The Fire Witness: A Novel Read online

  She sinks to a sitting position, breathing hard. She tries to collect her thoughts as she looks at her hands and at the boy. She pushes hair out of Dante’s face and leans toward him.

  “Wake up now,” she says.

  He blinks and looks at her blood-covered face. He seems frightened.

  “I’m all right,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt. Have you ever had a bloody nose?”

  He nods.

  “I can’t carry you any longer, Dante,” she says, fighting the urge to cry. “You have to walk the last bit.”

  “I just want to sleep,” Dante says as he yawns.

  “It’s all over now. You are going to go home.”

  “What?”

  “You are going home to your mother,” she says, and smiles. It lights up her exhausted face. “All you have to do is walk.”

  He nods and sits up. He runs a hand through his hair.

  Somewhere within the large storage area there’s a loud bang as something falls. It sounds like steel pipes are starting to roll.

  “Try and stand up now,” Vicky says.

  They both get up and start toward the glass door. Each step is unbearably hard. Vicky realizes that she might not make it. Then she sees the revolving blue light of a police car. More cars pull up beside it. Vicky thinks that they’re saved.

  “Hello?” It’s a man’s harsh voice. “Hello?”

  The man’s voice echoes between the walls and the ceiling. Vicky is dizzy and has to stop. Dante keeps going.

  Vicky leans against the cold metal of the container.

  “Go straight out the door,” she says. Her voice is weak.

  Dante looks back and it seems as if he is going to turn around.

  “No, no. Go straight out,” she pleads. “I’ll be right there.”

  She sees three uniformed police officers running in the wrong direction. They’re heading to a building on the other side of the street. Dante keeps going toward the door. He pulls down the handle and pulls. Nothing happens.

  “Hello?” the man’s voice is closer.

  Vicky bites her lip and spits bloody saliva on the floor, then starts to walk again.

  “Won’t open,” Dante says as he pulls hard on the door.

  Her legs are shaking but somehow she manages the last few steps. Her hand burns with pain as she pulls on the door handle as hard as she can. The door does not budge. She pushes it, but it is locked. She tries banging on the glass, but there’s not much sound. She can see four police cars outside. Their blue lights flash over the façades and windows of the surrounding buildings. She waves to get their attention, but no one sees her.

  Heavy footfalls are approaching swiftly behind them. Vicky turns and sees a heavyset man heading right for them. He is smiling.

  126

  Beneath the ceiling is an electric conveyor hung with tightly packed pig carcasses. The chill of the refrigerated room dampens the sweet smell of the meat.

  Joona runs bent over beside the bodies of the animals deeper into the room, looking for something to use as a weapon. He can hear dull screams from the machine room, followed by a few quick thuds. He tries to spot his pursuer through the plastic slats that cover the opening. An indistinct figure is moving between the cutting counters. He appears as wide as four people and then as thin as a stick.

  He is running Joona’s way and he is carrying a pistol in his right hand.

  Joona backs up and bends over. He looks underneath the pig carcasses and sees a white bucket against the wall. Next to it are a pipe and a few dirty rags. He could use the pipe.

  He inches toward the bucket but stops when the short man moves aside the heavy plastic slats with his prosthetic hand.

  Joona stands still and glimpses his pursuer in the narrow reflections on the chrome edge of the doorway.

  He watches the man enter, holding his pistol with his arm straight out. His eyes search the room.

  Without making a sound, Joona takes a few more steps toward the wall. He’s hidden behind a pig and can no longer see his pursuer, but he can still hear him walking and breathing.

  Fifty feet farther on is an exit, which probably leads toward the loading dock. Joona could run down the aisle between the hanging carcasses, but right before he reaches the entrance, his pursuer would have a clean line of fire for a few seconds.

  A few seconds too many, Joona thinks.

  He can still hear quick footsteps and then a thud. One of the pigs starts to swing and the connection to the conveyor gibbet creaks.

  Joona reaches the wall and sinks down next to the cooling unit. His pursuer’s shadow appears not more than thirty feet away.

  Time is beginning to run out. The man with the prosthetic hand will find him soon.

  Joona slides to the side and picks up the pipe. It’s made of plastic. It’s absolutely useless as a weapon. He’s starting to move away when he notices that there are tools in the white bucket. Three screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, and a knife with a powerful short blade.

  Joona draws the knife from the bucket slowly. Metal scrapes against metal. The blade slides against the jaws of the pliers.

  He figures out where his pursuer is from the sound of his footsteps and realizes he has to move now.

  A shot is fired and the bullet slams into a carcass eighteen inches from Joona’s head. The one-handed man is running at him. Joona rolls away under the row of meat.

  127

  The cop has no weapon. He must be afraid, the man thinks as he pushes his hair out of his face with his prosthetic hand.

  He stops so he can aim his gun. He tries to peer through the row of slaughtered pigs.

  He has to be afraid, he repeats to himself. He’s hiding right now, but he is going to make a run for the door facing the street.

  He’s panting and the air is dry and cold in his lungs. He coughs weakly and turns completely around. He looks at his pistol and then raises his eyes. He has to blink hard. Perhaps there was just something there by the cooling unit. He starts to run alongside the row of pigs.

  He has to end this. All he has to do is catch up to the cop and shoot him point-blank: first through the trunk and then a shot through the temple.

  He stops. The space along the concrete wall is empty. There are a few dirty rags and a white bucket on the floor—nothing else.

  He spins on his heel and begins to walk back to where he’d come from.

  All he can hear is his own breathing.

  He pushes a pig with his left hand. It’s heavier than he thought. He has to really heave it to get it to swing, and it hurts him where the stump of his arm presses against the prosthesis.

  The gibbet’s fastener squeaks.

  The pig swings to the right and he gets a glimpse into the next row.

  He can’t go anywhere, the man thinks. He’s in a tiny cage. All he has to do is keep a line of fire open toward the exit in case the cop tries to get out, while also monitoring the plastic-sheeted opening.

  His shoulder is getting tired and he lowers his pistol slightly. He knows he’s risking valuable seconds, but the weapon will start to shake if his arm gets too tired.

  He sneaks forward and thinks he sees a human back. He aims and fires. The recoil bumps against him and the spray from the fuse burns his knuckles. Adrenaline pumps through his body and chills his face. It was only a pig hanging crookedly.

  This is going to hell, he thinks. He has to shoot the cop. He can’t let him get away, not now. But where the hell is he? Where has he gone?

  The ceiling creaks and he looks up at steel girders and overhead cranes. He can’t see anything. He backs up and stumbles. He grabs a pig for balance and feels the moisture of the cold meat through his shirt. The rind glitters with small drops of condensation. He feels nauseated. Something is not right. Anxiety is starting to overwhelm him. He can’t stay here much longer.

  The man keeps retreating. He sees a quick shadow against the wall and raises his weapon.

  All of a sudden, there’s an electric buzz from the
ceiling and all the pigs start swaying. It’s hard to make out where one carcass starts and the next leaves off. Then the conveyor system roars to life. The heavy carcasses start to revolve. They are moving along the conveyor and pulling an ice-cold breeze through the room.

  The man turns around and blinks. He tries to look in all directions at once and thinks that the job isn’t worth this.

  It was supposed to be simple: buy a Swedish boy the police believed was dead. He’d get a good price for him without going much farther than Holland or Germany. It’s not worth all this trouble.

  The pigs stop suddenly and swing in place. A red lamp glows on the wall. The cop has hit the emergency button. The room falls silent and the man feels uneasy.

  What the fuck am I doing here? he asks himself.

  He bends down to look beneath the carcasses and then takes two steps forward.

  The exit to the street is still closed.

  He turns around to check the exit with the plastic slats. The cop is standing right in front of him.

  A shiver goes up his back.

  128

  Joona can see the short man starting to take aim at him. He tracks the man’s arm motion as he steps toward him and knocks his pistol upward as he grabs his wrist. He slams the man’s hand over his head against a pig carcass and drives the knife through the palm. The blade plunges deep between two ribs. The man screams.

  Joona lets go of the knife and moves away.

  The short man fumbles his lifeless prosthetic fingers over the knife handle, then gives up. He’s caught. He can’t move or the pain will increase. Blood runs from his palm and down his shirtsleeve.

  Joona picks up the pistol and leaves the refrigerated room without looking at the man.

  The air in the large machine hall feels warm. He races along one of the walls in the direction Tobias disappeared with Dante. He stops at a green metal door and checks the pistol. There is at least one bullet in the chamber. There could be more in the magazine. He opens the door and steps into a warehouse area. Goods are stacked on pallets and there are forklifts standing still.

  He can hear a rustling, moaning sound.

  Joona determines the direction and runs over to a large garbage container. Blue light is dancing through a window and over the floor. He raises the pistol and creeps around the container. The fat man in the leather vest is on his knees with his back to Joona. He’s breathing heavily as he bangs Vicky’s head on the floor. Dante is lying a few feet away, curled into a ball and crying as if he’s been completely abandoned.

  Joona reaches the fat man before he can get up. He grabs him around his throat with his arm and pulls him up and away from Vicky. He cracks him on the collarbone with his pistol, heaves him backward, and then lets go of the man’s throat and kicks him in the chest so hard that he flies through the glass door. The fat man lands on his back among the splinters of glass and the blue lights revolve over him.

  Three uniformed policemen run up with drawn weapons. They aim at the man on the ground, who is trying to sit up.

  One of the policemen looks up. “Joona Linna?”

  The policemen stare at the tall detective standing in the broken door. Glass is still falling from the frame.

  “I’m just an observer,” Joona says.

  He throws the Glock on the ground and heads back to Vicky. He kneels on the ground. She is on her back and her breathing is irregular. Her arm is at an odd angle. Dante has stopped crying and looks at Joona in surprise. Joona rolls Vicky onto her side into the recovery position then squats beside her. He strokes her cheek and whispers that everything is all right now. An even stream of blood starts flowing from her nose. She does not open her eyes or respond to his words, but her feet are twitching.

  129

  The man who flew through the glass door tried to sit up, but two policemen grabbed him and forced him onto his stomach before they handcuffed him.

  The first paramedics to arrive put an oral airway into Vicky’s throat and immobilized her head before they lifted her onto a stretcher.

  Joona told the operations leader what had happened while two police units entered the building, one on each side.

  In the refrigeration room, they found a silent, pale man with one hand impaled to a pig carcass by a knife. The police officer who found him called the paramedics and needed the assistance of a fellow officer to wrestle the knife out of the meat. The blade grated against the ribs and came out with a sucking sound. The injured man pulled his hand to his stomach using his other, prosthetic hand but then twirled to the ground.

  The man who had been hit in the chest by the homemade automatic rifle was dead. The young man who had pulled the trigger when Joona shot him was still alive. He’d saved himself from bleeding to death by cinching his belt just below his knee as a tourniquet. When the police patrol unit approached with raised guns, he pointed to his foot, which had been shot off. It was lying beneath the cutting counter.

  The last man they found was Tobias Lundgren. He’d hidden among the garbage in the warehouse room. His face was cut to bits and was bleeding profusely, but none of his wounds were life-threatening. He tried to crawl deeper into the mound of garbage. When the police pulled him out, he was shaking from fear.

  * * *

  Carlos Eliasson has already been informed of what took place in the slaughterhouse area when Joona calls him from the ambulance.

  “One dead, two seriously wounded, and three slightly injured,” Carlos reads out loud.

  “But the children are alive. They survived.”

  “Joona.” Carlos sighs.

  “Everyone decided they’d drowned, but I—”

  “Yes, you were right. Absolutely,” Carlos interrupts. “But you are still the subject of an internal investigation and you had other orders.”

  “So I was supposed to just let it be?”

  “Yes, that’s what you were supposed to do.”

  “But you know I couldn’t do that.”

  The sirens abruptly stop wailing as the ambulance turns into the entrance of the Söder Hospital emergency receiving area.

  “The prosecutor and her people are going to be the ones to question the witness. You are now on sick leave and cut off from everything.”

  Joona takes this to mean that the internal investigation is not going his way, and it crosses his mind that he may even be charged with dereliction of duty. Nevertheless, the only emotion he feels is relief. Vicky Bennet has been found and the little boy ripped from the jaws of wolves.

  Joona climbs out of the ambulance unassisted, but he heeds the paramedics’ request to lie down on a stretcher. They lift the rails and roll him away.

  Instead of waiting in line for an X-ray after he’s been examined and his wounds dressed, he heads out to find the doctor in charge of Vicky’s care.

  A nurse points to where a short woman is studying the automatic coffee machine.

  Joona explains that he has to know whether Vicky can be questioned today.

  The short woman listens to him without looking up. She presses the button for mocha and waits for her cup to be filled. Then she says that she’s done a CT scan of Vicky’s brain in order to determine whether there has been intracranial bleeding. Vicky has received a severe concussion, but luckily there has been no cerebral hemorrhage.

  “We must keep her here for observation, but there’s nothing to indicate she can’t be questioned tomorrow morning if it’s important,” the doctor says. She walks away with her coffee cup in her hand.

  * * *

  The prosecutor Susanne Öst is on her way from Sundsvall to Stockholm. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp, she intends to start her initial interrogation of Vicky Bennet, the fifteen-year-old girl who has just been arrested and charged with two murders and one count of kidnapping.

  130

  Vicky is sitting up in bed, the curtains drawn around her, when Joona Linna shows his ID to the young policeman guarding the door and walks in. Her head is bandaged; her face is covered in b
ruises and grazes; her broken thumb is in a cast. Susanne Öst is also there. With her is a younger woman. Joona does not greet them but pulls up a chair beside the girl.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks.

  She gives him a muddled look and asks, “Is Dante with his mother now?”

  “He’s here at the hospital and his mother is sitting next to him.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “No, he’s fine.”

  Vicky nods and then stares into space.

  “And you? How are you feeling?” Joona asks again.

  She looks at him but is not able to answer before the prosecutor clears her throat.

  “I would like Joona Linna to leave this room right now,” Susanne says.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Joona says, and doesn’t look away from Vicky.

  “You are not part of this initial investigation.” Susanne raises her voice.

  “They’re going to ask you a ton of questions,” Joona says to Vicky.

  “I want you to stay here,” she says in a quiet voice.

  “Honestly, I can’t,” Joona says.

  Vicky whispers something to herself and then she looks at the prosecutor.

  “I’m not saying anything unless Joona stays.”

  Susanne says, “He can stay if he keeps quiet.”

  Joona is watching Vicky and thinking about how to get through to her.

  Two murders are a heavy burden to bear. Most girls her age would have already broken down and confessed, but Vicky is calm and expressionless. She won’t let anyone inside her mind. She creates quick alliances, he thinks, but hides her true motives to keep as much control as she can over her situation.

  “Vicky Bennet,” the prosecutor starts with a smile, “my name is Susanne and I’m going to be asking you questions, but before we begin, I have to let you know that we are recording everything so that we can listen to it later. This means I don’t have to write much down, which is nice … I’m lazy that way.”