The Fire Witness

by Lars Kepler

  Disa walks into the kitchen.

  Joona says, “The food’s almost ready. The meat just needs to rest.”

  “It smells wonderful,” Disa says.

  “It’s been a long time since we saw each other last,” Joona says. “I’m very happy that you’ve come.”

  They raise their glasses without saying a word. As always, when Joona looks at her, Disa feels as if she’s starting to shimmer. She forces herself to look away from his eyes, then tilts the wine in her glass, sniffs the aroma, and tastes it again.

  “Perfect temperature,” she says.

  Joona starts to arrange the meat and potatoes on a bed of arugula, basil, and thyme. He slowly pours the sauce over the plate as he thinks he should have talked with Disa long before now.

  “How have you been?” he asks.

  “Without you, you mean?” Disa says. “Pretty darn good.”

  There’s silence at the table and she gently places her hand on his.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I’ve been so angry with you. Especially when I’m my bad self.”

  “Who are you now?”

  “My bad self.”

  Joona takes a sip of wine.

  “I’ve been thinking about the past lately,” he starts.

  She smiles and raises an eyebrow. “Lately? You’re always thinking about the past.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, you’re thinking about it but you never talk about it.”

  “You’re right, I …”

  He falls silent and his gray eyes seem to shrink. Disa feels a shiver go down her back.

  “You asked me here for dinner because we needed to talk,” Disa says. “I had decided never to talk to you again. But now … Several months have gone by. And when you called—”

  “Yes, because I—”

  “You’re screwing around with me, Joona.”

  “Disa, you can think of me however you want,” Joona says gravely. “But I want you to know that I care … I care about you. I think of you all the time.”

  “I see,” she says as she starts to get up without looking at him.

  “It’s something else. Something horrible, which—”

  Joona watches her put on her polka-dot raincoat.

  “Goodbye,” Disa whispers.

  “Disa, I need you.” Joona is surprised to hear himself say these words. “You’re the one that I want.”

  She’s staring at him now. Her shining black bangs reach her eyelashes.

  “What did you say?” she asks after a few seconds.

  “You’re the one that I want, Disa.” He gets up from the table.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I need you. I’ve needed you all this time,” he says. “But I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way. I didn’t want anything horrible to happen to you if we—”

  “What could happen to me that is so horrible?”

  “You could disappear,” he says simply. He is holding her face between his hands.

  “You are the one who disappears,” she whispers.

  “I’m not easily frightened,” Joona says. “I’m talking about real events.”

  Disa goes up on her toes and kisses him on the mouth and stays to feel his warm breath on her face. He searches for her mouth and kisses her again and again until she parts her lips.

  As they kiss, Joona unbuttons her raincoat and lets it fall to the floor.

  “Disa,” he whispers. He strokes her shoulders and slides his hands to her waist. He presses against her and breathes in her silky aroma. He kisses her collarbone and her throat and takes her gold necklace between his teeth. He kisses her chin and her soft, moist mouth.

  He searches for her warm skin beneath her thin blouse. The small fasteners snap open. Her nipples are hard. She looks him in the eye then pulls him after her into the bedroom. Her blouse is open and her breasts are gleaming like polished porcelain.

  They stop and kiss again. His hands stroke the small of her back, her ass, and then slip beneath the sheer cloth of her panties. Disa slowly draws away and feels warmth pulse in her body. She’s already wet. Her cheeks are bright red and her hands tremble as she unbuttons his pants.

  76

  After breakfast, Disa is propped up in bed, drinking coffee and reading The Times on her iPad. Joona is taking a shower.

  Yesterday, he decided he would skip going to the Nordic Museum to look at the Sami bridal crown made from braided roots. Sometimes he just had to be near the crown in order to remember his former, entirely different, life. Instead, he is with Disa. He didn’t plan what had happened. Perhaps this was because Rosa Bergman’s dementia has cut his last remaining tie to Summa and Lumi.

  It has been more than twelve years.

  He has to understand that he has nothing to be afraid of now.

  Still, he knows he should have warned Disa earlier. He should have told her what frightens him so that she could decide for herself. He stands in the bedroom doorway and watches her, unnoticed, for a long time, then slips into the kitchen to call Holger Jalmert.

  “I heard that Gunnarsson was being difficult,” Holger says, amused. “I’ve had to promise him not to send you any copies of my reports.”

  “Are you allowed to talk to me?” asks Joona.

  He moves his sandwich and coffee cup from the counter to the table and waves at Disa, who’s reading her iPad with a wrinkled brow.

  “Probably not,” Holger says with a laugh.

  “Were you able to look at the purse we found at the dam?” Joona asks.

  “Yes, I’ve finished my examination. At the moment, I’m in my car on my way back to Umeå.”

  “Were there any notes or papers in the purse?”

  “Only a receipt from Pressbyrån.”

  “A cell phone?”

  “No, unfortunately.”

  “So what do we have?” Joona says as he lets his eyes rest on the gray sky above the rooftops.

  Holger takes a deep breath and starts speaking as if he’s reading aloud from a list: “There are traces of what is most probably blood on the purse. I cut out a sample and sent it to the National Forensic Laboratory. Some makeup—two different lipsticks and a stump of a kohl stick—a pink plastic barrette, a wallet with a skull on it, some cash, a photograph of Vicky herself, some kind of bike tool, a prescription bottle without its label, which I also sent to the National Lab. A few pills of diazepam. Two pens. And hidden in one of the purse pockets I found a table knife as sharp as a sushi knife.”

  “Nothing written at all? No names? No addresses?”

  “No, that was everything.”

  Joona hears Disa’s footsteps on the wooden floor behind him. He stays where he is. He shivers and a few seconds later he feels her soft lips on the back of his neck and her arms slip around his body.

  She releases him and wanders off to take a shower. Joona sits at the kitchen table and dials the number for Solveig Sundström, the nurse responsible for the girls from Birgittagården. Maybe she knows what kind of medications Vicky took.

  The phone rings eight times before it’s picked up.

  “Caroline here, answering an ugly telephone that was left on a chair.”

  “Is Solveig there?”

  “I don’t know where she is right now. Can I tell her who’s calling?”

  Caroline is the older girl. She’s a head taller than Tuula. He remembers she had old injection scars on the insides of her elbows, but she seemed to have things together. She appeared intelligent.

  “Is everything going all right for you girls?” he asks.

  “You’re the detective, right?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Is it true that Vicky is dead?”

  “Unfortunately it seems so,” Joona replies.

  “It feels strange,” Caroline says.

  “Do you know what kinds of medications she was prescribed?” Joona asks.

  “You mean Vicky?”

  “Right.”

  “I dunno, probably Eu
trexa, but it’s hard to believe—she was so thin.”

  “That’s an antidepressant, right?”

  “Yeah, I used to take it. Now I just take Imovane,” Caroline says. “It’s fucking nice not to have to take Eutrexa.”

  “What are its side effects?”

  “Different for different people. I put on twenty-two pounds.”

  “Does it make you tired?” Joona asks. In his mind’s eye, he sees the bloody sheets where Vicky slept.

  “At first it’s the opposite. All I had to do was start sucking on the pill and it took off like gangbusters. It creeps through your entire body and you get angry and yell. I threw my phone against the wall once and another time I ripped down the curtains in my room. After a while, it stops making you angry and does the opposite. It’s like you have a warm blanket wrapped around you. You get tired and all you want to do is sleep.”

  “Do you know if Vicky was taking any other medications?”

  “I imagine she was like the rest of us and held on to anything that worked—diazepam, Lyrica, Stesolid, Ketogan.”

  There’s a voice in the background and Joona realizes the nurse has come into the room and seen Caroline talking on the phone.

  “I’m going to report you for theft,” the woman is saying.

  “It rang and I answered,” Caroline says. “It’s for you, anyway. It’s the detective on the line. You’re a suspect in the murder of Miranda Eriksdotter.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the nurse says. She takes the phone and clears her throat before saying, “Solveig Sundström.”

  “I’m Detective Inspector Joona Linna with the National Police and I’m investigating—”

  The woman hangs up without a word and Joona doesn’t bother to call back since he’s already gotten the answer he wanted.

  77

  A white Opel pulls to a stop underneath the flat roof of the gas station. A woman in a light blue sweater gets out and stands at the pump while searching through her purse.

  Ari Määtilainen turns his gaze back to the two thick grilled hot dogs on their bed of mashed potatoes with chili sauce and roasted onions. He glances up at the heavyweight motorcyclist waiting for his food and says mechanically that coffee and soft drinks are available at the opposite counter.

  The zippers on the motorcyclist’s leather jacket scrape against the glass counter as he leans over to take his food.

  “Danke,” he says and then heads over to the coffee machine.

  Ari turns up the volume on the radio. The woman in the blue sweater has walked away from the pump as it’s filling the Opel’s tank.

  On the radio the news announcer is reporting developments in the recent kidnapping case: “The search for Vicky Bennet and Dante Abrahamsson has been called off. The Västernorrland police are not commenting, but sources have told us that they are feared to have drowned last Saturday. The police are being criticized for sending out a general bulletin. Radio Eko has been trying to reach the chief of the National Police, Carlos Eliasson, for a statement …”

  “What the hell,” Ari whispers.

  He looks at the sticky note, which is still next to the cash register. He picks up his cell phone and calls the police again.

  “Police, Sonja Rask speaking,” a woman says.

  “Hi,” Ari says. “I saw them, the girl and the little boy.”

  “May I ask who is calling?”

  “Ari Määtilainen. I work at Statoil gas station in Dingersjö. I was just listening to the radio and they said that the kids drowned on Saturday. But they didn’t. I saw them here in the early-morning hours Sunday.”

  “You’re talking about Vicky Bennet and Dante Abrahamsson?” asks Sonja skeptically.

  “Yes, I saw them here. It was just after midnight, so it was already Sunday. They couldn’t have drowned on Saturday and then showed up here on Sunday, right?”

  “You’re saying you saw Vicky Bennet and Dante Abrahamsson on Sunday?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t you call right away?”

  “I did call, and I talked to a police officer.”

  Ari had listened to Radio Gold on Saturday evening. The general bulletin hadn’t gone out yet, and the local news was asking the public to keep their eyes open for a girl and a little boy.

  At eleven p.m., a long-haul truck parked in the lot behind the diesel pumps. The truck driver napped for three hours.

  He saw them in the middle of the night, around two a.m.

  Ari was looking at the monitor, which showed everything the security cameras were picking up outside. The picture changed and showed the long-haul truck from another angle. The gas station appeared deserted as the driver started the engine and the truck began to pull away. Then Ari noticed a figure at the back of the building, close to the car wash. He was surprised to see anyone, then realized that there were actually two figures. He stared at the screen. The truck was backing up and turning around. The truck’s headlights shone into the window as it turned. Ari left his position behind the counter and ran around the building. The truck was on the exit ramp and the parking lot was empty. The girl and the little boy were gone.

  78

  Joona parks his car outside the Statoil gas station in Dingersjö, 360 kilometers north of Stockholm. It’s a sunny day and the breeze is brisk. Ragged advertising flags are flapping in the wind.

  Joona and Disa had been having lunch at Villa Källhagen when Joona received a call from a nervous Sonja Rask, the policewoman.

  Now Joona is walking into the shop. A hollow-eyed man with a Statoil cap is placing paperback books in a rack. Joona looks at the menu over the counter and then at the hot dogs rotating on the grill.

  “What would you like?” asks the man.

  “Makkarakeitto,” Joona answers in Finnish.

  “Suomalainen makkarakeitto,” Ari Määtilainen says with a smile. “My grandmother used to make sausage soup when I was a boy.”

  “With rye bread on the side?” asks Joona.

  “Yes indeed. But here there’s only Swedish food,” he says, gesturing to the hot dogs and hamburgers.

  “Well, I’m not really here to eat. I’m from the police,” Joona says.

  “I realized that. I talked to one of your colleagues the night I saw them,” Ari says and points at the monitor for the security cameras.

  “What did you see that made you call?”

  “A girl and a little boy at the back of the building.”

  “You saw them on the screen?”

  “Right.”

  “Clearly?”

  “Well, I’m used to keeping an eye open.”

  “Did the police come here that night?”

  “This guy Gunnarsson stopped by the next morning and didn’t think there was much to the video. He told me I could erase it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I imagine you’ve kept a copy on an external hard drive.”

  Ari Määtilainen smiles and shows Joona to the minuscule office beside the storage area. A sofa bed is open and some empty cans of Red Bull are lying on the floor. A carton of milk is standing in the frosty window. On a school desk, there’s a laptop computer connected to an external hard drive. Ari Määtilainen sits down on a plastic chair and quickly goes through the files.

  “I’d heard on the radio that everyone was looking for a girl and a little boy, and this is what I saw in the middle of the night,” he says as he opens a file.

  Joona leans forward to get a better look. There are four small squares showing the inside and outside of the gas station. A counter in the corner of each square ticks away the time. The gray pictures don’t move. Ari is sitting behind the counter. Every once in a while, he turns the page of a newspaper and eats an onion ring.

  “This long-haul truck was there for three hours,” Ari tells Joona. He points at one of the pictures. “Now it’s about to move.”

  They see a dark shadow in the driver’s seat.

 
“Can you enlarge the picture?” asks Joona.

  “Just a moment.”

  A grove of trees is suddenly lit up by the headlights of the truck. Sensors outside detect motion and banks of lights go on.

  Ari points at the second exterior picture and changes it to full screen.

  “You can see them here,” he whispers.

  The long-haul truck is starting to roll forward. Ari points at the back of the gas station with the garbage bins and the recycling boxes. There are many shadows and it’s still. Then there’s movement next to the black glass of the entrance to the car wash. A small figure appears—a thin being pressed against the wall.

  The picture is grainy and flickers. It’s hard to make out the face or other details. However, it’s obviously a girl. And now there’s something else.

  “Can you make the picture clearer?” asks Joona.

  “Just wait,” Ari whispers.

  The long-haul truck is turning toward the exit ramp. Light floods the door beside the figures and the glass turns blinding white for a second. Then the entire back of the gas station building is bathed in light.

  Joona can see that it definitely is a thin girl standing there with a child. They’re looking at the long-haul truck. Then they turn black again.

  Ari points at the screen as both figures run along the dark gray wall and disappear from the picture.

  “You saw them?” Ari asks.

  “Can you show it to me again?”

  Ari moves the cursor back to where the two figures are briefly lit up. He plays the video extremely slowly.

  It appears that the long-haul truck is barely moving. In jerks, the light goes from the grove of trees, over the back wall of the station, and starts to fill the windows with white light.

  The smaller child is looking down and its face is in shadow. The thin girl is barefoot and it looks like she is carrying plastic bags in both hands. The headlights reach them and the girl starts to lift her hand.

  Joona sees that she’s not carrying plastic bags. Her wrists are wrapped in bandages that have partially come undone and are hanging loosely and swaying in the light. Vicky Bennet and Dante Abrahamsson did not drown in the river.

  The digital clock says 2:14 a.m.

  Somehow, the two children managed to get out of the car and cross the river. They reached the other shore and traveled seventy-two kilometers farther south.