The Fire Witness

by Lars Kepler

  “You have a nice house,” Elin says softly.

  She places her hand on his. He turns it over and their fingers intertwine. They sit in silence as they continue to swing. The hammock keeps creaking.

  Her glossy hair falls into her face, and she sweeps it away and meets his gaze.

  “Daniel,” she says.

  “Yes,” he replies in a whisper.

  Elin looks at him. She thinks she’s never needed the tenderness of another human being as much as now. Something about his gaze and his wrinkled forehead touches her deeply. She kisses his mouth softly, smiles, and kisses him again. She takes his face between her hands and kisses him deeply.

  “Dear Lord,” he says.

  Elin kisses him again and skims her lips over his beard stubble. She opens her blouse and pulls his hand to her breast. He touches her gently and caresses her nipple.

  She kisses him again and slips her hand into his shirt. His stomach trembles at her touch.

  Waves of desire go through her body and she feels weak. She wants either to lie in the grass with him or sit astride his hips.

  She closes her eyes and pulls him to her. He says something that she doesn’t hear. Her blood pulses inside her. She feels his warm hands on her body but then he stops and pulls away.

  “Elin, I can’t …”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean …” She tries to breathe more calmly.

  “I just need some time,” he says. There are tears in his eyes. “It’s too much for me now, but I don’t want to scare you off.”

  “You’re not scaring me off,” she says and tries to smile.

  Elin gets up and adjusts her clothes as she leaves the garden. She gets into her car.

  Her cheeks are flushed and her legs are still trembling as she drives away from Sundsvall. Five minutes later, she has to turn off onto a forest road. Her panties are soaking and her heart hasn’t stopped racing. Her blood throbs through every vein. She looks at her face in the rearview mirror. Her eyes are heavy and glistening and her lips are swollen.

  She can’t remember the last time she felt such sexual power stream through her body. Daniel seems unimpressed by her beauty. Instead, it feels as if he can look right into her heart.

  She tries to breathe slowly and waits, but finally she looks around the small forest road. She shifts her dress and lifts her ass so she can pull her panties down over her hips. She touches herself quickly with both hands. Her orgasm comes violently, in quick bursts.

  She’s panting and sweating with two fingers inside herself. She looks out the windshield at the magical rays of sunlight streaming through the branches of the Scotch pines.

  112

  Night is falling as Flora heads to the recycling bins behind the grocery store to look for cans and bottles. She can’t stop thinking about the murders in Sundsvall. She’s started to fantasize about Miranda and her life at Birgittagården.

  She imagines Miranda wore suggestive clothing, smoked, and swore. She stops thinking about the girl as she passes the grocery store’s loading bay. She looks in the cardboard boxes stacked near the dock. Then she keeps going.

  She starts to imagine Miranda as a child playing hide-and-seek with some friends outside of a church. She sees her cover her eyes and start to count to one hundred. A little girl is running among the gravestones and laughing in an exaggerated way, already a bit frightened. Flora’s heart is fluttering.

  She stops beside the bin for old newspapers and cardboard boxes and puts down her plastic bag of empty bottles and cans. She goes up to the container for clear glass and shines her flashlight into it. The light leaps over both broken and whole bottles. In one corner, Flora spies a bottle that she can get some money for. She reaches in and gropes around, since she can’t look in at the same time. Something touches her. It feels like someone is stroking the top of her hand. A second later, she cuts her fingers on a shard of glass. She snatches her arm out and backs away.

  She can hear a dog bark far away and then she hears the slow, prolonged crash of glass inside the large bin.

  Flora runs away. Her chest hurts and she can’t catch her breath. Her wounded fingers are burning. She looks around. The ghost was hiding among the glass bottles, she thinks.

  I see the dead girl as a child. Miranda haunts me because she wants to show me something. She hasn’t left me alone since I lured her to this side by my séance.

  Flora sucks the blood from her fingertips and relives how the girl tried to catch and hold her hand. She thinks that the girl tried to hiss something. She can hear it now: Someone was there and witnessed the whole thing. There weren’t supposed to be witnesses, but there was one anyway. One witness.

  Flora starts to walk again as quickly as she can. She’s looking back over her shoulder and screams when a man bumps into her. He smiles and mumbles an apology as she hurries away.

  113

  Joona walks briskly through the entrance to the building at Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 9. He runs up the stairs to the top floor and rings the bell beside the only door. His heart starts to calm down as he waits for an answer. The brass plaque screwed to the door bears the engraved name Horácková. There’s a piece of tape above it on which the name Lundhagen has been scrawled. He knocks as hard as he can, but he can’t hear a thing inside the apartment. He opens the mail slot and peeks inside. It’s dark but he can see the floor is covered with mail and flyers. He rings the doorbell again, waits, and then pulls out his cell phone to call Anja.

  “Can you search for Tobias Horácková?”

  “No such person,” she replies a moment later.

  “Horácková at Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 9.”

  “There’s a Viktoriya Horácková at that residence,” Anja says. She keeps typing.

  “What about a Tobias Lundhagen?”

  “Let me just tell you that Viktoriya Horácková is the daughter of a diplomat from the Czech Republic.”

  “What about a Tobias Lundhagen?”

  “Yes, he lives there. Either he rents it from her or he lives with her.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Joona, wait,” Anja says hurriedly.

  “Yes?”

  “Three small details. One: You can’t go into a diplomatic apartment without a warrant from the Justice Department—”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Two: You have a meeting with the Internal Review Board in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Can’t make it.”

  “Three: At four thirty this afternoon, you have a meeting with Carlos.”

  Joona is sitting straight-backed in a hard armchair at the office of the Public Prosecutor for Police Cases. The head of the Internal Review Board is reading the report from the first interview with Joona in a monotone. Then he hands it to Joona so he can approve and sign it.

  Mikael Båge has a drop of snot hanging from his nostril. He sniffs it into his nose as he takes the report back and hands it to Helene Fiorine, the lead secretary. Then he starts to read the transcript of the testimony given by the witness Göran Stone from Säpo.

  Three hours later, Joona is walking the short stretch from Kungsbro Bridge to the police station. He takes the elevator to the eighth floor, walks past Carlos Eliasson’s assistant, and knocks on the chief’s door. He takes his place at the table where his colleagues Petter Näslund, Benny Rubin, and Magdalena Ronander are already waiting.

  “Joona, I am a reasonable person, but this is going too far,” Carlos says. He’s feeding his paradise fish.

  “Bringing in the national SWAT team!” Petter says with a grin.

  Magdalena is sitting silently looking at the table.

  “Tell them you’re sorry,” Carlos says.

  “Because I wanted to save the life of a little boy?” asks Joona.

  “No, because you know you were wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joona says.

  Petter giggles. His forehead is sweaty.

  “I’m going to have to suspend you from active service,” Carlos says, “until the inter
nal investigation is concluded.”

  “Who is taking over?”

  “The preliminary investigation is being shut down—”

  “Vicky Bennet is alive,” Joona interrupts.

  “—probably tomorrow afternoon, once the prosecutor has the chance to formally close it.”

  “She’s alive!”

  “Get a grip!” Benny says. “I’ve also taken a look at that security film—”

  Carlos silences Benny with a wave of his hand.

  “There’s no indication that it was Vicky and the boy on that security film at the gas station.”

  “She left a message on her mother’s cell-phone voice mail two days ago,” Joona says.

  “Vicky doesn’t have a phone and her mother is dead,” Magdalena says in a serious tone.

  “You’re starting to get sloppy, Joona,” Petter says in a pitying voice.

  Carlos clears his throat and hesitates before he takes a deep breath. “This isn’t easy for me,” he says slowly.

  Petter looks expectantly at Carlos, while Magdalena stares at the table and Benny doodles on a piece of paper.

  “I’ll go on leave for a month,” Joona says.

  “That’s good,” Carlos says. “That will solve—”

  “As long as I can enter a specific apartment first.”

  “An apartment?”

  Carlos’s face darkens and he sits down behind his desk as if all his strength has just left him.

  “It was purchased seventeen years ago by the ambassador from the Czech Republic. He gave it to his twenty-year-old daughter.”

  “Forget it,” says Carlos.

  “The daughter hasn’t lived there for twelve years.”

  “Doesn’t matter. As long as it’s owned by a person with diplomatic immunity, paragraph 21 doesn’t apply to it.”

  Anja Larsson comes into the office without knocking. Her blond hair is arranged in a bun on the top of her head, and she’s wearing glittery lip gloss. She walks right up to Carlos, looks at him, and gestures toward his cheek.

  “You have a spot of dirt on your face,” she says.

  “Is it my beard?” Carlos asks weakly.

  “What?”

  “Maybe I forgot to shave this morning,” Carlos says.

  “It doesn’t look good at all.”

  “I see,” he says as he looks down.

  “I need to talk to Joona. Are you done here?”

  “No,” Carlos says. “We’re—”

  Anja leans over his desk. The red beads of her necklace jostle in her cleavage. Carlos is about to remind her that he’s married when his eyes fasten on the shadow that disappears into her low-cut blouse below the lowest bead.

  “Are you about to have a nervous breakdown?” Anja asks.

  “Yes, I am,” Carlos says weakly.

  Their colleagues stare as Joona gets up from his chair and walks out of the office with Anja.

  They head toward the elevators and Joona presses the call button.

  “So what do you want, Anja?” he asks.

  “Oh, here you are, all stressed again,” she says, and offers him a piece of candy in a red-and-white-striped wrapper. “I just wanted to tell you that Flora Hansen called back and—”

  “I need a decision on a search warrant.”

  Anja shakes her head. She peels the paper from the candy and pops it into Joona’s mouth.

  “Flora wants to give you your money back.”

  “She lied to me.”

  “She just wants us to listen. She said that there is a witness. She really did sound frightened and she kept repeating that you have to believe her. She doesn’t want money. She just wants us to listen to her.”

  “I must get into the apartment at Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 9.”

  “Oh, Joona.” Anja sighs.

  She takes the paper off another piece of candy and holds it to Joona’s mouth as she puckers her lips. Joona eats the candy. Anja laughs happily and unwraps a third piece and holds it up. It’s too late. Joona is already in the elevator.

  114

  There are balloons hanging from a door with a scratched window in the Wollmar Yxkullsgatan building. The high voices of children singing comes from the inner courtyard. Joona opens the door and looks in: It’s a small garden with a lawn and an apple tree. In the last light of the evening sun, he can see a table set with colorful paper napkins and cups, as well as streamers and balloons. A pregnant woman is sitting on a white plastic chair. She is made up to look like a cat. She’s calling something to the children. Joona is hit with a pang of longing.

  One of the girls leaves the group and runs up to him.

  “Hi,” she says, and pushes past him through the door festooned with balloons.

  Her bare feet leave dirty footprints on the foyer’s white marble floor. She opens the apartment door and yells that she has to pee. One of the balloons is loosened from the door and falls to meet its pink shadow. Joona sees that the entire foyer is filled with traces of bare feet: back and forth from the entrance, up and down the stairs, past the storage door and the garbage chute.

  For the second time, Joona walks up to the loft apartment and rings the bell. He stares at the brass plaque with the name Horácková and the piece of tape with the name Lundhagen. He is starting to get a headache.

  He can still hear the voices of the children coming from the inner courtyard. He presses the doorbell again and is about to take out his break-in tools when a man of about thirty opens the door. His hair is styled so it sticks up. The security chain is not attached, and it clatters against the doorframe. Old mail and advertisements still cover the floor in the narrow entry hall. A tiled staircase painted white leads up into the apartment.

  “Are you Tobias?”

  “Depends on who’s asking,” the man replies.

  He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt and black jeans. His hair is stiff with gel and his face has a yellow tinge.

  “The National Police,” Joona says.

  “No shit,” the man says in English with an amazed smile.

  “May I come in?”

  “No, I’m just going out, but if—”

  “You know Vicky Bennet,” Joona says.

  “Maybe you should come in for a short while,” Tobias says seriously.

  Joona is aware of the heaviness of his new pistol in its shoulder holster as he walks up the short staircase and into an attic apartment with a sloped ceiling and rounded windows. A framed poster showing a Goth girl with large breasts and angel wings is hanging on one of the walls.

  Tobias sits down on the sofa and tries to zip up a large dirty suitcase on the floor close to his legs, but gives up. He leans back into the sofa.

  “So you want to talk about Vicky?” Tobias says, reaching forward to take a handful of candy from a ceramic bowl.

  “When did you last hear from her?” Joona asks as he flips through some of the unopened mail on the sideboard.

  “Well, that’s a good question.” Tobias sighs. “I don’t know. It must have been a year or so ago. She called from … Damn.” He has dropped some candy on the floor.

  “What were you going to say?”

  “She called me from Uddevalla, I think. She talked a lot, but I really don’t know what she wanted.”

  “No calls the past few months?”

  “Nope.”

  Joona opens a small wooden door, which leads to a closet. Four hockey video games are unopened in their packages. There’s an old computer on the shelf.

  “I’ve really gotta get going,” Tobias says.

  “When did she live here?”

  Tobias tries to close the suitcase again. One of the windows on the side facing the inner courtyard is slightly open. The children are now singing the birthday song.

  “Almost three years ago.”

  “How long did she stay?”

  “She didn’t stay here the whole time. About seven months in all,” Tobias answers.

  “Where did she stay when she wasn’t here?”
r />   “Who knows.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I had to get her to leave here a few times. See, you don’t get it. She was a kid but she could be really difficult.”

  “In what way?”

  “The usual—drugs, theft, suicide attempts,” he says as he scratches his scalp. “I never thought she’d kill anybody, though. I saw it in the tabloids. I mean, it was all over.”

  Tobias glances at the clock and then meets the detective’s eye.

  “Why?” asks Joona after a few moments of silence.

  “Why what?” Tobias replies.

  “Why’d you let her stay here?”

  “I had a rough childhood myself,” he says, and again tries to close the zipper on the suitcase. Joona can see it is filled with tablet computers in their original packaging.

  “Can I help you?” Joona holds the zipper together while Tobias zips it shut.

  “Sorry about this stuff,” he says, patting the suitcase. “I promise, it’s not mine. I’m just watching it for a friend.”

  “I see,” Joona says.

  Tobias laughs and a bit of candy flies out of his mouth. He gets up and pulls the suitcase behind him as he goes down the stairs and into the hallway.

  “Do you know where Vicky would be hiding?” asks Joona.

  “No idea—wherever she finds a spot.”

  “Who does she trust?”

  “No one,” he replies. He opens the front door and heads toward the stairwell.

  “Does she trust you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There’s no chance that she’d come here?”

  Joona dawdles in the narrow hall a few seconds and opens the key cupboard by the front door.

  “No, maybe she’d go to … Nah, forget it,” Tobias says, his back turned to Joona. He presses the button to call the elevator.

  “What were you about to say?” Joona asks.

  “I need to get going.”

  Joona carefully removes the spare set of keys to the apartment from the hook before he leaves. He closes the door behind him and rides the elevator down with Tobias.

  115

  They leave the building to the happy shrieks of children. The balloons on the apartment door are bumping against each other in the breeze.