“—Related to me by marriage,” Brand nodded. “He agreed to accompany me on a tour of locations relevant to my interest.”
“And this guided tour, what was the purpose?”
“Oh, just to get my bearings, I guess,” Brand said. “One thing I want to understand is what happened in 1940, with the Nordic Light arson.”
It was a shade surreal, because she had taken on the other role so many times, interrogating suspects. Now her own “I can explain” theme had a very familiar ring.
The frustration Brand felt, as an innocent person whose circumstances might paint as guilty, that too was familiar, although she knew such impatience could be easily faked. Sorting the sheep from the goats, the innocent from the guilty, that was a part of the job, an occupation that she shared with Hult and Larsson.
“You present yourself as a tourist,” Hult said. “A visitor seeking out ancestors, researching the history of your family. And yet the Vosses figure somehow into this.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“How? You mean, how am I researching?”
“I mean, Veronika, how do the Vosses connect to the Brands? Or it’s really not the Brands, is it? That’s your father’s family—it’s the Dalgrens of your mother’s side who interest you. Why is that? It’s important for us to know, because of the recent discovery of two dead bodies in a residence owned by the Vosses.”
“Local police questioned you about this matter.” Larsson managed to sound accusatory.
“Perhaps you should ask the Vosses about the whole business. I’d like to speak to Loke Voss myself. I just had a brief run-in with one of his grandsons.”
Her words seemed to anger the younger cop in particular. “Loke Voss is a prominent and well-respected citizen of Sweden. His reputation is unchallengeable.”
“Yet you say two murders occurred in one of his homes.”
“I don’t think we used the word ‘murder,’” Hult put in quickly. “Did we, Edvin?”
Larsson shook his head vigorously. He seemed gleeful to have caught Brand in a mistake. “No, indeed, we did not mention murder, but Veronika here did. How did you know it was murder, Detective?”
“Come on, you guys, you’d never have hauled me in if there were two dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Brand silently gave herself the same advice she often considered offering to her own interrogation suspects.
Shut up.
“Do you think we Swedes are stupid, Detective?” Hult asked. “You’re the super-cop from the greatest city in the world, as Americans always shout about New York, New York? And Edvin and I, we’re slow-witted idiots right off the farm, is that it? That’s Sweden to you, just simple folk and socialism and furniture you have to assemble yourself?”
“I’ve been to New York City once,” Larsson put it. “I didn’t like it.”
Hult bore down on her. “Did you think we wouldn’t know, Veronika? That we aren’t aware of our national history? We’re all taught the story of the arson fire at the Nordic Light newspaper. What did you think? That you could come over here and somehow put things right? Correct an old wrong? Avenge your family?”
Shut up. She definitely did not want to say the words, “I would like to have a lawyer present” or “may I speak to a representative from the U.S. embassy?” But she thought that it might come to that, given the way the interview was going.
“Now she remains silent.” Larsson’s sneering tone annoyed Brand.
“I’m not speaking because I don’t know what to say,” she responded. “There is family history involved, certainly, and, yes, I am interested in finding out about it.”
“A coincidence, then,” Hult said, clearly unconvinced. “Your presence in Sweden and suddenly two murders.”
“Look, damn it,” Brand exclaimed. “I’ve been on your side of the table, okay? I know what’s going on. You’re on a fishing expedition here. You aren’t going to detain a fellow cop. I want to cooperate. I am cooperating.”
“It doesn’t look like that to me,” Larsson said. “It looks like you have something to hide.”
“I’m seeing the same with you,” Brand returned. “You aren’t exactly coming clean, either. There’s absolutely nothing to link me or Krister Hammar to whatever it was that happened at the manor house. So you’ve got nothing. Yet we get jerked out of a dinner party at midnight for some sort of bogus q and a. I’m the one who should be asking, ‘what’s up with that?’ Yes, I’m here in Sweden doing a little historical research. So what?”
“Two men lie dead—” Larsson said, but Brand cut him off.
“Gentlemen, please, I understand how things work, okay? First this Hans Voss person baits me, then suddenly the polis are at the door. I sense the hand of the brass here. Tell me who set this bullshit move in motion. I’d love to know whose feathers I’ve ruffled.”
And it’s actually three dead, Brand thought, maybe more. But she didn’t say it. No one had mentioned a dead body turning up at Västvall. Perhaps the corpse had been snowed over by the blizzard, waiting for the spring melt to be discovered. But she didn’t think so, and suspected a different kind of cover up.
After over an hour of back-and-forth, middle-of-the-night grilling, Hult finally released Brand, allowing her to walk free. Well, not entirely free.
“I’m going to have to retain your passport,” Hult said to her. “We might not be through with you just yet.”
She gave it up, not without regret. A persistent voice within—the voice of logic, of sanity—urged her to bail out immediately and return to life in New York. A double murder investigation, counseled Brand’s inner voice, might well serve as a roadblock to the success of her oh-so-vital mission in Sweden, to investigate her family’s past.
Hult also said he’d prefer if she remained in the immediate area of the Swedish capital, within easy reach if he needed to speak with her further.
“And keep away from members of the Voss family,” he added as a final caution.
“Well, they somehow keep turning up,” Brand said.
That was the message she was getting from the authorities. Yes to staying put in Stockholm, no to bothering the Vosses. Immediately after Detective Inspector Hult laid down those rules, Brand moved to violate both.
29.
They fled, the two of them. As soon as she emerged from the polisstation, she found Hammar waiting for her. He had already managed to retrieve the Saab from where it had been left at Lehtonen’s. Without a word he allowed her to climb into the driver’s seat.
“We have to get a goddamned different car,” Brand said. “This one sticks out like a pink mohawk.”
They bickered about that for a while, sounding like an old married couple. Hammar claimed there were plenty of old Saabs on the road, because the vehicle was such a miracle of durability. Brand doubted his argument. All the while they spoke, she guided the Saab through empty pre-dawn streets heading out of town. Her paranoia was such that she repeatedly checked the rear-view for a tail. She had no idea where she was going, other than away from the eyes of the Stockholm police.
“North on the E4,” Hammar advised her. “Then swing northwest at Tönnebro, taking road 83.” He promptly fell asleep in the passenger seat.
Daylight dawned with ice black skies. From the trials of the previous night, Brand should have been just as exhausted as Hammar. But she felt alive and awake, perhaps to a fault. She drove like a hellion, pushing the little three-cylinder Shrike engine in the Saab to its limits. Her mind raced. She wondered if she was in the midst of a manic episode. Multiple trains of thought coursed through her mind, crashing into and derailing each other. The skinhead’s sneer had by now become a sour sort of mantra.
What are you doing here, bitch? Go home!
The face of the sleeping Hammar brought out feelings of gentleness and hope in Brand. Here was a man who had thrown himself into the search for missing young women, vulnerable souls from a vulnerable immigrant community. As much as she
was a lone wolf, Brand realized she depended upon Hammar’s presence for her mission. Over the years Brand had her difficulties with men. Serial relationships never seemed to settle into long-lasting ones. Being a police officer was notoriously hard on the “boy and girl thing.” But it was more than that. Brand suspected there was something broken inside her. She wondered what it was, where it came from. Why hadn’t she married? Why hadn’t she had children? Could the difficulty be due to her brooding Scandinavian roots?
Or was this idea too simple? After all, there were plenty of good times. Warm summer days with trips to a pond in the woods with Grandma Klara and Alice, her great aunt. Along the way the two women taught Veronika the names of plants and trees, berries. Following the seasons, they’d take along tin pails and spend hours picking plump blueberries off bushes, Veronika, as an adolescent, often eating more than she picked. Cherry season came, and fresh peaches at almost the same time. Everything was canned or frozen for use during the winters.
There were apple trees everywhere, the best fruit she would ever eat. Klara and Alice told her the appleseeds were brought over from early pioneering Swedes. Veronika believed most of what they told her in those early years. She absorbed their ways, but during her teenage years deliberately set aside much of what she had learned.
She watched the gradual destruction of the household. The consumption of alcohol, the on again off again emotions, the unexpected angry face. Gustav drank, and Brand’s mother Marta inherited the gene. Marta broke it off with Nick Brand, just as Veronika hit puberty. Later on came a second divorce, an unhappy home life, more and more erratic behavior.
The farm of her maternal grandparents at times represented an idyllic haven of peace for the young girl. But a sadness seemed to permeate the relationship of Klara and Gustav Dalgren. Brand fully realized their unhappiness only in retrospect. Some killing flaw lay at the heart of the marriage. Eventually, that flaw led to disaster. Brand stood witness to the arguments and shouting, making up her mind she would never travel the same route. Her pursuit of police work grew out of her childhood determination. Becoming a cop saved her life and at the same time damaged her chances of having a normal one.
As she slowed for a petrol stop, Hammar came awake and caught Brand looking at him.
“What?” he asked. “Was I drooling or something?”
“Not drooling, and not snoring too loudly, either,” she said. “In sleep, you’re perfect company.”
Hammar laughed. “Only when I’m asleep, huh?”
“Where are we going?” Brand asked. “I was thinking an AirBnB or something, up in the mountains, somewhere way off the grid. I want to see reindeer out my window.”
“You pretend not to know where we are headed?”
Brand realized that she did know. She had always known.
Västvall.
They had to get back on the horse that had thrown them. Her missing Glock still weighed on Brand’s mind. Even though good sense, simple reason, and Detective Inspector Hult had 5
The Saab chugged toward a traffic circle. Voss Hospital loomed in the rear-view. It allowed Brand a sense of the family’s reach and power. Hammar glanced backward.
“The place is said to be often virtually empty. Under-utilized. Unneeded.”
“A white elephant,” Brand said. “It gives me the willies.”
In the center of town stood an enormous wooden sculpture of a bear, thirty feet tall. The elaborately carved statue served as a local landmark. In her present mood it, too, struck Brand as ominous. Visions of the beast in the blizzard came back to her. Had she been mistaken? Could the creature really have been a bear?
The day remained bright, sunlight streaming through the blue sky from the west. Brand drove along squinting against the sun, as if snow blindness might be a concern. They passed through Sveg and arrived at a nearby village in the mountains. Hammar directed her to pull over in the center of town. The outside air cut surprisingly sharp when they stepped from the car.
Hammar had brought her to the site of the Nordic Light arson. Nothing was left of the original building, of course. Brand harbored a ludicrous thought that she might somehow see the charred, still-smoking remnants of her grandfather’s newspaper offices. The town authorities had erected a silver plaque marking the location. A metal memorial sculpture represented newspaper pages, flared open and arrested mid-flutter.
“Freedom. Thought. Life.” The creators of the shrine chiseled inscription into a plaque of brushed aluminum. “In memory of the five victims of the attack on the newspaper, Nordic Light, 3 March, 1940.”
“Should be six,” Brand said.
Hammar knew the poignant history of Gustav Dalgren’s time in America. The man had descended into bitterness and alcoholism. His death, whispered to be by his own hand, came in a barn fire on the farm outside of Jamestown, New York.
Brand privately wondered about linking the tragedy so firmly to the Nordic Light attack. Gustav’s death had happened long after the arson incident, almost forty years later.
“What’s he like?” she asked, looking at the memorial, musing.
“What’s who like?”
“Loke Voss.”
“Well, I’ve mostly dealt with the younger one, the one they call Junior. A man without a conscience. They all are.”
“How about senior?”
“I’ve seen the elder Loke Voss in court a few times—let’s see, three times, I guess, back when he could still get around. He has the kind of face you could imagine carved on a brazil nut, have it for a keychain. That lean and hungry look, like Cassius. The worst laugh in Christendom.”
“Very nice Shakespeare reference, but you haven’t answered me. I wasn’t asking about his appearance. Or his laugh.”
“Oh, well, the man’s a pirate. A wolf in wolf’s clothing, with probably a murder or two in his past.”
“More than these here,” Brand said, indicating the memorial.
“The trucking industry is pretty vicious. Loke Voss is known for toughness.”
Brand found herself curiously unmoved by the arson site. Maybe her exhaustion was telling on her. Hammar had to be wondering, if Brand wasn’t in Sweden to track down the details of the arson, what was she here for? Lately, she seemed more focused on retrieving her lost sidearm than on her own family’s history.
“You die in a terrorist attack, you get a victim’s plaque,” Brand commented as they left the memorial, a detached tone to her words. “Downtown Manhattan, where the Twin Towers stood, it’s like a square-mile size plaque.”
30.
3 March 1940.
The pale-eyed man paced in the enveloping dark. This far north in Sweden, in Härjedalen, early March still meant bitter winter. But he didn’t feel the cold.
Even though the night would represent the triumph of his young life, he steeled himself to display no excitement. But the heart beating within his chest would not quiet. He saw himself as a wolf about to be uncaged. He had chosen not to wear his beloved uniform. It didn’t matter. A Browning sidearm slept cinched in its shining leather holster at his waist. That was all the uniform he needed.
Two-thirty. A waning cuticle moon. Of course, he had intentionally scheduled the mission that way. Full moonlight might destroy the advantage of a surprise attack. A half kilometer below the townspeople slept. The night was about to get many degrees hotter, the man thought. He focused on the blocky silhouette of a three-story wooden structure near the center of town. A vile left-wing daily newspaper, Nordic Light, was based there.
A burrow for vermin. The place was a stain on the sacred soil of Sweden. Articles, rhetoric, and rallying calls poured forth in a constant, polluted stream. The man considered the newspaper’s continued existence a personal affront. Nordic Light journalists had in fact called him out by name several times as an enemy of the people. Their insolence filled him with fury.
He was not alone. Other men, powerful, wealthy men who knew who the real enemy was, reached out to him. The man was aston
ished to be summoned for a secret meeting in Stockholm. He could not believe such important individuals even knew of his existence. They spoke to him, praised him—noticed him! He took his place among those leading the charge. The communist menace from the east had to be stopped. This printing press up north was a pebble in their boot. They were pleased to request a small favor of him, they said.
“I would have Nordic Light silenced. Pour gasoline down its throat.” Here was the greatest of the grandees at the meeting, speaking directly to him!
“This is no favor,” the man replied. He did everything but click his heels and give a stiff-armed salute. “Rather it is an honor. And it is also my pleasure.”
The “big shots”—he liked the English phrase—left the operational details to him. The building below now was the agreed-upon target for the night. In the weeks before he had sent in scouts. The reds were foolishly lazy about security. The printing press on the ground floor stood surrounded by rolls and rolls of newsprint. A single match would burn brighter than any Nordic Light. On the second floor were offices, and on the third, a dormitory.
He recruited a pair of Finns, brothers, and a Swede. The brothers had fought in the Winter War against the Russians. The other was a rather unhinged individual whom the man had long admired. During his youth they had both participated in the silly juvenile gang battles that pitted the youths of one village against those from a neighboring one. Such fights were nothing. At most they resulted in bloody noses and blackened eyes. But this fellow always went the extra distance. He cracked skulls and broke bones.
The pale-eyed man fell easily in line with the opinions of his wealthy backers. In his ultra-correct political beliefs he could not be challenged. But deep down he held to a more elemental view. The attack on Nordic Light was simply a heightened version of the village bully boy battles he fought almost weekly during his adolescent years. The stakes might be higher, that was all. The excitement rising in his groin was the same.
He and his men waited without speaking. The Finns smoked. The man felt the night cold reach into his bones. He consulted his pocket watch. Three a.m. He touched the butt-end of the Browning. A thought passed through his mind. Herr Himmler was fond of a wry, outlandish statement, taken from a famous play about the heroic Albert Leo Schlageter. “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol.”
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