“We have a slight problem. We need a drawing of the tattoo. . no, preferably not a photo. . drawing, yes. . would be a bit clearer. Oh, really? Great!”
With the last sentence he brightened up and gave both his inspectors a triumphant look.
“Thanks a lot.”
He put down the receiver and unconsciously rubbed his hands together with satisfaction.
“Stridner will arrange for the sketch. One of the autopsy assistants is working on a degree in art. He’s there today. They’ll send the picture over when it’s finished.”
“Do they know if the victim is a man or a woman?” asked Hannu.
“A man. They did a chromosome test.”
Without changing his expression, he took away the top pages in the pile of missing persons information he was carrying.
“That leaves three,” he said.
“Stridner has also measured the skeleton. She says that the victim is a rather broad-shouldered man between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age, and between one hundred and seventy-five and one hundred and eighty-five centimeters in height. The body hair that was left on the chest was relatively dark. The man probably had dark hair, but not black according to Stridner.”
“A foreigner?” suggested Irene.
“Maybe. But he wasn’t dark skinned and didn’t have black hair. Probably brown to dark brown hair.”
Hannu flipped through his papers and placed yet another page farther back in the pile. “That leaves two,” he said calmly.
Irene could not contain her curiosity and asked, “Was it a man you weeded out?”
Hannu nodded. “Seventy-two years old. White haired. Heavy. One hundred and sixty-seven centimeters. Disappeared in Hindås in January. It’s not him.”
“Hardly. But which ones do you have left?” Andersson interrupted impatiently.
“Steffo Torberg. Thirty-two years old. Disappeared during a furlough from Kumla, March 13. In prison for seven years for bank robbery and manslaughter. He had one year left and had handled all of his furloughs excellently up till then. We know that he took a train to Göteborg to visit his family. Has two children down here with his ex-girlfriend. All traces disappear at the Central Station.”
“Didn’t he have some connection with a motorcycle gang?”
“The Brotherhood.”
“Not the best guys to have problems with? Did he?”
“Not that we know of.”
“Description?”
“One hundred and eighty-three centimeters, weighed about one hundred kilos. In good shape. Shoulder-length thick dark hair. Not black. Dark brown.”
“Tattoos?”
“Tons. Over his entire body.”
The superintendent sighed. “He probably looked like a comic strip.” “Probably.”
To Irene’s surprise, Hannu winked mischievously in her direction. Was he teasing the boss? She wasn’t sure, since he immediately returned to his neutral tone of voice.
“The next one has several tattoos and piercings.”
“Piercings? Damn!” Andersson said emphatically.
“He’s too young. Twenty-two years. Pierre Bardi. Has lived in Sweden for three years. The whole time in Stockholm. Disappeared March 22 after a fight with his live-in girlfriend. Pierre packed his bags and said that he was going back to Paris. He took his passport, two suitcases, and left. No one has seen him since. In Stockholm or in Paris.
“Description?”
“One hundred and seventy-six centimeters, in good shape and good health. Shoulder-length dark brown hair with blond highlights. Large tattoo on the left shoulder blade, right shoulder, and above the left nipple, though no dragon. Piercings in the nipples, through the top of the penis, in the right eyebrow, and in the tongue. Several gold rings in both ears.”
Andersson knitted his eyebrows in concentration. Finally he shook his head. “No. It isn’t either of them. Our body part only has one tattoo. He certainly could have had rings in his nipples, but we don’t know anything about that since the entire chest muscles are missing.”
Hannu nodded in agreement.
“So who is the victim? Could it be a foreigner nobody misses? A sailor?”
“No sailors have been reported missing during the last six months,” Hannu said calmly.
“Whoever he is, no one has reported him missing,” Andersson stated.
“We may have to publish the picture of the tattoo in the papers,” Irene suggested.
Andersson muttered to himself for a moment before he answered. “Maybe so. We’ll wait another day or so and see if we find more pieces of the victim.”
TWO MORE sacks were found that afternoon by a dog patrol searching the coastline south of Killevik. In a small overgrown bay, an old leaky skiff, turned upside down, was lying a few meters from the water. The dog instantly started for the boat, struggling to get to it. The two policemen carefully turned the skiff on its side. When they saw the sacks, they called in backup from Technical and from the Violent Crimes Unit.
The technicians were already hard at work when Irene and Jonny arrived. Svante Malm stopped photographing in order to greet them.
“Appears as though they belong to the same body we found the day before yesterday,” he said.
“What’s inside the sacks?” asked Irene.
“The lower part of the abdomen in one and the thighs in the other.”
The technician got back to his work with the camera.
Irene and Jonny walked around the discovery site. They had to watch where they put their feet because of the treacherously slippery stones and boulders. It was a gray and overcast afternoon, and the lowlying clouds warned of rain for the evening. Appropriately, a gloomy light shone over the ocean and the police officers on the beach. Beach grass was growing thickly around the skiff.
“Good hiding place,” Jonny pointed out.
“Yeah. No one comes here to swim. It’s too overgrown,” Irene agreed.
“Was the sack with the upper body also deposited here?”
They looked around, trying to answer the question. Finally Irene said, “No. It couldn’t have been under the skiff. There’s no chance that it could have washed out during high tide.”
“So then, there are more hiding places.”
“Yes, but probably close by. How far is it from here to Killevik?”
“As the crow flies I would guess four hundred meters.”
“It’s easy to get here by car.”
They looked up toward the little gravel road that followed the coastline in a north-south line.
“You can get all the way down to Kungsbacka on these roads,” said Jonny.
“It’s just a matter of continuing to search along the ocean and the smaller roads.”
“ IT ’ S AFTER six. Go home. You aren’t working this weekend. Fredrik and I are on duty,” said Birgitta.
“But you have the murder behind Flora’s Hill,” Irene objected.
“We’ve actually gotten a tip that Fredrik is checking out. It may be a jealousy killing. That wasn’t what we would have suspected would happen to Laban. Apparently, he had been together with a relatively young girl. Since she is a drug addict and he was a dealer they had a lot in common. Supposedly, the girl’s ex went around telling the world what he was planning on doing to Laban when he got his hands on him. Stabbing him to death was the least of it. We only know the ex’s first name. Robert. Apparently, he is also her pimp.”
“Has Fredrik gone to talk to Robert on his own?” asked Irene.