The Sandman Read online

  ALSO BY LARS KEPLER

  The Joona Linna Series

  The Hypnotist

  The Nightmare

  The Fire Witness

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Neil Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Sweden as Sandmannen by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, in 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Lars Kepler. Published by agreement with the Salomonsson Agency. This translation was originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Blue Door, an imprint of HarperCollins UK, London, in 2014.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kepler, Lars, author. | Smith, Neil (Neil Andrew), translator.

  Title: The sandman / by Lars Kepler ; translated by Neil Smith.

  Other titles: Sandmannen. English.

  Description: New York : Knopf, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024978 (print) | LCCN 2017021057 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732257 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732240 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Criminal investigation—Sweden—Fiction. | Serial murders—Sweden—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT9877.21.E65 (print) | LCC PT9877.21.E65 S2613 2018 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017024978

  Ebook ISBN 9781524732257

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph © Henry Steadman / Photolibrary / Getty Images

  Cover design by Henry Steadman and Carol Devine Carson

  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lars Kepler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Chapter 151

  Chapter 152

  Chapter 153

  Chapter 154

  Chapter 155

  Chapter 156

  Chapter 157

  Chapter 158

  Chapter 159

  Chapter 160

  Chapter 161

  Chapter 162

  Chapter 163

  Chapter 164

  Chapter 165

  Chapter 166

  Chapter 167

  Chapter 168

  Chapter 169

  Chapter 170

  Chapter 171

  Chapter 172

  Chapter 173

  Chapter 174

  Chapter 175

  Chapter 176

  Chapter 177

  Chapter 178

  Chapter 179

  Chapter 180

  Chapter 181

  Epilogue

  A Note About the Author

  It’s the middle of the night, and snow is blowing in from the sea. A young man is walking across a high railroad bridge, toward Stockholm. His face is as pale as misted glass. His jeans are stiff with frozen blood. He is walking between the rails, stepping from tie to tie. Fifty meters beneath him, the ice on the water is just visible, like a strip of cloth. A blanket of snow covers the trees. Snow is swirling in the glow from the container crane far below, and the oil tanks at the harbor are barely visible.

  Blood trickles down the man’s lower left arm and drips from his fingertips.

  The rails sing as a night train approaches the two-kilometer-long bridge.

  The young man
sways and sits down on the rail, then gets to his feet again and carries on walking.

  The air is turbulent in front of the train, and the view is obscured by the billowing snow. The locomotive has already reached the middle of the bridge when the engineer catches sight of the man on the track. He blows his horn and the figure almost falls. The man takes a long step to the left, onto the other track, and grabs hold of the flimsy railing.

  His clothes flap around his body. The bridge shakes violently under his feet. He stands still with his eyes wide open, his hands on the railing.

  Everything is swirling snow and enveloping darkness.

  His name is Mikael Kohler-Frost. He went missing thirteen years ago and was officially declared dead six years later.

  1

  The steel gate closes behind the new doctor with a heavy clang. The sound echoes down the spiral staircase.

  Everything suddenly goes quiet, and Anders Rönn feels a shiver run down his spine.

  Today is his first day working in the Secure Criminal Psychology Unit at Löwenströmska Hospital.

  For the past thirteen years, the strictly isolated bunker has been home to the aging Jurek Walter.

  The young doctor doesn’t know much about his patient, except the diagnoses: Schizophrenia, nonspecific. Chaotic thinking. Recurrent acute psychosis, with erratic and extremely violent episodes.

  Anders shows his ID at the entrance, removes his cell phone, and hangs the key to the gate in his locker before the guard opens the first steel security door. He goes in and waits for the door to close before walking to the next door. When a signal sounds, the guard opens the second door. Anders walks along the corridor toward the isolation ward’s staffroom.

  Chief Physician Roland Brolin is a thickset man in his fifties, with sloping shoulders and cropped hair. He is smoking under the exhaust fan in the kitchen, leafing through an article on the pay gap between men and women in the health-care industry.

  “Jurek Walter must never be alone with any member of staff,” he says. “He must never meet other patients. He never has any visitors, and he’s never allowed out into the exercise yard. Nor is he—”

  “Never?” Anders asks. “Surely it’s not policy to keep someone…”

  “No, it isn’t,” Roland says sharply.

  “So what’s he actually done?”

  “Nothing but nice things,” Roland says, heading toward the corridor.

  Even though Jurek Walter has committed the most heinous crimes of any serial killer in Swedish history, he is completely unknown to the public. The proceedings against him in the Central Court House and at the Court of Appeal were held behind closed doors, and all the files are strictly confidential.

  Anders and Roland pass through another security door, and a young woman with tattooed arms and pierced cheeks winks at them.

  “Come back in one piece,” she says cheerily.

  “There’s no need to worry,” Roland says to Anders in a low voice. “Jurek Walter is a quiet elderly man. He doesn’t fight, and he doesn’t raise his voice. Our cardinal rule is that we never go into his cell. But Leffe, who was on the night shift last night, noticed that he had made some sort of knife and hidden it under his mattress, so, obviously, we have to confiscate it.”

  “How do we do that?” Anders asks.

  “We break the rules.”

  “We’re going into Jurek’s cell?”

  “You’re going in. To ask nicely for the knife.”

  “I’m going in?”

  Roland laughs loudly and explains that they’re going to pretend to give the patient his normal injection of risperidone but will actually be giving him an overdose of Zypadhera.

  The chief runs his card through yet another reader and taps in a code. There’s a bleep, and the lock of the security door whirrs.

  “Wait,” Roland says, holding out a little box of yellow earplugs.

  “What are these for?”

  Roland looks at his new colleague with weary eyes, and sighs.

  “Jurek Walter will talk to you, quite calmly, probably perfectly reasonably,” he says in a grave voice. “He will convince you to do some things you’ll regret. His words will play in your mind over and over again, and later this evening, when you’re driving home, you’ll swerve into oncoming traffic and smash into a semi, or you’ll stop off at the hardware store to buy an ax before you pick the kids up from preschool.”

  “Should I be scared now?” Anders smiles and puts a pair of the earplugs in his pocket.

  “No, but hopefully you’ll be careful,” Roland says.

  Anders doesn’t think of himself as lucky, but when he saw the advertisement in a medical journal for a full-time, long-term position at Löwenströmska Hospital, he had a good feeling. It’s only a twenty-minute drive from home, and it could well lead to a permanent appointment. Since working as an intern at Skaraborg Hospital and in a health center in Huddinge, he has had to get by on temporary positions at the regional clinic of Sankt Sigfrids Hospital. The long drives to Växjö and the irregular hours proved difficult to manage with Petra’s job in the Parks Department and Agnes’s autism.

  Only two weeks ago, Anders and Petra had been sitting at the kitchen table trying to work out what on earth they were going to do.

  “We can’t go on like this,” Anders had said.

  “But what alternative do we have?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Anders replied, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

  Agnes’s teaching assistant at her preschool had told them that Agnes had had a difficult day. She had refused to let go of her milk glass, and the other children had laughed. She hadn’t been able to accept that break time was over, because Anders hadn’t come to pick her up as he usually did. He had driven straight back from Växjö but hadn’t reached the preschool until six o’clock. Agnes was still sitting in the dining room with her hands around the glass when he arrived.

  When they got home, Agnes had stood in her room, staring at the wall beside the dollhouse, clapping her hands in that introverted way she had. They don’t know what she can see there, but she says that gray sticks keep appearing, and she has to count them, and stop them. She does that when she’s feeling particularly anxious. Sometimes ten minutes is enough, but that evening she stood there for more than four hours before they could get her into bed.

  2

  The last security door closes, and they head down the corridor to the isolation cells. The fluorescent light in the ceiling reflects off the linoleum floor. The textured wallpaper has a groove worn into it from the rail on the food cart.

  Roland puts his pass card away and lets Anders walk ahead of him toward the heavy metal door.

  Through the reinforced glass, Anders can see a thin man sitting on a plastic chair. He is dressed in blue jeans and a denim shirt. The man is clean-shaven, and his eyes seem remarkably calm. The many wrinkles covering his pale face look like the cracked clay at the bottom of a dried-up riverbed.

  Jurek Walter was found guilty of only two murders and one attempted murder, but there’s compelling evidence linking him to nineteen others.

  Thirteen years ago, he was caught red-handed in Lill-Jan’s Forest, on Djurgården, in Stockholm, forcing a fifty-year-old woman back into a coffin in the ground. She had been kept in the coffin for almost two years, but was still alive. The woman had sustained terrible injuries, she was malnourished, her muscles had withered away, she had appalling pressure sores and frostbite, and she had suffered severe brain damage. If the police hadn’t followed and arrested Jurek Walter beside the coffin, he might never have been stopped.

  Now Roland takes out three small glass bottles containing yellow powder, puts some saline into each of the bottles, shakes them carefully, then draws the contents into a syringe.

  He puts his earplugs in and opens the small hatch in the door. There’s a clatter of metal, and a heavy smell of concrete and dust hits them.

  In a dispassionate voice, Roland tells Jurek that it’s time
for his injection.