Death Angels

10

A MASSIVE EFFORT WAS UNDER WAY.

Twenty men had rung every bell in the neighborhood, and Möllerström was working overtime entering all the information they had gathered into the database.

A couple of days after Jamie’s murder, rumors had begun circulating that Sture Birgersson was thinking about calling in the National Criminal Police Corps, and the issue resurfaced when Winter’s team convened to discuss the latest murder. Halders, who had heard the scuttlebutt, made a grimace that changed his appearance only slightly. “I’d rather eat shit.”

Winter laughed out loud, which was unusual for him, especially at meetings. “I believe Fredrik just summed up all of our feelings.”

“ Stockholm is a great city,” Djanali mused, looking out the window toward Skövde and Katrineholm. She turned back and eyed Halders. “Nice people, cultured, easy to be with.”

“Particularly in the Flemingsberg area,” Halders said.

“Do you always get off the subway there?” Djanali asked. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it goes farther?”

“I’d rather eat shit,” Halders said.

“You could use a more balanced diet.”

“Your irony is a little undernourished too.”

“Irony? Who’s being ironic?”

Winter discreetly shuffled his papers and everyone stopped talking. “We’ll continue to work in teams of two. Djanali and Halders will be together today. They seem to be hitting it off just fine. The rest of you can go ahead like you have been.” He glanced over at Bergenhem. “And I have something to talk to you about after the meeting.”

Bergenhem raised his head. He looks like a schoolboy, Winter thought. “We’ve found something,” he said to the whole group.

Ringmar flipped off the light and turned on the slide projector. He clicked back and forth between the rooms of the two British victims and finally stopped on Jamie’s.

The police photographer had used a wide-angle lens, and the room bulged out in the center.

Winter nodded. Ringmar clicked to the next slide, Jamie’s upper body, and Möllerström felt ashamed, like an eavesdropper who is privy to a forbidden act.

“Look at those uninjured shoulders,” Winter said, nodding again. Ringmar clicked to a new enlargement.

“Do you see it?” Winter stared into the semidarkness. Nobody noticed anything. He nodded to Ringmar once more, and an even bigger enlargement appeared.

“Do you see it now?” Winter moved his pointer toward a spot on the bare shoulder that could have been a piece of dust on the screen.

“What’s that?” Djanali asked.

“It’s blood,” Winter said. She saw the light from the projector reflected in his eye. “But it’s not Jamie’s.”

Nobody stirred. Djanali shivered and raised her arm as if to keep her hair from standing up.

“I’ll be damned,” Halders said.

“Not Jamie’s blood,” Bergenhem echoed.

“When did you find this out?” Djanali asked Winter.

“Just a couple of hours ago, when I went through the photos in the morning light.”

He was here when it was pitch black, Djanali thought, when everyone except this superman was fast asleep.

“Fröberg called me as soon as the test results came back,” Winter said.

“And the lab has verified it?” Halders asked. “I mean, there was quite a lot of blood, to put it mildly.”

“Yes,” Winter said.

“Can it be used as evidence?” Bergenhem asked.

“If there’s enough,” Ringmar said. “They think so. They’re working like crazy on it right now.”

“Enough for what?” Möllerström asked. “If there’s nothing to compare it with in the register, we won’t have a thing to go by.”

“That’s negative thinking.” Bergenhem looked at Möllerström as though he had broken a spell.

“It’s realistic thinking, as long as we don’t have a DNA database that starts at infancy.”

“We all know your opinion about that,” Djanali said.

“I for one am glad that we’re finally getting somewhere,” Halders said.

“This could be our breakthrough,” Ringmar said.

Ringmar rolled in a VCR with an oversized television screen and put in the videotapes from the crime scenes one by one. They began discussing the patterns on the floor.

These tapes are horrible, Winter thought. It’s like we’re seeing everything through the murderer’s eyes, and you can bet he taped it too and it’s lying in a drawer someplace or playing to an avid audience. “There’s a clue for us somewhere,” he said.

The video camera zoomed to the oval pattern on the floor.

“We think it’s a dance.” Ringmar pointed to the screen. “The two rooms show striking similarities, as if the murderer acted the same way both during and after the crime.”

“What kind of dance?” Bergenhem asked

“When we know that, we’ll be in much better shape,” Winter answered. “Sara Helander here will be working on it from now on,” he continued, nodding at the person to Halders’s right. “You all know Sara.”

Helander lifted her hand in acknowledgment. She had been called in from the wanted persons group. Crossing her legs, she brushed back a lock of hair from her left temple and kept her eyes fixed on the screen.

“If it’s the fox-trot,” Halders said, “we can pick him up any night of the week at the King Creole Club.”

Helander spun around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Forget it.” Halders turned back to the video.

“How are we ever going to make anything out of all this?” Bergenhem asked.

“How do you make anything out of anything at the beginning of an investigation?” Helander retorted.

Winter nodded in approval. Police work was all about waiting until the impossible became possible. A dance? Why not? He had jotted down the name of the album in Jamie’s CD player and given it to Helander. There’s a tape somewhere with audio, he thought, and it might be music or it might be something else that only people with certain predilections can stand the sound of.

“What does the London team have to say about this?” Djanali asked.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of the chief investigator all morning,” Winter answered.

“How about INTERPOL?” Halders asked.

“We need to be talking directly with London at this point,” Winter said.

Winter stood where he had been during the meeting, while Bergenhem sat next to him and jotted down some notes.

“Try to be as discreet as possible,” Winter said.

“How many strip joints can there be?”

Winter fingered the package of cigarillos on the table in front of him. When he opened the blinds, he saw a whole class of students crossing the street from Kristinelund High School, no doubt on a field trip to the upholders of public order. At the front of the pack was a man in his early fifties, a wrinkled Seeing Eye dog leading blind youth, none of them much younger than the victims of the murders Winter was investigating. He closed his eyes. “Any questions?” he asked, turning to Bergenhem.

“Can you give me a week?”

“We’ll see. I know someone you can talk to right away.”

Winter went home early that night and made an omelet. Cutting up the tomatoes, he thought briefly of the Mediterranean sun that watched over his vagabond parents.

A restless feeling chafed at him. He walked over to the stereo but stood there idly. He thought about opening a bottle of beer, then changed his mind and decided to go for a run in the Slottsskogen woods across Sprängkullsgatan Street. He’d pulled the jersey halfway over his head when he heard the phone ring. It was Angela, one of his girlfriends-the best idea of all.

He pulled her to him as soon as she walked through the door. In bed he bent down and lifted her by the thighs. He was in a hurry, and it felt like an eternity before his body erupted, his mind blissfully empty.

They lay on their backs in the silent room. “You needed that,” she said.

“It takes two.”

The phone on her side of the bed began to ring, and she rolled over to pick it up while he gazed at the smooth contours of her hips and thighs. “Hello?” she said, listening intently. “That’s fine, go ahead and put him through.”

How does she manage? he wondered. It’s almost like she’s my wife.

“Yes, he’s right here.” She looked over her shoulder. “It’s a chief inspector calling from London -MacSomething,” she whispered to Winter.