Jens Lapidus - Never Fuck Up

After dinner, he went in to the computer. Closed the door behind him. Turned it on. The Windows logo jumped around on the screen like a lost soul.

Clicked on the Explorer icon. Was reminded of his greatest fear—that Åsa would get computer savvy enough one day to know how to find his porn searches in Explorer’s history. He should ask someone at work if it could be erased.

But that wasn’t what he was here to do this time. He rummaged around in his pocket. Pulled out a USB memory stick. Thomas: as far from a computer geek as you could get, but it felt better to carry what he needed in physical form than to e-mail it. At regular intervals, he’d checked nervously that the USB was still there. If he were to drop it, if someone were to find it, check what was on it, and realize it was his—the questions would pile up worse than at a hard-core cross-examination in court.

He inserted the memory stick into the computer. A plopping sound. A window opened on the screen. One file on the memory stick, named Autop.report.

The computer made a spinning sound. Adobe opened up. The autopsy report was less than three pages long. First he scrolled down to the bottom—signed by Bengt Gantz, chief forensic pathologist—as it should be. He started reading from the beginning. It took time. He read it again.

And again.

Something was weird. Nasty weird—in the autopsy report, there was no mention of the track marks in the arm or if they’d tested the body for increased levels of drugs or other junk.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. When Thomas’d seen his report at Hägerström’s, and realized that the last lines about the potential cause of death were missing, he’d wondered, sure. Thought it was strange, but hadn’t thought more about it. But a forensic pathologist didn’t miss stuff like that. The track marks were conspicuous. Either the examiner didn’t want to write about them for some reason or—the thought hit him and stuck right away—someone else’d edited it out. And this same someone must’ve edited out the same thing from his report.

He had to calm down. Feel it out. What he should do. How he should act. Never during his years as a cop had he experienced anything like this.

Åsa was tidying in the kitchen. Didn’t even look up when he opened the door and stepped into the garage. It was routine. Thomas worked on his Cadillac whenever he had time. Anyway, it was an investment. He could put some of the extra cash he made in the field into it without anyone asking. But even more important: the car was like mediation for him. A place, like the shooting range, where he relaxed. Felt at home. It was his little Nirvana.

There was another thing in the garage too: the big locked gray metal cabinet. Åsa and he called it the tool cabinet, but she was the only one who thought there were tools in it. Sure, he kept some tools and gear for the car in there, but 80 percent of the cabinet was filled with more important stuff: weed confiscated from a bunch of Arabs in Fittja, hash plucked from Turkish druggies in Örnsberg, amphetamines surrendered by Sven junkies in the subway, a couple packs of Russian growth hormone found in a parking garage in Älvsjö, cash from countless hits along stops on the red subway line. And so on. His little gold mine. A kind of retirement fund.

The car gleamed. Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz from 1959. A beauty he’d found online six years ago. It was in Los Angeles, but he didn’t hesitate. Every single time he’d confiscated something from the dregs, this car’d been his goal. Without the money he’d made outside of his crappy police salary, it would never have been his. But it was. He’d picked it up with his old man, who was still in good shape back then. Drove it from Los Angeles to Virginia in one stretch. Twenty-seven hundred miles. Fifty-five hours on the road. At the time, Åsa wondered how he’d been able to afford it and it’d been twice as expensive as he’d told her.

It was wonderful. The Cadillac’s V8 engine—better known among car lovers as a Q-345—the pistons alone had taken him six months to fix. Now they were like new. It guzzled gas like a truck.

The car that was parked in front of Thomas now was from a different planet than modern junk. He was almost done. Had fixed the chrome, bought new upholstery, installed purple metallic power-seat adjustments, mounted the back fenders, imported a new grille from the States, played around with the new synchromesh gearbox. Gotten the right whitewall tires, fog lights, air-conditioning, tinted windows on the sides. Adjusted the back axle, the carburetor, the brakes. Acid-washed and zinced every single metal part.

Eldorado Biarritz: the car that’d first introduced the back tail fins and the twin back lights. A style icon without compare, a miracle, a legend among cars. The most rock ’n’ roll money could buy. Most of these cars were no longer even drivable. But Thomas’s car rolled smoothed as hell. It was unique. And it was his.

The only big thing left to do was to fix the hydraulic suspension. Thomas knew what he wanted—to return to the original suspension, it was as simple as that. He’d saved it for last. Otherwise, the car was perfect.

Thomas put on his overalls, strapped on his headlamp. Rolled in under the car. His favorite position. Darkness surrounded him. In the light from the headlamp, the car’s undercarriage appeared like a world of its own, with continents and geological formations. A map he knew better than any other place in the world. He didn’t pull out the wrench right away. Studied the car’s parts. Just lay there for a while.

Someone’d deleted both his and the pathologist’s description of the track marks and the possible cause of death. The pathologist himself? Someone within the police? He had to do something. At the same time—it wasn’t his problem. Why should he care? If the doctor didn’t want anything written about the track marks, maybe he had his reasons. Annoying to have to write a bunch of extra crap about that in the autopsy report. Or else it was one of Thomas’s colleagues who didn’t want it known that an unidentified dude’d been injected to death. So, let it be that way. He wasn’t the type to rat anyone out, to screw things up, to dig up dirt when it concerned other officers. He wasn’t like that guy Martin Hägerström.

On the other hand—he could wind up in trouble himself. If the mistake in the autopsy report was investigated, the question could arise as to why he’d left relevant information out of his own report. That was a risk he didn’t want to take. And whoever’d deleted his text was unknown. It’s not like he was messing things up for some colleague he knew. If you wanted to cover something up, then at least come clean to your co-workers.

It wasn’t okay. He should talk to someone. But who? Jörgen Ljunggren was out. The dude was almost dumber than a reality-TV blonde. Hannu Lindberg, one of the men Thomas usually drove with, might understand, but the question was if he’d agree. To Hannu, anything that didn’t concern money or police honor was not worth bothering about. The other guys on the beat didn’t feel close or reliable enough. They were good men, that wasn’t it, but they weren’t the kind who wanted to think too much. He thought about Hägerström’s comment: “The desk people together with the guys who are really out there. There’s so much knowledge that’s lost today.”

Thomas didn’t have the energy to think more about it. He turned the headlamp off. Continued lying where he was for another three minutes before he rolled himself out.

Stood up. Rinsed his hands under a hose in the garage.

Pulled out his cell phone. He’d saved Hägerström’s number.

Martin Hägerström picked up. “Hägerström.”

“This is Andrén. Are you alone?”