The Demon of Dakar aka The Demon from Dakar

Thirty-Nine

“We’ve found something,” Allan Fredriksson said, but was not overwhelmingly enthusiastic as he stepped into Ann Lindell’s office.

She waited for an elaboration that did not come. Allan looks worn out, she thought, as he sat down in the visitor’s chair. The gray hairs were more numerous and the circles under his eyes were more marked.

“What is it?”

“The tattoo,” Fredriksson said. “Armas went to a place that is on Salagatan. There are four tattoo salons in town. I checked three of them earlier, but this guy was closed and on vacation.”

“And he remembered Armas?”

“Very much so. He remembered the tattoo and the scar on his back as well.”

“What scar?”

Fredriksson gave Lindell a look of surprise.

“Then you haven’t read up on it well enough. Armas had a scar below one of the shoulder blades, perhaps from a knife.”

Lindell felt her cheeks grow hot. She had missed that.

“Right,” she said. “Now I remember. He went there to get the tattoo?”

“He wanted to get a second tattoo, on his other arm. The one that we found the remains of was already there.”

“But he never got another one,” Lindell observed. “Did Armas say anything about the one he already had?”

“Not more than that he thought it was fitting. The tattoo artist looked it up online. It was a depiction of a Mexican god with a name with too many letters.”

Fredriksson laid a paper on her desk. It was a copy of the tattoo. It represented an animal-or was it a person?-who appeared to be dancing. Feathers hung from its back.

“Thought it was fitting,” Lindell mused, studying the figure. “And this is a Mexican god? We’ll have to check with Slobodan Andersson. We know they both went overseas a couple of years ago. Didn’t the tax authorities say something about that? Maybe they were in Mexico.”

Fredriksson stood up with a sigh.

“How is it, Allan?”

“I must have caught Berglund’s bug,” he sighed. “Can you take Mexico?”

Lindell nodded.

“Thanks for your help,” she yelled after Fredriksson as he walked back down the corridor.

What was it that he had found so fitting? A dancing figure from Mexico. “Quetzalcóatl,” Fredriksson had written on the piece of paper. What did it mean to Armas and what could it tell them now? It meant something to the killer, that much was clear. Lindell knew absolutely nothing about Mexico, except for the fact that its capital city was a disaster for asthmatics-here she was dealing with a mythological figure that she could not pronounce the name of and that did not tell her anything.

Why, she kept asking herself as she scrutinized the copy of the tattoo design. Why remove a tattoo depicting a Mexican god?

She reached for the phone to call Slobodan Andersson, but changed her mind. Better to go down to Dakar, she thought, and instead she called Görel, her friend who often babysat Erik.

“You want to go out for dinner?”

“What do you think?” Görel replied.

“We’re going sleuthing,” Lindell said.

“It’s about time.”

“Do you think Margot can watch Erik?”

“My sister is always up for that sort of thing,” Görel said. “I’ll call her right away.”

They decided to meet at the main square at seven o’clock.

“Sleuthing” was the last thing Görel said as she put the phone down.

A series of calls followed. The first went to Schönell, who had gone through Armas’s video collection. He had scanned around one hundred films but had not discovered anything particularly noteworthy. They were mostly action and war movies.

“Was there anything about Mexico?” Lindell asked.

“A Mexican film, you mean?”

“I don’t actually know what I mean.”

“Something in that vein, I think, I was mostly checking for porn, but I can look through the covers and see if there is anything related to Mexico,” Schönell said.

“I’d appreciate it,” Lindell said and hung up.

Her next call went to Barbro Liljendahl. She was in Järlåsa tracking down a suspected fence but had only found chantarelles.

“Loads of them, right next to the road. There are patches of yellow. I’ll have to get Janne and come back here tonight. He loves mushrooms.”

“Great,” Lindell said, but she was irritated by her colleague’s enthusiasm and the information that there was a Janne. She found her out-of-breath and agitated voice disconcerting, almost repellant.

“I just wanted to hear about Rosenberg,” she resumed.

“He was furious about his Mercedes. Someone has amused himself by scraping the paint job. He claimed that it was gambling wins that had paid for the car.”

“And the contact with Sidström?”

“They were just friends he said, but he was clearly shaken when I told him that his friend had been stabbed and admitted to Akademiska.”

“What’s your hunch?” Lindell asked.

“Drugs,” Liljendahl said. “There is something here. I think it would pay to put Rosenberg under surveillance.”

“Good luck,” Lindell said, convinced that there would not be enough resources for that and happy that her colleague did not appear to want to draw her further into the stabbing incident in Sävja.

“One more thing,” Liljendahl said. “Rosenberg smoked like a chimney and the matchbox he used was from Dakar. Isn’t that the restaurant where Armas worked?”

“Yes,” Lindell said.

“I was wondering if you should circulate a snapshot of Rosenberg among the restaurant staff.”

Lindell heard how pleased Liljendahl sounded and realized she had held back the information in order to drop it in like this as if in passing.

“Maybe,” Lindell said.

She was on the verge of saying something laudatory, but refrained.

They ended the conversation and Lindell took out her pad of paper and started to draw circles and arrows.

In the large circle she wrote “Dakar” and lines extended from it in all directions with names of places and people who had figured in the investigation thus far. She stared at her attempt to create an oversight before adding “Mexico?” in the left-hand corner and drawing a line to “Armas.”

Then she called Ola Haver and told him about the tattoo and the matchbox at Rosenberg’s and asked him to retrieve all the files on the old drug user, as well as print out a photo.

She leaned back, slipped her shoes off, put her feet up on the desk, and whistled several bars of a song by Simon and Garfunkel off-key.