Studio Sex aka Studio 69 / Exposed

***

The air in the main entrance of the newspaper hit them like a cold, wet towel. The damp glistened on the marble floor and made the bronze bust of the newspaper shine. Annika shuddered and felt her teeth give a rattle.

Tore Brand, the porter, sat sulking in the glassed-in reception booth in the far left-hand corner. 'You're all right!' he shouted as the small group passed him on their way to the elevators. 'You can go outside and defrost now and then. This place is so damn cold that I've had to bring the car heater in so I don't get frostbite!'

Annika tried to smile but didn't quite manage. Tore Brand hadn't been allowed to take this year's holiday until August, something he considered to be little less than harassment.

'I'm going to the bathroom,' Annika said to the others. 'You go on upstairs.'

She rounded Tore Brand's little cubicle and could smell that he'd smoked a cigarette on the sly again. After a moment's hesitation she chose the disabled washroom before the ladies'. She didn't want to be jostling in front of the sinks with a bunch of sweaty women.

Tore Brand's plaintive voice followed her into the washroom. She locked the door by turning the door handle upward and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked awful. Her face was blotchy and her eyes red. She opened the cold-water tap and, holding up her hair, bent forward and let the cold water run over her neck. The enamel of the sink was icy cold against her forehead. A rivulet of water trickled down her spine.

Why do I do this to myself? she thought. Why am I not lying on the grass by Pine Lake, reading Vogue?

She pushed the red button on the hand dryer, held out the neckband, and tried to dry her armpits. Without much success.

***

Anne Snapphane's desk was empty when Annika got back to the newsroom. Two mugs with dried-up coffee were on the desk, but the Coke was gone. Annika figured Anne had been sent out on a job.

Berit was talking to Spike over by the news desk. Annika flopped onto her chair and let the bag fall to the floor. She felt dizzy.

'So, how was it?' Spike called out.

Annika hastily dug out her pad and walked over to the desk.

'Young, naked, plastic tits,' she said. 'Lots of makeup. She'd been crying. No decomposition, so she can't have been there for very long. As far as I could see, her clothes weren't anywhere nearby.' She looked up from her pad.

Spike gave her a nod of approval. 'Well, I'll be damned… Any terrified neighbors?'

'A twenty-nine-year-old mother, Daniella, with a small child. She'll never cross the park at night again. 'It could have been me,' she said.'

Spike took notes, nodding appreciatively. 'Do they know who she is?'

Annika pressed her lips together and shook her head. 'Not that we know.'

'Let's hope they release her name during the evening. You didn't see anything that indicated where she lived?'

'Her address tattooed on the forehead, you mean? Sorry…'

Annika made a smile that Spike did not return.

'Okay, Berit, you do the police hunt for the killer, who the girl was- check with her family. Annika, you do the scared mother and check the cuttings on the old murder.'

'We'll probably be working together a bit,' Berit said. 'Annika has information from the crime scene that I don't have.'

'Do whatever you like,' he said. 'I want a report on how far you've got before I go to the handover at six.'

He swiveled round in his chair, lifted the receiver, and dialed a number.

Berit closed her pad and walked over to her desk. 'I've got the cuttings,' she said over her shoulder. 'We could go through them together.'

Annika borrowed a chair from the next desk. Berit took out a heap of yellowed sheets from an envelope marked 'Eva Murder.' The killing had obviously taken place before the newspaper was computerized.

'Anything that's more than ten years old you'll find only in the paper archive,' Berit said.

Annika picked up a folded sheet, the paper feeling stiff and brittle. She ran her eyes over the page. The typeface of the headline seemed straggly and old-fashioned. A four-column black-and-white photo showed the north side of the park.

'I was right,' Berit said. 'She was climbing the steps and somewhere halfway up she met someone going down. She didn't get any farther. The murder was never solved.'

They sat down on opposite sides of Berit's desk and became absorbed in the old stories. Berit had written several of them. The murder of young Eva really was similar to today's.

A warm summer night twelve years ago, Eva had been climbing the steep hill that was a continuation of Inedalsgatan. She was found next to the seventeenth step, half-naked and strangled.

For a few days the stories were both numerous and long, with big pictures high up on the page. There were reports of the murder investigation and summaries of the autopsy report; interviews with neighbors and friends; and a piece with the headline 'Leave Us in Peace.' Eva's parents were pleading with someone for something, holding each other and gazing earnestly into the camera. There were public rallies against violence- violence against women and violence on the streets. A memorial service was held in the Kungsholm Church, and a mountain of flowers collected at the murder scene.

Strange that I can't remember any of this, Annika thought. I was old enough to understand things like that.

As time went by the stories became shorter. The pictures shrank and ended up farther down on the page. Three and a half years after the murder, a short item reported the police bringing someone in for questioning but subsequently releasing him. After that it went quiet.

Now Eva was newsworthy again, twelve years after her death. The comparison was inevitable.

'So what do we do with this?' Annika wondered.

'Just a short summary,' Berit replied. 'There's not much else we can do. I'll type out what we've got- you do your mother and I'll do Eva. By the time we've done that, Krim ought to be on the case and then we can start making some calls.'

'Are we in a hurry?' Annika asked.

Berit smiled. 'Not really. Deadline isn't until four forty-five A.M. But it would be good if we finished a bit before, and this is a good start.'

'What'll happen to our stories in the paper?'

Berit shrugged. 'Maybe they won't get printed at all. You never know. It depends on what's going on in the world and on how much paper we've got.'

Annika nodded. The number of pages in the paper often determined whether a story would be printed. It was the same at Katrineholms-Kuriren, the provincial paper were she normally worked. In the middle of the summer, the management would economize on paper, partly because ad revenue went down in July, partly because nothing much happened. The number of pages always went up or down by four, as there were four pages to a printing plate.

'I have a feeling this may get quite high priority,' Berit said. 'First the news event of the murder itself, the police hunt, and then a spread on the girl, who she was. After that they'll have the recap of the Eva murder, your frightened mother, and last, possibly, a piece on 'Stockholm, City of Fear.' That's my guess.'

Annika leafed through the cuttings. 'How long have you worked here, Berit?'

Berit sighed and gave a faint smile. 'It'll be twenty-five years soon. I was about your age when I came here.'

'Have you been on the crime desk all this time?'

'Christ, no! I started out with animals and cooking. Then, in the early eighties, I was a political reporter. It was