Uh-huh. Ylva didn’t think so, and she didn’t much care about motivations anyway. She liked the idea of covering her granddad’s ceremony in case Detective Brand thought to crash it. Granted, taking the woman out might mar the anniversary festivities somewhat. Then again, it could also be seen as the ultimate tribute to Loke Voss. It depended how you looked at it.
The small casement window in the tower apartment had a clear view of the square. Ylva was forced to lean halfway out onto the gabled roof to position herself properly, but really, nothing could be easier. She could make a shot like that in her sleep.
The .22 long rifle bullet is not ordinarily that powerful of a load, much smaller and slower than those used in many sniper situations in the military. But Ylva did what she could to boost the speed and heft of the projectile, choosing a lead-tipped, steel jacketed magnum cartridge. With the wallop that a round like that would pack, she didn’t think she would need a second shot.
As she sighted the rifle in, she had a thought that the distance and angle resembled Lee Harvey Oswald’s kill shot in Dallas. Eighty meters, more or less, tower window to square, though the angle—she gauged it at twenty-two degrees—was slightly greater. And of course Oswald had to hit a moving target, the presidential limousine moving at five kilometers an hour.
As kids she and Malte had fooled around trying to duplicate Oswald’s shot on the Västvall estate. They hooked a little four wheeler ATV to a flatbed wagon with a couple of pumpkins on it, then cajoled Hans Voss into driving it slowly past where the two of them had positioned themselves atop a farm silo. Of course their younger cousin had objected to the arrangement, but they extended the length of the rope between the target wagon and the four wheeler, so there was no real danger.
She and Malte took turns blasting away, hooting and hollering.
“Slower!” Ylva shouted down, laughing at poor frightened Hans. “Go slower!” The boy was driving like a bat from hell attempting to remove himself from the line of fire.
It took Malte a dozen tries, but Ylva managed a bull’s-eye on her third. Not that difficult of a shot at all, despite what the conspiracy theorists might say.
53.
Stockholm is a horizontal, not a vertical city, approachable on a human scale, unlike the claustrophobic soar of New York. There are no bona fide skyscrapers, The capital’s tallest building tops out at thirty-two floors. But at least Brand had an upper story view from her apartment, or hotel room, or pied a terre—whatever her quarters might be called. There were streets, waterways, and parks visible from the twin west-facing windows. The mostly gravel gray landscape displayed a few surprising bits of green, pine trees that had hung on through the long winter.
The Stockholm archipelago made for a city of islands and bridges, tens of thousands of islands, skerries, sea stacks, tombolos, islets, and rocks, linked by the most amazing collection of bridges in the world, and Brand had come to believe that here was a good correlative for the Swedish people, connected by numberless strong bridges of community and cooperation, but after all separate, independent, immune.
Moro Part had assigned Brand a minder, Sandri, stationed in the long empty corridor outside her room, always there whenever she peeped out. She never seemed to catch the man coming into the room, but kaffe and food had always appeared as if by magic whenever she woke from sleep.
Three rooms, a small suite. Brand experienced moments when it felt like a jail. Taking full advantage of the bathroom’s elaborate Jacuzzi-nozzled tub, she bathed twice within twelve hours, washing off the verminous stench of the deer shack. Black silk pajamas, her size, materialized, her filth-ridden clothes disappeared, only to show up again cleaned and neatly folded. She was a captive princess.
Even with all that, she was shocked to find a bottle of prescription Adderall in the medicine cabinet. Moro Part, she decided, knew her all too well. She slipped back into addiction as if it were a comfortable suit of clothes. Mostly, though, Brand allowed herself to be bored, a blessing in the wake of the constant drumming, recently, of excitement, violence, and event. A feeling gnawed at her, a question she was not ready to answer. Had she joined the enemy, let go of her pledge to uphold the law, disgraced herself and the work she had done for the past twenty years?
She stayed off social media, focusing instead on local news feeds and newscasts. She understood enough Swedish to figure out the reporting. Film footage helped. The media played the incident along the Hede River as drug violence, three Norwegian Turks murdered by hands unknown. The limited reporting made no mention of the Voss name or the incongruous presence of a spotted hyena at the scene.
Moro had informed her that Dollar Boy had gotten his pink-haired head fatally split open, but there seemed to be no mention of that in news reports, either. Nor of Hammar or Brand. The furious knife-fight in the hospital room at Sveg had likewise somehow been kept off the media radar. What was going on?
Twenty-nine hours into her stay, Sandri the Quiet Minder knocked and entered. The windows showed dark, with an overcast sky reflecting the city lights. Brand had just woken up, luxuriating in bed despite needing to pee. She lazily felt another nap coming on.
“Mademoiselle,” Sandri said, addressing her in accented French. He handed over an iPhone, then discreetly withdrew to his post out in the hall.
A FaceTime convo was already in progress on the cell phone’s screen. Some poor mook totally swaddled in gauze moved a pair of parched-looking lips in a failed attempt at speech.
Veronika couldn’t speak, she was so relieved.
