Lars Kepler - The Fire Witness

He thinks they are somewhere behind the barn. Its black doors are wide open and shafts of sunlight are falling between its wide boards.

He runs past a rusty gasoline tank and is right at the huge barn when he hears the shot. The sound resonates among the buildings then dies away over the fields.

It’s too far to get around the barn and the wall. There’s not enough time. Perhaps it’s already too late.

Joona pulls out his pistol as he runs into the empty barn. Sunbeams thrust in all directions through the gaps between the boards, making a cage of light. Joona races over the dry gravel floor of the barn. He stops when he catches sight of both figures on the other side.

Flora is lying on the ground and Daniel is standing over her with a rifle aimed point-blank at her face.

Joona stands and aims with his arm straight out. The distance is much too far. Through a gap, Joona watches Daniel put his head to the side and press the rifle against Flora’s eye.

It all happens fast.

The pistol’s front sight shakes before Joona’s gaze. He aims at Daniel’s stomach, follows Daniel’s movements, and pulls the trigger. There’s a loud crack and the recoil runs up Joona’s arm. The flash burns over his hand.

The bullet goes straight between the gap in the boards. Dust motes whirl in the light.

Joona doesn’t stop to see if he’s hit his mark. He keeps running through the barn. The sunbeams flash over him. He kicks open a narrow back door and runs out into the waist-high weeds. Daniel has dropped the rifle into the grass. Joona hopes he did not have time to pull the trigger again.

Daniel is walking out into the field, clutching his stomach, blood running between his fingers. He can hear Joona behind him and he turns, swaying, and gestures to Flora, who is lying on her back in the grass and breathing hard.

Joona keeps heading for Daniel with his pistol aimed at his chest.

Daniel sinks to the ground and groans as he looks up. Sunlight reflects from his glasses.

Without saying a word, Joona kicks the rifle away from him. He grabs one of his arms, drags him over to one of the iron rings on the concrete foundation, and handcuffs him to it.

Flora has not fainted, but she looks at Joona with a stiff, unnatural gaze. She’s bleeding heavily from her leg. Her face is gray and she’s breathing fast. So fast that Joona can tell she is about to go into shock.

“Thirsty,” she whispers.

One leg of her pants is soaked with blood and new blood keeps bubbling out. There’s no time to make a tourniquet. He grabs her leg with both hands and presses his thumb into the wound right against the artery. The flow of warm blood diminishes immediately. He presses even harder as he looks at Flora’s face. Her eyes have shut and he can feel her pulse racing.

“The ambulance will be here soon, Flora,” he tells her. “It’s going to be all right.”

Behind his back, Joona hears Daniel try to say something.

He turns toward Daniel and sees an elderly man wearing a black coat over a black suit walking toward Daniel. The man’s strict face is colorless and his eyes are sorrowful. He looks over at Joona.

“Let me just embrace my son once more,” the old man says. His voice is gruff.

Joona can’t let go of Flora’s leg. He must not move or Flora might die.

The man walks slowly past him as if in a spell. Joona can smell gasoline.

The old man has soaked his coat in gasoline. He’s drenched himself in gasoline and he’s holding a matchbox.

“Don’t do it!” Joona yells.

Daniel stares at his father and tries to crawl away. He yanks at the handcuff holding him back.

The old man stops and gazes down at Daniel. He says nothing, but his fingers are trembling as he opens the matchbox and pulls out a match. He closes the box and runs the match along the side.

“She’s lying! She’s lying!” Daniel howls.

There’s a puff of air as his father’s coat catches on fire. A band of light blue fire embraces him. The heat reaches Joona’s face.

The burning old man sways, then he kneels beside his son and embraces him with fire. The grass around them begins to burn. Daniel fights, but the old man holds on tightly. Daniel stops struggling as the flames burn around them both. It sounds like a flag whipping in the wind as the fire swirls upward. A tower of black smoke rises, and pieces of soot, glowing, rise to heaven.

When the fire behind the large barn has been put out, only two blackened bodies are left, entwined in a pile of ashes.

The ambulance drives away with Flora.

Just as it is leaving, the old woman walks out. The lady of the manor stands completely still as if she froze the moment the wall of pain hit her.

Joona starts to drive back to Stockholm. He is listening to the Radio Book Club, but he’s thinking about the weapons Daniel used at Birgittagården.

The hammer and the rock had confused him.

Now it’s clear. Elisabet was not killed because the killer needed her keys. Daniel had his own key to the isolation room. Elisabet must have seen him, and he must have known she had. He followed her and killed her solely because she had witnessed him murder Miranda.

Rain, hard as glass, spatters the windshield. A ray of the setting sun pierces the clouds and steam rises from the asphalt.

Daniel probably went in to Miranda after he thought Elisabet had taken her sleeping pills and gone to bed. Miranda did as he asked because she did not have a choice.

She took off her clothes and sat with the blanket around her to keep her warm.

Something went wrong that night.

Perhaps Miranda told him she was pregnant. Perhaps he found the pregnancy test in her room. Perhaps he felt suffocated. Perhaps he panicked. Joona may never know. But he does know that something made Daniel decide that he had to get rid of a problem, that Miranda was a problem.

Joona can picture him putting on the boots that always stood in the hallway, going outside, and searching the garden for a sharp rock. Then he returns, tells her to shut her eyes and place her hands over her face, and hits her again and again.

She was not supposed to see him. She was supposed to have her hands over her face, just as Ylva had all those years ago.

Nathan Pollock had interpreted the covered face as a sign that the killer wanted to make the girl into an object before he killed her. The reality, Joona thinks, was that Daniel was in love with Miranda and he wanted her to put her hands over her eyes so that she wouldn’t be frightened.

He’d had plenty of time to prepare the deaths of the other girls, but not Miranda’s. He beat her to death without thinking of what would happen next.

At some point in the middle of this — as he hit her with the rock, lifted her onto the bed, and covered her face again — Elisabet burst in on him. Perhaps the sound of his car woke her.

Perhaps he’d already gotten rid of the rock. Perhaps he’d thrown it far into the forest.

Daniel hunted Elisabet down, grabbing a hammer from somewhere, following her into the brewery, and ordering her to cover her face before he hit her.

When Elisabet was dead, he decided to place the blame on the new girl, Vicky Bennet. He knew that she took strong sleeping pills, which meant she’d slept through the events of that evening.

Daniel had to hurry. Any minute someone could wake up. He took Elisabet’s key to the isolation room from her ring of keys, returned to the main building, put the key in the isolation room lock, scooped up Miranda’s blood, went to Vicky’s room, placed the hammer under her pillow, and smeared the blood on her sleeping body. Then he left the grounds.

He’d probably used garbage bags or some newspapers to protect his car while he drove back to his house. He probably burned them along with his clothes in the cast-iron stove.