The Bucket List

by Peter Mohlin

  “No need,” he said.

  42

  For the first time in years, Heimer had blisters from his shoes. He sat on the sofa with the laptop next to him and twisted his leg into an uncomfortable position so that he could examine the bubble of skin on his heel. It was red and hurt when he pressed it. The combination of new shoes and the manic running of the last few days had been painful. But pushing his body to the limit was the only way to silence the anxiety gnawing away inside him.

  He leaned back against the sofa, rubbed his eyes, and tried to relax. All he had thought about in the last few days was the anonymous letter. Heimer had visited the site the evening before to familiarize himself with the setup. There hadn’t been many chatters online. But now, when he opened the laptop and logged on, the situation was different. There was a Friday night vibe and the chatrooms were filled with people who preferred socializing on their screens to meeting up in real life.

  Heimer wished the letter writer had given him another nickname. Froggy divulged nothing about gender, and it made him more popular than he would’ve liked. After just a few minutes, his screen was filled with messages from screen names like HotGuy and his mates. They wanted to know whether he was a girl and whether he wanted to get to know them a little better. When he ignored them they raised their voices.

  Come on. Pics please.

  Don’t be such a cunt.

  Heimer wanted to reply to the chatters and tell them he was a man of almost sixty who was NOT going to send any pics. But that would only trigger a fresh avalanche of messages. He was already busy enough keeping track of the stream of visitors logging in and out of the Lobby of the chatroom.

  The clock in the top right corner of the screen moved forward. It was 7:26—just four minutes left until the appointed time.

  Is it your time of the month or what?

  The messages kept coming, but there were gradually fewer of them. The boys—many of them no doubt men his own age—had presumably found someone else to harass.

  He thought about Sissela and how angry she got when he hadn’t given the first letter to the police. This time she wouldn’t find out, given that she was occupied with her director of finance. The thought of the two of them naked in a Paris hotel room made him sick.

  He glanced at the time. Still no Nadja6543.

  Had the letter writer gotten cold feet and called it all off? Doubtful. The sort of person who started something like this probably had sufficient nerve to see it through. He found himself thinking of the person as a woman, even though it could just as easily be a man.

  Then it arrived—the message he’d been waiting for. Nadja must have entered the chatroom without him noticing. He or she was as taciturn online as they were in their letters. Switch to Salon was their instruction.

  Heimer felt overcome by nerves. The thing he had visualized so many times over the last few days was now happening. He read the message again and tried to find the Salon. The mouse was harder to move when his fingers were slick with sweat, but he eventually managed to open the virtual door to the new chatroom.

  The letter writer was waiting for him inside.

  Are you alone?

  Yes, Heimer replied.

  Good. Listen carefully.

  Heimer nodded at the computer and then remembered that Nadja couldn’t see him.

  I’m listening, he wrote, instead. He found himself holding his breath.

  It was as if the letter writer were reaching through the screen with their hands and squeezing his throat. Nadja had all the power and he had none.

  The text appeared so quickly that it had to have been written in advance and then pasted into the chatroom.

  In ten days’ time, have 300,000 kronor ready in a bag. Drop it off in locker 109 at the train station in Karlstad at exactly 2:00 P.M. Lock the locker, take the key with you, and get on the bus to Säffle leaving at 2:12.

  Heimer scribbled the information into a notebook. His hands were shaking so much that he struggled to write. Despite the absurdity of the situation, he wasn’t surprised. He had spent several days and nights thinking—and he had been expecting something like this.

  He put down the pen and returned to the keyboard.

  Can I trust you? he wrote.

  The answer came quickly.

  Yes.

  Heimer brushed his hair from his forehead. It wasn’t reassuring. The answer was so brief and automatic. Just yes—nothing else. However, he knew that more words wouldn’t have made him feel any better. He had asked a question and Nadja had answered. He’d have to be satisfied with that.

  How do you know? he wrote.

  This time the answer took some time. The letter writer needed time to think. The emptiness of the Salon seemed to echo. It was just the two of them in there. Heimer stared intensely at the screen, as if it were possible to see through it and make out the contours of the person on the other side.

  Eventually, his vision began to flicker and he had to close his eyes for a bit until it calmed down. When he opened them he still hadn’t received an answer. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote:

  Who are you?

  The answer came quickly.

  Nadja6543 has left the room.

  43

  In order to avoid starting the engine—and giving away their position on a stakeout—some of the unmarked police cars in New York City were equipped with portable electric heaters that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter. They were like gold dust during the winter months when officers working surveillance at night were freezing their asses off. The Swedes didn’t feel the cold the same way. John had searched both under the seats and in the trunk without finding a heater. Either the Scandinavian cops were hardened to it, or they hadn’t come up with the idea yet. He guessed the latter.

  His thin suit trousers felt cold against his thighs and his toes had begun to go numb in his Loake shoes. He’d already dismissed the idea of driving away from the residential neighborhood to warm up the car a bit. Primer could still be awake and might get suspicious if there was activity out on the quiet street in the middle of the night.

  John lowered the side window a crack to clear the foggy windshield and checked the time.

  11:45 P.M.

  Thus far, the surveillance had been undramatic. Primer had spent most of the afternoon and evening at the kitchen table with his laptop, and then he had gone to bed. The house was dark and the whole neighborhood seemed to be asleep.

  John turned on the radio—for the umpteenth time during the stakeout—and twiddled the tuner for a while before turning it back off.

  He didn’t feel like himself.

  How many hours, days, weeks had he spent like this? Keeping an eye on people under police protection or watching suspected criminals had been part of his daily work as a detective in New York City and he never had any issues with it. Quite the opposite—he liked it.

  But now it was different. After everything that had happened in Baltimore, situations like this made his skin crawl—times when he was alone with just himself and no distractions to divert his thoughts. He found himself putting his hand to his stomach, as if looking for Trevor’s tumors in his own body. The friends’ fates were so closely entwined that it wouldn’t have surprised him if he too had cancer.

  He took a deep breath and reclined the seat back a notch. Then he saw lights in the rearview mirror and sat up again. On the other side of the sparse clump of trees, there was a taxi that had just stopped. John turned toward the house. If Primer had called a cab and he jumped into it, he’d have a head start. He was relieved when he saw the door of the taxi open and a woman get out. It hadn’t been ordered for a pickup—it was doing a drop-off.

  The woman took a shortcut through the trees and then walked along the dark path past the bus shelters and toward John. He saw her weaving between puddles glittering like small lakes on the asphalt. In the meantime, he noticed that the taxi hadn’t left—it was still there with its engine running. He sank farther down into his
seat while waiting for her to pass. When no one appeared, he looked around and out the back window. The woman was no longer in sight. She must live in one of the first houses and had presumably vanished into the front yard.

  A gentle tap on the driver’s side window made him jump.

  “You’re not drifting off, are you?” said a familiar voice through the crack in the window.

  “No. How the fuck would I in this cold?” said John.

  Mona walked around the car and got in. She handed him a brown paper bag.

  “Only McDonald’s was open, I’m afraid. But I guess like all Americans you like fast food …”

  “Stereotype or fact?”

  “Both, I suspect.”

  Mona looked at him searchingly.

  “You look tired. Go home and get some sleep—I’ll take over. I asked the taxi to wait.”

  John looked in the rearview mirror and saw the black car was still there, ready to take him home to the apartment at Bryggudden and his warm bed. But what would he do there? Lie, sleepless, staring at the night sky through the skylight? He was barely fifty meters from the man who made Billy’s life hell. Leaving now would feel like betrayal.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, retrieving a hot cup of coffee from the paper bag.

  Mona ran her hand through her wet hair and then opened her bag.

  “You left this in the basement,” she said, handing over John’s rolled-up overcoat.

  “Thanks.”

  She used her phone flashlight to signal to the taxi, which slowly departed into the darkness.

  “Which one is his?” she said, nodding at the row of identical houses.

  “On the left, with the blue SUV outside. He hasn’t left all evening.”

  “No visits?”

  “No.”

  John took a sip of coffee and felt its warmth spread through his chest. He could smell from Mona’s breath that she had drunk wine and he stifled the impulse to ask where she’d been. It was none of his business and he didn’t really care. When it came to life outside of work, she had an aura of integrity around her. During the short time they had worked together he’d found out nothing about her private life—apart from the fling with Tinder Martin, and he got that through spying.

  He dug into the bag and found chicken nuggets, fries, and dipping sauces, before opting for a hamburger. However, after he’d pulled off the wrapper and taken a few bites, he put it back. Even though he hadn’t eaten since lunch—apart from the bar of chocolate someone had left in the glove compartment—he wasn’t hungry. Smelling the fast food was all it had taken to kill his appetite.

  “I’ve checked him out,” said Mona, pulling her notebook from her pocket.

  She angled it toward the windshield so that the streetlight would illuminate the text.

  “Primer has been registered at this address since 1989. He’s never been married and doesn’t appear to have any children. He trained as a police officer in Stockholm and did a six-month assignment in Helsingborg. After that he came back to Karlstad and spent three years working as a beat cop before taking his detective inspector exams at the end of the nineties.”

  She paused and flashed one of her barely perceptible smiles at John.

  “You’ll like this.”

  “What?”

  “From the autumn of 2001 he worked in narcotics—and he was there for almost a decade.”

  “Jesus—that’s how he got the cocaine and sold it to Emelie.”

  “It’s a theory, at least,” said Mona. “But he must have done a pretty tidy job. There are no reports about missing evidence.”

  “Mister Hyde,” said John, looking at the dark house. “If Emelie knew Primer was a police detective and also dealing drugs, she might very well have called him out on it.”

  “Yes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he let her pay with sex.”

  “What a bastard,” he said, thinking about how well the scenario correlated with what Matilda Jacoby had told him about Emelie’s destructive behavior.

  Mona looked at her notebook again.

  “Apparently he was on temporary assignment in Anton Lundberg’s department in the summer of 2009 when Emelie went missing. Anyway, Primer went back to narcotics once the AckWe investigation was closed and stayed on for another year or so before ending up with Lundberg again.”

  John pulled out his phone and started searching through his contacts. Eventually, he found the name he was looking for.

  “What are you doing?” said Mona.

  “I’m calling Matilda Jacoby. If it was Primer that Emelie went to meet, she may be able to confirm it.”

  She pulled the phone away from him and ended the call before it started ringing.

  “We’re not going to call anyone until we can tie him to the scene.”

  “But Matilda might have kept quiet precisely because he was with the police.”

  “Matilda Jacoby is a junkie,” said Mona. “If we give her sensitive information, she won’t hesitate for a second to sell it to the media as soon as her comedown gets too tough and she needs cash. We need to talk to her—but not until we hear back from the lab in Linköping.”

  She handed the phone back to John and kept her gaze on him to emphasize the seriousness of what she’d just said.

  John was woken by Mona tapping his thigh. He pulled his coat off his face and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It said 2:31 A.M. What felt like a quick nap had been almost two hours of sleep. He shifted his seat upright and stretched his aching body as best he could in the cramped space.

  “He’s up and moving about,” said Mona, pointing through the windshield.

  John rubbed his eyes and turned his gaze to Primer’s house. A light was on in the downstairs hall.

  “He came downstairs a little while ago and disappeared into the room with the small square window.”

  “That’s the bathroom. He’s probably just having a piss,” said John.

  “Maybe. But I’m not so sure.”

  “No?”

  “No, it looked like he was carrying something.”

  John looked at Mona.

  “Carrying what?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  John felt the last of the sleepiness leave his body. They sat in silence for a long time, trying to see what was happening inside the house. The light was switched off and a dark figure emerged into the kitchen. The fluorescent tube above the sink flashed and an angry white hue illuminated the room.

  “He’s dressed,” said John.

  Mona nodded tensely.

  They watched Primer open the fridge door and get out a carton, which he drank from. John guessed it was milk or juice. Then he returned to the hall, turned left, and disappeared once again from sight.

  “What’s he doing?” Mona whispered to herself.

  It had begun to drizzle and John closed the side window to stop water from getting inside the car. A moment later, Primer returned to the kitchen—he was now wearing a coat—and turned off the light.

  Mona fell back into her seat.

  “Jesus! He really is leaving,” she said.

  Then the front door opened and Primer emerged onto the front step carrying two suitcases.

  At the same time, the rain grew in intensity. Water streamed down the windshield and it became harder to see what was happening by the house. John didn’t dare turn on the wipers in case Primer noticed.

  “Do we arrest him?”

  He could see Mona thinking as she stared out into the wet darkness.

  “No,” she said finally.

  “Why not? If he heads off in his car there’s a high risk of something going wrong. It’s two against one here and we have the element of surprise on our side.”

  “We can’t arrest a senior detective until we’re absolutely sure,” she interrupted. “It’ll be a damn mess if we happen to be wrong.”

  “We’re not wrong. He got up in the middle of the night and put two suitcases in the trunk of his car. Surely that says it
all?”

  Primer shut the trunk, turned on the engine, and reversed into the street. The headlights swept across the unmarked police car while John and Mona crouched down in the front seats. When they looked up again they saw two taillights leaving the neighborhood.

  “Follow him,” she said.

  John waited until Primer had vanished from sight before pressing the ignition button. He drove slowly with his headlights off along the narrow streets, before eventually reaching the main road. He put his foot down, and didn’t ease up until he was at a safe distance from Primer and could hang back.

  “Oslo or Stockholm?” said Mona, plugging her charger into the car’s USB port.

  John put on his seatbelt to silence the beeping safety warning and focused on the red lights ahead. They got their answer at the first exit. Primer turned left and headed onto the E18 going north—toward the Swedish capital.

  Mona scrolled through her contacts and made a call.

  “Hello—this is Ejdewik at National Crime. I need to check whether a certain individual has a booking with any airline today, and if so, where he’s going.”

  She waited on the line.

  “His name is Bernt Primer—and he’s probably traveling from Arlanda,” she added, and read out his social security number from her notebook.

  She waited again while the person searched the database. Meanwhile, Primer was stuck behind a truck and the distance between them was shrinking rapidly. The illumination from the many lights on the back of the truck shone into the blue SUV. The figure ahead was still as a statue at the wheel. John eased his foot off the accelerator.

  “Okay, great,” said Mona after a long pause. “Gate number?”

  She offered concise thanks, ended the call, and turned to John.

  “He’s booked on a flight leaving Arlanda at 7:10.”

  “Destination?”

  “Bangkok. Connecting in Vienna,” she said. “What a damn fool.”

  Thailand, John thought to himself. Primer had mentioned the country—his holidays there and his plans to buy a house once he retired.

  “We don’t need to wait for the lab results,” he said. “We’ve got enough to stop him.”