They had reached the driving range behind the clubhouse. Beata Roslund removed a club from the golf bag, weighing it in her hand as she looked over at Lake Vallentuna, which was visible through the trees. And then she told him about the happy little girl who had once given her life meaning, the girl she had raised alone after her husband left her, the girl who’d had a normal childhood, playing normal games with normal kids her own age, the girl who had been gifted, charming, beloved. The girl who had learned to read when she was only five, who had been the brightest in her class for her nine years of compulsory school, and who had suddenly, overnight, transformed into someone Beata didn’t recognize, a wildly foreign person.
“So what happened?”
“The summer she turned eighteen she was on the way to Frankfurt with her father. Carl-Adam was an absent father, always working, totally absorbed in his company. Jennifer only saw him sporadically, on school breaks and her birthday . . . and a few weeks every summer when he would take her on road trips to the continent or go sailing in the archipelago. They were in a head-on collision with a so-called Geisterfahrer just south of Frankfurt. Have you heard of those? Young German guys who make bets on how long they can drive the wrong way on the Autobahn without chickening out. The guy in the other car was killed instantly, but my daughter and ex-husband had a guardian angel. Calle made it through with a broken shoulder. Jennifer had a crushed spleen and a few scrapes. But something must have happened to my daughter. Something the doctors could never pinpoint no matter how many CAT scans they took of her brain. The sort of injury you can’t locate . . . She was never the same again.”
After the accident, Jennifer became emotionally isolated. She lost interest in school. She skipped class, instead spending her days drawing—fantasy motifs, other worlds, often frightening ones. She started dressing differently, provocatively. She got pet snakes, like a protest against her environment; there was something deeply symbolic about her interest in herpetology, Beata Roslund explained, as if she wanted to frighten other people away.
“It was like she was no longer in touch with herself. There was some sort of disconnect between her body and her soul. And maybe that was why she started taking drugs, to fill the emptiness between them, try to bridge that gap. And it happened fast—it only took a few months for her to develop a full-blown addiction. I tried to get her help. From child psychologists, drug clinics, the Maria Youth Centre. But Jennifer was impervious to care; instead my interventions caused her to become even more destructive.”
She sighed, replacing the golf club in the bag. She stuck her hands in her armpits as if she were freezing.
“What about her dad?” Katz asked.
“Calle died just over a year ago. An accidental drowning. He fell off his boat near Norr Mälarstrand while heavily intoxicated. I found out about it from the newspapers. And like I said, he never had much contact with her. Even less after the car accident. My ex was from an upper-class family, all of whom were experts in repressing problematic emotions. I suppose he couldn’t handle not recognizing his own little girl, the one who used to worship him, possibly because he was so inaccessible, because they so seldom saw each other.”
She looked at Katz defiantly, as if he suspected her of something even though she was innocent.
“I want you to know I didn’t have many warm feelings for my ex. He left me in the lurch with a small child. Sure, he gave me the house in Vallentuna, and he paid child support so we wouldn’t have to live on my nurse’s income. But he was never a dad in the true sense of the word.”
She gazed sadly at Katz with her good eye.
“Anyway, when she turned eighteen, there was nothing more I could do. She was of age, free to do whatever she liked with her life. First she took off for Skåne; somehow she got into art school down there. She studied painting and drawing. Her only passion, besides drugs. She went to Copenhagen and bought drugs off the street dealers in the Vesterbro district. She was kicked out of school after stealing a computer from her boyfriend at the time. She frequently came to Stockholm to beg for money. And when I finally refused, she threw acid in my face.”
She stopped talking and touched the scars on her cheek as if she still couldn’t grasp what had happened.
“She moved abroad,” Katz said.
“Yes, to Switzerland. She wrote me a letter while I was in hospital, where the doctors were trying to save my sight, to tell me that she was going to Zurich with some guy. I don’t know what happened there, except that she became a prostitute and started doing porn. Later I heard that she lived and worked at an escort company that advertised sex services by way of a website.”
She looked at Katz with disgust, as if he were one of her daughter’s johns.
“And then suddenly she showed up in Sweden again. At that point I hadn’t heard from her in several years. I was convinced she was dead. Of an overdose . . . or just from the life she was living, killed in the line of duty, so to speak. She stayed at shelters in the city, as far as I could tell, avoiding the authorities, living with another man. That Ramón, I suppose, the one you mentioned on the phone. Yet another pimp.”
“Did you see her?”
“No. I refused. But she called to tell me she was working at a sex club. I don’t know if she’s alive or has killed herself with drugs, nor do I care. I’m done crying, you know? I’m out of tears.”
She turned away from him, adjusting her eyepatch, which had slid down. A man in his forties was approaching from the clubhouse, his arm extended in a greeting. Her lover, Katz thought. Fit, tanned, looked like a model; they resembled each other somehow.
“That brings us to the end of this audience,” she said drily. “And there’s just one thing I want to ask of you.”
“What’s that?”
“If you find her . . . don’t tell her the two of us met. I don’t want anything to do with Jennifer. I don’t want her to know I was talking about her. I don’t want to be part of her life, even as a thought.”
Hiding spots were holy places for heroin addicts. It was an art to find secure areas for your junk so it wouldn’t be found by the cops. Or other junkies.
But where was Jennifer’s?
Katz merged onto the E18 and drove past the racetrack and Näsby Park. The sound of the car engine was soothing. He rolled down the window to get some air.
His thoughts swam through his head like small schools of fish as he approached the city center. Where had he kept his goods during his dark years? The small doses he sold on the street, zip lock bags full of heroin capsules? In electrical boxes in the city. Inside the service panels on streetlights. The few times he’d handled larger amounts? In a forest outside the city. And during the short time he’d hung around with Ramón? A secret place in Årsta; they had managed to move a manhole cover, and one meter below ground there was a niche where they had been able to hide a small lot that they were planning to sell on commission.
If you could just find the hiding spot, you would find the owner. That was how he would locate her.
He went right at the Bergshamra exit, crossed the E4, and continued west on the old Enköping road.
Why hadn’t he thought of it until now? Ramón had screwed him over that time. Stolen the goods. And he hadn’t confessed where it was until Katz tracked him down at a dope den in Söder and put a knife to his throat: the junk was in an old banger parked in a long-stay car park.
Katz drove faster. He remembered his encounter at the junkie’s car. The way John Sjöholm had looked back over his shoulder as Katz was bent over him, against the trunk. Nervous at the thought that Katz might have suspected something.
He parked outside a removals company and walked the last little bit to the empty car park.
He was thinking that he had misjudged everything, that this was all much simpler than he’d first thought. Jennifer was out there somewhere. She was the one who had killed Ramón; it was the most plausible explanation. Together they had blackmailed people and invested the money in drug
s. But she had become greedy and wanted to keep it all for herself. Perhaps along with Sjöholm.
She wasn’t the person he thought she was. She was the one who’d fixed the rig for Ramón, full of a dose she knew he couldn’t handle. She’d injected it in his left arm, in a vein he couldn’t get at, because he asked her to. She watched calmly as his heart stopped . . .
The car door was unlocked; the crowbar was on the floor next to the prescription medication and the porn magazine.
Katz stuck the fork end into the gap and broke into the trunk. At first he didn’t see anything, just a tarp covering the space. He pulled it aside. Swallowed hard.
Sjöholm was in a fetal position. His face was bluish-black. A nylon rope was wound around his neck several times.
Nearly a week passed. Eva learned more about the robbery. She pored over reports and newspaper articles, conspiring with her old contact at the National Intelligence Bureau, Wernström, who had better insights into confidential material than she did—not to mention the nose of a bloodhound when it came to strange coincidences. She wondered if she should contact the robbers who had been apprehended, but she decided not to bother; none of them would talk to her anyway.
For the time being, she was letting the matter of the tip line rest. Instead she emailed her colleagues in Sarajevo, wondering about their question regarding corruption, but they were taking their time getting back to her.
And all the while, that little bell was ringing in the back of her head.
She needed help from above, but Hoffman was on a business trip and didn’t answer his phone until late Wednesday evening. He was at a conference in Östersund. She skipped the small talk and got straight to the point, telling him what she was after.
“So you want to get hold of a higher-up to find out why they closed an investigation into the shooting of a robber. What is your reason, if I may ask?”
“This guy was the most interesting person on my list of suspected front men.”
“You’ll have to give me something juicier than that.”
She knew it was a long shot. And she wondered how much more she could reveal at this point without giving away her source. According to Wernström, who had definitely exceeded his authority by helping her, there seemed to have been a lengthy investigation before the police action, possibly going as far as entrapment.
“I know I’m coming out of left field with this,” she said, “but something tells me that this robbery is connected to my case.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know yet, but I intend to find out. And isn’t it odd that one of the suspects died suddenly during a manhunt for the robbers?”
“I’m not seeing the direct connection.”
She studied the photos of her children on her office walls. She hadn’t even called them since handing them over to Ola. She felt a pang of guilt, which she managed to stuff in that special compartment for feelings that must be immediately repressed.
“For one thing, Abramović left the criminal life behind ten years ago and hadn’t had so much as a parking ticket since. He was happily married with small children. He had a steady job as a massage therapist at a clinic near Hötorget. And then, out of the blue, he robbed an armored truck! For another, why was an internal investigation closed after less than twenty-four hours? Isn’t that a bit too speedy? They’re usually careful to get to the bottom of fatal shootings—to avoid a civil-rights mess. And out of sheer self-preservation. If criminals think the police are cold-blooded executioners, it gives them reason to become quicker on the draw . . . Abramović, my suspected frontman, was holding an automatic weapon with an empty magazine when he was shot. But it seems that the robbers had tried to ditch their weapons earlier in the chase. An empty revolver was found in the car, and another pistol and three hand grenades were in the bushes along the path they fled.”
“Perhaps the robbers were just trying to drop ballast? Maybe they didn’t want to be carrying so much weight—just enough to force the task force to be cautious?”
“Or else the automatic weapon was placed in Abramović’s hands once he was already dead.”
“An execution?”
“Well, he was shot at close range . . . right in the forehead. No witnesses.”
“And a cover-up on top of it all?”
She couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic.
“It’s not out of the question. The police in Sarajevo were asking strange questions about how corrupt the Swedish police truly are. And Abramović had called the police tip line about a month before he died. About what, one might ask.”
Hoffman gave a loud sigh.
“Okay,” he said. “I know a few people in the upper echelons. I’ll check and see if anyone is prepared to talk to you. Karl Mattson, for example; my old boss. He works for the county police these days. But not until I’m back in town. And I want you to take time off from this case until then, Eva. That is a direct order to a colleague who has apparently never heard the term ‘burned out.’ Call me on Friday when I’m back home.”
Katz took off his outerwear and went to the kitchen. He drank a glass of water while listening to his messages. A slurred voice said the name “Mona,” and then there were sirens and the call cut off. He dialed her number but there was no answer.
The rain was tapping at the window. He took an apple from the fruit bowl to cut it into slices, but his hand was shaking so much that he had to put down the paring knife. He was startled by a sound but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He looked out the window at the dark street.
H.o.P., he thought. Something about missing women. But the thought slipped out of his grasp.
Sjöholm’s body flickered through his mind, the rope around his neck, his black and blue face. Katz had flashbacks to the Klingberg Affair the year before; all the events he had experienced still gave him nightmares sometimes.
Jenny was likely dead, just as he’d suspected from the start. And if she was alive, she had nothing to do with the murder of John Sjöholm. It took raw strength to strangle a person.
He thought about calling the police but realized that he would have a difficult time explaining his own involvement.
Had anyone seen him at the deserted industrial area? He didn’t think so.
He pulled out the porn magazine he’d taken from the car. According to the information on the editorial page, it was produced in Zurich. The price of the single copy was given in Swiss francs. Had she moved there with Sjöholm? Was he her boyfriend at the time?
The craving was back again and almost irresistible. He had four packs of heroin left, and all he needed to escape everything was a syringe.
Battling the growing emptiness that screamed out to be filled, he went to the hall and picked up the pile of post that had collected over the last week, pulling out the advertising fliers and bringing the rest back to the kitchen. He noticed a draft of air coming from somewhere.
Katz stood still. Listening, concentrating . . . He thought he heard something.
The handgun he’d brought from Husby was in the safe in his office, along with the bukkake DVD and Ramón’s address book. He took the paring knife and walked into the living room.
The balcony door was open; the windowpane was broken. The address book, he thought. That’s what they were after. Or the DVD. Or both.
The room was dark. He walked over to close the door. A faint scent of autumn on the breeze, from rotting leaves and asphalt wet with rain. Earthy smells that blended with something else he couldn’t identify at first; the scent of adrenaline, he had time to think before a movement out of the corner of his eye startled him and a painful blow to the back of the head made everything go black.
Darkness . . . He didn’t know how long he was out; probably only a few seconds. He was lying on his stomach across the glass table—must have landed on it; blood was flowing from a wound on his forehead. Someone had an arm around his neck in an iron grip, squeezing his larynx so hard it creaked. Weird little gnomes mov
ed across his field of vision and were projected into the room. The walls seemed to be flowing with color.
The table gave way under the weight of two bodies; they fell onto the Tabriz carpet and it soaked up the blood.
Sounds seemed to reach him from a distance, the animalistic panting of the man on top of him, music suddenly coming through the balcony door from one of the neighboring buildings. The growl rising from his own throat.
The grip loosened for a split second and he managed to suck in more air. The pain sent a shot of adrenaline through his body. He fumbled among the shards of glass in front of him and caught hold of something. The ashtray. He whacked it backward as best he could, but all he hit was empty air.
As the oxygen slowly drained from his brain, he groped with his other hand and found the knife he’d dropped. He swung to the side this time, downward and diagonally, and hit something soft. The denim fabric absorbed the blow. Katz struck again, but he was losing strength . . . He could feel his hate, the old hatred of his life streaming out of him like a geyser, that genuine desire to do harm to another person. His rage erased the pain; he struck again and felt the tip of the knife pierce the other man’s thigh.
The man screamed and let go of his throat. Katz sucked in air and managed to turn halfway around. He lost his grip on the knife but got hold of the man’s hair, pulling him closer, embracing him, gnashing his teeth in the air, biting until he caught the man’s cheek; he felt his front teeth break the skin, felt its rubbery resistance before they cut through. He bit onto the man’s cheek as hard as he could, like a human tick, just below his eye.
The man’s grip loosened when his skin broke. Blood rushed into Katz’s mouth. The man roared in pain.
Katz was so dazed he couldn’t manage to stand up. The man staggered backward through the room. He couldn’t see his face in the darkness, couldn’t make out his features—just his limping figure as he moved toward the open balcony door. The way he came in was also the way he got out.
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