Could she really have a dead cop on her hands? The discovery transformed the whole situation. The alarm bells going off in her head tripled in volume. Reaching in cautiously, she quickly searched the body for a weapon. There was none. The man didn’t look like police. The beard and the clothing seemed wrong to her. But what did a Swedish plainclothes look like, anyway?
Brand stood. Recoiling from what she had seen, she crossed the room. She raised a single window shade. Weak, cloud-filtered sunlight helped illuminate the ghastly scene. A second victim sprawled a short distance from the first. The body, also male, lay blood-covered and motionless.
As she knelt to feel for a pulse, the corpse abruptly came alive. Rearing up, the man grabbed Brand in a bloody hug. She tried to escape. One forearm gripped her around the neck. Her face came inches away from the wounded man’s. Something was wrong with his eyes. They stared blankly as Brand struggled to free herself.
With a jolt of fear she saw the blade coming at her.
10.
Brand parried the stab of the knife. She quickly realized that the last-gasp attack had exhausted her opponent. His thrusts now resembled the feeble movements of an infant. She was able to relieve him of the weapon. She tossed the knife away. It clattered to rest beneath the bank of windows.
The man collapsed heavily back down to the floor. He sighed out a long, rattling wheeze, then lay still. When Brand put two fingers to his neck, she felt an uncertain pulse fade and disappear.
Silence returned to the scene. Brand had a momentary sense that her presence was intrusive. She had experienced the feeling before. In the company of the dead, the living are an insult. She rose to her feet. Blood now marked the front of the down vest she wore. She left the knife where it lay and moved to search the premises. To her relief she discovered no more torn apart bodies.
She tried to parse out the footprints. Full and partials patterned the floor. Someone had evidently allowed a large animal into the room. A bear? A panther? A wolf? Were there big cats in the Swedish wilds?
Brand thought that an attack dog employed as a weapon of violence was more likely. The size of the paw-prints indicated a bullmastiff or a boerboel, perhaps a Great Dane. She tried to remember what the fearsome red-eyed beast in “The Hound of Baskervilles” had finally turned out to be. A large dog of some sort. A wolfhound?
On the job in New York City, Brand had encountered intentional, human-directed canine attacks. It happened only a few times, but those were memorable. In some neighborhoods pit bulls were virtually the only breed around. Naturally there were incidents. But what Brand saw in front of her rose to a whole different level.
At the rear of the main room she entered an adjacent hallway. The polished wood flooring along the whole corridor remained clean and unbloodied. Brand gingerly opened a closed door. She expected the worst. It was only a small, empty, powder-room style bathroom.
She stepped inside. The conventional white porcelain facilities appeared modern and ordinary. Several discarded tissues were piled beneath the mirror of the vanity, caked with some sort of heavy white paste. The doors to a small cabinet below the sink were open. The cabinet itself was empty. There was no blood in evidence anywhere.
Brand moved forward and pulled aside the white plastic shower curtain. In the stall lay several items of discarded clothing. She took a pen from her pocket. Using it as a probe, she fished out a miniskirt, then another dress. Brand was surprised to see it was a wedding gown.
Whoever had worn the garment had to have been in some kind of distress. There were tears and rips everywhere. Brand slid her finger into a small, specially made pocket torn open in the waistband. A place to hide a bride’s mad money? She understood nothing of what she was seeing.
Witnessing the scene had worked a transformation in her. She hesitated before returning to the main room. She was no longer a suspended police detective visiting from NYC. All her on-the-job expertise prompted a new urgency. She became a detective again. An insistent, familiar urge kicked in, a determination to discover what had happened. It was the only way to quell the fear the killings had triggered in her. Somehow she felt this was the true, fundamental role of the police: to help beat back the natural terror that extreme violence triggers in the hearts of ordinary citizens. Cops worked to tease order from chaos.
She stuffed both the discarded gown and the white-smeared tissues into the side pocket of her down vest. As she emerged from the bathroom hallway, Brand realized her breath had a ragged, uneven rhythm to it. She needed to clear her head. She crossed to the single unshaded window. She gazed out for a moment at the deserted, darkening yard. Something bothered her about the whole set-up, something beyond the deadly hurt which humans inflict on one another.
Hammar had brought them here. He insisted on immediately heading up the driveway to the house. Why?
Beyond the grounds, at the edge of the birch woods that skirted the property, Brand detected movement. A hallucination bloomed in the faded afternoon, a sight she could hardly credit. The light was becoming increasingly unreliable.
A dark silhouette passed among the trees. Some sort of animal moved there. She caught a glimpse of a mottled coat of fur, a flash of sesame color. Brand had only a quick look. The form vanished
