Zack Read online

  Zack. She can see him out on the balcony. His muscular frame, curly blond hair. He’s okay.

  The sight in the next room. The blood, the shattered bodies. Who could have wished the women so much harm?

  She knows what men can do to women, what fathers can do to their own daughters, and, above all, what brothers can do to their sisters. If you’re going to survive in this world, you have to meet force with force, and realize that it’s you or me.

  Sometimes you can’t back down.

  Not in the face of this sort of brutality.

  The forensics officers’ cameras click away in the living room. Quiet voices discuss the possible angles of the killer’s shots.

  “I need coffee,” Zack says when he comes in from the balcony.

  “Let’s see if we can sneak out of a back door somewhere,” Deniz replies.

  “I’ll come with you,” Douglas says.

  The sun feels merciless as they open the basement door and emerge at the back of the building. No journalists there. They’re all hanging around outside the cordon around the front.

  They follow the path down to the shopping center, find a branch of Coffee House by George next to an Oriental supermarket, and get espressos to take out. On their way out of the café they see a reporter interviewing a woman with a stroller outside the entrance to the subway station.

  “Looks like they’ve already started on the side story: A suburb living in terror,” Douglas says. “They need to find a few locals who say it doesn’t feel safe living here, and that they’re going to be keeping their children indoors from now on.”

  They sit down on a low stone wall in the shade of a large oak on the way back up to the apartment blocks.

  Douglas’s phone rings and he excuses himself and walks away from them.

  Deniz and Zack immediately start talking about what they saw in the apartment. How the murderer wasn’t content merely to kill the women, but also shot them in their genitals.

  “You have to be perverted to do something like that,” Deniz says.

  “We could be dealing with a crazy client. A sadistic sex maniac,” Zack says.

  The children on the computer.

  Children with no mother now.

  He senses Douglas’s hand on his shoulder, and its paternal warmth feels good. A weight holding him down to earth. But there’s something wrong, it’s as if Douglas is leaning on him, and not the other way around.

  Douglas sits down beside them again.

  He’s usually quick to take the initiative in conversations like this, but on this occasion he’s more reserved. Nothing like the self-assured boss who pushed his way through the crowd of reporters when he arrived at the scene, parting them like a sea.

  It’s as if his mind is elsewhere.

  Has he finished with another woman? Has someone scratched the Warhol painting in his Östermalm home? Was that what the phone call was about?

  I’m too hard on him, Zack goes on to think. He’s basically okay.

  Then Douglas finds his focus again.

  “So, they seem to have been prostitutes. Which means we might be dealing with trafficking. There’s money to be made, bringing in women from Asia and putting them to work.”

  “Who could be involved in that, then?” Deniz asks.

  “I’m not particularly clued up on it,” Douglas says. “But some of the biker gangs are supposed to be involved in running Thai massage parlors.”

  Zack searches his memories of the apartment and finds himself thinking about the graffiti on the door.

  DEATH TO ALL NIGGERS.

  “Could it be a white hate crime? Right-wing extremists?”

  “Not impossible,” Deniz says. “I checked a few of their websites for another case recently, and there isn’t exactly a shortage of inflammatory articles about the ‘import’ of Thai women. But God knows if one of them would be capable of something like this. They usually stick to spreading their hatred online.”

  “Ever heard of Anders Behring Breivik?” Zack says.

  Deniz changes tack:

  “We need to get hold of the woman who made the call.”

  “We will,” Douglas says, standing up from the wall. “We’d better start pulling at a few of these threads. I’ll call Sirpa. And we’ll have to bring in Östman as well.”

  Zack and Deniz look at each other. Tommy Östman, a criminal profiler, isn’t officially employed within the unit, but gets called in when necessary. He used to be renowned throughout Police Headquarters as a real charmer, the sort who was the life and soul of any party. But in the end he was spending most of his evenings partying, and his family had had enough.

  These days he’s a sober alcoholic, with no trace of his earlier charm, and a man who seems to have found new and questionable ways of holding his dopamine levels stable.

  But the profiles he produces have ended the livelihoods of numerous career criminals, and have led to plenty of violent thugs being taken off the streets.

  * * *

  THE APARTMENT looks like a laboratory when they return. Measuring devices, test tubes, plastic bags containing hair and fabrics, and, in the middle of the living room, a portable sample kit connected to a MacBook Pro.

  The black Compaq laptop is gone.

  Thank goodness.

  A man in a white coat is leaning nonchalantly over the shoulder of a woman tapping at the MacBook’s keyboard.

  “Any results yet?” he asks impatiently.

  Koltberg.

  Damn, Zack thinks. He must have come straight from the airport.

  Koltberg turns around when he hears the voices of the three detectives in the hall. He stalks over to Zack. His coat is hanging open and Zack has time to notice that Sam is wearing the red necktie of power with a blue shirt today, before the complaints begin.

  “Well, this is just great, isn’t it? One of the bodies disappeared before I even got here. How did you think I was going to examine it? By teleport, maybe?”

  The forty-three-year-old coroner raises his eyebrows toward his receding hairline and adopts an exaggeratedly affronted expression.

  Zack feels like punching him in the face. You arrogant fucking bastard.

  He knows Koltberg thinks he’s an inexperienced upstart who hasn’t got where he is on his own merits but because of his mother’s reputation. And it doesn’t seem to make any difference what Zack does to prove the opposite, Koltberg simply can’t accept a twenty-seven-year-old as an equal.

  What the fuck gives Koltberg the right to an opinion? Zack wonders. After all, he grew up in a wealthy doctor’s family, with a summer cottage out in the archipelago and a mom who could afford to be a housewife.

  What the fuck does he know about anything?

  Zack has a sudden flashback.

  He’s ten years old and is standing in the kitchen of their apartment in Bredäng. He takes a break from the washing up to look down into the yard. His friends are playing football and laughing, but he’s shut inside the stifling heat on the eighth floor. His dad is lying on the sofa after a bad relapse, and has a big, red, butterfly-shaped rash across his cheeks. Zack spends all day cooking, cleaning, and doing the washing, but his dad never says thank you. He barely says anything at all. He’s just sad, and complains about the pain in his joints.

  The doctors call the illness lupus, and Zack has just been told by a social worker that his dad will never get better.

  He looks down at the football, which seems to float back and forth across the yard. His friends are puppets, governed by some unknown force.

  He grabs hold of the cheap stone windowsill, pressing his hands against it until his knuckles turn white, and looks up at the gray sky and tries to imagine the endless expanse of air he knows is up there behind the clouds. Then he hears his dad cough, then say:

  “Bring me my inhaler, I need it now.”

  What the fuck does Koltberg know?

  “Did you have a good time in Mallorca?” Zack says to him. “You look nice and relaxed.”
<
br />   Koltberg loses his train of thought. He seems to be considering a vicious retort, but doesn’t have time to reload before Douglas appears at Zack’s side.

  “There’s no murder weapon at the scene,” Koltberg says to Douglas instead, in a considerably calmer voice.

  “Anything else?”

  “One of the women was holding a cell phone. A Nokia, not exactly flavor of the month these days. Whatever. She made a call at two forty-five last night. Two minutes later she sent this text.”

  He holds the phone up to Zack and Douglas.

  Help us

  he kill all

  “My preliminary conclusion is that she died immediately after that.”

  “Who did she contact?” Douglas asks.

  “The number’s listed under the name Sukayana, and she called it several times yesterday morning. I made a note of the name and number.”

  He holds a note out to Douglas, who glances quickly at the number and then hands it on to Zack.

  “Can you check this out with Sirpa?”

  Zack takes the note and goes into the bedroom, calling Sirpa as he walks.

  The tubes of lubricant are gone. As are the condoms. Sometimes Forensics is very quick.

  Sirpa answers after the first ring. Half a minute later she’s found the answer to Zack’s question.

  “There’s only one Sukayana in the whole of Sweden. Sukayana Prikon, registered as living on Gaveliusgatan. She owns the Sawatdii massage parlor on Södermalm.”

  “So, Thai massage,” Zack says. “Anything else?”

  “Bound to be. But you’ll have to give me a bit of time.”

  They hang up and Zack returns to the others and repeats what Sirpa told him.

  “If Sukayana Prikon was these women’s boss, then the whole thing starts to look like pimping,” Deniz says. “Maybe trafficking as well. And if that’s the case, then it’s hardly surprising that she didn’t want to stay here and wait for the police.”

  “I don’t get it, though,” Zack says. “It looks like she received the text at two forty-seven, but didn’t sound the alarm until six hours later. Would she have had her cell switched off?”

  * * *

  THE JOURNALISTS swarm around them as they leave the crime scene to go to Sawatdii, Sukayana Prikon’s massage parlor. There is a clatter of cameras, several people shout questions at the same time, and a number of iPhones set to record are thrust into their faces.

  It’s almost noon and the sun is oppressively hot. Its intense rays are attacking the suburb, seeming to want to put everyone in their place.

  Zack and Deniz force their way through the reporters.

  Ignore their questions.

  “You drive,” Zack says, and they’re soon sitting in the car, rolling slowly past the play area.

  The mother is still there with her daughter on the swing.

  As if their lives are an endless pendulum motion rather than a line with a beginning and an end.

  6

  “LET’S GO in,” Deniz says, eager to find out what they might discover behind the white crocheted curtain hanging behind the neon-pink OPEN sign in the window of the door.

  “Hang on a moment,” Zack says.

  They’re standing on the pavement outside the Thai massage parlor at Lindvallsplan, near Hornstull. Where the murdered women probably worked. It’s located on the ground floor of a 1970s building with a yellow stone façade and windows that look like they could fall out of their brown aluminum frames at any moment, transforming into deadly projectiles on their way down to the pavement.

  Above the doorframe a frayed, sun-bleached Thai flag is flapping gently in the warm breeze.

  Glittery letters spelling out SAWATDII TRADITIONAL THAI MASSAGE have been stuck on the window.

  Cheap sign, cheap name, Zack thinks.

  Three large photographs show blond, fair-skinned women lying on massage tables being treated by young Oriental women with dazzling white smiles. The women’s bodies are covered by white towels, and the masseuses are dressed smartly. Short-sleeved shirts and burgundy trousers, no sexier than the uniforms worn by staff at Södermalm Hospital not far away. On a shelf below the pictures there’s a selection of exclusive massage oils and moisturizing creams.

  “This is all fake,” Zack says.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I did a bit of googling in the car. Traditional Thai massage is done on the floor, and without any oil at all. And the clients keep their clothes on.”

  “This couldn’t just be a Swedish version, and they’re doing some kind of mash-up massage?”

  “Maybe. But the most important thing is what’s missing. There’s no statue of Buddha in the window.”

  “So?”

  “In Thailand that means: we sell everything.”

  “And you found that out on Google as well?”

  “No.”

  Shuffling footsteps behind Zack make him turn around. A bearded man, reeking of body odor, stops, and holds out a dirt-stained hand.

  “You haven’t got a few kronor to spare for the bus, have you, son?”

  Zack feels like telling him to get lost, but he digs in his jeans pocket and finds some coins to give the homeless guy. Sometimes he offers them a hot dog or burger. No one should have to starve. He rarely gives them money, because they only spend it on alcohol, but the day’s events have left him feeling shaken.

  The man thanks him and shuffles on past Zack, then catches sight of Deniz. He stops and turns back to Zack.

  “What the fuck, you’re taking your girlfriend to the whorehouse?”

  Deniz turns calmly toward the homeless man, leans forward, and whispers right next to his ear, almost sensually:

  “You’ve got two choices. Either you carry on walking right now, or I rip your balls off. Here and now.”

  He stares at her for a few seconds, speechless. Then he turns and moves off toward the subway station as quickly as his shaky legs will carry him.

  Whorehouse? Zack thinks. Is it really that obvious?

  He pushes the massage parlor’s door handle.

  The lobby is small, the air heavy with liniment and incense. The pale yellow walls are decorated with posters of Thai beaches and the strains of some Southeast Asian string instrument are coming from hidden speakers.

  A thin Thai woman is sitting behind the reception desk reading some sheets of letter-size paper. She’s wearing a white blouse and a thin red summer jacket, and looks to be in her sixties.

  “Hello,” Zack and Deniz say almost simultaneously.

  The woman looks up at them and stiffens. Something about their posture or the way they said hello has given them away.

  She quickly gets up from her chair, but one arm is still hidden by the counter and Zack has time to think that she’s got a weapon. He crouches down instinctively and puts his hand to the holster inside his jacket, but by that time the woman has already opened the white door behind her and disappeared.

  How can such an old woman move so fast? Zack wonders, rushing after her.

  He finds himself in a dark blue corridor lined with curtained doors, and just catches sight of one of the woman’s gym shoes disappearing through an open door at the far end.

  He runs after her and emerges into a large, rectangular courtyard containing a number of trees.

  Where is she?

  A door slams shut to his right.

  There. He hurries across the tarmac and pulls the handle. Locked. A coded lock. Shit.

  He quickly evaluates the door. It opens inward, and doesn’t look that solid.

  He backs up a few steps, takes aim, and throws himself at the door as hard as he can. It gives way and he tumbles into a stairwell, landing on his knees, and when he puts his arms out to stop himself he feels pain shoot through his right shoulder as if he’s been stabbed.

  He listens for footsteps but can’t hear anything. If she’d gone up he’d be able to hear her. So, down the stairs and out.

  “Zack!”

 
Deniz’s voice from the courtyard. But there’s no time to wait for her to catch up.

  “She’s running. I’m going after her!” he cries as he gets to his feet and starts to run. There are five steps down to the hall leading to the front door. He takes them in one bound and shoves the heavy door open with both hands. The pain in his shoulder is intense, it feels like someone’s trying to pull the joint apart. There’s something seriously wrong with it.

  Serves you right for being so fucking clumsy.

  A different street.

  He loses his bearings for a moment.

  Looks right. No sign of the woman.

  Looks left. The water beyond Bergsunds Strand is shimmering in the sunlight fifty yards away.

  Where is she?

  Then he sees her appear from behind some trees a hundred and fifty yards ahead of him. Running along a cycle path beside the water with light, easy strides. He must have misjudged her age. No sixty-year-old runs like that. Her legs are moving in a way that makes it look like they don’t belong to the rest of her body.

  Zack runs down Bergsgatan, crosses Bergsunds Strand, and reaches the cycle path just as the woman disappears into the shadows beneath the Liljeholmen Bridge.

  The energy that was coursing through him when he ran up the stairs out in Hallonbergen is all gone, and his steps are heavy.

  He can feel the effects of the night in him. His body is longing for more cocaine.

  For more sleep.

  The sun is baking his hair and back, and he feels like tearing off his jacket and top. He’s already out of breath, and curses his nocturnal adventures.

  People in sunglasses crowding the pavement terrace of the bar next to the bridge cheer him on, raising their glasses of golden beer to him.

  Shut the fuck up!

  He gets a few brief seconds of cool as he runs through the shadow under the bridge and emerges into Tantolunden. The large park is heaving with people. Families with strollers, groups of friends with disposable barbeques, office workers in shirtsleeves who’ve left off early.

  He scans the area as he runs on. He thinks he can see her off to the left, but he’s wrong, it’s a young girl chasing after a Frisbee.

  He puts his foot down on a large lump of wood, stumbles and loses his balance, regains it, and staggers on as a group of angry skittle players yell at him from behind.