The Viper (27 page)

“So this is where it was?” she asked, turning her attention to the twenty-or-so-square-yard section of earth that had been dug up by the two pigs.

“Yes,” said Johannes and pushed away the black hair from his face. “It was standing just behind that birch tree there.”

Eva quickly put up a hand and stopped him when he was going to walk over and stand where the pig had been standing just a few hours before.

“Just point if you don’t mind.”

“One or two yards behind that birch tree over there,” said Johannes Klarberg and pointed obediently.

“How about the other one, where did you find that?” asked Eva.

“It was further inside,” he said and waved with his hand. “I can show you.”

“Thanks. That would be great,” said Eva.

She let Johannes go first. Their footsteps rustled through the tall grass. The trees stood far apart, but there were a few spots where thick patches of underbrush had grown up that they had to skirt around.

“Otherwise there are no animals being kept in this enclosure?” she asked.

“Not usually. I think Lasse puts his horses in here sometimes, mostly just so to stop it from getting too overgrown, but as you can see that’s not really enough.”

Beautiful, knotted oaks, thick grass, and the sun filtering down between the puffs of cloud. Eva followed a few yards behind Johannes and thought about how best to organize the extensive work that lay ahead. But first of all, she had to answer the most important question: Was there a human body buried here? In pieces?

42.

It had taken Eva Karlén and Granholm over two hours to exhume the remains of a human body from the hole that the pigs had begun. On a piece of white plastic sheeting beneath the shelter of a tent, she had laid out two legs, two arms, and a torso with missing genitals. The legs had been severed from the rest of the body at the hip joints, chopped off so that the balls of the thigh bones remained in the sockets of the pelvis with a stump of bone. The arms, on the other hand, were broken off in such a way that the balls of the joints were exposed. The head was missing, as were the feet.

It was unusual for dismembered bodies to be buried without the individual parts being packaged in some way. Plastic bags sealed with tape was the most usual, but they could also be found wrapped in pieces of cloth. Of course they were much easier to handle that way. When they were not prepacked, as was the case here, it was possibly an attempt to accelerate the rate of decay. But in this sandy ground, the effect had almost been the opposite.

Göran, who had just arrived on the scene, regarded the dismembered body parts from the opening of the tent. He was reluctant to go inside, so instead he held aside the strip of tent fabric that formed the door with a cautious grip, his thumb partially covering the tent manufacturer’s green and blue logo. Crumbs of black soil had scattered across the white sheeting around the body parts.

“We’re still looking for the head and feet, but I don’t think they’re buried in the same spot, at least not the head,” said Eva over her shoulder at him.

“Because…?” said Göran.

“All these body parts lay concentrated within a limited radius. They were probably all buried in the same hole. It seems illogical to me for someone to dig a separate hole for the head in immediate proximity to the hole where the rest of the body is buried.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that, though I’m not sure how logical anyone who does something like this really is,” said Göran and turned his back on the pale-gray, earth-covered remains.

“Who is it? Can you provide a basic description?” he then asked.

“Middle-aged male, good physical condition, but no manual laborer, about six-two to six-three. Not much more I can say,” answered Eva.

“And the cause of death?”

Eva shook her head.

“I can’t see any injuries other than the ones resulting from the actual dismemberment. It could of course have come from violent trauma to the head, but might just as well have been caused by poisoning, asphyxiation, or loss of blood. He may, for example, have had an artery severed in the armpit or groin, but as the body looks now it’s impossible to say. For me, that is.”

“I guess we’ll have to assume that the head has been hidden somewhere in order to make it more difficult to determine the cause of death, or prevent the body from being identified. Worse comes to worst, it’s been destroyed altogether,” said Göran. “But the feet? I don’t understand why they’re missing.”

“It may have had something to do with the identification. There are people with fused toes, stuff like that,” said Granholm and adjusted his glasses with his forefinger against the root of his nose.

Göran sighed and looked up toward the treetops. The last of the clouds had dissolved and the sun was beaming from a clear blue sky. Airplanes on their way to and from Finland, Russia, and Northeast Asia drew white lines across the blueness. Seven hundred flights crossed above Gotland every day. You could make out a distant rumble from the jet engines.

He felt a slight dizziness, not so much from the body parts in the tent, as from the thought of what people were capable of doing to each other.

“Aside from the head and feet, it seems that all the body parts we found were lying in the same hole,” he said, “but why would you cut up a body if you’re going to put all the pieces in the same hole anyway?”

“It could have been due to the logistical difficulties associated with their subsequent transportation,” said Granholm and Göran wondered silently why he couldn’t speak like a normal human being.

“It would be easier to get them into the ground as well,” said Eva. “Burying a big body like this one at a decent depth requires a whole lot of work. But if the body’s in pieces…”

Göran drew himself up and adjusted his jacket. The irritation he felt earlier had given way to thoughts about how best to organize the new murder investigation. He had left Ove Gahnström in Visby as head of the investigation. That meant one less man out in the field and Lennart Svensson couldn’t be counted on for at least another week.

He took a deep breath.
Tobacco,
he thought.

“There are two more spots where someone has been doing some digging recently, but it’s hard to determine whether it’s the pigs or something else,” said Eva.

“Could be both,” said Göran.

“Anyway, that’s where we’ll have to start.”

“Nothing else? No clothing, objects?” said Göran.

“Not yet. We’re prioritizing the head.”

Göran nodded, sickened at the thought of the headless body lying inside the tent.

“How long do you think he’s been lying here?” he asked.

“As I’m sure you noticed, there’s not a lot of decay,” said Eva.

He had noticed. The body parts hadn’t smelled at all, either. Of course there had been an odor inside the tent. Of earth, dampness … humus. And a little plastic.

“It’s hard to say because it’s unclear how deep they were buried. The pigs’ digging may have changed the position of the body parts,” she continued. “We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner. But if I say a month, tops, then I wouldn’t be saying too much.”

“A month. That’s not good,” said Göran.

“Tops,” Eva repeated, “and at the low end I’d say at least a week, yeah, not less than a week.”

“So we’ve got a span of three weeks?”

“The medical examiner will be able to shorten that. I’ve spoken with the medical examiner’s office and we can get a preliminary report by tomorrow afternoon. But, we’ll probably still have about a week to play around with.”

“Okay,” said Göran, “I better get back to the station. This is turning into a real mess. I’ll see if I can get National CID to send over a few extra hands to manage the database, and then we’ve got a press conference this afternoon.

The last bit he said mainly to himself. He was already heading off when Eva hurried to catch up with him.

“We’ve found tire tracks from a car. I can tell you about it on the way, if you like,” she said.

She adjusted the chief inspector’s direction gently but firmly and they walked together twenty or so yards in among the trees before she stopped him.

“They start from the road and end up over there by the bushes,” she said and pointed out the course for Göran. “You can’t make out any tire pattern, but I’ve measured them. It has to be from a larger vehicle. A jeep, pickup, or small truck.”

“If we’re lucky that time span won’t turn out to be all that big after all,” said Göran. “We’ve found a witness who saw a car drive out of here late on the night of the second of October.”

“Here, in the middle of the forest?”

“Yes. He was on his way home from dinner at his daughter’s house in Etelhem. When he was just a short distance away from here,” said Göran and pointed, “he saw a light in his rearview mirror. Someone pulled out, he was sure of that, and it wasn’t from the farm right up here.”

“The second of October is within my range anyway,” said Eva.

“We’ll have to wait and see then,” said Göran and started heading down toward the road.

*   *   *

FREDRIK WAS SITTING
in the car with the door ajar. He flipped through his notepad with his left hand and held his cell phone pressed against his ear with his right. A dog barked somewhere close by.

“I’ve got another witness, one Anette Larsson, who saw a truck standing parked by the field, but this was in the middle of the day and how long it had been standing there she had no idea. She just drove past. But she was sure that it was somewhere between the fifth and the eighth,” he said on the phone.

“She didn’t see any logo or anything?” Ove responded at the other end.

“No. It had a big light yellow or beige cargo box. That was all she could remember.”

Fredrik continued flipping through his notepad.

“Otherwise there’s not much here,” he said.

“It’s going out on local radio and the national news bulletin in an hour. We’ll have to see what we get in then,” said Ove.

Fredrik shut his notepad and had to switch hands on the phone in order to be able to put his notepad in his inner jacket pocket.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” said Ove. “This may be the answer to your question.”

“My question? What question is that?” said Fredrik.

“Where did Arvid Traneus disappear to? That question.”

“You mean that this could be him…”

“Lying buried in the field, yeah. The head and feet are missing. Arvid Traneus wore a size forty-seven.”

Fredrik didn’t answer at once. He looked out at the farm where he had just questioned a witness. Five little black lambs were grazing around a dead, graying oak tree. At the very top of the severed trunk, someone had nailed up a birdhouse. The grass beneath the apple tree in front of the house was speckled red with fallen fruit.

“That would change everything.”

“Might seem a bit of a stretch, but on the other hand, we’ve got someone who’s been missing for fourteen days,” said Ove.

“Which wouldn’t be that strange if he’d killed his wife and her lover.”

“Which he could still have done, even if he turns up at the bottom of a hole in the middle of a field.”

“I can’t quite get my head around it,” said Fredrik and lay his free hand on the steering wheel. “Each of the murders is so different in character.”

“We have to be ready to consider it. We could be looking at two completely unrelated crimes. The one doesn’t have to be connected to the other,” said Ove.

*   *   *

ELIN HAD PACKED
her things. She could only blame the fact that she was still there out of some kind of inability to act. It was quickly done, stuffing the few items of clothing, her makeup, wallet, and psychology books into the little sports bag she had bought to replace the Prada bag that she had used for the last time. But packing a bag was just a gesture. It was harder to actually set off.

When darkness fell, it was as if she had lost whatever strength she had left.
Tomorrow,
she thought,
I have to get away from here tomorrow.

How many days had she been thinking like that?

It was dark outside. There were lights on in the house next door, but otherwise it was completely pitch black. She couldn’t understand how Ricky could live like this. When you looked out the window, you couldn’t be sure that there was actually anything there. It could just as well be a great big void of nothingness.

She wondered if she was starting to become paranoid, or was about to suffer another panic attack. It wouldn’t be very strange, anyway. What was she doing there? Why was she hanging around?

Ricky had stopped trying to apologize, while she had gone completely silent. They moved past each other in the house, alongside each other in the house, but without really taking any notice of each other. Neither of them knew how to talk to the other anymore. Maybe she lingered because she knew that she couldn’t leave until they had somehow become reconciled, or at least had broken this silence. But how?

Ricky had slept late, then kept out of sight up in the study, and now he was sitting there sunken in front of the TV for the past half hour. He was staring intently at the silly variety talk show as if it were the most important thing in the world and yet it was obvious that he was just passing the time or hiding. It was childish, but she was grateful to him for doing that. As for her, she was hiding in the kitchen with a magazine that she couldn’t get herself to actually read, with a dish that was already washed and a glass that was already empty, but which she could easily fill up again.

She ought to leave, stop swilling red wine, go home, and focus on her studies that had been set aside for the past two weeks. It was stupid to fall behind right from the start. How many times had she thought that thought? Stupid to fall behind. Yeah, it sure was. Tomorrow, when it was light and her strength had returned, then she would take her packed bag and get on a bus. If she took the number 10, she only had a mile to walk to the bus stop. She didn’t even need to ask Ricky for a ride. But maybe that was just what she should do. Find a practical opening. Ask him to drive her to the bus stop. One minute in the car and five to ten minutes at the bus stop, before the bus came, it was all the time they would have at their disposal, maybe all the time they needed.