Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  Was that the quickest way to get there? She can’t remember, it’s been so long since she was last here.

  She half runs out to the bus station instead, breathing in the pleasant scent of herbs being unloaded from a van by a market trader. A little farther away a man with a white beard is hanging up a display of colorful kaftans.

  She goes around the corner of the shopping center and follows the path up a steep slope. Beautiful greenery to her left, uninspiring apartment blocks up to her right.

  She walks through the rows of identical buildings. Beige brick façades, gray walkways. She sees the number she’s looking for above a doorway and runs across the shabby little play area.

  A cold wind meets her as she walks into the shadow of the building, and she shivers uneasily. Her stomach clenches, and when she opens the front door her hands feel strangely stiff.

  The elevator door is blocked by yellow-and-black striped tape and a sign with the words OUT OF ORDER on it. Her body feels heavy as she walks up the stairs, and by the time she reaches the fourth floor she’s out of breath and her brow is sweating.

  She stops outside the door of the flat and digs about in her handbag for the key, but just as she gets hold of the key ring she stops.

  Help us

  he kill all

  She can hear something inside the flat.

  Music.

  Why?

  They would never have forgotten to switch off the television or stereo before leaving for the massage parlor. Electricity costs money, and they’re never wasteful.

  She doesn’t want to open the door.

  But inserts the key and turns it.

  Opens the door cautiously.

  “Hello?”

  No answer, just silence.

  There’s a faint smell of food in the flat, and for a moment she’s sitting at home with her parents, watching Mom crush spices with her ancient mortar and pestle.

  And she can smell something else. Something that reminds her of the market in Klong Toey.

  A smell of iron. Like the smell of the stalls selling freshly butchered meat.

  “Hello? Daw Mya? Mi Mi?”

  A heavy weight settles in her stomach. She takes a cautious step into the hall and closes the door behind her. It clicks shut automatically, and she panics and quickly unlocks it again and leaves it ajar. Doesn’t want to be locked in here.

  The music falls silent and is replaced by a chirpy voice that she recognizes from one of the morning talk shows on television. Peter Jihde, maybe? She walks slowly into the living room.

  It takes a moment for her brain to understand that the one-eyed lump of flesh sticking out of the silk pajamas is all that’s left of a human face.

  Then she sees the other three bodies. So bloody. So mutilated.

  And it’s as if she can no longer breathe, as if a huge fist has wrenched the air from her lungs and is pressing her down.

  She falls to her knees. Whimpers and rocks her body back and forth. Her hands clasp together in prayer and she can feel the spirits of the dead drifting around her, like an unquiet chill. Like the wind in the shadow of the building.

  She wants to run.

  Away.

  Down the stairs.

  Home.

  But who can escape their fate? Who can do what she has done without one day being made to pay?

  She takes out her cell.

  Calls 112.

  Then she leaves the flat behind her.

  4

  THEY TAKE the stairs two at a time. Aware that every second can make all the difference. Sixteen steps in each flight. Then a new floor. A quick turn to the right. Sixteen more steps.

  This morning’s tiredness has blown away. He hates the fact that the elevator is broken. But loves having to make an effort, feel his jeans strain around his thighs, the way the stairs are drawing every last bit of strength from his muscles.

  Deniz is right behind him. He can hear her slightly labored breathing. She’s in good shape, but not as good as him.

  Third flight now.

  There’s a loud buzz of voices in several languages and Zack looks up to see a dozen or so people crowded onto the landing above them. A woman in a black hijab with pink beads around her eyes is weeping loudly, and is being comforted by a man with a thick black mustache, who’s dressed in a sweater and neatly pressed brown woolen trousers.

  The flight of steps leading to the last floor has been cordoned off.

  Good. Quick work, Zack thinks. An overweight uniformed officer in his fifties is standing guard on the other side of the blue-and-white striped tape. Zack can see he’s doing a good job. He’s keeping his cool in spite of all the waving arms and shouted questions. He smiles amiably and keeps patiently repeating that he doesn’t know what’s happened, and that he can’t let anyone through.

  Zack and Deniz push their way through the crowd and hold their badges up to their colleague behind the cordon.

  “Hi, Zack Herry, Special Crimes Unit. My colleague, Deniz Akin.”

  The policeman nods to them and lifts the cordon slightly.

  “Go right ahead,” he says. “But it’s not a pretty sight.”

  * * *

  THE DOOR to the flat is open and Zack and Deniz almost collide with two paramedics on their way out. Zack and Deniz say hello to them as they pull on protective blue shoe-covers.

  They walk into the living room. Zack stops just inside the door.

  Oh, God.

  Holy fucking God.

  If he does exist, he certainly isn’t here.

  Deniz pushes aside the arm he has instinctively raised to shield her. She goes over to one of the bodies and squats down to examine the injuries, but Zack remains standing in the doorway.

  He can’t make any sense of what he’s seeing. As if he were looking at a surreal installation by an artist on the brink of a mental breakdown. An artist who loves red, and who’s used several quarts of the color for this particular piece. As if the most grotesque of Francis Bacon’s paintings has become reality.

  The room is bathed in sunlight, which only exacerbates the sense of unreality. The bodies are lying at unnatural angles with their trousers pulled down and their genitals destroyed, and the room reeks of excrement and blood and urine.

  Of death.

  Of grass.

  Damp grass and blood.

  Black stars, and beyond them even blacker darkness.

  Deeds that can never be undone.

  No. Not now. Not here.

  Zack shuts his eyes tight. He quickly puts a lid on his inner thoughts and looks around the room instead. The furnishing is minimal. Impersonal. No pictures on the walls, just a small pine shelf with some tea lights and a small brass Buddha. An apartment furnished by people who are only planning to live here for a short time.

  There’s a laptop computer on a simple birch veneer desk. A black Compaq that looks antiquated. On the screen a Skype invitation is flashing, with a picture of a smiling Thai family. An older woman, two children, a girl and a boy around ten years old, twins, perhaps.

  Zack feels like going over and closing the lid, doesn’t want the family on the screen to have to look out into this room. But he doesn’t. Forensics can do that.

  He hears a deep cough from Deniz and turns around. She stands up with her hand over her mouth. He can feel his own nausea from that morning coming back. He shivers. The shudder moves through his whole body and the hairs on his arms stand up.

  Two forensics officers enter the flat carrying their cases. Zack doesn’t recognize them.

  “Where’s Koltberg?” he asks.

  Samuel Koltberg is regarded as the most talented forensics officer in Stockholm, and has therefore become closely linked with the Special Crimes Unit.

  “On holiday in Mallorca. I think he’s supposed to be flying home today,” one of the technicians replies.

  Good, Zack thinks. At least we don’t have to deal with him today.

  He looks over at the computer again, at the happily smil
ing girl, and the even more cheerful boy.

  Is that your mom lying there?

  * * *

  ZACK LEAVES the living room and looks around the apartment. Two rooms plus the kitchen. There’s a neatly made double bed in the bedroom, some white wardrobes, a chest of drawers made of pale wood, and two mattresses leaning against the wall.

  He goes out onto the balcony and looks down at the grounds. His adrenaline is starting to give way to tiredness, and all he wants to do is lean his head against the cool railing and shut his eyes for a while. More police have arrived and are cordoning off an expanded area covering ten square yards around the entrance. Crowds of curious onlookers have gathered beyond the blue-and-white tape, and a little farther away a broken swing sways forlornly in the weak breeze.

  A blue Volvo XC60 pulls into the yard. It stops a short distance from the cordon and Douglas gets out and adjusts his hair. He glances up at Zack and gives him a slight nod. Zack raises his hand and returns the greeting.

  A mother walks into the play area with her daughter. A young blond woman, with an equally blond little girl.

  Mother and daughter. Alive.

  The girl rushes over to one of the swings and soon picks up speed with an energetic pendulum movement. Her mother glances anxiously toward the crowd, but the girl is bubbling with laughter, entirely unaware of what has happened to their neighbors.

  More cars arrive. Men and women with cameras and notebooks jump out. Zack recognizes two of them from Aftonbladet.

  Zack wonders when the media were last in Hallonbergen. In the aftermath of another murder? Or maybe a wave of break-ins. But they never bother to report on ordinary life here.

  “Hey, Zack!”

  He looks down but can’t see the person calling.

  “Zack, over here!”

  A young man in a blue shirt and jacket is leaning out from a balcony on the same floor that Zack’s on, but in the next stairwell. Fredrik Bylund from Expressen. A tenacious bastard. Spins his crime stories beyond recognition, but actually okay to deal with. Once he managed to provide them with some invaluable information for a case they were working on. Zack even managed to persuade him against publishing a story on one occasion. An extremely rare occurrence.

  “Has this got anything to do with organized crime?” Fredrik Bylund shouts.

  Zack thinks for a moment. Chooses his words carefully to avoid crazy quotations in the headlines.

  “At this stage we’re keeping an open mind,” he says, aware that it makes him sound like one of Mera’s PR trainees.

  “So you’re not ruling it out?”

  A typical journalist’s question, the answer to which can be spun any way at all.

  “We’re not ruling anything out.”

  Zack knows he hasn’t given Bylund a thing, but he can still see the headline in front of him:

  POLICE: ORGANIZED CRIME COULD BE BEHIND BLOODBATH

  A red van from TV4 with an aerial on its roof rolls into the yard. It parks with one wheel up on the grass, more or less blocking in the ambulance that’s parked in front of it. Three people jump out. A man in a patterned shirt runs over to the cordon while a bald cameraman begins setting up his tripod outside it in preparation for a live broadcast. The third person, a female reporter with long blond hair, is holding her cell mobile between her shoulder and her cheek as she scribbles down prompts for her piece to camera.

  “Is it true that you’ve got four dead bodies in there?” Bylund calls.

  Zack nods.

  “All women?”

  Zack nods again. That information will be public knowledge within an hour anyway.

  “I need to go back in and do some work.”

  “Hang on, just a few more questions. How were they killed?”

  Zack ignores Bylund and closes the door behind him. Deniz is wearing plastic gloves, and is kneeling down as she searches through the chest of drawers. She sticks her hand in and pulls out a white tube, which she inspects carefully.

  “What’s that?” Zack asks.

  “Genital lubricant,” Deniz says. “Helps keep things moisturized.”

  “So?” Zack says.

  “Nothing, really, it’s just that there’s a whole box of it. There must be at least twenty tubes here. And there are several other disposable tubes of ointment for itching and genital infections.”

  “Maybe there was a sale at the drugstore?”

  “A tube like this lasts ages. Either all four women had boyfriends they slept with ten times a day, or . . .”

  “Or they were prostitutes,” Zack concludes. “Which means we’re dealing with pimps and johns and undeclared income.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Deniz says. “But we can’t put too much store in that yet. There are no clothes in the wardrobes that suggest they were selling sex,” she says. “Ordinary clothes, nothing particularly provocative.”

  She opens more drawers.

  Stops abruptly. Frowns.

  “But my suspicions have just got stronger,” she says.

  She beckons Zack over. He looks down in the drawer. A bumper box of condoms. Profile. Thin. Grande. Mixpack.

  Douglas enters the room.

  “How’s it going?” he says.

  “Have you been in the living room?” Zack asks.

  “Yes. Very unpleasant sight. What do you think?”

  Deniz shows him the contents of the chest of drawers, and explains her theory. Douglas nods.

  “I’ll make sure the prostitution unit gets brought in straightaway. Have you found any purses or ID papers?”

  “Not yet. Judging by their appearance and taste in whiskey, I’d say they’re from Thailand,” Zack says. “And the fact that there are four of them living in an unfurnished flat suggests that they haven’t been here very long.”

  “Or are here illegally,” Douglas says.

  “Human trafficking?” Deniz asks.

  “One of many things we’re going to have to look into. We’ve got to try to find out who raised the alarm. The caller asked to stay anonymous, which means we can’t get hold of the number.”

  “What? But we’ve got four murders to solve,” Deniz says.

  “They’ll fall back on confidentiality legislation. But naturally we’ll put in a request for both the number and the recording of the call, and we’ll probably get them in the end, but it might take some time. All we’ve got to go on for the time being is that the caller was female.”

  “So we don’t know why she didn’t stay until the police arrived?” Zack asks.

  “No. And that’s obviously very odd behavior.”

  “The call could have been made by the killer,” Deniz says.

  “Female mass murderers are extremely rare,” Douglas says. “And people who raise the alarm about things they’ve done usually stay and wait for the police. But you might be right. Unless she’s got other reasons for wanting to keep out of our way.”

  Keep out of the way.

  Did you manage to do that last night, Abdula?

  Zack excuses himself and goes out onto the balcony again. He looks for Bylund, but he’s gone, so he gets out his private pay-as-you-go cell and calls Abdula.

  In the background the little girl is still swinging up toward the sky.

  Her mom is smiling at her, and seems to have forgotten the commotion around them now.

  I used to swing like that, Zack thinks, as the phone rings at the other end. Farther and farther up toward the sky, away from everything for a few brief moments. Lurching up into the atmosphere, away from Dad’s coughing and sores and hands fumbling for medicine bottles.

  “Hello?” a familiar voice says.

  Zack closes the balcony door behind him.

  “Zack here. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t picked up,” he whispers.

  “No, but all hell broke loose there after you left. Shame. I wouldn’t have had any trouble getting one of those girls to go home with me.”

  “Do you know what they were looking for? Some s
ort of undercover operation?”

  “You’re the cop, not me. They started lining up loads of people against the wall, but I didn’t feel like hanging around for that.”

  Zack smiles. There always seem to be emergency exits in Abdula’s life. As if he really were as invincible as he’s always tried to make out.

  “So everything’s fine, then?”

  “Everything’s always fine. You know that.”

  Zack laughs.

  “I’ve got to go. Speak later.”

  “Take it easy out there with the good guys.”

  Zack feels a bit calmer as he puts the phone back in his pocket. Abdula’s free, and the raid doesn’t seem to have been anything out of the ordinary, the sort of thing that uses up a lot of resources but only ever leads to a few insignificant fines for narcotics offenses.

  But he could have been there when they stormed in. How would he have got out of that? Maybe he could have snuck out with Abdula.

  They’ve done so many crazy things together. Like when Zack was accepted to the Police Academy and Abdula made him spray his tag across the entrance to Police Headquarters to prove they would still be friends.

  The tag has been washed away.

  But the friendship endures.

  Stronger than ever.

  He watches the paramedics emerge from the door carrying a stretcher. The body is covered by health service blankets, but when one of the paramedics climbs into the ambulance an arm falls out and sways in the air.

  The arm is slight and skinny. The palm is turned outward, facing Zack. As if the woman under the blanket were asking someone to take her hand in theirs. As if she wants someone to help her up.

  Up from the stretcher.

  Back to life.

  To her family, somewhere far away.

  Or back to the time when she was a little girl, swinging up to the sky.

  5

  DENIZ IS sitting on the bed.

  Looks around the room. Sees the tawdriness of it all. Can smell the violence from the next room.

  She shuts her eyes.

  Thinks how she hates men.

  Sometimes.

  But feelings like that don’t lead anywhere.

  She opens her eyes again.