The Fire Witness

172

Joona is bumping over rusty train tracks when the coordinator for the operation at Duved answers the phone. His voice is jumpy and he’s speaking to Joona at the same time that someone else in the operation bus is talking.

“Things are a bit jumbled right now-but we’re on the scene,” he says, coughing.

“I have to know if-”

“Damn it, no! Before Trångsviken and Strömsund!” the coordinator shouts.

“Are they alive?” Joona asks.

“Sorry, I’m trying to get some roadblocks set up.”

“I’ll wait,” Joona says. He starts to pass a long-haul truck.

He hears the coordinator put down the phone and talk to the operational leader, confirming the positions of the roadblocks and telling Alarm Communication Central to use patrol cars to block the roads.

“I’m back,” he says, when he picks up his phone again.

“Are they alive?” Joona asks again.

“The girl is fine. She’s not in danger. The woman is in critical condition. They’re going to do emergency surgery in Östersund and then fly her by helicopter to Karolinska in Stockholm.”

“What about Daniel Grim?”

“There were no other people in the house. We’re putting up the roadblocks right now. Still, if he knows the side roads… We don’t have the resources to cover everything.”

“What about helicopters?”

“We’re talking to a hunt club in Kiruna to see if we can borrow theirs, but it will take some time,” the coordinator answers in a voice harsh from strain.

Joona is now on the outskirts of Sundsvall. He can’t imagine what Elin has been through, but she obviously was able to reach the house in time to save the girl.

Elin is seriously injured, but Vicky is still alive.

Daniel Grim might get caught in one of the roadblocks, especially if he doesn’t think that the police are after him. If he gets through the roadblocks, the earliest he can reach his house is in two hours. The police will have to set a trap for him.

We have to finish the technical search for evidence before he gets there, Joona thinks.

He stops on Bruksgatan behind a patrol car. The front door to Daniel Grim’s house is wide open and two uniformed officers are waiting for him in the hall.

“The house is empty,” one of them says. “Nothing unusual.”

“Is the technician on the way?”

“He’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“Let me look around,” Joona says.

Joona walks through the house without knowing what he’s looking for. He opens closets, pulls open drawers, looks inside a wine cellar, goes to the kitchen, looks through the cupboards, the refrigerator, the freezer. He runs up to the second floor and pulls off the tiger-striped bed covering, turns over the mattress, opens the closet, throws Elisabet’s clothes to the side and knocks on the wall. He kicks away old shoes and pulls out a box of Christmas decorations. Then he goes into the bathroom and looks in the medicine cabinet. Shaving cream, medicine bottles, makeup. Then he runs down to the basement and looks over the tools hanging on the wall. He tries the door to the furnace room, looks under the lawn mower, and lifts the lid to the floor drain. He looks behind bags of potting soil.

Joona closes his eyes and thinks. First, the trapdoor in the ceiling, which leads to the attic. That was in the bedroom. Second, the locked door to the furnace room. Finally, the wine cellar. He thinks that it should be much larger considering where it is.

He opens the door to the wine cellar again. It’s situated beneath the stairway and has a sign on it: ALLWAR OCH SKÄMT.

About a hundred bottles are stacked on their sides in small boxes on a tall wooden shelving unit. The shelving appears to be freestanding, and when he checks he sees that there is at least a twelve-inch gap between the back of the wine storage unit and the wall. He pulls at the shelving, but it doesn’t budge. He moves a few bottles from both ends and finds a bolt far down on the left. He carefully lets the unit swing open on its hinge.

The space behind it is empty, except for a shoe box on the floor. A heart has been painted on the lid.

Joona gets out his cell phone to take a picture of the shoe box and then he puts on latex gloves.