The Fire Witness

185

There are only two destinations from Sveg Airport. Joona chooses to fly back to Arlanda Airport and then change planes to Helsinki. He feels as if he’s in the middle of a dream. He’s looking out the window at the veils of clouds over the Baltic Sea. A flight attendant offers to serve him something, but he can’t make himself answer.

His memories are drowning him in their deep ocean.

Twelve years ago, Joona cut off the finger of the Devil himself.

Nineteen different people had disappeared-from their cars, their bicycles, their mopeds. At first it seemed like a coincidence. When none of the disappeared showed up anywhere, the case was given highest priority.

Joona was the one who insisted that they had a serial killer on their hands.

Working with Samuel Mendel, Joona was able to trace the whereabouts of their prime suspect, a man named Jurek Walter, and catch him in the middle of committing a crime. They found him in Lill-Jans Forest, forcing a fifty-year-old woman into a coffin. The coffin was a few feet underground, and he’d been keeping her there for two years. They were able to rescue her.

When the woman was examined at the hospital, the enormity of what she’d undergone was revealed. Her muscles had atrophied and bedsores had deformed her. Her hands and feet were frostbitten. She was not only psychologically traumatized but had also suffered brain damage.

The way Joona sees it, the Devil resides in the worst cruelty of humankind. It is impossible to kill the Devil, but twelve years ago, he and Samuel Mendel cut off one of his fingers when they caught the serial killer Jurek Walter.

Later, Joona was at the Swedish Supreme Court in Wrangelska Palace on the island of Riddarholm in Stockholm. The case had gone through the system. Now Jurek Walter was being sentenced to a life in a closed insane asylum with special requirements for parole. He was moved to a high security institution twenty-one kilometers north of Stockholm.

Joona will never forget Jurek Walter’s wrinkled face as he turned to face Joona.

“Both of Samuel Mendel’s sons are going to disappear,” Jurek said in a tired voice as his defense lawyer collected his paperwork. “Samuel’s wife, Rebecka, will also disappear, but… No, listen to me, Joona Linna. The police will never find them, and once they call off the search, Samuel will keep looking. When he realizes that they will never be found and he will never see them again, he will kill himself.”

Joona got up to leave.

“And as for your little daughter-” Jurek Walter continued.

“Watch out,” Joona said, though there was no rage in his voice.

“Lumi will disappear, then Summa, and when you realize you will never see them again, it will be your turn to commit suicide. You will hang yourself.”

One Friday afternoon, a few months later, Samuel’s wife drove from their apartment in Liljeholmen to their summer house on Dalarö Island. Their sons, Joshua and Reuben, were with her in the car. When Samuel arrived at their summer house a few hours later, no one was there. The car was found abandoned on a nearby logging road. Samuel never saw his family again.

One chilly morning in the beginning of March, he went down to the beach where his boys used to play. The police had ended the search for them eight months earlier. He’d now given up himself. He took his service pistol from its holster and shot himself in the head.

Joona watches the shadow of the plane move over the waters of the Baltic Sea and thinks back to the day his life shattered. There was no sound in his car. The world seemed to be bathed in an odd light. The sun shone red behind veils of clouds. It had rained and the rays of the setting sun made the puddles shimmer as if they were burning underground.