Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  * * *

  WHEN MARTIN Stefansson finally speaks, what he says isn’t the important information Rudolf and Niklas were hoping for.

  “I don’t like my brother,” he says. “But if you think I’d give him up to you, you’re seriously fucking mistaken.”

  He folds his arms again.

  “And I’m not saying anything else without a lawyer.”

  All these phrases from American cop shows, Rudolf thinks. People seem to believe that’s what happens in real life.

  “As I said earlier, you’re not under suspicion of anything. You’re being questioned to see if you can help us. So you don’t have to say anything, but you also don’t have the right to have a lawyer present.”

  “In that case this conversation is over. Can I go now?”

  “You can go,” Niklas says.

  * * *

  INGELA STEFANSSON is taking short, shallow breaths, and looks as if she doesn’t dare move as she stands there in front of her overturned chair.

  Zack slowly sits down again, still with his eyes fixed on her.

  Deniz is looking at Zack with eyes full of questions, but she quickly turns back to Ingela Stefansson to make the most of the moment.

  “Six women are dead. Women like you and me. Brutally shot in cold blood. We believe that the man who did it will do it again. If you agree to help us, we can stop that happening.”

  Something changes in Ingela Stefansson. She tugs her blouse slightly, then says quietly:

  “I sublet an allotment cottage in Tantolunden. Ingvar was there with me a few times, he knows where the key is. He might be there. That’s the only place I can think of.”

  Zack and Deniz get the address and hurry out of the room.

  “Tantolunden,” Deniz says. “Close to Sawatdii.”

  Out in the corridor they hear Ingela Stefansson’s thin voice behind them.

  “You’ll treat him right, won’t you? Promise me that!”

  “She did hit me in there, didn’t she?” Zack asks. “When I had my eyes shut?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Zack looks at Deniz.

  “I was just kidding. Of course she didn’t hit me.”

  42

  DOUGLAS WATCHES Sirpa from a distance as the coffeemaker prepares his double espresso.

  She was still working when he left last night, and she was here when he arrived this morning. Even though he got here at half past seven. How many hours is she actually working?

  It’s eleven o’clock now, and he hears a door open at the far end of the open-plan office and sees Zack and Deniz disappear.

  They’re going after Stefansson.

  Finally, it looks like we’re going to get hold of the bastard.

  Please, just let us have a bit of luck for once, he thinks. We need it.

  He takes his mug and goes over to Sirpa’s desk. He puts his hand on her shoulder and says:

  “How are you doing?”

  “I think I’m making good progress mapping this,” she says, without taking her eyes from the screen, then pushes her chair back and pretends to read something on a printout to get his hand to move from her shoulder.

  “I didn’t mean like that,” Douglas says. “I’m asking how you are. You’ve been working extremely hard recently.”

  Sirpa spins her chair around and looks up at her boss.

  “Do I look that bad?” she says, thinking that if that is the case, then Douglas is her exact opposite.

  The red handkerchief in the breast pocket of his dark gray suit matches the narrow red stripes on his tie, his eyes are clear, and his blond hair is combed in its usual neat waves.

  Douglas laughs.

  “No, Sirpa. You don’t look that bad, but I’m worried about the hours you’re putting in. This group needs you, and I can’t let you run yourself into the ground.”

  She nods.

  “Maybe I have put in a lot of hours in the past few days, but once this is all over I promise to behave. Okay?”

  “It’s about time you started to come to grips with that mountain of vacation pay.”

  “Do you want to know how I’m getting on with this or not?”

  He smiles at her.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ve had some help putting together a register of the Sawatdii’s customers. A lot of them were women, so she did run a regular massage business as well. And presumably most of the men who pay for sex do their best not to end up on any customer databases or pay by card. But we’ve managed to track down another two men we suspect of paying for sex among the emails we’ve been able to recover. And another one who sent text messages to Sukayana Prikon’s cell asking about sexual services. To be honest, they don’t seem all that exciting, but I’ll let you have an outline of all three in a little while. Then there are the seven we’d already identified, but we’re already on top of that, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, all but two have already been questioned. One of them has been in Crete all week, and the other evidently got home last night from a fishing trip to Norrland. We’ve got confirmation that neither of them was in Stockholm at the times of the murders.”

  “What are we going to do with them now? The men who paid for sex, I mean.”

  “The prostitution team are already involved. The human trafficking group as well, because they want to look at it from the other end. It does look like several of the women had been tricked into coming here on false pretenses. I daresay they’ll be getting in touch with you sometime today.”

  Sirpa nods.

  “We’re going to start looking through the computer files and email accounts of the second massage parlor soon, but there’s still one email address among Sukayana Prikon’s customer contacts that I haven’t been able to trace.”

  She points to it on the screen.

  dirtysanchez@woomail.com

  “I can’t get at that address using legal methods. The server’s in China, which means there’s no chance . . .”

  She leaves a long pause before finishing her sentence:

  “. . . unless we hack it.”

  Douglas says nothing, and Sirpa is unable to read his silence. Does that mean yes or no?

  “I know it’s important. We need to know the identity of the man behind this account,” she says.

  “How can you know that?”

  “Call it intuition.”

  She regrets saying the word as soon as it’s out of her mouth. Douglas is analytical, not the sort of person who relies on intuition to take decisions. Which is just as well, she thinks. But she’s convinced she’s right. She can feel it. And sometimes you have to trust your feelings.

  “Just take it easy,” Douglas says, and walks away from her desk.

  Sirpa watches him go with a quizzical look on her face. Take it easy. What does that mean? What sort of fucking answer is that?

  Take it easy.

  Does that mean that she has permission to make her way behind the locked door, as long as she’s careful?

  She decides that must be what he meant.

  43

  THE FRONT door of the little allotment cottage has been painted a bright yellow that clashes badly with the pale green walls. Beige curtains are drawn across the kitchen window, and on the other side of the door three stone hearts hang on thick brown ropes from rusty nails. Spindly roses in various colors are fighting for space in the flowerbeds, and the worn handles of some garden tools stick up from a broken bucket.

  The recent rain has made the plants and flowers put on extra growth, and the large leaves sticking through the rotting planks of the fence look sharp enough to cut yourself on.

  A lawn mower and children’s laughter can be heard at a distance, and in several of the surrounding allotments people are spending their holidays sweating as they weed their small gardens.

  Zack and Deniz keep the yellow door under observation from their vantage point behind a tree and some bushes a short distance away among the allotments of Tantolunden. The bushes sm
ell of ammonia from last night’s parties, and an empty bottle of Explorer vodka and two disposable barbeques have been kicked into the bushes where they’re standing.

  The morning sun makes the black leather of his Rick Owens jacket burn his skin, but Zack keeps it on to conceal his holster. He looks enviously at the others, Deniz hiding her equipment under a thin, airy cotton cardigan, and the four cops in their short-sleeved uniform shirts.

  Six people. Zack thinks that should be enough to bring in someone like Ingvar Stefansson.

  If he’s involved in holding women or children captive, this is hardly where he’d keep them. A house in the forest, Paw Htoo said. Not even the most hard-boiled child of the concrete jungle could mean somewhere like this.

  After the interviews with Stefansson’s brother and mother, Zack and Deniz had a short discussion with Douglas about whether to call in the rapid response unit for this operation, but they all agreed that it was unnecessary. Ingvar Stefansson isn’t a formal suspect yet, for either the murders or torture, and he has no prior convictions for violent offenses. His only clear link to Yildizyeli is a newspaper clipping about an extreme right-wing organization that Ösgür Thrakya was once a member of.

  Those wolf jaws could be the connection they need, to tie Stefansson to the mutilation of Sukayana Prikon, at least. But they don’t know that yet. He could just as easily have bought them from an illegal hunter, or off the Internet.

  “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone home,” Deniz says.

  “No, and considering how overgrown the garden is, there doesn’t seem to have been anyone here for a while,” Zack says.

  He looks off toward the park by the water, and thinks back to chasing Sukayana Prikon between the picnic blankets. That was only three days ago, but it feels like weeks. He can’t stop thinking about his decision not to take her into custody, and wonders if a different decision would also have saved the lives of the two Burmese women on Klara Norra Kyrkogata. Maybe Sukayana Prikon would have said more if they’d brought her in and put her under more pressure, maybe she might have said something that would have led them to keep the other massage parlor under observation. He’s convinced that she knows far more that she made out.

  Zack stretches and tries to focus. He woke up in bed with Mera after just four hours’ sleep, and couldn’t doze off again. He knows why: remnants of cocaine being released by the cells of his body, setting him going again.

  He would have liked to get up later and make breakfast with Mera, but he couldn’t relax. He lay awake for almost an hour, holding her. Then he walked home, even though all he wanted to do was stay.

  Now he’s standing behind some bushes that stink of urine, staring at an ugly allotment cottage, and trying to understand his choice. Right now there’s nothing he’d rather do than curl up on Mera’s big, soft bed and pull her billowing covers over him.

  In the car on the way here he fell asleep, and dreamed of amphetamines. He woke up with a start and for a moment believed that he’d actually taken some pills in front of his colleagues.

  First being slapped, now taking drugs.

  Constructs of his overheated brain.

  The thought of taking drugs in front of his colleagues brought him out in a cold sweat. The car felt horribly claustrophobic, and he felt like opening the door and jumping out while it was still moving.

  Then he thought about sensei Hiro, and the times they sat and meditated together.

  Empty your head of thoughts, Zack. Let them pass by like the wind.

  He shut his eyes in the passenger seat and meditated for a few minutes. It didn’t work as well as it used to in the dojo, but he did manage to stop thinking about his headache and withdrawal symptoms, and become more present in the moment.

  But not entirely. He still feels rather distracted, and is glad Deniz is leading the operation rather than him. Douglas picked her without giving him so much as a glance. Zack guesses he doesn’t want to take any risks after seeing the state he was in yesterday.

  Or else he knows more about me than I think.

  Deniz turns to the four cops. They’ve been called in for this operation from the City Police, and they all look expectant. Being picked to help the Special Crimes Unit looks good on their CVs.

  Three of them, two women and a man, look like they’re in their thirties. The fourth is maybe ten years older. Zack was struck straightaway by his relatively advanced age and lowly rank, but the older officer introduced himself as Theodor Larsson, and explained that he used to be a teacher and only recently joined the police.

  Then he asked Zack if he had children.

  “No,” Zack replied, rather taken aback by the question. “I need to do a bit more growing up myself first.”

  “I just thought you looked like you weren’t getting much sleep, that’s all.”

  “Really? No, I’ve just been working a bit too hard lately.”

  “I hope I didn’t speak out of turn. I’ve recently become a dad for the third time, so I know what a lack of sleep feels like.”

  “How’s little Oscar getting on?” Maria asked, and Theodor whipped out his cell to show her the latest pictures.

  “Can I see?” Deniz said, and gazed at the pictures with a maternal look in her eyes.

  “Oh, he’s so cute!”

  Zack couldn’t even be bothered to pretend to be interested. He’s never found it particularly interesting to be told things about strangers’ children, or partners he’s never met.

  But he can understand why other people find it interesting. Gossip can help you feel like part of the gang, a member of the collective.

  He looks back toward the allotment cottage again.

  So which gang do you belong to, Ingvar Stefansson?

  “You two stay here,” Deniz says to Theodor and one of the women, “while you two go around the back so you can keep an eye on the rear of the cottage. There could well be another door there. Zack and I will wait until you’re in position, then we’ll creep up and take a look.”

  Something crashes into the tree and all six police officers crouch down instinctively and put their hands to their holsters. A black-and-white football bounces to the ground in front of the them, then rolls off onto the path.

  They look at each other and laugh.

  “God, that scared the life out of me,” Theodor says.

  A boy of about ten, with curly brown hair, runs up to fetch the ball. He stops when he sees the four uniformed officers and two other grown-ups slowly getting to their feet behind the bushes.

  “Oh,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Did it hit you?”

  “No, it’s fine,” Deniz says. “But we’d appreciate it if you could stay a bit farther away for a while. Okay?”

  “Sure,” the boy says, and runs off with the ball.

  A minute later Zack and Deniz are creeping toward the cottage under cover of the surrounding vegetation.

  “Are you okay?” Deniz asks as they crouch behind a rhododendron. “I mean, really?”

  “What do you mean, really?” he replies.

  “I didn’t like what I saw during our interview with Ingela Stefansson. It may have got good results, but if everything kicks off I need to know you won’t flip out. Did she hit me? What the hell was that about?”

  Zack wonders if he should explain what happened, that he saw his mom before him, and felt her hit him, but decides against it. Deniz would only think he was hallucinating.

  Because that’s exactly what I was doing, isn’t it?

  “It’s fine, I promise,” he says.

  She looks him in the eye. He meets her gaze, and holds it until eventually she looks away.

  “Okay. I’m going into the garden to take a look around. You wait here,” she says quietly.

  She has stood up to walk toward the gate when they both see one of the curtains flutter. A quick movement, a shadow moving away from the window.

  A man? It must be a man.

  Ingvar Stefansson.

  Deniz turns a
nd gestures to the officers behind them to be ready. They nod back.

  “I’m coming with you,” Zack tells Deniz.

  “Okay.”

  They walk toward the little cottage. Talking in a normal conversational tone, they point at various plants.

  There shouldn’t be any danger. Maybe Stefansson doesn’t even know they’re looking for him.

  But maybe he does.

  Zack pulls his Sig Sauer from its holster, but Deniz pulls a face at him and shakes her head.

  A woman in her sixties, wearing a straw hat and huge red-framed sunglasses, walks past, and Zack tucks his pistol back in its holster under his leather jacket again.

  Deniz has reached the fence now. Zack is right behind her. She carefully lifts the catch on the gate and pushes it open.

  The gunshot pierces the summer idyll.

  Zack and Deniz throw themselves to the ground and snake off along the fence until they’re hidden from the cottage by a large lilac bush.

  The woman in the straw hat screams and starts running away on stiff legs.

  Zack draws his pistol.

  The grass is still damp with dew in the shade, and he can feel it seep through his jeans as he crawls forward to find a gap in the dense foliage. There, a glimpse of the door. Still closed. But the window is ajar. He detects rapid movement behind the glass. A flash of metal.

  He aims and fires, but realizes what a fool he is as the glass shatters. There could be anyone inside the cottage. A child, a woman. He has no idea of whom he might have hit, or where he might have hit them. A shot at that height could easily cause fatal injuries.

  Someone grunts something unintelligible nearby, doors slam, and an unsteady old man two cottages away trips over his patio table and falls to the ground as he tries to take cover.

  “Police! Come out with your hands above your head!” Deniz shouts.

  No response.

  Zack turns to see if he can get eye contact with one of the cops, but from his prone position he can’t see them through the bushes.

  A young woman with headphones on is jogging along the path toward Zack and Deniz. Zack waves his hand to get her to turn back, but she’s staring at the ground and carries on running.