The Fire Witness (17 page)

“You should be done by now,” Nina whispers.

“Okay,” he says, and gets up quickly.

As he pulls some toilet paper off the roll and wipes his mouth, Caroline can see that the man is the security guard.

“So where’s my money?” Nina holds out her hand.

The guard starts digging around in his pocket.

“Damn it, I just have eighty,” he says.

“You told me you had five hundred.”

“What am I supposed to do? I only have eighty.”

Nina sighs and takes the money.

Caroline hurries away and slides into her own cold little bedroom. She closes the door and turns on the light. She can see herself reflected in the black window and realizes that she’s visible to anyone outside. She stands to one side as she pulls the blind down, so she can’t be seen. For the first time in a long while, she feels afraid of the dark. She leans against the wall, suddenly remembering Tuula’s light blue eyes as she talked about various serial killers. She knows Tuula was frightened and only wanted the others to be scared too when she said that Vicky had followed them to the fishing village.

Caroline decides to forget about brushing her teeth. Nothing can induce her to go back out into that cold hallway.

She moves the chair to the door and tries to wedge its back under the handle, but it’s too short. She gets a stack of old magazines from the bookshelf and puts them underneath the rear legs until the back reaches the handle at an angle.

She thinks she hears someone outside in the hallway and a shiver runs up and down her spine.

There’s a sudden bang behind her. The window blind has snapped up and is now spinning.

“Oh God.” She sighs and pulls it back down.

She stands still in the room and listens. Then she turns off the ceiling light and hurries into bed, pulling the quilt tightly around her. As she waits for the sheets to warm up she stares fixedly at the door.

She thinks about Vicky Bennet. Vicky, who seemed so shy and withdrawn. Caroline doesn’t think that she really did that awful thing; she just can’t wrap her mind around that. Before she can force her thoughts in another direction, she remembers the sight of Miranda’s crushed skull and the blood dripping from the lamp shade.

There are footsteps in the hallway. They fall silent for a moment, then start again. Whoever it is stops outside her door. Caroline can hear the faint scrape of the door handle being pushed down. Then it stops. She shuts her eyes and prays to God, who loves little children.

57

In the middle of the night, a child’s car seat bumps against the dam by the hydroelectric plant at Bergeforsen, its gray plastic back barely breaking the glassy surface of the water. The car seat has floated here in the current of the Indal River.

The river has been high since the snow melted in the Jämtland mountains. The power company has been partially opening the sluice gates as needed to prevent water from spilling over the dam. The heavy rainfall of the past few days has aggravated the threat, and the sluice gates are now wide open. For months, the Indal River resembled a lake, but now its current is strong and evident. The car seat hits the dam, whirls back a short way, and then bumps against it again.

*   *   *

Joona is running along the lane at the edge of the dam. On the far side, a slick concrete wall falls straight down a hundred feet. It’s dizzyingly tall. Water is gushing out of the dam’s gates with chaotic violence and churning over black rocks far below. But on this side of the dam, the shining river is almost at the brim. Two uniformed policemen and a guard from the power plant are standing farther along the lane. One of the policemen is pointing at the water below and the other has a boat hook.

A great deal of garbage has collected around the car seat. The river has brought empty plastic bottles, branches, spruce logs, and half-dissolved cardboard boxes to the dam. Joona joins the three men and looks at where the officer is pointing. The current is swirling the car seat around and it repeatedly bumps into the wall. Only its gray plastic back is visible. It’s impossible to tell whether a child is still strapped into the front.

“Turn it over,” Joona says.

The other policeman nods and leans as far as he can over the rail. He lets the boat hook break the surface of the water and he pulls a spruce log to the side. Then he moves the hook over to the car seat and lets it sink. He lifts it again carefully so that the hook will catch. He draws it up and there’s a splash when the car seat flips over. It’s empty. The unbuckled seat belts trail in the water.

Studying the car seat, Joona thinks that the child’s body could have slipped through the belts and sunk to the bottom.

“As I said on the phone,” the policeman says, “it appears to be the right car seat. It’s not noticeably beaten up, but it’s hard to see the details from here.”

“Tell the technicians to put it in a watertight plastic bag when they get it out of the water.”

The policeman lets the car seat go and it begins to tumble in the current again.

“Meet me at the bridge near Indal,” Joona says. He starts walking back to his car. “There’s a beach there for swimming, right?”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going swimming,” Joona says, without a trace of a smile. He keeps walking to his car.

58

Joona stands at the point where the bridge meets the ground on the river’s north bank. He’s looking down the grassy slope, and at the floating swimming dock that stretches from the sandy edge of the beach out into the river’s current.

The wind blows open his jacket.

He walks away from the bridge along the edge of the road and feels the humidity rising from the grass; he can smell the scent of sweet fireweed. He stops, bends down, and picks up a small cube of glass hidden among the plants. He lets it sit in his palm and then looks at the water again.

“Here’s where they drove off the road,” he says. He points out the direction.

One policeman walks to the sandy beach and shakes his head.

“There’s no sign of anything here. Nothing at all,” he calls back.

“I’m sure I’m right,” Joona says.

“Well, we’ll never know. There’s been too much rain,” the other policeman says.

“It didn’t rain underneath the water,” Joona says.

He strides past the two police officers to the water’s edge. Walking upstream, he catches sight of tire tracks in the shallows. Parallel tracks in the sand head straight out to the deep water.

“Do you see anything?” yells one of the officers.

“Yes, I do,” Joona shouts back, and then he walks into the river.

The cool water swirls around his legs and tugs him gently to one side. It’s hard to see beneath the shimmering surface, but he can make out reeds dancing in the current. One of the policemen follows him into the river, swearing audibly. Now up to his thighs in the river, Joona makes out a dark form about thirty feet farther out.

“Let me call for a diver,” says the policeman.

Joona takes off his jacket and hands it to the officer as he keeps going.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to know if they’re dead,” Joona says. He hands his pistol to the officer, who is also thigh deep in the river, and wades farther out. The water is cold here and the current pulls at his pants.

“Hey! There are logs floating in the river! You can’t go swimming around in there!” yells the other policeman from the shore.

Joona keeps going. The riverbed is falling away beneath his feet and the water is up to his stomach. He dives in. His ears thud as water fills them. He opens his eyes. Rays of sunlight cut through the water. Mud whirls in the current. He kicks and glides deeper beneath the surface. Suddenly he can see the car. It’s slightly to the side of the wheel tracks. The current has already shifted it toward midstream.

The red body panels glimmer. The windshield and the two side windows on the right are missing. Water glides through the interior.

Joona swims closer, trying not to think about what he might find. Still, his brain flashes images of the girl in the driver’s seat, the seat belt diagonally across her body—her arms floating, her mouth open, her hair swirling.

His heart is beating hard now. This deep below the surface everything is dim and silent. He reaches the rear door on the right side and grabs the empty window frame. The power of the river is drawing him away. There’s a groan of metal and the car shifts. Mud whirls up and he can’t see. He swims a few strokes. The cloud of mud clears and he can see again.

About three meters above his head is the other world, drenched in sunlight. A waterlogged log is gliding just below the surface—a heavy projectile.

Joona’s lungs are starting to spasm. The water current is strong down here.

Joona grabs the empty window opening and sees that blood is flowing from his hand. He forces his body down and tries to look inside the Toyota.

The car is empty. There is nobody there—no girl, no child. The windshield is gone. The bodies could have been washed out through the gap and drifted along the bottom of the river. He quickly registers the area around the car. There’s nothing to catch a child’s body. The stones are rounded and the plants are sparse.

His lungs are screaming for oxygen, but he knows he has just a bit more time. His body has learned to wait. When he was in the navy, he often had to swim twelve kilometers carrying the signal flag. He’s left a submarine with an emergency balloon. He’s swum beneath the ice of the Gulf of Finland. He can go without oxygen for a few more seconds.

He swims around the car and searches the smooth riverbed. The water pulls him like a strong wind. Shadows from the logs above pass swiftly over the bottom.

Vicky drove off the road, down the beach, and into the water. The windows were already broken from crashing into the traffic light in Indal. The car would have filled with water immediately but kept going for a few seconds before it settled on the riverbed.

But where are the bodies?

He sees something shining among the stones. It’s a pair of glasses that have tumbled away from the car. Joona swims over and grabs them as they are about to whirl farther downstream. Bright spots flash before his eyes. He’s out of time. He kicks, swimming up blindly. He breaks the surface and draws air into his lungs. He doesn’t see the log until just before it hits his shoulder. It hurts so much he howls. His shoulder has been dislocated by the force of the blow. Joona finds himself underwater again. The ringing in his ears sounds like church bells calling him to service. Above him, the sun flares in broken rays.

59

The police on shore watch as the log slams into Joona, and within moments they are in the river, swimming out to grab him. They drag him up onto the beach.

“I’m sorry,” Joona manages to pant. “I just needed to know…”

“Where did the log hit you?”

“There aren’t any bodies in the car,” Joona says. The pain in his shoulder is excruciating.

“Let’s take a look at your arm,” says an officer.

“Shit,” another whispers.

Blood has spread through Joona’s soaked shirt and his arm hangs at a weird angle. It’s dangling loosely from its tendons.

They take the glasses from his good hand and put them in a plastic bag.

One of the police officers drives him at top speed the twenty-nine kilometers to Sundsvall hospital. Joona sits quietly, his eyes shut, and holds his arm close to his chest. In spite of the pain, he tells the other officer how the current had shifted the car over the riverbed and the direction of the water flowing through the broken windows.

“The children weren’t there,” he says, barely audible.

“Bodies can float pretty far in the current,” the officer replies. “There’s no reason to start a diving search just yet. Either they will be snagged by something and never surface, or they’ll end up at the dam just like the car seat did.”

At the hospital, two cheerful, chatty nurses who could be mother and daughter get him out of his wet clothes, but when they see his arm, they fall silent. They clean him up and take him to the X-ray unit.

Twenty minutes later, a doctor comes in to report that nothing is broken, the clavicle is intact, but Joona’s shoulder is dislocated. Joona lies on his stomach, his arm hanging straight down, and the doctor injects twenty milligrams of lidocaine directly into the joint. Then the doctor sinks to the floor. He pulls the arm down while the two nurses press it back into position. Joona bites hard on a towel. Then he hears a crack, and he finds to his relief he can release his breath. And think. The car with Vicky Bennet and Dante had disappeared on a stretch of the road without intersections. And with the press hounding them, the police had searched every possible place a vehicle could be hidden. But what Joona realized when he saw the car seat at the dam was this: If the car had gone off the road and into the river, there was only one spot where it could have happened without being spotted. After Indal, Highway 86 swings to the right and over the bridge. There, Vicky must have missed the turn and headed the car straight down the riverbank and into the water.

The hard rain would have washed away the tracks on the sandy beach. And given its broken windows, the river would have rushed in to fill the car. In just a few moments, it would have disappeared from sight.

60

The air is cool inside the police garage, and Joona is thankful for it as he walks down the stairs, his arm in a dark blue sling.

A large plastic tent covers the car Vicky Bennet stole. Police used a four-point suspension crane to salvage it from the Indal River, then wrapped it in plastic and transported it here. All the seats have been removed and set aside. Plastic bags containing everything found inside the car have been marked and placed on a long bench. Joona takes a look at the secured evidence. There are fingerprints from Pia, Vicky, and Dante. There are bags of glass splinters, hairs, and fibers, an empty water bottle, a tennis shoe, which most likely belonged to Vicky, and the boy’s tiny pair of glasses.

The door to the garage office opens and Holger Jalmert comes out holding a folder.