Today of all days Zack wishes he could see those bodies through Koltberg’s eyes. When he walked into the room they were lying in, he couldn’t summon up any defense against the brutality, and now the images are coursing through his mind.
The blood.
The smells.
The fleshy hole where an eye should have been.
He looks through the window of a police car parked close to the door. A young Asian woman with straight dark hair is sitting in the backseat with an older female police officer. She was the one who found the dead women. She can’t speak any Swedish, and barely any English either. But she managed to say the words “police” and “help,” and that was enough for a passing teenage girl to sound the alarm.
Her face is swollen and she’s sitting there staring ahead of her with red, puffy eyes.
Her face blurs, and Zack realizes that he’s having trouble focusing on anything for more than a few seconds. He shuts his eyes and rubs his face with the palms of his hands. Deniz looks at him and shakes her head. Douglas notes her reaction, seems to be weighing something up, then turns to look at the door again.
“I don’t think this is going to end here,” he says.
The first journalists have arrived on the other side of the cordon. Large telephoto lenses focus on the doorway, and one reporter tries in vain to get a uniformed officer to say something.
Koltberg walks over to Douglas, Deniz, and Zack. He greets them with a barely perceptible nod, then directs his attention to Douglas alone.
“Same caliber weapon, same modus operandi. I’d say with ninety-nine percent certainty that these murders are connected to those in Hallonbergen. We’ll see if we can find any fingerprints to compare as well.”
He goes back inside the massage parlor.
Douglas is about to say something to Deniz when a howl rings out somewhere nearby. They turn around, but can’t work out the source of the noise at first.
“There, from the car,” Zack says.
The young woman who only minutes ago had seemed apathetic now seems to be having some kind of fit. The police officer in the car is trying to calm her down, but her whole body is shaking, and she carries on screaming, her head turned toward the roof of the car. She manages to open the door and practically falls out of the car.
The journalists’ cameras start to click. The volume increases immediately, and the scream really does sound like a howl. A howl full of pain that seems to transmit itself to everyone who hears it, a pain that can only be expressed by someone who no longer feels that there is any good in humanity.
The woman gets to her feet and runs a few steps, but she seems to be having trouble putting any weight on one of her feet. She stumbles and collapses onto the tarmac, and then falls completely silent. Zack rushes over and picks her up in his arms.
She doesn’t even seem to notice his presence. She just stares up at the cloud-free sky, as if her body decided to numb her out of sheer mercy.
“Who is she?” one reporter calls out.
“Does she know the murder victims?”
Zack turns his back on them and carries her to the patrol car and carefully sits her in the backseat once more. The female officer helps strap her in.
She looks at him as if she’s expecting a reprimand. But Zack merely says:
“It’s good that you’re with her if she comes around.”
Douglas comes over to the car. He leans in and asks:
“What’s your name?”
“Karin Åkerstig.”
“Is your partner nearby?”
“Yes, he’s standing over there. His name’s Karl Skog.”
“Good. Then can you and Karl take this woman to the acute psychiatric department at St. Göran’s Hospital? She needs proper medical treatment.”
She nods.
“Karin, I want the two of you to stay at the hospital and guard her room. It’s of the utmost importance that she isn’t left unprotected.”
Karin Åkerstig looks surprised, but nods and calls her partner over.
Douglas turns to Zack.
“We’ll just have to hope she’s in a state to be questioned later. Can you and Deniz take care of that?”
Zack mutters a weary yes and tries in vain to stifle a yawn. It feels like someone’s thrown a handful of grit in his eyes. He shuts his eyes and massages his eyelids in an attempt to wake them up.
Outside the cordon all of the national media has fallen into line. Expressen, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, TV4, Swedish Television. The atmosphere is feverish and the reporters are trying in vain to attract the attention of any of the police officers inside the cordon.
“Come on, you’ve got to give us something!”
“Is it true that they’ve been shot?”
“Are there more than two?”
“Have you got a suspect?”
Zack can understand their eagerness. Six women shot and killed in three days. Nothing like this has happened in Sweden in the past twenty years, not since that madman in Falun shot seven people in the course of one night.
The cameramen are jostling for the best angles. One television cameraman stumbles forward with such force that the cordon tape almost breaks.
“Okay, you all need to calm down now,” one of the two uniforms charged with keeping people out says.
Zack tries to identify Fredrik Bylund, but he can’t see him. Maybe all that coffee left him with an upset stomach?
But that wouldn’t have stopped him being here, he could have stood there with a sick bag in one hand and his cell in the other, Zack thinks, then hears a cry:
“Zack?”
“ZACK!”
Douglas’s voice in his ear. Zack turns around and finds himself looking into his boss’s irritated face.
“I was just saying, we’ll have a quick meeting in the command vehicle.”
Zack follows Deniz and Douglas into the sparklingly clean van. He sits down beside Deniz and hopes she can’t see how out of it he is.
“Okay, what are we dealing with here?” Douglas says, to kick-start the discussion.
“This feels more and more like gang war,” Deniz says. “What do we know about this massage parlor?”
“Nothing yet. It’s not on the list of parlors that were checked yesterday. But obviously we need to look into it at once. I’ll put someone onto that.”
“They were shot the same way as the others, weren’t they? So we could be dealing with a racist, misogynist mass murderer,” Zack says. “What was Peter Karlson doing last night?”
“Naturally we need to look into that,” Douglas says. “But could we really be looking at something as straightforward as racism? Or misogyny?”
“And where does Sukayana fit into the picture? Why would a mass murderer want to leave one of his victims alive?” Deniz asks, turning to Douglas. “Have you heard anything more about her condition?”
“She’s still sedated. I called the hospital this morning. She’s got an unknown and extremely aggressive bacterial infection that the doctors are having trouble controlling. It probably came from the wolf bites, but seeing as neither we nor they know where the wolves come from, they’re having to work on trial and error.”
They sit in silence for a moment. Realize that they haven’t made much progress with the investigation.
“Nothing new about Ingvar Stefansson?” Deniz asks.
Douglas shakes his head and says:
“We’re still trying to track down his family. We’re also talking to his neighbors. The ones we can get hold of, that is.”
“Could we be looking at more than one killer?” Zack says, mainly to show that he’s actually trying to think.
The other two look at him in surprise.
“But what about that text from one of the women, ‘He kill all’? That suggests we’re dealing with a single killer,” Deniz says.
“It could be a copycat,” Zack says tentatively. “Someone who’s heard about the first murders and is doing the same
thing. That sort of thing has happened before, and it wouldn’t be unthinkable in this case, at least not if we’re dealing with people goading each other on to commit hate crimes.”
“That feels like a long shot,” Deniz says. “I think the murderer is one person who’s got some experience of the prostitution that’s been going on. Who else would go to a massage parlor in the middle of the night on the off chance that the employees are sleeping at work? That’s hardly particularly common in Sweden. The door wasn’t even broken in. That could mean the killer had a key to the parlor.”
“So we could be dealing with an insider?” Zack wonders.
“I don’t know,” Deniz says. “We need to start looking into that angle as well.”
Douglas nods. Zack can see how stressed and focused he is, and understands all too well that they’ve got to hurry now if they don’t want to find themselves being called out to yet another massage parlor tomorrow morning.
He tries desperately to pull himself together. He wants to wake up, he wants to solve the murders, and give these women some sort of justice. He wants their children, parents, and relatives to know that the murderer who took their loved ones from them has been punished. He wants them to be able to sleep at night, even if he can’t give them peace.
“What if these women aren’t the only ones?” Deniz says.
“How do you mean?” Douglas asks.
“You read that report on the interviews we’ve conducted at different massage parlors, haven’t you? One of the women said that a number of women have disappeared without a trace. They think they’re going home to Thailand, but never get there. What if those women have been murdered as well, without us knowing anything about it?”
“We’ve been trying to get hold of the woman you’re referring to, to question her again, but she seems to have vanished into thin air,” Douglas says. “We’re still looking. Let’s just hope nothing’s happened to her.”
Zack’s brain feels like it’s boiling.
“Fucking hell, we don’t know a thing,” he says, far too loudly.
“We don’t know much yet,” Douglas says calmly, “but if we’re going to solve this, we all need to take our responsibilities seriously and make sure we’re working to the very best of our abilities. And make sure that we’re capable of doing that.”
He looks at Zack, and Zack looks down at the floor.
Douglas’s phone rings.
“Hang on, I’ll put it on speaker,” he says once he’s answered. “Zack and Deniz need to hear this.”
It’s Sirpa.
“Good morning. I’ve spoken to my contact at Interpol, and I’ve got a bit more information about Yildizyeli. He doesn’t know anything about them moving into Sweden, but he did have a few other interesting things to say, concerning right-wing extremism, torture, and wolves.”
Deniz and Zack lean over the phone to hear better. Don’t want to miss a single word.
“This Ösgür Thrakya seems to be one of the founding members,” Sirpa says. “He used to be in Bozkurtlar, an ultranationalist Turkish organization that’s evidently claimed thousands of lives. The name means ‘the grey wolves.’ ”
Deniz and Zack look at each other. They’re both thinking the same thing: the newspaper clippings in Ingvar Stefansson’s apartment.
Is he their lone madman? With some sort of connection to the mafia?
“Ösgür Thrakya made a name for himself in his twenties as an effective interrogator during the Grey Wolves’ brutal raids against Kurds, Armenians, and left-wing sympathizers in both Turkey and other countries. To put it bluntly, that means he’s horribly good at torturing people. According to Interpol, he was in Chechnya around the turn of the millennium, fighting with the separatists against the Russians. When he returned to Turkey he broke away from the Grey Wolves along with some of his closest followers and formed a criminal organization of his own, Yildizyeli.”
Which he’s now trying to establish in Sweden, Zack thinks as Sirpa and Douglas end their conversation.
Wolves, right-wing extremism. Links to a lone madman.
“I’ll get a warrant issued for Stefansson,” Douglas says. “It’s time for that now.”
Suddenly it feels like a number of pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.
“We’ve got to get hold of him,” Zack says. “Right away.”
38
AS THEY’RE on their way to St. Göran’s Hospital to question Paw Htoo, Deniz turns into Kronobergsgatan from Fleminggatan without any warning.
“What are you doing?” Zack asks.
“You need to sleep.”
“No, I’m fine. I just had a bit of an odd night.”
“I’m not going to ask what you’re on,” Deniz says. “But if you’re going to work with me, you need to get some sleep.”
“We haven’t got time. We’ve got to talk to Paw Htoo. And we need to go on looking for Stefansson.”
“You can’t have more than an hour’s sleep. Then we go to the hospital.”
She turns onto Kungsholms Strand, parks outside Zack’s building, and they go inside.
Zack unlocks the door, kicks off his shoes, and lies down on the unmade bed. He’s asleep before Deniz has even hung up her jacket.
She stands beside the bed and looks at him. He’s lying on his front, slightly to one side, breathing heavily.
He looks so young. Young and exhausted. Like a twenty-seven-year-old who’s just got home from a week in Ibiza. She gets a blanket from the sofa and tucks it around him, then strokes his curly blond hair.
She’s eight years older than Zack, but she doesn’t usually think about the age gap. She may have been through a lot, but so has he. He understands her better than anyone else in Police Headquarters, and he’s a good friend.
He always backs her up when older, prejudiced colleagues try to patronize her, because she’s a woman, a lesbian, or an immigrant. Or all three.
She thinks of an incident several years ago, when a superintendent slapped her on the backside when she passed his table in the dining room. Zack dropped his tray on the floor with a crash, and as the shards of porcelain flew through the air, he pushed the superintendent’s face into his mashed potatoes.
Or the time when, for some unfathomable reason, she found herself suffering from unbearable homesickness for the village she grew up in. She slept badly for weeks, and was worried that she was heading into severe depression.
Zack organized a surprise party for her in Empati, the Kurdish restaurant, and invited friends she had no idea how he’d found. She’d never forget that evening. She danced half the night away, and when she woke up the next morning she finally felt a bit better.
She looks at his face. It’s as if his features have been chiseled by some powerful force of nature, she thinks, and feels very grateful she doesn’t find men attractive. It would have been very hard to work with Zack if that had been the case.
She knows he’s broken plenty of hearts over the years, and can’t help thinking that he’s probably going to break Mera’s before too much longer.
She suspects he’s being unfaithful to Mera. She thinks of the way Zack and that hairdresser looked at each other, and the time last winter when she was supposed to pick him up from his apartment one morning, and he called at the last minute and asked if they could meet in Gröndal instead.
Deniz doesn’t understand how people can do it, how they can look their partners in the eye after they’ve been with someone else. It must show, surely?
She’d never betray Cornelia like that. But perhaps she lets her down in other ways. Cornelia wants them to move in together. She’s wanted that for a long time, but Deniz keeps putting off the decision. She can’t imagine how she’d cope with having to tell someone else what she’s planning to do, or when she’s going to be home. Or having to get someone else’s agreement before repainting the hall or hanging a new picture on the wall.
Zack stirs in his sleep. She stokes his hair again.
She trust
s him, and he trusts her, even when things look like they’re getting out of hand.
But he’s impulsive.
Takes too many risks.
Sometimes crosses the line into foolhardiness.
Sometimes Deniz can’t help wondering if he does it on purpose, as a way of testing himself.
Or because he doesn’t care if he dies?
That thought has struck her more frequently recently. Zack isn’t like other people. He can do great things. But he keeps on putting himself in harm’s way. More and more.
She wonders how many drugs he’s actually taking, and how often, and worries about losing him. Worries that he’s pushing himself toward the edge of the cliff.
To shake herself out of her thoughts she walks around the small apartment. She picks up the framed photograph of Zack’s parents.
Roy and Anna. They’ve got their arms around each other and are smiling. She estimates that they must have been about twenty-five when the picture was taken. Zack has his mother’s fair hair, but his father’s face.
Roy was a handsome man. Dark-haired, with symmetrical features. He looks healthy and fit in the photograph.
Before the illness.
Zack’s told her about Roy’s work as a bodyguard. How he was discreet and professional and therefore popular with celebrities and people “with far too much money,” as Zack put it. People like the Heraldus billionaire, Olympia Karlsson.
Until he finally messed up because of his lupus, the illness that he didn’t know he was suffering from at the time. It affected his joints, his breathing, and could make him incredibly tired.
According to Zack, Roy had fallen asleep on duty when he was working for a foreign pop diva while she was visiting Sweden. While he was asleep someone broke into her hotel room and stole her valuables, including some diamond jewelry.
People started to talk in the industry. Didn’t he look like he was drinking too much? Red cheeks. Clumsy. He had been spotted dropping a walkie-talkie in the middle of a crowd, and on another occasion he tripped over a step and fell on top of the businessman he was supposed to be protecting.
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