Lars Kepler: The Fire Witness

“There were two, Rolf Wikner and Sonja Rask. And I got here around a quarter to six. I called the prosecutor. She must have shit her pants over it, since she called you guys in Stockholm. And now I have you hanging around my neck.”

Gunnarsson smiles again at Joona. It’s not a friendly smile.

“Any suspects yet?”

Gunnarsson sighs and then says, as if he’s giving a lecture, “I’ve been at this sort of thing for a long time and my experience tells me to let the investigation take its course. Start from the beginning, find witnesses, secure evidence—”

“May I go inside and take a look?” Joona asks, glancing at the front door.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. We’ll soon have photos for you.”

“I need to take a look at her body before it’s moved,” Joona says.

“It’s blunt trauma,” Gunnarsson says. “The perpetrator is tall. After she died, the victim was placed on her bed and no one noticed anything until one of the girls had to go to the bathroom and stepped into blood that had come out from under the door.”

“Was it still warm?”

“You know, these aren’t the easiest girls in the world to work with,” Gunnarsson says. “They’re frightened and angry all the time and they’ve been arguing about everything we say and not listening at all. They’ve been screaming at us. Earlier this morning they tried to cross the police tape to fetch things from their rooms, iPods and jackets and so on, and when we tried to move them out to the smaller building, two ran off into the woods.”

“Ran off?”

“Oh, we caught up with them, and we’re trying to get them to return on their own. Right now they’re lying on the ground and demanding that Rolf give them a piggyback ride.”

Joona puts on his protective gear and walks up the steps into the big house. Inside the entrance, he can hear floodlight fans humming, and the air is already too warm. Dust motes float through the air.

He walks across the protective mats that have been placed on the tiled floor. A picture has fallen from the wall and the broken glass glitters in the bright light. There are bloody footprints in all directions, to and from the front door.

The home has retained some details from when it was a wealthy farmhouse. The colors of stenciled patterns on the walls are a bit faded, but fanciful vegetables and vines, painted by itinerant painters from Dalarna two hundred years ago, still meander along the walls and around the chimneys.

A technician, who introduces himself as Jimi Sjöberg, is aiming a green light beam at a black chair he’s sprayed with Hungarian Red.

“Any blood?” asks Joona.

“Not on this one,” answers Jimi, continuing to look for traces of blood.

“Found anything unusual?”

“The Head of Crime Scene Investigation in Stockholm told us not to move even a single piece of fly shit until Joona Linna gives us permission,” Jimi replies, smiling.

“And I’m very grateful.”

“So, the thing is, we haven’t really started yet,” Jimi says. “We’ve put down these damned mats and we’ve taken photos and filmed everything, and I’ve taken the liberty of swabbing a blood sample from the hallway so we could send it to the lab.”

“Good.”

“And Siri lifted prints in the hallway before they could be ruined.”

A second technician, Siri Karlsson, has just removed the brass handle from one of the doors. She puts it in a paper bag and comes over.

“This guy needs a look at the crime scene,” Jimi says.

“Not a pretty sight,” Siri says through the dust mask covering her mouth and nose. Her eyes look strained and tired.

“So I understand,” Joona says.

“You can take a look at the photos instead if you’d like,” Siri says.

“This is Joona Linna,” Jimi says.

“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.”

“I’m here only as an observer,” Joona says.

Siri looks away and the mask can’t hide her flushed cheeks when she looks back at him. “Sorry. Everyone’s talking about what’s happening to you. And I... that is... I don’t care about the internal investigation. I think it’ll be great to work together.”

“I think so, too,” Joona replies.

He stands for a moment longer, listening to the hum of the floodlights. He’s searching for that mental stillness that will allow him to observe and not give in to the impulse to look away.

Joona goes down the hall to the door from which Siri removed the handle. The key is still in the lock. He closes his eyes a moment and then walks into the room. It’s completely silent and fully lit, and the heated air is filled with the smell of blood and urine. Joona concentrates on breathing and in a moment he begins to distinguish other smells: damp wood, sweaty sheets, deodorant. The hot metal of the floodlights makes a pinging sound.

Joona does not move. He takes a long look at the body on the bed and lets each detail sink in, even though he’d much rather turn around and head for the fresh air of the forest.

Blood is all over the floor and splashed on the bolted-down furniture and the faded pictures of Bible scenes on the walls. It has spattered the ceiling and all the way to the toilet in the washroom, which has no door. A skinny girl, barely into puberty, is lying on the bed. She’s on her back wearing only a pair of white cotton panties. Her hands are over her face. Her elbows protect her breasts, her legs are straight, and her feet are crossed at the ankles.

Joona can feel his heart beating and the pulse throbbing in his temples.

He forces himself to look, register, and think.

The girl’s face is hidden as if she were afraid, as if she did not want to see her killer.

Before the girl was arranged on the bed, she had been hit repeatedly on her head and forehead by a blunt object. Her skull is smashed in.

Such a young girl; she must have been terrified. What chain of events had brought her to this home for troubled girls, to this room? Perhaps her parents or her foster parents couldn’t cope anymore. Perhaps they’d needed help and brought her here to be safe.

Joona takes in every grisly detail until he can absorb no more. He closes his eyes and thinks about his daughter’s face and the stone set over a grave that’s not hers. Then he opens his eyes and continues his investigation.

Everything indicates the victim was sitting on the chair next to the small table when the suspect attacked her. Joona tries to figure out the sequence of events that caused the blood to spatter in this pattern. He knows that each drop of blood, flying through the air, forms a sphere with a diameter of about five millimeters. If the drop is smaller, it means that the blood was traveling at such high speed it split into smaller drops.

He stands on two protective mats in front of the table; most likely the spot where the killer stood just a few hours earlier. The girl would have been sitting on the chair on the other side of the table. Joona follows the spatter pattern with his eyes. He leans back to trace a high arc on the walls. The weapon must have been swung back to gain momentum, and each time, as its direction changed slightly for the next blow, blood was flung off in a backward trail.

Joona has already spent more time on this crime scene than most inspectors would, yet he knows he’s not through yet. He steps over again to the girl on the bed. He notes her pierced navel, the lipstick stain on the glass by her bed, the scar, possibly from the removal of a birthmark, under her right breast. He sees the hair on her shins and a yellowed bruise on her thigh.

Joona leans over her and feels slight warmth still rising from her naked skin. He takes a closer look at her hands. There’s nothing under her nails. She didn’t scratch her assailant.