“Hult?” Baron Kron asked. “What do you say?”
“It depended on how it was done, or course. To kill a visiting cop—”
“—A suspended cop, disgraced in her own jurisdiction,” Junior cut in.
“Okay, but the job still requires a certain degree of care,” Hult said. “In this particular case, my involvement must be masked. I’m not in any position to have it done myself.”
“Of course not,” Junior said hurriedly.
“If the woman could just…vanish?” Magnusson suggested.
“Turn up with the spring thaw,” the Baron agreed.
“Listen, gents,” Hult said, “as long as things don’t get too messy, I think I can handle any repercussions on the part of the police.”
“We are agreed, then,” the Baron said. “Try to control Ylva, Junior, will you? Bless her black heart, I know the young woman can be a terror when she wants to be.”
“What about the Sami lawyer, gentlemen?” Magnusson asked. “We have not spoken about him.”
“Already dead, or soon will be,” Junior said. He screwed up his face into an expression of disgust. “Damn, those animals stink like Satan’s anus.”
Kron gave a sweet smile. “I no longer smell it myself. The odor stems from a substance excreted from certain glands. They smear it everywhere they go.”
“Ugh,” coughed Junior. “I’m feeling as though they’ve smeared it on me.”
“Would you like to hear the term for the excreta? ‘Hyena butter’!” Kron laughed coarsely.
“I have to leave or I’ll vomit,” Junior exclaimed.“I need something to wash the stench out of my mouth.”
“Shall we adjourn to the lodge, then?” Kron suggested. “There is a cuvée of Krug I’ve been wanting to attack.”
As they left the barn, the Baron took a last glance over his shoulder at the hyena dam. She panted hungrily in the darkness of her den.
47.
Brand knew she would have to leave the medical center as soon as possible. The effects of hypothermia dissipated, leaving only a maddening prickly feeling in her extremities. She was healthy enough to go, the doctors at Sveg were willing to discharge her, but still she failed to depart.
Hammar remained in a coma. It seemed less and less likely that he would regain consciousness anytime soon. In a four-hour operation that occurred while he was still under, surgeons pieced back together the pieces of his skull, inserting as a temporary fix a series of tiny stainless steel screws into the caved-in parietal bone. They would soon be flying him via helicopter to a hospital in Stockholm.
The threat of imminent discovery by the Voss family formed the pressing reason Brand had to absent herself from the hospital sooner rather than later. Not only that, but somewhere nearby, law enforcement authorities were playing a game of connect-a-dot. They would soon place her and Hammar at the chalet along the Hede River.
She had hewed as closely to the truth as possible when explaining Hammar’s injuries to the hospital staff. He had broken through on the frozen river, she said. His nasty head wound occurred in the rough and tumble journey under the ice. As though there were sharpened battle axes submerged in the current, and the poor guy had bumped up against one of them.
Soon enough, the local cops would link what happened at the chalet near the Norway border with the comatose hospital patient and his hypothermic caretaker. The hospital staff would take a closer look at the slice in Hammar’s scalp. Questions would arise that would be difficult to evade.
It was inevitable. Brand should depart before it all came tumbling down on top of her. “Go where?” was the natural question, with “anywhere but here” being the natural response. She had to maintain her liberty. Her Dalgren relatives would be of no use. They would be the first to be contacted by any authorities searching for her.
Brand thought of Aino Lehtonen. Then of Moro Part, the Romani godfather. Her only possible allies. At the same time she feared their involvement. It was clear that Moro was not only a man of immense power in the Romani community, but also the mastermind of the revenge plot. The godfather’s tireless campaign against the traffickers felt Biblical. But we live in a world of rule of law, she reminded herself, not an Old Testament realm of eye-for-an-eye.
During the day, Brand had become something of a ghost in the medical center at Sveg. She wandered the deserted halls at all hours, slept in the lounges, ducked out for food at the village’s few restaurants. The weather remained bitter and she could not stay outside for long.
Still she hesitated to leave. Perhaps immersion in the stingingly frigid waters of the river had dazed her mind more than she knew.
The sight of a police uniform in the lobby of the hospital jolted her into action. The police woman was only checking on a victim of a car accident, but Brand took the hint. She threaded her way back up through the maze of medical center hallways to the room where Hammar had lain for over twenty-four hours now, dead to the world. The staff was well familiar with the coma victim’s helpmate, his assumed girlfriend, his guardian angel.
Entering Hammar’s room, she saw a slim, unfamiliar doctor or nurse bent over his motionless form. A female, anyway, in the midst of administering some kind of strange treatment, pressing a pillow down onto the face of the figure lying in bed.
At Brand’s entry, the woman turned her head, and despite the surgical mask Brand recognized her immediately. She had taken time to familiarize herself with as many members of the Voss family as she could. Ylva Voss was a biathlon hero who had been pictured many times in the press.
The woman reacted more quickly than Brand. She snarled what appeared to be an oddly happy greeting, as if delighted to see the American, then took up a steel bowl resting next to the patient’s bed and spun it across the room like
