“You sure don’t like rain, boys,” Nyberg observed, surveying the building. It was a classic warehouse; boxes of various dimensions were stacked on well-marked shelves. Many of them were on the floor now. Computer equipment peeked out of some of them, a bit jumbled. Very little seemed to have been stolen.
“Maybe they had other things to do,” Nyberg said aloud.
Hultin gave him a quick but expressionless glance and turned to Benny Lundberg. “Is this exactly how it was when you came in?”
Lundberg nodded and cast a furtive glance at the three unfortunate fellows who were still standing inside the door, at a loss since no orders had been forthcoming.
Hultin and Nyberg dutifully poked around the large warehouse, then thanked Lundberg and went back out into the autumn night.
“Two unrelated incidents?” said Nyberg.
“Hardly,” said Hultin.
“A dispute between burglars about the division of loot?”
“Hardly,” Hultin said, with little variation.
“At three-oh-seven our anonymous tipster calls about the body. Five minutes later, the steroid stereotype Benny calls about the break-in. The time is now four-oh-six and ten seconds, beep. Where’s the connection?”
“You’ll have to talk to LinkCoop tomorrow.”
“Today,” Nyberg corrected him, wondering whether there was any point in going home and sleeping for two hours.
“You look like you need those two hours,” said Hultin telepathically.
He himself appeared to be thoroughly need-free as he made his way dry-footed through the rain toward his Volvo Turbo.
13
To claim that progress had been made would certainly have been a lie-and yet something had changed during the night. The atmosphere in “Supreme Central Command” had been, if not transformed, at least upgraded a bit.
Arto Söderstedt had taken the liberty of using an official car to transport his five children to various day care centers and schools; nowhere would the extra miles around Södermalm be reported. Paul Hjelm still hadn’t signed out an official car but took the subway from Norsborg, undisturbed by the rush-hour traffic, and listened to music for as long as possible.
Jorge Chavez, however, got stuck in the traffic from his bachelor’s studio in Rågsved, where he had returned after having rented a room in town. Every morning he found himself experiencing the same infantile surprise at the extent of the traffic; it was as though cars were becoming more and more central to people’s lives, as though the distinct metal borders were replacing the increasingly diffuse borders of self-identity. Every morning he promised himself he’d leave his old BMW home the next day; every morning he broke his promise. It was like an ineffective magic spell.
Gunnar Nyberg had gone home; he lay down with his clothes on in his bed for the overweight, slept like a clubbed seal-and woke two hours later like a completely pulped seal. He felt as though an aggressive Norwegian had lost his head during seal clubbing and kept going until all that was left was a nine-foot-square steak tartare. He finally ceased fantasizing about his similarities to small, cute, white, threatened baby seals, joined the line of cars on Värmdöleden along with all the other sour-pusses, and decided that his right to be a sourpuss was superior to that of his fellow drivers.
Viggo Norlander had defied the long working hours and gone to King Creole for a last-chance pickup at three in the morning. It had worked, but somewhere inside himself he began to realize the advisability of getting to know the lady in question a little bit before the act was allowed to commence. The fact was, tonight’s lady turned out to have had the sole goal of becoming pregnant; immediately after the fait accompli she pulled on her clothes and rushed through the door fertilized and happy and spitting in the face of menopause, leaving behind a detective inspector who felt as if he had lost his mind. It took him half an hour to find it. On the morning bus from Öster-malm, he fell into a trancelike fantasy about an unknown, successful son who tracks down an old bachelor cop father at the nursing home.
Kerstin Holm moved in mysterious ways from her new two-room apartment somewhere in Vasastan; possibly burned by a few collapsed relationships with colleagues, she kept a distance between her private life and her work life. But that was nothing compared to Jan-Olov Hultin, the man without a private life. Rumor had it that he lived with a wife and without an empty nest in a villa somewhere north of the city and that he played intercompany soccer with startling brutality in the Stockholm Police veterans’ team, but it was impossible to find out more than that. He was his job. He was like a god-pure presence, pure action-or like a father figure viewed through the eternally selective eyes of a five-year-old.
Sure enough, by the time they all arrived at “Supreme Central Command” from these various directions and experiences, each sensing the heightened atmosphere, he was already there.
The rain continued its ravages outside. At least, since rain always had a certain dampening effect on crime, fewer false leads would be scattered about.
The item they discussed by way of opening the meeting was the false lead of Laban Hassel. Hjelm and Chavez’s quick summary filtered out the unfathomable tragedy: a father-fixated son threatens the absent father to get attention, then turns to his half-brother’s mother in a half-incestuous relationship, where they both discover they’ve taken their ability to procreate out of the game because of the father, who is murdered in almost the same way that the threats had described.
It sounded like the synopsis of a soap opera that they were pitching to the director of programming at a commercial television channel. The director of programming replied with an awful tone of rejection: “And he didn’t do it?”
“No,” they said in unison.
Hjelm added, “But we’ll keep that door open.”
“Okay. Gunnar?”
Sullenly and laconically, Gunnar Nyberg recounted the night’s events in Frihamnen.
When he was finished, Söderstedt said, disenchanted, “It sounds about as promising as the flasher in Tantolunden.” Targeted by their stares, he elucidated, “The one who got beaten up by the women’s soccer team.”
“In any case, we’ll keep that door open as well,” Hultin said.
Despite the rather worthless reports and the lack of responses, the atmosphere remained heightened. Somewhere in what had been said lay the potential for more.
“Who was he?” said Chavez. “The body in Frihamnen?”
“Unidentified,” said Hultin. “The fingerprints didn’t tell us anything. A classic John Doe, as the Americans like to call their unidentified bodies. About twenty-five, medium-blond, nothing more. The autopsy didn’t tell us anything. Four shots to the heart can probably be considered reason enough to die. Otherwise he was hale and hearty.”
“Hale and hearty, he lay on the autopsy table,” Söderstedt said indifferently, counting on being ignored, and so he was.
“We’re looking around Frihamnen for any vehicle he might have left behind,” Hultin continued. “Gunnar will go to the company, LinkCoop, to discuss the break-in. We’ll send the fingerprints to Interpol for examination, and some people whose next of kin are missing will come to look at the body. Viggo can go to the pathologist and get a statement. Otherwise we’ll keep on with what we were doing before.”
What they were doing before was, in practice, waiting. Considering the circumstances, it was surprising that all of them left with renewed hope. No one could explain it as anything other than an intuition, and intuition was really the only thing they had in common; it had been the decisive characteristic when, once upon a time, Hultin had handpicked them.