The Fire Witness

by Lars Kepler

  Flora stops to listen.

  “Her eyes were closed?” asks the reporter.

  “No, no, like this, with her hands in front of her face—”

  “You’re such a fucking liar,” another girl’s voice breaks in.

  Flora hears a crash. She glances down and sees she’s dropped the bottle. Her feet are wet. Her stomach suddenly flips and she barely makes it to the toilet before she throws up.

  45

  A woman with a German accent is discussing fall recipes when Flora gets back to the kitchen. She cleans up the mess of glass and juice and stands for a while, staring at her cold white hands. Then she walks into the hallway to call the police.

  Flora listens to the crackle on the line before the first signal.

  “Police,” says a woman with a tired voice.

  “Yes, hi, my name is Flora Hansen and I—”

  “Just a second, I didn’t catch that.”

  “All right.” Flora starts over. “My name is Flora Hansen. I want to leave a tip about the murdered girl in Sundsvall.”

  There’s a moment of silence and then the same tired voice says, “What do you want to tell us?”

  “Do you pay for tips?” asks Flora.

  “No, sorry.”

  “But I … I saw the dead girl.”

  “Are you saying that you were present when the girl was killed?”

  “I’m a psychic,” says Flora in her most mysterious voice. “I can contact the dead. I saw everything, but I need to get paid to remember things better.”

  “You can contact the dead. Is that it?”

  “The girl held her hands in front of her face.”

  “The headlines say that already.” The policewoman sounds impatient.

  Flora feels her heart shrink from shame. She feels sick. She hadn’t planned what to say, but she realizes she should have said something else. It was already front-page news in the tabloids stacked at the grocery store when she was buying food and cigarettes for Hans-Gunnar.

  “I didn’t know,” she whispers. “I can only tell you what I see. I’ve seen other things that you might want to pay for.”

  “As I said, we don’t pay.”

  “I saw the murder weapon,” she says. “Maybe you think you’ve found the murder weapon, but you haven’t. It’s not the right one. I saw—”

  “Do you know that it is against the law to call the police without cause?” the policewoman interrupts. “It’s actually a criminal offense. I don’t mean to sound angry, but you’ve been taking up my time when someone with real information could be trying to get through.”

  Flora is about to tell the policewoman about the murder weapon when she hears a click. She looks at the phone for a moment; then she dials the number again.

  46

  The Church of Sweden has loaned Pia Abrahamsson a temporary apartment in Sundsvall in a large wooden house filled with furniture designed by Carl Malmsten and Bruno Mathsson. The deacons, who come by with groceries for her, keep urging her to talk to one of the other Lutheran pastors, but Pia can’t bring herself to do it.

  She’s been driving her rented car up and down Highway 86 the entire day, going through all the small villages and along all the timber roads. Several times she’s run into police officers, who keep telling her to go home.

  It’s night now and she’s lying on the bed in this strange house, fully dressed, and staring at the ceiling. She has barely slept since Dante disappeared. She keeps hearing him cry. He’s frightened and keeps begging to go home.

  Her cell phone rings. She reaches for it and looks at the number before turning off the ringer. It was her parents. They call all the time.

  Pia gets up, puts on her jacket, and leaves. There’s a taste of blood in her mouth. She gets into the rental car and begins to drive. She has to find Dante. What if he’s in a ditch at the side of the road? What if the girl just left him in the woods?

  The road is dark and empty. It appears that everyone is asleep. She tries to peer through the mist beyond her headlights.

  She drives to the logging road where her car was stolen. She sits there for a while, clutching the steering wheel to stop herself from shaking. Then she turns around and drives back to Indal. She drives slowly past a preschool and turns at the next street, Solgårdsvägen. The houses she passes are all quiet, their windows dark. She sees something move under a trampoline and stops. She gets out and pushes through a row of roses to get to the front yard, the thorns tearing at her legs. She reaches the trampoline and a cat darts out from underneath.

  She turns toward the house, her heart racing.

  “Dante?” she cries. “Dante! Where are you? Mamma’s here!”

  Lights go on inside the house. Pia runs across the lawn to the next house and rings the bell.

  “Dante!” she screams as loud as she can. She hammers on the door then abruptly heads to the shed.

  She runs from house to house, calling for her son, pounding on closed garage doors, opening the doors to playhouses, pushing her way through hedges, and finally through a ditch until she finds herself back on Indalsvägen.

  A car races up behind her and screeches to a stop. Pia starts running but trips, landing on all fours. She rolls onto her back, blinking back tears. A policewoman hurries up to her.

  “Are you all right?”

  The policewoman helps Pia to her feet.

  “Have you found him?” asks Pia.

  A second police officer comes up and says that they’ll drive her home.

  “Dante is afraid of the dark,” Pia says. Her voice is hoarse. “I’m his mother, but I haven’t been patient enough with him. He comes into my bedroom at night, and I make him go back to bed. He just stands there in his pajamas, scared, and I just—”

  “Where did you park your car?” asks the policewoman as she takes Pia’s arm.

  “Leave me alone!” Pia screeches. “I have to find him!” She jerks free and slaps the woman’s face. The two officers grab her and force her, screaming, facedown onto the asphalt. She thrashes against their hold, scraping her chin, but they’ve pulled her arms behind her. She starts to weep as helplessly as a child.

  47

  Joona Linna is driving along a beautiful stretch of road between lush meadows and glittering lakes, wondering why there are no witnesses. No one seems to know anything about Vicky Bennet, and no one saw a thing. There are no witnesses. He puzzles over this until he arrives at a white stone house. There’s a lemon tree in a huge pot on the veranda. He rings the doorbell, waits a moment, and then walks around to the back.

  Nathan Pollock is sitting at a table beneath an apple tree. He has a cast on one leg.

  “Nathan?”

  The thin man twists around, shading his eyes with a hand, and smiles in surprise.

  “Joona Linna, as I live and breathe!”

  Nathan’s a member of the National Criminal Investigation Department, a group of six experts who help both the national and the county police with difficult homicide cases. He has long silver hair that is tied in a thin ponytail and hangs over one shoulder, and he’s dressed in black pants and a loosely knitted sweater.

  “Joona, I’m really sorry about the internal investigation. I shouldn’t have tried to stop you from seeing the Brigade.”

  “It was my decision to handle it the way I did,” Joona says. He sits down.

  Nathan shakes his head slowly. “I had a real fight with Carlos over it. They were clearly making an example of you, and I said so.”

  “Is that how you broke your leg?”

  “No, this came from an angry mamma bear that rushed into our yard.” Nathan grins so that his gold tooth shows.

  “Or perhaps the truth of the matter is that he fell off the ladder when he was picking apples,” a bright voice says behind them.

  “Hello, Mathilda,” Joona says.

  He gets up from his chair to give the freckled woman with thick reddish-brown hair a big hug.

  “Hello, Detective Inspector,” Mathilda s
ays as she sits down beside Nathan. “I hope that you have some work for my beloved husband to do for you. Otherwise he’s going to have to learn how to do sudoku.”

  “Yes, I might have something,” Joona says. “The murders at Birgittagården.”

  “Really?” Nathan looks up from scratching beneath his cast.

  “I’ve gone to the crime scenes and I’ve examined the bodies, but they won’t let me look at the reports or the results from the tests.”

  “Because of this internal investigation business?”

  “It’s not my preliminary investigation,” Joona says. “But I would like to hear your thoughts.”

  “You’ve made my Nathan a happy man,” says Mathilda as she leans over to pat her husband on the cheek.

  “Nice that you’re thinking of little old me,” Pollock says.

  “You’re the best investigator I know,” Joona says.

  Nathan is particularly good at psychological profiling—extrapolating from the evidence what kind of person most likely committed the crime. So far, he’s been right every time.

  Joona sits back down and begins to report everything he knows about the case. After a while, Mathilda heads indoors, but Pollock listens intently, occasionally interrupting with a question. A gray tabby cat winds itself around Nathan’s legs, and warblers sing in the apple tree while Joona describes the position of the bodies, the pattern of the blood spatter, where the blood pooled, where it dripped, where it was smeared, the tracks of bloody footprints, where there were traces of liquid and crusted blood. Nathan closes his eyes and listens as Joona tells him about the hammer beneath the pillow, the blood-soaked blanket, and the open window.

  “Let’s see,” Nathan starts. “The killer was extremely violent, but there are no bites, no hacking or dismembering …”

  Joona says nothing and watches Nathan’s lips move as he thinks things through. At times, he whispers something to himself or he pulls his ponytail absentmindedly. After a few minutes, he starts to talk.

  “All right, I can see the bodies in my mind and I see how the blood spattered as it did. You already know this, of course, but most murders are committed in a moment of frenzy. Then the killer is panicked by all the blood and chaos. That’s when they’ll grab a sander and a garbage bag or skid around in the blood with a scrub brush and leave evidence everywhere.”

  “Not here.”

  “This killer did not attempt to hide a thing.”

  “I agree.”

  “The violence was severe and methodical. It’s not punishment that’s gone too far. In both cases, the intent was to kill and nothing more. Both victims were in small rooms. They couldn’t escape. The violence is not passionate. It’s more like an execution or a slaughter.”

  “We think the murderer is a girl,” Joona says.

  “A girl?”

  Joona meets Nathan’s surprised look and hands him a photograph of Vicky Bennet.

  Nathan laughs. “Sorry, but, really, I don’t buy it.”

  Mathilda reappears with a tea service and jam cookies on a tray. She sits down at the table and Nathan pours the tea into three cups.

  “So you don’t believe a girl is capable of this?” Joona asks.

  “Never had a case like that,” Nathan says.

  “Not all girls are nice girls,” Mathilda points out.

  Nathan jabs a finger at the photograph. “Is she known to be violent?”

  “No, the opposite.”

  “Then you’re looking for the wrong person.”

  “We’re certain she kidnapped a child yesterday.”

  “But she hasn’t beaten the child to death?”

  “Not as far as we know,” Joona says as he helps himself to a cookie.

  Nathan leans back in his chair.

  “If the girl is not known for violence, if she hasn’t been punished for being violent, if she hasn’t ever been suspected of a similar kind of violence, she’s not the one you’re looking for,” Nathan says, and looks at Joona sharply.

  “What if it is her in spite of that?” Joona asks.

  Nathan shakes his head and blows on his tea.

  “Can’t be,” he says. “I’ve just been reading a paper by David Canter. He says what I’ve always thought, that during the commission of the crime, the suspect assigns the victim the role of an opposing player in an interior drama.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” Joona says.

  “According to his hypothesis, a covered face means that the killer wants to remove the victim’s face and make her into nothing more than an object. Men in this category often use exaggerated violence.”

  “What if they were just playing hide-and-seek?” Joona asks.

  “Where are you going with that?”

  “The victim covers her eyes and counts to one hundred while the killer hides.”

  Nathan lets this thought sink in.

  “Then I believe the killer intends for you to do the seeking.”

  “But where?”

  “All I can tell you is to go back and seek the answer in the old places,” Pollock says. “The past always reveals the future.”

  48

  Carlos Eliasson, the National Police chief, is standing by his office window on the eighth floor. He’s looking out at the steep hillsides of Kronoberg Park. He has no idea that Joona Linna is walking through the park after a brief visit to the old Jewish cemetery.

  Carlos goes back to sit at his desk and doesn’t see the detective with the disheveled hair cross Polhemsgatan and head for the main entrance of the police station.

  Joona walks past a banner proclaiming the role of modern police in a changing world. He passes Benny Rubin, who is sitting hunched in front of his computer, and Magdalena Ronander’s office, where she’s on the phone, saying something about cooperation with Europol.

  Joona is back in Stockholm because he’s been summoned to a meeting with both of the internal investigators later this afternoon. He takes his mail from his box, goes to sit at his desk, and then flips through the messages and envelopes while thinking about what Nathan said. He agrees with Nathan. Vicky Bennet’s profile doesn’t fit these two murders.

  In the admittedly incomplete psychological documentation the police have on Vicky Bennet, there’s nothing to indicate that she could be dangerous. She is not on the police register. The people who have met her find her shy and withdrawn but nice.

  But all the technical evidence points to her. Everything indicates that she took the little boy. Maybe the boy is already lying in a ditch with a broken skull. If the boy is still alive, they must find him quickly. Maybe he’s with Vicky in some dark garage. Maybe she’s in a rage at him right now.

  Go seek the past. Nathan Pollock’s usual advice.

  It’s as simple as it is clear. The past always indicates the future.

  In her short life, Vicky has moved many times. She’d moved around with her homeless mother, then from foster home to foster home, into an urgent-care facility, then a youth home, and finally to Birgittagården. But where is she now?

  Maybe the answer is hidden in one of her conversations with her counselors, social workers, or temporary foster parents. There must be someone whom she trusted and confided in.

  Joona is about to look for Anja to ask if she’s found any new names or addresses, when he sees her standing in the doorway. Her hefty body is squeezed into a tight black skirt and one of several angora sweaters she owns. Her blond hair is artfully pinned up and her lipstick is bright red.

  “Before I tell you what I’ve found, let me just say that fifteen thousand children are placed in foster homes every year,” Anja starts. “And let me remind you that it was called health reform when politicians opened the door of health care to the private sector. Now venture capitalists own the youth homes. It’s like the olden days when they used to auction off orphans. They save money on staff, on education, on therapy, and even on dentists, all to stoke their coffers.”

  “I know,” Joona says. “Just tell me about Vicky
Bennet—”

  “I thought I would start by finding out who was responsible for her last placement.”

  “And?” asks Joona.

  She smiles and leans her head to the side. “Mission accomplished, Joona Linna.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I do whatever I can for you.”

  “I don’t deserve it,” Joona says.

  “I know,” she says, and leaves the room.

  He waits in his chair for a few minutes, then he goes to Anja’s office and knocks on the door.

  As he enters, she says, “The addresses are there,” and nods at the printer.

  “Thanks.”

  “When the last person responsible for Vicky’s placement heard my name, he said that Sweden once had a famous butterfly swimmer by the same name,” she says, and blushes.

  “So you told him you were that famous swimmer?”

  “No, I didn’t. But he told me that Vicky Bennet doesn’t appear in any records before the age of six. Her mother, Susie, was homeless and appears to have given birth alone and kept Vicky out of the health system. When Susie was committed to a mental hospital, Vicky was placed with foster parents here in Stockholm.”

  Joona is holding the list in his hand. It’s still warm from the printer. He glances down the list of dates and placements. He sees that Vicky’s first foster parents were Jack and Elin Frank, who lived at Strandvägen 47. Among numerous other placements, there are two youth homes on the list: Ljungbacken in Uddevalla and Birgittagården in Sundsvall township. Against several names on the list there’s a note saying that the child asked to be returned to her first foster family. Each one says the same thing: “The child requests to be returned to the Frank family, but the family declines.” The sentence is dry and clinical.

  The two youth homes are at the end of the list after other foster families, emergency placements, and treatment homes.

  Joona thinks about the bloody hammer underneath the pillow and the blood on the windowsill. He thinks about the glum, thin face in the photograph. Her hair in tangled curls.

  “Can you find out if Jack and Elin Frank are still living at this address?” Joona asks.