The Fire Witness

25

Police officer Mirja Zlatnek has parked her squad car diagonally across the road and pulled up the emergency brake. To get past her, a car would have to leave the road and then at least two wheels would go into the ditch.

There’s a long stretch of road before her, and the rain beats against the roof of her car. Mirja peers through the windshield, but it’s hard to see in the increasingly heavy rain.

She’d thought she’d have a quiet day, since all the other police officers in the region were sent to Birgittagården after the dead girl was found there. She started at her desk, reading recipes on a food website. Baked fillet of moose, potato wedges, and Karl Johan mushroom sauce. Full-bodied puree of Jerusalem artichoke. Then she had to get in the squad car and check out a stolen trailer in Djupängen, which was where she was when the call came in about the kidnapped boy.

Although she’s never been involved in a case involving violence, Mirja has started to fear the operative side of police work. She can trace this back many years to when she tried to mediate a family conflict, which ended badly. Over the years since, her fear has crept up on her to the point that she prefers administrative work and preventive tactics. But she tells herself that she can handle the situation. There’s no other place where the car with the four-year-old boy could go. This road is like a single long tunnel-a fish trap. Either the car will drive over the bridge after Indal, where her colleague Lasse Bengtsson is waiting for it, or it will come here-and here’s where I’m waiting, Mirja thinks.

The tractor-trailer should be about ten or eleven kilometers behind the car. Much depends on how fast the car is going. In twenty minutes, no less, it will be here. Mirja tells herself that this is probably not a random kidnapping. It could be a custody battle. The woman on the phone was too upset to give much concrete information, but her car should be somewhere on this highway, this side of Nilsböle.

It’ll soon be over, she thinks. In a little while, she’ll be able to return to the office, have a cup of coffee, eat her ham sandwich.

But there is something that bothers her. The woman kept talking about a girl with twigs for arms. Mirja didn’t ask the woman for her name. There wasn’t time. She assumed that the emergency center had taken it down. The woman’s agitation was frightening. She had described what happened as if it were some incomprehensible or supernatural event.

The rain keeps beating down. Mirja picks up the radio and calls her colleague Lasse Bengtsson.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Raining like hell, but otherwise not much. Not a single car,” he says. “Wait, now I see a truck, a huge tractor-trailer. On Highway 330.”

“He’s the driver who placed the call,” she says.

“Then where the hell is the Toyota?” asks Lasse. “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes and I haven’t seen it. Unless the car is a UFO, it should reach you in less than five minutes.”

“Just a minute,” Mirja says quickly, and cuts off communication. She can see headlights in the distance.