“What others?”
“On my bandy team. Stockholm Attorneys’ Bandy Club. We’d had a late away game up in Knivsta, and we were on our way home.”
“Let me see if I understand,” Hultin said mildly, and little did Mats Oskarsson suspect how ominous this mildness was. “A gang of the guardians of the law were on their way home from a bandy match at three in the morning, ended up in Frihamnen, witnessed a murder, and intended to keep it from the long arm of the law. Is that correct?”
Oskarsson stared down at the table. “It was late,” he said.
“Late on earth,” Hultin said even more mildly.
“I beg your pardon?” Oskarsson asked.
“Are you an attorney?”
“A tax attorney at Hagman, Grafström, and Krantz, yes.”
“And you were the one driving the car?”
“Yes. A Volkswagen van.”
“Do you want me to try to reconstruct the chain of events?” Hultin asked rhetorically. “You played bandy, got creamed, drank it off, lost your way in Frihamnen of all places, ran into a murderer who had left a body behind, realized you were all shitfaced, and decided to hell with it all. Then you were struck by a pang of conscience, maybe after having dropped off the whole gang to avoid any digs, and called from a telephone booth at Stureplan, even though you all surely had pockets stuffed full of cell phones, but of course you wouldn’t want to leave behind any traces in the registry. Were you driving drunk?”
“No,” said Oskarsson. His eyes were drilling green holes in the desk.
“Yes, you were,” Hultin said, still mildly. “You called even so, and now you’re here. I’m sure you’re basically a conscientious person, unlike your attorney colleagues in the ball club, and that the only reason you could have had for calling anonymously was that you were driving drunk. But of course, that’s not something that can be proven.”
“No,” Oskarsson said, with unintentional ambiguity.
Time for a change of tone. Hultin bellowed, considerably less ambiguously, “Spit it all out now, the whole fucking story, and we’ll see if I can save you from being charged.”
Mats Oskarsson sighed and spat it out with a lawyer’s precision. “It was a few minutes past two-thirty. The man was a bit taller than average, rather powerfully built, and was wearing black clothes and a black balaclava over his face. He was driving a ten- or twelve-year-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a license plate that started with B. He had just loaded a bundle of blankets into the trunk and was about to load the other one when we interrupted him.”
“So it was more than half an hour before you called?”
“Yes. Unfortunately. I’m sorry.”
“Me too. If that information had been reported immediately, there wouldn’t be a raving serial killer running loose in Stockholm today. I hope your daughters are his next victims.”
Hultin didn’t usually go too far, even in his most agitated moments, but his firmly rooted distrust in the guardians of the constitutional state caused him to go over the limit. “A raving serial killer.” He had to smooth things over. “Do you remember anything more than the B in the license number?”
“No,” Oskarsson mumbled.
The man didn’t have more to say. Hultin could have given him a thorough lecture on the corrupt legal practices in the buy-and-sell world of Swedish jurisprudence; on how the Western democracies were gradually selling out the constitutional state; on how laws that were established to protect citizens were being transformed into market games and low-odds competitions between high-cost old-fox lawyers and recently graduated low-budget prosecutors; and on how a whole busload of attorneys hadn’t for one second considered setting aside their own egos in order to catch a double murderer. But Mats Oskarsson had shown at least the beginnings of moral courage, and in addition he seemed already pounded into the ground by the contents of the nonexistent lecture. He slunk toward the door. He had just opened it when he heard Hultin’s subdued “Thanks.”
For a split second, Hultin met the man’s clear green gaze. It actually said more than a thousand words.
Jan-Olov Hultin, now alone, stretched his legs out under the desk, emptied his consciousness, and let his eyes sweep over the walls of his office. For the first time in a long time, he was struck by the room’s anonymity. There was not a single trace of him in here. It was purely a workroom. He hadn’t even taken the pains to put up a photo of his wife. When he was at work, he was one hundred percent policeman, maybe even a little more. The rest he kept to himself. Not even after the success with the Power Murders had he let anyone in. He didn’t really know why. The intercompany soccer wasn’t a secret anymore. One night Hjelm and Chavez had popped up on the Astroturf field at Stadshagen and seen him in action. Unfortunately, the Stockholm Police Veterans team had been playing Rågsved Alliance, which had a sharp attacker named Carlos, and Hultin had clipped Carlos’s left eyebrow with a thundering header, so the blood gushed out. Carlos’s last name was, unfortunately, Chavez. He didn’t know whether Jorge had informed his father that it was Jorge’s boss’s skull that had transported him across the street to St. Göran’s Hospital.
His short, weak smile was interrupted by the ringing of a phone.
“Yes,” he said into the receiver. “Yes. Yes. I understand. Yes.”
Then he thought for a few seconds as his finger hovered over the internal telephone’s keypad. While he thought, he dialed Kerstin Holm’s number.
“Kerstin, are you there?”
“Yep,” came Holm’s alto, in a reproduction that didn’t do it justice.
“Are you busy?”
“Not particularly. I’m trying to familiarize myself with every detail of the FBI’s material. It’s a huge volume.”
“Can you run a check on a dark blue Volvo station wagon, model years, say, eighty through ninety? The license should start with a B. We’ve gotten a better witness report on Frihamnen.”
“Hell, that’s great! Of course.” She hung up on him before he had time to hang up on her.
His finger hovered again. Söderstedt? Nah. Norlander, who would be back by now? No. Was Nyberg back from LinkCoop? Nah. Chavez? Not alone.
His hesitation, he knew, was more of the democratic than the realistic sort. He dialed Hjelm’s number. “Paul?”
“Yes.”
“Come see me. Bring Jorge.”
It took thirty seconds.
“Is the Laban Hassel story over and done with?” he asked as they stood there like schoolboys. Why was everyone always standing in front of him like schoolboys?
“Yes,” said Chavez. “We’ve tried to find a basis for bringing charges, but we might as well admit that we don’t really want to charge him. We can only hope things go well for him and Ingela. Despite their sterility.”
“Okay, then. I’ve just received information about a clue in Frihamnen. A car that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone has been found a few blocks from LinkCoop’s warehouses. A beige Saab 900. Two things make it interesting. One, it was completely clean, with not a fingerprint anywhere, neither inside nor outside. And two, it’s registered to Andreas Gallano. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Gallano,” said Hjelm. “Repeat offender down in Alby, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, yeah, Andreas Gallano. I had a few confrontations with him during my time in Huddinge. Quite a bit of violence, as I recall. He’s a ways up in the chain of drug distribution, but still a classic street hooligan. No conscience. We put him away once for assault and battery and once for selling drugs.”
“Oh yeah!” Chavez exclaimed. “He escaped from Hall Prison.”
“That’s right,” said Hultin. “He was in Hall for assault and battery again until just over a month ago. He and three violent criminals escaped through the kitchen. A bold plan.”
Hjelm and Chavez nodded. It had been a noteworthy escape.