Unseen

MONDAY, JUNE 11

Johan’s week would turn out to be tougher than he thought. As soon as he set foot in the newsroom on Monday morning, he was summoned to Grenfors’s office.

“Great job you did on Gotland.”

“Thanks,” said Johan, slightly on guard. He always had a feeling that the editors wanted something special from him whenever they started off the conversation by praising him.

“I assume nothing else is going to happen over there. After all, the boyfriend seems to be guilty,” Grenfors went on.

“Could be.”

“The thing is, now we’re in the shit here.”

“Is that so? Seems I’ve heard this before, haven’t I?” Johan said dryly.

Grenfors ignored his tone of voice. “We had to scrap the feature story that was supposed to run on Friday. We don’t have any new ideas. You talked before about putting together something on the gangster war in Stockholm. Do you think you’d have time to do it now?”

Johan understood the problem, so he didn’t want to be unreasonable, even though he’d been hoping for at least one calm day after the Gotland trip. Emma Winarve had haunted his mind all weekend, making it hard for him to sleep. He couldn’t understand what had gotten into him. A married woman and the mother of young children, from Gotland, and he hardly knew her. It was ridiculous. He looked at Grenfors.

“Well, I guess so. I have a lot of material already on tape from before. I don’t think there’s time to do a full-length story, but I could probably put together seven or eight minutes.”

Grenfors looked relieved. “Good. Then that’s what we’ll do. I knew I could count on you.”

When Johan returned to his cubicle in the editorial office, he started going through his material. The shooting in Varberg, when a man with a criminal record was killed right on the street with three shots to the head. An execution, pure and simple. Two months earlier the victim had been involved in the murder of a pizza maker in Hogdalen, who was shot to death while sitting in his car in a parking lot. The pizza maker in turn was in debt, big time, to the unknown owner of a restaurant in Stockholm’s underworld, which everybody knew had connections to the Russian mafia. In addition, he was an accomplice in the murder of a gym owner in Farsta, who was shot to death at the Taby racetrack several years before. And so it continued. Shootings, armed robberies, and even murder had become common fare in Stockholm. The news desk had stopped reporting all the incidents of armed robbery. They occurred so often that they no longer qualified as news on the broadcast. Most of the murders and serious felonies in Stockholm were committed by a small clique of hardened criminals. That was the angle that Johan was thinking of using for his story.

He had developed a good contact with the girlfriend of one of this year’s latest victims. He punched in her phone number. She had promised him an interview.

Now it was time to call in that promise.