The Shadow Woman

He parked the car outside the police station and walked along the stream. Outside the city hall a couple was drinking something out of transparent plastic cups. That’s not raspberry juice, Halders thought to himself, seized by an urge to grab the cups out of their hands and arrest them-kick up a real stink over some petty shit. Society ought to send a clear message: zero tolerance. Every little goddamn crime should be treated as a crime. Anyone riding a bike without a light should lose their license. Anyone caught drinking in public should be sent to jail. That’s what they did in New York. The city would calm down. The country would calm down.

Everything and everyone would calm down, except me, thought Halders. The more I think about calm, the angrier I get. How far would I go if society gave me the go-ahead for my brand of zero tolerance?

He waited together with a thousand others to cross over Gotaleden and suddenly found himself crowded together with ten thousand others on the Packhuskajen quay. The fireworks began. Halders’s head was popping. He bought a mug of beer and sat at the very end of a long table and scowled at a man opposite him. The man moved after a few minutes.

Halders raised his gaze to the sky and saw the fireworks explode. The light reflected in people’s faces. Their foreheads looked like they were tattooed and their cheeks and chins were stamped with symbols that he couldn’t decipher. He emptied his mug. He thought of Aneta in her white bed at the hospital. The bad thoughts brewed.

Winter had crawled into the playhouse and lain down on the air mattress. It was only partially inflated, and he felt the grain of the floorboards in the small of his back. Maybe there was old air inside the mattress, some that had remained in the hard corners. Maybe he was lying on air from his childhood.

He reached out his arms and felt the walls on both sides of him. He fell asleep.

14

WINTER BIKED HOME AT DAWN. HE HAD MADE AN ATTEMPT AT around midnight, against his better judgment.

“Go lie down in the guest room,” his sister said, and that’s what he’d done.

Now the streets were being swept clean after the night, water flowed over the asphalt, and he nearly fell off his bike while illegally cutting across Linneplatsen.

In the apartment he kicked off his sandals and bent down for the newspaper. The Goteborgs- Posten had covered the murder with restraint, without a lot of speculation.

Helene was without a name, a cold body in cold storage in a white zippered bag. It was Friday morning, twenty-four hours after he had seen her face for the first time. He tried to remember her features, but they melded together with other lifeless faces he’d seen.

The sun climbed onto the roofs of the buildings on the other side of Vasaplatsen. Winter adjusted the blinds and took out beans and a mill and ground the African coffee, its aroma wafting in his face, invigorating him even before it was brewed.

He put butter and cheese on two French rolls that he had bought at the local bakery on the ground floor of the building. The butter was cold in his mouth. He ate the cheese by itself, two thick slices. Streetcars rattled past below, and a seagull took off from the balcony with a shriek and darted awkwardly past the kitchen window. Winter drank his coffee and heard the flap of its wings in the early morning stillness.

The meeting was a short one. Winter took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, rolled up his sleeves, and brushed away something from his pant leg.

Cerruti, Sara Helander thought. Cool. Quality.

“So we still don’t know who she is,” Winter said.

“We’re going through that community today-what’s the name?” Fredrik Halders said.

“Helenevik,” Bertil Ringmar answered.

“There’ll be seven of you,” Winter said.

“Wow.”

“That’s as many as we could scrape together.”

“I meant that’s a lot,” Halders said. “I’m impressed.”

Winter looked at him but said nothing. Fredrik was starting to have increasingly obvious problems with his attitude. Is that how it is to grow old? To step across the magical crest at forty and slowly slide downhill?

“How many of us are going to be working with our fellow officers?” Bergenhem asked.

“What do you mean?” Carlberg said.

“The little party the guys over at investigations had,” Helander said.

“Can’t they investigate that themselves?” Halders asked.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Janne Mollerstrom asked.

“Investigation… investigations department.”

“Cool it, Fredrik,” Winter said.

“You and Borjesson handle the party animals,” Ringmar said to Bergenhem.

“Some of them are doubtless a little tired,” Bergenhem said.

“They’re not the only ones,” Helander added.

Everyone in the room-all twenty-four of them-suddenly thought of the upcoming weekend. Many of them would have planned the season’s big crayfish party for later that evening or Saturday night. Would they have the energy to have a good time? Would they even make it home? How much overtime was the brass ready to give them?

“Tired? Who’s tired?” Winter said, and yawned and waved auf Wiedersehen to the group. There was a tie-up at the door as everyone tried to get out at the same time.

Winter took the stairs up to forensics and went in through the double doors that protected the department from unwanted visitors.

He was let through. Immediately to the right was the laboratory section-the evidence lab with two employees, a firearms examiner, and a chemist to analyze narcotics and clothing and do the chemical processing of fingerprints.

A few men were sitting in the new coffee room. The National Center for Forensic Science had come through with a substantial sum of money for the department just minutes before the premises were to be deemed inadequate. Beier was able to refurbish and expand the single lab into a rough lab, where materials were brought in; a room for clothing and fiber analysis; a chemistry and toxicology lab; the trace evidence lab that Winter had just walked past; a fingerprint lab; and an isolation room, since they didn’t want to put the clothes from the victim and suspect in the same room.

Impressive, Winter thought. He hadn’t been here for a while. Beier came striding down the corridor. “Want some coffee?”

“You bet.”

They walked back down the corridor, and Beier shut the door behind them.

“What should we start with?” he asked.

“The car.”

“That’s some blurry footage.”

“But it is a Ford?”

“We think so.”

“Escort CLX?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“Could you see anything more of the driver?”

“Jensen is sitting with it now, trying to peer through the blur, but he’s not very optimistic, nor am I.”