“It’s difficult to say how long she has been lying there, but her body is quite well preserved, as you can see, as a result of the cold weather. The perpetrator also covered the body with moss, so no animal got to her. Fanny was fully dressed when she was found, but her sweater was torn at the neck. Her clothing will be examined more closely when the ME arrives, but we’re leaving her body where it is until he gets here tomorrow. I can make an educated guess and say that she died from lack of oxygen. Do you see the red specks in the whites of her eyes and the bruises on her neck? Without going out on a limb, we can assume that she was strangled.
“She apparently offered some resistance, since her sweater was torn. I’m hoping that the perpetrator has left some evidence on her clothing-skin particles or saliva, for instance. The body was protected by the woods and the moss. It was also lying in a hollow, so we hope we can find some traces from the killer. We’ve taken scrapings from under her fingernails. There are skin particles that most likely came from him. Everything is being sent to SCL, as usual.
“When it comes to the location of the body, we can conclude that she was probably killed elsewhere and was then dumped in the woods. There are no traces of blood or anything else that might indicate the murder was committed at the site. We haven’t yet been able to examine the body, but we did discover one thing. She has cuts on her wrists.”
Sohlman clicked through the photographs until he found the pictures of Fanny Jansson’s hands. Cuts were clearly visible on both of her wrists.
“Someone has cut her here. She probably did it herself.”
“So she did try to kill herself, after all,” exclaimed Norrby.
“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” Sohlman objected. “I think it’s more likely that she was one of those girls who cut themselves. It’s not all that uncommon among teenage girls who are depressed. She had cut herself in other places as well, for instance behind her ears. The cuts are superficial, so there’s no question of a real suicide attempt. It’s possible that there are more cuts hidden under her clothing.”
“Why would she do that?” asked Wittberg.
“Girls who cut themselves do it because they don’t know how to handle their fears,” Jacobsson explained. “When they cut themselves, all their anxiety collects in that one spot. It’s also possible that they experience the pain and the blood as liberating. It’s something concrete and controllable. The moment they cut themselves, all their other anxieties disappear; their fear becomes concentrated in the part of their body that is being subjected to pain.”
“But why would she cut herself in such odd places?”
“Probably so that it wouldn’t be visible.”
Knutas switched on the lights and looked at his colleagues with a serious expression on his face.
“We now have two murders to investigate. The question is whether there is any connection between them. What does a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl have in common with an alcoholic man in his sixties?”
“As I see it, there are two obvious connections,” said Kihlgard. “First, alcoholism. Fanny’s mother drinks, and Dahlstrom was an alcoholic. Second is the racetrack. Dahlstrom bet on the horses, and Fanny worked at a stable at the trotting track.”
“Those are two reasonable connections,” said Knutas. “Is there anything else that might not be as obvious? Anyone?”
No one replied.
“All right,” he said. “That’s all for now. Both lines of inquiry need to be explored without bias.”
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14
It felt as if the dawn would never come on that cold December morning. Knutas was having oatmeal with his wife and children in the kitchen. They had lit candles, which made their shared breakfast a bit more pleasant. Lina and the kids had baked saffron rolls while he was out at the site where Fanny was found. He was going to need them. Today he had to pick up the ME at the airport and then drive back out to the forest clearing. He put on a wool sweater and got out his warmest winter jacket. The frost of the past few weeks was holding on.
The children were upset and worried, and they wanted to talk about Fanny’s murder. They had been greatly affected by the death, since Fanny wasn’t much older than they were and they knew her by sight. Knutas ran the palm of his hand over their cheeks as they stood at the front door on their way to school.
In the car on his way to the airport, he felt a cold sweat come over him, and he was overcome by such nausea that he had to pull over and stop for a moment. Everything swam before his eyes, and he felt a tight pressure in his chest. Occasionally he suffered from panic attacks, a form of anxiety, but it had been a long time since the last one. He opened the car door and tried to calm his ragged breathing. The images of Fanny’s body, combined with his worries about his own children, had apparently brought on this attack. With his type of work, it was impossible to protect his kids from all the shit he was forced to deal with: drunkenness, drugs, and violence. As his children were growing up, society seemed to be getting more and more brutal. It was probably worse in the big cities, but even here on Gotland the change was noticeable.
He tried not to say too many negative things about his job. At the same time, he could seldom come home and tell them that he’d had an uplifting sort of day. Of course he was always relieved when a case was solved, but it was hardly a matter of feeling elated. When an investigation was successfully completed, he just felt tired afterward. There was no sense of catharsis, as some people might think. Instead, he mostly had a feeling of emptiness, as if he were utterly deflated. Then all he wanted to do was go home and sleep.
After a few minutes he felt better. He rolled down the window and slowly continued driving to the airport.
The ME was waiting for him outside the terminal. His plane had landed earlier than anticipated. It was the same doctor that Knutas had worked with last summer, a lean man with thinning hair and a horselike face. His extensive experience lent him an air of gravity and authority. On their way out to the site where the body was found, Knutas told the doctor about everything they knew so far.
By the time they arrived, it was ten fifteen in the morning, and Fanny Jansson’s eyes were still staring up at the gray December sky. Knutas grimaced with dread as he thought about what the beautiful girl lying on the ground might have gone through. Her body looked so small and thin under her clothing. Her cheeks were brown and smooth, her chin softly childish. Knutas was annoyed to feel tears welling up in his eyes.
He turned his back and gazed at the woods, which were dense and inaccessible. Over near the tractor road he could see that the forest thinned out a bit. Since he had previously studied the map of the area, he knew that some distance away there were open fields and pastures. A crow cawed from far off, otherwise everything was silent except for a quiet rustling from the dark green branches of the trees. The ME was now fully involved in his examination, and would be for the next several hours. Erik Sohlman and a couple of the other techs were assisting him with his work.
Knutas realized that his presence wasn’t needed. Just as he got into the car to drive back to police headquarters, Karin Jacobsson called him.
“There’s one person who has ties to both Dahlstrom and Fanny Jansson.”
“Really? Who is it?”
“His name is Stefan Eriksson, and he’s the stepson of Fanny’s aunt in Vibble. She has a daughter of her own, but she divorced the father early on and married someone else, a man who had a son from a previous marriage. Fanny and this Stefan have seen each other for years at various family gatherings and the like. He’s forty years old, married with two children, and he also happens to own a horse at the stable.”
“I know that. We’ve been down the whole list,” said Knutas impatiently. “What about him?”
“He was an intern under Dahlstrom when he was in high school. He worked at the newspaper for two weeks. After that he was a temp for Gotlands Tidningar and later he also worked for Dahlstrom when he started his own business. This Eriksson owns a cafe in town, the Cafe Cortado on Hastgatan, but his hobby is photography.”
“Is that right?” exclaimed Knutas in surprise. This was new information to him.
“He and Dahlstrom may have kept in contact over all these years, even though Eriksson denied it when Wittberg and I interviewed him. A most unpleasant type of person. I could easily imagine him-”
“All right, but let’s not jump to any conclusions,” Knutas interrupted her. “What else?”
