Stone Coffin Part 13

Haver glanced over at Lindell. There was a tone of irritation in her voice-an impatience-that Haver interpreted as criticism of the unknown woman.

"You mean, it's her fault?"

"In a sense. Without her, the Cederen family would probably still be alive."

She paused. Haver waited for the rest, but she didn't speak again until they reached the turnoff for Uppsala.

"She must have loved him," she said, "and that isn't a crime. She can't be held responsible for his actions."

"Maybe she was pressuring him?"

"To run over his family?"

"Who knows? But I don't actually think she's like that," Haver said. "She bought bags of seeds in Vallby."

The evening of June 16, the preliminary autopsy report came in. Lindell regarded the fact that it came out that same day as a minor sensation. Combined with the forensic report, she was starting to piece a picture together.

Cederen had died sometime on June 14. "Around lunchtime" was the a.s.sessment on the report, with the official window of death estimated to be between eleven A.M. and two P.M. The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning by inhalation of car exhaust fumes. Shortly before his death, Cederen had consumed approximately fifty centiliters of gin. The brand was Gordon's London Dry. In his stomach there had also been remains of breakfast: yogurt, cereal, and coffee.

There were no signs of outward violence other than a discoloration on his right forearm consistent with the fact that the body had been found leaning against the steering wheel. He had been in good physical condition.

Lindell closed the folder with a sigh. Maybe he'd been in good physical condition, but he obviously was not in particularly good psychological condition. She did not know what she should think and did not like how the current situation appeared: a murder-suicide. It was now clear that the BMW was the vehicle that had struck Josefin and Emily. Fabric from Josefin's clothes had been found wedged next to the right headlight.

"Why?" was the question that recurred in Lindell's head. Perhaps the killing of his wife could be explained by a temporary state of confusion and hatred, but the child? Had Cederen intentionally killed Emily? Was that why he had written that pathetic suicide note and ended his life?

Had he stopped and made sure that the girl was dead or simply driven away? There were no witnesses to help them answer these questions. Despite persistent door-to-door work in Uppsala-Nas, they had not found anyone who had seen Cederen's BMW or any other car. The stretch of road where it happened was surrounded by fields, and there were no residential houses on either side.

He could have stopped, backed up, and checked to see if the girl was dead. But why drive all the way to Rasbo? Was he on his way to his mistress, or had he been there and then killed himself?

The questions on Lindell's pad grew in number. It was not clear if they would ever find answers. If they managed to track down the mistress, then perhaps a couple of the pieces would fall into place.

She was not as convinced as Haver that the woman would turn up again at the store in Vallby. A new sigh and then she stood up from the desk and walked over to the map. There were hundreds of residences in Rasbo, even more if one increased the area up to Upplands Tuna, Stavby, Rasbokil, and Alunda.

With her gaze fixed on the web of roads that branched through these districts, she was struck by a thought: Were there any public agencies they could consult? Anyone who might have records of single women in their thirties? Lindell dismissed the social welfare department outright. This woman did not seem a case for them. She had been well dressed and appeared financially comfortable. The church? Perhaps it was worth the trouble to call around to ministers in nearby parishes and ask if they had any ideas. Lindell decided to put Fredriksson on it. He was the right sort to call men of the cloth.

Lindell shut her door with unnecessary force. Ottosson, who never seemed to go home, peeked out of his office. When he saw Lindell, he smiled.

"Anything new?" Lindell shook her head. She walked up to him and thought how amazing it was that he managed to keep his spirits up.

"I'm going to go home, take a bath, have a gla.s.s of wine, and read some silly women's magazine," she said and stopped quite close to Ottosson.

"You read those? That surprises me."

"I go to the grocery store and ask what a gal in her best years should be reading and then buy something sight unseen."

"There's one called Amalia," Ottosson said. "Buy that one."

Lindell patted him on the cheek. "Amelia's," she corrected him and smiled.

He smiled back. "I like you. You know that, don't you?" he said.

"I do. The feeling's mutual."

She saw that he was touched by her words. How sensitive he was, how much he cared about her. She didn't want to embarra.s.s him any further, so she turned around and walked down the hallway. She glanced back before she went down the stairs. Ottosson was still there. He held up a hand. Under the pale glow of the fluorescent lights he looked like the kindly old gentleman he was. Lindell paused for an instant to reciprocate his greeting, then half ran down the stairs.

She felt happy for the first time in a long while. Lucky to have a job that she liked, colleagues and a boss that she respected; happy that Edvard had answered her. His voice had the same contented tone as it had had on her answering machine.

He had told her he couldn't work because of a knee injury. He had fallen five meters from a ladder. Lindell tried to imagine five meters and saw him fall helplessly to the ground. He admitted he'd had infernal luck. "I could have broken my neck," he had said in his calmest voice, and Lindell had been struck by his words, understood that she still liked him very much. Nothing bad was allowed to happen to him.

When she stepped into the Konsum grocery store, she realized how hungry she was and that she had been so for a while without thinking of it. She pushed the cart in front of her and quickly s.n.a.t.c.hed up some items, driven by the desire to get home as soon as possible.

She wanted to hurry life along, she realized as she waited in the long line that reached halfway into the store. Couldn't people buy their groceries at another time? She wanted Midsummer to arrive. They had agreed that she would go out to Graso Island. They had planned out the food. She would get aquavit and beer. He would make a couple of dishes with matjes herring. She had the feeling that everything was as before, as if the six months that they had been apart had been only a seconds-long pause.

Now that the Cederen case appeared to have been solved-with the exception of the motive-things would hopefully calm down a little. No murders, no rapes, and no a.s.saults, please. The time until Midsummer would pa.s.s, the beautiful weather would persist, and Edvard would be rested and happy. The sea would be more beautiful than ever. The narrow gravel road up to Viola and Edvard's house would be surrounded by woodland geranium and Queen Anne's lace and-in the drier areas-yarrow and German catchfly.

Ann loved the pastures and meadows, the sea breeze and the buzzing of b.u.mblebees in the flowers. Last Midsummer all three of them-Viola reluctantly at first-had picked flowers and made wreaths.

In the end there was neither a bath nor a magazine. Fatigue overcame her. She puttered aimlessly around the apartment as the rice cooked on the stove. She ate quickly as she flipped through the morning paper. They wrote about the hit-and-run in Uppsala-Nas, but she skipped past it.

She sat down in the sofa with a gla.s.s of wine. The television was on by force of habit. She felt an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. Her mind circled back to all of the people she had encountered over the past two days. She didn't want to think of work, but as so often happened, her thoughts churned unsystematically over recent events, a parade of words and facial expressions.

She tried to think of other things but couldn't think of anything that interested her. Why don't I have a personal life? she wondered. I'm married to my job. I drag my investigations home with me; everything else seems unimportant. What do other people do in the evenings? All the single people?

She realized that this was how bitterness set in. Even if she loved her job, there would come a day when all this would appear, if not meaningless, then of lesser importance. Work, all the papers, all the rushing-these would hardly count when weighed against her repressed need for love and intimacy. She feared that day when the scales dipped to one side, when her motivation fell to zero. Then there would be nothing there, at least if she went on in this way.

She had no countervailing ambition; that was the worst thing. No pa.s.sion for long-distance skating, bird-watching, reading, or theater, bowling, dog training, or watercolor painting-everything that people did so easily and with such enthusiasm. She just had the feeling that she ought to do more than work all day and drink red wine at night.

If she didn't get herself out of the house, she wouldn't meet anyone except violent perpetrators and police officers. She thought of her last escapade with the girls. Too much wine, too little judgment. The man she had dragged home-or had he dragged her? The fact was, she didn't remember much from that night.

They had made love. That much she recalled. Nothing earth-shattering, but he hadn't been so bad. He had left before she woke up around ten the next morning. Her bed had smelled of a man and s.e.x. She had lingered there and thought of Edvard.

He could have left a note-Bengt-ke was his name-but he had simply sneaked out, satisfied. Beatrice had recognized him and claimed that he was a married man. She had denied that he had followed her up into the apartment. When Beatrice asked, she had maintained that he had only walked her to her door.

She heaved herself out of the couch. Her body longed to be close to another, but no more Bengt-ke. She had decided that much that evening, the sixteenth of June. Edvard is the man that I will love. His hands will get to caress my body and his smell will linger in my sheets.

She pulled off her skirt and T-shirt, walked into the bathroom, and made a face at her mirror image. "No more Bengt-ke," she said aloud, and sat down on the toilet and closed her eyes so she wouldn't cry. Why this melancholy, this teary sensitivity, now that she was about to go and see Edvard? Had fear come creeping in? The fear she had seen even in him and that she had stubbornly tried to break down for two whole years? She had been the one on the offense, the one who took the initiative, while Edvard had followed her lead. He had both appreciated her drive and pa.s.sively resisted it, torn as he was between the past and the future.

Lindell pushed her thoughts aside, deciding to leave her melancholy, mechanically proceeding through her nightly bathroom routine and mentally preparing for sleep. This was a well-honed system driven by sheer self-preservation, by the necessity for sleep.

Thirteen.

In the next few days nothing else occurred that could shed any additional light on the Cederen drama. Lindell and the others felt that they had reached the end of the road. Fredriksson's rounds among the parish ministers had not yielded anything. In fact, most of them were pointedly unwilling to cooperate in the search for Cederen's mistress who-for lack of information to the contrary-was presumed to live northeast of Uppsala.

On a couple of occasions, Haver had called the store in Vallby and spoken with the clerk, but she had nothing new to report. The woman had not been back.

Lindell had held out hope for one final event, Cederen's funeral. It was held at Uppsala-Nas church one week after they had found him in the woods. Lindell guessed the woman might turn up, but it turned out to be a vain hope. Only a handful of people a.s.sembled in the pews. Apart from Cederen's parents, who mainly looked frightened, there were only a couple of colleagues from MedForsk: Mortensen and someone from the lab. There was also a fellow golfer from Edenhof golf course. Haver pointed him out to her. He had been questioned earlier. On this day, he had actually stood up next to the bier and said a few words. Cederen's parents shrank even further during this speech, and there was a painful silence in the church when he finished.

Lindell had lingered outside the church in the hopes that the woman she was looking for would turn up once the others had left. But it didn't happen. Lindell considered putting the graveyard under surveillance. Perhaps the woman would turn up at the grave site to say her good-byes. But they didn't have the resources to put an officer full-time in Uppsala-Nas. If the object of their search had been a suspected killer, that would have been one thing, but not simply to locate a grieving mistress.

Lindell did speak with the caretaker about keeping his eyes open and asked him to report to her if a blonde woman turned up at Cederen's grave. He agreed but also informed her that he did not spend many hours at the church and so chances were slim.

Why didn't the woman come forward? Lindell wondered. But when she thought about it a little longer, this didn't seem so strange. The woman presumably had-even if indirectly-contributed to Josefin and Emily's deaths and her lover's suicide. Lindell was convinced that there was a story in all this, a drama of pa.s.sion that no one was proud of, least of all the unknown woman. She had to grieve anonymously, alone with her despair. Perhaps she was ashamed? Perhaps she had ended the relationship and thereby set off Cederen's deranged actions?

Lindell wanted answers to her questions but realized that the chance of this happening was diminishing by the day. The unit had already started to consider the case solved. What remained were some suspicions about the financial crimes, but this did not fall to their division.

Mortensen denied any wrongdoing, in part blaming the Spaniards and in part the chaos surrounding the public offering, which now had been postponed. MedForsk had been shaken. They had put one of their best business lawyers on the matter and he had immediately charged headlong into the task of pushing the suspected transactions into the realm of legality. Many of the Financial Crimes officers were convinced he was going to succeed.

Life at Violent Crimes swung back into the old routine. That's how it seemed to Lindell after every extraordinary collaboration, where almost everyone in the building-Violent Crimes, Surveillance, Patrol, Forensics, and all of the other divisions-combined their efforts in order to generate a breakthrough. Many others experienced it as a hangover.

The old cases, the ones that had been pushed aside, came back to the fore. In some way they felt trivial. It would often take a couple of days until Lindell and her colleagues were back. Mentally they were still standing on the road in Uppsala-Nas or in the clearing in the woods in Rasbo.

Lindell wasn't satisfied. There were too many questions remaining. This feeling of dissatisfaction kept her from moving on for a while.

She had at least three investigations on her plate. Strictly speaking, she had even more, but she ignored the rest, moving the files far away onto a storage table in her office. From time to time she glanced at the stacks of papers.

Primarily she was working on an investigation involving drugs combined with threats and a.s.sault. The street dealer unit, which in spite of all the internal reorganization had managed to survive, had done a fantastic job and tracked the activities of a group of kids who during the past year had been supplying the market with Ecstasy. In the wake of the investigation there were at least three cases of a.s.sault, criminal threats, false imprisonment, and illegal possession of firearms. The investigation grew larger day by day, and Lindell had spent many hours sifting through the material, sitting in on interrogations, and partic.i.p.ating in case reviews with her colleagues.

With the help of the prosecutor, they were preparing to arrest others while new charges were being brought. This appeared likely to grow into a case of enormous proportions.

But the Cederen family still came up in discussion, during coffee breaks and a couple of times in their regular morning meetings. Ola Haver especially found the whole thing hard to drop. He was still waiting for the call from the convenience store in Vallby.

Really the only new thing that had transpired was the fragment of a ripped-up letter in Spanish that had been found in Cederen's garbage can outside the house in Uppsala-Nas. It had been written by someone named Julio Pieda, evidently complaining about something-that much they had been able to determine once it had been pieced together. The interpreter Eduardo Cruz had been called in again, but he had found it difficult to provide any additional context. Julio Pieda wanted money, that much was clear.

It was also not certain which country the letter came from. There were a couple of reasonable a.s.sumptions about the country of origin. Most of them a.s.sumed it was Spain. Lindell had questioned Mortensen to see if he had heard the name Pieda, but he denied all knowledge.

Perhaps an employee at the MedForsk branch in Mlaga had been unfairly terminated or treated badly and was now turning to the person in Sweden whom he knew and trusted.

Mortensen had promised to check with his Spanish contacts to see if there was or had ever been a Julio Pieda on their books.

The interpreter believed the letter came from the Dominican Republic. There was something about the handwriting, the quality of the paper, and perhaps above all the tone that suggested the Caribbean. He could not give any firm reasons, it was more of a feeling, he said, and Lindell believed him.

Now the letter had been pasted together as well as could be, copied, and archived. Perhaps Julio Pieda would emerge at some point in the future. Lindell had driven to the site of the accident by the Uppsala-Nas church, and on one occasion she saw someone standing by the side of the road whom she became convinced was Pieda.

That morning she had been poring over the letter with the interpreter and trying to understand it. It was as if the writer's words had sounded out across the valley. Lindell had learned the words in the letter by heart. It was written in a primitive, almost childish manner.

"We have experienced so much suffering," the interpreter had quoted, "and now we turn to you with a prayer for..." The rest of the sentence was missing.

"'We have experienced so much suffering,'" Lindell had repeated as she stood by the side of the road. Josefin's father would be forced to drive by this site many times during the remainder of his life. And he would always be reminded. The unjust, almost unimaginable events that had occurred in this place would carve deep wounds into him. Perhaps he would start taking another way around?

What suffering had Julio Pieda experienced? What role had Cederen played in all of this? Lindell walked along the road. A car went by slowly. The driver peered at her with interest and Lindell stared back grimly.

A few words from Josefin's diary returned to her. "Sven-Erik went out with Isabella. Was gone for two hours. Why does he drink so much? Jack says it is the stress, that he needs to rest. I don't believe him. Sven-Erik loves stress. He doesn't touch me anymore. He doesn't love me."

If Cederen no longer loved his wife, why run her over? Was there a financial motive? Lindell dismissed the idea. What had happened that morning? He had fetched the paper, had chatted with the neighbor as usual, and had driven away, apparently on his way to work. He had taken the dog. Where was it now?

Josefin had prepared for her annual pilgrimage to her mother's grave. No one saw her leave the house. She spoke with no one that day, either on the telephone or on the road. She did as she had planned to do, had taken her daughter by the hand and walked out the door.

Lindell could not understand it. And she hated not being able to understand.

Fourteen.

In fourth grade, Ann Lindell had played a mole in a school play. She had worn a fur costume-extremely hot and much too big-and a hat altered to look like the animal's snout and blind eyes.

She had stumbled when she made her entrance but had recovered by improvising and scoring extra points with her clumsy moves. When she took her final bow, she had bowed so low that the hat fell off, and as she fumbled for it, she had looked out over the sea of people in the audience and spotted her father, clapping wildly, as flushed as she was, enthusiastic, his mouth open and his eyes on her alone.

Everyone else in the school auditorium-parents and teachers-had faded away into a vague blur, still shouting and clapping but essentially faceless. Her father's face was the only one.

He had brought a case of soda for the entire cast to enjoy in the wings after the end of the show. Everyone had been talking excitedly at the same time. The costumes had come off and none of the sweaty ten-year-olds had yet recovered from the complete success that they now realized they had played a part in.

Ann's father had supplied soda and praise for the show. The teacher, Miss Bergman, had wept with joy. Ann had drunk Pommac. The crowded s.p.a.ce behind the stage had smelled of sweat and happiness.

Viola was outside the chicken coop wearing an incredible mole-brown coat with a worn fur collar. On her head she had a knitted cap in a gray shade, and on her feet, the obligatory boots with the tops turned down.

Midsummer's Eve. The sun had just broken out from behind the clouds. Viola had been collecting eggs in the chicken coop. She had just stepped out into the yard and was standing completely still, watching Ann as she drove up in front of the house and parked her car. The sun revealed her gaunt frame. Viola smiled, not too warmly or too long, but enough for some of Ann's nervousness to pa.s.s. She stepped out of the car and walked over to the old woman.

They stood in front of each other. It had been six months since the last time. Ann resisted the impulse to hug her.

"Happy Midsummer!"

Viola snorted in reply.

"The hens have taken a vacation," she said sourly, and rattled the basket where a dozen or so eggs lay tucked into a bed of newspaper.