After that, Peder had briefly interviewed baby Natalie’s parents and both sets of grandparents. None of them could think of anyone who might wish them ill.
‘Think hard,’ Peder told them. ‘Go right back in time. Try to think of even the slightest grudge that was never sorted out.’
But no, none of them could remember even the smallest thing.
And then his round of interviews had been interrupted by the discovery of Natalie lying dead in a bathroom in Bromma. Peder had to go back to Natalie’s parents first, and was then sent to supervise the first phase of the crime scene investigation in Bromma. This time, just like last time, they were without a murder scene.
But they did at least already know how their murderer killed his child victims, so they knew roughly what they were looking for. The duty pathologist at the scene ascertained almost at once that Natalie had a small mark on her head, probably from the lethal injection. The autopsy would confirm it later, but the group was working on the initial assumption that this child, too, had been murdered by an overdose of insulin, this time injected into the child’s head through the fontanelle. Was that what the murderer had tried to do to Lilian as well, but found he couldn’t get through her skull?
There were also other parallels with the way Lilian had been arranged when they found her. Natalie was also naked and had been washed with some kind of spirit. She had the same lettering on her forehead as Lilian, ‘Unwanted’. But she had been lying in a foetal position, not flat on her back like Lilian. Peder wondered if that was significant.
He also wondered about the word ‘Unwanted’. He and Alex had just been talking about it. Words like ‘Unwanted’ and ‘Rejected’ kept cropping up in this investigation, though neither of the children seemed to have been either.
The queue of cars inched its way forward, slowly dispersing. Peder felt lousy. The idea of trying to make contact with the American profiler had seemed so obvious. And his friend had offered the ideal way in. Or so it had seemed. In retrospect, Peder doubted it had been worth it. The time it had taken him to drive out to the university and back felt wasted. Peder’s friend had thought the psychologist would be prepared to have a word with him after the guest lecture, but he had in fact turned out to be extremely chilly and dismissive. Despite the potency and calibre of the current case, the psychologist intimated briskly that Peder had overstepped the mark by simply turning up and trying to pick his brains. He really had no wish to get involved with some strange Swedish case, when he was expected at Villa Källhagen for a lunch.
The psychologist unfortunately confirmed all Peder’s preconceptions about psychologists, and Americans. Dim and slow, with no social graces. Not the pleasantest of people. Peder virtually threw his card at the man and made his exit. Idiot.
The traffic jam finally cleared. Peder put his foot down and headed for HQ.
Then his mobile rang.
He was not a little surprised to find it was a call from the psychologist.
‘I’m so sorry I had to turn you down so publicly,’ he said apologetically. ‘You see, if I’d offered my services to you and your colleagues, every single psychology student there would have thought they were free to ask me to do the same. And to be honest, that’s not what I give my guest lectures for.’
Peder, unable to work out whether the psychologist was ringing to offer assistance or merely to apologize, said nothing and wondered frantically how best to respond.
The psychologist went on:
‘What I’m trying to say is that I’ll be glad to help you. Maybe I could come to see you and your colleagues sometime after this damn lunch I’m obliged to attend?’
Peder smiled.
Alex did not really know what to say at first, when Peder rang and told him that the psychological profiler had agreed to come and see them later that day. Then he decided it was quite a good idea, after all. They needed all the help they could get. And what was more, Fredrika would be back from Umeå in a couple of hours’ time.
Alex turned his little diagrams round, looking at them from all angles. At least they had a pattern, now. The murderer kidnapped and murdered children, and dumped them in places their mothers had some sort of link to. With savage speed.
Why had there been only a few days’ gap between the two abductions and murders, Alex wondered. The murderer was taking an enormous risk by committing two such serious crimes in swift succession. Three, if you counted the woman in Jönköping. There were some real psychos, of course, who never expected anything other than that they would be caught. Though ‘expected’ wasn’t the word: they wanted nothing better than to be caught. But was the murderer they were pursuing disturbed in that sort of way?
Alex went back to considering the locations in which the children had been found. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t found out exactly what Sara Sebastiansson had done or who she had met in Umeå. The main thing was that they were sure the place had some kind of significance for her, which explained why her child had been taken to that particular location and not left anywhere in Stockholm.
The truth was often much simpler than you first thought. Alex had learned that over the years. That was why it had seemed so obvious to focus on Gabriel Sebastiansson from the start. But this time, everything was different. This time, the truth seemed a vast distance away. It wasn’t a close relative who was to be held to account for what had happened, but something as uncommon as a serial killer.
How many serial killers have you actually met in all your years with the police, Alex? whispered the ghostly voice in his head.
Ellen interrupted his reverie with a hard knock on his open door.
‘Alex!’ she called, so loudly that it made him jump.
‘What is it now?’ he muttered.
‘We’ve had a call from Karolinska Hospital,’ said Ellen excitedly.
Alex looked quizzical.
‘They’ve got a woman there they think might be Jelena Scortz.’
Alex Recht briefly contemplated going straight out to Karolinska University Hospital on his own to talk to the woman the staff thought might be Jelena Scortz, but he decided it wouldn’t be fair to Peder. It was thanks to Peder they had identified the woman, after all. So Alex decided they would go together. He was in buoyant mood. He had just heard that Sara Sebastiansson thought she recognized Jelena as the woman who had delayed her in Flemingsberg. She couldn’t be entirely sure, since the picture they had shown her was so old, but she thought it might well be the same girl.
Peder felt a surge of euphoria when he arrived back at HQ and was told to get straight out to Karolinska to conduct – if at all possible – an initial interview with Jelena Scortz, or Monika Sander as she appeared in the files of the National Registration Service. He raced to the car with Alex on his heels, and drove to Solna breaking several speed limits on the way.
Peder had never made any secret of what he liked best about his profession. He lived for those unique adrenalin rushes that can only result from a breakthrough in an investigation. He could see Alex felt the same, even though he had been in the job so much longer.
Peder couldn’t help being slightly irritated by the fact that Fredrika seemed immune to such pleasures. While everyone else was caught up in the excitement, she turned in on herself and became one big ‘Is this really the solution?’ and ‘Couldn’t it equally well be that?’ On this occasion it was in fact partly thanks to her that they had reached the breakthrough, so she could at least have allowed herself a hint of a smile when she heard the news. He liked smiley people around him at work.
Alex and Peder did not really know what to expect when they got to the hospital. They had been told, of course, that the woman presumed to be Monika Sander had been very badly knocked about and was still in some form of shock. But nothing they had been told in advance prepared them for what they saw when they went into the patient’s room.