The Fire Witness

42

The parking lot outside the provincial hospital in Sundsvall is almost empty. The long, low building looks depressing, especially under these gray skies. Its brown brickwork is broken by windows that seem to have closed their eyes to the world. Joona strides up a path lined by bushes and through the front door.

There’s no one at the reception desk but in a moment a janitor comes by.

“Where’s your forensics department?” asks Joona.

“Two hundred and forty kilometers north of here,” the janitor says with a smile. “But if you want pathology, I can show you the way.”

He takes Joona down to the basement and through a pair of heavy metal doors. Down the hall Joona sees a sign over another door: DEPARTMENT OF CLINICAL PATHOLOGY AND CYTOLOGY.

“Good luck,” the janitor says as he points to the door.

Joona thanks him and walks down the empty hall. It’s cold and the tiled floor is cracked in places and scuffed with wheel marks from gurneys and carts. He passes a laboratory and opens the door to the autopsy room. No one is there and the stainless-steel autopsy table is empty. The overhead fluorescent fixtures bounce a cold, hard light off the white tiled walls. Joona waits and after a few minutes the door squeaks open, and two people wheel in a gurney from the morgue.

“Excuse me,” says Joona.

A thin man in a lab coat turns around and his aviator glasses glare in the light. He’s one of Joona’s old friends, Dr. Nils Åhlén, the head doctor at the National Forensic Laboratory, in Stockholm. His colleagues and friends call him “The Needle.” With him is his assistant, a young doctor Joona knows only as Frippe. Frippe’s dyed black hair hangs in wisps down to his shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” Joona asks.

“A woman from the National Police threatened me,” The Needle says.

“Anja.”

“She terrified me. She was yelling that you’re not allowed to go all the way up to Umeå to talk to anyone in forensics.”

“But we’re going to Nordfest as long as we’re here,” Frippe says. Joona notices black leather pants under his lab coat and cowboy boots swathed in blue protectors.

“The Haunted are playing at Club Deströyer.” The Needle smiles.

“That explains it,” says Joona.

Frippe laughs.

“We’ve just finished the woman, Elisabet Grim,” The Needle says. “The only unusual thing about her were the injuries on her hands.”

“Defensive wounds?” asks Joona.

“Except they’re on the wrong side,” says Frippe.

“Perhaps she held her hands in front of her face,” Joona says quietly.

“We’ll get back to her in a moment,” says The Needle. “First, let’s take a look at Miranda Eriksdotter.”

“When did they die? Can you determine that?” asks Joona.

“As you know, body temperature sinks.”

“Algor mortis,” Joona says.

“Right, and this cooling follows a billowing graph, which evens out to room temperature.”

“He knows all that,” Frippe says.

“So, with that and the rigor mortis as well as the lividity, we’ve determined that the girl and the woman died at approximately the same time late Friday night.”

Joona watches them roll the gurney over, count to three, then effortlessly lift the body bag onto the autopsy table. Frippe opens the bag and the smell of moldy bread and dried blood escapes. Miranda is in the same position in which she was found: her hands over her face and her ankles crossed.

Joona knows that the rigor mortis won’t have passed yet and that it is going to take some effort to move her hands away from her face. For a moment he wonders if perhaps it isn’t Miranda behind those hands. Perhaps her face is gone or her eyes were poked out. Perhaps she didn’t want her face to be seen.

“We didn’t receive an examination request,” The Needle says. “Why is she covering her face like that?”

“I don’t know,” Joona says.

Frippe is photographing the body carefully.

“I take it this is a forensic autopsy and that you will need a certified autopsy report?” The Needle says.

Joona nods.

“I could use a secretary,” mutters The Needle as he walks around the body.

“Now you’re just complaining again,” Frippe says, and smiles.

“So I was,” The Needle says. He pauses behind Miranda’s head and then completes his circuit.

Joona is reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s idea that only the living insist on distinguishing between the living and the dead. Rilke thought that other beings, such as angels, didn’t notice any difference.

“The lividity indicates that the victim has not been moved,” The Needle starts.

“The way I read the blood spatter, I’m sure that she was moved immediately after she was killed,” Joona says. “Her body would still have been limp when it was placed on the bed.”

Frippe nods. “If she was moved right away, she won’t show any lividity elsewhere.”

Joona watches quietly as the doctors examine the body. He’s thinking that his own daughter is not much younger than this girl whose life has been stolen.

The yellow network of veins has started to show beneath her white skin, and her flat stomach has started to bloat and has darkened.

Joona observes everything the doctors are doing and listens as they describe what they’re seeing, but he’s thinking of what he saw at the scene of the crime.

The Needle determines that there are no defensive injuries, no soft-tissue injuries, no indications of a fight or domestic abuse. Perhaps she didn’t see the blow coming, Joona thinks. Perhaps she just sat there and waited for it.

The doctors pull some hair out by the roots for comparison tests and fill in EDTA tubes with blood, then The Needle scrapes beneath her fingernails and turns to Joona.

“No traces of skin. She did not defend herself.”

“I know,” Joona says.

They start examining the skull injuries, and Joona comes closer to watch.

“Strong, blunt trauma to the head. Most likely cause of death,” The Needle says, noticing Joona’s close attention.

“From the front?” Joona asks.

“From the front, though slightly to the side.” The Needle points at the bloody hair. “Depression fracture on the temporal bone. We’ll do a CT scan, but I imagine the major blood vessels behind the skull were ruptured and bone fragments impaled the brain.”

“As with Elisabet Grim, we’re going to find trauma to the frontal lobe,” Frippe says.

“Brain tissue in the hair,” The Needle says.

“There were broken blood vessels, and blood and cerebral spinal fluid had run through her nostrils,” Frippe says.

“And in your opinion, they died at about the same time,” Joona says.

Frippe nods.

“They’ve both been hit from the front. The same cause of death for both of them,” Joona says. “The same murder weapon-”

“No,” The Needle says. “The murder weapon was not the same.”

“But the hammer,” Joona murmurs.

“Elisabet’s skull was crushed by a hammer,” The Needle says. “But Miranda was killed by a rock.”

Joona stares at him. “She was killed by a rock?”