The Nightmare Page 11

  The entrance is cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape marked DO NOT CROSS and CRIME SCENE in bold letters.

  Joona flashes his badge to the uniformed officer on duty, then shakes his hand. They’ve met before but never worked together.

  “Hot today.”

  “You’re telling me,” the officer replies.

  “How many technicians on the scene?” Joona asks, nodding toward the stairwell.

  “One of our guys and three from Säpo,” the officer answers cheerfully. “They’ve trying to find DNA from the perp.”

  “They’re not going to find any,” Joona says, almost to himself, as he starts up the stairs.

  Standing in front of the apartment door on the fourth floor is Melker Janos, an older officer whom Joona remembers from his own training days as a stressed and unpleasant superior. At that time, Melker was rising in his career, but then came a bitter divorce and periodic alcohol abuse, which resulted in his step-by-step demotion until he landed back on patrol.

  When he sees Joona, he greets him sourly and opens the door for him with an exaggeratedly servile gesture.

  “Thanks,” Joona says. He doesn’t wait for a response.

  Tommy Kofoed is just inside the door, moving around hunched and morose. He doesn’t even reach Joona’s chest anymore, but when their eyes meet, Kofoed’s face breaks into a wide grin.

  “Joona, great to see you. I thought they were sending you over to the Police Training Academy.”

  “I took a wrong turn.”

  “How wonderful!”

  “Have you found anything?”

  “We’ve secured all the shoe prints in the hallway,” Tommy replies.

  “Yes, they’ll all match my shoes.” Joona grins as they shake hands.

  “And the attacker’s,” Kofoed protests. “He was moving around in an awfully peculiar way, wasn’t he?”

  “Right.”

  There are mats all over, protecting the floor from evidence contamination. A camera has been set up on a tripod and the lens is focused on the floor. A strong lamp with an aluminum reflector lies in the corner, its cord wrapped around the base. The technicians are scanning for invisible shoe prints using raking light, a kind of light which shines parallel to the floor, then they lift the prints electrostatically. They’ve marked the intruder’s path from the kitchen through the hall.

  Joona doubts they will connect these prints with his assailant. The man would have certainly destroyed any shoes, gloves, and clothes he was wearing. He’s probably burned them.

  “Tell me, how did he run, exactly?” asks Kofoed as he points to the markings. “There … there … across there … and then nothing before here … and here.”

  “You’ve missed a shoe print,” Joona says with a small smile.

  “What the hell?”

  “There.” Joona points.

  “Where?”

  “On the wall.”

  “What the fuck!”

  A faint shoe print can be seen about seventy centimeters above the floor, outlined on the light gray wallpaper. Tommy Kofoed calls another technician over and asks him to take a gelatin print.

  “Can I walk on the floor now?” Joona asks.

  “Sure. Just keep off the walls,” a frustrated Kofoed replies.

  24

  the object

  In the kitchen, there’s a man wearing jeans and a light brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He’s stroking his blond mustache, talking loudly and pointing at the microwave oven. As Joona walks inside, he observes a technician in a mask and protective gloves pack the misshapen spray can into a paper bag, wrapping the open end of the bag twice. Then he tapes the bag shut and writes on it.

  “Joona Linna, right?” the man with the mustache says. “If you’re as good as they say, you ought to come work for us.”

  They shake hands.

  “Göran Stone, Säpo,” the man says contentedly.

  “Are you in charge of the initial investigation?” asks Joona.

  “Yes, I am. Or rather, formally, it’s Saga Bauer. For the sake of statistics,” he adds and grins.

  “I’ve met her. She seems capable—”

  “Isn’t that right?” Göran Stone laughs out loud and then snaps his mouth shut.

  Joona glances out the window. His mind is back to the drifting boat. What kind of contract had the killer been given, and why? He knows it’s much too soon to draw any type of conclusion, but still, a tentative hypothesis is not a bad thing. Joona leaves the kitchen and heads for the bedroom. The bed is made. The cream bedcover is smoothed. Saga Bauer from Säpo is standing in front of a laptop on the windowsill while also talking on her cell phone. Joona remembers her from a counterterrorism seminar.

  Joona sits down on the bed and tries to reorder his thoughts yet again. Three people on a boat. He visualizes Penelope and Viola standing before him and in his mind he places Björn next to them. All three of them could not have been on the boat when Viola was killed, otherwise the killer would have gotten the right person. At sea he would have just killed all three, put them on their beds, and sunk the boat. So they were not at sea. They’d docked the boat somewhere.

  Joona stands up again and walks into the living room. He lets his eyes wander over the flat-screen TV on the wall, the red plaid blanket folded over the arm of the sofa, the modern table with copies of Ordfront and Exit fanned on top.

  He walks over to a bookshelf that covers an entire wall. He stops and thinks about the boat. He visualizes the apparently crimped cables in the engine room, which were supposed to have generated an electric arc within a few minutes; the seat cushion stuffed behind the cables in order to catch fire more easily; the loop in the rerouted fuel line. Why hadn’t the boat sunk? They had probably not run the engine long enough.

  These were not coincidences: Björn’s apartment is set on fire. The same day, Viola is murdered, and if the boat had not been abandoned, there would have been an explosion in the fuel tank. Then the killer tries to ignite a gas explosion in Penelope’s apartment.

  Björn’s apartment. The boat. Penelope’s apartment.

  He’s searching for something either Penelope or Björn possesses. He started by searching Björn’s apartment and when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he set the apartment on fire. Then he followed the boat and when he’d searched it and couldn’t find what he was looking for, he tried to force Viola to talk. When she couldn’t reveal anything useful, he headed to Penelope’s apartment.

  Joona borrows a pair of latex gloves from a box and goes back to the bookshelf. He peers at the layer of dust in front of the books and sees there is none in front of some of the volumes. He concludes that someone has pulled out those books recently, perhaps sometime during the past several weeks.

  “I don’t want you here,” Saga Bauer says behind him. “This is my investigation.”

  “I’ll be going,” he says softly, “but there’s one thing I have to find first.”

  “Five minutes,” she says.

  He turns to look at her. “Can you have these books photographed?”

  “Already done,” she snaps.

  “From above so you can see the dust,” he says, not troubled at all.

  She realizes what he’s getting at. She doesn’t change her expression, but simply takes a camera from a technician and photographs every shelf she can reach before she tells Joona that he can look at the books on the five lower shelves.

  Joona takes out Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and looks inside. Flipping through it, he notices the underlined passages and notes written in the margins. He looks at the gap between the books but sees nothing. He replaces the book. Then his eyes range over a biography of Ulrike Meinhof, a worn-out anthology called Key Texts of Political Feminism, and the collected works of Bertolt Brecht.

  Joona looks at the next shelf down. Three books have obviously been taken out of the bookshelf recently since there’s no dust in front of them. One of them, The Cleverness of Antelopes, is a colle
ction of witness reports from the genocide in Rwanda. Another is Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Cien sonetos de amor. The last is The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas.

  Joona flips through each one. When he reaches The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas, a photograph falls out. It’s a black-and-white picture of a serious young woman with braided hair. He recognizes Claudia Fernandez. She can’t be more than fifteen years old, and the resemblance to her daughter is remarkable.

  Who would keep a photograph of one’s mother in a book on racial biology? Joona wonders to himself as he turns the photograph over.

  On the backside of the photo, someone has written a line: Don’t go far off, not even for a day. It’s in pencil.

  Joona takes out Neruda’s poetry collection again. He flips through it until he finds the entire verse:

  No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,

  porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,

  y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones

  cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.

  The photograph should have been in the Neruda collection.

  If the killer had been looking through the books, this photo could have fallen out.

  He was standing right here, Joona thought. He was looking at the dust in front of the books just as I am doing now and he was quickly flipping through the ones pulled out the past few weeks. He notices a photograph has fallen out of one of the books and is on the floor. He automatically picks it up and sticks it back, but into the wrong book.

  Joona closes his eyes.

  That’s what happened, he thinks. The hit man was looking through the books.

  If he knows what he’s looking for, then the object must be small enough to be hidden between the pages of a book.

  What could it be?

  A letter? A will? A photograph? A confession? Maybe it was a CD or a memory stick or a SIM card?

  25

  the child on the staircase

  Joona leaves the living room and peeks into the bathroom, now in the process of being photographed in minute detail. He continues along the hallway and out the door of the apartment. He stops in front of the tight grillwork that covers the elevator shaft.

  There’s a nameplate on the apartment door next to the elevator. Nilsson. Joona knocks and waits. Finally, he hears footsteps from inside. A plump woman of around sixty opens the door a crack and looks out.

  “Well?”

  “Hello, I’m Joona Linna, a detective inspector, and I—”

  “But I told you before, I didn’t see his face.”

  “Have the police already visited you? I didn’t know that.”

  She opens the door wider and two cats hop down from the telephone table to disappear deeper in the apartment.

  “He was wearing a Dracula mask,” the woman says impatiently, as if she’s said this a number of times before.

  “Who?”

  “Who?” the woman repeats, muttering, and goes inside her apartment.

  After some time she returns with a yellowed newspaper clipping.

  Joona takes a look at the twenty-year-old article describing a flasher who wore a Dracula mask and who groped women living in the Södermalm district.

  “He wasn’t wearing a stitch down there—”

  “But this is not—”

  “Not that I was looking, of course,” she continued. “But I’ve already talked to you about this over and over again.”

  Joona looks at her and smiles. “I actually intended to ask you about something completely different.”

  The woman’s eyes widen. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “I was wondering if you know your neighbor, Penelope Fernandez, who—”

  “She’s like a grandchild to me,” the woman says. “So sweet, so kind, so pleasant—”

  She stops herself short. “Is she dead?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because the police only come over to ask unpleasant questions,” she replies.

  “Did you notice any unusual visitors during the past couple of days?”

  “Just because I’m old, doesn’t mean I pry into other people’s business.”

  “No, I mean, perhaps you might have noticed something.”

  “I have not.”

  “Has anything else unusual happened lately?”

  “Absolutely not. That girl is hardworking and dutiful.”

  Joona thanks her for her time saying he might come back with a question some other time. Then he moves aside so the woman can shut the door.

  There are not many more apartments on the fourth floor. He begins to climb the stairs. Halfway up, he finds a child sitting on the steps. It looks like a boy approximately eight years old. His hair is short and he’s wearing jeans and a worn Helly Hansen sweater. He has a bag with a bottle of Ramlösa mineral water. Its label is almost worn completely away. He also has half of a French roll.

  Joona pauses in front of the child, who is looking at him in a shy way.

  “Hello there,” Joona says. “What’s your name?”

  “Mia.”

  “My name’s Joona.”

  Mia is a girl. Joona notices she has dirt on her chin and around her tiny neck.

  “Do you carry a gun?” she asks. “Why do you ask?”

  “You told Ella that you were from the police.”

  “That’s right. I’m a detective inspector.”

  “So you have a gun?”

  “Yes, I do,” Joona says. “Would you like to shoot it off?”

  The girl looks at him astonished.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Yes, I’m joking,” Joona says with a smile. The child laughs.

  “Why are you sitting on the staircase?” he asks.

  “I like it. You can hear stuff.”

  Joona sits down next to the child.

  “What kind of stuff have you heard?” he asks calmly.

  “Right now I just heard you were from the police and I heard Ella lying to you.”

  “What was she lying about?”

  “That she likes Penelope,” Mia says.

  “She doesn’t like Penelope?”

  “She sticks cat poop through Penelope’s mail slot.”

  “Why would she do something like that?”

  “I dunno.” The girl shrugs her shoulders and fiddles with the bag on her lap.

  “Do you like Penelope?”

  “She says hi to me.”

  “But you don’t know her?”

  “Not really.”

  Joona looks around. “Do you live in the stairwell?”

  The girl gives a slight smile back. “No, I live on the second floor with my mom.”

  “But you like to hang out on the stairs.”

  Mia shrugs. “Most of the time.”

  “Do you sleep here sometimes?”

  The girl picks at the label on the bottle. “Sometimes.”

  “Last Friday,” Joona says slowly. “Early in the morning, Penelope left home. She took a taxi.”

  “No luck,” the girl says quickly. “She missed Björn by, like, a second. He got here right after she left. I told him that she just left.”

  “What did he say?”

  “No big deal, he said. He was just going to pick something up.”

  “Pick something up?” Mia nods.

  “Sometimes he lets me borrow his phone so I can play games on it. But he was in a hurry. He just went inside and came right back out. Then he locked the door and ran down the stairs.”

  “Did you see what he picked up?”

  “No.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Nothing. I went to school. Quarter to nine.”

  “And after school, in the evening. Did anything happen then?”

  Mia shrugged. “Mom was gone so I was inside and I ate some macaroni and cheese and watched TV.”

  “What about yesterday?”

  “Mom was gone a
gain so I was home.”

  “So you didn’t see anyone coming or going?”

  “No.”

  Joona takes out one of his business cards and writes a telephone number.

  “Look at this,” he tells Mia. “Here are two good telephone numbers. One is my own number.”

  He points at the number on the card, which is also imprinted with the police insignia.

  “Call me if you need help or if someone is doing something mean to you. And the other number is the Child Hotline. See, I’ve written it down: 0200-230-230. You can call them whenever you want and talk about anything you want.”

  “Okay,” Mia whispers as she takes the card.

  “Don’t throw that card away, now, the minute I turn my back,” Joona says. “Keep it, because even if you don’t want to call someone now, you might want to later on.”

  “When he came out, Björn had his hand on his stomach,” Mia said. She demonstrated.

  “Like he had a tummy ache?”

  “Yeah. Just like he had a tummy ache.”

  26

  a palm

  Joona knocks on the other doors, but all he finds out is that Penelope was a quiet and somewhat shy neighbor who took part in the annual cleaning days as well as the yearly meetings, but not much else. Once he’s done, he slowly climbs the stairs back to the fourth floor.

  The door to Penelope’s apartment is open. A Säpo technician has just dismantled the lock from the outer door and bagged the bolt in plastic.

  Joona goes in but stays in the background to watch the forensic investigators work. He’s always enjoyed hanging around to see how systematically they photograph everything, collect evidence, rigorously note every aspect of what they find. It’s ironic how the investigation itself will destroy the crime scene, contaminating layer by layer, even as it progresses. No piece of evidence or a key to reconstructing what has happened must be lost.

  Joona lets his gaze wander over Penelope Fernandez’s tidy apartment. Why had Björn Almskog come here? He had arrived the minute Penelope left. Joona could almost picture him hiding outside the entrance to the building waiting for her to leave.