It seemed thoroughly improbable that he should somehow be involved; there had to be some other explanation for the fact that his phone number was in the address book. But she couldn’t keep her thoughts from moving in that direction.
She remembered a course in criminology she’d taken during her prosecutor training: the lecturer had said that sex offenders sometimes collected souvenirs from their victims.
She started with the desk, since it seemed like the most private place. Top drawer first: office supplies, scissors, a ruler, the phone Linus had answered. On to the next: a couple of tax forms he’d saved, plastic folders containing user’s guides, a file full of receipts.
She pulled out another drawer: electronic junk, a screwdriver, old post that had evaded sorting.
The bottom drawer was locked. She picked up the screwdriver and stuck it into the gap, putting all her strength into it as she used it like a crowbar. There was a dull crunch as the wood cracked.
The drawer was empty except for a few unmarked DVDs.
She inserted the first one into the laptop on the desk. She felt the blood trickle from between her legs, soaking through the toilet paper and into her underwear as she pressed the power button and waited for the operating system to load.
She couldn’t figure out why she was doing this. Hoffman was a perfectly normal man . . .
The folders were neatly arranged by date. They ran back several years. They had been created at fairly regular intervals, about one new folder per month.
Some of them had been named “Bathing Friends.” Others were labeled with the acronym “H.o.P.”
She could hardly bear to look at the images, they were so horrific. They had been taken in a bare room somewhere. They documented acts of cruelty.
She opened more folders, her body stiff as a board and in a cold sweat brought on by fear and disgust. Pictures of a dead woman in one of the cages, emaciated into a skeleton; it seemed they had let her starve to death. More photographs, and film clips, of gang rape and out and out sadism. A woman dangling from a noose on the ceiling.
The tools they used resembled instruments of torture. Close-up images of bawling, terrified women. She noticed the track marks on their arms. Junkies, she thought. That could have been her in a different life . . . The men’s faces were not visible; they were only shown from behind.
She went to the living room and found her bag. She looked through it until she found an old USB drive. She returned to the computer, inserted it into the port, and began to copy the material onto it.
The laptop fan started up with an insect-like buzzing. She wondered if there was anything else in the apartment . . . anything else she should look for, and if so, where was it?
She quickly looked through the other rooms. She searched the wardrobes in the bedroom, the laundry basket, the kitchen cupboards, the freezer, the drawers under the work surface. A brief foray through the kids’ rooms, but she didn’t find anything else.
So she went back to the office, dragged the final folder to the USB drive, and ejected it.
Who were the women in the videos and photos? How did the men get hold of them? She understood that they were women from other countries. Did they buy them from pimps or human traffickers? From Mattson’s contacts in the Balkans?
The nausea swept over her again, and for an instant she had the terrifying feeling that she was pregnant, that she had become pregnant by Hoffman, even though she was on her period.
She wanted Katz to be there. Or Jorma Hedlund. She needed someone to talk to, someone she could trust.
“Eva . . .”
She turned around as slowly as if she were moving underwater.
He was standing in the doorway with a bakery bag and a bunch of fresh roses in his arms. The visual echo of a smile was still on his face—the forced smile of a person who wants to surprise his lover with French rolls and cut flowers but instead finds her doing something shameful.
He stared at the computer screen and the terrible pictures, and then at her . . .
She said nothing, avoiding his gaze; she just walked past him with purposeful steps, heading for the front door. She held her bag to her chest like a shield against the evil in the world. The door was locked with the security chain, she saw . . . and she could no longer keep her fear under control; she started running out of sheer reflex.
Maybe this unleashed his hunting instinct. Maybe it was the sign he was waiting for. He had been standing on the threshold of the office as if petrified, passively letting her walk right by him. But not anymore. Before she could reach the door, he was on top of her, hitting her, kicking her, growling like an animal. Like the predator he was deep down inside.
Katz parked the car on Fleminggatan and went in through the front door of the City Mission. As he passed the day room, a young junkie couple were sitting at one of the tables and eating Salisbury steak. Their children—twin boys around five—were playing with Lego on the floor.
The door to the storage room was open. Katja was at the window, just about to finish a phone call. As soon as she hung up, he asked if she knew where Wiksten was.
“He was supposed to be here this morning, according to the schedule,” she said, “but he never showed up. I just had to call another co-worker to cover for him. Why?”
“When did you see him last?”
“Yesterday. He came by to pick up the new schedule. But he didn’t mention anything about taking a day off.”
“Do you know if he ever went out of town . . . to a country place?”
“To be honest, I don’t know that much about Magnus. He works as a volunteer, as you know; he’s not an actual employee or anything. I’m happy for all the help I can get around here. But Magnus doesn’t usually say much about his private life.”
“Do you have his mobile number?” Katz asked.
“Just his home number; I called it a little while ago, but there was no answer.”
Out in the hall, the junkie dad walked by. He was staggering as if the earth’s gravity was stronger than his body could handle; he shouted something to his sons as they played.
“Was that all? There are people out there who need me.”
“Two things,” said Katz. “Did you happen to see if Wiksten had injuries to his face when he was here . . . or bandages?”
“I don’t think so. Not that I noticed, anyway. What’s your last question?”
“I’d like to know how a person could go about tracking down a homeless Roma family . . .”
Wiksten was guaranteed to be in the crime database, Katz thought as he walked back to his car—at the very least, there would be old sentences for buying sex. There was no way he could have stayed under the radar for all these years; there had to be something on him, even if it was on the fringes of another investigation. He needed to get hold of Eva Westin to learn more.
He took out his phone to dial her number, but instead he discovered three missed calls from Mona. She had left a message.
He dialed the number to his voicemail and felt his stomach sink when he heard her voice.
She sounded calm and collected as she explained she’d hit rock bottom, the only place where you could get a foothold in order to rise up again. Because she truly wanted to get better. Because she wanted to get her son back.
She was on her way to a private clinic outside the city, she explained. You got to stay in a large house surrounded by nature; she had seen the photos. The form of treatment wasn’t exactly on the up and up; it was experimental, still in its infancy, so she wasn’t really allowed to tell anyone about it. She was at a petrol station outside the city with Wiksten. She was calling from a phone box while he filled up the car. She’d had to surrender her own phone; she wasn’t allowed to bring it along. She apologized for not answering when Katz tried to reach her earlier. She’d had a lot on her plate—contacting the authorities, petitioning to have her son stay with her for a trial period as soon as she worked out a proper living situation. She would be in touch once she
was back in town. “Cross your fingers for me,” was the last thing she said before she hung up.
PART 6
Jorma had managed to shadow the cop for nearly twenty-four hours. He’d bought a GPS tracker at an electronics store and attached it to the car outside the police station with a magnet. Amazingly enough, it hadn’t been discovered. He’d followed the cop at a distance in Emir’s Sierra. He was cautious, always leaving a gap between them. He lost sight of him a few times but always managed to catch up with him again.
The man had zigged and zagged through the city. He’d visited a few apartments and a tanning salon; he had taken a detour to Värtahamnen, where he disappeared into a shipping store.
He had spent the night at the police station. Or perhaps he had left the station on foot through one of the side entrances. In any case, in the morning he came out through the main doors again and got back into his car.
More visits to apartments, plus a short stop at a Thai massage place in Liljeholmen. Trafficking women, Jorma thought. It matched up with what Leyla had told him.
Late in the afternoon, he went to a cafe on Ringvägen. He met someone inside. Then he crossed the Skanstull Bridge and drove to Enskededalen, where he rang the doorbell at a turn-of-the-century villa and was let in.
Jorma took out his phone and googled the address. No hits. The same went for the Land Rover in the driveway. The person who lived there appeared to have unlisted information. Another cop?
He waited until it started to get dark before walking around the house to the back garden. Lights were on on the ground floor, but the blinds were down. There was scaffolding on the gable facing the neighboring house. The aroma of fallen apples. A bit further on there was a pond; its fountain was turned off.
He rolled up the left leg of his trousers and pulled off the tape that had secured the Colt to his shin. He stuck it into the pocket of his hoodie and walked up to the house, hunching down as he went.
He slid behind the scaffolding, noticing the smell of paint from the freshly painted facade. One of the windows was covered in plastic.
He pulled off the electrical tape. He tore it in two with his teeth and stuck the pieces on the windowpane in the shape of a cross. He took off his hoodie, wound it around his hand, and smashed the glass. All that was heard was a dull crunch. The tape held the pieces in place. He carefully removed them from the window frame, then crawled in feet-first and landed on the floor with a soft thud.
He found himself in some sort of hobby room. A pool table stood in the center and there were diplomas on the walls, trophies in a glass cabinet—marksmanship awards, it looked like.
Framed newspaper clippings were arranged on a shelf as if they were museum pieces. A fat man was visible in the photographs. Cheeks like a bulldog. In one press photo, he was posing in a uniform full of insignia alongside some politicians; it was some sort of gala event. The man was a cop.
Karl Mattson, read one caption. So this was the man Hillerström had told him about—the handler’s boss.
A dark passageway led out of the room. Jorma opened a door and was standing at the cellar stairs. He heard country music coming from the floor above.
No alarm had sounded; he would have heard it when he broke the window.
He stopped in front of the door that opened onto the ground floor. He peered through the keyhole. There was a kitchen on the other side. But no people.
He took the Colt from his pocket.
The country music was still playing. It seemed to be coming from a room further on. He pressed the door handle down and stepped into the kitchen with his finger on the trigger.
No one there. No voices. Just the music.
Too late to turn back, he thought as he headed for a door.
The music suddenly stopped. There was a faint light from the room on the other side. He opened the door. The parquet floor creaked as he took a step inside.
He froze mid-step. He felt something cold on the back of his neck. A voice mumbled something, and then he fell forward and all light vanished.
Katz tried to picture the images as he drove north on the E4, but his mind refused. He could only see darkness and cages. A black lake, birds of prey circling in the sky. But no people.
House of Pain. Mona was on her way there with Wiksten.
The dark-skinned woman in the photographs from Ramón’s iCloud, the article in the magazine in Wiksten’s bedroom. It was all connected.
He exited the highway at Sollentuna. His GPS updated his directions: Go straight ahead . . . then take the second exit from the roundabout . . .
The field assistant at Crossroads, the volunteer organization that helped vulnerable migrants in the EU, had sent him a link with the GPS coordinates. But the man was unsure whether the migrant camp still existed. These people are frightened; they keep moving, and they have good reason to do so. People threaten them and abuse them. There’s not usually anything in the papers, because they don’t dare to report the crimes to the police. And also sometimes the police evict them; communities won’t let them settle down just anywhere.
He was getting close. The site was in the nature reserve at Östra Järvafältet. The absurdly friendly computerized voice told him he had arrived. He parked the car at a rest area. The tent camp was supposed to be a hundred meters into the woods.
A piece of frayed tarp was still hanging from a tree, flapping in the breeze. A couple of squares of dead grass indicated where the tents had once stood. Further on was a ditch latrine, a hole in the ground they had used as a toilet.
Katz was startled by a jogger running by on the path. The man stopped, took off his headphones, and shook his head.
“It’s such a fucking relief that they’re gone! They were shitting in that pit over there.”
He used his elbow to point at the hole in the ground.
“Seriously, they can do that stuff back where they came from. But not here, dammit.”
“What happened?”
“The place burned down a week ago. Wouldn’t surprise me if they did it themselves, so people will feel sorry for them.”
The man wiped the sweat from his brow and jogged in place.
“What are they even doing here? You can’t go into a shop in this city without tripping over a beggar holding out a cup.”
Katz didn’t say anything. He tried to digest the fact that he was too late.
“Believe me, they’re going to end up spreading disease. Have you seen how some of them sit there, scratching themselves?”
The man put his headphones on again and made a bitter face, then jogged on into the forest.
Katz clicked on the next GPS link. This place was on the other side of the Skanstull Bridge, at the abutment below Gullmarsplan.
Most of the big camps are south of the city. There’s one at Högdal Hills, for example, at the old dump. If you can’t find the boy there, you might check under the bridges leading out of Södermalm. They spread out so they don’t have to compete with each other. You know, they can’t all beg in the same spot, or camp in the same spot. That’s the sort of thing that makes people think there’s a beggar mafia running everything behind the scenes. But it’s not true. These people are just trying to help each other, make sure they’re not competing the wrong way . . .
Just before Haga, he changed lanes and drove onto Essingeleden. Stockholm lay before him like a panoramic postcard. He saw the Dagens Nyheter building keeping vigil over southern Kungsholmen, the church towers of Gamla Stan spearing the sky to the east . . .
He got the sense that it was already too late once he came out of the Söderled Tunnel and muddled his way down to Simlångsvägen. He stopped the car at a turnaround and followed a path over to Skansbacken. He could see the camp from quite far away, just under the bridge abutment.
He walked past a temporary wall made of sheets of hardboard. The bridge itself served as a roof. This could have been anywhere in the Third World, he thought, a shantytown in Bombay or Lusaka.
A camping stov
e stood on a wooden bench. A discarded steel work surface with two sinks had been set up beside it, like a parody of a kitchen. Plastic drums of water. A toothless woman in her forties was sitting on a mattress, making tea on another camping stove. The boy’s mother—they looked alike. Two young girls, about ten years old, were playing further up the hill.
“Le Alexandrus rodáv . . . I’m looking for Alexandru.”
The woman nodded toward a tent not far away.
“So mangés lestar?” she said. “What do you want with him? He hasn’t done anything naughty, has he?”
Katz didn’t respond. A barge slipped by in the canal. The hum of traffic. The shrieking of a metro train crossing the Skanstull Bridge. And he remembered the days he’d spent in places like this. The nights when he hadn’t found a spot in a shelter and had to sleep outdoors. The times he’d woken to people assaulting him, waking into a nightmare of violence. The nights he’d been robbed, when people had taken his belongings and pissed all over him. Or the time an obviously mentally ill man had crawled into his sleeping bag as he lay in a multi-story, totally gone on heroin, and tried to rape him before someone realized what was about to happen and chased the man away.
He sat outside the tent with Alexandru and showed him the photos he’d printed out. He started with the picture of the dark-skinned girl in the back seat of the car. Tears sprang to the boy’s eyes.
“Do you know her?”
“Yes . . . it’s Mariella.”
“Your sister, right?”
The boy nodded; he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the photo.
“Is Mariella a prostitute? Do you understand what I mean? Does she sell herself to men?”
The boy peered up at the bridge abutment. And Katz suddenly saw Benjamin as a child, just a little older than this boy was now, fleeing through Europe with his parents. His sister had vanished, too.
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