by Peter Mohlin
“Occupied,” John snapped, putting his hand against the man’s hairy chest and forcing him back to the pool.
When he turned around, his mother looked away.
“Take me out of here,” she said. “We’re done.”
John took hold of the wheelchair and pushed it into the corridor and toward the lobby. He collided with a fire cabinet, making his mother’s right foot slip off its footrest and drag along the floor. He left that for the Ring and Ride crew to deal with. He didn’t plan to spend a minute longer than necessary with this woman who—through one of the universe’s worst flukes—happened to be his mother.
He continued toward the sliding doors by the entrance and waited while the ramp from the minibus was folded down. She slowly turned her face toward him again. The worst of the rage seemed to have dissipated.
“Have you thought about what’ll happen to Nicole?”
John pictured the girl on the turquoise bike. His mother’s words had touched a sore spot. He hadn’t given much thought to his niece since he had hit the body in the ground with his shovel.
John lay on his bed on the third floor. He had been there for almost an hour. He knew that his mother was a world-class manipulator. It was masterful, playing on his conscience by bringing up the risk of an eight-year-old growing up with her father in prison.
John reminded himself that even if he felt genuinely sorry for the girl, it didn’t matter. Or rather: he couldn’t let it matter. It was that kind of sentimentality that had put him in this position in the first place.
He’d thought he had a debt to settle. That he owed Billy and their mother his help. But it was all bullshit. He was twelve years old when his father dragged him to New York. It hadn’t been his decision—he didn’t have to take responsibility for it.
His mother had expressly asked him to leave and that was his intention. She, Primer, Brodwick, and all the others trying to control his life could go to hell. He was going to create his own witness protection program. Head to Germany using Fredrik Adamsson’s passport and then buy a new identity. Maybe go on to France. Or Italy. Europe was wide open for anyone with money and time—and he had an excess of both.
He got up and threw the black suitcase onto the bed. Hanging behind the sliding doors of the wardrobe were his neatly ironed shirts in a row. Sorted by color. White on the left, blue in the middle, and then other colors on the right.
He pulled the first one from its hanger and threw it into the bag. Then he continued with the next one. It felt good—a suitable ending to a trip that had been a mistake from the start.
With just a couple of shirts to go, his phone beeped. Annoyed, he pulled it out of his jacket pocket and saw there was a text message from Erina Kabashi. It was short and informative like last time. “Massage 11:30.”
He left the remaining clothes and sat down on the edge of the bed. According to the time on his phone, that was in twenty minutes. A scene from The Godfather Part III sprang to mind. For some unfathomable reason, Trevor liked that one best when they’d binged the trilogy in the Baltimore safe house. Michael Corleone trying to escape his past and complaining: “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” John remembered the eyes. They were filled with a darkness that only a young Pacino could deliver.
He rose to his feet and kicked the wardrobe with his black leather shoe, making the sliding doors rattle on their rails. With a final glance at the half-packed suitcase, he left the room and hurried down to the parking garage.
“No massage today?”
Erina Kabashi was alone in the room at Rat Chance Thai Massage. She was wearing the same kimono as last time.
“Gewalin is coming after our meeting is finished,” she said. “But first you and I need to talk, and I would prefer not to be lying down this time.”
John sat on the massage table and waited for her to get to the point. She had asked to meet him and he didn’t want to seem too keen.
The lawyer stood in front of him.
“I was skeptical—I’ll freely admit that.”
“Skeptical about what?” he asked.
“Your long shot. It might seem risk-free to take a new DNA sample from my client and demand that it’s compared with the semen found near Emelie’s blood. A match doesn’t really change anything—he’s already tied to the scene. But you’re forgetting the psychological impact. The defense risks looking desperate.”
He hadn’t thought about it like that, but she was right. A trial was about so much more than hard facts and evidence. The psychological dimension was at least as important in determining the outcome.
“But after thinking it over, I decided it was still worth a chance,” she said, before falling silent—as if she wanted to keep him on tenterhooks.
“And?” said John.
Erina grinned from ear to ear.
“A conclusive result. It’s not Billy’s semen. Never was and never will be.”
John struggled to believe what he had just heard. Even though he was the one who had suggested a new DNA test, he hadn’t expected this.
“So, he was telling the truth?” he managed to say.
“It seems that way,” she said. “At any rate, the police have absolutely no proof that Billy was ever near the girl.”
“So, what happens now?”
“I’m going back to the police station to sign some papers. Then he’s free to go.”
Erina poured two glasses of cucumber water and handed one to John.
“Thanks for the idea. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d probably still be trying to persuade your brother to change his story to a hand job in the woods.”
“I take it that wasn’t easy?”
John thought she sounded slightly more hoarse than usual when she laughed. She’d presumably been using her voice nonstop since the results had come back from the lab.
“I’ve never met a more pigheaded person in my life.”
He thought about the suitcase on his hotel bed. It would be easier to keep packing after this news. His job in Sweden was done. Billy would be able to get on with his life, without the cloud of suspicion hanging over him. Just like John would get on with his own. Far away from internal investigations and impossible family relationships.
Erina interrupted his train of thought.
“The question is how on earth the samples got so messed up in the first place.”
“Technical error?”
She shook her head.
“No, technical errors mean no results at all. For safety’s sake, the lab has to rerun the comparison between Billy’s old DNA sample and the semen on the rock—and there’s still a one hundred percent match.”
“So, the DNA sample labeled with Billy’s name ten years ago belongs to someone else.”
“Yes, and not just any old person. Right?”
“No, it is likely to belong to the perp.”
“Exactly,” said Erina. “How likely is it that the mix-up happened by mistake?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. The lawyer pulled the kimono tighter around herself, as though the chill they both felt at her rhetorical question was a real blast of cold air. Erina sat down next to him on the massage bench.
“I think that the real perp panicked when he gave a sample,” she went on. “He realized he was going to be found out and wrote Billy’s name down on the sample instead of his own.”
“What you’re saying presupposes two things,” said John. “One: the perpetrator must’ve lived in the area or had been asked to give a sample for some other reason. Two: he must’ve had access to the samples.”
Erina said nothing. She didn’t have to. John saw she’d reached the same conclusion he had: everything suggested that the perpetrator worked somewhere in law enforcement. In other words, he was a police officer, prosecutor, lawyer, or lab employee in Linköping.
“There’s a third thing you ought to add to that list,” she said.
“You’re thinking of the choice of Billy as a scapegoat?”<
br />
Erina nodded. She had clearly done her research on his brother and read the report from the closed investigation into what happened at the party a year or so before the disappearance of Emelie Bjurwall.
“He was never charged with the rape of that girl,” she said. “So, the information isn’t public. But you can get hold of it if you have access to the police computer system.”
“So, when the perp needed a name to write on his own sample, he searched old investigations for suitable candidates,” John added.
“Yes, and Billy was the perfect match. He lived in an area on Hammarö that the investigators had already decided to take samples from. All the perpetrator had to do was get hold of both samples and swap the labels.”
There was a knock on the door and Gewalin’s face appeared in the crack.
“Time for your massage,” she said in her soft, accented English.
Erina looked at John apologetically.
“Sorry, but I need a good massage before I head back to the police station. It’s going to be a long day—not that I’m not looking forward to it.”
30
“It sounds completely unlikely to me.”
Once again, Heimer heard the sharp edge to his wife’s voice. It was the way she spoke to employees at AckWe when they provided unconvincing excuses for their failures.
“I know it must sound strange to you.”
Primer’s voice sounded slight and seemed to lack authority. The police detective was troubled by the conversation and for a good reason. The investigators had had all the evidence they needed to get a murder conviction against Billy Nerman. Yet they’d screwed it up and had to let him go again. There was apparently no limit to these people’s incompetence.
Sissela seemed to feel the same way. She continued to push Primer, who seemed to shrink inch by inch behind the desk in his office at the police station.
“What happened to the strong forensic evidence you told us about?” she said.
“It no longer holds up.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it no longer holds up.”
Heimer did his best to contain his anger. But Primer’s robotic manner was galling. It sounded as if the bastard was reading from an internal teleprompter.
“Yes, that much I gather,” Sissela said. “But what happened to it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t go into details about that for investigative reasons.”
She fixed her gaze on him and lowered her voice.
“Are you seriously going to take that line? We’re Emelie’s parents and we’re entitled to know what’s happening.”
Primer looked unhappy and shrank a little more in his office chair. He had slipped so far forward on the seat that he would soon fall off it.
“I don’t want to seem unnecessarily formal, and as next-of-kin you have every right to be frustrated. But at the moment, I can’t tell you any more than I already have.”
“Then I’ll have to speak to the commissioner of county police,” she said.
“That’s your prerogative. But I should tell you that he’s the one who made the decision.”
Sissela didn’t seem to have been prepared for Primer’s reply and for a moment she lost her thread. The policeman appeared to regain some of his authority for a moment. He adjusted his position on the chair and pulled it closer to the desk. Heimer looked at him and felt disgust. The man was as mediocre as the office he was sitting in, from the yucca plant in the corner to the IKEA storage units.
“I understand if you—” Primer continued.
“What is it you understand?” Heimer interrupted him. “What it feels like to have a bunch of amateurs investigating your daughter’s murder?”
Sissela gave him a look that was unmistakable in meaning. She thought he’d crossed a line. Heimer didn’t.
“You mess up the whole investigation, and then you won’t even tell us what’s happened. Fucking hell, it’s a disgrace.”
“Like I said, preliminary investigations are confidential. And I would appreciate it if you calmed down.”
“You want me to calm down?”
Primer held out his arms to indicate there was nothing he could do. The decision to keep things under wraps wasn’t his.
“I understand if you—” he began.
He didn’t get any further before Heimer smashed the wall with his fist so hard that his knuckles sank into the plasterboard.
“If you say ‘I understand’ one more time, I’ll smash up your whole damn office.”
Sissela was implacable when, after a few brief apologies, she led him out of Primer’s office. Heimer regretted his outburst even before the elevator had made it to the ground floor of the police station, and he knew it was the prelude to a long conversation.
One step forward, two steps back.
He had to learn to control his emotions. What was inside him belonged only to him. It couldn’t influence how he acted out in the world.
31
Just like last time, John parked a few hundred meters from his childhood home so as not to draw unnecessary attention. He had spent the whole afternoon weighing whether to say goodbye to his brother or not.
He decided the risk was acceptable. The Chrysler was already packed and if he took a ferry down to the continent tonight, it wouldn’t matter if someone connected it with a visit to Billy Nerman. He’d sell the car for cash in Germany and all traces of Fredrik Adamsson and John Adderley would vanish when he bought his new identity.
What had made him hesitate was more to do with the emotional aspects. John wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see his brother one last time. The visit might unleash a lot of emotions that he had neither the time nor inclination to deal with. Better to let the story end here. That way, he could at least pretend that Billy was living his life happily, now that all suspicions against him had disappeared.
Nevertheless, he walked up the gravel road toward Nerman’s Autos. It was dusk and John felt his father’s sermons resounding in his ears. “There’s nothing more important than family, John. When all is said and done, that’s all we have.” That was what he’d said at the kitchen table in their apartment on the Lower East Side, with the poorly concealed expectation that his son would give him a grandchild or two. It hadn’t worked out like that. Instead, the old man’s words had driven him back here—to his childhood home.
John was aware that his father didn’t include either Billy or his mother in the concept of family. That branch of the family tree had been chopped off with an axe the moment they stepped on the plane to New York. But it was different for John. It didn’t matter how many times he tried to erase his Swedish family from his consciousness. They would always be there, a pang of bad conscience. And leaving the country without saying goodbye was the coward’s way out.
John stood outside the front door. He rang the doorbell but no one came to open it. The bell had been broken back when they were kids, and it seemed Billy hadn’t gotten around out to fixing it. Maybe not many guests came to visit.
John knocked on the door a few times. Now there was some movement inside. He heard a chair being pushed back, scraping the floor—and then footsteps approaching. Billy’s face lit up when he opened the door, and he gave John one of his bear hugs.
“I was just wondering if you were going to turn up. Come on in! We’re celebrating. There’s cake and everything.”
He let go of John and showed him into the kitchen. John had to make an effort not to brush away the dirt he imagined his brother’s hands had left on his jacket.
The kitchen looked just as John remembered it from childhood. The walls were still covered with that white wallpaper with thin blue stripes and a border of flowers. On the gateleg table that his father had won at an auction, there were party provisions: a cake, whiskey, a wine box, and a bottle of pear juice.
“ Didn’t I tell you to leave?”
His mother spoke harshly, huddled in her wheelchair at the far end of the table. She gave hi
m a hostile look as she washed down her cake with a large mouthful of red wine. John ignored her and fixed his gaze on the girl sitting on the bench. Her ears were concealed by a pair of red headphones with a sticker on one ear. It had half peeled away and depicted a snowman in a cartoon winter landscape. She’d looked up from her tablet when he came in, but then became engrossed in her screen again.
“Nicole,” his brother said loudly and clearly, to make sure she heard him through the noise of the game or movie.
The girl removed her headphones.
“Go up to your room. You can take your snack with you.”
She balanced the plate of cake in one hand and glass of juice in the other as she walked through the kitchen and into the hall, the tablet tucked into the waist of her trousers. Billy waited until he heard her steps on the stairs and a door being shut upstairs before he said anything.
“Mom—I haven’t told you yet.”
“Told me what?” she hissed.
“I know you’re angry with him, but it was John who got me out. He arranged for the lawyer and suggested a new DNA test. Without him, I’d still be locked up.”
“It was because of him you ended up there,” she muttered.
“Yeah, but for ten years everyone in town thought I killed that girl. Now everyone knows it was someone else—and it’s all thanks to my brother.”
“Is this true?” she said to John. “Were you responsible for the new test?”
John could hear that she was slowly thawing. It would probably take a while, given the permafrost that had characterized their encounter at the hotel.
“It was technically the lawyer who requested the DNA test,” he said. “But it was my idea.”
“Jesus—you’re not as dumb as I thought,” she said, taking a fresh gulp of her wine. This reminded Billy that his own glass was empty and that John didn’t have a drink. He got up, rinsed a glass in the sink, and put it on the table.
“You like Jack Daniels, right?” he said, pouring at least three fingers for each of them.