The Bucket List Page 12

  “Are you getting anywhere with tracking her down?” said John.

  Ulf didn’t seem to like the question.

  “I’m working on it,” was his curt response.

  John sat down at the table again and turned to Primer. The fact that their boss had been involved in the previous investigation was a drag on the team. While he brought his knowledge of the case, he was also the single biggest obstacle to fresh thinking. John saw that it was going to be a balancing act on a slack tightrope to stay in his good graces.

  “What did you have in mind for me?” he said.

  Primer passed the question on to Ruben, and John saw that he was the de facto head of the investigation. Maybe not unexpectedly. After all, it said Head of County CID on Primer’s business card—this presumably meant there wasn’t much spare time for day-to-day police work, even if the newspaper article had implied otherwise.

  “There’s one thread we need to follow up on,” said Ruben. “Four years ago, the police in Gothenburg passed us details of a young woman who had taken her own life. She had a tattoo that was identical to Emelie Bjurwall’s. The same design and the same position on the body. But since Gothenburg hadn’t found any connection to the Bjurwall case, it didn’t go any further.”

  John focused. This was news to him.

  “But you think there may be a connection between the girls?” he said.

  “Yes, it seems plausible,” said Ruben. “The tattoo design is so unique that two girls of the same age can hardly have come up with it independent of each other. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean the deaths are linked. But I still think we should look into it.”

  John agreed with his colleague with the inscrutable face.

  This was definitely worth taking a closer look at.

  After the meeting, Primer showed John to his office. He wondered if the others on the team had as much space, or whether the boss was still sucking up to him. In New York, it had only been the captain who’d been able to close a door behind him. Run of the mill detectives like John had had to make do with cramped desks in an open office.

  Once his boss had hurried off to his next meeting, John logged on to the laptop that the IT department had left on the desk. Primer had said the police in Värmland were dedicating significant resources to digitizing old investigation files. Everything from 2002 onward was already scanned onto the server. He searched for the documents from the Gothenburg police about the girl who had committed suicide. Kirsten Winckler—that was her name—had come from a good family and had ended up in a downward spiral of mental illness and drugs, just like Emelie.

  He read the autopsy report carefully and even looked up several Latin words to be sure he understood their meaning. Unless the pathologist had missed something, everything suggested the girl really had taken her own life with prescription sleeping pills, even though it was never possible to prove it with one hundred percent certainty. In theory, someone might have forced Kirsten Winckler to take the pills.

  John looked up from the screen when he heard a discreet knock on the door. He cleared his throat and asked the visitor to come in. It was Ulf Törner, and in his hand he had a calendar.

  “I was going to check whether you could do your week in the kitchen now,” he said. “Sorry to spring it on you, but it would be easiest if you just took on Svantesson’s weeks.”

  John had no idea what the man in the doorway was talking about, but that didn’t stop Ulf from pushing on.

  “He’s on paternity leave. Svantesson, that is. And if you don’t take his weeks then I’ll have to redesign the whole schedule,” he said, waving the calendar in the air.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’ll be fine,” said John, without really knowing what he had agreed to.

  “Brilliant, thanks. Follow me and I’ll show you,” Ulf said, leading him down the corridor. They passed a coffee maker with a sticker on it that said “Warning: cop coffee” and reached a break room with some round tables. In one corner there was a kitchenette with a sink filled with dirty cups.

  “It gets like this when there’s not an empty dishwasher,” said Ulf, who began emptying the machine.

  John was still none the wiser. Were police officers really expected to clean up the police station themselves?

  “You need to empty it twice a day. Once in the morning and once after lunch. Clean dishes go up here,” said Ulf, putting the last few plates in the cupboard above the counter. “Best to run the cloth over the tables too—it makes it nicer for everyone.”

  Ulf rinsed the cloth under the tap, wrung it, and threw it toward John, who caught it reflexively. He wanted nothing more than to shove the blue cloth down the throat of his new colleague. He hadn’t come to Karlstad to wipe fucking tables. But starting a fight on day one wouldn’t be keeping a low profile, which was what he had promised both himself and Mona Ejdewik he would do.

  “Sure,” he said, dutifully wiping the nearest table. Then he tossed the cloth back to the surprised Ulf and returned to his office.

  With a few rapid taps of the keyboard, he woke up the laptop and pulled up the preliminary investigation into Billy. He’d had an idea. He searched for the details of the treatment center that Emelie Bjurwall had been admitted to. Her parents had been questioned several times, so it took a while for him to find the document. Once he had the right one, it didn’t take long to learn that the place was called Björkbacken and that it was in Charlottenberg, just one hundred kilometers northwest of Karlstad.

  John closed the laptop to give himself peace and quiet to think. There was something about screens that stopped the brain from making free associations. He was happier with the big sketch pad he had brought with him from Baltimore. The sketch—his investigation piece for the AckWe case—had continued to evolve as he had read through the file in the hospital and at the safe house.

  He put the sheet in front of him on the desk and wrote Kirsten Winckler in a blank area. Then he drew a copy of Emelie’s tattoo. He started with the three squares, but stopped himself when he came to draw the ticks. How many of the Gothenburg girl’s squares were filled in when she died?

  He opened the laptop again and pulled up the photos of the left arm from the autopsy. All the squares were filled with ticks. If Kirsten’s tattoo was a bucket list, it meant she had achieved her goals only to then commit suicide. It was tragic, John thought to himself, for such a young person to feel done with life. According to the date on the autopsy report, she had ended up on the table just a couple of weeks after her twenty-sixth birthday.

  He finished drawing the tattoo and then wrote Björkbacken under both girls’ names. Perhaps they had met somewhere, and if so, there was a good chance that it had been at the treatment center. Both had similar issues and came from well-to-do families who could afford to pay for private care.

  Then he leaned back in the comfortable desk chair, deliberating. The car that Primer had organized for him was parked outside. He considered his two options.

  One—go to Björkbacken. Really, he ought to check in with Primer first, but he was busy in meetings. Anyway, it would be best if his boss got used to his new employee making his own decisions. John never let paper pushers stand in the way of police work. That rule had applied in New York City and Baltimore, and he had no plans to change it in Karlstad.

  Two—visit his mother, whose address he’d found online the night before. She had been living in a nursing home at Gunnarskärsgården for the last couple of years—not far from John’s childhood home outside Skoghall.

  He thought again about the letter he had read in the hospital and the desperation seeping off the page.

  Billy won’t be able to handle it. Not again. Neither will I. I’m dying, John. I don’t have much time left—that’s what they say, the people who know these things.

  John made up his mind. The treatment center could wait.

  He put the investigation piece in one of the desk drawers, grabbed the car keys, and hurried out to the parking lot.

  1
8

  The rain was pouring down, and John ran the short distance from the entrance of the police station to the parking lot to avoid getting soaked through. He unlocked the car and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  It turned out that SEAT was a Spanish make of car. The reason John hadn’t heard of it was because they weren’t sold in the States. And there was no doubt about why—the minimalist steel box was clearly made for miniature flamenco dancers and it was impossible for tall people like him to fit into it comfortably. He pushed the seat back as far as it would go, and his knees were still at a ninety-degree angle. It was almost impossible to reach the pedals without also getting his thighs stuck on the steering wheel. Worst of all was the manual transmission. The fact that the Europeans still messed around with that stupid stick shift every time they wanted to change gears was beyond his comprehension.

  He had tried to swap the car that morning when he arrived at the police station. However, the man behind the counter in the basement had simply shaken his head. Automatic transmissions were only standard on marked patrol cars—they were less common on civilian vehicles. John had sworn silently when he realized he’d have to put up with the SEAT and then hurried away before the man could spot how annoyed he was.

  He ran his hand over his wet scalp, put the key in the ignition and turned it. The low-powered engine started with a noisy rattle. John had been surprised to discover the car came with GPS. Before exiting the parking lot he entered the address of the nursing home. The traffic moved slowly until he reached the road toward Hammarö. The GPS showed that Gunnarskärsgården was on the same road that ran from his childhood home to the paper mill.

  After crossing the bridge, it didn’t take him long to get there. Once he had parked and gotten out of the car, he immediately recognized the smell. Sulfur smelled like shit, sulfate smelled like food—that was what they’d chanted on the school playground. How bad it smelled depended on the direction of the wind. On good days, the odor would disappear across the water, on bad ones it would drift over Skoghall and its surroundings.

  John leaned against the car door and wondered how to approach the woman who lived in the low brick building in front of him. The plan was to show his police credentials to a staff member and request to speak to Mrs. Nerman. It shouldn’t arouse suspicion, given that the AckWe case had been reopened and she was the mother of the prime suspect.

  The risky moment was the meeting itself. If his mother recognized him and spontaneously called out his real name, or even worse addressed him as my son, someone might hear and then the rumors would start to spread. Skoghall was a small community and gossip would move faster than the paper machines in the mill.

  He walked toward the entrance and once he was inside, he headed for the nurse in the small office on the right. He explained the purpose of his visit. An informal conversation with Mrs. Nerman, that was all. The nurse nodded understandingly. She said the person he was looking for was probably in her room—she usually spent the mornings in bed.

  “If you just keeping going along the corridor, you’ll find her in the first room after the bathroom.”

  John thanked her and left the nurse before she asked any questions. When he came to his mother’s room, he checked that the name sign was right before raising his hand to knock. When he got no reply after two attempts, he carefully opened the door and entered.

  His first thought was that he had the wrong room. The wrinkly face framed by lank, brown hair couldn’t possibly be his mother’s. She wasn’t even sixty. There was a wheelchair parked by the bed. John squeezed past it, to the visitor’s chair. He sat down and leaned carefully over the bed. He was so close he could hear the woman’s breathing and smell her sour breath.

  “Mom,” he whispered softly.

  The woman didn’t react.

  “Mom, are you awake?” he continued.

  This time she turned slowly and opened one eye. He saw right away that she knew who he was.

  “John! So you came.”

  Her voice was hoarse and when she tried to smile it looked wry, as if her muscles didn’t want to obey her. When she opened the other eye, John saw that her eyebrow was sagging unnaturally so that it almost impeded her field of vision.

  “Yes, I came this time,” he repeated.

  She reached out toward him with her left hand and John took it in his.

  “I’m so happy to see you.”

  She was slurring her words slightly—he could hear that now. From her body movements, John realized she wanted to sit more upright. He let go of her hand and helped her adjust the angle of the bed.

  “How do you feel?” he said, once she seemed to be in a more comfortable position, propped up on an extra pillow.

  “Like I’ve got my just desserts.” She laughed hoarsely. “Broken everywhere except in my head, where I’m unfortunately far too lucid. The rest of these folks have dementia and I’ve got to admit I’m jealous. It looks so nice to just slip away.”

  “What’s happened to your face?”

  “A stroke. Two years ago. My right side is paralyzed all the way down to my toes. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this,” she said, nodding at the wheelchair.

  His mother looked at him, scrutinizing him from top to bottom as if trying to determine what had become of her lost son.

  “Do you still draw?” she asked.

  John smiled at her. That was her first question after twenty years. Not how he was. Not whether he had a family or children.

  “Some. Not enough,” he said. “What about you? Do you still paint?”

  She raised her left hand, and only now did he spot the residue of oil paints on her fingertips.

  “I’ve got an easel in the closet. The staff gets it out sometimes when they think I’m being too unruly.”

  Suddenly, she became serious and sought out his hand again.

  “You have to help your brother,” she said. “They don’t care whether he’s guilty or innocent. Someone has to go down for this and it’s going to be my Billy.”

  The woman in the bed was dying and had no time for small talk. Not even with a grown son she hadn’t seen since he was a child. John knew better than to underestimate her. His mother might look worn-out, with broken blood vessels standing out red on her nose and cheeks after many years of drinking. But the lioness who had shouted at a teacher for daring to criticize her youngest son was still there on the inside. It had always been like that. John was big and strong and could manage by himself, while little Billy always got in trouble and needed to be looked after.

  “I’m going to make sure the investigation is fair,” he said, noticing how reluctantly those words came out. He didn’t want to tell his mother more than was absolutely necessary.

  “How?”

  John turned around to make sure there were no members of staff about to come into the room and then moved the chair closer to the bed.

  “Listen to me, Mom. I’m one of the detectives investigating the case.”

  She looked at him as if he had lost his senses.

  “You’re lying. How can they let you investigate Billy? There must be rules against that.”

  “They don’t know who I am,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know it sounds strange, but the less you know, the better. And you absolutely cannot tell a soul.”

  His mother fell silent while she took in what he had said. Then she squeezed his hand again. Her face, which had been full of worry, now looked relieved.

  “Then you can make sure his name is cleared.”

  John shook his head and looked at her gravely. It was important that she understood. “That’s not what I said. I promised to make sure it was a fair investigation. But if it turns out Billy’s guilty …”

  “I trust Billy. He’s done a lot of stupid things in his life, but he’s never lied to me. If he says that he didn’t touch that girl, then he didn’t.”

  John suppressed a smile that wasn’t appropriate for this serio
us conversation. Billy had caused trouble and then persuaded his mother he was innocent countless times. But that had mostly involved innocent boyhood larks, not violent crime with apparently deadly consequences.

  “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone I’ve been here. It’s very important. Do you understand?”

  “Not even Billy?” she said.

  “Not even Billy. If he finds out I’m one of the investigators working on the case, it’ll put him in a difficult situation. It’s better for everyone that no one knows.”

  His mother nodded slowly. It seemed she understood the gravity in John’s voice.

  “He was taken in for questioning. I guess you knew that?” she said.

  “Yes, that was just before I got here. How did he take it?”

  “It was tough—they had him in there for over three hours. But he’s a fighter. Do you know what he said when I told him I’d sent the investigation to you again?”

  John shook his head.

  “That it was a waste of postage. He didn’t think you’d come this time either, but I said he should trust his big brother.”

  “You can’t blame him for doubting,” said John.

  She looked at him gravely.

  “It was hard for Billy in the first few years after that girl went missing. I don’t know how many times I cleaned up bruises on his face after the beatings he got from people in town. You should’ve been around then—I won’t say otherwise. But you’re here now and that’s what counts.”

  There was a brief knock at the door. The nurse John had spoken to when he arrived stuck her head in. He quickly removed his hand from his mother’s grasp and leaned back in the chair.

  “I was just going to ask you if you wanted to have lunch in your room today, since you’ve got a visitor.”

  “Why don’t you leave the tray and we’ll see if any of it’s edible.”

  The nurse opened the door fully with her hip and stepped inside. John moved so that she could fold down a table over the bed and put the lunch tray on it.