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“You don’t believe in all that, then?” Julia said. “It already works that way in a ton of other countries. The police need more effective tools against organized crime; you have to admit that, surely?”
Amante shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t really matter what I think. But people are saying that the Bar Association is likely to try to stop a number of the proposals. And if the opposition wins the election this autumn—”
Amante broke off abruptly. He blushed slightly, as if he’d suddenly realized he was talking too much. Julia put her foot down and changed lanes again, gaining a few more places in the queue. The maneuver made Amante grab hold of the handle above the passenger door. Julia smiled to herself. Just wait until we get the lights and sirens on. But that presupposed he’d be sticking around, which she doubted. Amante clearly wasn’t an expert in either violent crime or murder investigations, and didn’t seem remotely interested in the subject. He must have been recruited to the unit for some other reason. Because someone wanted or needed him there. Superintendent Pärson was a keen adherent to the path of least resistance. Everyone knew that the fat little bastard supplemented his horse-racing pot by tipping off the evening tabloids about ongoing investigations at advantageous moments. Yet no one was ever able to catch him. He knew exactly how often he needed to change his pay-as-you-go cell phone and Western Union account. And, perhaps most importantly of all, which people to stay on the good side of: whom he ought to do favors for, and when.
She glanced surreptitiously at Amante as they approached the heavy gates leading down into the garage of Police Headquarters at Kronoberg. She couldn’t quite make sense of the rhythm she had picked up from him so far. His age was difficult to determine; she guessed at thirty-five or so. But he spoke in a rather stilted way, like someone considerably older, more like a politician than a cop. And the way he dressed was something else. A blue blazer with the gilded emblem of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club on top of a coral-colored sweater with a designer logo, just frayed enough at the collar to suggest that its owner had worn it when he sailed around Gotland. Pale slacks with a neat crease and hand-sewn boating shoes. But in place of the slicked-back, sun-bleached hair that would have matched his well-to-do summer wardrobe perfectly, Amante’s dark hair was cut short. And he didn’t have a salt-splashed suntan from Båstad or Sandhamn with lighter patches left by his sunglasses either. Amante’s skin was swarthy, like someone from southern Europe. Or even farther south. His whole rhythm was full of contradictions, a syncopated beat that was hard to follow.
“Your surname,” she said. “Is it Italian?”
“Spanish,” he replied, slightly too quickly.
An image flashed through her mind. Something on the news, a row of smartly dressed EU politicians, something about the legal system. An articulate man making critical remarks about the government and minister of justice.
“Victor Amante. The EU politician?” She guessed the answer as she saw her new colleague squirm uncomfortably in his seat.
“He’s my stepfather.”
* * *
The quiet knock made Sarac slip the bag of pills under his pillow in a flash. It was designated rest time, so no one should be disturbing him now. Had the staff begun to suspect something after all? But a search team would hardly knock and wait politely to be let in before they turned his room upside down.
“Come in,” he said as calmly as he could. He leaned back against the pillow so that the bag of pills ended up behind his back. Damn, he should have slipped the bag back into the gap he had carved out behind one of the baseboards instead of hiding it in the first place he thought of like a startled five-year-old.
One of the caregivers, a man in his late twenties whose name Sarac thought might be Eskil, came into the room. Sarac noted that he closed the door behind him in a different way from usual. Carefully, as if he were trying to be as quiet as possible. Whatever Eskil was doing there, it definitely wasn’t a search.
“Hello, David.” The nurse glanced at the closed door, then put his hand in the pocket of his uniform tunic and held out a small white envelope. “For you.”
Sarac frowned.
“Who from?” he said, without taking the envelope.
“The guy said his name was Frank.”
“Surname?”
“He didn’t say. Just that you were colleagues of some sort. That he’d been looking for you last Christmas but didn’t manage to find you.”
Sarac closed his eyes for a few seconds, searching his broken mind for an image that matched the name. He didn’t succeed.
“What did he look like?”
“Dark hair, short, bit like a cop.”
“Height, build? Other distinguishing features? You must be able to remember something?”
Eskil shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Normal height, normal build. Looked a bit like you, but not as skinny.”
“And where did you meet this Frank?”
Eskil looked like he was getting fed up with all the questions. Instead of answering, he held the envelope out a bit farther. Waved it gently in front of Sarac’s nose.
Sarac didn’t move. He was trying to work out if the nurse’s nervousness was because he had been threatened into doing this, or because he was used to taking bribes and didn’t want to get caught.
“Just take it, for God’s sake.” Eskil glanced over his shoulder again as if expecting someone to throw the door open at any moment. So he’d been bribed, then.
Sarac still didn’t move. Could this be some sort of trap? Were they trying to trick him? Find out what he was planning to do? The distant rumble of his nightmares was suddenly back in his head. He put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes tight.
Eskil gave up his attempts to hand the letter over and tossed it onto the bed next to Sarac before heading for the door.
“I’ll look in again in an hour in case you want to send a reply. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“Sure,” Sarac mumbled. “Actually, hang on …”
But before he had time to say more, the nurse had left the room. Sarac quickly put his hand under the pillow. The feeling of the plastic against his fingertips was strangely reassuring. It made the roar in his head subside.
The letter was lying on his bed, beside his left foot. He could read his own name in Times New Roman on the front. Detective Inspector David Sarac; nothing else. Unless there was something on the back. He picked the envelope up, turned it over, and held it up to the light. The back was blank, the envelope smooth and flat. It couldn’t really contain anything but a sheet or two of paper.
He hadn’t had any visitors for a long time, no contact with the outside world except for TV and the Internet. Perhaps Frank was yet another reporter trying to arrange an interview with him, an unusually creative one who was willing to bribe a staff member.
He slowly opened the envelope with his forefinger and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. At the top was a message in the same impersonal font as the envelope. Four lines, seven sentences, forty-six words. More than enough to make his heart beat faster.
He betrayed you, David. Swapped his future for you and Janus. Then he moved on while we bled and died out there on the island. No punishment, no consequences, straight to the top. How about a swap? Your secret for mine? A chance to get justice.
Sarac unfolded the bottom part of the sheet of paper. Two photos fell out onto the bed, landing upside down.
He turned the first one over. Husband, wife, two teenage girls dressed up for some sort of premiere. A good-looking, happy family smiling assuredly toward the photographer with perfect, dazzling media smiles.
His heart beat even faster. Spread out from his chest and up into his throat. He turned the second photograph over. Felt his hand tremble. He swallowed hard a couple of times.
The dead blonde woman was lying on her stomach across the black hood of a car. The pool of blood formed a sort of aura around her naked body. The force of her descent had been so strong that it almost welded her body to the expensive car. Transforming it into a single horrifying sculpture of skin, glass, and metal.
* * *
“The dismembered body at Källstavik: What do we know?”
The waitress had barely put their plates down on the checkered cloth and walked off before Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin revealed the purpose of their meeting. Julia couldn’t help smiling. Wallin hadn’t changed. Straight to the point, no unnecessary beating around the bush. Just like her. That morning he had suddenly called after months of silence. Now she understood why. Or at least what he wanted to talk about.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I am or what I’ve been doing for the past six months?” Julia smiled, but Wallin’s expression didn’t change. “Anyway, you didn’t have to ask me to lunch. Most of it’s already been in the papers.”
That was more accurate than she would have liked. No more than a couple of days had passed since her visit to the Forensic Medicine Unit, but the public already knew almost as much as she did. The evening tabloids loved summer murders, and their reporting followed the usual pattern. Yesterday there had been a few grainy pictures of police boats and divers, and a map covering the whole centerfold. Where the body parts were found. Quotes from a source with inside knowledge of the investigation, obviously her own boss, and today she had just read the assortment of speculation and confident assertions from the usual academic detectives who had never seen a dead body in real life.
This could be connected to the criminal underworld. Statistically, the killer is likely to have been known to the victim, and her personal favorite: Dismemberment is a way for the killer to get rid of the body.
Wallin put what looked like a perfectly judged mix of beef patty, potato, sauce, and lingonberry preserve in his mouth. He chewed slowly as he raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“The victim, according to the latest we’ve got from the pathologist, is a white male between thirty-five and forty-five,” Julia said. “Just over one meter eighty centimeters tall, with short, dark brown hair. We may need to take that last bit with a pinch of salt. The crayfish didn’t leave much of his scalp.”
She fell silent. Wallin went on chewing, as implacable as ever. If the malicious rumors about his career contained any truth at all, there certainly wasn’t any sign of it in his behavior or appearance. His boyish features, emphasized by his perfectly combed side parting, formed such an abrupt contrast to his tailor-made three-piece suit that it almost jarred. He looked like a boy dressed up as a grown man, he always had. Previously only the most deranged of his colleagues had made fun of that. Only in recent months had she heard his nickname spoken out loud in the corridors of Police Headquarters. Even by some of her superiors.
Manboy.
She didn’t approve. Wallin was a talented policeman and an equally skilled administrator. But now others were enjoying the fruits of his labors, and the whole of his handpicked team had been transferred to the staff of the national police chief. All but Wallin himself, which most of his colleagues took to mean that he was going to be sidelined somewhere and never heard from again. She hoped that interpretation didn’t turn out to be correct.
“Have you been able to identify the body?” Wallin wiped his mouth on his napkin with exaggerated thoroughness.
“Not yet. We’ve checked for a match on the missing persons register: nothing there. His hands haven’t been found, so we haven’t got fingerprints. Same with teeth and dental records. We’re expecting DNA results from the National Forensics Lab by tomorrow at the earliest but probably on Friday, maybe even Monday. It’s not at all certain that they’ll be able to get any DNA. The body was in a very poor state.”
“And the face? Could you release a photograph to the press? Ask the general public to get in touch with tip-offs?”
Julia shook her head.
“The perpetrator had a go at the face with a chain saw. It’s completely unrecognizable.”
At least for the time being, she added to herself. She considered telling Wallin about her backup plan. Let him know how good she was at her job. Six months ago she would have done so without hesitation. But for some reason she decided to wait. Besides, she wasn’t even sure if what she was considering could actually be done.
“The experts in the tabloids are right, then,” Wallin said. “You’ve got a real challenge on your hands with this case. You know the statistics as well as I do. Only six out of ten dismemberments get cleared up. A sixty percent chance that quickly shrinks to single digits if you don’t manage to identify the body. And what would that do to your solving rate?”
The question seemed to be rhetorical, because Wallin turned his attention back to his food without waiting for an answer. Julia stuck her fork into her Caesar salad, took a mouthful, and discovered at once that something was missing from the dressing. It took her a few seconds to work out what. Anchovies. What chef would make a Caesar salad without using anchovies? Presumably one who thought he could get away with it.
The murmur of conversation in the restaurant rose in volume as more and more diners sat down at the tables. One or two suits, but mostly neon-clad laborers. People who, like Wallin, had a preference for traditional Swedish fare. Personally she preferred Asian. Lighter food: less flour, cream, and potato.
Wallin went on eating calmly. He was evidently planning to make her ask.
“So, tell me! Why is the minister of justice’s special investigator so interested in an old dismembered body?”
Wallin took a sip of his lingonberry drink and then carefully wiped his mouth again before leaning over the table.
“As you may be aware, the party has its training center in Källstavik. Several of the higher-ups rent houses on the grounds with access to the water, including the minister of justice’s father-in-law, Karl-Erik Cedergren. A dismembered body in the water they go swimming in, just in time for the holidays, is a little uncomfortable, particularly when the tabloids are wallowing in the details. The minister’s phone is going to start ringing, and when it does, I want to be prepared.”
“You want me to keep you informed?”
He smiled at her, a crooked, slightly mocking smile. Yet Julia still found herself smiling back at him. She’d missed this. Missed their rather peculiar sense of camaraderie.
The first time she’d met Oscar Wallin was around five years ago. She’d been part of the team investigating an unusually grisly murder in the southern suburbs of Stockholm. The victim was a small-time informer, and the method resembled another case that National Crime was investigating. Wallin was involved in his capacity as National Crime’s informant handler, and he was the only one who didn’t shake his head when she, unlike all the alpha males on the investigative team, declared firmly that they were dealing with two different perpetrators and that the second was simply a copycat. When the forensics experts proved her right a week later, Wallin bought her lunch. Over a meal of stuffed cabbage leaves he asked how she could have been so certain. She explained that the two crime scenes were just too different. The perpetrators had moved through the rooms in different ways and did things in a different order. And, unlike all the other police officers she knew, Wallin seemed to be in no doubt about her abilities.
Two months later he had called her and asked her to take a look at the security camera footage of a robbery and compare it with videos of various suspects and images from where they lived. She had found it relatively easy to point out those whose movements and rhythms matched the robbers’. Not long after that, she was suddenly promoted to detective inspector and given her own room in the front corridor of the crime unit, and she slowly began to make a name for herself within the force. And even if Superintendent Pärson claimed the credit for having discovered and coached her, Julia was well aware of who her real mentor was.
Wallin had continued to contact her every now and then: sometimes to find out how she was getting on, but more usually to give her a new challenge or ask for discreet favors. Most recently last Christmas.
“By the way, what happened about that trace of blood I found in Sophie Thorning’s apartment?” she said. “Did it help prove that someone else had been there the night she jumped?”
Wallin shook his head. “It turned out to be her own blood. I thought I’d told you that.”
“No, we haven’t spoken since I sent you my report. Not so much as a Christmas card by way of thanks.” She pretended to be upset. That would have made most guys blush and start to stammer their apologies. She knew she looked pretty good and that this could occasionally be used to her advantage. But that sort of trick never worked on Wallin, which was another reason why she respected him. The only way to get Wallin’s attention and respect was by delivering results.
“I’ve been busy,” he said, without sounding the slightest bit apologetic, but more like he was chastising her for not realizing something so obvious.
“And the post of national police chief …?”
Julia regretted saying it before it was even out of her mouth. Wallin’s mouth narrowed to a thin line.
“If I’m allowed to say what I think, the minister of justice picked the wrong person,” she added quickly.
Wallin sat silent for a few seconds, as if he was trying to work out how truthful her statement was. The thin line curved into a controlled smile.
“Thanks. Obviously, I’m aware that I’m being talked about. That people are saying I’ve been passed over, even that I’m heading toward the exit.” Wallin shook his head gently. “Success breeds enemies, Julia. You’ll find that out. Colleagues who are envious or bitter, who take pleasure in the few occasions when you fail, and who don’t hesitate to spread all manner of rumors.”
He leaned forward slightly and smiled more broadly, revealing his canine teeth.
“But I’m still here, as you can see. I’ve still got an office just a few meters from the minister’s, and sooner or later everyone who’s underestimated me will have to pay for that.”
He held her gaze for a few seconds. Then straightened up.
“Enough about that. There’s another reason why I wanted to talk to you. It’s about your new colleague …”
Wallin wasn’t the sort to do air quotes, but Julia thought she could almost see his fingers twitching on the checkered tablecloth.
“Omar Amante, lawyer, excellent grades at university, foreign service. If the predictions are correct and the opposition win this autumn’s election, his stepfather will replace Jesper Stenberg as minister of justice. Which makes Amante junior the golden boy. The question is: Why has he suddenly appeared from nowhere to join you in the Violent Crime Unit?”
“What do you mean?” Julia frowned. A police car drove past outside in the street. Flashing lights and sirens. The sound bounced between the buildings, drowning out everything else for a few seconds.
“Amante left his job with Europol last Christmas,” Wallin said as soon as the car had passed. “Six months before his contract was due to finish. One unconfirmed rumor is that he fell out with his boss. That there was some sort of scene that got hushed up. No one seems to want to talk about it. Either way, Amante disappeared off the radar for a few months. He wasn’t in Sweden, and he wasn’t at Europol’s offices in The Hague. Then he suddenly shows up in Stockholm and lands in the middle of a murder investigation that has vague connections to the party. The same party that his stepfather is doing his utmost to eject from power.”
Wallin leaned across the table again and lowered his voice.
“You’ve been saddled with Amante for a reason. And I’d dearly love to know what that reason is.”
* * *
Sarac zipped his jacket up and pulled his hat as far down on his forehead as he could before looking at his watch again. Thirty seconds. This was madness. He was mad. Which made it all the more ironic that he was trying to escape from a mental institution.
He put his fingers on the door handle. Five, four, three, two, one …
He stepped out into the corridor. Walked without hesitation straight toward the door to the stairwell, not falling for the temptation of looking up at the spherical camera above it. The change of shift was under way and the likelihood of any member of the staff looking at the picture from the camera for the few seconds it took him to pass it wasn’t very high. At least that was what he tried to tell himself to calm his pounding heart. Panic and fear were being temporarily held at bay by the tranquilizer he had swallowed just over half an hour ago.
This isn’t a good idea, the voices in his head whispered. But the happy pills had rendered them impotent. Easier to ignore. At least for the time being.
The doors to the ward were always kept locked, and he fiddled with the key, got it into the lock, but couldn’t turn it. He jerked and twisted it. For a fraction of a second he considered giving up. Going back to his safe little room, forgetting everything, and carrying out his original plan. Gulp down all those sleeping pills at once, tonight. Put an end to everything. But he knew that was impossible. He had to know the truth, had to know how everything fit together.
He suddenly felt the lock give with a clicking sound. The key Eskil had given him was evidently a cheap copy that took a bit of fiddling to make it work. He guessed that his new pen pal Frank had paid for it, just as he had paid for Eskil’s services.
Sarac headed down the marble staircase, all the way to the basement. He managed to unlock the heavy steel door almost at once and found himself in a bare, low-ceilinged corridor. Another glance at his watch. Two minutes and ten seconds had elapsed since he began his escape. He quickened his pace, trying to make use of the surplus adrenaline while it lasted.
He stopped at the door marked District Heating. Once again he used the copied key to unlock the door and stepped inside a large, warm room full of pipes and meters. He stood still for a couple of seconds to get his bearings. Then he identified the incoming pipes and followed them to the far end of the room, just as he had been instructed to do. Another heavy door, and behind it a tunnel where the pipes disappeared into the darkness. He took a few steps forward. Felt for the circuit breaker but couldn’t find it.
Suddenly the door behind him closed and everything went pitch-black. He was seized by panic as it broke through the chemical barrier protecting him from his anxieties and gripped his rib cage.
Why are you doing this, David? the voices whispered. Why?
