The Fire Witness (8 page)

The police in the bus listen silently; then they all turn to the map spread out on the table. Bosse Norling traces the route of Highway 86 with his finger.

“If they’ve blocked here and here, then the car can’t just disappear,” he says. “Obviously, the kidnapper could have driven it into a garage in Bäck or Bjällsta, or onto a logging road, but that would be a damned strange thing to do.”

“And there’s nowhere to go,” Sonja Rask says.

“Am I the only one who’s thinking that Vicky Bennet could have taken this car?” asks Bosse.

The rain is starting to ease up, but water is still washing down the bus’s windows.

Sonja turns back to her computer and starts to go through lists of pedophiles and custody disputes via the police intranet.

“Nine times out of ten,” Gunnarsson begins as he leans back and starts peeling a banana, “these kinds of events solve themselves. I think she had a guy with her in the car. They fought and he took off, leaving her at the side of the road.”

“She’s not married,” says Sonja.

“According to our statistics,” Gunnarsson says, keeping his pedagogic tone of voice, “most of the children born in Sweden are born outside marriage and—”

“Here we go,” said Sonja. “Pia Abrahamsson requested sole custody of her son, Dante, and the father tried to contest it.”

“So we’re going to drop the possible connection to Vicky Bennet?” asks Bosse.

“Look for the father first,” says Joona.

“On it,” says Sonja. She heads to the back of the bus.

“What did you find beneath Vicky Bennet’s window?” Joona asks one of the technicians.

“There wasn’t anything on the ground. We found prints and some coagulation traces on the windowsill.”

“And what did you find near the edge of the forest?”

“Nothing, and then it started to rain.”

“But apparently Vicky Bennet headed directly into the forest,” Joona says thoughtfully. He watches Bosse Norling, who is leaning over the map, place a pin on Birgittagården and then draw a circle around it with a compass.

“Vicky didn’t take the car,” says Gunnarsson. “It doesn’t take three whole damn hours to get from the forest to Highway 86 and then go—”

“On the other hand, she was running at night. It’s not easy to find your way in the dark. She could have walked all the way there,” Bosse says. He jabs the map to the east of a forested area and then traces a line going north.

“The timing would work,” Joona says.

“Dante’s father is in the Canary Islands right now,” Sonja calls from the back of the bus.

Olle Gunnarsson swears, then picks up the radio to call Mirja Zlatnek.

“Gunnarsson here,” he says. “Has the mother given us her statement?”

“Yes, and I—”

“Can she describe the suspect?”

“It wasn’t easy. The mother is emotional and the picture of the suspect is somewhat unclear,” Mirja says. “The mother is obviously in shock. She’s talking about a skeleton with rags hanging down coming out of the forest. A girl with a bloody face and twigs instead of arms.”

“But she says it’s a girl?”

“I’ve recorded her testimony, but it’s really odd. She keeps saying the strangest things. She’ll have to calm down before we can get a decent—”

“But she says it’s a girl?”

“Yes. Over and over.”

29

Joona stops his car at the roadblock on Highway 330. He greets one of the policemen on duty, shows his ID, and then keeps driving along the road, paralleling the Indal River. He’s been told that the students from Birgittagården are being housed at the Hotel Ibis in Sundsvall; Daniel Grim has been checked into the psychiatric ward of the provincial hospital; the housemother, Margot Lundin, is now at her home in Timrå; and Faduumo Axmed, who works part-time as an assistant, is with his parents in Vänersborg.

When they heard Mirja Zlatnek tell them that Pia Abrahamsson insisted she’d seen a small girl with rags on her hands, everyone understood that Vicky Bennet had taken the car with the little boy in the backseat.

“It’s a mystery how she didn’t get caught in the roadblocks,” Bosse Norling said.

They’d put a helicopter up, but the pilot could not see the car anywhere. Not in Indal and not on any of the logging roads.

It’s not much of a mystery
, Joona thought.
The logical explanation is that she managed to find a hiding place before she reached any of the roadblocks. But where? She must know someone who lives in the village, someone who owns a garage.

Joona asked to speak with the girls at the hotel and agreed that there should be a child psychologist and a support person from the Office of Victim Services in the room with him.

He’s been thinking over the girls’ behavior when they were in the small house. Gunnarsson had returned with the two who’d run into the forest. The little red-haired girl had been watching television while banging the back of her head against the wall. The girl named Indie had said putting hands over her face was a game Vicky played. Then everyone realized Vicky had disappeared and had started screaming and carrying on. A couple of the girls had been sure she was still sleeping off a heavy dose of Stesolid. The girl called Almira had spat on the floor and Indie had rubbed her eyes so hard that she’d smeared blue eye shadow over her hands.

Joona thinks that the red-haired girl, Tuula, was onto something. Tuula was so pale even her eyelashes were white. She wore shiny pink sport shorts. She’d said something while the others were all jabbering away.

She’d said that Vicky must have run off to meet the guy she likes to fuck.

30

The two-star Hotel Ibis is on Trädgårdsgatan not far from the police station in Sundsvall. When Joona pulls the front door open, he is greeted by the smell of vacuum cleaners, musty carpets, and cigarette smoke. There’s a dish at the reception desk filled with stale candies. The police have assigned the students from Birgittagården to five adjacent rooms and placed two uniformed officers in the hallway. Joona strides over the worn wooden flooring.

The psychologist, Lisa Jern, is waiting for Joona outside one of the bedrooms. Her dark hair is streaked with gray. Her mouth is narrow and nervous.

“Is Tuula here already?” asks Joona.

“Yes, but wait,” she says as Joona lays his hand on the door handle. “From what I understand, you are an observer from the National Police—”

“A little boy’s in danger,” Joona says.

“Tuula is hardly speaking, and my recommendation as a child psychologist is that you wait until she starts speaking about it on her own initiative.”

“No time for that.” Joona pushes down the handle.

“Wait. It’s really important that you keep yourself on the same level as the children. They must not feel as if they’re sick or—”

Joona is already in the room. All the furniture has beech-wood veneer and the floor is covered in green wall-to-wall carpet. Tuula Lehti is sitting with her back to a row of windows. She’s a tiny girl, just twelve years old, and she’s still dressed in her pink shorts and tennis shoes.

Between the slats of the venetian blinds, Joona can see the parked cars in the street. Standing in the farthest corner of the room, there’s a man wearing a blue flannel shirt, with his hair combed back. He’s tapping the screen on his cell phone. Joona assumes he is the support person for the students.

Joona sits directly across from Tuula and studies her. She has light blond eyebrows and her red hair is straight and needs washing.

“We met briefly this morning,” Joona says.

Tuula crosses her freckled arms over her chest. Her lips are narrow and almost colorless.

“Pop a cop,” she says.

Lisa Jern has followed Joona into the room and now sits down next to the tiny girl.

“Tuula,” she says in a mild voice. “Remember how I told you that I sometimes feel like Thumbelina? It’s not strange to feel little, just like Thumbelina, even when you’re grown up.”

“Why do people always talk like idiots?” Tuula asks, looking Joona directly in the eye. “Is it because you grown-ups are idiots, or because you think we’re idiots?”

“We grown-ups probably think you’re a bit idiotic,” Joona says.

Tuula smiles, surprised. She is about to say something when Lisa Jern breaks in and tries to reassure her that Joona wasn’t telling the truth. The officer was just making a joke.

Tuula hugs her arms closer to her chest, stares at the table, and puffs out her cheeks.

“You’re not an idiot at all,” Lisa Jern keeps repeating.

“Yes, I am,” Tuula whispers.

She spits, and a long string of saliva hits the table. She says nothing but begins to draw with the saliva on the table. She draws a star.

“Do you want to talk?” Lisa says quietly.

“Only with the Finn,” Tuula replies, her voice so low as to be almost inaudible.

“What did you say?” asks Lisa Jern with a smile.

“I only want to talk to the Finn!” Tuula lifts her chin, pointing at Joona Linna.

“How nice,” the psychologist says stiffly.

Joona turns on the recorder and quietly states the formalities: time, place, people present, and the reason for the conversation.

“Why are you at Birgittagården?” he asks.

“I was at Lövsta, and some things happened that weren’t so good,” Tuula says. “So they put me with the girls who are locked in, even though I’m too young. I kept my nose clean, just watched TV, and one year and four months later they moved me to Birgittagården.”

“What’s the difference between Lövsta and Birgittagården?”

“Well, Birgittagården is more like a real home, at least as far as I’m concerned. They have rugs on the floors, and they haven’t bolted down the furniture, except in the isolation room, and they don’t have alarms connected to everything, and you can sleep in peace and quiet, and they give you homemade food.”

Joona nods and notices that the support person is still flipping through pages on his cell phone. The psychologist Lisa Jern is breathing heavily as she listens to them.

“What food did they make for you yesterday?” Joona asks.

“Tacos.”

“Was everyone at dinner?”

Tuula shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Miranda, too? Did she eat tacos with you?”

“Cut open her stomach and you’ll find out. Haven’t you done that yet?”

“No, we haven’t.”

“Why not?”

“We haven’t had time yet.”

Tuula semi-smiles and starts pulling at a loose thread on her shorts. Her nails have been bitten to the quick and the cuticles are raw.

“I looked into the isolation room,” Tuula says, and she starts to rock. “It was pretty cool.”

“Did you see how Miranda was lying there?” asks Joona.

“Yeah, like this,” Tuula says and puts her hands over her face.

“Why do you think she was doing that?”

Tuula starts kicking at the carpet. “Maybe she was scared.”

“Did you ever see anyone else do that?”

“No,” Tuula says, scratching her neck.

“So you’re not locked into your rooms,” Joona says.

“No, it’s almost like open wards,” Tuula says and smiles.

“Do you often sneak out at night?”

“Not me.” Tuula’s mouth becomes tight and hard as she pretends to shoot the psychologist with her index finger.

“Why not?” asks Joona.

She looks back at Joona and says in a small voice, “I’m afraid of the dark.”

“What about the others?”

Lisa Jern stands up and frowns as she continues to listen.

“Yes,” Tuula whispers.

“What do they do when they sneak out?” asks Joona.

The girl looks down and smiles to herself.

“Of course, those girls are older than you are,” Joona says.

“Right,” Tuula says. She is blushing.

“Do they meet boys?”

She nods.

“Does Vicky meet boys, too?”

“Yes, she sneaks out at night,” Tuula says. She leans on the table in Joona’s direction.

“Do you know who she goes to see?”

“Dennis.”

“Who is Dennis?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. She wets her lips with her tongue.

“But his name is Dennis? Do you know his last name?”

“No.”

“How long is she gone?”

Tuula shrugs and pulls at a bit of tape stuck to the underside of the chair cushion.

31

The prosecutor Susanne Öst is waiting outside the Hotel Ibis. She’s leaning against a Ford Fairlane. There’s not a trace of makeup on her round face, and her blond hair is gathered up in a messy ponytail. Her shirt collar sticks straight up out of her gray suit jacket.

“Do you mind if I play police officer with you?” she asks, blushing.

“Not at all,” Joona says, shaking hands with her.

“We’re supposed to go knocking on all the doors, looking into each and every garage, shed, and parking lot, et cetera, et cetera,” she says. “We’ll close the net. There aren’t many places where you can hide a car.”

“Right,” says Joona.

“It’ll go faster now that we have a name,” she says, smiling, as she opens the door to the Ford Fairlane. “There are only four people with the first name of Dennis in the area.”

“I’ll follow you,” Joona says, and walks over to his Volvo.

The American car sways as it turns onto the road and starts toward Indal. Joona follows it and thinks about what he knows so far about Vicky Bennet.

Her mother, Susie Bennet, was a drug addict and homeless at the time of her death last winter. Vicky had lived with various foster parents and institutions from the age of six and had probably learned to create and let go of relationships quickly.

If Vicky goes out at night to meet a boy, she must meet him close-by. Perhaps he waits for her in the forest or on the gravel road. Perhaps she walks along Highway 86 until she reaches his house in Baggböle or Västloning.

The asphalt is starting to dry. The rainwater is pooling in the ditches. The skies are brightening although raindrops still drip from the trees.

The prosecutor calls Joona and he can see her glancing at him in her rearview mirror as she talks.

“We’ve only found one Dennis in Indal,” she says. “He’s seven years old. The second Dennis lives in Stige, but he’s working in Leeds in England right now.”