The Fire Witness

141

Joona sits down by himself in the inner room of Il Caffé and places Susanne Öst’s folder on the table. He’s convinced she’s made a big mistake in provoking a confession that morning.

He doesn’t believe that Vicky meant to take Dante. He thinks she was telling the truth about not noticing him in the backseat when she stole the car. And he can’t dispute that she saved him from drowning. Yet for some reason she killed Miranda and Elisabet.

Why?

Joona opens the folder hoping that the answer lies in one of these reports.

Why does Vicky get so enraged? It’s not just the Eutrexa. She hadn’t taken it before she came to Birgittagården.

Joona quickly flips through the pages. He knows that crime scenes and other places where there’s evidence reflect more than the actions of the suspect. There are traces of the motive in the pattern of blood spatter, in where overturned furniture lies, in the footprints, and in the positions of the bodies. Nathan Pollock would probably say that the careful reading of the crime scene is more important than evidence collection. The victim plays a role in the killer’s inner drama and the scene of the crime is the stage, complete with stage directions and props. There are multiple clues, including coincidence, but there’s always that bit which is part of the inner drama and can be connected to the motive.

For the first time, Joona has the reports from the crime scene investigation. He starts to study the documents, which detail the evidence collection and the analysis of the crime scene.

The police have done a good job and were more careful than Joona would have expected.

A waiter in a knit wool cap comes by with a large mug of coffee on a tray, but Joona is concentrating so hard that he doesn’t notice. A young woman with a ring through her lower lip, sitting in the booth next to his, says with a smile that she saw Joona order the coffee.

Although the results from the National Forensic Laboratory are not part of this report, Joona realizes that the results themselves are clear: the fingerprints are Vicky’s. The highest level of certainty, grade 4+, has been noted.

There is nothing in the crime scene analysis to contradict anything he observed when he was there. However, many of his observations are not there. For instance, there’s nothing about how the blood that had coagulated on Vicky’s bed must have soaked into the sheets for at least an hour. The report also does not state how the blood spatter changed angle after the first three blows.

Joona reaches for his coffee and takes a sip. He studies the photographs again. He flips through them slowly until he’s gone through the entire stack. Then he pulls out two pictures from Vicky’s room, two from the isolation room where Miranda Eriksdotter was found, and two from the brewery room where Elisabet Grim was found. He moves his coffee cup to one side and places the six photographs on the table. He stands up so that he can look at all six at once. He’s looking for a pattern.

After a while, Joona turns over all the photographs except one. He studies this photograph carefully. He remembers how this scene looked when he was in the room. He puts himself into the emotions and aromas of the murder. In the photograph, Miranda is lying on the bed. She’s wearing cotton panties and her hands are over her face. The flash of the camera makes her panties and the sheets blaze white. The blood from her crushed head is a dark, formless shape on the pillow.

Joona sees something he didn’t expect.

He takes a step backward, hastily putting his mug on the floor by his feet.

The girl with the silver ring through her lower lip watches him and smiles to herself.

Joona leans over the photograph of Miranda but he’s thinking of his visit to Flora Hansen. He’d been irritated about wasting his time talking to her. As he was leaving, she’d followed him into the hallway, trying to show him the drawing she’d done of Miranda, but he’d pushed her hand away and it had fallen to the floor. Still, he’d caught a glimpse of it as he stepped over it on his way out the door.

Now, as he’s looking at Miranda’s arranged body, he’s remembering the drawing. It looked like it had been done in two stages. Flora had first drawn a stick figure and then filled in the limbs. The girl in the drawing had shaky contours in certain areas, but other parts of her body were still as thin as thread. Her head was disproportionately large. Her straight mouth could barely be seen, since her unfinished skeletal hands were over her face. The drawing was similar to what had been described in the newspapers.

What the newspapers hadn’t revealed was that Miranda had been hit in the head and that the blood had run into the pillow. No photographs from the crime scene had been released. The press had speculated about what the hands over her face meant, but no one outside the police and the justice system had known about the injury to the head. Strict confidence had been kept and will be kept until the moment the court process begins.

“You figured it out, didn’t you?” the girl in the next booth says.

Joona meets the girl’s glittering eyes and nods before he looks back at the photograph on the table.

What he realized while looking at Miranda’s body in the photograph was that Flora had drawn a dark heart next to the girl’s head right where the blood had been in reality. The same size, the same place.

It’s as if she’d seen Miranda lying on her bed.

It could just be a coincidence, but if he remembers Flora’s drawing clearly, the similarity is striking.