His voice stops and he quickly clears his throat, angry at himself.
Claudia nods her head and gently moves her fingertips over her daughter’s cheek.
“Viola, Violita…”
She draws back her shaking hand and Joona slowly says, “I’m very, very sorry for your loss.”
Claudia looks faint but reaches out a hand to the wall for support. She turns her face away and whispers to herself.
“We were going to the circus on Saturday. I bought tickets as a surprise for Viola…”
They all look at the dead woman: her pale lips and the arteries in her throat.
“I’ve forgotten who you are,” Claudia says in confusion. She looks at Joona.
“Joona Linna,” he says.
“Joona Linna,” the woman says with a thick voice. “Let me tell you about my daughter Viola. She is my little girl, my youngest, my happy little…”
Claudia looks at Viola’s white face and it seems as if she might fall to one side. The Needle pulls over a chair, but Claudia waves it away.
“Please forgive me,” she says. “It’s just that… my eldest daughter, Penelope, had to endure so many terrible things in El Salvador. When I think about what they did to me in that jail, when I remember how frightened Penelope was, how she’d cry and scream for me… hour after hour… but I couldn’t answer her, I couldn’t protect her…”
Claudia meets Joona’s eyes and takes a step toward him. Gently he puts an arm around her, and she leans heavily against his chest, trying to catch her breath. She moves away again, not looking at her daughter’s body, gropes for the chair back, and then sits down.
“My greatest joy was that Viola was born here in Sweden. She had a nice room with a pink lamp in the ceiling, toys and dolls. She went to school. She watched Pippi Longstocking on television… I don’t know if you can understand, but I was proud that she never needed to be hungry or afraid. Not like us, not like Penelope and me. We wake up at night and are frightened that someone will come into our house and hurt us…”
She falls silent and then whispers, “Viola was happy, just happy…”
Claudia leans forward to hide her face in her hands as she weeps. Joona lays a hand gently on her back.
“I’ll go now,” she says, even though she’s still crying.
“There’s no hurry.”
She manages to contain herself, but then her face twists again into tears.
“Have you talked to Penelope?” she asks.
“We haven’t been able to reach her,” Joona says in a low voice.
“Tell her that I want her to call me because-”
She stops suddenly. Her face turns pale. Then she looks up again.
“I just thought that she might not be answering me when I call because I… I was… I said some horrible things, but I didn’t mean anything, I didn’t mean anything-”
“We have already started a helicopter search for Penelope and Bjorn Almskog, but-”
“Please, tell me that she’s alive,” she whispers. “Tell me that, Joona Linna.”
Joona’s jaw muscles tense as he reassures her by the pressure of his hand and says, “I will do everything I can to-”
“She’s alive, tell me that,” Claudia whispers. “She must be alive.”
“I will find her,” Joona says. “I know that I will find her.”
“Tell me that Penelope is alive.”
Joona hesitates and then meets Claudia’s black eyes as a few lightning sensations sweep through his heart. A number of unseen connections click in his mind, and suddenly he hears his own voice answer, “She’s alive.”
“Yes,” Claudia whispers.
Joona looks down. He’s not able to recover the thought behind the certainty he’d felt that prompted him to ignore caution and tell Claudia that her eldest daughter was still among the living.
16
Joona follows Claudia Fernandez to the waiting taxi and helps her in. Afterward he stands motionless until the taxi disappears around a curve in the driveway. Only then does he dig in his pocket for his cell phone. When he realizes he must have forgotten it, he strides back to the forensic department and quickly enters The Needle’s office, takes The Needle’s phone, and sits in The Needle’s chair. He dials Erixson’s number and waits while the call goes through.
“Let people sleep,” Erixson drowsily answers. “It’s Sunday, you know.”
“Confess that you’re at the boat,” Joona says.
“Yes, I am,” Erixson confesses.
“So there was no explosive,” Joona says.
“Not your average bomb, no. But you were still correct. This boat could have gone up at any second.”
“What do you mean?”
“The power cables’ insulation is seriously damaged in one spot because of crimping. Someone stuffed an old ripped seat cushion behind the cables, too. Very flammable. So it’s not that the leads are making contact-that would trip the circuit breaker. But they are exposed. If you kept running the engine, eventually you’d cause a discharge, with an electric arc running between the two power cables.”
“What happens then?”
“The arc would reach a temperature above three thousand degrees Celsius and it would ignite the seat cushion back there,” Erixson continues. “Then the fire would find its way to the hose from the fuel pump, and bang!”
“A quick process?”
“Well, the arc could take ten minutes to form, maybe longer, but after that, everything would happen fast- fire, more fire, explosion-and then the broken boat would fill with water and sink, fast.”
“So if the motor was started, there would soon be a fire and an explosion sooner or later?”
“Yes, but the fire wouldn’t necessarily be considered arson.”
“So the cables were damaged by accident and the sofa cushion just happened to be lying there?”
“Of course.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“Not for a second.”
Joona pictures again the drifting boat. He clears his throat and says thoughtfully, “If the killer planned all this-”
“He’s not your normal killer,” Erixson finished.
Joona repeats the thought to himself once the conversation ends. Again he agrees. The average murderer is motivated by passion, by greed, by anger. Emotions are almost always involved even to the point of hysteria. Only later does he fumble to cover his tracks and fabricate an alibi. This time it appears the killer had followed a sophisticated strategy right from the start.
And still, something went wrong.
Joona stares into space, grabs a legal pad from The Needle’s desk, and writes Viola Fernandez on the first page. He circles her name and then writes Penelope Fernandez and Bjorn Almskog beneath it. The women are sisters. Penelope and Bjorn are in a relationship. Bjorn owns the boat. Viola asks if she can come with them at the last minute.
Joona feels the road to finding the motive behind this murder is long. He’s still internally convinced that Penelope Fernandez is alive. It’s not just a wild hope or an attempt to give comfort. It’s intuition. Based on what, he cannot say. He’d caught the thought in flight, but lost it again before he could capture it and pin it down.
If he followed the usual procedures put forth by the CID, suspicion would immediately fall on Viola’s boyfriend
