The Fire Witness

  “Daniel,” the doctor says, “you don’t have to do this unless you want to. I can ask the police to come back later after you’ve had a chance to rest.”

  Daniel shakes his head and tries to breathe calmly.

  “Just give me a place,” Gunnarsson says.

  “Stockholm.”

  “Where in Stockholm?”

  “I … I don’t know anything.”

  “What the hell!” barks Gunnarsson.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Daniel’s chin is quivering. He turns his face away and starts sobbing.

  “She killed your wife with a hammer and—”

  Daniel throws his head back against the radiator so hard his glasses fall off into his lap.

  “It’s time for you to go,” says the doctor. “Not another word. Bringing you here was a mistake, and I will not allow any further questioning.”

  42

  The parking lot outside the provincial hospital in Sundsvall is almost empty. The long, low building looks depressing, especially under these gray skies. Its brown brickwork is broken by windows that seem to have closed their eyes to the world. Joona strides up a path lined by bushes and through the front door.

  There’s no one at the reception desk but in a moment a janitor comes by.

  “Where’s your forensics department?” asks Joona.

  “Two hundred and forty kilometers north of here,” the janitor says with a smile. “But if you want pathology, I can show you the way.”

  He takes Joona down to the basement and through a pair of heavy metal doors. Down the hall Joona sees a sign over another door: DEPARTMENT OF CLINICAL PATHOLOGY AND CYTOLOGY.

  “Good luck,” the janitor says as he points to the door.

  Joona thanks him and walks down the empty hall. It’s cold and the tiled floor is cracked in places and scuffed with wheel marks from gurneys and carts. He passes a laboratory and opens the door to the autopsy room. No one is there and the stainless-steel autopsy table is empty. The overhead fluorescent fixtures bounce a cold, hard light off the white tiled walls. Joona waits and after a few minutes the door squeaks open, and two people wheel in a gurney from the morgue.

  “Excuse me,” says Joona.

  A thin man in a lab coat turns around and his aviator glasses glare in the light. He’s one of Joona’s old friends, Dr. Nils Åhlén, the head doctor at the National Forensic Laboratory, in Stockholm. His colleagues and friends call him “The Needle.” With him is his assistant, a young doctor Joona knows only as Frippe. Frippe’s dyed black hair hangs in wisps down to his shoulders.

  “What are you doing here?” Joona asks.

  “A woman from the National Police threatened me,” The Needle says.

  “Anja.”

  “She terrified me. She was yelling that you’re not allowed to go all the way up to Umeå to talk to anyone in forensics.”

  “But we’re going to Nordfest as long as we’re here,” Frippe says. Joona notices black leather pants under his lab coat and cowboy boots swathed in blue protectors.

  “The Haunted are playing at Club Deströyer.” The Needle smiles.

  “That explains it,” says Joona.

  Frippe laughs.

  “We’ve just finished the woman, Elisabet Grim,” The Needle says. “The only unusual thing about her were the injuries on her hands.”

  “Defensive wounds?” asks Joona.

  “Except they’re on the wrong side,” says Frippe.

  “Perhaps she held her hands in front of her face,” Joona says quietly.

  “We’ll get back to her in a moment,” says The Needle. “First, let’s take a look at Miranda Eriksdotter.”

  “When did they die? Can you determine that?” asks Joona.

  “As you know, body temperature sinks.”

  “Algor mortis,” Joona says.

  “Right, and this cooling follows a billowing graph, which evens out to room temperature.”

  “He knows all that,” Frippe says.

  “So, with that and the rigor mortis as well as the lividity, we’ve determined that the girl and the woman died at approximately the same time late Friday night.”

  Joona watches them roll the gurney over, count to three, then effortlessly lift the body bag onto the autopsy table. Frippe opens the bag and the smell of moldy bread and dried blood escapes. Miranda is in the same position in which she was found: her hands over her face and her ankles crossed.

  Joona knows that the rigor mortis won’t have passed yet and that it is going to take some effort to move her hands away from her face. For a moment he wonders if perhaps it isn’t Miranda behind those hands. Perhaps her face is gone or her eyes were poked out. Perhaps she didn’t want her face to be seen.

  “We didn’t receive an examination request,” The Needle says. “Why is she covering her face like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Joona says.

  Frippe is photographing the body carefully.

  “I take it this is a forensic autopsy and that you will need a certified autopsy report?” The Needle says.

  Joona nods.

  “I could use a secretary,” mutters The Needle as he walks around the body.

  “Now you’re just complaining again,” Frippe says, and smiles.

  “So I was,” The Needle says. He pauses behind Miranda’s head and then completes his circuit.

  Joona is reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s idea that only the living insist on distinguishing between the living and the dead. Rilke thought that other beings, such as angels, didn’t notice any difference.

  “The lividity indicates that the victim has not been moved,” The Needle starts.

  “The way I read the blood spatter, I’m sure that she was moved immediately after she was killed,” Joona says. “Her body would still have been limp when it was placed on the bed.”

  Frippe nods. “If she was moved right away, she won’t show any lividity elsewhere.”

  Joona watches quietly as the doctors examine the body. He’s thinking that his own daughter is not much younger than this girl whose life has been stolen.

  The yellow network of veins has started to show beneath her white skin, and her flat stomach has started to bloat and has darkened.

  Joona observes everything the doctors are doing and listens as they describe what they’re seeing, but he’s thinking of what he saw at the scene of the crime.

  The Needle determines that there are no defensive injuries, no soft-tissue injuries, no indications of a fight or domestic abuse. Perhaps she didn’t see the blow coming, Joona thinks. Perhaps she just sat there and waited for it.

  The doctors pull some hair out by the roots for comparison tests and fill in EDTA tubes with blood, then The Needle scrapes beneath her fingernails and turns to Joona.

  “No traces of skin. She did not defend herself.”

  “I know,” Joona says.

  They start examining the skull injuries, and Joona comes closer to watch.

  “Strong, blunt trauma to the head. Most likely cause of death,” The Needle says, noticing Joona’s close attention.

  “From the front?” Joona asks.

  “From the front, though slightly to the side.” The Needle points at the bloody hair. “Depression fracture on the temporal bone. We’ll do a CT scan, but I imagine the major blood vessels behind the skull were ruptured and bone fragments impaled the brain.”

  “As with Elisabet Grim, we’re going to find trauma to the frontal lobe,” Frippe says.

  “Brain tissue in the hair,” The Needle says.

  “There were broken blood vessels, and blood and cerebral spinal fluid had run through her nostrils,” Frippe says.

  “And in your opinion, they died at about the same time,” Joona says.

  Frippe nods.

  “They’ve both been hit from the front. The same cause of death for both of them,” Joona says. “The same murder weapon—”

  “No,” The Needle says. “The murder weapon was not the same.”

 
“But the hammer,” Joona murmurs.

  “Elisabet’s skull was crushed by a hammer,” The Needle says. “But Miranda was killed by a rock.”

  Joona stares at him. “She was killed by a rock?”

  43

  Joona stayed in the autopsy room until he saw Miranda’s face. He felt uneasy as the doctors forced her hands away. His earlier thought that she didn’t want her face to be seen rang in his brain.

  Now he’s sitting at Gunnarsson’s desk in the Sundsvall police station. He’s reading through the early technical reports. A woman is sitting a few feet away in front of a computer. Her telephone rings and she mumbles something as she checks the number display.

  One wall is covered with maps and pictures of the little boy, Dante Abrahamsson. There are binders and heaps of paper in the bookshelves lining the other walls. A copier rumbles ceaselessly. A radio is playing in the lunch room and when the pop music stops, Joona is able to hear the police alert for the third time.

  “We have a missing person alert,” the radio host says. “The police are searching for a fifteen-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, probably together. The girl has long blond hair and the boy is wearing a dark blue sweater and corduroy pants. They were last seen in a red Toyota Auris on Highway 86 heading toward Sundsvall. Please contact the police at 11414 if you have any information regarding these missing children.”

  Joona gets up, goes to the empty lunch room, and changes the channel to P2. He pours himself a cup of coffee. The radio plays a scratched recording of an unusually clear soprano voice. It is Birgit Nilsson singing the role of Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.

  Joona sits back down at the desk and it occurs to him that the girl who took the little boy is probably psychotic. He pictures them hiding in a garage. Perhaps the boy has been forced to lie beneath a blanket with tape over his mouth. Perhaps he’s tied up.

  If he is still alive, he must be terribly frightened.

  Joona continues to read the technical report. It confirms that it was Elisabet’s key in the lock to the isolation room at Birgittagården and that the boots that had left bloody footprints in the main house were the same ones found in Vicky Bennet’s closet.

  We have two murders, Joona thinks. One is primary and the other is secondary. Miranda is the primary victim, but to get to her, the suspect had to take Elisabet’s key.

  The technicians’ reconstructed chain of events suggest that an argument could have been the triggering factor, even if there had been rivalry for some time. According to the report Vicky Bennet had gotten the hammer and the boots before lights-out and waited in her room. Once the other girls had gone to sleep, she’d approached Elisabet and demanded the key. Elisabet refused and fled through the hallway, out the door, and into the brewery. Vicky had followed her, killed her with the hammer, and taken the key. She’d returned to the main building, unlocked the isolation room, and killed Miranda. For some reason, she’d lifted Miranda onto the bed and placed Miranda’s hands over her face and crossed her legs at the ankles. She then returned to her room, hid the hammer, the blanket, and the boots, climbed out the window, and fled into the forest.

  Joona puts the report down on the desk. He knows that it will be several weeks before the lab has the test results. Without that information, the crime scene investigators have assumed that both Elisabet and Miranda were killed with the hammer.

  But Miranda was killed by a rock.

  Why was she killed by a rock when Vicky had a hammer?

  Joona looks carefully at every photograph sent with the report. There is Miranda, lying on the bed, her skin as pale as porcelain, her ankles crossed, a small bruise on her leg, a tiny jewel in her belly button, her hands over her face.

  He puts himself in the mind of the killer, as he usually does, and forces himself to see each action, each frightening choice, as absolutely necessary: the simplest or the best solution right that minute.

  It’s unlikely that the killer thought this murder bestial or appalling. It could have been rational or even enticing.

  Sometimes the killer can’t see beyond one blow at a time. He needs to strike just this one blow—he justifies just this one blow—and there is no thought of the next until the need for it comes over him like a wave. Time is warped, and the murder can seem epic, starting with the first blow and ending years later with the last, although in reality it might take no more than thirty seconds.

  The evidence points to Vicky Bennet. Everyone believes she killed both Elisabet and Miranda, and yet no one believes that she is capable, physically or mentally, of murder.

  Every human being is capable of murder, Joona thinks. He puts the report back in Gunnarsson’s folder. We see this in our dreams and our fantasies. Everyone is violent inside, but most people have tamed and caged their inner beast.

  Joona gets up from the desk just seconds before Gunnarsson arrives. He hangs up his wrinkled coat and goes into the cafeteria. When he comes out with a cup of coffee in his hand and sees Joona, he breaks into a grin.

  “Aren’t they missing you in Stockholm yet?”

  “Not yet,” Joona says.

  Gunnarsson searches his jacket for his cigarettes and turns to the woman at the computer.

  “All reports go directly to me.”

  “Yes,” she says, but she doesn’t look up.

  Gunnarsson mumbles to himself and fishes out a cigarette and lighter.

  “How did the interview with Daniel Grim go?” asks Joona.

  “Fine, not that it’s any of your business. But I had to be damned careful.”

  “What did he know about Vicky?”

  “Nothing the police can use.”

  “Did you ask about Dennis?”

  “That doctor was on my ass like the man’s mother and cut off questioning.”

  Gunnarsson pats his pockets, not noticing he’s holding a cigarette.

  “I want the report from Holger Jalmert as soon as it comes in,” Joona says. “I also want the forensic examination results and—”

  “Get the fuck out of my sandbox,” says Gunnarsson. He smiles widely at the woman, but falters when he sees Joona’s serious, steely gaze.

  “You have no idea how to find Vicky Bennet and the boy,” Joona says. “And you have no idea how to proceed with the investigation.”

  “I’m waiting for tips from the public,” Gunnarsson says. “There’s always someone who’s seen something.”

  44

  That morning, Flora woke up before her alarm clock went off. Hans-Gunnar needed breakfast in bed at eight fifteen sharp. Once he got up, Flora aired out his room and made his bed, while Ewa sat in a chair, dressed in yellow sweatpants and a skin-colored bra, keeping an eye on Flora. She got up to check that the sheet was completely smooth and that the corners were tucked in precisely. The crocheted bedcover needed to hang evenly on each side of the bed. Flora had to remake the bed before it passed Ewa’s inspection.

  Now it’s lunchtime. Flora returns home with groceries as well as cigarettes for Hans-Gunnar. She hands him the change and waits while he examines the receipt.

  “Goddamn, that cheese was expensive,” he says.

  “You told me to be sure to buy cheddar,” Flora says.

  “Not if it’s this damned expensive. You should realize you need to buy a different kind if this one is too expensive.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought—”

  Flora is stopped by a powerful blow to the side of her head. She’s knocked to her knees and her ear begins to ring. Her cheek is burning. Hans-Gunner stands over her, staring, until she gets up.

  “You said cheddar,” Ewa says from the sofa. “You said cheddar or nothing, so it’s not her fault.”

  Hans-Gunnar mutters that they’re both idiots and goes out onto the balcony to smoke. Flora puts away the groceries, then goes into the maid’s room and sits on the bed. She touches her cheek and thinks that she’s tired of Hans-Gunnar’s punches. There are days when he hits her more than once. She can tell when he’s
working up a head of steam because he keeps looking at her, and normally he ignores her. The worst thing is not the blows but the way he looks at her and breathes afterward.

  He never hit her when she was a child. In those days, he worked and was almost never home. She remembers once his showing her different countries on the globe he kept in his bedroom.

  She can hear Ewa and Hans-Gunnar leave the apartment. Flora looks over at the glass horse-and-carriage on her dresser. It was a gift from one of her teachers. In one of the dresser drawers there’s an old toy from her childhood, a bright blue Smurf with blond hair and high-heeled shoes. In the middle drawer is a pile of pressed handkerchiefs. Flora gets up and opens the drawer, shifts the handkerchiefs, and takes out an elegant green dress, which she bought at the beginning of the summer at the Salvation Army store. She never wears it except in her room, but she likes to try it on whenever Ewa and Hans-Gunnar are out.

  She’s buttoning it up when she hears voices coming from the kitchen. The radio is on. She walks out to turn it off and notices that Ewa and Hans-Gunnar snacked on cake before they left. There are crumbs on the floor by the pantry. They’ve left a glass of strawberry juice on the counter by the sink. It’s half full. The bottle is still out as well.

  Flora gets a dishrag, washes the glass, then wipes up the crumbs from the floor.

  There’s a news report on the radio about a murder in northern Sweden. A young girl has been found dead in a youth home for girls.

  Flora rinses out the dishrag and hangs it on the faucet.

  The police are refusing to comment, but a reporter has tracked down a few of the girls who’d been living at the home and the girls are being interviewed live.

  “I wanted to see what was going on, so I pushed ahead of the other girls,” says one girl. “I couldn’t see much because the others pulled me away from the door. I screamed for a bit, but then I realized it didn’t matter much.”

  Flora picks up the bottle of strawberry juice and heads to the refrigerator.

  “Can you tell us what you saw?”

  “Yes, I saw Miranda and she was lying on the bed, like this, just like this, see?”