by Lars Kepler
Joona slides down and simultaneously releases a wide kick. He connects, perhaps on the intruder’s ankle. He rolls away, pulling out his pistol and releasing the safety in the same movement. The outer door is open now. Footsteps sound running down the stairs. Joona scrambles to his feet and is ready to chase after the man, but he stops. There’s a humming sound behind him. He knows immediately what is going on and runs into the kitchen. The microwave is on. Behind its glass door, it’s giving off sparks. The control knobs of the four burners on the old gas stove are turned fully open and gas is blasting into the room. With a feeling that the flow of time has slowed down, Joona leaps to the microwave. The timer clicks menacingly, the sparking sounds keep increasing. A spray can of insect poison is rotating inside the microwave.
Joona grabs the electric plug and yanks it out. The ticking stops. The gas hisses loudly until Joona turns off the stove. The chemical smell is nauseating. He yanks open the kitchen window and then looks in on the spray can in the microwave. Its belly is grotesquely swollen. Joona thinks it could still explode at the slightest touch.
He leaves the kitchen and quickly surveys the rest of the apartment. The other rooms are empty. The air is still heavy with gas.
Erixson’s lying on the floor beside the stairwell, a cigarette in his mouth.
“Don’t light that!” Joona yells.
With a smile and a weak wave of his hand, Erixson replies, “It’s chocolate.”
He coughs weakly and Joona can see that there’s a pool of blood beneath him.
“You’re bleeding,” Joona says.
“No big deal,” Erixson replies. “I’m not sure how he did it, but he sliced my Achilles tendon.”
Joona calls for an ambulance and then crouches next to Erixson, whose face is pale and whose cheeks glisten from sweat. He looks nauseated.
“He cut me while he ran past. It was so quick … like being attacked by a fucking spider.”
They fall silent. Joona remembers the lightning-fast movements behind the kitchen door and how the blade of the knife moved effortlessly, with a life of its own. He’d never seen anything like it before.
“Is she in there?” Erixson pants.
“No.”
Erixson smiles, relieved. Then he’s serious again.
“Was he going to blow the place to hell anyway?”
“Looks like it. He’s good at getting rid of evidence,” Joona answers sarcastically.
Erixson fumbles at the paper on his chocolate cigarette but drops it. He closes his eyes for a minute. By now his cheeks are ash-white.
“I take it you didn’t see his face either,” Joona says quietly.
“No,” Erixson mumbles. “We saw something, though. There’s always something we notice in spite of ourselves.”
18
the fire
The medical crew from the ambulance reassures Erixson that they’re not going to drop him.
“I can walk,” Erixson protests and shuts his eyes.
His chin shakes each step down.
Joona goes back into Penelope Fernandez’s apartment. He opens all the windows to clear the air and then sits down on the apricot-colored sofa. It is very comfortable.
If the apartment had exploded, it would have looked like an unfortunate accident caused by a gas leak. The case would have been closed.
Joona lets his memory expand. No fragment of observation ever completely disappears. It simply must be retrieved just like the seas heave flotsam and jetsam up onto the beach.
But what was it?
He had seen nothing. Just a quick, blurred movement and a knife blade.
That’s what I saw! Joona realizes. I saw nothing!
This lack is exactly what is nudging his intuition.
We’re dealing with a pro here, a contract killer, a hit man, a grob.
There aren’t many in the world.
This was not the first inkling he’s had, but now he’s thoroughly convinced. The killer in the hallway is the same man who murdered Viola. There was certainly time to do both. He’d planned to kill Penelope and sink the cruiser as if it were an accident; then he’d use the same method here. This is a killer who wants to remain invisible. He wants to kill under the radar of the police.
Joona looks around slowly. He tries again to assemble the parts of the puzzle into a whole.
He hears children playing in the apartment above his head. They’re rolling marbles over the floor. They’d have been in the middle of an inferno right now if Joona hadn’t been able to pull the plug in time.
This was a cold-blooded, driven attack, Joona thinks, and the man behind it was not some hate-filled right-wing activist. Penelope Fernandez might be involved in the peace movement, sure, and those groups did, ironically, resort to violence sometimes. But this man was different: a highly trained professional at a level well above any of the amateur groups.
So why were you here? Joona wonders. What does a hit man have to do with Penelope Fernandez? What is she mixed up in? What’s going on beneath the surface?
Joona reviews those unusual knife movements. The technique was obviously meant to circumvent the usual police and military defensive training. His skin prickles as he realizes that the first cut would have sliced into his liver if he hadn’t carried his pistol under his right arm. The second cut would have gone straight into his brain if he hadn’t thrown himself backward.
Joona gets up from the sofa and walks into the bedroom. He studies the well-made bed and the crucifix over the headboard.
A hit man believed he’d killed Penelope, and his intention was to make it seem like an accident … but the boat never sank.
Either the killer was interrupted or he left the scene of the crime intending to return and complete his assignment. He must never have intended that the Coast Guard would find the boat adrift with the drowned girl on board. Something had gone wrong or the plans had to be drastically changed. Maybe he was given new orders. At any event, a day and a half after killing Viola, he was here in Penelope’s apartment.
You must have had a strong reason to come here. What was your motive behind this major risk? Is there something here that connects you or your client to Penelope?
You did something here. You got rid of fingerprints or you erased a hard drive or destroyed an answering machine or you came to get something.
That’s what you wanted, but then I showed up and wrecked your plan.
Or maybe your plan was to destroy something in the fire? That’s a possibility, Joona thinks.
Joona wishes he had Erixson with him now. He needs a forensic technician; he doesn’t have the right tools and might even destroy evidence if he searched the apartment on his own. He could contaminate DNA or miss invisible evidence.
Joona walks to the window and looks down at the street. He sees empty tables by a sandwich café.
He really must head back to the police station and talk to his boss, Carlos Eliasson. He must ask to be assigned as the leader of the investigation and call in another forensic technician now that Erixson will be on sick leave.
Joona’s telephone rings just as he’s made the decision to play by the rules and go talk to both Carlos and Jens Svanehjälm and put together an investigative group.
“Hi, Anja,” he says.
“I want to go to the sauna with you,” Anja says.
“Why the sauna?”
“Well, why not? Can’t we take a sauna together? You could show me how real Finns use the sauna.”
“Anja,” he replies slowly, “I’ve lived almost my entire life in Stockholm.”
Joona starts walking through the hallway to the outer door.
“I know, I know. You’re a Swede with Finnish heritage. How boring is that? Why couldn’t you be from El Salvador? Have you read any of Penelope Fernandez’s opinion essays in the newspaper? You should see her—the other day she scolded the entire Swedish weapons export industry on television!”
Joona can hear Anja’s light breaths in the receiver as he l
eaves Penelope Fernandez’s apartment. There are bloody marks on the stair from the ambulance crew’s shoes. A shiver runs down his back as he remembers his colleague sitting there, legs splayed, as the color drained from his face.
Joona believes the hit man is still under the impression he killed Penelope Fernandez, so he thinks that part of his contract is done. The other half was to get into the apartment for some reason. When the killer figures out Penelope’s still alive, he’ll be back on the hunt in a hurry.
“Björn and Penelope were not living together,” Anja is saying.
“I figured that out,” he replies.
“Even so, they could still be in love—just like you and me.”
Joona walks into strong sunshine. The air has grown heavier and even more humid.
“Can you give me Björn’s address?”
He hears Anja’s fingers fly over the keyboard. Small clicking sounds.
“Almskog, Pontonjärgatan 47, third floor.”
“I’ll go there before I—”
“Wait a second!” Anja said. “Not possible. Listen to this … I’ve just cross-checked this address … there was a fire in the building on Friday.”
“Björn’s apartment?”
Anja replies, “Everything on that floor is gone.”
19
a wavy landscape of ashes
Detective Inspector Joona Linna walks up the stairs, then stops and stands still, looking into a completely black room. The acrid stench is sharp. Not much of the inner, non-weight-bearing wall is left. Black stalactites hang from the ceiling. Charcoaled stumps of shelves stick up among a wavy landscape of ashes. In several places there are holes straight through the double floors to the room beneath. It’s no longer possible to determine which part of this apartment floor had been Björn Almskog’s.
Plastic sheets in the windows keep out the sun and present a strange green face to the street.
Nobody had been injured in the fire at Pontonjärgatan 47 because most people had been at work. The first call had come into Emergency Central at 11:05 a.m. Even though the Kungsholm fire station was relatively close-by, the fire had been so fierce that four apartments were completely destroyed.
Joona mulls over his conversation with Fire Inspector Hassan Sükür. Sükür had said it was “strongly indicated” that the fire had started in Lisbet Wirén’s apartment. She was Björn Almskog’s eighty-eight-year-old neighbor. She’d gone out to convert a small winning on a lottery ticket into two new tickets, and couldn’t remember if she’d left her iron on. The fire had spread rapidly, and all signs pointed back to her apartment and the iron on her ironing board.
Joona surveys all the blackened apartments on this level. Nothing is left of any of the furniture in the rooms except individual twisted metal fragments, parts of a refrigerator, a bed frame, a sooty bathtub.
Joona turns and walks back down. The walls and ceiling of the stairwell are smoke damaged. He stops at the police tape, turns, and looks back up at all the blackness.
As he bends to go under the plastic tape, he notices that the fire inspectors have dropped a few DUO bags, used for preserving volatile liquids, on the floor. He continues past the green-marble entrance hall and out the main door onto the street. As he heads toward the police station, he calls Hassan Sükür again. Hassan answers at once and turns down the background sound from his radio.
“Have you found traces of flammable liquids?” Joona asks. “You’d dropped some DUO bags on the floor and I was wondering—”
“Let me give you some facts. If you pour flammable liquid on something, that’s the first thing to burn—”
“I know, but it was—”
“I, on the other hand, I am one who always finds whatever there is to find,” Hassan continues. “It often runs into gaps between the floorboards or into the double floor, or the fiberglass, or the underside of the double floor, which might have survived the fire.”
“But not at this site,” Joona says as he continues walking down the hill on Handverkargatan.
“Nothing at all,” Hassan replies.
“But if you knew where traces of flammable liquid might collect, you might be able to avoid detection.”
“Of course … if I were a pyromaniac, I would never make a mistake like that,” Hassan says cheerfully.
“But in this case you’re sure the iron brought on this blaze?”
“Yes, it was an accident.”
“So,” Joona states, “case closed.”
20
the house
The darkness of night is giving way to morning, even in the forest. Penelope and Björn move back toward the beach together but angle farther south, away from the house where the party had been. Away from their pursuer.
As far from their pursuer as they possibly can go.
Spotting another house between the trees, they start to run again. It’s about half a kilometer away, maybe even a little less. They hear the roar of a helicopter overhead somewhere but the sound fades as it moves on.
Björn looks dizzy; Penelope fears he won’t be able to keep running much longer. His bare feet are raw.
A branch breaks behind them. Perhaps underneath a human boot.
Penelope begins to run as fast as she can through the forest.
As the trees thin out more, she can see the house again. It’s just one hundred meters away. Lights in the window reflect on the red paint of a parked Ford.
A hare leaps up and jumps away over moss and twigs.
Panting and terrified, Penelope and Björn run up the gravel driveway and clamber up the stairs to the house. They spring inside.
“Hello? We need help!” Penelope screams.
The house is warm from yesterday’s sunshine. Björn, bare-chested and white with cold, is limping and leaves tracks of blood on the floor as he limps in. Penelope hurries from room to room, but the house is empty. The people who live here probably attended last night’s party and are sleeping it off at the neighbors’, Penelope realizes. She goes to the window and, hiding behind the curtains, peers outside. There’s no movement in the forest or over the lawn. Perhaps the man has lost their trail. Perhaps he’s still waiting at the other house. She returns to the hallway where Björn sits on the floor examining the open wounds on his feet.
“We have to find you a pair of shoes.”
He looks up at her as if he no longer understands human speech.
“It’s not over. You have to find something to put on your feet.”
Björn slowly begins to rummage in the closet and pulls out beach shoes, rubber boots, and old bags.
Penelope creeps past the windows in search of a phone. She looks on the hall table, in the briefcase by the sofa, in the bowl on the coffee table, and among the keys and papers on the kitchen counter.
She hears something outside. She freezes to listen.
Maybe it was nothing.
The first rays of the morning sun shine through the windows.
Crouching low, she hurries into the large bedroom, pulls open dresser drawers. Tucked among the underwear, she finds a framed photograph, a studio portrait of a man, a wife, and two teenage daughters. All the other drawers are empty. Penelope yanks opens the closet and pulls out a black hoodie for herself and an oversized sweater for Björn.
She hears the faucet run in the kitchen and hurries there. Björn is leaning over the sink, cupping handfuls of water. He’s found a pair of worn-out sneakers a few sizes too large.
This is crazy, Penelope thinks. There must be people all around here; we have to find someone who can help us.
Penelope hands Björn the sweater when someone knocks on the door. Björn smiles, surprised, and pulls it on while mumbling something about their luck turning. Penelope wipes her hair back from her face, and is almost at the door when she sees the silhouette through the frosted glass.
She stops abruptly and observes the shadowy form in the windowpane. Her hand no longer reaches out to open the door. She knows that stance; that head an
d shoulders. That’s the man in black.
All the air rushes from her lungs. She backs toward the kitchen slowly, her body tense and ready to run. Staring at the glass pane, she can see the blurred outline of a face—a face with a small chin. She feels dizzy, stumbles backward over bags and boots, and reaches to steady herself against the wall.
She finds Björn next to her, holding a carving knife with a wide blade. His cheeks are pale and his mouth is half open. He’s staring at the pane of glass, too. Penelope backs into a table as the door handle slowly turns down. Suddenly she races into the bathroom, blasts on the water, and yells loudly, “Come in! Door’s open!”
Björn jumps and his pulse pounds in his head. He holds the knife out in front, ready to attack, when he sees the door handle ease back up. Their pursuer has let go. The silhouette disappears. A few seconds later, they hear footsteps crunching on the gravel path around the house. Björn looks stiffly to the right. Penelope emerges from the bathroom and Björn points to the window in the TV room. They move away into the kitchen as the man crosses the wooden deck. The footsteps reach the veranda door. Penelope tries to put herself in the killer’s head. Are the angle and the light enough to show the shoes tossed out of the closet and Björn’s bloody footprints? The wooden deck creaks again near the back stairs. Björn and Penelope creep along the floor and then roll right next to the wall underneath the window. They try to lie still and breathe silently. They can hear that the man has reached the kitchen window, can hear his hands touch the windowsill. They realize he’s peering inside.