Emelie Schepp - Slowly We Die

“Hello, Father,” she said.

* * *

Lead investigator Gunnar Öhrn opened a can of Coca-Cola and drank it quickly, as if he were worried it would go flat. Henrik and Mia stood next to him near the window. It was afternoon, and the staff kitchen was otherwise empty.

“It feels shitty to be hunting Danilo Peña again,” Mia said, slurping her coffee.

“The boathouse where you caught him, might he have gone back there?” asked Henrik.

“Hardly,” Mia said. “He’s definitely fucking disturbed, but he’s not that crazy. Arkösund has to be the last place he’d go.”

Mia thought of the boathouse, and she could almost feel the cold whirling flakes as she watched the ambulance helicopter take off into the sky above her. They had managed to rescue a Thai girl from drowning, a girl who had been used as a mule in the Policegate drug ring. Close to the boathouse they had also found Danilo, the man who was holding the Thai girl captive in the boathouse and who had tried to kill her.

Gunnar sighed.

“But how could he be in a medically induced coma and then just suddenly stand up, plan his escape and just walk away? The doctors at Vrinnevi must not have been monitoring his condition very closely,” he said. “Why was he in the hospital for so long, anyway?”

“I talked with one of the doctors,” Henrik said. “There’d been a complication after the various surgeries he underwent for his injuries. Something had started leaking after the last of the operations when they stitched up his intestines. It caused an infection, if I understood the doctor correctly,” Henrik said. “Danilo was on a number of medications as he recovered, including Stesolid, which is a muscle relaxant and a sedative...”

“And which put Mattias right to sleep,” Mia said.

“Yes, Stesolid makes you drowsy. But if you stick a needle full directly into your chest, you risk hitting the heart or lungs. You can die if you don’t get care immediately.”

“So Mattias Bohed got lucky,” Gunnar said. “Have we gotten any information from the guard who was beaten and locked in the closet?”

“Nothing worthwhile,” Henrik said.

Anneli Lindgren came into the staff kitchen and nodded at them, her eyebrows raised.

“Are you having a meeting in here?” she asked.

“Only of the more informal variety,” Henrik replied.

She took a mug from the cupboard and filled it with hot water. Gunnar tried to ignore Anneli, pretending that his former live-in partner and the mother of his child hadn’t entered the room.

“Was his name Anders, the guard?” he asked.

“Andreas,” Henrik said.

“Sorry, I...”

Gunnar took three long, slow gulps of his Coke as he waited for Anneli to leave the room with her cup of tea.

“So. Where were we?” he said once the sound of her footsteps had disappeared down the hallway.

“The guard’s name is Andreas Hedberg, and he’s twenty-four years old,” Henrik said. “Worked as a guard for a year or so.”

“And he probably won’t stay after this,” Mia said.

“Why did they have a relative rookie outside the door? I thought we insisted on only the most experienced,” Gunnar said. “Have we checked him out thoroughly? He didn’t help Peña, did he?”

“And received a beating as thanks, you mean?” Mia said.

“Probably not,” Henrik said. “But we’re questioning him this afternoon.”

“Should we put Danilo’s name out there?” Gunnar asked. “I assume the media has already snapped up the news. You don’t cordon off the entrance to Vrinnevi without good reason.”

Henrik furrowed his brow.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Danilo Peña is a dangerous criminal.”

“But we’ve already issued a BOLO for him once, in connection with Policegate,” Henrik said, looking resolute. “Won’t it make us look completely ridiculous if we put his name and picture out there again?”

“Yes, but do we have a choice?” Mia said. “How long can we hide that Peña has escaped from his guarded room at the hospital? If something happens while he’s AWOL, it will only mean that we have to deal with a whole new mess of shit. Haven’t we already had enough to deal with?”

“You have a point there, Mia,” Gunnar said, setting his empty can on the table. “But I agree with Henrik, that it’s probably better to work quietly for a bit longer.”

“Good,” Henrik said. “We have to focus on finding him before the media even knows that he has escaped and prove that our new organization actually works.”

Gunnar grinned.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Collect all of the information we have on Danilo.”

“What do you want to know?” Henrik asked.

“I want to know everything. Again.”

CHAPTER

THREE

PHILIP ENGSTRÖM STARED at the ceiling light, thinking about the strange dream he’d just woken up from. He had been in a museum, looking at a man dressed all in white who was standing completely still in a glass case. The disturbing part was that the man looked exactly like him.

He reached across the bed, grabbed his cell phone to check the time and saw that it was already five in the afternoon. He also saw a text from Lina, read it quickly and got out of bed.

He put on his pants and pulled a shirt over his head as he left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen. As usual, the refrigerator door refused to open until he jerked the handle with both hands. He surveyed its contents: butter packets, ketchup bottle, jar of pickles.

Just as he picked up the milk carton to check the expiration date, he heard Lina’s voice from the entranceway.

“Hello? Sweetie, are you home?”

“Yes, I’m here,” he answered. He heard the front door close as he took a mouthful of milk from the carton and put it back in the fridge. When she came into the kitchen, he was standing quietly by the kitchen table.

“Great that you’re already up,” she said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled.

She caressed his arm, gave him a light kiss on the cheek and set a white plastic bag on the table.

“I got takeout.”

“Oh, nice.”

“Red curry.”

“Are we celebrating something?” he asked

“No, I just didn’t want to waste time cooking dinner. I thought we could use the time for something better.”

Philip felt her hand slip around his arm, and he looked at her. The text message she’d sent earlier had been just three words: Snuggle time tonight.

It meant that she wanted to have sex at least once if not more in the next few hours before he had to leave for work. Their wedding three years ago had marked the beginning of a long struggle with infertility. He was now in his thirties, and she was only twenty-five, and it felt as if they already had tried everything. Their specialist could not find any medical reason why they couldn’t get pregnant on their own; they were told they probably just needed to relax.

Lina eventually devised the current plan, a schedule to have sex as often as possible around when she was ovulating,

Today happened to be three days before, and so they should have sex. Not necessarily because they wanted to—just because that was how their life was now.

“We have to,” she said.

“I know, I know,” he said. But he didn’t want to think about routines and schedules. Not today, and especially not now. He hoped the stiffness of his smile wouldn’t give him away, but it did.

“Don’t you want to?”

“Of course I do.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” he said, much more emphatically than he’d intended.

She jerked away and refused to look at him, instead staring into the bag at the aluminum containers with their steaming lids.