The Fire Witness (45 page)

Elin grabs a frying pan as she darts through the kitchen. She runs across the living room and opens the door to the garage. She throws the frying pan down the stairs to the basement and hears it clang as she rushes up the stairs to the upper floors.

Daniel has reached the basement stairs, but he hasn’t been fooled. He’s heard her running up the stairs. She’s almost out of ideas. She races past the floor where Vicky is hiding and then deliberately slows down to lure Daniel toward her and away from the girl. She’s now in the big open room on the top floor. It is almost completely dark.

Elin knows she must hold on until the police arrive. She has to keep Daniel following her and ignoring Vicky’s room.

She hears his footsteps on the stairs and knows that he is coming after her.

She runs to the tile stove in the corner and grabs the poker from the rack of implements, then crosses to the middle of the room and smashes the ceiling lamp with one blow. The large dish of frosted glass crashes to the floor and slivers fly everywhere. Then the room is silent.

There is only the sound of heavy steps on the stairs.

Elin hides in the darkness next to a bookcase beside the door.

Daniel is panting when he reaches the top. He’s not in a hurry. He knows there’s only one staircase down from the top floor of the house.

Elin tries to stifle the sound of her breathing.

Daniel stands in the doorway holding the ax. He stares into the room and then hits the light switch.

There’s a click, but nothing happens. The room stays dark.

169

Elin hides in the darkness with a poker in both hands. She is shaking with the adrenaline coursing through her, but she feels remarkably strong.

Daniel slowly steps into the room. Elin can’t see him, but she hears the glass crackling beneath his shoes.

Then there’s a loud buzz and the metal shutters start to open. Light begins to seep into the room. Daniel is standing right inside the doorway and he is waiting until he can see where Elin is. Bit by bit, light pours into the room.

There is nowhere to hide.

He spots her. He stares at her and she backs away, aiming the poker at him.

Daniel has the ax in his right hand. He glances at it and then approaches her.

She hits at him, but misses. He moves away. She’s panting from the strain as she aims at him again. Her foot burns. She’s stepped on a shard of glass. She keeps staring at Daniel.

The ax sways in his hand.

She hits, he dodges the blow.

His eyes are boring into hers.

He slashes the ax down with all his strength. But he hasn’t aimed it at her. Instead, the blade hits the poker. The clang of metal against metal. The poker is knocked out of her hand and thuds to the floor.

She can’t defend herself. She just keeps stepping backward. She realizes with a kind of astonishment that things aren’t going well for her. Fear floods her body but clears her mind. She feels uninvolved, as if she’s merely observing what is happening.

Daniel keeps approaching.

She looks him in the eyes and he looks back. He seems calm, as if none of this has touched his emotions.

Finally she has her back to the large window. Behind her, it is three and a half stories to a stone patio.

Her feet are bleeding and red footprints mark her path over the blond wood floor.

She can’t do anything more. She thinks that she should try to negotiate, promise him anything, just get him to talk.

Daniel is breathing heavily and watches her for a while. Then he swiftly crosses the last few feet while lifting the ax. He strikes as hard as he can. Instinctively, Elin jerks her head to the side. The ax smashes into the window. She feels the thick glass vibrate behind her back and crack. Daniel lifts the ax again but before he can land a blow, Elin leans back. She’s throwing all her weight at the broken window and she can feel it give way. Her stomach churns. Then she’s falling through the air with glass showering down all around her. Elin Frank closes her eyes and does not feel the ground when she hits it.

Daniel steadies himself on the windowsill and looks down. Splinters of glass are still falling from the window as Elin lies on her back down below, a steady stream of blood flowing from her head onto the stones of the patio.

Daniel begins to breathe more calmly. His shirt is stuck to his back from sweat.

He has a spectacular view from this uppermost window. He can see Tyskhuvud close-by but Åreskutan is lost in the clouds. On the road from Åre, the bright blue lights of emergency vehicles are heading this way. The road to Tegefors, however, is completely empty.

170

Joona had put the puzzle together the moment Flora said her brother’s name. Daniel Grim was the boy who had been adopted by the Rånne couple in Delsbo. He was the same Daniel whom Flora saw kill a little girl at Delsbo Church thirty-five years ago.

Now Joona understood why Elisabet had wounds on the backs of her hands, not her palms. She hadn’t been trying to defend herself, she’d been holding them over her face. Daniel wasn’t leaving any witnesses. No one could see what he had done.

Once he’d phoned Elin and warned her of the danger she was in, Joona radioed the national communications center asking them to send a helicopter, an ambulance, and police cars to Elin’s house near Duved. He was told that the helicopters were already in use in Kiruna, so it would take at least half an hour for the police to get to the house by road.

Joona couldn’t get there himself—it was more than 150 kilometers from Delsbo to Duved.

He was starting the car engine when Carlos Eliasson called, wanting to know why Joona thought Daniel Grim was the murderer.

“Thirty-five years ago he killed another girl in the same way as the girl at Birgittagården,” Joona said as he started driving down the gravel road.

“Anja showed me the photo from the accident at Delsbo Church.” Carlos sighed.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Joona said.

“What makes you believe they are connected?”

“Both victims had their hands over their faces when they were killed,” Joona said.

“I know Miranda did, but this victim is lying on a sheet and her hands are at her sides.”

“The body was moved before the police arrived,” Joona said.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“Is this your usual stubbornness or did that psychic woman tell you about it?”

“She is an eyewitness to the Delsbo murder.”

“That’s well past the statute of limitations,” Carlos said with a slight laugh, and then he continued in a more serious tone. “We have a prosecutor who is leading the investigation for the case against Vicky Bennet. You are still under internal investigation.”

Now Joona is turning east onto Highway 84 toward Sundsvall. He contacts the Västernorrland police and requests a patrol car and a technician to Daniel Grim’s home. Over the radio, he can hear the Jämtland police estimate the time of arrival at ten minutes.

171

The first patrol car stops right outside Elin Frank’s house on the side of Tegefjäll. One of the police officers runs over to the Jeep and turns off the engine. The other one pulls out his gun on his way to the front door. A second patrol car is turning into the driveway, followed by an ambulance. The light from a second ambulance behind it is flashing on the gravel road.

There is no noise coming from the house. The windows are shuttered.

Everything is frighteningly quiet.

Now both officers from the first patrol car are entering the house with their guns drawn. A third officer stays in place, while a fourth starts to walk around the house. He walks up a wide white concrete staircase.

The house appears abandoned. It is as dark as a locked treasure chest.

The fourth police officer walks onto the terrace and past a cluster of outdoor furniture. He sees blood, glass splinters, and two human beings.

He stops.

A girl with a pale face and dry, cracked lips looks up at him. Through her messy hair, her eyes look almost black. She’s on her knees beside a woman who appears lifeless. A pool of blood has surrounded them both. The girl is holding the woman’s hand in hers. She’s moving her mouth, but the police officer can’t hear what she’s saying until he comes closer.

“She’s still warm,” Vicky is whispering. “She’s still warm.”

The officer lowers his weapon and picks up his radio to call the paramedics.

Vicky can’t stop weeping. She keeps a tight hold on Elin’s hand.

The paramedics roll two stretchers to the wounded people. They determine immediately that the woman is still alive. She has a skull fracture and possible damage to her spine. They secure her breathing, then brace her head and neck and lift her onto a backboard before lifting it carefully onto the stretcher. The girl does not once let go of the woman’s hand.

The girl is also seriously wounded. She’s bleeding from kneeling on the glass. Her neck is swollen and badly bruised, and her neck vertebrae might be injured. She refuses to lie down on a stretcher. She won’t leave the woman’s side.

The paramedics are in a hurry now, so they don’t argue with the girl. They let her sit beside Elin Frank and hold her hand while they drive to Östersund, where they’ll both be examined. An ambulance helicopter can take Elin on to Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm.

172

Joona is bumping over rusty train tracks when the coordinator for the operation at Duved answers the phone. His voice is jumpy and he’s speaking to Joona at the same time that someone else in the operation bus is talking.

“Things are a bit jumbled right now—but we’re on the scene,” he says, coughing.

“I have to know if—”

“Damn it, no! Before Trångsviken and Strömsund!” the coordinator shouts.

“Are they alive?” Joona asks.

“Sorry, I’m trying to get some roadblocks set up.”

“I’ll wait,” Joona says. He starts to pass a long-haul truck.

He hears the coordinator put down the phone and talk to the operational leader, confirming the positions of the roadblocks and telling Alarm Communication Central to use patrol cars to block the roads.

“I’m back,” he says, when he picks up his phone again.

“Are they alive?” Joona asks again.

“The girl is fine. She’s not in danger. The woman is in critical condition. They’re going to do emergency surgery in Östersund and then fly her by helicopter to Karolinska in Stockholm.”

“What about Daniel Grim?”

“There were no other people in the house. We’re putting up the roadblocks right now. Still, if he knows the side roads … We don’t have the resources to cover everything.”

“What about helicopters?”

“We’re talking to a hunt club in Kiruna to see if we can borrow theirs, but it will take some time,” the coordinator answers in a voice harsh from strain.

Joona is now on the outskirts of Sundsvall. He can’t imagine what Elin has been through, but she obviously was able to reach the house in time to save the girl.

Elin is seriously injured, but Vicky is still alive.

Daniel Grim might get caught in one of the roadblocks, especially if he doesn’t think that the police are after him. If he gets through the roadblocks, the earliest he can reach his house is in two hours. The police will have to set a trap for him.

We have to finish the technical search for evidence before he gets there
, Joona thinks.

He stops on Bruksgatan behind a patrol car. The front door to Daniel Grim’s house is wide open and two uniformed officers are waiting for him in the hall.

“The house is empty,” one of them says. “Nothing unusual.”

“Is the technician on the way?”

“He’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“Let me look around,” Joona says.

Joona walks through the house without knowing what he’s looking for. He opens closets, pulls open drawers, looks inside a wine cellar, goes to the kitchen, looks through the cupboards, the refrigerator, the freezer. He runs up to the second floor and pulls off the tiger-striped bed covering, turns over the mattress, opens the closet, throws Elisabet’s clothes to the side and knocks on the wall. He kicks away old shoes and pulls out a box of Christmas decorations. Then he goes into the bathroom and looks in the medicine cabinet. Shaving cream, medicine bottles, makeup. Then he runs down to the basement and looks over the tools hanging on the wall. He tries the door to the furnace room, looks under the lawn mower, and lifts the lid to the floor drain. He looks behind bags of potting soil.

Joona closes his eyes and thinks. First, the trapdoor in the ceiling, which leads to the attic. That was in the bedroom. Second, the locked door to the furnace room. Finally, the wine cellar. He thinks that it should be much larger considering where it is.

He opens the door to the wine cellar again. It’s situated beneath the stairway and has a sign on it:
ALLWAR OCH SKÄMT
.

About a hundred bottles are stacked on their sides in small boxes on a tall wooden shelving unit. The shelving appears to be freestanding, and when he checks he sees that there is at least a twelve-inch gap between the back of the wine storage unit and the wall. He pulls at the shelving, but it doesn’t budge. He moves a few bottles from both ends and finds a bolt far down on the left. He carefully lets the unit swing open on its hinge.

The space behind it is empty, except for a shoe box on the floor. A heart has been painted on the lid.

Joona gets out his cell phone to take a picture of the shoe box and then he puts on latex gloves.

173

The first thing Joona sees when he lifts the lid of the shoe box is a photograph of a girl with reddish-blond hair. It’s not Miranda. This girl appears to be twelve years old.

She is holding her hands in front of her face.

It seems to be just a game—she’s smiling and her glittering eyes show through her spread fingers.

Joona lifts out the photograph and finds a dried rose and another photograph. This one shows a girl curled up on a brown sofa and eating some chips. She’s looking at the photographer with curiosity.