it was their job to try to figure out exactly what those mistakes were. Until then, their entire investigation was stuck pawing at the ground in endless confusion, where everything and nothing was possible.
Fabian tried to suppress a yawn, but gave up when he realized that his exhaustion was about to claim victory over the caffeine. Sonja had woken him at five o’clock, when she came tip-toeing into the bedroom with her high heels in hand and literally collapsed onto the bed. He had tried to go back to sleep, but the stink of alcohol and cigarette smoke, along with thoughts of the ongoing investigation, had kept him awake.
When Sonja’s alcohol-saturated breathing turned into rattling snores, he gave up hope and instead went for a run through Pålsjö forest. His route was longer than usual, and somewhere along the steep path of Landborgspromenaden with its view of the Sound, his thoughts turned to Cliff’s wife Berit, and her comment about the shipowner’s son, Johan Halén, who had committed suicide. A quick shower, a search in the archive for Elvin’s report, and then he’d made his way down to the hospital to wait for Lilja with a cup of bad coffee and a dry cinnamon roll.
The report described how Halén had been found dead in his garage on Monday, December 13, 2010. A repairman who had come to fix the dishwasher found him lying in a fetal position in the back seat of one of his cars, a Mercedes C220. A vacuum hose had been duct-taped to the tailpipe and had brought the exhaust fumes straight into the car through a side window.
Fabian had been in Thailand with Sonja and the kids at the time, but he remembered that an investigation had been initiated and that Molander had been responsible for examining the scene. No fingerprints had been found, aside from Halén’s own, plus a few on the end of the vacuum hose that were traced back to the maid. An interview with a gossipy neighbour mentioned the rumour that Halen had a sex dungeon in his basement, but they searched the house and found nothing — and in any case, Braids determined it a suicide and the investigation was terminated.
Elvin had been thinking along the same lines as Berit before they concluded it, and
— suicide or not — the similarities between the cases were undeniable. Johan Halén and Peter Brise were both wealthy, and neither had a family of his own. What’s more, the toxicology report showed that Halén, too, had high levels of alcohol in his blood, and his body, like Brise’s, had been frozen when it was discovered. The explanation in that case was that the garage was uninsulated and it was an unusually cold winter, with an average temperature a good deal below freezing.
There wasn’t much else to take from the report. But a simple online search of the news turned up quite a few interesting hits. One of them stated that Halén had been almost penniless when he died. That, during his last few months, he had sold his majority stake in the shipping company, as well as his private stock portfolios and most of the artwork in his home, which included Gerhard Richter’s famous A B, Brick Tower.
Exactly where the money had gone was unclear, a fact which sparked a minor avalanche of rumours. One of them maintained that he had gambled it all away at the casino in Malmö. Another said he had gone crazy and burned his entire fortune at home in his fireplace before killing himself.
One of the less scrupulous gossip sites accused him of having done a lot of online dating, and systematically abusing and degrading the women in a secret room in his basement. Sometimes so gravely that the woman in question had to seek medical care afterward. A similar search of Peter Brise, however, got no results. In other words, their similarities lay elsewhere.
“Whoa, looks like you had a late night.”
The last thing Fabian wanted was to get caught up in an explanation of how things stood between Sonja and him. Instead he forced down the last of his coffee, closed the report, and stood up. “Shall we?”
Lilja nodded. “By the way, did you manage to get hold of him to let him know we’re coming?”
“If you mean Braids, I didn’t even try,” Fabian said as they walked through the foyer. “Why give him the chance to say no?” When they reached the information desk, he turned to the woman with the headset. “Hi, Fabian Risk and Irene Lilja. We’re here to see Einar Greide in Pathology.”
The woman nodded and began dialling a number.
“Oh, hey, here are some pictures I got from Ylva Fridén.” Lilja took some photos from an envelope and showed them to Fabian.
In the first one, Per Krans was lying on his stomach on a bed, posing with a smile on his lips and without a stitch of clothing on his body. In the second one, he had turned onto his back and was holding a teddy bear over his genitals; and in the third the bear was gone.
“What do you think about this?” Lilja put her finger on the tattoo on Krans’s left shoulder. “Shouldn’t this help with the ID?”
Fabian took a closer look at the tattoo, which covered a large portion of the man’s shoulder. It was so finely detailed that it rather looked like someone had spilled a jar of bluish-grey paint on him.
“They’re here right now,” said the woman behind the desk. “No, I didn’t say you were available, but from what I can see on your calendar, it shouldn’t be a problem —”
Although the woman was wearing a headset, Fabian and Lilja could hear Braids cutting her off with an out-and-out diatribe about how his calendar didn’t have one goddamn thing to do with it.
“Well? What’s so important that they had to send the Stockholmer?” Braids said, letting Fabian and Lilja into the underground walkway without shaking their hands.
“Who are you suggesting sent me?” Fabian said, as he noticed the whip-like grey braid that hung down the pathologist’s back and functioned as a clear declaration of his belief that Peter Brise was only the first in a series of homicide victims.
“Even though you know I’m right,” Braids said without slowing his pace. “Even though the facts I give you are always correct, you can’t help coming by and bothering me and questioning what I say just to force your crude theories into coherence.”
“I don’t know that they’re all that crude.” Fabian felt his phone start to vibrate. “But there are a lot of —”
“Believe me,” Braids interrupted him. “Otherwise Two-fer would never have sent you. Irene, you’ll have to forgive me, but only Risk is brave enough to back me up against the wall. But let’s not dwell on it forever. The morning is ruined anyway.” Braids threw up his hands.
Fabian took out his phone, saw that it was Cliff, and rejected the call.
“At least it means she’s taking this seriously,” Braids went on. “And who knows, maybe she’ll even put down the bottle for a while. Hmm?” He punched in the code and opened the door to the morgue. “Time to get to the point. What is it you want?”
“We’re not totally convinced that Peter Brise is really dead. The fact is, there’s quite a bit of evidence to the contrary,” Fabian said on his way into the chilly room.
Braids gave a laugh, and his expression said this was one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard. “Then who does the body belong to, if I may ask? Santa Claus?”
“Per Krans,” Lilja said, finally breaking her silence. “He was the financial manager at Ka-Ching, and he’s been missing since Monday, when he apparently went to Brise’s house to try to work out a conflict the two of them were having.”
“Well, those puzzle pieces certainly do seem to fit together awfully well. Almost like in a movie.” Braids closed the door behind them. “Unfortunately, I must inform you that you’re mistaken. Brise is as dead as my grandmother’s old three-legged dachshund.”
“Are you absolutely certain of that?” Lilja said, as if to prove that Fabian wasn’t the only one brave enough to stand up to Braids.
“Okay, maybe if Gruvesson had been in charge of the examination. But he isn’t — I am. And if I say he’s dead, then he’s dead.”
“Unfortunately, that isn’t sufficient,” Fabian said as his phone came to life once again, a smiling Cliff on the screen.
“Do you know how long I’ve been a pathologist? Huh? Do you have even the slightest idea?”
“A very long time, I’m sure,” Fabian said, rejecting Cliff’s call again. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we need concrete proof. And from what I understand, there’s no way you could have gotten the results of the DNA test yet.”
Braids opened the refrigeration drawer and yanked out the table so hard that the victim’s body shook as if in one last throe of death. “For one thing, he hasn’t got a single tattoo, which in and of itself will be pretty unique soon.”
Lilja exchanged glances with Fabian and nodded.
“For another,” Braids went on, as if he were underlining each word so emphatically that it was rubbing holes in the paper, “according to his medical records he’d had two surgeries: one for a right-sided inguinal hernia, and one to repair the menisci in both knees. Those both check out. For the third, in case the gentleman still has doubts, he was homosexual.”
“And you can tell?”
“No, but I was able to confirm that his external anal sphincter suffered from a serious rectal prolapse, which could certainly be a result of excessively forceful anal penetration.”
“But that’s no —”
“For a fourth thing,” Braids interrupted, “I just received the results of the dental analysis.”
Fabian nodded. Braids was right. This could only be Brise. Which made the house of cards collapse once again. “And how certain are you that his body was frozen for two whole months?”
Braids sighed. “Honestly. What do you take me for? Do you really think I would claim that it was two months if I had any doubt? The cell disruption that occurs when the water in the body expands varies depending on two main factors: temperature and time. The higher the temperature, the faster the body breaks down. The most likely scenario is that he was placed in a run-of-the-mill chest freezer, which is why I went with a temperature of eighteen degrees below zero. The result: two months, give or take a week.”
“Then how come we have heard from several different people that he was alive as recently as a few days ago?” Lilja asked as Fabian’s phone received a message.
Braids threw up his hands. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the point of your job?” He fired off a grin. “Are we done now?”
Fabian looked at the message on his phone.
Might have found an explanation that makes sense. Best if you could come in right away. Cliff
19
The air that struck Dunja was not nearly as repulsive and urine-saturated as she’d expected. It was reminiscent of one of Copenhagen’s many vintage shops, with subpar ventilation. Thick, heavy, and damply stale. In the past few months as a street cop, she had visited a number of shelters around North Zealand. But this was the first time she’d been to the one called “Stubben,” at Stubbedamsvej 10, south of Helsingør.
A bulletin board in the hallway informed her that there were eleven rooms, each costing about 2,500 Danish kroner per month. On weekdays, breakfast and warm meals were served for 15 kroner per person, and on Fridays you could shower and get a haircut for 20 kroner.
There was no door to the waiting room, and Dunja could see that the chairs along the walls were filled with homeless people. A few were chatting with each other or to themselves, and others were ignoring the sign that said this was not a dormitory. But neither the bloody woman nor any of the others from the closed wine shop on Stengade were there.
Dunja glanced at her watch and found that it was 12:40. She’d been gone for almost five minutes, and probably had at least twenty more before Magnus would start to wonder where she was. She hadn’t told him what she was up to, since he would surely protest, and she had no intention of telling him until she had found what she was looking for.
She’d left him in the pizzeria further up the same street, at the intersection with Kongevejen, along with the monstrosity of a lunch he’d invented, which he called “Quattro Magnus.” It consisted of kebab, chicken, beef with Béarnaise sauce, shrimp, and mussels. She thought “Jabba the Pizza Hutt” would have been a more fitting name. Dunja had settled for a tomato and mozzarella salad.
Eighteen Below Page 9
