The Shadow Woman (6 page)

“What are you still hanging around there for?” Ringmar asked.

“I thought we might get some help with the identification.”

“Yeah, maybe. People tattoo themselves in the most bizarre places. So, you find anything?”

“No. Just a naked face. She wasn’t wearing any makeup.”

“What?”

“She didn’t use makeup.”

“Is that unusual these days?”

“It depends on your social scene. In more refined circles it may well be, but I don’t think she belonged to any like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“She seems poor. Cheap no-name clothes. Stuff like that. Or else that’s not the case at all.”

“What does Beier say?”

“He hasn’t said anything yet.”

“I have someone who’s got a bit more to say.”

Winter thought about the silhouette in the parking lot. He had spoken briefly to the man before handing over the rest of the questioning to Ringmar and joining the funeral procession to the hospital. “Yeah. So, what’s he say?”

“He owns one of the cars in the parking lot.”

“What was he doing there at four in the morning? Could he explain that?”

“He claims that he’d been to a party down in Helenevik and might have had one beer too many, and that he didn’t dare drive farther into town, so he decided to pull into the parking lot at Delsjö Lake and sleep it off in the car.”

“That’s one hell of a tall tale. He tried to pull that one on me too, or parts of it anyway.”

“He claims it’s true.”

“Did you give him a Breathalyzer?”

“As soon as we could. But he wasn’t unfit to drive. He had been drinking but not enough.”

“Okay, okay. So, what’s he saying? What did he see?”

“After being in the car for a while, he had to go take a pee and wandered off a ways from the parking lot, and that’s when he saw her.”

“What did he say?”

“Before he had a chance to pee, he saw something lying a bit farther on, in the ditch, so he went over and found the body. He had his cell phone in his breast pocket and called us straightaway.”

“We’d better check up on that call.”

“Of course.”

“What time was it?”

“When he called? Quarter to four, give or take. Dispatch has the exact time.”

“So, what did he see? Anything else?”

“Nothing, he says. Nobody coming or going.”

“Find anything on the other cars?”

“We’re working on it.”

“Morning prayer has been pushed back half an hour.”

“You want everyone there?”

“Without exception.”

 

Back in the autopsy room, the woman on the steel slab remained a dead body with no name. Usually when somebody was murdered, there was at least a name that could be laid to rest and, the terrible ordeal over, be handed back to the family.

“Decent teeth,” Fröberg said. “Some discoloration but in good condition.”

“That’ll only help us if she’s been reported missing,” Winter said. “I want the autopsy report just as soon as you can get it to me. Thanks.”

“As always.”

“You’re doing a good job, Pia.”

“That kind of talk makes me suspicious.”

Winter said nothing more. He walked toward the door. The dry air had made him feel thirsty and tired.

“What are you doing tonight, Erik?” Fröberg asked when he was halfway out the swinging door.

He stopped and looked at her. She was clearing off the autopsy table.

“I thought you were remarried or whatever you call it.”

“It didn’t work out. Again.”

“I don’t think it’s a—”

“No. You’re absolutely right. And the main reason I asked was to tell you not to push yourself too hard right at the start of the case.”

“Tonight I’m going to sleep with Angela and maybe talk about the future.” He was answering a question that was no longer being asked. “And think about this one lying over here.”

“One last thing, just to give you something more to think about. This woman has given birth.”

“She’s got a child?” Winter repeated.

“I don’t know if she does now, but she has had at least one child, maybe more.”

“How long ago?”

“I can’t say, at least not yet. But she shows signs of—”

“You don’t have to give me all the details,” Winter said, “not right now anyway.” He felt a shiver spread across his head.

There could be some family out there. It could help in the investigation, or be a source of frustration, or maybe something worse.

THE WATCH COMMANDER WAS FANNING HIMSELF WITH A
double-folded form, possibly “Lines of Inquiry in Felony Cases.”

The corridor smelled of sweat and sun, and the waiting room off to the right smelled of stale booze. Some joker had hung a poster of a beach with a palm tree next to a recruitment ad for the homicide department. Winter stepped into the elevator and rode up to his office on the third floor.

He had perked up again on the drive down from Östra Hospital. Adrenaline was pumping through his body while sweat ran down his back. This was no ordinary murder investigation. He knew that much without knowing it. He felt the tension in his body. A tension that might not leave him for months.

He poured himself a mug in the coffee room and lingered there for a few seconds, gazing at the morning outside. The thermometer in the window showed eighty degrees, and it was only twenty past eight in the morning, but Winter knew that for him the swimming season was over.

 

The situation room filled up with people. The ones who’d been at it since the start looked tired; the others waited impatiently, their bottoms literally on the edges of their seats. On the whiteboard Ringmar had written, “Visualization relating to the murder.”

Well, here we are again, after the summer’s rest, Winter thought to himself.

He drew an
X
on the board.

“We’ve got an unidentified woman, approximately thirty years of age, probably strangled, discovered between three thirty and quarter to four this morning by a man whom we’re going to question further over the course of the day. For the moment, this man is not a suspect, but as you’re all aware, you never know.”

Winter fell silent and stared at his
X
, then began sketching out a rough map as he spoke. “She was found here.” He drew a circle at the spot where the body was dumped. “We’ll take a closer look at the map later, but I just want to mark out the relative positions. If you continue underneath the highway on Old Boråsvägen, you come to a junction that leads toward Helenevik and Gunnebo, but we’ll wait on that. So here’s where she was found,” he repeated, and pointed at his circle.

“That’s where the lodge is,” Halders said.

“That’s right. As most of you know, the police department’s recreation lodge is located a bit farther down the road.”

“That’s where I had my fortieth birthday party,” Halders said. “Wasn’t there something going on there yesterday?”

“Our colleagues over at the investigations department had a little do there in the early evening,” Ringmar said.

“How early?” Janne Möllerström asked.

“The last man walked out of there at around four,” Ringmar said. “Or rather hopped a cab.”

“What the fu—,” Halders began, but was interrupted by Ringmar.

“Naturally we’re going to question our esteemed colleagues on the subject.”

“That lodge can’t be more than a few hundred yards away from the ditch where the body was found,” Bergenhem said.

“Isn’t there a dog kennel just before it?” Halders asked.

“Yes. Right after the intersection. We’re going to question them too.”

“What, you mean the dogs?” Halders asked, putting on an innocent expression.

“If necessary,” Winter said. “There are a lot of houses along that road. The Örgryte shooting range is a few hundred yards farther up and then the Delsjö Golf Club and the GAIS football club’s training facility. There are a number of houses at the intersection of Old Boråsvägen and Frans Perssonsväg. Here.” He drew a few small squares on the board.

“And then we’ve got a bunch of drunken cops,” Halders said.

Winter didn’t answer. He finished sketching on the board and turned back toward his team sitting in the room.

“The site where the body was discovered is not where the murder was committed. She was moved postmortem to the ditch where she was found at least one hour after she was killed. She had been dead for eight to ten hours when we arrived on the scene. That’s where we are now. I’m waiting for the autopsy report.”

“Sexual violence?” Halders asked. He felt rested despite the late night.

“We don’t know yet. But her clothes seemed undisturbed and Pia Erikson Fröberg saw no immediate indication of sexual violence.”

“Any other witnesses?” asked Möllerström. He was Winter’s database expert, a meticulous detective who saw to it that all materials were entered into the preliminary investigation database.

“So far no one’s gotten in touch voluntarily, except for the guy sitting downstairs.”

“We’re looking at four cars,” Ringmar said. “Two of them were reported stolen.”

“That’s good,” Bergenhem said.

Everyone knew a stolen car could lead straight from a murder scene to a dump site.

“We’re scouring the vehicles today,” Ringmar said.

“What do the owners say about it?” Sara Helander asked.

Winter studied her. She had become part of his core group during the last investigation—an agonizing one—and he wanted to hold on to her permanently and not just have her on loan from surveillance. “Two of the owners were very happy that we’d found their cars—at least that’s what they’re saying—and the other two will just have to make the best of it.”

“Why had they parked there in the first place?” Halders asked.

“Yeah,” Veine Carlberg filled in, “why leave your car in that godforsaken parking lot overnight?”

“That’s what we have to find out.”

“Did she have any defensive wounds?” Helander asked, eyeing the two photos in her hands. “It’s hard to tell from these.”

“She appears to have fought for her life,” Winter said. “There were injuries to her forearms, but we’ll have to wait for the report to know when they were inflicted. Here are the photos from the autopsy,” he said, and handed her a thin pile. “You can see there.”

“So she’s unidentified, huh,” Halders mumbled.

“She’s also had at least one child,” Winter said. “That could be of help to us.”

No one commented on this last statement. Winter studied the faces in front of him and started to hand out the day’s assignments. The work they did that day could prove to be the most important of the entire investigation.

He already had people sifting through the lists of persons reported missing.

DNA samples were being analyzed, of course.

They would go through the criminal-records database in hope that the woman had previously been arrested and charged, maybe even sentenced, and that her fingerprints would help them find the murderer. But the chances of that were slim.

The photograph on the desk in front of Winter didn’t reveal much of death. The woman looked like she was still part of the world, like she was resting.

They would hope that some fellow human being missed her, but they weren’t going to sit around waiting for that fellow human being to get in touch.

Winter thought about the woman as a mother.

They would knock on the door of everyone who lived in the vicinity of the dump site. They would track down newspaper deliverymen and others who might have been moving around there during the night.

They would check the taxi companies. Halders was assigned that job, and he grimaced despite his interest in cars. It’s pointless, he thought, but he didn’t say it.

“I know you think it’s pointless, but it’s gotta be done,” Winter said.

“This time it could be different,” Halders said. “There must have been a few fares from the recreation lodge. But fuck, man, cabbies never get in touch and they never see anything. It was better back in the old days.”

It was better back in the old days, thought Winter. Back in the day when he could have picked up the phone and dialed 17 30 00, and the central dispatcher would have made an announcement to all cars, “Anyone working last night call Winter,” and the job of an investigator would sometimes be made a little bit easier.

The Migration Board needed to be notified. The woman could be a foreign national. Interpol. Easy does it, Winter.

He looked at the arrows and numbers on the whiteboard—almost nothing there. Just a point of departure.

 

“Well, welcome back for real now,” Ringmar said. It was eleven o’clock, and they were sitting in Winter’s office.

“I was starting to get bored anyway. Summer vacation.”

“It’s better to have a hobby,” Ringmar said. “Then you make better use of your free time.”

“I went biking and swimming,” Winter said. “And listened to rock. You know, rock could become a hobby for me. Jazz is work but rock is like a hobby. It takes time to learn how to listen to it.”

“Yeah, you said it,” Ringmar said.

Winter heard the sound of engines outside and the jeering shrieks of the seagulls that followed the comings and goings of the radio cars.

“No one reported missing,” Winter said. “That could be good or bad.”

“What’s good about it?”

“She was somewhere less than twenty-four hours ago, was moving around somewhere. Somebody saw her, maybe even spoke to her. And I don’t mean the person who killed her. Just maybe.”

“One might come in over the course of the day. Or tomorrow.”

“Until then, her teeth are of no use to us.”

“We need a dentist,” Ringmar said.

“We need a name and a home address and leads,” Winter said. “It feels like—as if it’s indecent to speak about her. Do you feel that way?”