Bad Blood

15

When Jan-Olov Hultin returned on the well-worn path from the john, he found a nervously tramping man in his forties standing outside his door. His first thought was that the Kentucky Killer had quite coolly walked into police headquarters to stick his tongs into his neck. The man’s strangely clear, green eyes calmed him, however; he looked more like a humiliated high schooler outside the principal’s office.

Having realized this, Hultin could curse the security procedures down at reception a bit more levelheadedly.

“Can I help you?” he asked calmly.

The green-eyed man gave a start. His fingers fumbled along the knot of his tie as though they had a life of their own.

“I’m looking for someone who’s working on the murder in Frihamnen,” he said uncertainly. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place.”

“You are.” Hultin let the man into his office.

As the man sat down on the practically unused visitors’ sofa, Hultin waited for him to speak.

“My name is Mats Oskarsson,” he said. “From Nynäshamn. I called on the night of the murder.”

“At three thirty-seven from a telephone booth on Stureplan,” Hultin said neutrally.

Mats Oskarrson from Nynäshamn blinked a few times. His eyes looked like a starboard light with battery problems.

“I don’t really know when it was, but it was from Stureplan.”

“Get to the point,” said Hultin. “You’ve already done enough to obstruct our investigation.”

By this point, Oskarsson had been degraded to an elementary school student. “The others didn’t think I should call at all.”

“What others?”

“On my bandy team. Stockholm Attorneys’ Bandy Club. We’d had a late away game up in Knivsta, and we were on our way home.”

“Let me see if I understand,” Hultin said mildly, and little did Mats Oskarsson suspect how ominous this mildness was. “A gang of the guardians of the law were on their way home from a bandy match at three in the morning, ended up in Frihamnen, witnessed a murder, and intended to keep it from the long arm of the law. Is that correct?”

Oskarsson stared down at the table. “It was late,” he said.

“Late on earth,” Hultin said even more mildly.

“I beg your pardon?” Oskarsson asked.

“Are you an attorney?”

“A tax attorney at Hagman, Grafström, and Krantz, yes.”

“And you were the one driving the car?”

“Yes. A Volkswagen van.”

“Do you want me to try to reconstruct the chain of events?” Hultin asked rhetorically. “You played bandy, got creamed, drank it off, lost your way in Frihamnen of all places, ran into a murderer who had left a body behind, realized you were all shitfaced, and decided to hell with it all. Then you were struck by a pang of conscience, maybe after having dropped off the whole gang to avoid any digs, and called from a telephone booth at Stureplan, even though you all surely had pockets stuffed full of cell phones, but of course you wouldn’t want to leave behind any traces in the registry. Were you driving drunk?”

“No,” said Oskarsson. His eyes were drilling green holes in the desk.

“Yes, you were,” Hultin said, still mildly. “You called even so, and now you’re here. I’m sure you’re basically a conscientious person, unlike your attorney colleagues in the ball club, and that the only reason you could have had for calling anonymously was that you were driving drunk. But of course, that’s not something that can be proven.”

“No,” Oskarsson said, with unintentional ambiguity.

Time for a change of tone. Hultin bellowed, considerably less ambiguously, “Spit it all out now, the whole fucking story, and we’ll see if I can save you from being charged.”

Mats Oskarsson sighed and spat it out with a lawyer’s precision. “It was a few minutes past two-thirty. The man was a bit taller than average, rather powerfully built, and was wearing black clothes and a black balaclava over his face. He was driving a ten- or twelve-year-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a license plate that started with B. He had just loaded a bundle of blankets into the trunk and was about to load the other one when we interrupted him.”

“So it was more than half an hour before you called?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. If that information had been reported immediately, there wouldn’t be a raving serial killer running loose in Stockholm today. I hope your daughters are his next victims.”

Hultin didn’t usually go too far, even in his most agitated moments, but his firmly rooted distrust in the guardians of the constitutional state caused him to go over the limit. “A raving serial killer.” He had to smooth things over. “Do you remember anything more than the B in the license number?”

“No,” Oskarsson mumbled.

The man didn’t have more to say. Hultin could have given him a thorough lecture on the corrupt legal practices in the buy-and-sell world of Swedish jurisprudence; on how the Western democracies were gradually selling out the constitutional state; on how laws that were established to protect citizens were being transformed into market games and low-odds competitions between high-cost old-fox lawyers and recently graduated low-budget prosecutors; and on how a whole busload of attorneys hadn’t for one second considered setting aside their own egos in order to catch a double murderer. But Mats Oskarsson had shown at least the beginnings of moral courage, and in addition he seemed already pounded into the ground by the contents of the nonexistent lecture. He slunk toward the door. He had just opened it when he heard Hultin’s subdued “Thanks.”

For a split second, Hultin met the man’s clear green gaze. It actually said more than a thousand words.

Jan-Olov Hultin, now alone, stretched his legs out under the desk, emptied his consciousness, and let his eyes sweep over the walls of his office. For the first time in a long time, he was struck by the room’s anonymity. There was not a single trace of him in here. It was purely a workroom. He hadn’t even taken the pains to put up a photo of his wife. When he was at work, he was one hundred percent policeman, maybe even a little more. The rest he kept to himself. Not even after the success with the Power Murders had he let anyone in. He didn’t really know why. The intercompany soccer wasn’t a secret anymore. One night Hjelm and Chavez had popped up on the Astroturf field at Stadshagen and seen him in action. Unfortunately, the Stockholm Police Veterans team had been playing Rågsved Alliance, which had a sharp attacker named Carlos, and Hultin had clipped Carlos’s left eyebrow with a thundering header, so the blood gushed out. Carlos’s last name was, unfortunately, Chavez. He didn’t know whether Jorge had informed his father that it was Jorge’s boss’s skull that had transported him across the street to St. Göran’s Hospital.

His short, weak smile was interrupted by the ringing of a phone.

“Yes,” he said into the receiver. “Yes. Yes. I understand. Yes.”

Then he thought for a few seconds as his finger hovered over the internal telephone’s keypad. While he thought, he dialed Kerstin Holm’s number.

“Kerstin, are you there?”

“Yep,” came Holm’s alto, in a reproduction that didn’t do it justice.

“Are you busy?”

“Not particularly. I’m trying to familiarize myself with every detail of the FBI’s material. It’s a huge volume.”

“Can you run a check on a dark blue Volvo station wagon, model years, say, eighty through ninety? The license should start with a B. We’ve gotten a better witness report on Frihamnen.”

“Hell, that’s great! Of course.” She hung up on him before he had time to hang up on her.

His finger hovered again. Söderstedt? Nah. Norlander, who would be back by now? No. Was Nyberg back from LinkCoop? Nah. Chavez? Not alone.

His hesitation, he knew, was more of the democratic than the realistic sort. He dialed Hjelm’s number. “Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Come see me. Bring Jorge.”

It took thirty seconds.

“Is the Laban Hassel story over and done with?” he asked as they stood there like schoolboys. Why was everyone always standing in front of him like schoolboys?

“Yes,” said Chavez. “We’ve tried to find a basis for bringing charges, but we might as well admit that we don’t really want to charge him. We can only hope things go well for him and Ingela. Despite their sterility.”

“Okay, then. I’ve just received information about a clue in Frihamnen. A car that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone has been found a few blocks from LinkCoop’s warehouses. A beige Saab 900. Two things make it interesting. One, it was completely clean, with not a fingerprint anywhere, neither inside nor outside. And two, it’s registered to Andreas Gallano. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Gallano,” said Hjelm. “Repeat offender down in Alby, right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, yeah, Andreas Gallano. I had a few confrontations with him during my time in Huddinge. Quite a bit of violence, as I recall. He’s a ways up in the chain of drug distribution, but still a classic street hooligan. No conscience. We put him away once for assault and battery and once for selling drugs.”

“Oh yeah!” Chavez exclaimed. “He escaped from Hall Prison.”

“That’s right,” said Hultin. “He was in Hall for assault and battery again until just over a month ago. He and three violent criminals escaped through the kitchen. A bold plan.”

Hjelm and Chavez nodded. It had been a noteworthy escape.

Hultin looked at them. He tried to inventory his intuitions one by one. “It must have something to do with this, right?” His question mark was nearly an exclamation point.

They nodded.

“Gallano’s car, left behind, without fingerprints, a break-in, two bodies,” Hjelm summarized, and concluded, “Oh, yeah.”

“The body wasn’t him, was it?” Chavez asked.

“If it were, the fingerprints would have screamed it out,” said Hjelm. “But he must have played some part in the drama.”

“The only thing we don’t have any indication of is the Kentucky Killer,” Hultin mumbled.

“Except hunches,” said Hjelm. “Latest address?”

“Same as ten years ago.”

“We’ll take it.”

The duo were on their way-Chavez’s BMW got to play service car. They raced wordlessly through the rain-soaked city and came out on Essingeleden. Riddarfjärden seemed to have risen to biblical-flood proportions. It would gush up over the city at any moment, and who, in these times, would have received forewarning to build an ark?

No one, Hjelm thought misanthropically, sitting beside the violently accelerating Chavez. Not a single one of us would be forewarned by God. We would all drown in the same sticky sludge and be swallowed up by the angry earth, and from out in the universe, the earth would look exactly the same. A negligible little disturbance in the balance of eternity, nothing more.

He raised his eyes from his morass of pessimism and launched a vain attack against evil. It felt as though they were tilting at windmills.

No passersby out on the E4 could have told Alby from Fittja or Norsborg from Hallunda. The crazy buildings climbed sky-high, brutally similar along the hills, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, they had filled up with criminals. The building was the result of the same social-building spirit that had once planned to level Gamla Stan to the ground so that Le Corbusier could build a row of glass and concrete palaces.

But no one knew better than Paul Hjelm that this place also contained an inaccessible alternative culture, with small-scale everyday heroism, infinite inventiveness, and a continuous battle against all odds. He had been stationed here for all of his working life up until the remarkable change just over a year ago, when, instead of being booted from the force, he was transported to inner-city mode, more specifically A major, A as in the A-Unit, major as in success.

His transfer had come in large part thanks to Erik Bruun, his old chief at the Huddinge police, whose contacts with his former colleague Jan-Olov Hultin had been crucial, and it was outside his office that they now stood. Hjelm had succeeded in walking past his former colleagues unnoticed and knocked on Bruun’s door. The light system on the doorpost shone yellow as in “wait,” and Hjelm was seized by apprehension. Bruun’s light was never yellow as in “wait.”

They waited in the hallway for three excruciating minutes, under continual threat of discovery, before Hjelm had had enough and barged in.

The Bruun room, once covered in health-injurious rings left behind by smoke, was now bright yellow. The wallpaper paste didn’t seem to have dried yet.

Behind Bruun’s desk sat a forty-year-old man in a suit and tie, his chestnut-colored hair brushed back over the beginnings of a bald spot. As they entered, his hand moved instinctively in the direction of his service weapon.

“Where is Bruun?” Hjelm demanded.

The man refrained from drawing his pistol, but he kept his hand at the ready. “It says to wait out there, in case you can’t read.”

“It says wait, and it says Bruun. This is yellow. Where is Bruun?”

“Who are you?”

“Hjelm. I worked here once. Under Bruun. Where is he?”

“Hjelm. Aha, the man who was kicked upward.”

“Exactly. Where’s Bruun?”

“Hjelm, well-not long ago I sat down and went through your file. I hope you’re not here to get your old job back now that the A-Unit has packed it in. There’s no room for you here.”

“Where’s Bruun?”

“There’s no room for heroes and mavericks here. It’s time to clean up. Close up the ranks a little.”

“Where’s Bruun?”

“I guess you’ll have to brush off the old uniform, then, and get ready for a good old time on patrol.”

Hjelm had had enough. He did an about-face and nearly ran into Chavez, who was waiting at the door. Behind him he heard: “Bruun had a heart attack a week ago. Just thinking about how this office looked ought to be enough to cause one.”

Hjelm did another about-face. “Is he dead?”

The man at the desk just shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Hjelm had to leave immediately; otherwise time on patrol would have seemed like utopia. He went downstairs to the break room.

It was as though no time had passed. Every mug and sugar cube seemed to be in the same place as they had a year and a half ago. And every cop. They were all sitting there: Anders Lindblad and Kenneth Eriksson, Anna Vass and Johan Bringman. And there was Svante Ernstsson, who had been his partner for over a decade. They had been best friends; now it had been many months since they’d spoken.

“Well, look at that,” Ernstsson said with surprise. “A special visitor.”

Their handshake was firm and almost ridiculously manly.

“First off,” said Hjelm, “is Bruun dead?”

Ernstsson looked at him gravely, then burst into a smile. “Just a scratch, as he said himself.”

“Who’s the clown?”

“New chief inspector, Sten Lagnmyr. A stain on our department. Instead of Bruun we got a real brown-noser. With a taste for yellow, to boot.”

“This is Jorge Chavez, by the way. Sorry. My new colleague.”

Chavez and Ernstsson shook hands. Hjelm was struck by a strange vision-for a split second, he saw Cilla and Kerstin shaking hands. He pulled himself together. “We’re not here to socialize ourselves, as Lena Olin said, but to get some help. Do you have any more active investigations going on about our old friend Andreas Gallano?”

Ernstsson shrugged and raised a curious eyebrow. “Not more than what you’d usually have on a fugitive.”

“Do you know if he’s here at all?”

“What is this all about?”

“The murder in Frihamnen.”

Ernstsson nodded and stopped being stubborn. “We have no indication that he’s returned; that’d be pretty stupid after escaping from Hall. His apartment was empty and undisturbed. There was six-month-old milk in the fridge. As usual, we’re overloaded with work, and he’s not a top priority. We were going to start working on it next week.”

“I’m going to make sure that Hultin takes care of Lagnmyr-then you can help out a bit more officially. Is it still best to go through, what was his name, Stavros?”

“Stavropoulos. No, he died. Overdose. Gallano had to get new contacts and fought his way into a new gang with slightly greater resources, synthetic drugs. We got him through a dealer, Yilmaz. We still have pretty good means of investigating him, if you’re not too worried about privacy protection.”

“It’ll all work out. What could we get from Yilmaz?”

“Gurra gets his junk there. You remember Gurra?”

“Hell, yes!” Hjelm exclaimed. “Crazy Gurra. Childhood friends.”

“If anyone has any idea where Andreas is, it would be Gurra. For old times’ sake,” Ernstsson added a bit ambiguously.

“How should we go about this?”

“Yilmaz distributes in a pretty good place, stakeout wise, so we’ve let him be. The old storeroom of the ICA that shut down. We just lie there on the upper floor and look right down. Ideal.”

“It’s not possible to get hold of Gurra some other way?”

“He keeps out of sight. This is best.”

“Right away?”

Ernstsson shrugged. “Let’s just do it,” he said briskly.

Jorge Chavez was trying to get an idea of the partnership between Hjelm and Ernstsson. Had it been like his and Hjelm’s was now? Had they been close to each other? Did their teamwork work as well? He observed them as they all waited in the filthy old upper floor of the ICA store. Wasn’t there something hesitant, even guilty, about the way Hjelm related to his former colleague, something strained in their body language? But then how colored was his own view?

Their stakeout position was slightly strange. They really could have peered straight down through the floor and observed Yilmaz’s law-defying transactions, but that would have meant lying on the floor with their cheeks in rat droppings and syringes, hour after hour. It was a bit simpler, they found, to tape a miniature camera to the hole and observe the spectacle on a monitor. It was in front of this monitor that all three were now crouching.

A steady stream of customers passed through Yilmaz’s hardly hidden drugstore. It was like a cross-section of society, from peculiar relics of the 1960s trying to escape their overdoses in unfathomable ways to fresh-looking middle-class kids on their way to raves; from prostitutes with advanced AIDS to executive secretaries on secret missions. If Hjelm felt a pang of nostalgia for his old workplace, it had long since passed.

Yilmaz was sitting like a pasha on an old chest freezer and, with great control, fishing the orders up out of another one. To his drug customers, he was God. His goodwill meant the difference between heaven and hell. He found pleasure in waving the keys to the pearly gates for a few seconds.

Hjelm hated every one of those seconds, not only because the line of the downtrodden was endless but also because time crept on and Gurra was conspicuous by his absence. Yilmaz’s visiting hours would be over soon, and the day would be wasted. Three hours had passed. It was already afternoon. The dampness sucked itself deeper and deeper into the rotten building. The steady stream of customers began to subside.

Yet another young middle-class boy showed up to treat himself to some small, colorful pills with funny figures imprinted on them. He was about sixteen or seventeen and strode self-confidently up to the pasha on the freezer. In the background, a friend was waiting with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched. He stood with his back to the camera and stamped his feet nervously while his buddy extended his hand to Yilmaz. Then the friend threw a short, ultranervous glance over his shoulder-at which point Hjelm saw his face.

It was more than enough for Hjelm. His body contracted into an incredible convulsion that threw him sideways, and he vomited straight out. Even as it happened, his reaction surprised him. Shame and guilt rippled through him. He saw the procession that is said to pass before the eyes of the dying. His whole life as a father passed by, and he saw every false step, every wounding shot that he had inflicted upon his son over the years.

When he looked up after thirty seconds, transfixed, and stared past his astounded colleagues, Danne was still there, standing with his back to the camera. His friend’s transaction had been temporarily interrupted. A truly rock-bottom junkie came in and fussed at Yilmaz.

“It’s Gurra,” Svante Ernstsson whispered.

Hjelm didn’t give a damn. He stood up so violently that his chair flew over, and he took off. All the eyes on the lower floor looked straight up at the camera. Before Yilmaz could close his shop, Hjelm charged downstairs, drawing his weapon. Not until they saw him do so did Ernstsson and Chavez think to follow him.

Hjelm kept everyone frozen in place. The massive bodyguard who had been standing beside Yilmaz was now sprawled flat on the ground. Hjelm dug a large western-style revolver out of the man’s waistband and tapped its barrel lightly against Yilmaz’s forehead. Chavez took over and kept a gun trained on Yilmaz and the bodyguard. Gurra tried to slink away unnoticed, but Ernstsson yanked him to the ground.

Hjelm walked over to the teenager, who was in the process of stomping the colorful pills into the rotten wood floor. He grabbed the kid’s collar and pulled his deathly pale face close until there were only a few fiery inches between it and his own. “Your face is engraved on my corneas, you bastard.” His nose told him the kid was pissing himself in his grip. He let him go. The kid collapsed, sniffling.

Hjelm then turned to his son, who was cowering in the doorway, gawking in astonishment. His jaw was moving, but no words came out.

“Go home,” said Hjelm neutrally. “And stay home.”

Danne took off and disappeared.

His friend stared wildly. “Get out of here,” Hjelm ordered, and the kid scrambled away.

Hjelm then turned to Gurra, who was lying under Ernstsson with his back in the rat crap. Somewhere behind the practiced sneer he could see genuine pallor.

“Andreas Gallano,” Hjelm said, with emphasis on each syllable.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Hjelm bent over. His facial expression was nothing to mess with, Gurra noticed. “Try again,” said Hjelm softly.

“I haven’t seen him since he went in.”

“But?”

“But he… well…”

“It’s simple. Speak and live. Keep silent and die.”

“Yeah, yeah, what the hell, he thinks he’s so fucking fancy now anyway. He has a secret cabin somewhere up north. Riala, I think it’s called. I have the address. In my address book.”

“I’m surprised,” Hjelm said, fishing damp, folded papers from Gurra’s inner pocket. “Not only do you have an address book, it contains the address of an escaped criminal.”

“Encoded,” Gurra said sophisticatedly. “It’s listed under Eva Svensson.”

Hjelm tore out the page with Eva Svensson’s address in Riala and put the address book back in Gurra’s pocket.

He heard sirens in the distance; Ernstsson had called for backup. They shoved Gurra into the freezer corner next to Yilmaz and the bodyguard. “Have you got this, Svante?” Hjelm said, already on his way.

“Keep an eye on them,” Ernstsson said to Chavez, then took Hjelm aside. “You ruined our best stakeout spot, Pålle,” he said, a dash of disappointment in his voice.

Hjelm closed his eyes. This hadn’t occurred to him, even for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “The circumstances were a little special.”

Svante Ernstsson stepped back and looked at him. “They’ve actually managed to change you.” Then half-turning, he added, “I hope it works out with Danne.”

Hjelm nodded heavily.

“Now get out of here,” said Ernstsson. “I’ll take care of this. Lagnmyr’s gonna love it.”

Hjelm remembered to contact Hultin from the car. The detective superintendent promised, without having received more than an outline of the course of events, to contact Sten Lagnmyr and try to salvage the situation. As for everything else, Hjelm was at a loss.

Chavez felt petrified. It had all gone so fast, all of it. He had seen sides of Paul Hjelm that he’d never seen before, but that wasn’t unpleasant. Not until they reached Skärholmen did it occur to him that the teenage boy must have been Paul’s son. He decided not to mention it. “Aha” was all he said. Hjelm turned to him expressionlessly, then went back to being out of it.

They avoided Stockholm. These days one could easily get from the southern to the northern suburbs without passing Go. Still, the price had been high.

Around Norrtull, Chavez began to organize his thoughts. Without having exchanged a word with Hjelm, it was clear that they were on their way to Riala, in Roslagen, between Åkersberga and Norrtälje.

Judging from the police atlas, the address belonged to a cabin in an isolated forest lot.

“Are we going to do it alone?” said Chavez.

He didn’t receive an answer. Hjelm just stared out the window.

“Are you ready for this?” Chavez said a bit more sharply.

Hjelm turned to him with the same blank facial expression. Or was it resolute?

“I’m ready,” he said. “And we’re going to do it alone.”

“If we look at it rationally, then Frihamnen could have been a drug deal. And in that case, of course, a whole lot of shit might be waiting for us up in Riala. Gallano’s cabin, for example, could be a center for his new drug syndicate.”

“Then why would they leave the car in Frihamnen, completely wiped?”

“Maybe he was the other body, the one in the car. Our unknown body could have been a foreign companion. Maybe they were superfluous and were weeded out. But the cabin could have tight security.”

“That could be,” said Hjelm, “completely rationally. But let’s be completely irrational. Here’s a piece of paper and a pen, and I’ll take some paper and a pen. We’ll write down what we think we’ll find up there, fold up the papers, and put them in our pockets. Then we’ll compare them later.”

Chavez laughed and wrote something. Hjelm was back.

They placed the pieces of paper in their pockets.

Then Hjelm disappeared again. His gaze dissolved in the unending cascades of rain.

Fatherhood. How incredibly easy it was to inflict irreparable wounds. A random word, a moment of indifference at the wrong time, too hard a grip on an upper arm, demands, not enough demands. If the parents have a rotten relationship, what’s best-silence, constant fighting, divorce? An icy hell, like the one Laban Hassel would always be frozen in? Or the white-hot, crackling, absurd hell of fighting? Last summer the Power Murders, the separation-how had their absence affected the children at their most sensitive age? And how much of their behavior was inherited?

The banner of biology waved grandly nowadays. It didn’t seem to matter anymore what people were subjected to; everything was preprogrammed in their genes. This ought to have given Paul Hjelm some comfort: maybe it wasn’t his fault that his son associated with drug dealers. Maybe there was a gene for drug abuse that made his upbringing irrelevant. But he refused to believe it. Somehow or another Danne’s behavior was his fault, but how? What the fuck was the problem? That he hadn’t been able to change diapers without throwing up? That he chose to converse in relatively masculine jargon? That he was a policeman? What the fuck was it?

He knew that there wasn’t one answer. That was one advantage of his job. For each case there was one answer, one guilty person. Your focus narrowed, filtering out anything ambiguous and complicated.

The rain poured down.

Two hunters traveled north on Norrtäljevägen.

Two pieces of paper burned in two pockets.

Riala had a small downtown, but the district was spread out across a large area in heavy pine woods, and the map took them farther and farther from the downtown. In the end, the road was nothing more than a cow path through virgin forest.

“Stop here,” Hjelm said with his eyes on the detailed police atlas.

Chavez stopped the car.

“Two hundred yards or so. Up the rise and then to the right. It’s isolated.”

Chavez nodded, took out his service weapon, checked it, and put it back into his shoulder holster. “Do we dare leave the car unlocked?” He grinned.

Hjelm gave a weak smile and hurled himself out into the pouring rain. It was past five o’clock. The waterlogged skies were made more ominous by the suggestion of dusk; the forest lay in a dense gloom.

Hunching slightly, they ran through the autumn storm. The crowns of the trees danced above their heads and released copious needles, which the rain carried through their hair. A bolt of lightning lit up the forest with piercing clarity. For a fraction of a second, the trunks of the trees were separate from one another; when the thunder came, hard and heavy, only a few seconds later, they merged again.

The cabin was wedged among trees up on a hill; if they hadn’t known it was there, they probably would have missed it. It was small, brown, and dark. From where they stood, not a single sign of life was visible.

They made their way up to the door, their weapons raised, ready.

Next to the door was a glass pane with a round hole in it. Hjelm pressed the door handle down silently. The door was locked.

He extended his hand through the hole in the glass pane and turned the lock. Then he kicked the door open, and they rushed in.

Even before Chavez found the light switch and the light blinded them, the stench struck them. They exchanged glances. Both knew immediately what it was.

They bustled around the cabin; it didn’t take long to get through the living room, the kitchen nook, and the tiny bedroom. Everything was empty, unused. Had it not been for the hole in the glass and the stench, they would have put their pistols away.

There was another door, just next to the sink. Hjelm cracked it open carefully. A dark cement staircase led down to a cellar. There was no light switch. Keeping close to each other with their weapons raised, they trod carefully down the stairs.

They could see nothing. Then they were down. The stench intensified.

They felt their way along the ice-cold stone wall. Finally, Chavez found a light switch.

A naked, faint lightbulb on the ceiling lit up.

In a chair sat Andreas Gallano.

His eyes stared lifelessly at them. A pain that was beyond words remained in his eyes.

In his bare neck were two small holes.

They went back upstairs. Hjelm sat on the floor and, his hand trembling, dialed Hultin’s cell number. Meanwhile Chavez leaned over the sink and splashed water on his face. Both of them still had their service weapons in hand.

Chavez stared out into the loud darkness for a moment. A flash of lightning lit up the forest. It looked horribly insignificant.

He sat down next to Hjelm. The crash of thunder came. He moved a bit closer. Hjelm didn’t move away. Their shoulders were rubbing. They needed it.

Almost simultaneously they fished their pieces of paper out of their pockets and, with effort, unfolded them.

Chavez’s read “Corpse with holes in its neck.” Hjelm’s read “Neck-perforated stiff.” They smiled weakly at each other.

Such good teamwork.