The Fire Witness

129

The man who flew through the glass door tried to sit up, but two policemen grabbed him and forced him onto his stomach before they handcuffed him.

The first paramedics to arrive put an oral airway into Vicky’s throat and immobilized her head before they lifted her onto a stretcher.

Joona told the operations leader what had happened while two police units entered the building, one on each side.

In the refrigeration room, they found a silent, pale man with one hand impaled to a pig carcass by a knife. The police officer who found him called the paramedics and needed the assistance of a fellow officer to wrestle the knife out of the meat. The blade grated against the ribs and came out with a sucking sound. The injured man pulled his hand to his stomach using his other, prosthetic hand but then twirled to the ground.

The man who had been hit in the chest by the homemade automatic rifle was dead. The young man who had pulled the trigger when Joona shot him was still alive. He’d saved himself from bleeding to death by cinching his belt just below his knee as a tourniquet. When the police patrol unit approached with raised guns, he pointed to his foot, which had been shot off. It was lying beneath the cutting counter.

The last man they found was Tobias Lundgren. He’d hidden among the garbage in the warehouse room. His face was cut to bits and was bleeding profusely, but none of his wounds were life-threatening. He tried to crawl deeper into the mound of garbage. When the police pulled him out, he was shaking from fear.

Carlos Eliasson has already been informed of what took place in the slaughterhouse area when Joona calls him from the ambulance.

“One dead, two seriously wounded, and three slightly injured,” Carlos reads out loud.

“But the children are alive. They survived.”

“Joona.” Carlos sighs.

“Everyone decided they’d drowned, but I-”

“Yes, you were right. Absolutely,” Carlos interrupts. “But you are still the subject of an internal investigation and you had other orders.”

“So I was supposed to just let it be?”

“Yes, that’s what you were supposed to do.”

“But you know I couldn’t do that.”

The sirens abruptly stop wailing as the ambulance turns into the entrance of the Söder Hospital emergency receiving area.

“The prosecutor and her people are going to be the ones to question the witness. You are now on sick leave and cut off from everything.”

Joona takes this to mean that the internal investigation is not going his way, and it crosses his mind that he may even be charged with dereliction of duty. Nevertheless, the only emotion he feels is relief. Vicky Bennet has been found and the little boy ripped from the jaws of wolves.

Joona climbs out of the ambulance unassisted, but he heeds the paramedics’ request to lie down on a stretcher. They lift the rails and roll him away.

Instead of waiting in line for an X-ray after he’s been examined and his wounds dressed, he heads out to find the doctor in charge of Vicky’s care.

A nurse points to where a short woman is studying the automatic coffee machine.

Joona explains that he has to know whether Vicky can be questioned today.

The short woman listens to him without looking up. She presses the button for mocha and waits for her cup to be filled. Then she says that she’s done a CT scan of Vicky’s brain in order to determine whether there has been intracranial bleeding. Vicky has received a severe concussion, but luckily there has been no cerebral hemorrhage.

“We must keep her here for observation, but there’s nothing to indicate she can’t be questioned tomorrow morning if it’s important,” the doctor says. She walks away with her coffee cup in her hand.

The prosecutor Susanne Öst is on her way from Sundsvall to Stockholm. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp, she intends to start her initial interrogation of Vicky Bennet, the fifteen-year-old girl who has just been arrested and charged with two murders and one count of kidnapping.