The Magdalena File

by Jon Stenhugg

  “Well, I’ll give you one thing, little girl. You never give up. Reminds me a little of myself when I was working.”

  “And even after. I remember you solving a case that had been unsolved for more than forty years.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s what makes it so much easier when I’m over here. I can’t find much of that over there in the States anymore. We had it once, at least when I was growing up, but it got lost. No one there has the guts to do anything now. They sit around and bitch about how much more they need, instead of trying to figure out what they need to do.” He took a long sip at what was left of the dark brew. “I even think about moving over here once in a while. Your pensioners seem to have a better deal than I’m getting back at home.”

  “Maybe you should take a good look at the other shore before you try to leap across the creek, John. I get tired of this place sometimes: the bundling up, the smell of wet wool on the radiator as my gloves dry out. I’ve even considered applying for work at Europol and moving to some warm country in Europe. I mean, there must be crooks there too.”

  Sara looked across at the old man on the other side of the table. He looked like a father, or grandfather, at least someone she could trust. “Anyway, before you go maybe you can help me one more time. You’ve been chasing bad guys a lot longer than I, so maybe you could tell me what to do so I don’t lose her on Tuesday.”

  “Sure, I’ll help. But I have a condition.”

  Sara already knew it.

  “I need to have my passport back, and I don’t want any more hassles from Ekman.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “Ekman makes his own rules. But if you want to help you can come with me right now. I’m going to check out the place where the accomplice will show up on Tuesday.”

  They buttoned up their coats and walked over the bridge to City Hall. The gate was still open into the inner square where they got some relief from the wind as they stood in the middle of the courtyard.

  “This is where the city government sits when they make their decisions,” Sara said, pointing to the building surrounding them. “There’s a tourist store just to the right of the entrance, and that’s an entrance to a restaurant off to the left.”

  “Where’s your mark supposed to meet her contact?” Hurtree asked.

  “Through here.” They continued out towards the Bay of Knights in front of them. “There, off to the right. There’s a garden there, they call it the Zodiac Labyrinth Garden. The architect for this place liked anything to do with the zodiac. They tell me you can find the entire set of zodiac symbols in the paving stones around that little maze of boxwood bushes.”

  “They look just like chopped-down bushes to me. Those paving stones are so covered with snow and ice it’s hard to see symbols at all,” said Hurtree. “And frankly, I wouldn’t know a zodiac symbol if it bit me in the ass. But there is one thing. I’d never stand out here, so exposed and with nowhere to run. I’d have to have at least two ways out. Out here I’m boxed in.”

  “But she’ll have to see someone that looks like Lemko to feel safe enough to get to where we’re standing. How do I do that?”

  “I don’t think he’d be out there either. I think he’d find a place where he could mix with people if necessary and still have two ways to get out.”

  “Like over there?” Sara asked, as she pointed to a place where the wall receded to create an outdoor room with only two walls; an alcove that gave shelter from the wind and rain and provided a way to either run out to the street directly, or back through the main entrance. A large, blue ornamental statue of a Swedish Dala horse stood under the roof near the inside corner, creating a place where someone could hide, but blend in easily with the bands of tourists that grouped to have their pictures taken as they posed in front of the landmark.

  “Exactly here,” said Hurtree, as he gave the horse a pat on its hindquarters. “This is where Schneller would stand and wait.”

  “Let’s try it out,” she said, and went to the corner of the alcove. She looked to the right and could see anyone approaching from that angle. With only a slight movement of her head she had a complete view of anyone coming from the left. “This is it. All I need now is the appropriate clothing.”

  “You’re not gonna do this alone, are you?”

  “No, no,” Sara laughed. “We don’t get to be heroes over here like you American cops. I’ll have at least half a dozen men scattered around the place to help me get her, once I know who she is.”

  “And how will you know who she is?” he asked.

  It was a good point. Sara would have to get Magdalena to identify herself. She thought about using Lemko, but the risk of losing him was way too large. Any attempts to restrict entry would be a dead giveaway.

  She hesitated, then said, “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you will,” said Hurtree as they walked back to the Central Station.

  “Have you had any contact with your army buddies?” she asked.

  “Yeah, Peters told me to go home,” said Hurtree.

  “Did they ever give you any background on the torpedo?”

  “He only said that we knew about a weapons shipment from Estonia which had been on board the MS Sally. He put a man there to keep an eye on the shipment, but it didn’t help. From what we could figure out, someone opened the front bow visor and it got caught in a wave and just broke off. Bye-bye, ship.”

  “What happened to your guy on board?” Sara asked.

  “He drowned,” said Hurtree. He looked out towards the Baltic for an explanation.

  “I’m sorry. Did you know him?”

  “No. From what I heard, he was just a young man that was part of the team sometimes. He started just after I left. I’m sure he’d have been a good cop if he’d lived. I went out to the monument before I left for Tallinn to put a flower next to his name. It’s probably a ridiculous thing to do. His body’s not even there, but I guess someone has to thank him for his sacrifice.”

  They went back into the sports bar and ordered hot coffee and tea to warm up.

  “Do you ever feel alone, Hurtree?” asked Sara. “I mean, you don’t seem to talk about other people, except in the past tense. What about it – do you have a bunch of friends you haven’t told me about?”

  He cocked his head to one side, hiding his face, while still being able to monitor her expression. “I don’t need many people, Sara. Never have,” he said. “I got used to being alone a long time ago. It was too much trouble to make the effort. The job kept getting in the way. Everyone I knew who worked in our line of work and was married…yeah, they ended up divorced. Life is too short for grief, and that’s what you get when you get too close to people.”

  “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Yeah? Maybe so. Anyway, I think being alone is easier in the winter, when everything is bare and most people seem to be too busy keeping warm to give each other problems. Everyone you see looks as lonely as you feel. Anyway, being alone isn’t something to be afraid of, it’s another way to be human. We all need others, it’s just that some need to have people listen to them when they talk to the wall. Do you like talking to the wall too?”

  “Screw you, Hurtree,” said Sara. “You’re not much help at all right now.”

  “You’re edgy and pissed off. Strange. You should be out celebrating your successes, and here you are, freezing your butt off, talking to an ancient relic like me. I guess it’s time for me to get back to the hotel.”

  Sara stared into her tea. The leaves inside the teabag at the bottom of the cup remained an unreadable soggy brown blob. “My grandmother died. She was my only…the only person I could trust. Then she just dies. And I wasn’t there for her. I feel like shit, John.”

  Hurtree stretched his arm across the table to take Sara’s hand. “Yeah. I thought it was something like that. Here’s what I think. You’ve forgotten how to be busy living your own life. Imagine how good you’d be in a private life where you concentrated on th
at as much as you do on work.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like my grandmother.” Sara’s voice dropped. “The funeral is next week. Could you be there? I mean, could you stay for that? For me?”

  “You bet I can,” said Hurtree. “Anyway, where can I go? Ekman still has my passport.”

  “I’ll talk to him. Sorry I’m such a wreck, John. Hey, before you go, there’s something strange about the victim’s wife I can’t get out of my head. It’s nothing concrete, something Lemko said when I questioned him yesterday. He shot Hoffberg with a pistol that he’d been told would be available to him in the garage, if he needed it.”

  “Who told him that?” asked Hurtree.

  “This woman, Magdalena, the one who gave him Hoffberg’s address and the times when he’d be alone.”

  “Yeah? Pretty specific information, I’d say.”

  “It sure is. And Lemko told me he put the pistol back in the box after shooting Hoffberg.” Sara was getting an idea as she spoke, and it seemed to run back and forth between other thoughts in her mind, making it difficult for her to know which words would pop out first.

  Hurtree sat sipping his coffee, watching her like a father does when his daughter discovers something obvious for the first time; the joy of watching discovery, that first step in the race for the rest of your life.

  “I have some photos on my phone,” Sara said, pulling it out and firing it up. “That box should be visible somewhere.”

  “Maybe. If you’re lucky. Maybe your forensic team took it with them.”

  “No, something like a murder weapon wouldn’t be left out. It would’ve been on the top of the list of items in their report, and I’d have been informed immediately,” Sara replied. She began flipping through the images from the day of the murder, one more time. “It’s not here. There’s no box on the workbench where Schneller said he put the gun. There’s no box.”

  Hurtree thought he could hear the question forming in her mind, and coaxed, “Think outside the box, Sara. Who was there before you?”

  “Lemko, the wife who called it in, and the first officer on the scene.” Sara could see from the look on Hurtree’s face that she’d just answered her own unspoken question. “The wife! It’s either her or she’s working together with this Magdalena woman. One of them must have removed the gun. That’s it!”

  “Yeah, maybe. It usually is the spouse, you know. But you’ve still got a lot of loose ends to tie up. I’d have a good look at the forensic evidence, then talk to her as soon as I could. But that’s only me.”

  “Hurtree, you’re a genius. How did you make me figure all this out?”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything except maybe be the wall you bounced ideas off. Something anyone can do.”

  “No, not just anyone, Hurtree. You’re special. Really old, grumpy most of the time, but very special.”

  “There must be a lot you don’t know about me, if you think that. Can I buy some flowers here? I think I’ll go by the monument again and talk to someone else’s wall.”

  When he’d paid for his bouquet he turned and gave Sara a bear hug that nearly broke a rib.

  “Be careful during your sting on Tuesday. You take care, little one,” he said as they parted company. She watched him as he walked away from her, dangling the white paper wrapping in his right hand.

  Hurtree looked like any other senior on his way to a funeral, his pace slow and measured. Sara watched as he exited through the revolving door to leave the Central Station, hoping he’d turn so she could wave at him one last time, but he continued out the door and never looked back. She hoped he wouldn’t change his mind about coming to her grandmother’s funeral next week. She watched him disappear towards the bus stop. A gust of wind made her eyes water a little.

  The rest of the day was uneventful, and the phone call from Sara’s mother ended up with both of them hanging up on each other at the same time. Nothing like a family feud to get your blood pumping.

  *

  Sara was glad to hear the alarm on Monday morning. At work before anyone else had arrived, she filed the report that Sven wanted and left some details in an email to Cantsten that would help her prepare Lemko’s arraignment. Then she walked around the block to the NSS wing to wait for Ekman. He was already there.

  “I thought I told you to lay off the Lemko case. Cantsten filed an emergency hearing for today, and she could make an even greater mess of this. What in the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Trying to bring a criminal to justice, that’s all.”

  “That was my case,” said Ekman. “Why didn’t you tell me what I needed to know so I could stop him at the ferry?”

  “At the time, I wasn’t sure he’d be there. It was just a hunch. I didn’t want to trouble you with my hunches. I was afraid I, uh…actually, I was afraid of you, sir.”

  “Me?” said Ekman. “Who could be afraid of me? That means you knew you were doing something wrong.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Sara said. “I was just afraid of you. You have a reputation, sir.”

  He spun around from the window to face her, his ears flaming and his eyes opened much wider than necessary. “You may have caused an international incident because of your meddling. When you’re told to do something, just do it. I need to know if Lemko said anything to you when you questioned him. Have you filed a report?”

  “Yes, sir, I did. He didn’t talk much. Spent most of the time staring at the table. He told me that he found the gun in a shoebox in the garage. He’d been told by his contact that it’d be there if he needed it. He said he put it back in the box after shooting Hoffberg. I took a couple of pictures with my phone when I got there, but I can’t see any shoebox. We should’ve heard something from Forensics if it’d been there when they went through the crime scene, but it wasn’t mentioned. My bet is that it was Hoffberg’s wife that removed it. I think she’s Lemko’s contact, the Magdalena woman he used to get details about Hoffberg. Oh, and he was trying to find the location of the torpedo. He was working for someone in Estonia, otherwise that’s about it.”

  Ekman sat down behind his desk and opened a binder marked Hoffberg, and flipped through to a section that included the summary of the forensic report. He read through it carefully and Sara wondered what to do next.

  She cleared her throat to remind him that she was still in front of him, and he motioned for her to sit down as he continued reading. Several minutes went by. He rubbed his temples as he concentrated on the file, shook his head a couple of times, then looked up when he finished and smiled. It was so unusual that Sara smiled back, then caught herself as she realised that a smile from Ekman could also mean trouble.

  “OK,” he said, “I give up. I need you to join the team. Sound interesting?”

  “Definitely,” Sara said, and fought back an urge to set conditions. “What can I do?”

  “Be spontaneous. Start at the beginning and tell me who you think killed Hoffberg and why.”

  “I think the murderer is Schneller, Lemko, or whatever we’re supposed to call him,” Sara said. “He admitted to it, and he described things about the crime scene only the murderer would know, like the two shots to the chest. I don’t believe what he said first about just liking it. He told me it was a contract, he was working for someone in Estonia who wanted the torpedo back. I think the torture got out of hand and Hoffberg died during the shock therapy. He said he put the two bullets in Hoffberg’s chest to make one hundred per cent certain he wouldn’t tell anyone else about the torpedo.”

  “And what about his wife? Why do you think she’s involved?”

  “I had a feeling about her very early on. Lemko had contact with someone called Magdalena, someone he’d used before during his Stasi days, and this woman gave him detailed information about Hoffberg’s address and habits. She told him about the pistol he could find in the garage. How else could she know about that? And now the gun is missing, if I’m to believe Lemko, which may or may not be a good idea. Everything wou
ld point to Magdalena having some kind of contact with the wife. Hell, the wife could be Magdalena.”

  “That seems reasonable.” Ekman stroked his chin and became Rubberlips, trying to contain the little dance his mouth had begun. “Did Lemko tell you anything about Magdalena’s identity? We’ve known of her existence for years, but there was no way we could ever identify her.”

  “Lemko set it up so well, he’s very good at his job,” Sara said. “They used two Post Office boxes in Älvsjö to make contact with each other. They both had mail forwarded to their home addresses, so they never had direct contact with each other. He told me the box number he used to contact her and I’ll ring the Post Office as soon as I can. I sent Magdalena a postcard over the weekend. I got Lemko to tell me the protocol he used, and told her he wanted to meet her tomorrow at City Hall, lunchtime, where they usually met before.”

  “Perfect,” said Ekman, “fucking perfect. How did you get him to reveal the protocol?”

  “I promised him a trial,” said Sara. “He seemed to be concerned about that.”

  Ekman’s lips twitched a little before he asked, “What was the box number they used?”

  “Box 4015,” Sara said.

  He jotted it down and picked up the phone. It took him only minutes to find out he’d need a formal letter to get the forwarding address released.

  Ekman pushed the notepaper with the bureaucrat’s name and telephone number on it over to Sara. “Get Cantsten to write a letter demanding that they release the forwarding address. If Magdalena decides to do a runner tomorrow instead of showing up for your meeting, we’ll at least know who to look for.”

  Sara was leaving his office when he continued, “When you get back I want you to come in and meet the rest of the team. We’ll have to discuss plans for your sting tomorrow. Does anyone else know about this?”

  “No,” Sara said, before she realised she’d already told Hurtree about it. What the hell, he’s probably already on the way back home. “No one on the team at the NBI knows anything. Not even Sven.”