Dark Secrets (50 page)

Billy knew there was something somewhere. There always was. The question was whether or not they were looking in the right place. Computers usually concealed more than people thought, which was why he was still searching. Most people were unaware of how much information still remains on the hard drive even after files have been deleted. When the user pressed
Delete
the file allocation system that governed the area of the hard drive in which information was stored did not remove the file itself, only the reference to it. This meant that the information was still there, deep inside the hard drive. When it came to Groth’s computer, however, Billy was beginning to feel a certain skepticism. He had already gone through it twice—albeit with less effective programs—and found nothing of interest. Nor was there any indication that Groth had used the powerful logarithms that could permanently clear a hard drive—quite the opposite. Billy had found a large number of deleted e-mails and documents, which unfortunately had turned out to be of no interest whatsoever as far as the investigation was concerned.

Billy stretched. The software would finish searching within fifteen or twenty minutes. Not long enough to make a start on something else, too long just to sit around. He took a stroll around the room to get his circulation going, and for a second he toyed with the idea of going down to buy yet another bar of chocolate from the machine on the ground floor. He decided to resist; his sugar intake was already way too high, and he knew that if he had more chocolate now, he would want even more within a few hours.

He caught sight of one of the other monitors on the desk. It was showing a frozen image from the final sequence of Roger’s movements. The boy was slightly turned away, heading toward the motel. At least, that’s what they had assumed this morning; it no longer seemed quite so clear-cut. Billy reached for the keyboard and began to click through the images slowly. He watched the boy’s final steps one frame at a time. The last thing to disappear was the right leg wearing a tennis shoe. The picture was empty now, apart from the rear window of the car behind which Roger had vanished; it was just visible in one corner of the screen.

Billy had an idea. He had assumed from the start that Roger had carried on walking, and so had searched for his appearance on another camera. But what if Roger had met someone, had an errand somewhere, then after a while turned around and come back? It wasn’t beyond the bounds of probability; it was worth a try, at any rate, and it was far more useful than eating chocolate.

Billy settled down and began. He clicked back to the last frame in which Roger appeared and started from there. Increased the speed to 4x. Billy stared at the empty street. The time code rolled on: one minute, two, three. Billy increased the speed to 8x to save time. After thirteen minutes he saw the car behind which Roger had disappeared drive away, leaving the street completely empty. Billy carried on, 16x now. Soon two figures appeared, moving through the picture at sixteen times their normal speed. It looked quite funny. Billy stopped and rewound until he saw the two figures again. It was an elderly couple with a dog, walking in the opposite direction in relation to Roger. There was nothing
to indicate that they were doing anything other than walking the dog. Even so, Billy made a note of the time and decided to ask Hanser to track them down. With a bit of luck they might have seen something. Billy restarted the tape. The minutes flew by, but nothing happened. Roger didn’t come back.

Billy was suddenly struck by a thought: that car, the one that drove off approximately thirteen minutes after Roger had walked past—when had it arrived? With two clicks Billy was back at the point where Roger could again be seen in the picture. They had assumed that the car was parked at the roadside, like a dead object. But that same car had been driven away by someone thirteen minutes later. Billy started to rewind and discovered that the car had backed into the picture just six minutes before Roger appeared. Any fatigue Billy might have felt was swept away by the realization that the car had been parked in close proximity to Roger for just nineteen minutes. Billy suddenly felt like an idiot; he had committed the cardinal sin of limiting the possible interpretations of the evidence in front of him. He had become trapped in searching for a particular pattern without leaving the door open to anything else. So far Roger had gone from one camera to another, moving on the whole time. And that was what Billy had continued to look for. Roger moving on. To the next camera.

Now that he had opened the door to other possibilities, he knew that there were other, highly credible scenarios. The car might not have been empty. It was possible that the person who had parked the car six minutes before Roger walked past had been sitting there the whole time. Billy could see only a part of the left side of the rear window; it was impossible to tell whether anyone got out of the car or not, but he clicked back to the image of Roger again and restarted the video. Tried to tell himself he was watching it for the first time.

Without preconceptions.

Roger entered the picture from the right, walked a few steps, then crossed the street. Billy stopped the video and went back frame by frame. There! Roger suddenly turned his head slightly to the left, as
if something had caught his attention. Then he continued across the street. Billy played the video again. Now that his tunnel vision was gone, it was just as possible to imagine that Roger walked behind the car and around to the doors on the passenger side.

Billy took a deep breath. No hasty conclusions. Check carefully. Focus on the image. On the car. It looked like a Volvo. Dark blue or black. Not a station wagon, but a sedan. Not the new model, but perhaps 2002 to 2006; he would have to check up on that. But definitely a four-door Volvo sedan. Billy started to fast-forward frame by frame, focusing on the car. Just the car, nothing else. Fifty-seven seconds and six frames after Roger disappeared, Billy saw something he hadn’t noticed before. The car shook slightly, briefly, as if a car door had been closed. It wasn’t very clear and he might have been mistaken. But he could soon check.

Billy loaded the sequence into a simple program with image stabilization software. He could assume that the fixed CCTV camera wasn’t moving, so any possible movement had to come from the object in the picture. Billy quickly marked a couple of movement points on the metal edge of the rear window above the wheel. At 00:57:06 these points definitely moved a couple millimeters then stabilized at a slightly lower level. Someone opened a car door, got in, and slammed it shut. The fact that the points stabilized at a lower level indicated that the car now contained more weight. Someone had gotten into the car. Presumably Roger.

Billy looked at the clock. Almost half past twelve. It was never too late to call Torkel. Torkel was more likely to be annoyed if he
didn’t
ring. He picked up the phone and called him on speed dial. While he was waiting for an answer, he looked at the image on the screen. The new course of events would explain a number of things.

Roger wasn’t picked up by any more cameras because he didn’t walk any farther.

He was in a dark-colored Volvo.

Probably on the way to his death.

L
ENA
E
RIKSSON
was sitting in the chair vacated by Billy some seven hours ago, looking around in surprise. There were a lot of people in the small room; she knew most of them already, apart from the young male officer who was doing something with a keyboard in front of two big blank computer screens.

So many police officers could mean only one thing.

Something had happened.

Something important.

She’d had that feeling as soon as they’d rung her doorbell, and it was growing stronger all the time. It was 6:45 a.m. when she dragged herself out of bed after the bell had been rung persistently and repeatedly for ages, and opened the door. The young female officer who had been to see her a few days earlier had introduced herself again, speaking quickly and eagerly.

They needed her help.

The whole situation—the early hour, the police officer’s serious tone and concise request, the urgency with which she wanted Lena to accompany her, all of this erased days of broken sleep and fear. Lena’s whole body was filled with unsettled energy.

They had driven through the gray, misty morning without a word. Parked underneath the police station in a parking garage Lena didn’t even know existed. Up several flights of concrete stairs and in through a big steel door. The police officer moved quickly down the long corridors.
They met some uniformed officers who seemed to be on the way out on patrol. They were laughing at something, and their cheerfulness seemed out of place.

Everything had happened so fast that Lena found it difficult to collate her impressions into a single picture. It was more like a series of separate, different images: the laughter, the corridors leading this way and that, the police officer who just kept on walking. One last turn and they appeared to have arrived. A number of people were standing there waiting for her. They greeted her, but Lena didn’t really hear what they said; she was busy thinking that she would never find her way out of here. The one who seemed to be in charge, the one she had talked to about Leo Lundin what seemed like an eternity ago, placed a friendly hand on her shoulder.

“Thank you for coming. There’s something we’d like to show you.”

They opened the door to the small room and led her inside.
This is how it feels when you’re arrested
, she thought.

They say hello and bring you in here.

They say hello and then they expose what you’ve done.

She took a deep breath. One of the officers pulled out a chair for her and the youngest, quite a tall man, started fiddling with the keyboard on the desk in front of her.

“It’s essential that what we tell you now remains within these four walls.”

It was the older one again. The boss. Torsten, was that his name? Lena nodded anyway. He went on. “We now believe that Roger was picked up in a car. We would like to see if you recognize it.”

“You’ve got a picture of it?” Lena turned pale.

“Not much of it, unfortunately. Or very little, to be more accurate. Are you ready?”

With that the older man fell silent and nodded to the younger one at the computer. He pressed the space bar on the keyboard and suddenly the screen was filled with a picture of an empty street. A lawn by the side of the road, a smallish house, and up in one corner the reflection of what was probably the yellow glow of a streetlamp.

“What am I supposed to be looking for?” Lena asked, somewhat confused.

“There.” The young man pointed to the lower left-hand corner of the picture. The rear window of a car. A dark-colored car. How the hell was she supposed to recognize it?

“It’s a Volvo,” the young man went on. “A 2002 to 2004 model. An S60.”

Lena stared at the image and saw the car’s indicator begin to flash just before it drove away and disappeared.

“Is that all?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Would you like to see it again?”

Lena nodded. The young policeman pressed a number of keys and the video jumped back to the beginning. Lena stared at the screen, desperately trying to find something. But it was just a part of a static image. A very small part. She waited for something else to happen, her body rigid with tension, but it was just the same street, the same car. The images stopped moving and from the expectant faces around her Lena realized that it was her turn to say something. She looked at them.

“I don’t recognize it.”

They nodded. That was what they’d expected.

“Do you know anyone who owns a dark-colored Volvo?”

“Maybe. It’s a very common car, I assume, but I don’t know… Not that I can think of.”

“Have you ever seen anyone give Roger a ride home in a car like that?”

“No.”

No one spoke. Lena could feel the excitement and expectation among the officers ebbing away, replaced by disappointment. She turned to Vanja.

“Where does this video come from?”

“From a CCTV camera.”

“But where was it?”

“We can’t tell you that.”

Lena nodded. They didn’t trust her to keep quiet. So they weren’t prepared to tell her. Her suspicions were confirmed when the boss spoke.

“It would compromise the investigation if any of this got out. I hope you understand.”

“I won’t say anything.”

Lena turned back to the screen and the frozen image of the empty street.

“Is Roger in this video?”

Billy looked at Torkel, who gave a slight nod.

“Yes.”

“Can I see him?”

Billy looked at Torkel again and received another nod in response. He reached for the keyboard and rewound the video somewhat further, then pressed
Play
. After a few seconds Roger appeared from the right-hand side. Lena sat on the edge of her seat. She didn’t even dare to blink, she was so afraid of missing something.

He was alive.

He was walking down the street.

With rapid, springy steps. He kept himself fit. Looked after his body. Was proud of it. And now it lay behind a stainless-steel door in the mortuary, cold and sliced open. Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t blink.

He was alive.

He suddenly turned his head to the left, crossed the road, and disappeared behind the car.

Out of the picture.

Out of her life.

Gone.

It had happened so quickly.

Lena fought against an urge to touch the screen. Everything and everyone was silent and motionless in the room. The young officer approached her cautiously.

“Would you like to see it again?”

Lena shook her head and swallowed. Hoped her voice would hold.

“No, thank you, it’s fine…”

The police chief came over and gently laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Thank you for coming. We’ll give you a ride home.”

With those words the meeting was over, and she soon found herself walking behind Vanja once more. They weren’t in as much of a hurry now. Not as far as the police were concerned, anyway. It was different for Lena. Her anxiety had eased, replaced by the fury of realization. The energy that came from certainty.