Death Angels

by Ake Edwardson

  “Enough for what?” Möllerström asked. “If there’s nothing to compare it with in the register, we won’t have a thing to go by.”

  “That’s negative thinking.” Bergenhem looked at Möllerström as though he had broken a spell.

  “It’s realistic thinking, as long as we don’t have a DNA database that starts at infancy.”

  “We all know your opinion about that,” Djanali said.

  “I for one am glad that we’re finally getting somewhere,” Halders said.

  “This could be our breakthrough,” Ringmar said.

  Ringmar rolled in a VCR with an oversized television screen and put in the videotapes from the crime scenes one by one. They began discussing the patterns on the floor.

  These tapes are horrible, Winter thought. It’s like we’re seeing everything through the murderer’s eyes, and you can bet he taped it too and it’s lying in a drawer someplace or playing to an avid audience. “There’s a clue for us somewhere,” he said.

  The video camera zoomed to the oval pattern on the floor.

  “We think it’s a dance.” Ringmar pointed to the screen. “The two rooms show striking similarities, as if the murderer acted the same way both during and after the crime.”

  “What kind of dance?” Bergenhem asked

  “When we know that, we’ll be in much better shape,” Winter answered. “Sara Helander here will be working on it from now on,” he continued, nodding at the person to Halders’s right. “You all know Sara.”

  Helander lifted her hand in acknowledgment. She had been called in from the wanted persons group. Crossing her legs, she brushed back a lock of hair from her left temple and kept her eyes fixed on the screen.

  “If it’s the fox-trot,” Halders said, “we can pick him up any night of the week at the King Creole Club.”

  Helander spun around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Forget it.” Halders turned back to the video.

  “How are we ever going to make anything out of all this?” Bergenhem asked.

  “How do you make anything out of anything at the beginning of an investigation?” Helander retorted.

  Winter nodded in approval. Police work was all about waiting until the impossible became possible. A dance? Why not? He had jotted down the name of the album in Jamie’s CD player and given it to Helander. There’s a tape somewhere with audio, he thought, and it might be music or it might be something else that only people with certain predilections can stand the sound of.

  “What does the London team have to say about this?” Djanali asked.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of the chief investigator all morning,” Winter answered.

  “How about INTERPOL?” Halders asked.

  “We need to be talking directly with London at this point,” Winter said.

  Winter stood where he had been during the meeting, while Bergenhem sat next to him and jotted down some notes.

  “Try to be as discreet as possible,” Winter said.

  “How many strip joints can there be?”

  Winter fingered the package of cigarillos on the table in front of him. When he opened the blinds, he saw a whole class of students crossing the street from Kristinelund High School, no doubt on a field trip to the upholders of public order. At the front of the pack was a man in his early fifties, a wrinkled Seeing Eye dog leading blind youth, none of them much younger than the victims of the murders Winter was investigating. He closed his eyes. “Any questions?” he asked, turning to Bergenhem.

  “Can you give me a week?”

  “We’ll see. I know someone you can talk to right away.”

  Winter went home early that night and made an omelet. Cutting up the tomatoes, he thought briefly of the Mediterranean sun that watched over his vagabond parents.

  A restless feeling chafed at him. He walked over to the stereo but stood there idly. He thought about opening a bottle of beer, then changed his mind and decided to go for a run in the Slottsskogen woods across Sprängkullsgatan Street. He’d pulled the jersey halfway over his head when he heard the phone ring. It was Angela, one of his girlfriends—the best idea of all.

  He pulled her to him as soon as she walked through the door. In bed he bent down and lifted her by the thighs. He was in a hurry, and it felt like an eternity before his body erupted, his mind blissfully empty.

  They lay on their backs in the silent room. “You needed that,” she said.

  “It takes two.”

  The phone on her side of the bed began to ring, and she rolled over to pick it up while he gazed at the smooth contours of her hips and thighs. “Hello?” she said, listening intently. “That’s fine, go ahead and put him through.”

  How does she manage? he wondered. It’s almost like she’s my wife.

  “Yes, he’s right here.” She looked over her shoulder. “It’s a chief inspector calling from London—MacSomething,” she whispered to Winter.

  11

  WHlLE ANGELA HEADED FOR THE SHOWER, WlNTER SQUlRMED HlS way across the bed to pick up the phone. She closed the bedroom door.

  “Erik Winter here.”

  “Good afternoon, this is Steve Macdonald in London. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Not anymore. I’m glad you called back.”

  “I got the message.”

  “We have some things to talk about.”

  “You can say that again. Somebody else was also . . . Sorry, I’m not talking too fast, am I?”

  “Not at all.”

  “You Scandinavians speak excellent English. That’s more than I can say of us in south London.”

  Winter heard the shower running. Soon she would come out and wave good-bye as if it had all happened in a distant, stormy dream. He felt the dried perspiration at the top of his forehead. “Your English is easy to understand,” he said to Macdonald.

  “Well, just tell me if I need to repeat anything. It’s my own special blend of Scottish and Cockney.”

  Winter heard Angela turn off the shower. He pulled the sheet up to his waist, suddenly embarrassed by the stranger’s voice. Or maybe I’m just cold, he thought.

  “We’ve got to get down to the nuts and bolts of this,” Macdonald went on.

  “I’m with you all the way.”

  “I’ve been reading your reports, and the last one makes me feel like we’re standing on some kind of stage.”

  “A stage?”

  “Somebody’s out to prove something.”

  “Isn’t it always that way?”

  “This guy is a little too clever,” Macdonald said. “We’re not talking about your everyday sociopath.”

  “You’re right. He’s a sociopath, but there’s something more.” Angela slowly opened the door and threw him a kiss. He nodded back. She turned around and walked out. He heard the front door close and the elevator cage rattle.

  “We just talked to Jamie’s parents for the first time,” Macdonald said. “Or rather his mother. They live on the outskirts of London.”

  “Our database expert mentioned that.”

  “I heard that he called his counterpart over here. He speaks good English and they had no trouble communicating.”

  Winter saw Möllerström in his mind’s eye, the way he enunciated every syllable. Why doesn’t everyone have an e-mail address? Möllerström had wanted to know. Is English easier to write than speak? Halders had asked.

  “It’s a strange investigation.” Macdonald paused. “Actually, it’s several investigations rolled into one. My boss has put our team on the case full time.”

  “Same here.”

  “Nothing new on the letters?”

  “We talked to Geoff ’s pen pal, but she couldn’t help us out very much. She didn’t notice anything unusual in his last letter, only that he was excited about coming to Gothenburg. As far as the letter that he supposedly received from someone else in Sweden is concerned, we don’t know anything yet. His pen pal had no idea who it might be from.”

  �
��I guess it’s to be expected that he no longer had the letter when you found him.”

  “No new witnesses who saw Per?” Winter was still mulling over Macdonald’s remark about being onstage.

  “Yes and no, you know what it’s like. Everybody has seen everything and nobody has the information you’re looking for. To say that our phones are ringing off the hook would be an understatement.”

  “Nothing solid to go on?”

  “Not at the moment, but that’s how it always is. The good news is that the press has been unusually cooperative. A white European kid murdered in the ghettos south of the river is a real story, as opposed to the crack-related murders we usually deal with. Try to get the papers to write about them. I’m grateful for all the publicity and calls we can get, even if we have to weed out a bunch of nutcases. Croydon is England’s tenth largest town—three million of us. So there’s no shortage of loonies here.”

  “Gothenburg is Sweden’s second largest, and that adds up to half a million.”

  “Any drugs to speak of?”

  “More and more.”

  “Did you get the newspapers I sent by diplomatic pouch?” Macdonald asked.

  “Yes, we did, thanks.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. When the Sun demands that a curfew be imposed until an arrest has been made, the public feels called upon to help us solve the case.”

  Winter was thinking to himself. “What did you mean by feeling like we’re onstage?” he asked finally.

  “Onstage?”

  “What made you say that?”

  “It’s like somebody’s watching us, somebody who’s in orbit above us, just out of reach.”

  “I have the same feeling.”

  “Maybe it’s the tripod. It could give anyone the creeps.”

  “What on earth did he need a tripod for?”

  “Excellent question.”

  Winter thought out loud. “Maybe he wanted to have his hands free. That’s one scenario at least.”

  “Who knows, maybe there’s even a script.”

  “What makes you think he needed one?”

  “Everyone needs a script.”

  Winter’s cell phone began ringing on the other nightstand. “Hold on a second.” He put down the receiver and lunged across the bed.

  “Hello?”

  “Erik? It’s Pia Fröberg over at the coroner’s lab. We’ve got a big problem with that blood on Jamie’s shoulder.”

  “Yeah”

  “There’s been a terrible mistake. It turns out the blood is from somebody on the ambulance crew.”

  “How can something like that happen?”

  “It can’t.”

  “I understand,” Winter said calmly, but he didn’t know whether his effort at restraint came across over the phone. “I’ve got someone on the other line. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

  He hung up and returned to Macdonald. “Sorry for the interruption.”

  “No problem.”

  “We need to go through all this from beginning to end, and there are a few things I have to see firsthand in London.”

  “When are you coming over?”

  “As soon as I get the go-ahead.”

  “My boss and I are both anxious to have you here. It’s a case for international cooperation if I ever saw one.”

  “I’ll let you know the moment my plans firm up.” Everyone needs a script, Winter thought. We’re onstage and somebody is orbiting just above our heads. We’re part of something bigger than ourselves. We make one mistake after another. Maybe we learn.

  “The ambulance guy,” Fröberg said.

  “How could anyone be so careless?”

  She had taken off her white jacket to meet Winter in her rectangular office, where the shelves were overflowing with books and file folders.

  She’s started to wear glasses at work, Winter thought.

  “He had a day-old cut on his wrist in the opening just above his glove,” Fröberg said.

  “Unfuckingbelievable.”

  “He scraped it on the doorjamb when they came in with the stretcher and accidentally smeared the blood on Jamie’s shoulder while they were wrapping him up.”

  “One little drop was all we needed.”

  “Actually, you should thank me, Erik. It takes just as much time to eliminate a possible clue as to verify it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “So you’ve followed up on all the evidence?”

  “Everything we could.”

  “And I was hoping that all we needed was one good suspect.”

  “What happened to all the ace interrogators?”

  Winter thought about his best hope, Gabriel Cohen, who had been brought in on the second day of the investigation. Cohen was as methodical as Winter, reading all of Möllerström’s printouts, waiting, preparing. “Cohen’s ready to go,” he said.

  “Medical science can’t always come to the rescue.”

  “You’re right as usual. How about dinner tonight?”

  “I can’t.” She smiled and reached for her jacket on the back of the chair, her blouse stretching against her breasts. “My husband is back.”

  “I thought he had left for good this time.”

  “So did I.”

  Waving good-bye, he walked out of the office and nearly rammed headlong into a stretcher that had come rolling past.

  12

  YOU HAD TO MAKE UP YOUR MlND HOW MUCH OF THE NEIGHBOR hood to cover—which buildings and which particular entrances. That meant all the tenants who lived in the chosen locations had to be questioned, no matter how heavy an accent they had, or how much they smelled of garlic, or how dirty they were—what we in this country call dirty, ventured a grinning twenty-five-year-old investigator fresh from the National Police Academy, his youthful cynicism intact. A seed of racism that could only grow, Winter thought, making a mental note of the man’s name. You’re far from enlightened yourself, he mused, but little shitheads like him can go find somebody else to work for.

  Jamie had died on the fifth floor while the cars passed by on Chalmersgatan Street below, and Winter thought about a possible connection with Geoff ’s dormitory half a mile away. It was pure speculation at this point.

  The buildings in this part of the city clung to each other, massive as cliffs carved out millions of years ago. The police walked up and down stairways, knocked on doors, drew muttering replies, invoked vague memories of incidents that nobody had paid any attention to when they’d happened and couldn’t say much about now.

  Lasse Malmström had continued to put on his suit and go to work, and on the afternoon of the third day it all caught up with him.

  It wasn’t only Per’s body, which had just arrived by plane.

  Time was like a stone wall. He was having gruesome thoughts. As the plane was landing, he had hoped for a second that one of the wings would fly off and the whole runway would go up in flames.

  Then the world ceased to exist for him. No job, no suits, silence all around and almost nothing he wanted to remember. Everything he thought he knew was gone, his refuge a place deep within.

  The last thing he needs to hear is that you feel his pain, Winter thought.

  The morning light flooded the living room, adding a shimmering veneer to the silence. A two-day-old beard deepened the wrinkles on Lasse’s face. He rubbed his chin nonstop, and it sounded like a nail file, or a rake unearthing frozen leaves. “What’s the latest?” he asked.

  Winter stalled. “Anything particular you want to know?”

  Lasse stroked his chin even harder. “I read the papers until Per’s body came back,” he said. “It seems like a hundred years ago.”

  “The fact that two kids were murdered here in Gothenburg around the same time as Per might be due to any number of things,” Winter began.

  “Things?”

  “I mean motives, however twisted they might be.”

  “I don’t know if that’s sup
posed to make me feel hopeful or discouraged.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I mean if more police are working on it, investigations are going on in different places, that’s a good thing even if the murders turn out to be unrelated.”

  It occurred to Winter that he would have felt the same way in Lasse’s shoes.

  “The more people get killed, the harder you guys try, and then maybe the murderer will be captured, or whatever the hell you call it.”

  “You could be right.”

  “Here I’m talking like there was some kind of connection between the murders, but I don’t know anything about it, and maybe you don’t either.”

  “It’s one of our theories, but we’re working on some other threads too.”

  “You’ll keep me informed of everything, right?” Lasse looked Winter straight in the eye for the first time.

  “No matter what happens, I’ll make sure to keep you posted. That’s what we always do, and I’m not about to start changing things now.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “We don’t just sit around and twiddle our thumbs and wait for someone else to figure it all out. We’re constantly coming up with new ideas. We have a good system that we stick to, and the investigation is always moving forward.”

  “Got it.”

  It’s really true, Winter thought. You’re not just saying this. He’s listening to you now. The dog that’s barking outside has jolted him back to his senses, and he’s stopped rubbing his chin. Now’s the time to spring the question. “There’s something I need to ask you, Lasse.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You know we’re trying to find out as much as we can about Per’s habits—the people he hung out with, his girlfriends, all that kind of thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “All that kind of thing,” Winter repeated. “We talked to his girlfriend, or that’s what we thought at first.”

  “What?”

  “She wasn’t his girlfriend after all.”

  “You just lost me there, Erik.”