The Fire Witness

59

The police on shore watch as the log slams into Joona, and within moments they are in the river, swimming out to grab him. They drag him up onto the beach.

“I’m sorry,” Joona manages to pant. “I just needed to know…”

“Where did the log hit you?”

“There aren’t any bodies in the car,” Joona says. The pain in his shoulder is excruciating.

“Let’s take a look at your arm,” says an officer.

“Shit,” another whispers.

Blood has spread through Joona’s soaked shirt and his arm hangs at a weird angle. It’s dangling loosely from its tendons.

They take the glasses from his good hand and put them in a plastic bag.

One of the police officers drives him at top speed the twenty-nine kilometers to Sundsvall hospital. Joona sits quietly, his eyes shut, and holds his arm close to his chest. In spite of the pain, he tells the other officer how the current had shifted the car over the riverbed and the direction of the water flowing through the broken windows.

“The children weren’t there,” he says, barely audible.

“Bodies can float pretty far in the current,” the officer replies. “There’s no reason to start a diving search just yet. Either they will be snagged by something and never surface, or they’ll end up at the dam just like the car seat did.”

At the hospital, two cheerful, chatty nurses who could be mother and daughter get him out of his wet clothes, but when they see his arm, they fall silent. They clean him up and take him to the X-ray unit.

Twenty minutes later, a doctor comes in to report that nothing is broken, the clavicle is intact, but Joona’s shoulder is dislocated. Joona lies on his stomach, his arm hanging straight down, and the doctor injects twenty milligrams of lidocaine directly into the joint. Then the doctor sinks to the floor. He pulls the arm down while the two nurses press it back into position. Joona bites hard on a towel. Then he hears a crack, and he finds to his relief he can release his breath. And think. The car with Vicky Bennet and Dante had disappeared on a stretch of the road without intersections. And with the press hounding them, the police had searched every possible place a vehicle could be hidden. But what Joona realized when he saw the car seat at the dam was this: If the car had gone off the road and into the river, there was only one spot where it could have happened without being spotted. After Indal, Highway 86 swings to the right and over the bridge. There, Vicky must have missed the turn and headed the car straight down the riverbank and into the water.

The hard rain would have washed away the tracks on the sandy beach. And given its broken windows, the river would have rushed in to fill the car. In just a few moments, it would have disappeared from sight.