The Nightmare

10

Joona Linna is in his car, driving toward the Karolinska Institute, the medical research center in Solna, a suburb north of Stockholm. He’s thinking about Carl Palmcrona’s hanging body, the tight laundry rope, the urine on the floor.

To the picture in his mind, Joona adds two sets of shoe prints on the floor circling the dead man.

This case is not over.

The department of forensic medicine is in a redbrick building set among the well-tended lawns on the large campus of the Karolinska Institute.

Joona swings into the empty visitors’ parking lot. He sees that the chief medical officer, Nils Åhlén, The Needle, has driven his white Jaguar over the curb and right onto the manicured lawn next to the main entrance.

Joona waves at the woman sitting in reception, who answers with a thumbs-up. He continues down the hallway, knocks at The Needle’s door, and goes right in. As usual, The Needle’s office is completely barren of anything extraneous. The blinds have been drawn but sunshine still filters in between the slats. The light is bright on white surfaces but disappears into the gray areas of brushed steel.

As if to match his environment, The Needle wears white aviator glasses and a white polo shirt underneath his lab coat.

“I just put a parking ticket on a white Jaguar outside,” Joona says.

“Good for you.”

Joona pauses in the middle of the room, his serious gray eyes darkening.

“So how’d he really die?”

“You’re talking about Palmcrona?”

“Right.”

The telephone rings and The Needle hands the autopsy report to Joona.

“You didn’t need to come all the way here to find that out,” The Needle says before he picks up the phone.

Joona sits down on a white leather chair. The autopsy on Carl Palmcrona’s body is complete. Joona flips through the file and eyes a few entries at random:

74. Kidneys weigh 290 grams together. Surfaces are smooth. Tissues are gray-red. Consistency is firm and elastic. Renal capsule is clear.

75. The ureters have normal appearance.

76. The bladder is empty. Mucous membrane is pale.

77. The prostate is normal size. Tissues are pale.

The Needle pushes his glasses up his narrow, hooked nose and finishes his phone call. He looks up.

“As you see,” he says, yawning, “nothing unusual. Cause of death is asphyxiation, that is, suffocation… but with a successful hanging we’re not talking about your typical meaning of suffocation. Rather, here we have closure of artery supply.”

“So the brain dies when the flow of oxygenated blood is stopped.”

The Needle nods. “That’s right. Artery compression, bilateral closure of the carotids. It happens unbelievably quickly, of course. Unconsciousness within seconds-”

“But he was alive before the hanging?” Joona asks.

“Right.”

The Needle’s narrow, smooth face is gloomy.

“Can you determine the drop?”

“I imagine it was a matter of decimeters. There aren’t any fractures of the cervical vertebra or at the base of the skull.”

“I see…”

Joona is thinking of the briefcase with Palmcrona’s shoe prints. He opens the file again and flips to the external examination: the investigation of the skin of the neck and the measurement of the angles.

“What’s bothering you?”

“Could the same rope have been used to strangle him before the hanging?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Well, first of all there is just one line and it’s perfect.” The Needle starts to explain. “When a person is hanged, the rope or line cuts into the neck and it-”

“But a killer might know that,” Joona says.

“But it’s practically impossible to reconstruct… you know, with a successful hanging, the line around the neck is like the point of an arrow with the edge on the upward side, right at the knot-”

“Because the weight of the body tightens the loop.”

“Exactly. And for the same reason the deepest part must be precisely across from the edge.”

“So hanging was the cause of death.”

“No doubt about it.”

The tall, thin pathologist gently gnaws his lower lip.

“But could he have been forced to kill himself?” Joona asks.

“There are no signs of it on the body.”

Joona shuts the file, drums on it with both hands, and thinks about the housekeeper’s statement that other people had been involved in Palmcrona’s death. Was it just confused rattling on? But what about the two sets of shoe prints Tommy Kofoed had found?

“So you’re absolutely sure of the cause of death?” Joona stares into The Needle’s eyes.

“What did you expect?”

“I expected this,” Joona says slowly, tapping the autopsy. “Exactly this. But still, something’s not right.”

The Needle smiles thinly.

“Take it and use it as bedtime reading.”

“Fine,” Joona agrees.

“Still, I’m sure you can just let go of this one… it’s nothing more dramatic than a suicide.”

The Needle’s smile disappears and he drops his gaze. Joona’s eyes are still sharp and focused.

“You’re probably right.”

“Of course I’m right,” The Needle replies. “And I can speculate a little more if you want… Palmcrona was probably depressed. His fingernails were ragged and dirty. He hadn’t brushed his teeth for several days and he hadn’t shaved.”

“I see.”

“You can take a look at him if you’d like,” The Needle prompts.

“No, that’s not necessary,” Joona answers and slowly stands up.

The Needle leans forward, a note of expectancy in his voice as if he’d been waiting for this moment.

“Something more exciting came in this morning. Do you have a few minutes?”

The Needle stands up as well, and gestures Joona to follow him along the hall. A light blue butterfly has managed to get into the building and it flutters in front of them.

“Has the other guy quit?”

“Who?”

“The other guy who worked here, the one with the ponytail…”

“Frippe? No way in hell we’d let him quit. He has a few days off. Megadeth was playing the Globe yesterday. Entombed was the lead-in act.”

They walk through a dark room between autopsy tables of stainless steel, hardly noticing the strong smell of disinfectant. They continue walking to a much cooler room where bodies are being stored in chilled lockers, waiting to be examined by the department of forensic medicine.

The Needle opens the door and turns on the ceiling lamp. The fluorescent light flickers once or twice before it’s fully on and can illuminate the white-tiled room and the long autopsy table covered in plastic. The table has double sinks and gutters for drainage.

The Needle uncovers the body lying on the table.

It is a beautiful young woman.

Her skin is tanned and her long hair winds in a thick, shimmering mass across her forehead and shoulders. She seems to look into the room with an expression of both doubt and amazement. There’s an almost mischievous tilt to the corners of her mouth, as if she had been a person who easily smiles and laughs. However, any light in those large, dark eyes has long gone. Small brownish yellow specks are starting to appear.

Joona moves closer for a better perspective. She can’t be more than nineteen or twenty years old. Not that long ago, she’d been a child still sleeping in bed with her parents. Then she was an adolescent schoolgirl and now she’s dead.

A line, like a smile painted in gray, curves for about thirty centimeters across the woman’s collarbone.

“What’s this?” Joona points at it.

“No idea. Maybe from a necklace or the top of a blouse. I’ll take a closer look later.”

Joona peers more closely at the quiet body. He sighs at the familiar wave of melancholy he feels when he faces death, the colorless vacuum.

Her fingers and toes had been painted with a light, almost beige, rose.

“So what’s the story?” Joona finally asks after a minute of silence.

The Needle gives him a serious look and light reflects from his glasses as he turns back to the body.

“The Coast Guard brought her in,” he relates. “They found her sitting on the bunk down in the forward cabin of a large motorboat. It was abandoned and drifting in the archipelago.”

“She was already dead?”

The Needle looks at him and his voice becomes almost melodic.

“She drowned, Joona.”

“Drowned?”

The Needle nods, and his smile almost vibrates.

“She drowned on a boat that was still afloat,” he says.

“I assume someone found her in the water and brought her on board.”

“If that was the case, I wouldn’t waste your time.”

“So what’s going on?”

“There are no marks of water on the body itself-I’ve sent her clothes to be analyzed, but I know the National Forensic Laboratory won’t find a thing.”

The Needle falls silent and flips through his preliminary report. He sneaks a look at Joona to see if he’s at all curious. Joona stands completely still and then his expression shifts. Now he looks at the corpse with an expression that is awake and alert. He takes up a pair of latex gloves and pulls them on. The Needle is happily content to see Joona leaning over the body to lift her arms, first one, then the other, for closer examination.

“There’s no trace of violence on her,” The Needle almost whispers. “I don’t understand it at all.”