Misterioso (6 page)

Finally he went over to the break room, unable to hide his joy.

Four people were sitting there, stuffing themselves with the junk food that they’d brought for lunch. Anders Lindblad, Anna Vass, and Johan Bringman. And Svante Ernstsson. They all looked at him with surprise. Maybe the expression on his face wasn’t exactly what they’d been expecting to see.

“I’ve come to say goodbye,” Hjelm said solemnly.

Bringman and Ernstsson stood up.

“What the hell do you mean?” said Bringman.

“Tell us,” said Ernstsson. “You mean to say those fuckers fired you?”

Hjelm sat down across from them and pointed at Ernstsson’s lunch.

“Put the burger in the nuker. I told you—it’s better if the sauce is warm.”

Ernstsson laughed with relief. “Okay, so they haven’t fired you! Tell us what happened.”

“I really have come to say goodbye. You might say I’ve been kicked upstairs.”

“What about Internal Affairs?”

“That ordeal is over. Now it’s the NCP for me, hand in glove with the commissioner himself.”

“So they thought it’d be better to remove you from the shitpile of the southern suburbs and the hordes of blackhead immigrants?”

“Something like that, I guess. It’s … top, top secret, as the man said. You’ll probably be reading about it in the newspapers, soon enough. But right now it’s all very hush-hush.”

“When do you start?”

“This afternoon, actually. Three o’clock.”

“Fucking great! I’ll drive you over to Ishmet’s bakery so you can buy the most expensive farewell honey-oozing cake that he’s got.”

Bruun inhaled the brown smoke from a black cigar and smiled into his beard, which covered a considerable portion of his face. He stretched his arms upward and growled faintly, and a few flakes of ash floated onto his reddish-gray mane.

“So, now I’ve produced yet another bigwig at the NCP,” he said with immeasurable conceit. “And you know that once you’re in over there, they’ll never let you out. Except in a casket. Stamped NCP.”

Hjelm removed his ID badge and service weapon from Bruun’s desk and fastened the shoulder holster around his chest.

“ ‘Another bigwig’?” he asked.

“Hultin was here in the late seventies. Didn’t you know? A hell of a soccer player. Wooden-leg Hultin. The worst centerback in the city. Absolutely no sense of the ball. Instead he specialized in head-butting and splitting open eyebrows.”

Hjelm felt a faint sensation of warmth creep through his veins. It was not altogether unpleasant. “He said he’d read about me in the papers. Lots of goodwill in the media.”

“Oh yeah, Hultin the newspaper hound.”

“Are you still in contact with him?”

“Occasionally I give him a call to remind him of old favors, sure. I think he still plays. On the senior team of the Stockholm police sports league. When he has time, which isn’t often. I can just picture him splitting open the eyebrows of his semiretired colleagues. That’d be a sight for the gods.”

Hjelm decided to ask him straight out. “It didn’t happen to be you who …?”

Bruun dropped the divine mental image of gray eyebrows gushing with blood and gave Hjelm a shrewd look. “It was pure luck that they were setting up a new group right now. The top, top secret A-Unit.”

“There aren’t many ways to get around Internal Affairs.”

“You have to take what you can get. Wooden-leg is always in the back of my mind.” Bruun took one last puff on his cigar, his mouth shaped like the hose of a vacuum cleaner. “Just do a good job, all right? I don’t want to have to go through this shit again.”

The A-Unit had its first meeting in one of the smallest conference rooms in the enormous complex of police headquarters, located within the rectangle formed by Kungsholmsgatan, Polhemsgatan, Bergsgatan, and Agnegatan. The original headquarters building, constructed in 1903, still boasts dreams of power; its yellowish expanse faces Agnegatan. It is the central hub of the Stockholm police. The opposite side of the rectangle faces Polhemsgatan, mirroring the entirely different but equally absurd architectural ideal of the seventies. That’s where the offices of the National Police Board are located.

And it was there that Paul Hjelm was headed a few minutes before three
P.M
. He was expected. A guard showed him on a map near the entrance how to find his way to the small conference room. Hjelm wasn’t paying attention, and so he arrived a bit late.

Five people were already in the room, sitting at a table and looking almost as bewildered as he felt. As unobtrusively as
possible, he slipped into a vacant chair. As if on cue, a blond man in his fifties wearing a serious expression and a custom-tailored suit appeared. He took up position at the head of the table, placing his right hand on the telescope-like arm of the overhead projector. He glanced around, looking for a face that he didn’t see. He left the room again, clearing his throat. Just as he closed the door behind him, the door on the other side of the room opened, and in came Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin. He too glanced around, looking for a face that he didn’t see.

“Where’s Mörner?” he asked.

The constituents of what was evidently the proposed A-Unit stared in confusion at one another.

“Who’s Mörner?” asked Hjelm, not offering much help.

“A man was just here,” said the group’s only female member, a dark-haired woman from Göteborg who was in the process of acquiring the first wrinkles on her face but clearly didn’t give a damn. “But he left.”

“That sounds like him,” said Hultin flatly. He sank heavily onto a chair and set a pair of half-moon reading glasses on his big nose. “Waldemar Mörner, the commissioner of the National Police Board, and the official boss of this group. He was planning to deliver a little welcome speech. Oh well, maybe he’ll come back.”

Hjelm had a hard time picturing this distinguished and efficient man with the controlled, neutral voice as a vicious soccer player.

“Okay, you all know what this is about,” Hultin continued. “You are now members of what for lack of a better term and for lack of much else is going to be called the A-Unit. You answer directly to the National Criminal Police, or NCP, but you’ll be working closely with the Stockholm police, primarily with their homicide department, which is housed in the Kungsholmsgatan
wing, around the corner from here. Stockholm is the scene of the crime, at least for the moment. All right then.

“The point is that all of you, regardless of rank, are in a position of higher authority than those who will be assisting you, whether it’s the Stockholm police or the NCP. This case has top priority, as they say on TV. Since you’ve been hand-picked from districts all over the country, I don’t think you know each other, so let’s start by introducing ourselves. As you know, my name is—”

The door was flung open, and the man they’d seen before entered again, out of breath and ill tempered.

“There you are, Hultin. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Is that so?” said Hultin. “Well, here you have your A-Unit.”

“Good, very good,” Waldemar Mörner said impatiently. He took up the same position as before, standing at the head of the table and leaning one hand on the raised section of the overhead projector. “So, gentlemen. And madam. You are a hand-picked unit consisting of six individuals—five men and one woman—and I assume that Detective Superintendent Hultin has already informed you of your assignment. So now you’ve got to get busy. It’s of the utmost importance to the security of this nation that you stop this insane serial killer before Sweden loses all of its leading citizens. You and you alone can end this rampage through the country’s streets. Yes, that’s right. Yes, indeed. I can see that you are all young and ambitious, fully aware of what’s at stake, and raring to take on this task. So let the game begin. May the guardian angel of police officers offer you protection.”

He left the room at the same whirlwind pace as he had arrived. Several jaws that had dropped open during his speech were now firmly back in place.

Jan-Olov Hultin closed his eyes and reached over his glasses to rub the corners of his eyes. “All right, so now everybody knows what this is about,” he said calmly. It took a second
before smiles began to appear around the table. It would take much longer before they fully understood Hultin’s subtle sense of humor. “Let’s continue from where we left off. My name is Jan-Olov Hultin, and I’ve worked here for a number of years, often directly under the former, nationally known boss, whose name we no longer mention. They’re just about to appoint a successor, with the new title of National Criminal Director, a title that carries the status of director-general. Gone are the police titles of the past. So why don’t you introduce yourselves now? Moving clockwise.”

This abrupt transition caused more confusion. Finally a balding, rather stout man in his early fifties spoke up. He was sitting on the far right in the small, bare conference room. He tapped his pen lightly as he spoke.

“Yes, well, my name is Viggo Norlander, and I’m the only one here who has worked on this case from the very beginning. So I’ve been transferred directly from the Stockholm police criminal division around the corner. You might say that I’m the one who has traveled the shortest route to get here. I also see that I’m presumably the oldest one present, except for Mr. Jan-Olov, of course.”

Hultin nodded slightly, without changing expression. They clearly knew each other well.

Next to Norlander sat the woman.

“I’m Kerstin Holm. As you can no doubt already hear, I’ve been imported directly from the North Sea coast. I’ve worked in the Göteborg criminal division all my adult life, and even before that.”

Then came the youngest and shortest member of the team, a dark-haired young man who couldn’t be much over thirty. He spoke with great clarity.

“My name is Jorge Chavez, and until yesterday I was the only ‘blackhead’ cop in the entire Sundsvall police district. I’m leaving
behind a real void, believe me. Apparently all the minorities have to be represented here. Including heroes, I see.”

He cast a meaningful glance at Hjelm, who sat next to him. Hjelm blinked a few times before attempting to speak. Off in the background, he saw the shadow of a smile cross Hultin’s lips.

“I’m here because of a foolhardy act and not because of some heroic deed, and we’ll just have to see whether this assignment is meant to be a punishment or a reward. My name is Paul Hjelm, and I’m from the Huddinge police. I’m sure you haven’t missed the charming photograph from my youth that’s been plastered all over the media the past few days.”

Quite a decent response, considering the circumstances
, he thought, though he was sweating so much afterward that he missed part of the next introduction.

The man on his left looked very Finnish. He appeared to be several years older than Hjelm, who immediately thought about Martti Vainio, the famed long-distance runner from Finland who had ended up testing positive for drugs and then became a conservative politician. The man’s accent was minimal but still noticeable, compared to Chavez’s complete lack of accent.

“Arto Söderstedt, your typical Finnish buffoon,” he said laconically. “Flown here from Västerås early this morning in the NCP boss’s private jet.”

Then there was only one man remaining, a huge guy wearing slovenly clothes, muscular but also with the rolls of fat often left by anabolic steroids when not combined with regular workouts. Hjelm tried not to draw any conclusions based on this initial observation.

“I’m Gunnar Nyberg from the Nacka police,” he said. They waited to hear something more, but nothing came.

Hultin took the floor again. “We have five offices at your disposal: my office, this—what should we call it?—conference
room, where we’ll have our meetings. And three other offices. That means you’ll have to share rooms, so you’re going to be working in teams of two for a while. That’s nothing new. I suggest the following pairs: Norlander and Söderstedt in room 302; Holm and Nyberg in room 303; Hjelm and Chavez in room 304. In each office you’ll find two desks, two phones, an intercom, two cell phones, and a fully equipped computer system. You’ll find me hunkered down in room 301, and this is of course room 300. On each desk you’ll find a file folder with a complete rundown of the case. With these administrative details now out of the way, I’ll ask Norlander to present a summary of what’s far more important, meaning the details relating to the police investigation. I’ll hand out your work assignments afterward. It’s all yours, Viggo.”

Norlander got up and perched on the edge of the table next to Hultin. He took a colored marker from the whiteboard behind him and fidgeted with it as he talked.

“There won’t be a scrap of technical evidence to go on. The perp didn’t leave a single clue, not even a strand of hair. The very lack of evidence has led us to believe that we’re dealing with some sort of professional. So we can leave the technical reports until later. An ordinary nine-millimeter weapon. But big firepower. The bullets passed right through the skulls of the victims and were afterward plucked out with some type of pliers. In both cases, the perp was sitting in the living room when the victim arrived home, and he fired the shots from that position. Even though in both instances the victim had a wife, it seems as if the perp
knew
that the victim would be coming home alone and also that he would arrive late in the evening. I’ll make a sketch of both living rooms so you can get an idea of the similarity of the modus operandi.”

Norlander drew two blue rectangles on the whiteboard and then filled them in with a number of smaller squares and rectangles.
Then he drew a short line that stretched diagonally from the same side of both rectangles.

“That’s the living room door,” he explained. “As you can see, both rooms are basically square-shaped. The arrangement of the furniture and the layout are practically identical. It was here, on the sofa along this wall farthest from the door, that the perp was sitting. He waited until the victim moved slightly to one side so that the slugs would end up in the wall and not go flying off to some unknown fate outside the door. Then he fired two shots through the victim’s head.”