The Chosen

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Her daughters were thrilled when they realized where they were going, and their laughter warmed Eden’s heart. Sometimes she did the right thing. It was important to remember that.

  From time to time Mikael said hello to people they met. People Eden didn’t recognize. When he spoke to a tall dark woman who gave him a big smile, Eden felt something she hadn’t experienced for a very long time. Jealousy.

  “Who the hell was that?” she said.

  The tone of voice and choice of words gave her away. Mikael couldn’t help smiling.

  “Jealous?”

  “Of course not. I just wondered who she was.”

  “A colleague.”

  Eden forced herself to keep on walking.

  “A colleague?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean she plays the organ or something?”

  Mikael’s laughter rang out across the park.

  “For fuck’s sake, pull yourself together,” Eden said, punching him on the arm.

  “You pull yourself together! ‘Plays the organ’—what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well, answer me, then—and stop swearing!”

  “Me stop swearing?!”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  Mikael let go of her hand, and for a fraction of a second Eden felt the ground give way beneath her feet.

  You’re not going to leave me, are you?

  But Mikael wasn’t the kind of man to leave the woman he loved. Instead he put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a big hug. Bigger than she deserved.

  Eden slipped her arm around his waist.

  “So who is she?”

  “She’s a priest.”

  “In your church?”

  “No.”

  “Do you find her attractive?”

  Mikael laughed again, quietly this time.

  “Do you?”

  “What do you want me to say?” he said.

  “How about: ‘No, she’s the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.’ ”

  He kissed her cheek.

  “I think she’s gorgeous,” he said.

  • • •

  Eden couldn’t believe how much energy was contained in a child’s body. She lost count of the number of times the girls ran up the hill to slide down again. At five foot nine, she felt like a giant among all the children.

  “Again!”

  Dani grabbed Eden’s hand and dragged her along. Her hat had slipped to one side and she had taken off her gloves, which dangled from the sleeves of her snowsuit. Eden picked her up and carried her off to the side.

  “Put me down!”

  The child kicked out at Eden, who was determined to have her way.

  “Quiet! We’ll go back up as soon as you put on your gloves, okay?”

  She put her daughter down on one of the wooden picnic tables. Eden’s stomach rumbled as she thought about grilled sausages; she was getting hungry.

  As she was helping Dani with her gloves, she detected a movement in her peripheral vision. Or rather a lack of movement. Someone was standing in the snow, watching her.

  Slowly she turned her head.

  And there he was.

  Efraim.

  About ten yards away.

  No, no, no.

  She could do nothing about her reaction. She stood there as if she were frozen to the spot in front of her daughter with one glove in her hand.

  They stood in silence staring at one another, Efraim and Eden. If she hadn’t had Dani with her, she would have done what she didn’t do the last time she saw him. She would have hurled herself at him, knocked him to the ground.

  “Mummy?”

  Dani’s voice sounded so far away.

  Oh God, Dani.

  With a start, Eden woke from her trance and looked away from Efraim.

  Got to get away got to get away got to get away.

  He mustn’t see her.

  Please, please, please, God, don’t let him see her.

  She picked up her daughter and began to back away. She had to get out of there.

  But it was too late. That was obvious when she glanced in his direction. His expression had changed from indifference to something that resembled a mixture of shock and horror.

  He was looking at Dani.

  Staring at Dani.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the face that revealed so much, if you knew what you were looking for.

  Dani noticed Efraim over her mother’s shoulder as Eden turned her back on him and set off toward Mikael.

  “Who’s that man?” she whispered in Eden’s ear.

  “Nobody. Just someone who’s lost his way.”

  But inside she was in total panic. The words she knew she would never say out loud to her daughter echoed in her heart and her head.

  That, Dani, is your daddy and your sister’s daddy.

  It had been a long, restless night. Time and time again he had woken up with all his senses on full alert. Dreams he couldn’t remember made his heart race. Eventually he gave up and took a shower.

  “Are you okay?” Ylva asked when he came back to bed.

  “Absolutely,” Peder said.

  Morning came and the curse was broken. Peder got up at seven when he heard noises from his sons’ bedroom. He found them sitting on the floor, playing with their Legos, still in their pajamas and with their hair standing on end. They hardly noticed him; they were completely absorbed in what they were doing.

  For a while everything seemed fine.

  Calm.

  Peaceful.

  Without Ylva and the boys, I would never have gotten back up again.

  “Do you want some breakfast?”

  “Not yet.”

  Peder left them and went into the kitchen, put the coffee on, and went to fetch the paper. Ylva came to join him; they enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and made plans for the day.

  “I need to put in a few hours’ work.”

  “Oh, Peder . . .”

  “I won’t be long.”

  “But we said we’d go somewhere—it’s such a beautiful day.”

  In a previous life Peder would have reacted with fury, felt as if Ylva were accusing him of something, putting him under pressure. But not anymore, because now he knew that she was right. It was wrong to prioritize work over family; it always had been and it always would be.

  Although that didn’t mean there was no room for compromise.

  “I’ve got a new job,” he said. “And some terrible things have happened over the past few days.”

  “You’re not a police officer anymore.”

  “I know that. But I am head of security. And I was a police officer for several years. It’s my duty to be around for a few hours over the weekend.”

  Ylva stroked his arm.

  “I just want you to be careful.”

  He knew she meant well. What she really wanted to say was that she was afraid, he thought. Afraid that he would lose control once again, make himself unhappy. But she didn’t need to worry about that. The Solomon Community murders weren’t personal, and therefore his duties were only professional. Otherwise he would never have walked into such a hornet’s nest.

  An hour later he left the house and drove into the city. There were two things he wanted to check out.

  • • •

  The hole in the facade was small, but not difficult to find. After Alex and Fredrika’s visit, Peder had spoken to the security guards who were taking turns to monitor the entrance to the Solomon school. He had asked if they had seen Efraim Kiel; they had. One of the female guards said she had seen Efraim outside the school on at least two occasions.

  Both times he had been interested in just one thing.

  The bullet hole in the wall.

  But why?

  Peder leaned closer and peered at the hole. He had no idea what CSI had to say about the matter, and he couldn’t see anything odd about it. He turned around and looked up at the roof where the sniper had been lying.

  It had
been a bold enterprise, shooting someone from that distance in such terrible weather.

  Peder gazed up at the roof. Then back at the hole. Then back at the roof.

  Wasn’t the hole a hell of a long way down?

  The teacher had been shot in the back. The bullet had gone straight through her body. Even if you took into account the sharp angle of the shot, Peder still couldn’t make sense of it. If you drew a straight line from the roof to the wall, it looked as if the bullet should have hit Josephine in the leg.

  If she had been standing up, that is.

  By this time Peder knew the witness statements by heart—the statements that had been taken by the community’s security guards, who had conducted their own interviews with those who had been out in the street and seen what had happened.

  The second before the shot was fired, Josephine had crouched down to help a child with a shoelace that had come undone. Either Josephine had been incredibly unlucky—if she had remained standing, the bullet would have caused nothing more serious than a leg injury—or she had taken a bullet that was meant for someone else.

  Peder breathed in the cold air.

  That had been one of his very first thoughts: that the bullet wasn’t meant for her. That it was supposed to have hit one of the children instead. The discovery of the paper bag strengthened his suspicions. Alex and Fredrika hadn’t been willing to tell him why the bag was important, but Peder thought he knew anyway: they must have found similar bags where the two boys had died.

  And still they were letting the National Crime Unit run the investigation into Josephine’s death.

  It made no sense at all.

  Peder went back to his office and pulled out the file containing all the information he had gathered so far. Which children had been standing outside when Josephine was shot?

  He read the names out loud, but they meant nothing to him. That wasn’t necessarily significant; if the killer chose his victims at random, then he might not have been aiming at one particular child. But if the choice wasn’t random, which child might he have been aiming at?

  Peder read through the list again. He didn’t know the children, had no idea who they were. However, none of them was over four years old. The boys who had been shot out on Lovön were ten.

  There was one more thing he wanted to follow up. No doubt the police had already done the same thing, but that didn’t matter, because Peder didn’t have access to their material. When reading through the witness statements, he had noticed something which one of the parents who witnessed the shooting had said:

  Josephine turned around to call to the child who was still inside. At the same time, one of the other children came up to her to ask for help with a shoelace that had come undone. As she crouched down, the shot was fired.

  Peder thought the phrase the child who was still inside was odd. Surely there must have been several children inside, so why would Josephine call one particular child? It didn’t look as if any of the witnesses had said that the child was theirs. Peder pictured the scene: it was after three o’clock, and parents had started arriving to pick up their children from day care and preschool. Josephine hadn’t been wearing a coat when she died; had she just popped out to speak to a parent?

  She was due to finish work at five that afternoon. She was shot just after three, when she happened to step outside.

  But how could the killer have known that he would get the chance to shoot her two hours before she was due to go home?

  The answer was simple. He couldn’t.

  Peder slammed his hand down on the desk. He had known it all along: the killer on the roof hadn’t been aiming at the schoolteacher. He had been aiming at the children. Or possibly at one of the parents, but he thought that was less likely.

  The children were the common denominator in both crimes, apart from the fact that they had been shot with the same gun. And now Peder wanted to know whether the killer had been after one specific child or whether any child would have sufficed.

  I’ve got a terrible sore throat.”

  Spencer was standing behind her in the hallway as she put on her boots.

  “I’ll be back in less than two hours.”

  She pulled up one zip, then the other. Scarf, gloves. Woolly hat. It was so damn cold. The fact that the sun was shining didn’t help at all when you lived in one of the most northerly countries in the world.

  “The thing is,” Spencer said, “I’m worried about the trip to Israel.”

  His shoulders were slumped, his posture poor. His eyes were dull and exhausted. For a moment Fredrika was afraid, as she always was when he felt ill or showed signs of tiredness. She stood up and placed a hand on his forehead. He pressed against it, wanting to get close to her.

  “You’ve got a temperature.”

  Damn. All at once leaving him at home with the girls didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  And what about the trip to Israel? Would she still go if she had to travel alone?

  “Go and lie down,” she said. “I’ll stay home.”

  “Nonsense, I can manage two hours. Go on—Alex is waiting.”

  Fredrika could hear the sound of shrieking from her daughter’s room; it sounded as if Saga and Isak were about to start demolishing the apartment.

  “I won’t be long,” she said, slipping out through the front door. She ran down the stairs; she didn’t even have time to say hello to a neighbor in passing.

  Quick, quick.

  She would have loved to go back to Israel with Spencer. If she had to go alone, the adventure was much less appealing. But she would still go.

  Her cell phone beeped; it was a text from the orchestra. Would she be coming to their rehearsal tomorrow evening?

  In just a couple of days the violin had disappeared from her universe. She was going to Israel; there was no chance that she would be able to make the rehearsal.

  “No time, will be there later in the week,” she replied.

  She dashed through Tegnérlunden and over Barnhus Bridge. Crossed Fleminggatan and turned into Scheelegatan, heading for Police HQ.

  Her cell phone rang; it was Alex, wondering where she was. He was already in the car. He sounded tense; Fredrika sensed bad news.

  “Pick me up outside Spisa hos Helena,” she said, stopping in front of the restaurant. Three minutes later she was sitting in the car.

  “The National Crime Unit called,” he said. “They think the person who was lying on the roof could be a woman. The footprints indicate smallish feet, and the indentation left by the body in the snow shows that the person in question was no taller than five foot six.”

  Fredrika was totally bewildered.

  “A woman? But whoever hunted down the boys on Lovön was wearing size 91/2 shoes.”

  “It could still be a woman,” Alex said. “A smart-ass who knows how to confuse the police.”

  Fredrika’s mind was whirling.

  It was possible that someone with small feet could have put on shoes that were too big . . .

  However, it was less likely that someone with big feet could have put on shoes that were too small.

  “What do we do now?” she said.

  “We carry on as before.”

  “With NCU investigating the murder of the teacher, while we concentrate on the boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if there’s more than one killer, Alex? Working as a team.”

  “In that case we’ve got twice the chance of catching them, if we carry on as we started.”

  Fredrika tried to bring together the evidence to form a coherent picture. It was impossible. Different killers, same gun. Different kinds of victim, different crime scenes. Same community, same ethnicity.

  One of her earliest thoughts came back to her.

  “I’m still not sure that the bullet that killed Josephine was meant for her rather than one of the children.”

  “To be honest, we can’t be sure of anything right now,” Alex said.

  “In that case, let
me raise the stakes and say that this is something we are particularly unsure about.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? Don’t you think it’s important to find out whether that lunatic actually meant to shoot a child?”

  “Because?”

  Because in that case we could be dealing with the one thing we don’t want to say out loud.

  A serial killer.

  “Because then we’d have three children who belong to the same school and the same community who have been attacked with the same gun, and a killer who has marked each death with a paper bag with a face drawn on it,” Fredrika said.

  “Would the killer have sent the bag to the school if the wrong victim had died?”

  “Maybe. If he or she wanted us to believe that the teacher really was meant to die. To stop us from looking for other possible victims.”

  Another thought occurred to her.

  “What if the chrysanthemum was sent before the murder took place?”

  Her voice was quiet, her tone almost submissive.

  “But we know that wasn’t the case,” Alex said. “It was delivered the following morning. The boys were missing but their bodies hadn’t been discovered, and Josephine was dead.”

  Fredrika felt an all-too-familiar surge of obstinacy. The same obstinacy that had once driven Alex crazy and alienated her from the rest of the team.

  “That’s got nothing to do with when it was ordered or when the delivery was arranged.”

  Alex sighed.

  “Well, no, but—”

  Fredrika interrupted him.

  “Do we know anything about those details? Have we been in touch with the firm responsible for the delivery?”

  “No, we haven’t, because as you might recall, this is not our investigation.”

  “In that case I’ll call NCU and check.”

  Fredrika got out her cell phone. “Who’s your contact?”

  They had almost arrived; Alex started looking for somewhere to park.

  “Please, Fredrika, don’t waste your time on this.”

  But Fredrika had no intention of giving up now.

  “Tell me who I need to speak to.”