The Bucket List Page 4

  John began by reading about the history of the company on Wikipedia. It was surprisingly easy to understand the text in his old mother tongue. The odd word here and there gave him trouble, but he could usually work out the meaning from the context. He thanked his lucky stars that he had watched Swedish movies and kept his language skills going over the years.

  The company had been founded in 1931 by the children of an emigrant who had brought denim back home to Värmland. The name AckWe was in honor of the local anthem “Ack Värmland, du sköna”—Värmland the beautiful! The heiress, Emelie Bjurwall, would have been the fourth generation to head the company. John examined an old photo of her posing with her mother, Sissela, at the opening of a store in London. She couldn’t be more than ten years old, but she already had a practiced smile for the camera. The caption quoted her as saying how beautiful she thought AckWe clothes were, and that she looked forward to leading the company herself one day.

  When it came to the details of what had happened to the girl, the Wikipedia article was extremely reserved. All it said was that she had disappeared in 2009 under unclear circumstances, in the Tynäs area on Hammarö just outside of Karlstad, Sweden.

  John closed the article and began to search for a summary of the case—something to give him an overview. He finally found a chronological summary of the case based on the presumed victim’s activities.

  The final sign of life from Emelie Bjurwall had been a photo posted publicly on her Facebook page. It showed a tattoo on the girl’s left forearm. The design comprised three squares with ticks; the one closest to her wrist had not been tattooed but carved into her skin using something sharp.

  Based on the blood clotting, the medical report had determined that the wound was relatively shallow and that Emelie had been alive when it had been made. It had not been possible to ascertain whether she was dead or alive in the photo. Nor had it been possible to determine whether she’d taken the photo herself.

  On the other hand, Facebook had released data that established the location of the phone at the moment the photo had been uploaded, with a good degree of precision. The patch shown on a map in one of the documents covered an area of just one thousand square meters. The circled area on the map was the tip of a promontory called Tynäs—just half a kilometer from the house where Emelie had been to a party the night she disappeared.

  Data from her cell phone company confirmed the information from Facebook. Emelie’s phone had pinged towers in the area until all contact had been lost later that night. Either the battery had run out, or someone had turned the phone off.

  John followed the Karlstad police’s attempts to piece together the clearest possible picture of the girl’s activities over the evening. Witnesses agreed unanimously that she had left the party at around midnight, and the photo had been posted on Facebook at 1:48 A.M.

  Finding out what had happened during those two critical hours was at the heart of the investigation.

  6

  KARLSTAD, 2009

  Just twenty minutes after Sissela had called the police, the buzzer at their gate rang. When Mrs. Bjurwall called, you came. This apparently also applied to the police. Heimer was expecting uniformed officers, but the person who took the call must have assigned top priority to the case and passed it directly to Criminal Investigations Department.

  He recognized the younger of the two detectives from the boating club. His name was Bernt Primer and they had done a night watch together. Heimer had shown him his Nimbus 405 Flybridge as they patrolled the jetties down by Lövnäs Church. But Primer had never mentioned that he was with the police. Or Heimer hadn’t been listening. He could remember having been out fishing with him a couple of times, but he had quickly grown tired of his company, irritated by the torrent of words flowing from the man’s mouth. He knew half the boating club and had something to say about every one of them.

  Heimer had never set eyes on the other police detective before. He would have remembered. The man had a large birthmark running across his balding pate that extended over part of his face. It was impossible not to think of Mikhail Gorbachev—the old Soviet politician who had talked about glasnost and perestroika and had brought down the whole Eastern Bloc. Heimer was sure the man had already heard this plenty of times from people with less sense of decorum than Heimer had.

  The obvious questions were soon dispensed with. When had they last seen Emelie? Yesterday morning, when she had stormed out after breakfast after an argument. Did they know where she was going or whom she was meeting? They didn’t, but Hugo Aglin—who had stayed with them to wait for the police—filled in the holes. His son had explained that Emelie had been one of the guests at his party. When Hugo had returned home late that evening, the house was full of young people. This had been a surprise, since his son had said he was going to sleep over at a friend’s.

  Exactly when Emelie had left the party was unclear. Hugo hadn’t seen her there, but on the other hand he had gone down to the spare room in the basement to sleep. Hopefully, his son and the other teenagers would know more. The police would need to speak with them.

  There was no doubt about it that Gorbachev was the higher ranking of the two detectives. Heimer noticed that he sat forward on the edge of the armchair, as if he wanted to get closer to Sissela and himself on the sofa. The glass coffee table between them was slightly too wide. If you leaned back, you ended up too far away from each other for it to feel comfortable when speaking at a normal volume. It was one of the few purchases for the house that he actually regretted.

  They got to the Facebook picture. Hugo was sitting on a pouffe by the short end of the table and had just shown the police officers the photograph of Emelie’s forearm.

  “What does the tattoo mean?” said Gorbachev.

  Sissela looked at Heimer.

  “You know more about that than I do,” she said.

  “Emelie says it’s a bucket list.”

  The policeman raised his eyebrows.

  “A bucket list? What’s that?”

  “A list of things you want to do during your lifetime,” Heimer explained.

  “I see. And what things does Emelie want to do?”

  “Only she knows that.”

  “You discussed it?”

  “Yes, but she refused to explain it. At least to me.”

  “And what about you?” said Gorbachev to Sissela, brushing a few imaginary crumbs from his trousers.

  Heimer noted that he had a self-conscious manner with his wife. She brought that out in men—especially those who weren’t accustomed to her world.

  “No, and I know there’s no point in asking,” she said.

  “Do you know when she got the tattoo?” Primer interjected.

  “It must have been after she came home from Björkbacken,” Heimer said. “At any rate, that was when I first saw it.”

  “Björkbacken? In Charlottenberg?” Gorbachev said in surprise.

  Heimer knew he was on thin ice. Sissela kept the stay at the residential treatment center for young women a secret. Officially, Emelie had been interning abroad at one of AckWe’s many offices.

  “Our daughter was going through a difficult time and needed the kind of support and treatment that they offer there,” Sissela said in a neutral voice.

  If she was annoyed that he had disclosed family secrets, she didn’t show it. Heimer glanced at Hugo to see how he had reacted, but the director of finance seemed unaffected. Either he was just as good as his boss was at maintaining his mask or she had already told him about the treatment center. Personally, he had no intention of keeping secrets that would come out anyway.

  “That carving on her arm—could she have done that herself?” said Primer.

  Sissela replied quickly and Heimer saw that she intended to handle the narrative about Emelie.

  “I can understand what you’re thinking, Detective Sergeant. And we don’t want to hide the fact that Emelie hasn’t always been so kind to herself. So yes, she may have cut herself.”<
br />
  Hasn’t always been so kind to herself.

  Well, that was one way of putting it, Heimer thought to himself. He remembered the empty pill bottle on the toilet seat and Emelie’s lifeless eyes as she lay in the bathtub after he had finally managed to pick the lock with a kitchen knife. It wasn’t until they had pumped her stomach in the hospital that she finally came to.

  “How has your daughter been feeling lately?” said Primer.

  “Much better,” Sissela answered. “She’s taken control of her life and last autumn she started at the School of Economics in Stockholm.”

  Naturally the story begins there, Heimer thought to himself—rather than with her failed studies or the drugs he’d found. He considered whether to say something and couldn’t think of any reasons to keep quiet.

  “She had a bag in her desk drawer with the remains of something I’m almost certain was cocaine,” he said, not addressing anyone in particular.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Sissela hurried to add.

  Now that the cat was out of the bag, she wanted to be the concerned mother.

  “Heimer and I are worried that she might lapse back into depression. It’s not unusual to encounter temporary obstacles during the rehabilitation process.”

  “The most important thing right now is that we find Emelie,” Gorbachev said, inching even farther forward onto the edge of the armchair in an attempt to foster intimacy across the wide glass table. “Do we know how this picture was taken?” he added.

  “It must have been with Emelie’s phone,” said Sissela. “We’ve called it lots of times without getting hold of her. Yesterday evening, it was still ringing—but now it goes straight to voicemail.”

  “We’ll have our tech people deal with that,” said Gorbachev, jotting the number down in his notebook.

  He then explained what would happen next. A formal missing persons report would be filed and all police departments across the county of Värmland would be issued a photograph of Emelie. But there was no cause for alarm. She had argued with her parents and sometimes young people disappear only to return a few days later. After all, she was twenty and didn’t need to report all of her comings and goings to her parents.

  Then the detective with the birthmark paused. It was clear he was choosing his words carefully.

  “If anyone makes contact with you, I’d like you to call me right away,” he said.

  Sissela looked at him.

  “Makes contact?” she repeated. “So that’s what you think—that she’s been kidnapped?”

  “We don’t think anything,” he replied. “But you’re a well-known family and we have to consider all the possibilities.”

  Heimer saw his wife nodding thoughtfully. They hadn’t discussed it, but he knew she had gone over all the possible scenarios in her head. It was out of the question that she would have overlooked kidnapping.

  “I’ll get you a photo of Emelie,” she said, vanishing into the library.

  There would be plenty to choose from. Since their daughter had started at university, Heimer had noticed his wife had regained her interest in photography. The empty pages in their family photo album had been filled with images that reflected her aspirations.

  In the photograph that Sissela selected a few minutes later, Emelie was wearing a white dress with a braided leather belt around her waist. Heimer saw that it had been taken on Midsummer’s Eve earlier that year. His daughter was looking at him from beneath the brim of a straw hat. She was wearing her blonde hair down and it framed her freckled face.

  His rib cage was back in a vise again. The air was being pressed out of him with each turn of the lever. He looked away from the photograph and let his gaze linger on the Lars Lerin painting on the wall just above Gorbachev’s head.

  “Are you alright, Heimer?”

  He felt Sissela’s cool hand on his back.

  “Oh, I’m just so worried,” he mumbled.

  7

  BALTIMORE, 2019

  The cart the nurse pushed in was laden with a new batch of intravenous drugs.

  “Ah, exactly what we need. More drugs!”

  Trevor laughed at his own joke and then groaned at the pain in his abdomen. It didn’t seem to matter how much it hurt. He was compelled to laugh. John noticed it was infectious. His neighbor’s positive energy wasn’t a façade—it was something that seemed to come from within. A force of nature expressed as a good mood that was impossible to resist.

  John had been woken early in the morning for his X-ray. When he returned to the room again, he had fallen into a long, dreamless, morphine-fueled sleep. Now the spring sun glimpsed through the thin curtains was high in the sky, and he realized it must be almost lunchtime. Possibly even later. John remembered the conversation between the doctor and their hotheaded boss the night before. If she gave the okay, the debrief would begin this afternoon.

  “Have you seen Brodwick today?” he asked, once the nurse had left the room.

  “I don’t think he dares come back until he has permission. It was almost worth the bullet in my stomach just to see him being put in his place by our favorite doctor.”

  Trevor expended great effort turning toward him. It was clear he was in greater need of painkillers than John was.

  “Are you worried about the debrief?” his colleague continued.

  “Not at all,” John replied. “Just wanted to know if he’d already come by.”

  That wasn’t the truth. The prospect of the initial conversation was playing on his nerves. Brodwick would tape it and pass the recording on to the prosecutor. Maybe it would even be played in court. He couldn’t say anything that differed from Trevor’s statement. It would kill his credibility as a witness, and the defense would exploit it. At the same time, he didn’t want the whole world to find out about his breakdown inside the container at the port.

  “Take it easy,” said Trevor, as if he had read John’s thoughts. “Brodwick’ll find out what he needs to know. How resourceful we both were in a high-pressure situation. That you realized that I was an agent too, and together we improvised a plan that got us out alive.”

  “Together?” said John.

  “Yes, together. Brodwick isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. He doesn’t understand fieldwork so there’s no need to burden him with too many details.”

  “And exactly how did I realize you were undercover?”

  “I whispered it into your ear while we were on the way to the container. That was when I realized what was about to go down.”

  John nodded slowly while silently repeating his witness statement to himself.

  “Thanks,” he said, really meaning it.

  “You’re welcome. Now I’ve saved your life and your ego.”

  Trevor laughed again and this time it didn’t seem to hurt as much. Maybe the nurse had taken into account the patient’s tendency to laugh at opportune and inopportune moments when adjusting his morphine dosage.

  “On the other hand, I don’t understand why you care what those macho dicks at the Bureau think,” he continued. “After the trial, we still get to start our lives over somewhere far away from all of this.”

  Of course, Trevor was right. John should be thinking more about the future and less about his legacy at the FBI. The cartel was more than just Ganiru, and it would do everything it could to find the squealers after the trial—no matter where on the planet they were. That was why they were going to be given new identities and placed into witness protection.

  “Let me give you some advice: make sure you make your demands now,” said Trevor. “Once you’ve testified and the judge has struck his gavel you won’t have any bargaining chips.”

  John waited for the laugh he thought was coming. But this time it didn’t. It was clear that Trevor had spent a great deal of time thinking about what was to come.

  “It’s your family that matters,” he said. “The deal you cut with the Bureau will determine what your future life is like.”

  John started. Did Trevor
have a family? John had thought it was impossible to combine it with the role of infiltrator.

  “So, it’s not just you who has to disappear?” he said.

  “No, my wife too. And our daughter.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Yep. She’ll be one year old this summer.”

  John tried to keep up. If Trevor’s daughter was that young, he must have become a father while infiltrating the drug cartel.

  “She was a beautiful accident,” Trevor said with a smile when he spotted John’s confusion. “When my wife found out she was pregnant, I was already in deep with Ganiru’s gang. I demanded they get me out as soon as possible, but I knew it’d take time. That’s why Brodwick doubled up on his agents in the cartel. As soon as you were inside, the plan to pull me out was going to be activated and then you were supposed to stay for as long as it took to uncover whoever Ganiru reports to.”

  John nodded. He understood why Brodwick hadn’t said anything. It was about protecting him and his colleague. The less John knew about the agent he was supposed to take over for, the better it was for everyone involved.

  “So were you at the birth?” he said.

  Trevor’s eyes suddenly filled with sadness.

  “No, unfortunately. Our precious bundle of joy had the good sense to make her entry into the world the same weekend Ganiru’s cousin got gunned down in Cherry Hill. Coming up with an excuse to leave town right then was impossible.”

  “But you’ve seen her?”

  “Jesus—of course I have. I’ve been there twice,” said Trevor, his face lighting up again. “She’s something else. Like a curly-haired angel. She has a temper too—at least when she doesn’t get her way. Gets that from her mother.”

  “And which characteristics have you provided?” said John.

  “She eats like a horse, or so I hear. That must be from me.”

  Trevor gave another booming laugh and managed to knock over the water glass on the nightstand.

  “What about you—is there anyone going with you?” Trevor said when he had caught his breath.