The truck driver repeats her words and then explains that he is on Highway 86 just thirty-eight kilometers from Timrå.
“We have to hurry!”
The truck driver slows down as they approach a broken traffic light before a roundabout. The truck thunders as it rolls over the speed bumps. They pass a white brick building as they pick up speed and keep heading down Highway 86.
The emergency center has connected the truck driver to the police. A female officer in a roaming squad car picks it up. She explains that her name is Mirja Zlatnek and she is only twenty-nine kilometers away from them on Highway 330 in Djupängen.
Pia Abrahamsson takes over the telephone. She swallows hard to force away her nausea. Her voice is calm even though it is shaking.
“Listen to me,” she says. “My son has been kidnapped. The car is on-” She turns to the truck driver. “What highway is this?”
“Highway 86,” he says.
“How far ahead are they?” asks the policewoman.
“Perhaps five minutes ahead of us,” Pia says.
“Have you already driven past Indal?”
“Indal,” Pia says loudly.
“Nineteen kilometers ahead of us,” the truck driver says.
“Then we’ll get them,” the policewoman says. “We’ll catch them.”
As Pia Abrahamsson hears those words, tears begin to flow. She wipes them from her cheeks and listens to the policewoman talk to a colleague. They’re going to erect a blockade on Highway 330 where there is a bridge over the river. The officer says that he’s just five minutes away and will be able to get there in time.
“Good,” the policewoman says quickly.
The truck driver keeps driving along the highway, which follows the river through the empty spaces of Medelpad Province. They know that the car with Pia’s son has to be ahead of them, although they can’t see it. There are no alternatives. The highway runs past small collections of houses, but there are no other roads and no turnoffs except for lumber roads leading to the occasional clearing.
“I can’t take this,” Pia says to herself.
The road forks a few kilometers ahead, past the village of Indal. One branch leads south to a bridge over the river, and the other continues east along the river toward the coast.
Pia is sitting with her hands clasped as she prays.
The police are setting up blockades on both forks of the road. One is on the other side of the bridge and the other is eight kilometers to the east.
The tractor-trailer with its driver from Denmark and the Lutheran pastor Pia Abrahamsson is now passing through Indal. Through the downpour, they can see the empty bridge over the river and the blue light of a squad car rotating on the other side.
25
Police officer Mirja Zlatnek has parked her squad car diagonally across the road and pulled up the emergency brake. To get past her, a car would have to leave the road and then at least two wheels would go into the ditch.
There’s a long stretch of road before her, and the rain beats against the roof of her car. Mirja peers through the windshield, but it’s hard to see in the increasingly heavy rain.
She’d thought she’d have a quiet day, since all the other police officers in the region were sent to Birgittagården after the dead girl was found there. She started at her desk, reading recipes on a food website. Baked fillet of moose, potato wedges, and Karl Johan mushroom sauce. Full-bodied puree of Jerusalem artichoke. Then she had to get in the squad car and check out a stolen trailer in Djupängen, which was where she was when the call came in about the kidnapped boy.
Although she’s never been involved in a case involving violence, Mirja has started to fear the operative side of police work. She can trace this back many years to when she tried to mediate a family conflict, which ended badly. Over the years since, her fear has crept up on her to the point that she prefers administrative work and preventive tactics. But she tells herself that she can handle the situation. There’s no other place where the car with the four-year-old boy could go. This road is like a single long tunnel-a fish trap. Either the car will drive over the bridge after Indal, where her colleague Lasse Bengtsson is waiting for it, or it will come here-and here’s where I’m waiting, Mirja thinks.
The tractor-trailer should be about ten or eleven kilometers behind the car. Much depends on how fast the car is going. In twenty minutes, no less, it will be here. Mirja tells herself that this is probably not a random kidnapping. It could be a custody battle. The woman on the phone was too upset to give much concrete information, but her car should be somewhere on this highway, this side of Nilsböle.
It’ll soon be over, she thinks. In a little while, she’ll be able to return to the office, have a cup of coffee, eat her ham sandwich.
But there is something that bothers her. The woman kept talking about a girl with twigs for arms. Mirja didn’t ask the woman for her name. There wasn’t time. She assumed that the emergency center had taken it down. The woman’s agitation was frightening. She had described what happened as if it were some incomprehensible or supernatural event.
The rain keeps beating down. Mirja picks up the radio and calls her colleague Lasse Bengtsson.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“Raining like hell, but otherwise not much. Not a single car,” he says. “Wait, now I see a truck, a huge tractor-trailer. On Highway 330.”
“He’s the driver who placed the call,” she says.
“Then where the hell is the Toyota?” asks Lasse. “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes and I haven’t seen it. Unless the car is a UFO, it should reach you in less than five minutes.”
“Just a minute,” Mirja says quickly, and cuts off communication. She can see headlights in the distance.
26
Mirja Zlatnek leaves the squad car and peers through the curtain of rain at the approaching car. She places one hand on her holstered gun as she walks toward it and motions for it to stop. Water runs over the road and puddles in the grass at the bottom of the ditch. Her own shadow cast by the rotating blue light behind her leaps around on the asphalt.
Mirja sees that the car is slowing down just as she hears a call come through on her radio. She stays on the road. It sounds as if the voices on the radio are coming from inside a can. There’s hiss and crackle, but she can tell what’s being said.
“There’s blood everywhere,” a voice says. Another body has been found at Birgittagården. A woman in her fifties.
The vehicle swings to the shoulder as it comes to a stop. Mirja Zlatnek walks over to the driver’s side. The vehicle is a Mazda pickup truck. The driver’s door opens and a huge man in a green hunting vest gets out. He has shoulder-length hair, a powerful nose, and narrow eyes. He’s smiling broadly.
“Are you the only person in the vehicle?” asks Mirja, wiping water from her face.
He nods and looks away toward the forest.
“Move aside,” she says as she reaches the vehicle.
The man takes a small step back and Mirja leans forward to look inside the truck’s cab. Her hair is soaked and water runs down her back. It’s hard to see anything through the windshield. A newspaper is spread out on the driver’s seat. She can tell he was sitting on it. She walks around and peers into the tiny backseat compartment. Nothing but a thermos and an old blanket.
There’s another call on her radio, but she can’t make out the words.
The huge man’s hunting vest is already turning dark green from the rain. She hears a scratching sound, something scraping against the metal. She turns to look at the man. He’s come closer, or perhaps she’s just imagining it, she’s no longer sure. He’s taking a good look at her, neck to knee, and his fleshy forehead wrinkles.
“Do you live around here?” she asks.
She rubs the mud off the license plate with her foot and writes down the number. Then she walks around the front of the vehicle.