The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “I’ll send over a vet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know who owns the animals? You’ll have to speak to the owner.”

  “It’s the kid’s father. He’s tried calling him, but apparently he’s at some meeting in town. He left a message.”

  “At least we know who it is anyway,” said the duty officer. “Well, a vet will be along in a while.”

  “Okay.”

  “And for the time being we’ll treat it as a body dump site, so you’ll have to cordon it off.”

  Knutsson hung up.

  “I’m afraid the pigs have to be put down,” Knutsson told the boy.

  Johannes Klarberg just nodded, as if he’d already worked that out himself.

  * * *

  LEIF KNUTSSON ACCOMPANIED the boy along the tractor path over toward the enclosure with the two pigs, while Mats Larsson opened the trunk of the patrol car and took out a roll of police ribbon.

  He tied one end around a telephone pole and cordoned off over a hundred yards down the road. He continued up along the edge of the trees where it abutted the recently harvested sugar beet field. The beets were still lying in great piles in one corner of the field, awaiting transport to the mainland.

  Better cordon off a large area, thought Mats Larsson. If there really were body parts buried in there, forensics would want to turn over every single leaf within a few thousand square yards. And if there really was a human body, or parts of one, buried in there, the place would be crawling with journalists and curious members of the general public as soon as news got out.

  Twenty-five minutes later, a cherry-red Volkswagen Passat station wagon approached from the north. The site lay a few miles south of the road between Hejde and Buttle. Just a few farms beside an area of cultivated land, otherwise just forest, silence, and no witnesses.

  The Passat slowed down as it approached the cordon and came to a complete stop when Mats Larsson stepped out from the tractor path and held out his hand to let the driver understand that this was the right place.

  A middle-aged woman with short, dark hair with gray streaks and dressed in a green cotton overall, stepped out of the car carrying a big, black bag. Before she walked up to Mats Larsson, she opened the trunk and pulled out a folded-up blue plastic tarp that she wedged under her arm.

  “I’m the vet, Ann-Charlotte Jansson,” she said and shook his hand.

  Mats Larsson introduced himself.

  “Do you need help with that?” he asked and nodded at the tarp.

  “Sure, if you could grab it that would be great,” she said with a smile and moved closer so that he could take if from her without her having to put down her bag.

  Having relieved her of her rustling light-blue burden, Mats Larsson led the way over toward the enclosure. He opened the electric fence and let Ann-Charlotte Jansson go in first.

  The vet continued toward Knutsson, who was waiting together with the boy.

  “Which of the pigs is the one that may have ingested a penis?” she said after greeting them.

  “It’s that one,” said Johannes Klarberg quickly and pointed at the pig closest to them.

  “If it’s true then I’m sure I’m going to remember this day,” she said.

  With the help of Mats Larsson, Knutsson, and the boy, she grabbed hold of the pig that had been pointed out and euthanized it with a bolt gun. It was over quickly and, as far as anyone could tell, painlessly. The procedure was then repeated on pig number two.

  The sun was shining down over the landscape and the dead animals from between what remained of the dispersed rain clouds from last night. Many of the trees beyond the fields were still a lush green, but the birches had turned completely yellow.

  Ann-Charlotte Jansson laid out the tarp and they heaved the first pig up as far as they could onto it.

  The vet quickly tied on a disposable apron of thin plastic, took out a knife from her bag and started to slice open the pig from the neck on down. She sliced open the peritoneum and then, with a few well-placed incisions, freed the stomach and intestinal package, which she then pulled from the pig’s body, out onto the tarp. Blood ran out of the disemboweled pig. It didn’t bother the veterinarian, who was wearing boots, but the other three stepped out of the way. Johannes Klarberg followed the vet’s work with great curiosity, eyes wide open, while Mats Larsson and his partner Knutsson regarded the entrails with not quite the same degree of enthusiasm.

  Ann-Charlotte Jansson opened the large stomach and let the contents spill out onto the blue plastic. Among the indefinable, partially digested stomach contents lay a larger object that she carefully scraped over to the side using the knife she had used to open up the pig’s belly. She took out a bottle with something that Mats Larsson guessed was salt solution and rinsed the object clean from the half-digested, greenish-yellow slurry.

  All four of them stared in silence at the object for a few seconds.

  “Well,” said Ann-Charlotte Jansson after a moment, “guess you’d better call in a medical examiner. I’m just a veterinarian, but that looks to me like a human penis.”

  41.

  In addition to the wooded area, the private tractor path and the stretch of public road that ran past the trees were also cordoned off.

  There were five cars parked along the road: Eva Karlén’s forensics van, two patrol cars, and two unmarked police cars, and two civilian fleet vehicles. Claes Klarberg, Johannes’s father and the pigs’ owner, had arrived on the scene after checking his voice mail.

  “Is this your land?” asked Fredrik pointing at the cordoned-off area.

  Claes Klarberg shook his head. He was tall and dark haired, just like his son, not a gray hair on his head. He had come driving up on a big Japanese motorbike.

  “Everything on this side of the road belongs to Bjersander,” said Klarberg and unzipped his red-and-white leather jacket.

  “Bjersander?”

  “Lars Bjersander. The next farm up on the right-hand side,” he said and pointed north.

  Fredrik made a note of that before continuing:

  “You didn’t notice a car or other type of vehicle parked here lately?”

  “No, but of course we live a mile over that way,” said Claes Klarberg and nodded at the tractor path.

  “You can’t see over here, you mean?”

  “Well, I can see over here I guess, but it’s far away and then there’s trees and things in the way.”

  “So nothing caught your eye as far as you can remember?”

  Claes Klarberg thinks for a moment.

  “It could have been anything. A light, a sound?”

  “No. Of course you see cars driving along the road, but that’s not something you think twice about.”

  You only had to turn your head around once to see that there was no one who lived close enough to get a good view of the wood. If they were going to find a witness, it would have to be a real stroke of luck.

  “Listen, it would be good if I could go take care of my pigs now. Can’t leave them lying out here.”

  Mats Larsson was still standing by the pig carcasses to keep the birds and other animals away. It hadn’t taken long before a couple of gulls showed up with a cry and started circling above the enclosure. One of them had landed on the telephone pole just a few yards from Fredrik and Claes Klarberg, patiently waiting for an opportunity to dive down to feast on the viscera.

  “Sure,” said Fredrik, “that’ll be fine. We’ll be in touch if there’s anything else.”

  “Just call me anytime,” said Claes Klarberg.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A scratching along the bark as a squirrel skittered up the trunk and disappeared somewhere up in the crown of the oak tree. Both Eva Karlén and Johannes Klarberg looked up instinctively and followed the little animal with their eyes.

  How could I have been so stupid? thought Eva and looked at the squirrel that suddenly popped its head out from a branch way up there. It shouldn’t be that difficult for her to keep her han
ds off of Fredrik Broman? Sure she was attracted to him, she couldn’t deny that, but he wasn’t all that special. Besides which, he was married.

  She hadn’t lost any sleep over what happened in the basement, but it didn’t take much for her to find herself reliving the memory of their kiss. It was exciting as well as frightening. What did it mean? What was the point? The best thing she could do was just forget the whole thing happened. Work and forget. Not think.

  “So this is where it was?” she asked, turning her attention to the twenty-or-so-square-yard section of earth that had been dug up by the two pigs.

  “Yes,” said Johannes and pushed away the black hair from his face. “It was standing just behind that birch tree there.”

  Eva quickly put up a hand and stopped him when he was going to walk over and stand where the pig had been standing just a few hours before.

  “Just point if you don’t mind.”

  “One or two yards behind that birch tree over there,” said Johannes Klarberg and pointed obediently.

  “How about the other one, where did you find that?” asked Eva.

  “It was further inside,” he said and waved with his hand. “I can show you.”

  “Thanks. That would be great,” said Eva.

  She let Johannes go first. Their footsteps rustled through the tall grass. The trees stood far apart, but there were a few spots where thick patches of underbrush had grown up that they had to skirt around.

  “Otherwise there are no animals being kept in this enclosure?” she asked.

  “Not usually. I think Lasse puts his horses in here sometimes, mostly just so to stop it from getting too overgrown, but as you can see that’s not really enough.”

  Beautiful, knotted oaks, thick grass, and the sun filtering down between the puffs of cloud. Eva followed a few yards behind Johannes and thought about how best to organize the extensive work that lay ahead. But first of all, she had to answer the most important question: Was there a human body buried here? In pieces?

  42.

  It had taken Eva Karlén and Granholm over two hours to exhume the remains of a human body from the hole that the pigs had begun. On a piece of white plastic sheeting beneath the shelter of a tent, she had laid out two legs, two arms, and a torso with missing genitals. The legs had been severed from the rest of the body at the hip joints, chopped off so that the balls of the thigh bones remained in the sockets of the pelvis with a stump of bone. The arms, on the other hand, were broken off in such a way that the balls of the joints were exposed. The head was missing, as were the feet.

  It was unusual for dismembered bodies to be buried without the individual parts being packaged in some way. Plastic bags sealed with tape was the most usual, but they could also be found wrapped in pieces of cloth. Of course they were much easier to handle that way. When they were not prepacked, as was the case here, it was possibly an attempt to accelerate the rate of decay. But in this sandy ground, the effect had almost been the opposite.

  Göran, who had just arrived on the scene, regarded the dismembered body parts from the opening of the tent. He was reluctant to go inside, so instead he held aside the strip of tent fabric that formed the door with a cautious grip, his thumb partially covering the tent manufacturer’s green and blue logo. Crumbs of black soil had scattered across the white sheeting around the body parts.

  “We’re still looking for the head and feet, but I don’t think they’re buried in the same spot, at least not the head,” said Eva over her shoulder at him.

  “Because…?” said Göran.

  “All these body parts lay concentrated within a limited radius. They were probably all buried in the same hole. It seems illogical to me for someone to dig a separate hole for the head in immediate proximity to the hole where the rest of the body is buried.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, though I’m not sure how logical anyone who does something like this really is,” said Göran and turned his back on the pale-gray, earth-covered remains.

  “Who is it? Can you provide a basic description?” he then asked.

  “Middle-aged male, good physical condition, but no manual laborer, about six-two to six-three. Not much more I can say,” answered Eva.

  “And the cause of death?”

  Eva shook her head.

  “I can’t see any injuries other than the ones resulting from the actual dismemberment. It could of course have come from violent trauma to the head, but might just as well have been caused by poisoning, asphyxiation, or loss of blood. He may, for example, have had an artery severed in the armpit or groin, but as the body looks now it’s impossible to say. For me, that is.”

  “I guess we’ll have to assume that the head has been hidden somewhere in order to make it more difficult to determine the cause of death, or prevent the body from being identified. Worse comes to worst, it’s been destroyed altogether,” said Göran. “But the feet? I don’t understand why they’re missing.”

  “It may have had something to do with the identification. There are people with fused toes, stuff like that,” said Granholm and adjusted his glasses with his forefinger against the root of his nose.

  Göran sighed and looked up toward the treetops. The last of the clouds had dissolved and the sun was beaming from a clear blue sky. Airplanes on their way to and from Finland, Russia, and Northeast Asia drew white lines across the blueness. Seven hundred flights crossed above Gotland every day. You could make out a distant rumble from the jet engines.

  He felt a slight dizziness, not so much from the body parts in the tent, as from the thought of what people were capable of doing to each other.

  “Aside from the head and feet, it seems that all the body parts we found were lying in the same hole,” he said, “but why would you cut up a body if you’re going to put all the pieces in the same hole anyway?”

  “It could have been due to the logistical difficulties associated with their subsequent transportation,” said Granholm and Göran wondered silently why he couldn’t speak like a normal human being.

  “It would be easier to get them into the ground as well,” said Eva. “Burying a big body like this one at a decent depth requires a whole lot of work. But if the body’s in pieces…”

  Göran drew himself up and adjusted his jacket. The irritation he felt earlier had given way to thoughts about how best to organize the new murder investigation. He had left Ove Gahnström in Visby as head of the investigation. That meant one less man out in the field and Lennart Svensson couldn’t be counted on for at least another week.

  He took a deep breath. Tobacco, he thought.

  “There are two more spots where someone has been doing some digging recently, but it’s hard to determine whether it’s the pigs or something else,” said Eva.

  “Could be both,” said Göran.

  “Anyway, that’s where we’ll have to start.”

  “Nothing else? No clothing, objects?” said Göran.

  “Not yet. We’re prioritizing the head.”

  Göran nodded, sickened at the thought of the headless body lying inside the tent.

  “How long do you think he’s been lying here?” he asked.

  “As I’m sure you noticed, there’s not a lot of decay,” said Eva.

  He had noticed. The body parts hadn’t smelled at all, either. Of course there had been an odor inside the tent. Of earth, dampness … humus. And a little plastic.

  “It’s hard to say because it’s unclear how deep they were buried. The pigs’ digging may have changed the position of the body parts,” she continued. “We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner. But if I say a month, tops, then I wouldn’t be saying too much.”

  “A month. That’s not good,” said Göran.

  “Tops,” Eva repeated, “and at the low end I’d say at least a week, yeah, not less than a week.”

  “So we’ve got a span of three weeks?”

  “The medical examiner will be able to shorten that. I’ve spoken with the medical examiner’s offi
ce and we can get a preliminary report by tomorrow afternoon. But, we’ll probably still have about a week to play around with.”

  “Okay,” said Göran, “I better get back to the station. This is turning into a real mess. I’ll see if I can get National CID to send over a few extra hands to manage the database, and then we’ve got a press conference this afternoon.

  The last bit he said mainly to himself. He was already heading off when Eva hurried to catch up with him.

  “We’ve found tire tracks from a car. I can tell you about it on the way, if you like,” she said.

  She adjusted the chief inspector’s direction gently but firmly and they walked together twenty or so yards in among the trees before she stopped him.

  “They start from the road and end up over there by the bushes,” she said and pointed out the course for Göran. “You can’t make out any tire pattern, but I’ve measured them. It has to be from a larger vehicle. A jeep, pickup, or small truck.”

  “If we’re lucky that time span won’t turn out to be all that big after all,” said Göran. “We’ve found a witness who saw a car drive out of here late on the night of the second of October.”

  “Here, in the middle of the forest?”

  “Yes. He was on his way home from dinner at his daughter’s house in Etelhem. When he was just a short distance away from here,” said Göran and pointed, “he saw a light in his rearview mirror. Someone pulled out, he was sure of that, and it wasn’t from the farm right up here.”

  “The second of October is within my range anyway,” said Eva.

  “We’ll have to wait and see then,” said Göran and started heading down toward the road.

  * * *

  FREDRIK WAS SITTING in the car with the door ajar. He flipped through his notepad with his left hand and held his cell phone pressed against his ear with his right. A dog barked somewhere close by.

  “I’ve got another witness, one Anette Larsson, who saw a truck standing parked by the field, but this was in the middle of the day and how long it had been standing there she had no idea. She just drove past. But she was sure that it was somewhere between the fifth and the eighth,” he said on the phone.