The Joona Linna Thrillers 3-Book Bundle

  “We’ve lost contact,” Joona says.

  “He has to come up.”

  “Pull on the line three times.”

  “He’s not answering,” Gunnarsson says after pulling.

  “Do it again. Use more strength,” Joona says.

  Gunnarsson pulls three more times on the lifeline, and this time he gets an immediate response.

  “He pulled twice,” Gunnarsson says.

  “That means he’s coming up.”

  “The line is getting slack. He’s on the way up.” Gunnarsson looks upstream. “There’s more timber coming.”

  “He has to get up quickly,” Joona says.

  Gunnarsson counts ten huge logs heading swiftly toward the dam. He climbs down the other side of the railing as Joona reels in the lifeline with his good arm.

  “I see him.” Gunnarsson points at the blue wet suit moving like a flag in the current.

  Joona pulls off the sling and grabs the boat hook from the ground as the first log hits the wall two meters away. He manages to keep the second log away. It hits the boat hook and dives beneath the first log. The two logs start rolling together.

  Hasse Boman breaks the surface of the water. Gunnarsson leans over and holds out his hand.

  “Come up! Come up!”

  Hasse looks at him in surprise and grabs at the side of the dam. Joona climbs over the railing with the boat hook and keeps steering the timber away from him.

  “Hurry up!” he yells.

  A huge log with wet, black bark is approaching, almost hidden beneath the surface.

  “Watch out!”

  Joona steers the boat hook between the rolling timber and a few seconds later, the black log hits it, breaks the shaft, and changes direction. It misses Hasse’s head by mere inches and smashes into the dam, then it tumbles over and bangs Hasse in the back. One of its wet branches pushes him back underwater.

  “Try to grab him!” yells Joona.

  The log keeps rolling against the dam, wrapping the lifeline around its girth. Hasse is being dragged down. Bubbles break the surface. Hasse manages to pull out his knife and cut the lifeline. He kicks as hard as he can and grabs Gunnarsson’s hand.

  Another log hits the black one, and just as three more logs loom close, Gunnarsson hauls Hasse out of the water. He lands on his knees and tries to stand, but his legs are shaking. Gunnarsson quickly frees him from his cylinders and Hasse sinks down to the ground. Joona takes the plastic bag from his trembling hands and helps Hasse out of his wet suit. He’s bruised and scrapes the length of his back have stained his sweaty T-shirt red. He’s in pain and cursing loudly.

  “This isn’t exactly the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says, panting.

  “But you found something important,” Joona says.

  He’s looking at the clear plastic bag where the purse is floating in scummy water along with a few yellow blades of grass. Joona holds it up to the sunlight. His fingers press on the plastic until he’s touching the purse.

  “We’re looking for corpses and you’re happy with a damned purse.” Gunnarsson sighs.

  Light through the plastic bag casts a gold shadow on Joona’s face. The purse has dark brown stains on it—blood.

  “It’s bloody,” Joona says. “The dog must have smelled it as well as the moose. No wonder she didn’t know how to mark it.”

  Joona turns the heavy bag over, and the purse bobs in the scummy water.

  71

  Joona is standing by the locked gates to the parking lot behind the police station in Bergsgatan, the industrial area of Sundsvall. The technicians there have the purse and he wants to talk to them, but no one is answering the intercom at the gate. The parking lot is empty and all the station’s doors are closed.

  Joona gets back in his car and drives to the station at Storgatan. Gunnarsson should be there. In the stairwell, he runs into Sonja Rask. She’s in civilian clothes and her hair is still damp from the shower. She’s put on a bit of makeup and seems happy.

  “Hello,” Joona says. “Is Gunnarsson upstairs?”

  “He can go to hell,” Sonja says. “He feels threatened. He thinks that you’re after his job.”

  “I’m just an observer,” Joona says.

  Sonja’s dark eyes shine. “I heard you dove right into the water and swam to the car.”

  “I just wanted to look at it,” Joona says.

  She laughs and pats his arm, but then turns shy and hurries off down the stairs.

  Joona keeps going up. In the police station, the radio in the lunch room is on, as usual, and through a glass door, he can see several people sitting around a conference table. Gunnarsson is at one of its ends. A woman sitting at the table catches Joona’s eye and shakes her head, but he still opens the door and walks inside.

  “What the hell!” Gunnarsson says when he sees Joona.

  “I need to look at Vicky Bennet’s purse,” Joona says tersely.

  “We’re in a meeting,” Gunnarsson says, cutting him off. He looks back at his paperwork.

  “Everything is with the technicians at the Bergsgatan station,” Rolf says, looking embarrassed.

  “There’s no one there,” Joona says.

  “Give it up, for fuck’s sake,” Gunnarsson growls. “The preliminary investigation has come to an end and as far as I’m concerned, the internal investigators can eat you for breakfast.”

  Joona nods and leaves the room. He goes back to his car and sits there for a while, then starts driving to the provincial hospital in Sundsvall. Something is still bothering him about the murders at Birgittagården.

  Vicky Bennet, he thinks. The nice girl who isn’t always nice. Vicky Bennet, who slashed the faces of a mother and son with a broken bottle. They were seriously injured, but they didn’t go to a doctor. They also did not report the incident to the police.

  Before Vicky drowned, she was a suspect for two violent murders.

  Everything indicates that she prepared her killings in advance. She waited for nightfall, killed Elisabet with a hammer, returned to the house, unlocked the door to the isolation room, and then killed Miranda.

  The Needle says that Miranda was killed by a rock.

  Why would Vicky leave the hammer in her room and then go find a stone?

  There are times when Joona thinks his old friend must be wrong. It’s why he has not yet said anything about his suspicions to anyone. The Needle will have to present his theory in his report.

  Vicky went to bed after killing these two women.

  Joona saw the blood on her sheets and how it had been smeared by Vicky’s arm as she changed positions in her sleep. Holger Jalmert said that this observation was interesting but impossible to prove.

  Without witnesses, he would never get an answer to this case.

  Joona has read Elisabet Grim’s final note in the Birgittagården logbook, but nothing in it indicates the violence that erupted later that night.

  The girls did not see a thing.

  No one knew Vicky Bennet.

  Joona has already decided he needs to talk to Daniel Grim, the therapist. It’s worth a try, even though it’s difficult to question someone in mourning. Daniel was the person the girls trusted the most. If anyone understands what happened, he’s probably the one.

  His shoulder is hurting, so Joona pulls out his cell phone slowly. He remembers that Daniel Grim kept himself together in front of the girls when he first got to Birgittagården, but his face had contorted in pain when he found out Elisabet had been killed.

  The doctor had called his acute shock “arousal,” a consequence of traumatic stress, which might prevent Daniel from remembering much for some time.

  “Psychiatric clinic, Rebecka Stenbeck speaking,” a woman says after five rings.

  “I would like to speak with one of your patients, Daniel Grim.”

  “One moment.”

  He can hear the woman typing on a keyboard.

  “I’m sorry, but the patient is not allowed to receive phone calls
,” she says.

  “Who made that decision?”

  “His doctor.”

  “Would you connect me to him, please?”

  There’s a series of clicks and then the phone rings.

  “Carl Rimmer here.”

  “I’m Joona Linna, a detective with the National Police,” Joona says. “It’s very important that I speak with a patient by the name of Daniel Grim.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t allow that,” Rimmer says immediately.

  “We are investigating a double murder and—”

  “Nothing will change my decision. The patient needs to recover.”

  “I understand that Daniel Grim is suffering, but I promise—”

  “My decision stands,” Carl Rimmer says, but his tone is friendly. “In my opinion, the patient will recover and then the police can talk to him.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I’d guess in a few months.”

  “I need to talk to him for just a little while, but I need to talk to him now.”

  “As his doctor, again I must say no.” Rimmer is adamant. “He was extremely upset after your colleague questioned him earlier.”

  72

  Flora is hurrying home with a heavy bag of groceries. The sky is dark, but the streetlights haven’t come on yet. Her stomach knots as she thinks of how the police rebuffed her. Her face had flushed with shame when the female officer told her that it was a crime to make a false report. Still, she’d called back to tell them she’d seen the murder weapon. Now she keeps going over the conversation again and again in her mind.

  “Police,” said the same officer who had just given her a warning.

  “My name is Flora Hansen. I just called a moment ago,” she said, and swallowed hard.

  “Yes, about the murders in Sundsvall,” the officer said calmly.

  “I know where the murder weapon was hidden,” she lied.

  “Do you realize that I am going to report you, Flora Hansen?”

  “I’m psychic. I’ve seen the bloody knife. It’s in the water—dark, glittering water. That’s all I saw, but I … I can go into a trance and find out more, for a fee. I can point out the exact place.”

  “Flora,” the officer said sternly, “if you persist, you will be under suspicion for a crime and the police will—”

  Flora hung up.

  Now she’s walking past the halal food market. She stops and looks in a garbage can for empty bottles, then she shifts the grocery bag to her left hand and keeps walking to the apartment building. The front lock has been broken and the elevator is stuck in the basement. Flora climbs the stairs to the second floor and unlocks the door to the apartment. She walks into the hall and flicks the light switch.

  There’s a click, but the light does not go on.

  She puts down the grocery bag, locks the door behind her, and slips off her shoes. As she bends over to put them away, the hair on her arms rises.

  The apartment suddenly feels extremely cold.

  She takes her wallet and the grocery receipt out of her purse as she walks down the hall to the dark living room. She can make out the sofa, the big worn armchair, and the dark pane of the television. There’s an odor of electric dust—a short in the wiring.

  Without stepping into the living room, she reaches to turn on the lights. Nothing happens when she pushes the button.

  “Is anyone home?” she whispers.

  The floor shakes and a teacup rattles in its saucer.

  There’s someone moving through the darkness.

  Flora follows. The floor is cold beneath her feet. It feels as if someone has left the windows open too long on a winter day.

  The door to the bathroom is shut. As Flora reaches for the handle, she remembers that Ewa and Hans-Gunnar are not supposed to be home this evening. They are at a pizza parlor, celebrating a friend’s birthday. This means no one should be in the bathroom, but still she pushes open the door.

  In the gray light of the bathroom mirror, she sees something that makes her stagger backward and gasp for breath.

  On the floor of the bathroom, between the tub and the toilet, a girl is lying with her hands in front of her face. There’s a huge pool of blood next to her head and tiny red drops have spattered on the bathtub, the floor mat, and the shower curtain.

  Flora trips over the vacuum cleaner hose and as her arm swings out, it catches Ewa’s plaster relief from Copenhagen. It crashes at the same time Flora does. Her head hits the hall floor.

  73

  The floor is icy under Flora’s back. She lifts her head and stares at the bathroom, her heart pounding.

  There’s no girl there.

  There aren’t any drops of blood on the bathtub or the shower curtain. A pair of Hans-Gunnar’s jeans is lying on the bathroom floor close to the toilet.

  It must have been her imagination.

  She rests on the floor as she waits for her heart to stop pounding. She can taste blood in her mouth. She turns her head and looks down the hall. The door to her room is open. She knows she closed her door. She always closes her door. She shudders and goose bumps rise over her entire body. Icy air is being drawn toward her room. Two dust bunnies roll in the draft down the hall and she follows them with her eyes. They stop at her door, between two bare feet.

  Flora moans.

  The girl who was lying on the bathroom floor is now standing in the doorway to her room. She steps into the hall.

  Flora tries to sit up, but her body is frozen with fear. She realizes that she’s seeing a spirit—for the first time in her life, she is face-to-face with a real ghost.

  The girl’s hair is tangled and bloody.

  Flora is breathing quickly and her pulse thunders in her ears. The girl is hiding something behind her back as she starts to walk toward Flora. She stops just one step away from Flora’s face.

  “Do you want to know what I have in my hands?” the girl asks so quietly that the words are almost impossible to hear.

  “You don’t exist,” Flora whispers.

  “Do you want me to show you what I have in my hands?”

  “No.”

  “But I don’t have anything.”

  A heavy rock lands with a thud behind the girl. The floor shakes and the pieces of broken plaster jump.

  The girl shows her empty hands and smiles.

  The rock is silvery-gray and has sharp edges. It looks like it’s from an iron-ore mine. The girl steps on it with one foot. It rocks back and forth. She pushes it away.

  “Well, go ahead and die!” the girl mumbles to herself. “Hurry up and die already!”

  The girl squats down and puts her ashen hands on the rock. She rocks it, trying to get a good grip on it. It slips out of her grasp. She wipes her hands on her dress and tries again. The rock turns over with a thud.

  “What are you going to do?” asks Flora.

  “Close your eyes and then I’m gone,” the girl says, and picks up the sharp rock. She lifts it over Flora’s head. Its dark underside looks wet.

  The electricity suddenly turns back on. Ceiling lights come on all over the apartment. Flora rolls to the side and sits up. The girl has disappeared. The television starts to blare and the refrigerator resumes humming.

  Flora gets up and walks to her room. The door is shut and she opens it. She turns on the ceiling light, opens the wardrobe, and looks under the bed. Then she goes into the kitchen and sits at the table. Her hands are shaking as she dials the phone for the police.

  The automatic voice-message system gives her a few choices. She can report a crime, leave a tip, or receive an answer to a general question. The last choice contacts her with an operator.

  “Police,” says the friendly voice. “What can I do to help you?”

  “I would like to talk to someone working on the Birgittagården case,” Flora says in a shaky voice.

  “What does this concern?”

  “I … I’ve seen the murder weapon,” Flora whispers.

  “I see,” the operato
r says. “I’m going to connect you to our department that takes tips from the general public. Just a moment.”

  Flora is about to protest, but there’s already clicking on the line. Then there’s another woman’s voice: “How can I help you?”

  Flora can’t tell if it is the same woman she’s talked to before—the one who got angry when Flora told her about the bloody knife.

  “I need to talk to someone who is working on the Sundsvall murder case,” Flora says.

  “Talk to me first,” says the voice.

  “It was a large rock,” Flora says.

  “I can’t hear you. Please speak louder.”

  “What happened in Sundsvall. You should be looking for a large rock. Its underside is all bloody and …”

  Flora falls silent. Sweat runs down her sides.

  “How do you know anything about the Birgittagården murders?”

  “I’ve … Someone told me.”

  “Someone told you about the Birgittagården murders?”

  “Yes,” Flora whispers. Her ears are ringing.

  “Keep going,” the woman says.

  “The murderer used a rock, a large one with sharp edges. That’s all I know.”

  “What is your name?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just wanted—”

  “I recognize your voice,” the policewoman says. “You called earlier about a bloody knife. I’ve already written up a report on you, Flora Hansen, but I think you should contact a doctor. You need some serious help.”

  The policewoman hangs up, and Flora looks at the telephone in her hand. She jumps, knocking over the paper-towel roll when the grocery bag in the hallway falls over.

  74

  Elin Frank got back to her apartment an hour ago after a long committee meeting at the Kingston Corporation to discuss two holding companies in Great Britain.

  She’s feeling anxious about having slept with the Vogue photographer, but she keeps reminding herself that it was just a small adventure and she needed one after so long without sex. Still, she finds herself sweating from embarrassment.