There were two minutes left until his next camera check. Two minutes in which he would be incapable of doing anything but waiting. Chris stood up, walked across the room, and turned on the monitor, which immediately began to play through the sequence he’d programmed. First the office, where he had a wall safe behind the framed poster of his old band, Crazy Motherfuckers, then the laundry room and garage, then further outside the house, down toward the gate by way of the long driveway.
The gate was open.
That was strange, and Chris immediately felt an icy wave spread through his body. His heart began to pound like it was trying to escape from his chest. He took control of the system with shaking hands, interrupting the sequence and jumping back to the camera in the foyer. But he didn’t move fast enough, and the system switched over to the next outdoor camera, which showed a truck that had backed up and stopped on the gravel drive halfway up to the house.
“What the hell?” he heard himself exclaim as he paused the sequence and zoomed in on the truck, which was lowering its loading ramp. “That’s enough, dammit,” he hissed, leaving the studio.
Whoever this was, thinking they could just come onto his property unannounced, would have to deal with him. Chris had taken the hunters’ exam and he wouldn’t hesitate to act. But first he would call the police.
He took out his phone as he walked through the house and dialled the emergency number 112, but he didn’t get through. He tried again before realizing he didn’t have a signal. Chris held the phone as high as he could, but there was no improvement, so he walked over to the glass wall in the living room where the signal was usually strongest.
Chris had chosen the tones of their doorbell with as much care as he’d put into building the studio. Jeanette thought he had overdone it, that his nerdiness bordered on pathological. She couldn’t understand why he had put so much energy into a tinkling little melody. And that was the problem. Every tinkling little melody he tried out eventually got on his nerves, and put him in a bad mood whenever someone dropped by for a visit.
In the end, Chris had linked the doorbell to a sampler that was hooked to the house’s hi-fi system, which had hidden speakers in every room. This way, he could create his own tone for the doorbell. For the past few weeks, it had been a lapping wave, peaceful and harmonious, which Chris had recorded on the beach north of Råå.
But today, the waves seemed more treacherous than peaceful.
Someone was ringing his doorbell. The same person who had the audacity to back a truck onto his property also had the nerve to come to his door. Chris was no longer frightened; now he was furious. And he certainly wasn’t going to let this bastard disrupt his concentration. This was his weekend.
As he headed for the entryway, Chris could feel the rage boiling inside him. As he unlocked and opened the door, he was prepared to unleash a scolding that would bring the unwanted guest to his knees.
But when Chris was faced with a man in coveralls and a cap, he completely lost his train of thought.
“Well, here it is.” A large box stood on a moving cart; the man patted it.
“I’m sorry, what is this?” Chris looked back and forth between the box and the man, who, he noticed, didn’t have eyebrows.
“The freezer you ordered. I apologize if it’s a little late, but —”
“I didn’t order any fucking freezer,” Chris said, shaking his head.
“Aren’t you Chris Dawn?” the man asked, turning to the delivery order that was taped to the box. “Or more accurately, Hans Christian Svensson.”
“Uh…yes, but —”
“Great! There’s that little misunderstanding sorted out.” The man’s face lit up, and he took the handles of the cart and began to back it into the foyer.
“Hey, wait! I didn’t order a freezer,” Chris called after the man, who had already pushed by into the house. “I said wait!”
The man didn’t stop until he had reached the open-plan kitchen, where he lowered the cart and carefully turned the chest freezer upright on the oiled wood floor.
“Hello, are you deaf?” Chris hurried after the man. “I don’t want a fucking freezer!” He felt himself get into the groove. “So I suggest you pack up your shit and get out of here before I get angry. For real.”
The man with no eyebrows didn’t pay him any attention; instead he took out a utility knife and began to cut away the wrapping.
“Get this fucking monstrosity out of my house!” There was still no reaction from the man, who had by now freed the whole freezer and was just about to raise its lid. “Okay, fine. You have only yourself to blame.” Chris would get one of his rifles from the basement. He couldn’t wait to see the surprised look on this idiot’s face when he stuck the barrel right into his snout.
“Get in.” The man nodded at the open freezer.
“Jesus, what the hell is this?” Chris didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Is this a fucking joke or something?”
“Unfortunately, no. We’re not here for fun. Now, get in. I don’t have all day.” The man looked at his watch.
“Like hell. You get in, if you think it’s so fucking exciting.” Chris turned his back on the man and set off for the basement steps. He heard a click behind him, and knew immediately what it was, but refused to believe it until he turned around and saw the pistol with its silencer aimed right at him. “Okay, okay…let’s take it easy.”
“Like I said, I don’t have all day.” The man waved the pistol at the freezer.
Chris realized he had no other choice, and raised his hands as he walked over to the freezer and climbed inside. The man frisked his pockets, taking Chris’s phone and his tin of tobacco.
“Sit down.”
“Okay, take it easy.” Chris sat down. “There, okay? You’re not going to —”
The inside of the lid hit his head with such force that it felt like it gave him whiplash. A key turned and was removed from the lock on the outside. What the hell was going on? Chris ignored the pain in his neck and tried to push the lid open, but it wouldn’t budge.
He was locked inside a chest freezer in his own kitchen. This had to be someone messing with him. Maybe it was that bachelor party that never happened? His friends had promised to show up when he least expected it. But that was several years ago. And this man was armed.
The sound of the compressor humming to life, followed by the characteristic ticking of the cooling element, erased all hope in Chris that this might just be a belated bachelor party kidnapping. He took a few deep breaths to keep the panic at bay. The moment he let it take over, he would be done for.
Chris wasn’t about to give up that easily. He had to stay positive. Look for solutions instead of problems. The first thing he would do was get out of this box. Exactly how, he didn’t know, but he would get out. Then he would make his way down to the gun safe in the basement, and since he didn’t have his phone, there would be no way out but a full-scale war.
He held his breath for a few seconds so he could listen for the man, but all Chris could hear was the hum of the compressor. There was no time for delay.
Chris pushed his lower body forward as far as he could while leaning backward, until he was lying on his back with both feet firmly against the inside of the lid. Then he brushed his hair out of his face, gathered his strength, and pressed as hard as he could with both legs. But the lid wouldn’t give. He tried again, feeling tiny beads of sweat on his forehead, but he couldn’t see any light making its way in around the edges of the door. Not even when he kicked as hard as he could. It was like the lid was welded shut. Shit, shit, shit…
The last thing he wanted to do was give up. But even though Chris had barely been trapped for fifteen minutes he had no fight left in him. Deep down, he knew that panic would take over at any moment.
24
Bye bye now.
Fabian was on his way back to the c
onference room after a short break to stretch his legs. Since the new theory had emerged that a doppelganger had taken over Brise’s life, there was no end to the discussion of how they should proceed. And yet Fabian couldn’t stop thinking about those last three words uttered by Sonja on the phone.
That was how they ended their conversations these days. Bye bye now. Fine, so they didn’t have sex anymore. Fabian could understand and maybe even accept that. The burning flame of their relationship had shrunk down to a tiny pilot light. It now existed only for their children’s sake. But bye bye now wasn’t just another step toward the edge of ruin. It was proof that Sonja had already jumped.
She no longer saw him as a man, an equal partner, someone to count on. Fabian had been downgraded to an annoyance, a genderless something that deserved, at most, a pat on the head before she ran off to do her own thing. Bye bye now. She had given up, severed that last thread, and now it was too late.
“…making identity theft an increasingly large problem.”
Elvin was on a roll again, and Fabian had no idea how much he’d missed.
“In just a few years, this type of crime is expected to be more common than bicycle theft. And while no one would leave their bike unlocked, most of us are downright careless when it comes to giving out personal information.”
“But is it really that common?” Lilja asked.
Elvin nodded. “Every five minutes, another identity is stolen, and that’s just here in Sweden. In most cases, it involves credit card fraud, where someone manages to get hold of a number and then buys as much as they can before the account is frozen. Unfortunately, it’s not much harder to hijack an entire identity so a thief can empty the mark’s bank accounts and take out a bunch of loans,” Elvin went on, and Fabian finally began to catch on to what he was talking about.
“It works like this.” Cliff walked over to one of the whiteboards and picked up a marker. “The first thing you do is request a temporary change of address for the mark, who obviously has no idea it’s happening.” He illustrated this with something that could have been either a house or a mailbox, with a number of arrows pointing in different directions. “The next step is to report the mark’s driver’s licence as lost. Information about a replacement licence is sent to the new address, which means that the victim still has no idea what’s going on.” As he spoke, Cliff kept adding more arrows and symbols, circling some and crossing out others. “After that, all you have to do is fill out all the information, attach a picture of yourself, and sign. Five business days later, a notice arrives in the mail and it allows you to pick up your brand-new, perfectly genuine driver’s licence, with your own picture but the mark’s name and personal ID number. Are you with me?” Cliff looked thoroughly pleased as he capped the pen and set it aside.
“Sure. Except for all those lines and arrows. I don’t understand any of that.” Molander pointed at the tangle of symbols.
“No one does,” Lilja said, crossing her arms. “But I’m still wondering if this can be accurate. Is it really that easy?”
“Sadly yes,” Elvin said. “And if you make sure that the mark continues to receive his mail regularly, there’s no way he’ll figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.”
“So you’re saying this is what happened to Brise?” Tuvesson asked.
Elvin nodded. “Just look at this.” He pressed a button on the remote, and an enlarged driver’s licence was projected onto the far wall. “Here we have Peter Brise. And here’s our perpetrator.” Another licence appeared on the wall.
Fabian studied the two licences, which bore the same name but showed two different people. Neither image, in and of itself, stood out in any particular way, and if you weren’t aware that it was two different people, you probably would have let it pass. The receding hairline was replaced by a shaved head; there were new bags under the eyes and a slightly broader face — but those were ordinary changes that came with age. Only when the pictures were placed side by side did the differences become more obvious.
“As you can see, the first licence was issued on January 17, 2008, and reported lost on February 24 of this year,” Elvin went on. “A little over a week later, the new one was ready. Just in time for Brise’s death.”
“But let’s be serious,” Tuvesson said. “This can’t be that common.”
“But it is, although our guy has taken it a step further. By putting his victim in deep freeze, he can do so much more than just take out loans and empty bank accounts. He can sell works of art, property, and shares. This allows him to collect sums on a completely different level.”
“Do we have any estimate of how much?”
“According to Rickard Jansson at Handelsbanken, the total of Brise’s sales and transfers was somewhere around sixty million.”
“But shouldn’t we be able to follow the money trail and see where it went?” Lilja said.
“That was our thought exactly.” Cliff took a sip of his coffee. “But according to Jansson, the money was transferred to an account in Panama, and from there it seems to have disappeared into a number of different accounts in jurisdictions where Sweden lacks information exchange agreements. That makes the money impossible to trace.”
“Well, we’ll have to take this a little higher than Jansson before we give up completely,” Tuvesson said. “What do the rest of you think? Fabian, you’ve been unusually quiet today.”
“Of course you have to take this higher,” Fabian said, trying to shake the image of himself as a lonely, single person. “But I’d say it’s probably a waste of time.”
“Why is that?”
“We’re dealing with an individual who froze his victim and, like a parasite, took over his host’s life to drain it of all worth. And then he stages a car accident in Norra Hamnen and manages to vanish without a trace in front of all those witnesses. In other words, he’s so well-prepared that I can’t imagine he would have overlooked that particular part.”
“What do we have to lose?” Tuvesson stood up. “Were you finished, by the way?” She turned to Cliff and Elvin, who nodded. “Good. You’ve done a fantastic job. The pieces are finally beginning to fall into place. We should be able to continue our work with a different focus. Fabian and Irene, as I understand it you two were on your way down to Lund to find out more about that missing accountant at Ka-Ching. What was his name again?”
“Per Krans.”
“Right. If this theory is correct, I can’t imagine that Krans would be the only one who’s reacted.”
“I’m wondering if we should issue a ‘Wanted’ notice,” Cliff said. “I mean, now that we have a picture of him.”
“But do you think it’s likely he’s walking around town disguised as Peter Brise?” Elvin asked.
“Not to mention, we would lose the only advantage we have,” Tuvesson said. “Right now he feels safe, so hopefully he’ll let his guard down. He thinks everything has gone his way and has no idea that Brise is a victim in a homicide investigation, much less that we’re on his trail. And it should stay that way until his arrest. I want nothing about this going to the media, or anyone else outside this group.”
“But we’re meeting with more people all the time,” Lilja said. “What should we tell Ka-Ching?”
“As little as possible.”
“May I say something?”
Tuvesson and the others looked at Molander, who had glanced up from his laptop. “There’s one thing you all seem to be taking for granted, something I don’t totally agree with.” He lowered his reading glasses so far down his nose that it was a wonder they didn’t fall right off. “Why do you think he’s finished?”
“You’re suggesting he might keep going and do the same thing to another victim? Oh my God, why didn’t we think of that?” Tuvesson said.
Molander shrugged. “His set-up obviously works.”
“But a person can live pretty wel
l on sixty million,” Cliff said.
“Not if he’s out for a hundred or two hundred.”
Molander was right, Fabian thought. As would be the case with a bank robber, there was no reason to believe he wasn’t already planning his next move. “We should put together a list of potential victims with similar characteristics,” he said, feeling his energy start to return at long last.
“That’s exactly what I’ve done.” Molander hooked his laptop up to the projector, and a list of names appeared on the wall. “These are men currently registered as living in northwestern Skåne with assets worth at least thirty million.”
“Whoa, are there really that many of them?” Lilja said.
“There are twenty-eight. But with any luck the list will be shorter once we’ve checked out which ones have applied for new driver’s licences in the past six months.”
“That one.” Cliff borrowed Molander’s laser pointer to show who he meant. “Henning Kampe. Isn’t he the guy who opened City Gross?”
“Yes, and became 148 million kronor richer for it,” Tuvesson said. “But isn’t he older than sixty? And wasn’t he the one who lost an ear in a fire?”
Molander performed a quick search of the name, and a picture of Henning Kampe appeared on the wall. Sure enough, he was missing his right ear. “Okay, we’ll remove him.” He erased the name from the list.
“Same with this one.” Lilja took over the laser pointer.
“Hans Christian Svensson. Who’s that?” Tuvesson said.
“He’s better known as Chris Dawn. He’s a songwriter, responsible for a number of major hits. All you have to do is turn on the radio and chances are, he’s behind the music.”
“Why should we cross him off?”
“He has a family. A wife and kids. Two, I think.”
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