The Fire Witness

“You can try to talk to them yourself,” Daniel says to Joona. “You can tell which ones I indicated earlier fairly quickly.”

  “Thanks.” Joona starts to leave.

  “Keep in mind that they’ve just lost a friend,” Daniel calls after him.

  Joona stops and turns to look at him. “Are you aware which room Miranda was found in?”

  Daniel shakes his head. “No, but I assumed …”

  “I find it hard to believe that the room she was found in was her own room,” Joona continues. “It is almost empty. On the right side of the hall, next to the bathrooms.”

  “The isolation room,” Daniel says.

  “Why are the girls put in that room?”

  “Because …” Daniel falls silent and appears to think of something.

  Joona asks, “What is on your mind?”

  “The door should have been locked.”

  “There is a key in the lock.”

  “Which key?” Daniel asks. “Only Elisabet has the key to the isolation room.”

  “Who is Elisabet?” asks Gunnarsson.

  “My wife,” Daniel replies. “She was the one on call last night.”

  “Where is she now?” asks Sonja.

  “What do you mean?” Daniel asks.

  “Your wife—is she at home?” Sonja asks.

  Daniel appears surprised and unsure of himself.

  “I assumed that Elisabet went with Nina in the ambulance,” he says slowly.

  “No, Nina Molander was alone,” Sonja says.

  “Of course Elisabet went with Nina! She would never let a student—”

  “I was the first person on the scene,” Sonja says abruptly. Her exhaustion has made her voice hoarse and brusque. “There was no staff here. Just a group of terrified girls.”

  “But my wife—”

  “Call her now,” Sonja says.

  “I’ve tried repeatedly. Her phone is off,” Daniel says softly. “I thought … I assumed—”

  “This is a real goddamn mess,” Gunnarsson says.

  “My wife, Elisabet … She has heart trouble,” Daniel Grim continued. His voice becomes even shakier. “Maybe she … she could have …”

  “Try to speak calmly,” Joona says.

  “My wife has an enlarged heart and she … she worked here last night … She should be here … Her phone is off …”

  21

  Daniel looks at the two officers in despair. He pulls at the zipper on his jacket and keeps repeating that his wife has heart trouble. The dog barks and pulls on its leash hard enough that it almost strangles. It wheezes and then starts barking again.

  Joona walks up to the dog, murmuring in a soothing tone, and lets him off the leash. The second it’s released, the dog dashes across the yard. Joona sprints after it. The dog starts scratching at the door to an outbuilding, whining and panting.

  Daniel stares at Joona and the dog for a moment and then starts to walk toward them. Gunnarsson yells at him to stay put, but he keeps walking. His body is stiff and his face contorts with fear. The gravel crunches beneath his feet.

  Joona tries to calm the dog down. He grabs it by the collar and drags it away from the door, while Gunnarsson runs across the yard and grasps Daniel’s coat, but Daniel tugs loose. As he yanks free, he slips on the gravel and scrapes his hand. He gets back up. The dog keeps howling, straining at its collar, its body quivering. A uniformed police officer moves to block the door, but Daniel tries to push past him.

  “Elisabet! Elisabet! I have to—”

  The police officer grips Daniel by the shoulder and steers him away, while Gunnarsson reaches Joona and helps him get the dog under control.

  “It could be my wife in there!” screams Daniel. “My wife—”

  Joona feels a pang of pain behind his eyes as he pulls on a pair of latex gloves.

  There’s a wooden sign hanging below the low roof. It says BREWERY.

  Joona opens the door slowly and peers into the dark. A tiny window is cracked and hundreds of flies are buzzing in the air. There are bloody paw prints all over the glazed tile floor. Joona makes sure not to step on them as he moves to the side to look beyond the stone fireplace.

  He sees the back panel of a cell phone next to a trail of smeared blood. The flies grow louder. A woman is lying on the ground with her head in a pool of blood. She looks about fifty years old. Her mouth is open. She is wearing jeans, rose-colored socks, and a gray cardigan. From her posture, it looks as if the woman had tried to slither away, but then her head and face were smashed in.

  22

  Pia Abrahamsson knows she’s driving over the speed limit. She’d hoped to get on the road a bit earlier, but the meeting in Östersund for pastors of the Church of Sweden dragged on later than usual. She glances at her son, Dante, in the rearview mirror. His head is leaning on the side of the child seat and his eyes are closed beneath his glasses. His little face is calm, and the car seems softly cloaked by the morning fog.

  She reduces her speed to eighty kilometers an hour, even though the road heads straight through the spruce forest. The highway is hauntingly empty. Twenty minutes ago she passed a lumber truck filled with logs, but since then she hasn’t seen a single vehicle.

  She screws up her eyes to see the road properly. Tall fences flash past her on either side. They are meant to keep wildlife off the road. They’re not meant to protect wildlife but to protect people. People are the most frightened animals on the planet, she thinks.

  She glances again at Dante in the child seat.

  She was already a pastor in the parish of Hässelby when she found out she was pregnant. The father was the editor of the newspaper Church Times. She found herself standing and staring at the results of the pregnancy test, realizing that she was thirty-six years old. She decided to keep the baby but not the father. Her son was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

  The sleeping boy’s head has fallen to his chest and his security blanket has slipped to the floor. Before falling asleep, he was so tired that he cried at the slightest frustration. He cried because he didn’t like the way the car smelled like Mamma’s perfume; he cried because Super Mario had been eaten up.

  Pia Abrahamsson realized she had to pee urgently. She’d had too much coffee at the meeting. It’s at least twenty kilometers to Sundsvall and more than four hundred to Stockholm. There has to be an open gas station soon.

  She tells herself that she shouldn’t stop the car in the middle of the forest. She shouldn’t and yet she finds she is stopping anyway.

  Pia Abrahamsson, who often preaches that there is a reason for everything that happens, is about to be the victim of chance.

  She turns onto a logging road and stops at the boom that prevents traffic from entering. Behind the boom, a gravel road stretches through the forest to a storehouse for lumber. She thinks she’ll walk just beyond the view of the road and she’ll leave the car door open in case Dante wakes up. Which he does.

  “Mamma, don’t go.”

  “Sweetie,” Pia says. “Mamma has to pee. I’ll leave the door open so I can see you the whole time.”

  He looks at her with sleepy eyes.

  “Don’t leave me alone,” he whispers.

  She smiles and pats his sweaty cheek. She knows that she’s overprotective, but she can’t help it.

  “Just an itty-bitty minute,” she says.

  Dante grabs for her hand, but she pulls away. She ducks under the boom and walks along the gravel road. She turns and winks at Dante.

  What if someone sees her with her bare backside and films her with a cell phone? Pia envisions the clip circulating on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter: “The Pissing Pastor.”

  She shudders at the thought, then steps off the road and into the trees. Heavy forestry machinery, harvesters, and bulldozers have torn up the earth.

  As soon as she’s sure that no one can see her from the main road, she lifts her skirt, moves her underwear to one side, and squats. She’s tired, and she steadies herself with one hand
in the soft moss that grows at the base of the trees.

  Relief fills her as she shuts her eyes. When she looks up again, she sees something incomprehensible. An animal has come out of the forest on two legs. It’s walking on the logging road, bent over and stumbling. A tiny figure covered in dirt, blood, and clay.

  Pia holds her breath. It isn’t an animal after all. It’s almost as if a part of the forest has freed itself and come alive. As if it’s a little girl made from twigs.

  She gets up and follows it. She tries to say something but can’t find her voice. A branch breaks beneath her foot. Rain has started to fall.

  She moves as if she’s in a nightmare. She can’t make her legs run.

  She sees between the trees that the creature has reached the car. There are dirty cloth bands hanging from the strange girl’s hands.

  Pia stumbles up the gravel road and watches the girl sweep her purse off the driver’s seat onto the ground. She gets in and shuts the door.

  “Dante!” Pia struggles to say.

  The car starts up and drives over her cell phone. It scrapes the guardrail as it turns around and onto the road. Then it straightens out and roars away.

  Pia is crying as she reaches the boom. Her whole body is shaking. How could this have happened? The twig girl appeared from nowhere, and now the car and her son are gone.

  She bends down under the boom then walks onto the long, empty road. She is not screaming. She can’t scream. The only sound she hears is her own breathing.

  23

  The rain is beginning to beat against his windshield. Mads Jensen, a Danish long-haul trucker, sees a woman standing in the middle of the road barely two hundred yards in front of him. He swears and blows the horn. The woman seems to come alive at the sound of the horn, but instead of moving, she stays in the middle of the road. The trucker honks the horn again and the woman takes a step toward him, lifting her chin to look right at him.

  Mads has already put on the brakes and feels the weight of the semitrailer press against the old Fliegel cab. He has to brake harder while gearing down. The transmission is bad and there’s knocking in the steering axle. A shudder goes through the trailer before he manages to bring the vehicle to a full stop.

  The woman is just standing there, barely three yards from the headlights. Now Jensen can see that she’s wearing the dress of a Lutheran pastor beneath her jean jacket. The little white rectangle at her collar shines against the black backdrop of her shirt. The woman’s face is devoid of color. When their eyes meet through the windshield, tears begin to stream down her face.

  Mads turns on his warning lights and leaves the cab. Heat and the smell of diesel stream from the motor. As he walks around the cab, he sees that the woman is now leaning on a headlight and is having trouble breathing.

  “What is all this?” asks Mads.

  She turns to look at him. Her eyes are wide open.

  “Do you need help?”

  She nods and he leads her to the side of the cab. The rain is getting heavier and the skies are darkening.

  “Has someone done something bad to you?”

  At first she hesitates, but then she climbs into the passenger seat. He closes the door behind her, hurries around the cab, and gets into the driver’s seat.

  “I can’t keep blocking the road,” he says. “Do you mind if I get going again?”

  She doesn’t answer, so he starts the motor and the tractor-trailer moves forward. He turns on the windshield wipers.

  “Are you hurt?” he asks.

  She shakes her head and holds her hand in front of her mouth.

  “My son,” she whispers. “My son …”

  “What did you say? What happened?”

  “She took my child …”

  “Would you like me to call the police?” he asks. “Let me call the police.”

  “Oh God!” the woman moans.

  24

  The wipers sweep the rain away as fast as they can. The road ahead appears to be boiling under the downpour.

  Pia is shivering and she can’t calm down. She realizes she can’t speak coherently, but she’s able to listen as the truck driver talks with the emergency center. He’s being advised to continue along Highway 86 and then take Highway 330 to Timrå, where an ambulance can take Pia to Sundsvall Hospital.

  “What are you talking about?” asks Pia, suddenly finding her voice. “I don’t need an ambulance! You have to stop the car! That’s all that matters!”

  The truck driver gives her a look and Pia realizes that she has to pull herself together and make herself clear. Even though she feels as if she’s falling through space, she must sound rational.

  “My son has been kidnapped,” she says.

  “She is saying that her son has been kidnapped,” reports the truck driver.

  “The police must stop the car. It’s a Toyota … a red Toyota Auris. I can’t remember the license plate number.”

  The truck driver asks the operator to hold on for a minute.

  “It should be ahead of us on the road. You have to stop it. My son is only four years old. He was still in his car seat when I had to …”

  The truck driver repeats her words and then explains that he is on Highway 86 just thirty-eight kilometers from Timrå.

  “We have to hurry!”

  The truck driver slows down as they approach a broken traffic light before a roundabout. The truck thunders as it rolls over the speed bumps. They pass a white brick building as they pick up speed and keep heading down Highway 86.

  The emergency center has connected the truck driver to the police. A female officer in a roaming squad car picks it up. She explains that her name is Mirja Zlatnek and she is only twenty-nine kilometers away from them on Highway 330 in Djupängen.

  Pia Abrahamsson takes over the telephone. She swallows hard to force away her nausea. Her voice is calm even though it is shaking.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “My son has been kidnapped. The car is on—” She turns to the truck driver. “What highway is this?”

  “Highway 86,” he says.

  “How far ahead are they?” asks the policewoman.

  “Perhaps five minutes ahead of us,” Pia says.

  “Have you already driven past Indal?”

  “Indal,” Pia says loudly.

  “Nineteen kilometers ahead of us,” the truck driver says.

  “Then we’ll get them,” the policewoman says. “We’ll catch them.”

  As Pia Abrahamsson hears those words, tears begin to flow. She wipes them from her cheeks and listens to the policewoman talk to a colleague. They’re going to erect a blockade on Highway 330 where there is a bridge over the river. The officer says that he’s just five minutes away and will be able to get there in time.

  “Good,” the policewoman says quickly.

  The truck driver keeps driving along the highway, which follows the river through the empty spaces of Medelpad Province. They know that the car with Pia’s son has to be ahead of them, although they can’t see it. There are no alternatives. The highway runs past small collections of houses, but there are no other roads and no turnoffs except for lumber roads leading to the occasional clearing.

  “I can’t take this,” Pia says to herself.

  The road forks a few kilometers ahead, past the village of Indal. One branch leads south to a bridge over the river, and the other continues east along the river toward the coast.

  Pia is sitting with her hands clasped as she prays.

  The police are setting up blockades on both forks of the road. One is on the other side of the bridge and the other is eight kilometers to the east.

  The tractor-trailer with its driver from Denmark and the Lutheran pastor Pia Abrahamsson is now passing through Indal. Through the downpour, they can see the empty bridge over the river and the blue light of a squad car rotating on the other side.

  25

  Police officer Mirja Zlatnek has parked her squad car diagonally across the road and pulled up the emergen
cy brake. To get past her, a car would have to leave the road and then at least two wheels would go into the ditch.

  There’s a long stretch of road before her, and the rain beats against the roof of her car. Mirja peers through the windshield, but it’s hard to see in the increasingly heavy rain.

  She’d thought she’d have a quiet day, since all the other police officers in the region were sent to Birgittagården after the dead girl was found there. She started at her desk, reading recipes on a food website. Baked fillet of moose, potato wedges, and Karl Johan mushroom sauce. Full-bodied puree of Jerusalem artichoke. Then she had to get in the squad car and check out a stolen trailer in Djupängen, which was where she was when the call came in about the kidnapped boy.

  Although she’s never been involved in a case involving violence, Mirja has started to fear the operative side of police work. She can trace this back many years to when she tried to mediate a family conflict, which ended badly. Over the years since, her fear has crept up on her to the point that she prefers administrative work and preventive tactics. But she tells herself that she can handle the situation. There’s no other place where the car with the four-year-old boy could go. This road is like a single long tunnel—a fish trap. Either the car will drive over the bridge after Indal, where her colleague Lasse Bengtsson is waiting for it, or it will come here—and here’s where I’m waiting, Mirja thinks.

  The tractor-trailer should be about ten or eleven kilometers behind the car. Much depends on how fast the car is going. In twenty minutes, no less, it will be here. Mirja tells herself that this is probably not a random kidnapping. It could be a custody battle. The woman on the phone was too upset to give much concrete information, but her car should be somewhere on this highway, this side of Nilsböle.

  It’ll soon be over, she thinks. In a little while, she’ll be able to return to the office, have a cup of coffee, eat her ham sandwich.

  But there is something that bothers her. The woman kept talking about a girl with twigs for arms. Mirja didn’t ask the woman for her name. There wasn’t time. She assumed that the emergency center had taken it down. The woman’s agitation was frightening. She had described what happened as if it were some incomprehensible or supernatural event.