Death Angels

5

SNOW HAD FALLEN AND CLOAKED THE BRANCHES, BESTOWING a solemn beauty on the city in just a few hours. From her fourth-story window, Östergaard could see people glide along the white surfaces, their breath like disintegrating cones in front of them. She ran her index finger across the windowpane to get a better view. The mist became clear and shiny. Rubbing her cold fingertip with her thumb, she turned to Winter.

“Too much all at once,” he said.

“I hear you.”

“At some point I can’t hold it in any longer.”

“Not even you?” She sat down behind her desk. It was big and cumbersome and she heartily disliked it. She had asked for another desk and another office, but she was stuck here while the wheels of bureaucracy ground away.

“Not even me.” Winter crossed his long legs with difficulty.

I’m fond of him, Östergaard thought. He’s too young for the job, too handsome, and he’s a snob in his Baldessarini and Versace suits. His expression changes far too rarely. But he’s a reflective man, and that’s why he’s here. He’s not going to break down, even though it’s occurred to him that he might.

“I’m not going to break down,” Winter said.

“I know.”

“You understand me.”

“I’m listening.”

“They say you’re a good listener.”

Östergaard shrugged. Listening was what pastors were supposed to do, and since she had started to divide her time between her congregation and police headquarters, she had gotten a lot of extra practice with the officers on the beat and the young inspectors who’d gone straight from the National Police Academy to the beltway around the Gothenburg tinderbox. If something really horrific occurred, they could go home for the day, but that wasn’t nearly good enough. They were in the middle of an inferno, both witnesses and participants as society devoured its own children. Nobody could be weak anymore if they wanted to survive. Misanthropy was always on the brink of taking over.

Winter had done a good job convincing the members of his team to talk with each other, but Östergaard had something he couldn’t give them. She wondered whether she could handle being here more than three days a week. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up being trapped in their nightmare.

“I’m so emotionally involved in this London murder that I don’t know whether I’m the right person to be chief investigator,” Winter said.

“Hmm.”

“I thought I was getting over Mats’s death, but that’s going to take some time too.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe what I need is a family.”

Östergaard studied Winter’s blue eyes, or whatever might lie behind them. “Do you miss having a family?”

“No.”

“You just said that you might need one.”

“It’s not the same thing. I made the choice to be alone, and I like being able to decide for myself when I want to talk with someone, but sometimes, like now…” He looked at her.

“Like now,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

Winter crossed his legs again. The scratchiness in his throat had coalesced into a tiny sore spot way down where he couldn’t get at it.

“I don’t usually stop to think about how it feels anymore,” he said. “When I was a rookie and they put me out on the streets, I got my first glimpse of real violence and I actually planned to try something else for a while, but then it got better.”

“What is it that got better?”

“What?”

“Did your feelings change? Did it all just start to swim past your eyes?”

“Swim past my eyes? That’s a pretty good way to put it.”

“Then they took you off the streets?”

“Sort of, but all the bad stuff was still there, though in a different way.”

Östergaard thought back. She remembered a couple of twenty-five-year-old officers, only ten years younger than she, though they could just as well have been gnarled old men. The first ones to arrive after a neighbor’s call on New Year’s Eve, they had broken down the door and stopped short at the body of a ten-year-old girl. On the other side of the living room lay her mother, who was to live another three hours, and her husband, who had tried to slit his own throat afterward. “Chicken-shit bastard,” one of the officers had said. Then they had come to her.

“Are there certain lines that can’t be crossed?” Winter asked after half a minute of silence.

“Lines?”

“Yes.”

“That’s hard to say. I’ve always had trouble drawing lines between things-between some of them, anyway.”

“Do you know what the hardest part of being an investigator is? It’s trying to establish habits and routines as quickly as possible, and then doing everything you can to keep those habits and routines at bay. To approach every case like it’s never happened before.”

“That makes sense.”

“As if the blood was dripping for the first time. Remembering that it could be yours or mine. Or, like this time, imagining the corpse before it went limp, before the soul left the body.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I go to my office and read Möllerström’s printouts.”

The burglar went back. For a moment he hoped that the apartment, or the whole building, wouldn’t be there, that he had simply suffered a temporary blackout due to all the suspense, which gets out of control once in a while on your way to becoming a pro.

As usual, he kept track of the time and watched people leave the building-women, men and a handful of children, none of whom saw him. He didn’t go in, though he knew that lurking about outside could get him in trouble.

He returned the next morning and saw the man leave the building at ten o’clock. Following behind, he watched him cross the road to his parking space and start an Opel that looked fairly new. Then the car disappeared into the distance. And now? Had he thought this far?

He was cold after standing outside for an hour and a half. He walked into the building, put his foot on the first step, and before he knew it he had his ear to the door of the apartment. Quickly entering, he went straight to the bedroom, his blood pounding in his ears. The floor was bare. No black garbage bags, no bloody clothing, nothing new to steal.

He heard someone in the hallway and realized that curiosity, or indecisiveness, or whatever had brought him here, had a breaking point.

It’s the fault of the damn newspapers, he thought. If they hadn’t written about the murder, you wouldn’t be here trembling in your boots as the front door opens.

He fell to his knees and slid under the king-size bed. This is the punishment for all your sins, he told himself.

There was dust under the bed, and he had to hold back a sneeze as he wedged himself in. He put one hand over his mouth and the other around his neck to stifle the urge. You’ve always known you would end up in this predicament sooner or later, he thought.

The hall light went on and he saw a pair of shoes come into the bedroom. He was so scared that the tickling sensation in his nose let up and he held his breath. The glow of a lamp, apparently from the nightstand, spread beneath the bed. He slowly turned his head to see whether he was casting a shadow on the floor.

You can’t just crawl out and lunge at him, he thought. He’ll wring your neck before you’re halfway out.

He heard a rattling sound and a series of cell phone beeps.

“I’m running late.”

I can’t bear this much longer, he thought.

“Right… Absolutely… No way… That’s why I came back… Okay… Ten minutes… No… I had a little chat with him… Celluloid… Hmm… No… Hmm… Yep… Ten minutes.”

The rattling sound again, and the shoes stood still with their toes pointing straight at him.

What next? he thought.

It was as quiet as it gets in an apartment building when all the tenants are away. He heard a car swish by and the streets fall silent again.

Is he thinking about something, or is he staring down at the bed? If those shoes come much closer, I’ll throw caution to the wind and roll out on the other side.

He got ready, his body taut.

The shoes retreated toward the hall, then through the doorway. The light went out and the door closed.

He lay there for twenty minutes soaked in sweat.

He won’t actually look under the bed when he vacuums, or is that just wishful thinking? What difference would it make if he realized that someone has been here? What do you do now? Besides never coming here again. What if he’s still out there in the hall? How long can you lie here? Wait a little longer. Okay.

Covered with dust like a thin layer of dirty snow, he tumbled out and scrambled to his feet. He tiptoed out of the room, picking up the clumps of dust that fell to the floor as he moved. Leaving the apartment, he listened for any signs of life, took a deep breath and soundlessly made his way down the stairs.

There was a draft from the balcony door. Winter stood up from his desk to close it, but then opened it all the way instead and stepped outside. He shivered, catching a whiff of the city below. A patch of fog from beyond the channel drifted through the park and across Nya Allén Street. When the clammy air reached him, he went back inside and shut the door.

He had been poring over the terse memo from the London police. There was an eerie similarity between the two murders. He couldn’t remember anything like it. Not only that, but there was something peculiar about the way the murders had been committed. The British investigators had found little marks in the dried blood that might turn out to match those in the dorm room here in Gothenburg.

He had come home from the office and immediately begun searching the Internet for similar cases, finding what seemed at first like clear patterns, but they were mostly in the realm of the imagination, an illusion. He saw photos that were evocative of his own case, yet they could just as well have been in a dream. He looked for clues in the depths of the electronic night and browsed through several American databases. A surprising number of these kinds of offenders came from Texas or California. Too much sun and sand drives people mad, he thought.

The cell phone on the desk began to ring. He extended the antenna and put the phone to his ear.

“Erik!” crackled a voice at the other end.

“Hi, Mom. You were just on my mind.”

“I’ll bet I was.”

“I was thinking about the sun and sand and what they do to people.”

“Marvelous, isn’t it?” She mumbled something, and he saw in his mind’s eye how she turned around in the little open-plan kitchen and fixed her fourth martini of the evening while glancing at her profile in the mirror. Dear old Mom.

“How was golf today?” he asked.

“We never made it to the course.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s been raining all day, but now-”

“Didn’t you move there to escape all that?”

Her sigh echoed in the receiver. “The grass is always greener.” She laughed and it reminded him of unoiled brakes.

“Erik?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“I was planning on calling Karin and Lasse.”

“Now?”

“It’s not that late, is it?”

It’s four dry martinis and half a white Rioja too late, he thought. Maybe mañana. “They’re going through an awful lot right now,” he said. “Wait until morning.”

“You’re probably right. I always said you had a good head on your shoulders.”

“For a cop, you mean.”

“That’s what you had your heart set on.” He heard her turn on a mixer with her free hand. “You’re the youngest chief inspector in Sweden.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a little work to do, Mom.” He clicked past a report from Costa del Sol.

“We’ll call again soon.”

“I’m looking forward to it. Say hi to Dad.”

“One more thing,” she said, but he was already putting down the phone.

Winter got up and walked into the kitchen. He poured some water in the coffeepot, plugged it in and pushed the button. As the hissing sound grew louder, he filled a tea ball and dropped it in a china cup. He poured in a little milk and finally the water. When the brew was dark enough, he removed the tea ball, tossed it in the sink and took the cup into the living room. He put on a Coltrane CD and sipped his tea, watching the evening outside darken to night. A floor lamp by one of the bookcases bathed the room in a soft glow. He stood by the window to look out over the city but saw only his own reflection.