Åke Edwardson - Death Angels

“Yes.”

“Because of the color of his skin?”

“Yep. The victim was a black person from another country. People aren’t so afraid. And considering that the murderer was white…”

“That’s an assumption on our part.”

“We have no reason to believe otherwise.”

“Here comes the beer.”

“And your quiche.”

“Now I won’t get a chance to meet your family,” Winter said.

“That makes two of us.”

“Do your kids remember what you look like?”

“Just as long as I don’t get a haircut.”

“Do you have a picture of them?”

Macdonald put his glass down and took his wallet out of his inside pocket. His holster strap stretched tightly across his chest like a big leather bandage. The metal revolver gleamed under his arm.

He pulled out a photo, a side view of a dark-haired woman sitting between two teenage girls. All three of them had ponytails.

“That’s the way they wanted it.” Macdonald smiled.

“Where’s the other half of the mug shot?”

“They’re a wild bunch.”

“Twins?”

“Uh-huh. Here’s another shot of them.”

“They look like your right side.”

“It’s the hairstyle.”

They ate in silence. Macdonald ordered coffee for both of them. He drove Winter back to the hotel. The traffic was hardly moving on Cromwell Road.

“ London is a hellhole,” Macdonald said. “At least to drive in.”

“I always end up back here. It’s one of the few truly civilized cities there is.”

“You just can’t resist our cigars.”

“The diversity is what most appeals to me.”

“Right, real diverse-murderers and rapists and pimps and junkies.”

“And soccer teams and restaurants and jazz clubs and people from all over the world.”

“It’s true. The eternal empire, although we call it the Commonwealth these days.”

“Could you imagine living anywhere else?”

“Somewhere other than London? I don’t live in London. I live in Kent.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

“Not to mention that you can sunbathe when it’s still winter in Sweden.”

Winter picked up his bags from the hotel. Macdonald coaxed the car back onto A4 and drove through the borough of Hammersmith onto M4 south of Gunnersbury Park. Winter looked out at the urban landscape. Children were playing soccer in Osterley Park, the wind ruffling their hair. Nothing ever changed. Middle-aged men strolled past, golf carts in tow. Three horses trotted by below him. He couldn’t tell whether the riders were women or men. He saw the last horse leave a trail of manure without breaking its elegant stride.

Winter felt the cold air as soon as he was out of the terminal. Spring was dawdling over the North Sea.

Ringmar was waiting in the car. “We had to let him go,” he said.

Winter waited.

“But he doesn’t have any alibis.”

“That’s good.”

“He can’t prove where he was during any of the murders.”

“Fine.”

“We’ve contacted the airlines, and he wasn’t on duty when they were committed.”

“Hmm.”

Out on the expressway, they drove through the town of Landvetter at eighty miles an hour. The lights of Gothenburg glimmered ten miles away.

“He was in London when it happened there and in Gothenburg when it happened here,” Ringmar said.

“What does he claim he was up to?”

“This and that. Laundry, cooking, going to a movie.”

Ringmar tapped his fingers on the wheel, as if to make the car go faster.

“No holes in his story?” Winter asked.

“Nope.”

“Have you checked whether he was working on the days that the victims were en route?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He was on all the flights.”

“That’s a little too good to be true.”

Ringmar switched on his turn signal and passed another car. They zipped by the suburb of Mölnlycke, a cluster of lights on the left. “Aren’t you the one who wanted quick results?” he asked.

“It wasn’t long ago that we were wondering if somebody had been on one of the flights, and now we’ve got a man who was on all of them.”

“And that’s too good to be true?”

Winter rubbed his eyes. He had dozed for half an hour on the plane, had shaken his head when they’d come around with the food and coffee. “All this is based on the suspicions of a self-confessed burglar,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be the first time we solved a case that way.”

“How discreet have you been?”

“We’re not going to botch a lineup.”

“We can’t afford to.”

“That’s what I’m saying. We won’t jeopardize what we’ve got.”

Waving photographs around before you can get a proper lineup together is a mortal sin, Winter thought. It’s spending your best ammunition, maybe for good. They had tried a photo lineup once, ten pictures in a row in front of the witness, but that was a huge risk.

“We’ve got to play by the book all the way,” Winter said, thinking of his escapade with Macdonald on Stanley Gardens.

“We took Vikingsson’s keys, but we didn’t have the chance to search his apartment very thoroughly.”

“I’ll go there right away.”

“If we want to know anything more about this guy, we’ll have to get a detention order,” Ringmar said, “so we can sit down with him and get to the bottom of things.”

“What does Birgersson have to say about it?”

“He told the D.A. that he’s never going to talk to him again unless he issues an order.”

“That’s quite a threat.”

“Birgersson is willing to take the chance. Also, the D.A. can consider it a promise. But so far he’s looking at whether we have probable cause.”

“And he’s decided that we don’t.”

Ringmar parked outside police headquarters.

Winter’s whole body was stiff as he got out of the car. Welcome to Sweden, he told himself. “What’s going on with Bergenhem, by the way?”

Ringmar locked the door with the remote. “He sniffs around like a bloodhound.”

“Has he come up with anything?”

“He says he’s waiting for a name.”

Winter meandered through Vikingsson’s two-room apartment. It was suffused with an air of transience and sudden departure. What does he need this place for, anyway? he wondered, looking around. Something’s wrong in here. I can sense it.

He rummaged through the drawers. Vikingsson’s apartment on Stanley Gardens was lived-in and comfortable, but these walls-this floor and this ceiling-were mute and impassive, and the rooms rejected him like a foreign object. Had the burglar really been here? What an insolent lot they are.

What are you looking for?

Where would you keep something important, even if you were just passing through?

Papers, rolls of film, addresses, receipts? Where?

Where would you put something that you don’t want anybody to see even though you have no reason to believe that someone is going to come barging in?

He went into the sparsely furnished bedroom: a bed, chest of drawers, bookshelf, chair with a telephone on it.

A telephone.

People had called Vikingsson and he had called them. Winter closed his eyes and imagined the chart on Macdonald’s wall. Phone calls like satellite orbits high above the Western Hemisphere, a map that tracked every last sneeze that went out over the lines.

That was one approach they could take. If Vikingsson was innocent, they would help him prove it.

He opened his eyes and moved around. Nothing on the walls. The chest looked like someone had flung it across the room. He went over and pulled out the drawers, one by one, each of them scraping as it resisted.