Zack Read online

Zack is studying Sukayana Prikon’s movements. He’s still having trouble matching her age with her quickness and agility, and can’t help wondering about her desperate behavior in Tantolunden.

  I thought that lunatic was coming for me.

  He would have done the same thing in her situation.

  But what if the desperation had a different cause, what if she had actually hired someone to kill the women? He’s having trouble thinking she could have done it herself.

  But why would she want them dead? They worked for her, after all. To stop them talking, maybe, or to avoid prosecution for procuring?

  The phone calls she made that morning to the dead women’s cell phones seem to suggest that she didn’t know they were dead, though.

  Zack’s mind keeps working. Perhaps something had happened, something that made them want to leave? Or take revenge?

  Zack realizes that he’s got stuck on the prostitution angle. That’s the sort of thing he criticizes older, more jaded colleagues for, detectives who have made up their minds about the way things are before the investigation has even started, and therefore end up missing or discounting vital information.

  He can’t let himself get like that.

  “That was a very neat maneuver you pulled when you got free of me,” he says instead. “Have you had jujitsu training?”

  She smiles at the compliment.

  “In the past. My grandfather taught me when I was little.”

  “Here in Stockholm?”

  “No, I was born in Thailand. I came here when I was thirteen.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason as most other people. In the hope of a better life in a wealthier country.”

  She says this in a tone of voice that lets Zack understand that reality didn’t quite live up to expectations.

  “We’re going to have to take a few things away from here with us,” he tells her. “Your computer and phone, among other things. I’d also like you to find your financial records, files, and year-end accounts.”

  “But you can’t do that. This is my whole livelihood.”

  “Yes, we can. According to chapter twenty-six of the penal code.”

  “But how am I going to . . . ?”

  Zack interrupts her.

  “But we’re not going to take you in, even though you tried to escape and threatened a police officer with a knife. We understand that you were frightened.”

  Zack looks at Deniz. She nods. She agrees with him.

  “We’ll need to talk to you again, though. Soon. So make sure we can find you.”

  Sukayana Prikon opens her mouth to protest, then shuts it again and remains silent.

  She gives Zack her cell.

  “I appreciate that this will cause you problems,” he says, “and I promise to let you have it back tomorrow. Okay?”

  She nods.

  Like a grandmother reluctantly agreeing to do what a stubborn grandchild wants.

  “Now, show me where you keep your files.”

  Zack turns to Deniz.

  “Can you call for another car? We’re going to need a bit of help.”

  Fifteen minutes later they’re standing out on the street. The heat is still oppressive. The smell of an early barbeque drifts down from a nearby balcony.

  Zack puts on his Ray-Ban Aviators, texts Sirpa, and asks her to check out Recruitment Solutions Ltd.

  Sukayana Prikon is standing in the door, glowering at the newly arrived police officers who are carrying out a box of files.

  Zack gently massages his shoulder and wonders if letting her go free is a mistake. She has no alibi. And even if she didn’t have anything to do with the murders, she may herself be in danger. Whoever killed her girls might also be after her. In which case she’d be safer in custody.

  But the police don’t lock people up to protect them, he thinks. And Sukayana Prikon seems to be the sort of person who can look after herself.

  8

  SIRPA HEMÄLAINEN rubs her aching left knee with one hand as she quickly scrolls through the search results with the other.

  One site appears on the list several times: thai-massage.nu, some sort of forum where readers comment and give marks to various massage parlors in Sweden. But so far she’s only found hints about prostitution at Sawatdii, nothing definite.

  “Your whole body gets looked after here . . .”

  “. . . not frightened to take a firm grip of any problems.”

  “Every muscle relaxed except one. And in the end that relaxed as well.”

  On Flashback, people were more explicit about “the slant-eyed whores at Hornstull” and the “Thai tarts at Sawatdii,” but Sirpa has checked out the rumors on Flashback enough times in the past to take everything written there with a grain of salt.

  She takes a short break to rub both knees at the same time. She stretches her legs and kicks the air for a while. It hurts, but in a good way. Like when the blood starts flowing again through frozen fingertips.

  She reaches for her half-full cup of coffee, takes a small sip, and pulls a face. Cold.

  She checks the time on the computer screen. Three hours without a break.

  Come on now, Sirpa. You know what the doctor said. Get up and walk every hour. Ideally more often than that.

  She stands up from her secluded corner behind the two twenty-four-inch screens and looks out across the open-plan office. Completely empty. The others are still out in the field.

  As for herself, she hasn’t been out in the field since November 7, 1998.

  The accident still haunts her at night. Not as much as it used to, but each time it’s as if she’s forced to experience the whole thing all over again. The concrete blocks racing toward them. Her colleague Stig yelling: “Fuuuck!”

  More terrifying in the dream than reality, the emotion clearer each time, as if memory were a diamond cutter that could highlight the worst instead of the most beautiful.

  It wasn’t even icy that day. It was the brakes. They just stopped working, without any warning.

  Stig died in the accident. Leaving a wife and two young children.

  And her knees were wrecked.

  Seventeen months later her husband met someone else. Sirpa knows that work is the only thing that has stopped her becoming a chain-smoking, embittered old cow, always going on about how much pain she’s in.

  These days she smiles when she sees herself in the mirror in the morning, and her colleagues are pleased to see her when she arrives at work. She’s the sort of person who makes other people laugh.

  The sort of person who solves crimes. Who finds things no one else can.

  Sirpa could make a good living as a consultant, traveling around and giving lectures about Internet security. But she’s happy just looking after a few online courses. She wants to work at the sharp end. Such as here, in the Special Crimes Unit. Where she can make a real difference. Ericsson will have to try to protect their secrets on their own without her help.

  She keeps typing, searching through the morass at the bottom of the Internet, feeling as though she’s drowning in rancid grease. She feels like going to the bathroom for a wash, but soap and water don’t have any effect on this sort of dirt.

  She wades through stagnant swamps that reek of ingrained prejudice and built-up hatred. She works through forum after forum. Saves interesting links and fragments of text in a separate document. Highlights anything she’ll have to take a closer look at.

  Hatred of Thai women seems to be a specific subculture among right-wing extremists. Sirpa can feel herself getting more and more depressed as she skims the posts.

  These copulating yellow women are spreading across the world like a slant-eyed plague. We’ve got to take a stand against it. We’ve got to spread the word and build barriers. Soon it will be too late. In the nation’s interest

  Let’s treat these whores to a taste of their own medicine! Gang rape is the only language Thai cunts understand. The Swede

  I KNOW that the so-called “massage institute
s” are disguised whorehouses, because I’ve found out the truth for myself. It was at the Sawatdii parlor on Södermalm in Stockholm. I asked what sort of massage they offered, and they said that everything could be arranged. I decided to see if it really was as bad as that, so I went in and paid 300 kronor for a “happy ending” handjob. I reported the incident to the police, but nothing’s happened. I bet the police are customers. What’s this foreign filth doing to our society? They ought to be shot, deported, put in camps. Who knows what diseases they’re spreading? Gustav Vasa

  “Gustav Vasa, my ass,” Sirpa mutters to herself as she types quickly to search for other posts by the same alias on other forums.

  She finds plenty. Most of all on the site whatwomenwant.se, some sort of forum for scoring porn films. She reads some of Gustav Vasa’s comments.

  I want to see warning signs when there are yellow bitches in films. All of us fighting against needless interracial breeding might get upset by nasty surprises like that. The fact that the woman in question was treated pretty roughly by the four men and that the scene concluded with a double penetration of her back passage might be counted in its favor under the circumstances.

  She moves on. Opens a WordPress blog called “Gustav Vasa,” and reads with mounting interest.

  It’s a site promoting extreme right-wing opinions. Reprinting articles from Avpixla. Publishing posts on how immigration is ripping the heart out of Swedish culture.

  So, Gustav Vasa. You’re both a pervert and a right-wing extremist. You’re worth a closer look.

  She searches for the name of the owner of the domain name and finds it without any trouble.

  Now let’s find out who you really are, she thinks.

  This is the part she enjoys. Finding the true identities behind the pseudonyms. Checking their family backgrounds, court convictions, and tax records. She knows from experience that plenty of the people who complain about “benefit-stealing quota-fillers” owe a lot of tax and are keen exploiters of Swedish society’s various financial safety nets.

  But not Gustav Vasa. He seems to be pretty comfortably off.

  She carries on her search in more databases, and finds one result for his ID number in an abandoned preliminary investigation into an alleged rape.

  Her revulsion grows with every word she reads.

  She saves the file in a folder on her desktop and carries on looking. She discovers that he is involved in an ongoing civil case, and is suddenly convinced that he’s the person they’re looking for.

  “Are you making progress, Sirpa?”

  Svensson and Gräns are walking toward her between the desks.

  “Hate, hate, hate,” she replies. “But if we’re looking for a crazy client I think I’ve found a rather interesting candidate.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Niklas says, leaning inquisitively over her screen and looking at the black-and-white passport photograph.

  “His name’s Peter Karlson. Thirty-six years old. It’s his birthday today, believe it or not. He’s development manager at D’Inc, an IT company based in one of the Hötorget skyscrapers. In the evenings he praises sadistic porn films and spews racist bile on a fanatical nationalist blog with over forty thousand unique visitors each week.”

  “Is that a lot?” Niklas asks.

  “Quite a lot. More than a lot of local newspapers can boast.”

  Sirpa pulls up a chair for Rudolf and invites him to sit down.

  “But here’s the really interesting thing,” she goes on. “In September last year he was accused of rape, both vaginal and anal, by a young woman he’d arranged to meet from a dating site. The allegations couldn’t be proved, but it’s very clear that the head of the preliminary investigation wasn’t exactly delighted to have to let him go. He’s also the plaintiff in an ongoing civil case, concerning an unpaid bill for massage treatment. Guess where?”

  “You’re kidding. Sawatdii?”

  “Exactly. He’s contesting the invoice on the grounds that the masseuse couldn’t do her job. The case is still going on.”

  Niklas lets out a whistle of approval.

  “But that’s not all. Peter Karlson also has a bronze medal for pistol shooting at the junior Swedish championships.”

  “Does he have a gun at the moment?”

  “Nothing registered.”

  “That racist blog, does it have any particular focus?” Rudolf asks.

  “Yes, quite an interesting one under the circumstances. I’ll play you one of the posts.”

  She opens the blog, highlights the text, then switches on the MacBook’s voice-over function. An artificial voice reads out the highlighted text:

  The Muslims’ desperation to rape our Swedish women is both a serious and widespread problem, but we mustn’t forget all the other aliens causing trouble for society.

  Take tax-dodging Asians, for instance. They exploit our goodwill and suck as much money out of the welfare state as they can. They take all they can without giving anything back. They steal money that should have gone to schools and care of the elderly and send it to their cousins in Thailand and Vietnam.

  Their crimes aren’t as visible as the more violent Muslims’, but the effects of them swindling billions will have devastating consequences both for coming generations and the people who built this country.

  They must be stopped.

  Rudolf adjusts his sunglasses and says:

  “So here we’ve got a man who has an unresolved dispute with one of the murdered women, who doesn’t like Asians, is a good shot and a sexual pervert by nature.”

  Niklas looks at the time.

  “Half past five. Do you think he might still be at work?”

  “It’s worth a try. People who earn that sort of money don’t usually go home at four o’clock.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Rudolf stands up and buttons his jacket as he considers the words the computer just read out.

  Has there always been so much hate? Maybe the hate itself has always been constant, just not as visible. What’s new about the digital world, he thinks, is that we can see each other’s unfiltered thoughts.

  Is humanity really ready for the kind of psychological challenge inherent in constantly being able to give voice to its very worst sides? Like an endless traffic jam in which everyone is blowing their car horn.

  9

  IN THE sluggish rush-hour traffic Zack and Deniz are crossing the Western Bridge on their way back to Police Headquarters when Zack’s phone rings.

  It’s Sirpa.

  “We’ve found a pretty clear suspect,” she says, and gives him Peter Karlson’s background.

  “Where is he?” Zack asks.

  “The Oracle and Niklas are already on their way. I just wanted you to know. But I’ve found something else as well which points in a different direction. About Recruitment Solutions Ltd.”

  Zack never ceases to be amazed at how fast Sirpa is. It hasn’t been more than a quarter of an hour since he called Douglas and gave him an outline of their interview with Sukayana Prikon. That means Sirpa first heard the name just five minutes ago.

  “What have you found?”

  “There’s an interesting connection to the criminal biker gang ‘Brotherhood of No Mercy.’ The club’s president, Sonny Järvinen, is on the board of Recruitment Solutions.”

  Zack recognizes the name. Sonny Järvinen makes regular appearances in the media, most recently in connection to revelations that members of the club had defrauded National Health Insurance of millions in sickness benefits.

  He recalls laughing when he read it. Those damned bikers. They call themselves “one percenters,” and claim to stand outside normal society, but when it comes to sickness benefits they’ve got nothing against being part of a tax-financed system. Which proves what they really are: troublemakers who crawl home to Mommy when the money runs out.

  “Can you check where their clubhouse is? They’ve moved, haven’t they?” he asks.

  “Already done,” Sirpa say
s. “Have you got paper and pen?”

  “No, but a damn good memory.”

  A few seconds later Zack ends the call and says to Deniz:

  “Sirpa’s found both a crazy john and a biker gang with connections to Sawatdii.”

  “What do we start with?”

  “Niklas and Rudolf are dealing with the crazy guy. You and I are heading to the clubhouse in Bromma.”

  The traffic on the Traneberg Bridge is even worse than the Western Bridge. The speedometer barely registers any movement at all.

  The sun makes the water of Ulvsundasjön look like a thin silk shawl caught in a gentle breeze, and Zack gazes enviously down at three men in kayaks far below. The water looks soft and gentle as the kayaks’ pointed noses pierce the surface.

  Then he thinks of the body they found tucked between some rocks near the water in Minneberg the previous autumn. At first they thought the skinny man had been tortured. Several bones in his body were broken and he looked like he’d been subjected to several hard blows to the face with a blunt object.

  That turned out to be wrong.

  He’d jumped from the bridge and got smashed up when he hit the water.

  Not so soft and gentle that time.

  And it had given Koltberg an opportunity to smirk at them.

  “What do you know about the Brotherhood of No Mercy?” Deniz asks.

  “They’re a bunch of upstarts who’ve managed to earn the respect of the Hells Angels and other biker gangs in the past two or three years. That means they’re seriously violent. Two unsolved murders this spring alone point to them, but there hasn’t been enough evidence to press charges.”

  “Okay, so Sukayana uses a company run by criminals to get women for her massage parlor. She’d hardly do that if it wasn’t about prostitution. And now something’s gone so badly wrong that all those women had to be killed. But what?”

  “I think it’s about more than just wanting to get rid of them. They could have done that in a far easier way—burying them out in the forest, anything, really. My feeling is that someone’s making some kind of point with this.”

  “You mean their competitors?”

  “Maybe. Someone who wanted to take a share of the market from the Brotherhood and found a very brutal way of doing it.”