The Fire Witness (38 page)

He’s certain that if Saga Bauer had been given just a bit more time, Vicky would have told her everything. Now they had a confession that could be considered forced.

As long as the technical evidence holds up, it won’t matter anyway
, Joona thinks as he leaves the room once the girl is fast asleep.

He walks along the hallway, only subconsciously aware of the strong odor of disinfectant escaping from an open door.

There’s something bothering him about this case. If he ignores the rock, the course of events is fairly clear. It would hold up but it’s not fixed. It’s like a pulsing shadow world—it’s still changeable.

He wants to look through all the evidence: the autopsy report, the technical reports, and the lab reports. But he’s not allowed access.

Why were Miranda’s hands over her eyes?

He remembers how the bloodied room looked, but he needs to read the reports from the crime scene to go deeper into the course of events.

Susanne is standing at the elevator, holding the door for him. They nod. The prosecutor seems untroubled.

“Everybody hates me because I was too tough,” she says as they get into the elevator. She presses the button. “Still, a confession is hard to ignore, even if the defense wants to protest it.”

“How does the technical evidence look?” asks Joona.

“It’s pretty good. I’m going with the highest level of suspicion.”

The elevator stops at the ground floor.

“Will I see the reports?” Joona asks.

Susanne Öst looks surprised. She hesitates a moment before she says, “It’s not really necessary.”

“Good,” Joona says, and starts to walk away.

“Do you think there’s a hole in my case?” the prosecutor asks. She trots to keep up with his pace.

“No,” Joona says brusquely.

“I have the reports right here,” she says, and stops to open her briefcase.

Joona keeps walking to the exit. He can hear her behind him, shuffling through her papers, then she runs to catch up to him. He’s already reached his car when she gets to him.

“It would be fantastic if you could look at these today,” she says breathlessly. She’s holding out a thick folder. “It’s the preliminary results from the National Forensic Lab as well as the cause of death from the autopsy reports.”

Joona looks her in the eye, nods, and throws the folder onto the passenger seat before he gets in his car.

141

Joona sits down by himself in the inner room of Il Caffé and places Susanne Öst’s folder on the table. He’s convinced she’s made a big mistake in provoking a confession that morning.

He doesn’t believe that Vicky meant to take Dante. He thinks she was telling the truth about not noticing him in the backseat when she stole the car. And he can’t dispute that she saved him from drowning. Yet for some reason she killed Miranda and Elisabet.

Why?

Joona opens the folder hoping that the answer lies in one of these reports.

Why does Vicky get so enraged? It’s not just the Eutrexa. She hadn’t taken it before she came to Birgittagården.

Joona quickly flips through the pages. He knows that crime scenes and other places where there’s evidence reflect more than the actions of the suspect. There are traces of the motive in the pattern of blood spatter, in where overturned furniture lies, in the footprints, and in the positions of the bodies. Nathan Pollock would probably say that the careful reading of the crime scene is more important than evidence collection. The victim plays a role in the killer’s inner drama and the scene of the crime is the stage, complete with stage directions and props. There are multiple clues, including coincidence, but there’s always that bit which is part of the inner drama and can be connected to the motive.

For the first time, Joona has the reports from the crime scene investigation. He starts to study the documents, which detail the evidence collection and the analysis of the crime scene.

The police have done a good job and were more careful than Joona would have expected.

A waiter in a knit wool cap comes by with a large mug of coffee on a tray, but Joona is concentrating so hard that he doesn’t notice. A young woman with a ring through her lower lip, sitting in the booth next to his, says with a smile that she saw Joona order the coffee.

Although the results from the National Forensic Laboratory are not part of this report, Joona realizes that the results themselves are clear: the fingerprints are Vicky’s. The highest level of certainty, grade 4
+
, has been noted.

There is nothing in the crime scene analysis to contradict anything he observed when he was there. However, many of his observations are not there. For instance, there’s nothing about how the blood that had coagulated on Vicky’s bed must have soaked into the sheets for at least an hour. The report also does not state how the blood spatter changed angle after the first three blows.

Joona reaches for his coffee and takes a sip. He studies the photographs again. He flips through them slowly until he’s gone through the entire stack. Then he pulls out two pictures from Vicky’s room, two from the isolation room where Miranda Eriksdotter was found, and two from the brewery room where Elisabet Grim was found. He moves his coffee cup to one side and places the six photographs on the table. He stands up so that he can look at all six at once. He’s looking for a pattern.

After a while, Joona turns over all the photographs except one. He studies this photograph carefully. He remembers how this scene looked when he was in the room. He puts himself into the emotions and aromas of the murder. In the photograph, Miranda is lying on the bed. She’s wearing cotton panties and her hands are over her face. The flash of the camera makes her panties and the sheets blaze white. The blood from her crushed head is a dark, formless shape on the pillow.

Joona sees something he didn’t expect.

He takes a step backward, hastily putting his mug on the floor by his feet.

The girl with the silver ring through her lower lip watches him and smiles to herself.

Joona leans over the photograph of Miranda but he’s thinking of his visit to Flora Hansen. He’d been irritated about wasting his time talking to her. As he was leaving, she’d followed him into the hallway, trying to show him the drawing she’d done of Miranda, but he’d pushed her hand away and it had fallen to the floor. Still, he’d caught a glimpse of it as he stepped over it on his way out the door.

Now, as he’s looking at Miranda’s arranged body, he’s remembering the drawing. It looked like it had been done in two stages. Flora had first drawn a stick figure and then filled in the limbs. The girl in the drawing had shaky contours in certain areas, but other parts of her body were still as thin as thread. Her head was disproportionately large. Her straight mouth could barely be seen, since her unfinished skeletal hands were over her face. The drawing was similar to what had been described in the newspapers.

What the newspapers hadn’t revealed was that Miranda had been hit in the head and that the blood had run into the pillow. No photographs from the crime scene had been released. The press had speculated about what the hands over her face meant, but no one outside the police and the justice system had known about the injury to the head. Strict confidence had been kept and will be kept until the moment the court process begins.

“You figured it out, didn’t you?” the girl in the next booth says.

Joona meets the girl’s glittering eyes and nods before he looks back at the photograph on the table.

What he realized while looking at Miranda’s body in the photograph was that Flora had drawn a dark heart next to the girl’s head right where the blood had been in reality. The same size, the same place.

It’s as if she’d seen Miranda lying on her bed.

It could just be a coincidence, but if he remembers Flora’s drawing clearly, the similarity is striking.

142

The bells in Gustav Vasa Church are tolling when Joona meets Flora outside Carlén Antiques on Upplandsgatan. She looks terrible. She’s tired and washed out. A fading bruise is visible on her right cheek. Her eyes are heavy. On a narrow door next to the store, there’s a small sign declaring that a séance will be held there that evening.

“Do you have the drawing with you?” Joona asks.

“Yes,” she says as she unlocks the door.

They walk down the stairs to the basement. Flora turns on the ceiling lamps and goes into the room on the right, which has a small window near the ceiling facing the street.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Flora says as she rummages in her purse. “I didn’t really feel anything with that key ring, but I—”

“May I just see the drawing?”

“I did see Miranda,” she says as she gives him the sheet of paper. “I don’t believe in ghosts and yet … there she was.”

Joona unfolds the paper and looks at the childish drawing. A girl is lying on her back, holding her hands over her face and her hair is undone. There’s no furniture or bed. He’d remembered correctly. Next to the girl’s head is a heart, shaded in, right where Miranda’s blood had run from her head and had soaked into the pillow.

“Why did you draw a heart next to her?”

Flora looks down at the ground and blushes.

“I don’t know. I don’t even remember that I did it … I was scared and shaking all over.”

“Have you seen the ghost since?”

She nods and her blush deepens.

Joona is trying to understand how this fits. Could Flora have guessed her way to the truth? Could she have guessed the rock as well? If she had, she somehow knew she’d guessed right. Because if the rock was right, it would be logical for her to assume that it had been used to hit Miranda in the head and that there’d be blood on the bed.

But she drew a heart, not blood
, he thinks.
That wouldn’t be right if she were trying to deceive.

It doesn’t fit.

She must have seen something.

She somehow saw Miranda in the bed, but she didn’t see her clearly, or she saw her for a brief moment, and then she drew what she remembered without thinking too much about it.

He has a vivid mental image of the photograph of Miranda with the bloodstain next to her head.

She sat down and drew what she’d seen. She remembered a body lying down with hands over her face and that there was something dark beside her head. A dark shape.

When she drew the picture, she interpreted the shape as a heart. She didn’t think about any connection or even logic.

Joona knows that Flora was far away from Birgittagården when the murders took place. He knows she has no connection to any of the people involved or to what has happened.

He looks at the drawing again and is struck by another thought.

Perhaps Flora learned about the crime from someone who was actually there. Perhaps a witness to the crime described it to her and told her what to draw.

A child witness who saw the shape of a heart.

Perhaps all this talk about a ghost is Flora’s way of protecting the witness.

“I would like you to contact the ghost,” Joona says.

“No, I can’t—”

“How does it usually work?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do it here.”

“You must ask the ghost if she saw what happened.”

“I don’t want to,” Flora says. “I can’t take much more of this.”

“I can pay you,” Joona offers.

“I don’t want to be paid. I just want you to listen to what I’ve seen.”

“I’ll listen,” Joona says.

“I’m beginning to think that I’m really going crazy,” she says.

She looks at him while wiping tears from her cheeks. Then she stares into space and swallows hard.

“I’ll try,” she says. “But I don’t really believe—”

“Go ahead and make an attempt.”

“You’ll have to wait there,” she says, and points to the pantry. “Miranda only comes when I’m completely alone.”

“I understand,” Joona says. He gets up and leaves the room.

143

Flora is sitting absolutely still, watching as the detective closes the door behind him. A chair creaks as he sits down in the pantry, and then there’s silence. She doesn’t hear anything, not even the sound of a dog barking or a car driving past and nothing more from the room where the inspector is sitting.

Now she can feel how exhausted she is.

Flora does not know what to do. Should she light a candle or burn incense? She closes her eyes for a moment. Then she looks at the drawing.

She remembers how her hand shook as she drew what she’d seen and how she had trouble concentrating. She glances around the room to see if the ghost has come back and looks at her picture again. She’s not good at drawing, but she can see that the girl is lying on the floor. She sees the small crosses and realizes she was trying to draw the fringe on the bathroom rug.

Her hand had been shaking, so one of the girl’s legs was as thin as a bare bone. The fingers are just lines. She can see part of the straight mouth behind them.

She hears the chair in the pantry squeak.

Flora blinks and stares at the drawing. It seems as if the fingers have spread. Flora can see one of the eyes.

The girl is looking at her.

Flora jumps when there’s a rattling in the pipes overhead. She looks around the room. The sofa is black with shadows and the table is hidden in a dark corner.

She looks back at the drawing. The eye is gone. A crease in the paper runs over the face.

Flora’s hands are shaking as she tries to smooth the drawing. The girl’s thin fingers are hiding her face and she can only see part of the mouth on the grid paper.

The floor creaks behind her and Flora whirls around.

No one is there.

She looks back at the drawing and tears come to her eyes. The heart next to the girl’s head is becoming blurry. She looks at the tangled hair and then again at the fingers in front of the face. Flora jerks her hands back from the drawing when she sees that the mouth is open. She can tell it’s screaming.