Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  “I think I’m on to something,” she said.

  She left Police Headquarters sometime between 11:30 and midnight, but she never came home.

  A huge amount of police resources was deployed, as it always is when an officer has been murdered. But the murder of Anna Herry seemed to have aroused stronger emotions than usual, and when Zack spoke to her former bosses many years later he finally understood why.

  Anna Herry had been one of the few female homicide detectives in the early nineties, an important marker in a male-dominated profession with a problematic macho image. She was clearly highly intelligent, and could hold her own against the men. She was also very good-looking and knew how to deal with journalists.

  The combination of these factors meant that she had been on her way to becoming a symbol for the future of the police force. A door opener for other women, and an eye-opener for more conservative colleagues and politicians.

  Then she was murdered. Brutally murdered, in a seedy place and by an obviously ruthless killer. It was like an attack against the entire force.

  Her killer had to be caught.

  But he wasn’t caught.

  A number of men were taken in for questioning. One of them was even remanded in custody, suspected on good grounds of having committed the murder. But the case wasn’t strong enough. The prosecutor couldn’t even prove that the man had been in the center of Stockholm on the night of the murder.

  Eighteen months after the killing, the investigation was put on the back burner, and a couple of years after that it was dropped.

  Zack remembers his father swearing quietly to himself when he read the written notification, then, with a great effort, crumpling the paper up between his stiff, aching fingers and tossing it in the garbage.

  Later that evening, when Roy was watching the news on television, Zack crept into the kitchen and pulled out the ball of paper. He straightened it out as best he could, and that night he sat with his pocket flashlight and tried to spell his way through the difficult words.

  He was only seven years old at the time, and didn’t understand everything it said. But what he did understand was enough: the police were going to stop looking for his mom’s killer.

  That night he decided he was going to join the police.

  He took a drawing pin off the bulletin board in his room, sat down on the blue carpet, and pricked out a drop of blood.

  Then he pressed his hand to the crumpled sheet of paper and said his promise out loud to himself:

  “I, Zacharias Herry, swear that I will never give up until I’ve found the person who killed my mom.”

  It ended up being rather a large bloodstain. He remembers thinking that it looked good. As if it was really serious.

  He can see himself as a seven-year-old.

  A small figure in pajamas, aware of the cruelty of the world at far too young an age. Who, somewhere deep in his childish soul, realizes that it’s fundamentally up to the individual to create his own truth and make his own fate.

  He takes the crumpled, yellowed sheet of paper out of a plastic sleeve in the folder and looks at it.

  The blood print has long since turned black. It looks so small, he thinks. The same color as the pool of his mom’s blood in Tysta Marigången.

  One day I’m going to find your killer, Mom.

  Often it feels like everything is far too late, that all possible avenues have already been explored. But he knows that isn’t the case. He knows that a murderer always leaves a trail, and he knows that the chances of getting a suspect convicted are greater now than when the investigation was conducted.

  Zack leafs through some sheets of paper that haven’t yet turned yellow.

  His own interviews with the original detectives. Nine sheets of letter-size paper.

  He reads a few quotes:

  “We never even came close.”

  “Sorry, Zack. It was impossible to identify a real suspect. That arrest was just playing to the gallery. Believe me, that man was innocent.”

  He looks through his own photographs of Tysta Marigången. There’s an international accountancy firm there now, the sort that helps rich people hide their money away in tax havens. But the place is just as dark and run down. Just as unpleasant in the eyes of the general public as it always has been.

  He feels like heading out into the night now.

  Looking for forgetfulness and the thud of heavy bass.

  But the clock on the bedside table is saying it’s already 4:30. So he takes two 5-milligram Stesolid tablets from his secret stash under the floor.

  He swallows them down with water and regrets it immediately.

  What on earth is he doing?

  Taking pills to help him sleep.

  When did he actually start doing that?

  He tries to think.

  Six months ago, maybe. When the dreams started to get really bad.

  When he found himself waking up screaming almost every night. When he started to see things during the day as well.

  When every spot of blood became his mother’s blood. When every starlit night forced him onto his back out in that meadow.

  Night after night.

  Just as bad as it had been in real life.

  Worse, even.

  He always knew in advance how it would end, but could still never do anything different.

  It wasn’t intentional.

  But you did it, Zack.

  He hadn’t dreamed about it for several years. He loved his new job. He was doing his best. Doing good things. Getting praised for what he did. Helping the good guys. Catching the bad guys. Demonstrating a courage that few people could muster.

  He’d stopped obsessing about the past.

  But now it’s as if those first few years in the police had merely been a warm-up, and only now is everything getting serious. As if all his cases so far were simply exercises, and now he has to prove himself properly.

  He put up with the dreams for a few weeks, then he asked Abdula to get him some tranquilizers. That wasn’t enough. His sheets were still soaked with sweat every time he found himself sitting up in bed, hyperventilating.

  He started taking stronger drugs. And slept better. Got himself some breathing space.

  And it was only a temporary measure, after all.

  A fuck of a long while for something temporary, don’t you think?

  Who gives a shit?

  It’ll work out.

  Everything works out in the end.

  He falls asleep in a comforting narcotic haze.

  But then comes the darkness within the darkness.

  He’s being chased by unknown beasts of prey. Their jaws are snapping at his neck. Then he dreams that he walks up to one of the shot women and sees his mom’s face. Sam Koltberg is laughing loudly in his blue doctor’s coat as he cuts away at her crotch. But the windows of the mortuary are open. Zack throws himself out into the night and finds the dead Thai women again. They’re the most beautiful of all the stars in the black vault of the heavens.

  PART II

  * * *

  About the men close to the edge of heaven,

  About lust, violence, and boys becoming men,

  And how the jagged teeth of night snap at anything human.

  15

  A MURMUR of chatter from twenty or so weary police officers greets Zack as he opens the door to the lecture hall. Douglas is standing onstage, connecting the wires from the projector to his laptop.

  Zack takes a seat toward the back, where the sloping ash-wood roof drops sharply toward the pale green, fabric-covered walls. The whole of the Special Crimes Unit is there, as well as a number of uniforms. The air is already stuffy and full of testosterone, even though almost half of the assembled officers are women.

  He knows Douglas likes to gather together as many of his colleagues as possible at an early stage of an investigation, to make sure the right information gets disseminated.

  Zack can see the neatly coiffed back of Sam Koltberg’s he
ad in the first row. Off to the side he catches sight of Tommy Östman.

  Zack yawns.

  All he wants is to get back out into the field and carry on working the case, but he knows he’s got to put up with this run-through before he can get going.

  Fortunately he feels much brighter today than yesterday. His body has recovered, despite another night of broken sleep, and the pain in his shoulder has gone.

  Douglas clears his throat, welcomes them all, and gives a brief summary of the previous day’s events and the state of the investigation.

  He points the little remote at his computer and passport photographs of the four women appear on the white screen.

  “The passports of the murdered women have been found tucked away at the bottom of a drawer in the apartment, and, as you can see here, they’re all Thai citizens. The names match the ones Zack and Deniz found out, but—strangely enough—we haven’t had any matches in official records in Thailand. Our contact in Bangkok has managed to find a woman with the same name and ID number as one of the victims, but she’s running a clothes shop in Surat Thani and is very much alive. So we must assume that the passports are fakes—albeit very good fakes—and that the dead women could be anyone. We’ve sent the information to our colleagues in Thailand, so we’ll have to see what they can come up with.”

  “Why were they using fake passports?”

  The voice is gruff, and comes from a thickset policeman in the second row.

  “Several reasons. If the women obtained the passports themselves, it could be that they were trying to protect their families. If they were picked up abroad, their relatives back home wouldn’t be questioned about it. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that they were prostitutes—we’ve found medical certificates stating that they didn’t have HIV or any other venereal diseases, for instance. It’s not unusual for people paying for sex to want to see that sort of certificate.

  “If a so-called recruitment agency organized the passports, the intention may have been to stop the women’s relatives finding them, and make it harder for the police if anything went wrong. As it obviously has.”

  Not even the genuine article, Zack thinks. Wasn’t that what Sonny Järvinen had said? Did he mean that they came from a different country? Cambodia, perhaps. That looked like it would soon be as popular a destination for sex tourism as Thailand.

  Sukayana Prikon must have been lying to us, giving us false names. Unless she didn’t know any better? We need to talk to her again.

  “Any more questions so far?” Douglas asks. “Okay. Tommy, your turn.”

  The tall, ungainly figure of the profiler, Tommy Östman, steps awkwardly up onto the stage. His face is thin, with deep wrinkles around his mouth, and his beige corduroy suit has shiny patches on the knees and elbows.

  “I’ve produced a perpetrator profile based on the information we’ve got, but so far unfortunately that’s just what was found at the crime scene.”

  He coughs from deep in his lungs and Zack can’t help wondering if the signs will always be there, if Östman will look and sound like an old alcoholic until his dying day.

  None of his colleagues was probably ever expecting to see him sober again. But somehow he managed to pull himself together. He went back to college in Uppsala and a few years later made an unexpected return as a profiler.

  Quite an achievement, Zack thinks. So why is he always so bitter and miserable? After all, he’s more or less conquered Mount Everest.

  Possibly because he hasn’t managed to defeat all his demons. Because he still gambles way too much, legally and illegally. The wages department now pays his rent and electricity bill before paying his salary into his bank account, and his official cell has a block on it to prevent him calling the most common betting companies.

  Östman coughs again and goes on:

  “In all likelihood, these offenses were committed by a man.”

  His hoarse voice, which in other contexts can sound weak and uncertain, becomes firmer as he talks about the possible perpetrator.

  “We’re dealing with a single male, as suggested by the text message, ‘He kill all,’ and I’m convinced that this is the case. A cold, calculating man. A man used to moving in criminal circles. Used to violence. Angry with women. Possibly a loner with warped ideas and ideals. Probably not someone who belongs to any organized group, like a biker gang. Unless this was a commission, and someone wants us to think it was the work of a madman,” he says.

  The next man up at the podium is Sam Koltberg. Today dressed in a gray jacket, white shirt, and a blue tie with three crowns on it.

  As if he were some sort of fucking king, Zack thinks.

  Koltberg looks around the room and manages to flash Zack a contemptuous glare before he starts to speak:

  “The crime scene was basically clean. No fingerprints or other physical evidence of the perpetrator or perpetrators. We’ve sent samples to the National Forensics Lab for analysis, but obviously the results will only be of interest when we’ve got a suspect we can compare them with, or if we get a match in the database. There’s a mixture of blood on the floor and some of the furniture, but we’ve been able to confirm that it all came from the women.”

  Koltberg asks Douglas to bring up some pictures of the crime scene. The first is an overview that makes some of the officers instinctively turn their heads away.

  “Three of the women were shot twice, the fourth three times. In each case they were shot in the chest or face before being shot in the crotch. At least three of the women were already dead by the time the perpetrator fired the second shot. We’re less sure of the fourth case, because the body had already been taken away to the mortuary by the time we arrived at the scene.”

  Zack can’t help thinking that Koltberg is looking at him again.

  Does he still think it was my fault that the paramedics took that woman away? he wonders. Or is it the way I dress that upsets him? If it is, fine. Sooner jeans and a T-shirt than a ridiculous tie.

  “The bullets came from a nine-millimeter Beretta, one of the commonest guns in the world, and a popular pistol here in Sweden. They’re also smuggled in from the Balkans in large numbers, which means that the quantity of unregistered weapons is believed to be high.”

  Koltberg steps down and Douglas takes over again.

  “We’ve questioned a potential suspect who fits the profile pretty well,” Douglas says, and gives a brief summary of Peter Karlson’s background and the interview with him on Monday evening.

  “Right now he doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murders, so we need to take a closer look at him today.”

  “But the fact that he fell out with the massage parlor over an invoice—is that really a credible motive for a multiple homicide?” the gruff policeman says again with a slight chuckle.

  “I agree that it might sound like a weak motive, but in this instance that invoice could just have been the catalyst, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  “Niklas, do you want to add anything?”

  Niklas stands up and adjusts his jacket.

  “Peter Karlson is a hatemonger of the intellectual variety. A fanatic who probably has the capacity and the contacts to build up a well-funded Aryan resistance movement in the business community. I got a feeling that the meeting he mentioned out in Edsviken could have been about that very subject. He also seems to have decided to direct his hatred primarily at Asians. Which is why I think he’s of interest to us, both as a potential lone perpetrator, or as part of something larger.”

  “Obviously, you’re going to carry on looking into him today,” Douglas says, clicking to bring up a picture of Sonny Järvinen on the screen.

  “And then we’ve got the biker gang, the Brotherhood of No Mercy. It’s long been known that the club controls a large number of massage parlors in the Stockholm region, and our working theory is that the undeclared earnings from prostitution have made the business a target for organized crime.

  “There are two hundr
ed massage parlors in Stockholm alone, and they bring in an average of fifteen thousand kronor a day in declared earnings. The true figure is probably many times that, especially if we’re talking about more than just massages, so it’s a business big enough to be worth fighting over. But what we don’t know is what percentage of the parlors are linked to organized crime.”

  “Is the Sawatdii parlor run by this biker gang, then?” a female officer in the third row asks.

  “According to Sawatdii’s manager, Sukayana Prikon, they’ve helped her recruit staff, but Sonny Järvinen, the gang leader, denies this. We’re going to be looking through the accounts of both the massage parlor and the recruitment company run by the bikers today, in the hope of finding confirmation of the connection. We’re also going to question her further today, not least to find out the women’s true identities. We have to find some way of contacting their relatives.”

  Zack hopes he’ll be allowed to conduct the interview. He’d relish the opportunity to question her a bit harder about her links to the biker gang, as well as the fake passports. And he might be able to return her phone to her, as a sign of goodwill.

  Douglas invites Deniz to give an account of the unexpected shootout at the biker’s clubhouse. She gets to her feet and Zack sees that she’s covered up the bandage around her neck with a multicolored scarf. It looks good. The others listen carefully—it’s not every day that their colleagues find themselves in a gunfight.

  “There’s no doubt that the bikers were ready for a fight when we arrived,” she says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve got anything to do with the murders, but at the very least it’s an interesting coincidence. The question is: Who or what were they expecting?”

  She runs through the underlying motives that could indicate the involvement of the Brotherhood in the murders. Then she sits back down and Douglas goes on:

  “Questioning the bikers hasn’t thrown up anything useful, but that’s hardly unexpected. These individuals know how to keep their mouths shut. But they seem nervous, so something might be going on. Two of them have been released on the advice of the prosecutor, two have been remanded in custody, charged with the attempted murder of Zack and Deniz, and their leader, Sonny Järvinen, is in custody for incitement to murder. The custody hearings are going to be held tomorrow, but we’ll have another go at them today. Järvinen, anyway. We’ll have to see what that gives us.”