The Viper (33 page)

Göran turned back to Ove, put one hand on the back of the chair and the other on his hip.

“How can anyone be that clumsy?” he said. “So close and then this…”

“Well, now we’ve got him anyway,” said Ove.

Göran raised his eyebrows tiredly.

“It’s important that we not lose momentum now. We have to assume that we’ll still get a chance to question him up in Stockholm. We have to prepare for that, see if we can find any other witnesses who saw him in Levide, check with the bus drivers who work that route and then we’ll have to see if forensics can give us anything else. Are we still waiting for the DNA analysis and the autopsy report?”

Ove nodded.

“And then there’s the son, Rickard Traneus. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him in three days. That’s gotta mean something and we have to find out what. Either he was involved in this somehow, or else he knows something that he doesn’t want to divulge for some reason, or,” said Göran and lingered a little before continuing, “or something’s happened to him. To him, too.”

50.

Tears in the cloud cover let in little specks of sunlight over the flat island and the surrounding sea. Sun, clouds, or rain, it didn’t make any difference to him. He was grateful for daylight in whatever form it came.

He had slept a few short hours as morning approached, and woke up when the first gray rays of dawn had filtered through the round window. His body was in pain from the alcohol and the hard floor, and his tongue felt like a piece of cardboard stuck to the roof of his mouth.

He looked at the backpack, the camping stove, and the five-liter container of fresh water that was still standing inside the door. It looked like some kind of scout camp. What did he really think he was going to do?

He made his way out through the door that he had kept closed the night before with the help of a flat rock covered in gray and yellow lichen. You couldn’t close the door properly from the outside and he was forced to leave it ajar.

He stood sheltered from the wind between the cylinder-shaped stone building and the roofless ruin on what had to be the island’s highest point. It was here, right next to the long disused old lighthouse, that the otherwise low-lying island rose up to a steep cliff that plunged straight down into the sea a dozen or so yards below.

What had he really been thinking when he decided to come out here? He had imagined that he was running away from something, that he would be able to escape by hastily packing his bags and leaving, but the island was no place to escape to. It may have been true that no one would come looking for him there, but he wouldn’t be able to survive there. If what he had hoped for was to get some breathing space, then he hadn’t gotten that, either. Instead his thoughts had harried him worse than ever, appalling creatures from his imagination had grabbed at him in the darkness.

He left the wind-still spot between the limestone and cement-gray buildings, stood where he could look over toward the new black-and-white lighthouse at the other end of the island. Standing there, he could feel Elin close to him and in the distance he saw Stefania slowly walking toward him, about five yards in front of Mom and Dad. He saw the
Adventure,
the fire ants, the bird skeletons, the sea and the limestone cave, and he saw that everyone was alive. Stefania was alive, Mother was alive, Father was alive, and in the summer sailing trips they all lived together just like they could have lived, and he just couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been possible. He wanted to turn around and touch Elin, he wanted to have somebody by his side, but he understood that there was no one there, that there would never be anyone there ever again. He was completely alone in this, as alone as it was possible for a person to be. Beyond the island he saw the arc of the horizon. It was the curvature of the earth, the boundary of what was possible and there he was completely alone. And then the summer memories were also gone, and instead his father’s head rose up out of a hole in the ground, and lurking behind his back were dark figures that he couldn’t see, that wouldn’t leave him in peace, and that you couldn’t fight against since you couldn’t touch them and because they only really came out in force once your eyes were closed.

Abruptly he turned his back on the lighthouse and the horizon in the southeast. He walked in the opposite direction, up to the precipice, stopped there with the wind blowing in his face.

He looked down. The already light-colored cliffs had been bleached by the salt from the sea. Was this what he had come here for? To step over the edge? Or was it so that he could see his parents and Stefania come walking through the dry yellowing grass?

Stefania hadn’t died in the same way that other young people sometimes died of cancer or in car accidents. Stefania hadn’t died; she had gone under. He had realized that. He wasn’t sure when exactly, but it wasn’t after her death, but long before. He had known long before she died what was in the process of happening. But he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t helped her. He hadn’t saved her. Instead he had convinced himself that everything was just as it should be. He hadn’t lifted a finger when his sister was sacrificed.

He stood there with his toes sticking out beyond the edge of the cliff, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to. It was quite possible that he lacked the courage, but there was something in those fragments of memory that was still beautiful. Not everything was ugly. Vivacious Stefania on her way through the grass that was buzzing with insects. When she walked there she was still alive, had not even begun to go downhill. She was strong, protective. He couldn’t kill that.

51.

Eva Karlén had put up a spotlight in the bathroom in order to have some decent light to work by. Once she had sprayed the floor, the Japanese bath, and the wall above it with luminol, she reached for the spotlight switch and plunged the room into darkness.

The entire bathtub shone a bluish green from the traces of blood.

It would have been difficult to wash away blood from an enamel bathtub thoroughly enough for the luminol not to react. In one made of stone with mortar seams it was impossible.

The camera was already set up and Eva hurried to take photographs of the bluish light before it faded away.

This was the third time that Eva was examining the same house. As she stood on her knees at the edge of the bathtub and took samples from the seams she heard a familiar voice lecturing her inside her head. It belonged to one of her CSI instructors. “Don’t forget! You find what you look for.” She tried to vindicate herself by saying that there hadn’t been anything in the investigation to justify searching for traces of blood in the bathtub down in the basement. Nowhere else, either, for that matter. It was a reasonable defense, but it didn’t quite hold up to scrutiny. That was just what the “you find what you look for” lecture was talking about. A bad crime scene investigation was one that worked on the basis of a single scenario. She shuddered, stood up, and set up the folding aluminum stool that she’d brought down there with her.

They had been through the house with a fine-tooth comb in search of Arvid Traneus, but they had been searching for something that could reveal where he’d gone, not for physical traces of his body. It was a letdown to discover that his life had run out right there in the bathtub. Either that or that he was dismembered there. Or both. Of course it remained to be seen whether it was Arvid Traneus’s blood that had run out down there, but Eva was ready to hazard a qualified guess. It must be him, unless they butchered an animal down here, or took the lives of some other people who hadn’t been missed by anybody.

*   *   *

FREDRIK SAT WITH
the phone pressed to his ear about to call up a tipster when Ove came in holding a white A4 sheet of paper. He stopped inside the doorway and made sure that Fredrik wasn’t in the middle of a conversation, before he began speaking.

“It looks as if Arvid Traneus was killed and dismembered at home in his own bathtub.”

Fredrik slowly put the receiver back in its cradle without taking his eyes off Ove.

“That sunken stone thing?” he asked.

“Yeah, down in the basement. I just spoke to Eva. She’s found extensive traces of blood in and around the bathtub, and a little splinter of bone from the skull behind the molding in the ceiling just above the bathtub.”

Fredrik recoiled in his chair.

“The molding in the ceiling? It sounds like she’s taken apart the whole house.”

“Not far from it, I think,” said Ove.

“Unbelievable.”

“Yeah, I’ve never heard of that kind of a find before,” said Ove.

He held out the sheet of paper to Fredrik who took it.

“What’s this?”

“That,” said Ove scratching his neck inside his collar, “is a list of Rickard Traneus’s mail contacts that we retrieved from his computer. They’re organized according to the ones he was last in contact with or had the most frequent contact with, which, as it happens, are most often one and the same.”

“So all we have to do is start at the top?” asked Fredrik and fixed his gaze on the top row.

“Jesper Mann, Ryska Gränd Four,” he read.

“Yes. Sara and Gustav have also each been given one,” said Ove.

“The same list?”

Ove did a double take and stopped scratching.

“No, not the same list.”

Fredrik felt he detected an indulgent expression.

“But the same type of contacts,” Ove continued. “I think you should go and pay a visit to any that are here on the island. I want to get as much as possible out of this. Even if they don’t know where he is, they must be able to provide something that will make it easier for us to track him down. None of them has a record,” said Ove and pointed at the list, “but it could be a good idea to read through the e-mails before you question them.”

Fredrik nodded and quickly scanned the list again, noted that the second address also lay inside the ring walls. He could just as well walk there.

“Eva was right by the way,” said Ove on his way out through the door, “forensics couldn’t determine whether Arvid Traneus died before or after his wife and cousin.”

“No help there in other words.”

“Nope,” said Ove and stopped in the doorway.

“Anything new on Ringvall? He is gonna make it isn’t he?”

“Sure, he’s out of danger, but it’ll probably be at least another two days before you can question him. His lung was pretty badly damaged.”

*   *   *

THERE WERE A
lot of people milling around on the main shopping street even though it was three days before payday. Maybe it was the first signs of Christmas shopping. It was Saturday, everyone had credit cards and the money never ran out. A woman with curly gray hair and an orange Amnesty banner shook a collection box at them. He dropped a ten-crown piece into it.

By the time he’d reached Åhléns, his cell phone rang. It was Eva.

“Fredrik speaking,” he answered and tried to sound as collegial and neutral as possible.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve checked Traneus’s mower now. I’ve been pretty busy as I’m sure you can imagine.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“The blade is new.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said and stopped for the bus that slowly rolled past.

“Straight out of the box. Never been used.”

“Now it got more interesting,” he said. “So, you mean it could be the murder weapon?”

“I’ve unscrewed it from the mower. It really looks like it came straight from the factory, but it’s possible that slicing through a bit of bone and tissue wouldn’t leave any visible marks. At the same time it’s pretty crazy to imagine the murderer cleaning off the blade and then screwing it onto the mower.”

“Ringvall definitely wouldn’t have done that,” Fredrik agreed, “but if it was Arvid Traneus then at least it might be conceivable.”

“An old worn-out blade would hardly cause the injuries we saw on the victims.”

“So you’re saying that if the murderer did use a mower blade, that that has to be it?”

“Well, it would have to be a new one anyway,” she answered.

“There’s something else, too,” he said, the sound of his voice changing as he passed through Österport. “If Arvid Traneus was killed in the bathtub down in the basement and a splinter of his skull bone…”

Fredrik broke off and looked around. This wasn’t an appropriate topic to be discussing over a cell phone out in the street, especially not when you were mentioning people by name. Luckily, he had been alone beneath the arches.

“Hang on,” he said and hurried past a family with little kids out on Hästgatan.

Once he had turned off onto Smittens Backe he was alone again.

“If a splinter of skull bone ended up behind one of the ceiling moldings and he had also been dismembered there,” he said in a hushed voice, “well, you can just imagine how it must have looked. Someone did one hell of a thorough job cleaning it up.”

“Not thorough enough for me,” said Eva.

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s not likely to have been the same murderer. Why put so much effort into cleaning up after the murder in the basement and then leave the living room looking like a slaughterhouse?”

“Maybe there wasn’t time, but sure, I agree with you,” said Eva. “It does seem strange.”

“If it was a crime of passion, and Arvid killed his wife and cousin, let’s say, with the new mower blade, then who killed him? Whoever killed him
had to
have caught him more or less in the act,” said Fredrik and stopped at the beginning of Ryska Gränd.

“Why ‘
had to
’?” asked Eva.

“As I see it, he can’t have had many choices in that situation. Either, turn himself in, or else make a run for it. I don’t think he even considered trying to cover up the crime. They would soon have been missed and he would have been the prime suspect.”

“You mean that whoever killed Arvid caught him literally red-handed?”

“Yes, if the murders are connected and took place in that order, then that almost has to be what happened,” said Fredrik and took a few steps into the alley.