Anders Roslund: Three Seconds

"I don't know, Nils."

Ewert Grens was still sitting by the head that had too many holes.

"The call-out said execution. But having looked… it could just as easily be suicide."

"Someone has tried to make it look like that."

"What do you mean?"

Krantz slid his foot closer to the hand that was holding a gun.

"That looks staged. I think that someone shot him and then put the gun in his hand."

He disappeared out into the hall and came back immediately with a black case in his hand.

"But I'll check it. I'll do a GSR test on the hand. Then we'll know." Ewert started to calculate, looked over at Hermansson; she was doing the same.

One hour and forty-five minutes since the alarm was raised, they still had plenty of time. The body hadn't yet started to attract enough foreign particles to make a residue test worthless.

Krantz opened his case and looked for a round tube of fingerprint lifting tape. He pressed the tape against the victim's hand several times, in particular the area between the index finger and thumb. Then he went out into the kitchen, to the microscope that had been set up on the worktop, put the fingerprint lifting tape on the glass plate, and studied it through the ocular.

A few seconds passed.

"No gunshot residue."

"As you thought."

"So the hand that was holding the gun didn't fire it."

He turned around.

"This is murder, Ewert."

He put his left hand to his right shoulder and pulled at the leather strap until the pressure on his shoulders was released and he could hold the holster with one hand. He opened it and pulled out a Radom with a nine-millimeter caliber. He did a recoil operation, put the last bullet in the magazine, so that fourteen were in place.

Piet Hoffmann stood still for a while, his breathing so loud he could hear himself.

He was alone in the room and the flat that looked out over Vasagatan and Kungsbron. The last mule had taken the train south a couple of hours ago, and Mariusz and Jerzy had just started their car and headed off in the same direction.

A long day, but it was still only the afternoon and he had to stay awake for hours yet.

The gun cabinets stood on the floor behind the desk. Two identical cabinets, a couple of meters high, about a meter wide, a smaller shelf on top and two rifles on a considerably larger shelf below. He put the gun on the top shelf in the first cabinet, and the full magazine in the same place in the second.

He walked through the rooms that had functioned as offices for Hoffmann Security AB for two years now. One of Wojtek Security International's many branches. He had visited most of them several times, and the ones farthest north in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo more often.

The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt, underpants, and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy's and Mariusz's clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.

A person had had half his head blown off.

A person who probably had the same job as he had, but had a less solid background.

He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but he knew if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.

He'd been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighborhood where people cur their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.

Hugo and Rasmus.

He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a gray jacket, and worn jeans.

You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the fiat.

He jumped and realized that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.

The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.

He should contact Warsaw immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.

The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.

He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organization worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St. Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.

He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang. The mobile phone that only one person knew about.

"Wait a minute."

He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.

"Yes?"

"You need my help."

"I needed it yesterday."

"I've booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility."

The gaping holes in the dead man 's head seemed even larger from a distance.

Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned around again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had one entrance wound in his right temple and two exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learned one truth-each death is unique, with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn't follow.

He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were looking toward.

"Do you want to know or not?"

Krantz had been squatting on the kitchen floor for a bit too long. "Otherwise I've got plenty else to be getting on with."

His hand was close to a crack in the marble floor. Ewert Grens nodded, I'm listening.

"That spot there, can you see it?"

Grens looked at something that was whitish with uneven edges.

"Bits of stomach lining. And it's definitely no more than twelve hours old. There are several similar spots in this area."

The forensic scientist drew a circle with his hand in the air around himself.

"All with the same content. Food remains and bile. But also something far more interesting. Bits of rubber."

When Grens looked closer, he could see the white spots with uneven edges in at least three places.

"The rubber is partly corroded, probably by stomach acids."

Krantz looked up.

"And traces of rubber in vomit, we know what that means."

Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.

Rubber meant human containers. Human containers meant drugs. A dead man in connection with a delivery meant a drugs-related murder. And a drugs-related murder always meant investigation and lots of hours, lots of resources.