Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  Sirpa looks up at them.

  “That’s what I’ve managed to come up with so far. But I’m going to call my contact at Interpol and see if he can give us anything else.”

  Douglas looks like he’s thinking hard. Zack guesses that he’s wondering the same thing as him: What does this have to do with the murder of four women in Hallonbergen?

  “Are they here to snatch a share of the prostitution market?” he says. “Could the women have belonged to the Brotherhood after all, and that’s why they were killed? Or the other way round: Did the Brotherhood kill the Turks’ women? To make the point that they’d crossed the wrong boundary? I mean, they were terrified when we arrived at their clubhouse. Maybe they were waiting for a revenge attack.”

  Douglas nods thoughtfully.

  “I need to ask for more resources,” he says. “This looks like it could get completely out of hand.”

  “Did Sonny Järvinen say where we could find Ösgür Thrakya?”

  Douglas takes a notebook out of his inside pocket.

  “Apparently he hangs out at a pizzeria next to Vasaparken. Some place called the Miramar. I want you to check it out, you and Deniz.”

  “What about those dangerous dogs in Alby?”

  “Ah, yes. I haven’t had a chance to tell you. According to Järvinen, the dogs are dead and their owner’s in South Africa. We’re sending a patrol to the address to check, but right now that line of inquiry looks pretty cold.”

  “In that case I’ll head off to the pizzeria, then.”

  “Not alone. Pick Deniz up from St. Göran’s first.”

  As Zack takes the elevator down to the garage, he thinks about Sonny Järvinen. One criminal revealing the name of another criminal after barely a day in the cells.

  Things must be bad.

  20

  THE COFFEEMAKER in the Special Crimes Unit squirts out espresso after espresso. Tommy is bent over a table with Douglas, going through a list of known sex offenders, Niklas is fast-forwarding through recordings from a surveillance camera in the vicinity of Peter Karlson’s home, and, in an office a short distance away, a woman in a blue uniform blouse is giving Rudolf a quick run-through of the latest interview with the most overweight member of the Brotherhood.

  Sirpa is sitting alone at her computers, shut off from all external distractions. She’s good at that. Her eyes are fixed to one of the screens as her fingers move quickly over the keyboard.

  But she can’t shut out the pain. She moves her hands from the keyboard to her knees and massages them. It gives scant comfort, she’s been sitting down for too long again.

  She has painkillers in the top drawer. Citodon and Tradolan. Strong, effective medication. But she doesn’t want to take them. Doesn’t want to become a pill-popping junkie like Agneta in Regional Crime, who got her elbow crushed with a baseball bat by a guy from the Firm seven years ago. Agneta loved her painkillers. She took the maximum dose for more than a year. Then she began to lie, claiming that the pain wouldn’t budge. A year after that she reluctantly booked herself into a clinic, and a few weeks later she emerged as an even better liar.

  Sirpa has seen her taking pills on the sly, and she’s seen how distracted Agneta gets when she hasn’t got any.

  Sirpa would rather be in pain.

  When it comes down to it, her brain is more important to her than her body, even if the two can’t function separately.

  She walks stiffly to the kitchen. Pours away her untouched cup of cold coffee and puts it back under the coffeemaker again. The machine bleeps as she makes her selection.

  She heads back to her desk and puts the cup to one side. Tries to come up with something new to try. She managed to connect most of the anonymous email addresses in Sawatdii’s customer database with real people a while back, but the last one is still causing trouble. The first step, finding a server, is child’s play. Breaking into it is harder, and often against the law. Particularly when she can’t even claim that the address she’s trying to trace belongs to someone suspected of committing a serious crime.

  Sometimes she ignores the illegality, and gets help to break through the digital walls from the hackers’ network she belongs to. She never does that from the police network but from other locations and computers.

  On previous occasions she’s always known what she was looking for, and it’s often been a race against the clock to prevent further crimes being committed.

  This investigation isn’t at that level.

  Not yet.

  But Sirpa is worried about what might happen if they don’t make a breakthrough soon. She’s heard about the woman with the chewed-off legs.

  At least I’ve still got my knees, she thinks.

  Her fingers tap at the keyboard for several minutes. Line after line of computer code fills the screen. She leans closer and scans the information. Where has she ended up this time? In Turkmenistan. Well, why not? A few hours ago she traced one email address to a Web server in Suriname.

  She could send a request for help with the identification to the company behind the server, but she knows there’s no point. People who locate their servers in dictatorships are rarely keen to share information with police authorities in the West. And even in the isolated cases when Sirpa has managed to contact helpful technicians, they often have no idea of the origins of all the traffic passing through their servers. Anonymity software distorts the signals, sending the messages via thousands of different servers, then putting the information back together somewhere else entirely.

  Sirpa stares into the screen. That one address is driving her mad.

  dirtysanchez@woomail.com

  Dirty Sanchez. Sirpa felt sick when she found out what it meant: a man having anal sex with a woman, then smearing excrement across her upper lip, like a sort of mustache.

  Disgusting, she thinks. How can there even be enough people doing that for there to be a specific phrase for it? And how could anyone want to use that expression in another context? The sort of person who would use it as an email address can’t be anything but misogynist scum.

  She thinks of Peter Karlson’s perverse contributions to various sex forums, and of the abandoned investigation into the charge of anal rape made against him.

  He could have chosen an alias of that sort when wanting to make Gustav Vasa’s fantasies real.

  She finds herself getting upset every time she sees the email address. These men with their warped view of women, who see women as nothing but objects to exploit as they see fit, who believe that the door is always wide open, and who don’t hesitate to kick it in if that isn’t the case.

  Men.

  She’s practically ignored them since her own husband left her.

  There are good men, she knows that. But it doesn’t help.

  She thinks of two teenage girls she saw on the way to work. Skirts that barely covered their underwear, breasts that seemed to be trying to escape from T-shirts that were too tight.

  She thinks about the middle-aged men staring at the girls. But why shouldn’t young girls be naïve? Why can’t they have the right to affirm their femininity in whatever way they like?

  They do have that right, but it’s constantly being taken away from them.

  Dirty Sanchez.

  The implications of the address make her feel sick.

  I’m damn well going to find out who the hell you are.

  21

  ZACK HAS driven across Barnhusbron and parked the car beside the greenery of Tegnérlunden.

  He’s looking at the picture attached to the email Douglas has just sent him. A picture of Ösgür Thrakya.

  It’s actually quite a nice portrait. Soft shadow, good light, a short depth of field. He can just see the outline of mountains in the background, but only just.

  The man’s face is thin, with a clear dimple in his chin. He looks like he’s from the Balkans, or perhaps the Middle East. Clean-shaven, but starting to go bald, with just a hint of gray at the temples.

  So why does the
picture make him feel so uncomfortable?

  The look in those eyes, Zack thinks. Unpleasant eyes, which seem to be staring straight through him. Cold, observant. No trace of empathy.

  He thinks about what Sirpa said about the man. Maybe those rumors on the street are correct after all? That Turkish criminals are establishing themselves in Stockholm.

  More drugs, more prostitution.

  Just what the city needs.

  But does that have anything to do with the four murdered women in Hallonbergen?

  He pulls out onto the road again. Drives toward the pizzeria in Vasastan.

  A gust of wind blows dust, ice-cream wrappers, and a bit of crumpled tinfoil up onto the windshield.

  He thinks of what his childhood friend Ernesto Santos always used to say:

  “It has to be Skultuna’s oven foil. Nothing else. It’s just the right thickness.”

  Nothing to do with cooking.

  Ernesto was in the heroin business, like a number of other Chileans in Bredäng and Skärholmen. They sold their small wraps out in the suburbs, four hundred kronor for 0.2 grams, and thought they’d hit the big time just because their pockets were full of hundred-kronor notes.

  “You don’t want to try a 0.2?” Ernesto often used to ask. “My treat.”

  But Zack never tried. He found the syringes and vomiting off-putting. A lot of people vomited their guts up the first time.

  He made do with occasionally taking a few of Dad’s strong painkillers. Two or three Kerogan were usually enough to make the world a better place for a while.

  Despite that, he used to hang out around at Ernesto’s a lot. There was no risk of running into his parents: Ernesto moved out when he was sixteen.

  When Zack thinks back to it now, he can’t understand how he could bear being there. How he could sit there with Abdula watching Blood In, Blood Out for the tenth time while some forty-year-old guy sat in the kitchen smoking horse.

  Ernesto used to go on about how he was going to be running the entire heroin market in Stockholm within a few years.

  But he didn’t live to see twenty. He weighed barely forty-five kilos in his last weeks.

  * * *

  THE WHITE plastic sign outside the pizzeria on Västmannagatan is broken, and the last two letters have fallen off.

  What a dump, Zack thinks. The name alone: MIRAMAR.

  How could you name something after a sea view when your customers are in the grayest part of Vasastan and have a view of a stone-clad 1970s building in the finest tradition of East Germany?

  He drives on until he finds a free parking space between a silver BMW and a white Audi Q7. Both cars look new.

  He walks back to the pizzeria. Deniz was still in the waiting room when he called her. He didn’t feel like hanging around. Better to get something else ticked off the list.

  He opens the Miramar’s door. What greets him isn’t the appetizing smell of oven-baked pizza, but something rancid, almost rotten. Like bits of old food stuck in a sink.

  The décor is typical of a pizzeria with no ambition. Whitewashed walls, plain plastic chairs and tables, a cheap bowl of watery cabbage salad on a table by the wall, and a few copies of yesterday’s Metro on the windowsill.

  A grotesquely broad-shouldered man in a blue tracksuit and shiny green sneakers is sitting watching a film clip on his phone. He’s got cropped hair, and his biceps would make the Hulk start taking steroids out of envy.

  He looks up at Zack. One eye is cloudy, almost white.

  Zack stares back.

  It isn’t Ösgür Thrakya.

  The man puts his phone in his pocket, then tips his chair over backward, and rushes into the kitchen. Zack hears agitated voices, and the sound of baking trays hitting the floor. He runs after the man, cursing himself for never being able to learn to look away.

  The kitchen smells like the garbage room out in Bredäng, and Zack shoves the back door open and catches sight of the man halfway up a rickety ladder fixed to the wall, which stretches all the way to the roof.

  A Jack Russell terrier on a nearby balcony is barking at the climbing man, keen to join in the hunt.

  All these fucking dogs everywhere . . .

  Zack leaps up onto the rusty ladder, but slows down at once when he realizes how fragile it is.

  The man he’s chasing must weigh close to three hundred pounds.

  Can this really hold both of us?

  He looks at the fixtures, one after the other, for a fraction of a second.

  Then climbs up.

  The building has four floors, and the man has almost reached the roof.

  Zack speeds up. Gets grit in his eyes as the bolts holding the ladder move in and out of their holes.

  The dog goes on barking and barking.

  As Zack reaches the black tin-covered roof, he sees the man leap onto the next one. He sets off after him across the green tarnished-copper roof, skirts a chimney the same height as him, leaps up a short ladder fixed to a steeply sloping roof, then jumps down five feet onto a black tin roof.

  The man has landed heavily and Zack is gaining on him with every step.

  Why are you running?

  Because you murdered four women the night before last?

  “Stop!” he shouts. “I’m a police officer. Stop!”

  The mountain of muscle turns around and yells something incomprehensible. Then he jumps down almost seven feet onto a balcony. One foot gets caught in the railing and his knee hits the hard concrete floor and he howls with pain. He gets to his feet, clambers onto the other side of the railing, and jumps half a yard to the next balcony.

  A woman in her seventies who is sitting sunbathing screams in horror as the bulky man climbs onto the railing, of her neighbor’s balcony and leaps toward her. She knocks her little table over as she quickly gets to her feet.

  She slams the balcony door shut a moment before the man crushes her coffee cup under his shoes.

  They’re thirty feet above the ground.

  Zack can feel the predators’ jaws from last night’s nightmare trying to get him, trying to force him to fall as he makes the next jump between balconies.

  But his body obeys him.

  The jaws snap shut on nothing but air.

  The man yells again. Zack can’t even hear what language it is. He seems to be searching his pocket for something, but can’t find it.

  Zack crouches down, with his right hand on his Sig Sauer. He calls out:

  “Stop. I just want to talk.”

  The man makes another jump.

  His thighs must be three feet in diameter.

  He lands on the last balcony on the building. No way forward from there.

  A blank wall ahead of him.

  No drainpipe to slide down.

  No ladder.

  He looks up and grabs hold of the tin roof jutting out over the balcony, climbs up onto the railing, and swings one leg up onto the roof. He tries to pull himself up, but he’s heavy and ungainly, and the angle is difficult.

  Zack lands on the balcony. The man makes a last desperate attempt to reach the roof. He launches himself upward, trying to pull both legs onto the roof.

  But he slips.

  He slips and fumbles and grunts.

  Then falls, without a sound.

  Just a muffled thud as his body hits the ground. The sound of something breaking.

  An elderly couple walk into the courtyard. They see the man and hurry over to him.

  “Get back! Get back!” Zack shouts. “I’m a police officer!”

  Horrified, the pair back away a few yards but stand and stare at the lifeless body and the red pool gradually spreading out beneath its head.

  Zack pulls at the balcony door and knocks on the glass. He peers inside, but the apartment is dark. He yanks the door open, rushes through the rooms, out into the stairwell, and down to the courtyard.

  The man’s head is lying at an unnatural angle and Zack sees immediately that he’s dead.

  He stands beside
the body and tries to feel something.

  Sympathy.

  Guilt.

  But instead he sees his mother in his mind’s eye. Sees the old photographs of the black pool of her blood.

  It’s still growing. Merging with the dust and dirt.

  Was this what it looked like when they found her?

  22

  THE SUNLIGHT forcing its way into the courtyard is blinding Douglas, and making one of his cheeks twitch in a rather odd way. Zack can’t help thinking that the spasms really don’t suit his boss.

  A yellow tarpaulin has been draped over the dead man’s body, the courtyard has been cordoned off, and forensics officers are aiming their cameras up at the balcony with its black iron railing and taking a few last pictures.

  A gaggle of journalists has gathered out on the street but are being kept strictly away from the yard.

  “So what happened?” Douglas asks, and Zack describes the chase to him.

  Douglas listens attentively and asks a few questions to clarify some of the details.

  “I believe what you say, you know that, but you also know that there’s going to have to be an investigation into this.”

  Zack nods. He feels calm, but knows that the impending interviews will be a torment. This isn’t the first time his actions out in the field have been scrutinized.

  “There’s a witness,” Zack says. “A woman who was sitting on one of the balconies, I don’t know if she saw him fall. She got scared and ran into her apartment.”

  “We’ve already started knocking on doors. They’ll get her details,” Douglas says.

  The look in his eyes keeps alternating between hard and friendly, and Zack can’t help thinking that none of the emotions Douglas is trying to convey with his eyes are what he really thinks.

  “Are you okay?” Douglas asks. “Do you need debriefing? You know I have to ask.”

  Zack can’t help smiling.

  “And you know what my response will be.”

  Other officers can go through their entire careers without ever drawing their weapons or being involved in a dramatic chase.

  Some of them are even proud of the fact. They regard it as a failure if you have to use your weapon, the same way a soccer goalkeeper can say it’s a failure if he has to throw himself after the ball, because it means he was in the wrong place to start with.