Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (17 page)

“Can I help you?” he asked calmly.

The green-eyed man gave a start. His fingers fumbled along the knot of his tie as though they had a life of their own.

“I’m looking for someone who’s working on the murder in Frihamnen,” he said uncertainly. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place.”

“You are.” Hultin let the man into his office.

As the man sat down on the practically unused visitors’ sofa, Hultin waited for him to speak.

“My name is Mats Oskarsson,” he said. “From Nynäshamn. I called on the night of the murder.”

“At three thirty-seven from a telephone booth on Stureplan,” Hultin said neutrally.

Mats Oskarrson from Nynäshamn blinked a few times. His eyes looked like a starboard light with battery problems.

“I don’t really know when it was, but it was from Stureplan.”

“Get to the point,” said Hultin. “You’ve already done enough to obstruct our investigation.”

By this point, Oskarsson had been degraded to an elementary school student. “The others didn’t think I should call at all.”

“What others?”

“On my bandy team. Stockholm Attorneys’ Bandy Club. We’d had a late away game up in Knivsta, and we were on our way home.”

“Let me see if I understand,” Hultin said mildly, and little did Mats Oskarsson suspect how ominous this mildness was. “A gang of the guardians of the law were on their way home from a bandy match at three in the morning, ended up in Frihamnen, witnessed a murder, and intended to keep it from the long arm of the law. Is that correct?”

Oskarsson stared down at the table. “It was late,” he said.

“Late on earth,” Hultin said even more mildly.

“I beg your pardon?” Oskarsson asked.

“Are you an attorney?”

“A tax attorney at Hagman, Grafström, and Krantz, yes.”

“And you were the one driving the car?”

“Yes. A Volkswagen van.”

“Do you want me to try to reconstruct the chain of events?” Hultin asked rhetorically. “You played bandy, got creamed, drank it off, lost your way in Frihamnen of all places, ran into a murderer who had left a body behind, realized you were all shitfaced, and decided to hell with it all. Then you were struck by a pang of conscience, maybe after having dropped off the whole gang to avoid any digs, and called from a telephone booth at Stureplan, even though you all surely had pockets stuffed full of cell phones, but of course you wouldn’t want to leave behind any traces in the registry. Were you driving drunk?”

“No,” said Oskarsson. His eyes were drilling green holes in the desk.

“Yes, you were,” Hultin said, still mildly. “You called even so, and now you’re here. I’m sure you’re basically a conscientious person, unlike your attorney colleagues in the ball club, and that the only reason you could have had for calling anonymously was that you were driving drunk. But of course, that’s not something that can be proven.”

“No,” Oskarsson said, with unintentional ambiguity.

Time for a change of tone. Hultin bellowed, considerably less ambiguously, “Spit it all out now, the whole fucking story, and we’ll see if I can save you from being charged.”

Mats Oskarsson sighed and spat it out with a lawyer’s precision. “It was a few minutes past two-thirty. The man was a bit taller than average, rather powerfully built, and was wearing black clothes and a black balaclava over his face. He was driving a ten- or twelve-year-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a
license plate that started with B. He had just loaded a bundle of blankets into the trunk and was about to load the other one when we interrupted him.”

“So it was more than half an hour before you called?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. If that information had been reported immediately, there wouldn’t be a raving serial killer running loose in Stockholm today. I hope your daughters are his next victims.”

Hultin didn’t usually go too far, even in his most agitated moments, but his firmly rooted distrust in the guardians of the constitutional state caused him to go over the limit. “A raving serial killer.” He had to smooth things over. “Do you remember anything more than the B in the license number?”

“No,” Oskarsson mumbled.

The man didn’t have more to say. Hultin could have given him a thorough lecture on the corrupt legal practices in the buy-and-sell world of Swedish jurisprudence; on how the Western democracies were gradually selling out the constitutional state; on how laws that were established to protect citizens were being transformed into market games and low-odds competitions between high-cost old-fox lawyers and recently graduated low-budget prosecutors; and on how a whole busload of attorneys hadn’t for one second considered setting aside their own egos in order to catch a double murderer. But Mats Oskarsson had shown at least the beginnings of moral courage, and in addition he seemed already pounded into the ground by the contents of the nonexistent lecture. He slunk toward the door. He had just opened it when he heard Hultin’s subdued “Thanks.”

For a split second, Hultin met the man’s clear green gaze. It actually said more than a thousand words.

Jan-Olov Hultin, now alone, stretched his legs out under the desk, emptied his consciousness, and let his eyes sweep over the walls of his office. For the first time in a long time, he was
struck by the room’s anonymity. There was not a single trace of him in here. It was purely a workroom. He hadn’t even taken the pains to put up a photo of his wife. When he was at work, he was one hundred percent policeman, maybe even a little more. The rest he kept to himself. Not even after the success with the Power Murders had he let anyone in. He didn’t really know why. The intercompany soccer wasn’t a secret anymore. One night Hjelm and Chavez had popped up on the Astroturf field at Stadshagen and seen him in action. Unfortunately, the Stockholm Police Veterans team had been playing Rågsved Alliance, which had a sharp attacker named Carlos, and Hultin had clipped Carlos’s left eyebrow with a thundering header, so the blood gushed out. Carlos’s last name was, unfortunately, Chavez. He didn’t know whether Jorge had informed his father that it was Jorge’s boss’s skull that had transported him across the street to St. Göran’s Hospital.

His short, weak smile was interrupted by the ringing of a phone.

“Yes,” he said into the receiver. “Yes. Yes. I understand. Yes.”

Then he thought for a few seconds as his finger hovered over the internal telephone’s keypad. While he thought, he dialed Kerstin Holm’s number.

“Kerstin, are you there?”

“Yep,” came Holm’s alto, in a reproduction that didn’t do it justice.

“Are you busy?”

“Not particularly. I’m trying to familiarize myself with every detail of the FBI’s material. It’s a huge volume.”

“Can you run a check on a dark blue Volvo station wagon, model years, say, eighty through ninety? The license should start with a B. We’ve gotten a better witness report on Frihamnen.”

“Hell, that’s great! Of course.” She hung up on him before he had time to hang up on her.

His finger hovered again. Söderstedt? Nah. Norlander, who would be back by now? No. Was Nyberg back from LinkCoop? Nah. Chavez? Not alone.

His hesitation, he knew, was more of the democratic than the realistic sort. He dialed Hjelm’s number. “Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Come see me. Bring Jorge.”

It took thirty seconds.

“Is the Laban Hassel story over and done with?” he asked as they stood there like schoolboys. Why was everyone always standing in front of him like schoolboys?

“Yes,” said Chavez. “We’ve tried to find a basis for bringing charges, but we might as well admit that we don’t really want to charge him. We can only hope things go well for him and Ingela. Despite their sterility.”

“Okay, then. I’ve just received information about a clue in Frihamnen. A car that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone has been found a few blocks from LinkCoop’s warehouses. A beige Saab 900. Two things make it interesting. One, it was completely clean, with not a fingerprint anywhere, neither inside nor outside. And two, it’s registered to Andreas Gallano. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Gallano,” said Hjelm. “Repeat offender down in Alby, right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, yeah, Andreas Gallano. I had a few confrontations with him during my time in Huddinge. Quite a bit of violence, as I recall. He’s a ways up in the chain of drug distribution, but still a classic street hooligan. No conscience. We put him away once for assault and battery and once for selling drugs.”

“Oh yeah!” Chavez exclaimed. “He escaped from Hall Prison.”

“That’s right,” said Hultin. “He was in Hall for assault and battery again until just over a month ago. He and three violent criminals escaped through the kitchen. A bold plan.”

Hjelm and Chavez nodded. It had been a noteworthy escape.

Hultin looked at them. He tried to inventory his intuitions one by one. “It must have something to do with this, right?” His question mark was nearly an exclamation point.

They nodded.

“Gallano’s car, left behind, without fingerprints, a break-in, two bodies,” Hjelm summarized, and concluded, “Oh, yeah.”

“The body wasn’t him, was it?” Chavez asked.

“If it were, the fingerprints would have screamed it out,” said Hjelm. “But he must have played some part in the drama.”

“The only thing we don’t have any indication of is the Kentucky Killer,” Hultin mumbled.

“Except hunches,” said Hjelm. “Latest address?”

“Same as ten years ago.”

“We’ll take it.”

The duo were on their way—Chavez’s BMW got to play service car. They raced wordlessly through the rain-soaked city and came out on Essingeleden. Riddarfjärden seemed to have risen to biblical-flood proportions. It would gush up over the city at any moment, and who, in these times, would have received forewarning to build an ark?

No one, Hjelm thought misanthropically, sitting beside the violently accelerating Chavez. Not a single one of us would be forewarned by God. We would all drown in the same sticky sludge and be swallowed up by the angry earth, and from out in the universe, the earth would look exactly the same. A negligible little disturbance in the balance of eternity, nothing more.

He raised his eyes from his morass of pessimism and launched a vain attack against evil. It felt as though they were tilting at windmills.

No passersby out on the E4 could have told Alby from Fittja or Norsborg from Hallunda. The crazy buildings climbed sky-high, brutally similar along the hills, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, they had filled up with criminals. The building was the
result of the same social-building spirit that had once planned to level Gamla Stan to the ground so that Le Corbusier could build a row of glass and concrete palaces.

But no one knew better than Paul Hjelm that this place also contained an inaccessible alternative culture, with small-scale everyday heroism, infinite inventiveness, and a continuous battle against all odds. He had been stationed here for all of his working life up until the remarkable change just over a year ago, when, instead of being booted from the force, he was transported to inner-city mode, more specifically A major, A as in the A-Unit, major as in success.

His transfer had come in large part thanks to Erik Bruun, his old chief at the Huddinge police, whose contacts with his former colleague Jan-Olov Hultin had been crucial, and it was outside his office that they now stood. Hjelm had succeeded in walking past his former colleagues unnoticed and knocked on Bruun’s door. The light system on the doorpost shone yellow as in “wait,” and Hjelm was seized by apprehension. Bruun’s light was never yellow as in “wait.”

They waited in the hallway for three excruciating minutes, under continual threat of discovery, before Hjelm had had enough and barged in.

The Bruun room, once covered in health-injurious rings left behind by smoke, was now bright yellow. The wallpaper paste didn’t seem to have dried yet.

Behind Bruun’s desk sat a forty-year-old man in a suit and tie, his chestnut-colored hair brushed back over the beginnings of a bald spot. As they entered, his hand moved instinctively in the direction of his service weapon.

“Where is Bruun?” Hjelm demanded.

The man refrained from drawing his pistol, but he kept his hand at the ready. “It says to wait out there, in case you can’t read.”

“It says wait, and it says Bruun. This is yellow. Where is Bruun?”

“Who are you?”

“Hjelm. I worked here once. Under Bruun. Where is he?”

“Hjelm. Aha, the man who was kicked upward.”

“Exactly. Where’s Bruun?”

“Hjelm, well—not long ago I sat down and went through your file. I hope you’re not here to get your old job back now that the A-Unit has packed it in. There’s no room for you here.”

“Where’s Bruun?”

“There’s no room for heroes and mavericks here. It’s time to clean up. Close up the ranks a little.”

“Where’s Bruun?”

“I guess you’ll have to brush off the old uniform, then, and get ready for a good old time on patrol.”

Hjelm had had enough. He did an about-face and nearly ran into Chavez, who was waiting at the door. Behind him he heard: “Bruun had a heart attack a week ago. Just thinking about how this office looked ought to be enough to cause one.”

Hjelm did another about-face. “Is he dead?”

The man at the desk just shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Hjelm had to leave immediately; otherwise time on patrol would have seemed like utopia. He went downstairs to the break room.

It was as though no time had passed. Every mug and sugar cube seemed to be in the same place as they had a year and a half ago. And every cop. They were all sitting there: Anders Lindblad and Kenneth Eriksson, Anna Vass and Johan Bringman. And there was Svante Ernstsson, who had been his partner for over a decade. They had been best friends; now it had been many months since they’d spoken.

“Well, look at that,” Ernstsson said with surprise. “A special visitor.”

Their handshake was firm and almost ridiculously manly.

“First off,” said Hjelm, “is Bruun dead?”

Ernstsson looked at him gravely, then burst into a smile. “Just a scratch, as he said himself.”