Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  Sirpa is sitting a few rows in front of Zack. He watches her stand up with an effort and raise her hand to speak.

  “Sirpa,” Douglas says.

  “I started to put together a database of customers based on the information in Sukayana Prikon’s computer last night. We’ve also added the names we found in her cell phone, and in those belonging to the murdered women.”

  “We?” Douglas asks.

  “Yes, it took a bit of time, but I had the help of an alert and talented trainee,” she says, nodding with a smile to a young woman with her dark hair in a ponytail. The trainee blushes and glances nervously around the room.

  “Either way, we’ve got a list of just over fifty names, numbers, and anonymous email addresses, so obviously we’ll be trying to identify them all as quickly as possible.”

  Douglas nods his approval.

  “Good work. I’ll see to it that you get any names that might crop up when the accounts and most recent invoices have been examined.”

  Zack lets out a large yawn and stretches. The room has got very warm, and he can feel his lower back sweating. Meetings like this drain him of energy.

  Douglas delegates work to the group leaders. The owners of the most lucrative massage parlors are to be questioned for information, and old tip-offs about prostitution from the public will be dusted off and looked at again.

  “Okay, people. Out into the real world with you.”

  16

  THE MOTHER pushing the twin buggy is in a hurry. There’s never enough time to get everything done, and this particular Tuesday morning seems worse than ever.

  Wrestling the boys into the car.

  “Need a pee!”

  Out again, and suddenly they’re running late.

  Their doctor’s appointment was two minutes ago.

  But at least the sun is shining.

  She half-jogs from the parking lot toward the main entrance of the Södermalm Hospital, the one with the projecting white roof and red benches. She doesn’t see the car before it bounces over the curb of the pavement and brakes hard just a yard or so in front of her buggy. One of the back doors opens and something is pushed out. Very gradually, as if time has slowed down, the body tumbles toward the tarmac and hits the ground right in front of the stroller.

  The car drives off at high speed.

  The three-year-old boys start screaming, and when their mother sees what the children have seen, she starts screaming as well. Two men come running over to help, but pull back instantly.

  “Oh, fucking hell!” one of the men says.

  His legs feel like they’re about to give way, but he grabs hold of a street sign and clings on as the vomit gushes from his mouth.

  It’s a woman’s body. She’s lying on the tarmac, not quite on her side, wearing nothing but a white undershirt and underpants. Her thin clothes are flecked with blood and excrement, but that isn’t what’s making the woman and children scream and the man throw up.

  It’s what’s missing.

  Her legs.

  It looks like someone’s torn them from her body by force, or carved them off with a blunt instrument. Stringy remnants of sinew and muscle dangle from what’s left of her thighs. Thick leather belts have been strapped tight around the stumps to stop the bleeding, and from the left thigh a stubby white bone protrudes a few inches.

  The mother quickly turns the stroller away from the body so abruptly that the boys start screaming even louder.

  “Do something, do something!” she shrieks at the men standing there staring at the mutilated woman.

  One of them pulls out his phone and starts to dial 112 with trembling fingers. Then he remembers where he is and runs back in through the swinging doors instead.

  The older man walks tentatively up to the woman, as if he were approaching a firework that hadn’t yet gone off.

  An acrid stench he’s never smelled before.

  Never wants to smell again.

  Blood, flesh, and excrement. A few flies are already buzzing around the wounds.

  Then he hears her groan and sees her move her head slightly.

  “Dear God, she’s alive,” he mutters to himself.

  He kneels down stiffly beside her head, but doesn’t know what to do. He gently strokes her hair and says:

  “There, now, it’s going to be okay. You’ll see. The doctors are on their way.”

  More people have gathered around the woman. They can’t stop staring at the mutilated body, as if they were witnessing some macabre play, and a man in a suit who’s just come out of the hospital stops midstride.

  “Out of the way!”

  He is suddenly shoved in the back and stumbles aside as two women and a man, all in white coats, come rushing out with a gurney.

  The first white coat is an anesthetist, Marianne Edberg, a wiry, gray-haired woman in her sixties. She immediately puts two fingers to the woman’s neck and brushes the hair away from her face. The mutilated woman seems to be roughly the same age as her.

  Who dumped you here? she thinks. Who could be monstrous enough to inflict this sort of damage on another human being?

  She looks down at the woman’s thighs, or rather what’s left of them. She’s seen a lot of things, but nothing remotely like this.

  A nurse comes out with a blue emergency bicycle loaded with medical equipment.

  “What do you need?” she says.

  “She’s got a pulse. It’s weak, but she’s breathing,” Marianne Edberg says.

  With practiced movements they lift the woman onto the gurney. Two small pools of blood have formed on the tarmac under the stumps of her legs.

  They fix an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, run toward the elevator, and press the button for the first level below the ground floor.

  “This is going to be tight,” Marianne Edberg says as the door slides open and she sees the emergency room ahead of her.

  17

  DOUGLAS’S PHONE starts to vibrate in his jacket pocket just as the last police officers are leaving the lecture hall. He looks at the screen. Number withheld. Probably some spotty call-center salesman, but it could be from another official body. He takes the call.

  “Juste . . . Yes, that’s me. When? Can we come over? Thanks, I’ll send two of my officers at once.”

  He runs out into the corridor and shouts:

  “Zack! Deniz!”

  They’re about to step into the elevator when they hear his voice.

  “You’ve got to get to Södermalm Hospital. A woman who’s had her legs cut off has just been brought in. Thai appearance, according to the doctor. And they say it doesn’t look like an accident.”

  Zack and Deniz see the concern in his eyes. They look at each other.

  Another young woman from a massage parlor?

  Or Sukayana Prikon?

  * * *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES later Deniz parks the car outside the white canopied entrance of the hospital. Zack drums his fingers on the dashboard. On the way he’s been repeating the same phrase to himself, over and over again.

  “It can’t be Sukayana. It can’t be her.”

  The emergency room is full of people, most of them sitting quietly and waiting patiently for their turn.

  The yellow walls of the waiting room seem to have a soothing effect.

  A middle-aged woman in a lilac-spotted fleece is standing at the reception desk discussing something with the nurse on the other side of the glass. Zack and Deniz show their ID and push in front of her.

  “We’re police officers. It’s urgent,” Zack says.

  The woman in the fleece looks annoyed, but can’t think of anything to say.

  Zack tells the nurse why they’re there.

  She looks up at him, and stares at his face. She blushes, but quickly pulls herself together as she recognizes the seriousness in his voice.

  “Just a moment, I’ll check.”

  Zack and Deniz look around the waiting room. A few elderly people, a teenage girl with her arm in plaster, se
veral children with runny noses. No one who seems seriously injured.

  The nurse returns. She’s trying to stay focused, but can’t help smiling shyly at Zack. “The patient’s no longer down here. She’s being operated on in the OR now.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The hybrid operating room, a special unit in the operating department. You can’t see her at the moment, but you can talk to the doctor who saw her when she was brought in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Follow me.”

  * * *

  IN A windowless office with pale yellow walls Zack and Deniz introduce themselves to Marianne Edberg. She’s sitting behind a beech-veneer desk and Zack can’t help noticing the skepticism in her eyes as she looks at him. A twenty-seven-year-old wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket isn’t what she was expecting.

  He’s starting to get fed up with looks like that. What does he have to do to be accepted?

  Deniz in her turquoise top, patterned scarf, and dark gray jacket seems to meet with approval, though.

  “Have you managed to identify the woman yet?” she asks as they sit down on the visitors’ chairs.

  “No. Our first priority is to save her life, not to . . .”

  The doctor stops herself, as if she’s realized how sharp she sounded. She puts a hand to her forehead and takes a deep breath before going on:

  “You must forgive me if I sound upset, but I’m so angry that someone could just dump a seriously injured woman on the pavement like that. Like she was an animal.”

  “And we want to catch whoever did that,” Deniz says. “Did you or any of your colleagues see who brought her here?”

  “No, by the time we got the alert she was already there. All on her own.”

  “But there must have been other witnesses?”

  “Of course. But I haven’t had a moment to think about that. I got the alarm, ran outside, and there she was. And then nothing else mattered.”

  “Do you know if any of the people who saw what happened left their contact details?”

  “Check with the staff on the reception desk down at the main entrance. I’d guess that’s where they would have gone to sound the alarm.”

  We need to get hold of that car as soon as possible, Zack thinks. Find the madmen who did this. Someone must have noticed the registration number or seen more of what happened. And if the injured woman does turn out to be Sukayana Prikon, the car would also be an important piece of the puzzle in their murder investigation.

  “Let’s split up,” Deniz tells Zack. “You find out who the injured woman is, and I’ll go down to reception and see what information they’ve got.”

  “Okay, I’ll come and find you there.”

  Zack turns back to Marianne Edberg.

  “Is there any way I could take a look inside the operating theater? We really do need to identify the victim, and there’s a good chance I’d recognize her if I could just see her face.”

  “You can take a look through the window. I’ll show you the way, then we can talk as we go.”

  They head down a long, deserted corridor, where someone has seen fit to stick a pink, rose-patterned border along the middle of the pale blue wall. A faint smell of surgical spirit and disinfectant fills the air, and Zack inhales memories of fragile lives and inoperable illnesses. He often went to the hospital with his dad, and used to visit him in Danderyd when he was receiving dangerously high doses of cortisone.

  But he can’t think about that now.

  “What injuries has she got?” he asks.

  “Both legs were cut off high up her thighs,” Marianne Edberg says. “And it looks like she was attacked by dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  “Or some sort of large carnivore. Both the bite marks and the way the flesh was torn from the bone point in that direction. I go hunting myself, and I’ve seen similar injuries inflicted by predators before. We also had to wash a lot of excrement off her body, and it smelled considerably worse than just human excrement.”

  So you’re a hunter, Zack thinks. That seems like a paradox. Saving lives at work, then donning a camouflage jacket and extinguishing life elsewhere in your free time.

  “So you’re saying she was attacked by a mad dog? Or some other predator, a wolf, or something?”

  “It’s most likely that it was a dog that did it, or several dogs. As far as I’m aware, wild wolves have never attacked anyone in Sweden, even if there are plenty of sightings in the Stockholm area these days.”

  “Is any of the excrement still there?” Zack asks, seeing in his mind’s eye the mixed-breed dog out at the Brotherhood of No Mercy’s clubhouse. He’s also wondering if Peter Karlson has a dog.

  “No, we had to wash her because of the risk of infection. But I did save a sample. I thought it could be useful to you.”

  “Good thinking,” Zack says.

  He falls silent for a few moments, thinking over what the doctor has told him about the injuries.

  “Could they have attacked her afterward?” he asks.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Could anyone have cut her legs off, and then left her for whatever those animals were?”

  Marianne Edberg raises her eyebrows, as if she were only just beginning to appreciate what the woman might have been subjected to.

  “It’s possible,” she says.

  They enter the X-ray department and walk into the room where patients are sedated before operations. Unless the situation is critical, as it was this time, in which case the gurney is wheeled straight into the hybrid operating theater.

  Marianne Edberg points toward a round window in a door.

  “She’s in there.”

  Zack looks through the window. The operating room is large and airy. Gleaming metal, shining white walls and floor. A large X-ray machine hangs from the ceiling, along with two active television monitors and operating lamps with LED lights. Below them stand six people in protective masks, working on the woman. Some are dressed in green, others in blue. There are leads running into her body from the anesthetic apparatus on one side of the table and a bag of blood on a drip stand on the other. Further tubes and cables lead off to other machines Zack can’t see.

  The woman is largely concealed by a green sheet, but her gaping wounds are exposed, with thin tubes inserted into the bleeding stumps.

  One of the staff in blue moves away to fetch an instrument, giving Zack a chance to see the patient’s face.

  He feels like screaming and slamming his hand against the wall.

  But he manages to stop himself.

  “Fuck,” he whispers, so quietly that Marianne Edberg barely hears.

  Why didn’t we take her in? Why didn’t we offer her some sort of protection?

  He runs his hands through his hair, shuts his eyes, and tries to gather his thoughts.

  “So you do recognize her, then?” Marianne Edberg says.

  “Her name is Sukayana Prikon. I talked to her yesterday in connection with a murder investigation.”

  Marianne Edberg raises her eyebrows.

  “Is she suspected of murder?”

  “No, she’s just of interest to our investigation. But we believe she’s got important information for us.”

  Marianne Edberg considers this, and nods silently.

  Zack looks into the operating theater again. Watches the doctors trying to save what’s left of her legs.

  He tries to take a deep breath, but the air only seems to get halfway into his lungs.

  I could have arrested her for attacking me with that knife. Or for procurement. Maybe we had enough to bring her in for that.

  He looks at the stumps of her legs again and feels his own knees wobble.

  “When do you think we’ll be able to question her?”

  “She’s lost a lot of blood, and her injuries are extremely serious. And her CRP values are through the roof, which means she’s fighting some sort of infection as well. We don’t know what yet. If she survives, it’ll be a while be
fore she’s up to being questioned.”

  “We’re going to have to put a guard on her.”

  “I understand,” Marianne Edberg says with a look of resignation. “I’m afraid it’s getting more and more common to see police officers on our wards.”

  And if that gun-carrying biker gang is involved in this mess, Zack thinks, there’s not much chance of that ending anytime soon.

  * * *

  DENIZ IS sitting on a bench rubbing the bandage under her scarf when Zack arrives in the entrance hall.

  “It was Sukayana,” he says before she has time to ask the question. “It looks like her legs have been eaten by dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  “Or something. Some sort of predator, anyway. And there’s no guarantee that she’s going to survive.”

  Deniz looks angry. Says:

  “Sonny Järvinen and his acolytes seem to like macho dogs.”

  Zack nods.

  “How did you get on?” he asks.

  “They haven’t got a thing. Nothing. All they know is that a car stopped and left her on the ground. But no one reported a registration number or make of car, not even the fucking color. And at least five people saw it.”

  “Did you get any of their names or phone numbers?”

  “Do you think those idiots behind the desk took any details? ‘Oh, we didn’t think of that,’ ” Deniz says, in a mocking imitation of their voices.

  On the way out to the car Zack almost steps in a pile of vomit outside the hospital. And there’s a fresh parking ticket on the windshield. He tears it in two and throws it on the ground.

  They sit in silence for a long while on their way back to Police Headquarters on Kungsholmen. Zack can’t shake off the image of Sukayana Prikon in the operating theater, the way there was nothing where her legs should have been, the skin of her face all but lifeless.