Joona Linna Crime Series Books 1-3: The Hypnotist, The Nightmare, The Fire Witness

“But you will?”

“We’ll see,” Joona said.

He crossed the small garden. A pink bicycle with training wheels was propped against a sandpit. Joona headed up the front steps, turned on his torch, opened the door, and walked into the hallway. The dark rooms were filled with silent fear. Just a few steps in and the adrenaline was pumping through him so hard, it felt like his chest would explode.

Purposefully, Joona registered it all, absorbing every horrific detail until he couldn’t take any more. He stopped in his tracks, closed his eyes, felt back to guilt deep inside him … and continued to search the house.

In the bleak light of the hallway, Joona saw how bloody bodies had been dragged along the floor. Blood spattered the exposed-brick chimney, the television, the kitchen cabinets, the oven. Joona took in the chaos: the tipped-over furniture, the scattered silverware, the desperate footprints and handprints. When he stopped in front of the small girl’s amputated body, tears began to flow down his face. Still, he forced himself to try to imagine precisely what must have happened; the violence and the screams.

The driving force behind these murders couldn’t have been connected to a gambling debt, Joona thought. The father had already been killed. First the father, then the family; Joona was convinced of it. He breathed hard between gritted teeth. Somebody had wanted to annihilate the whole family. And he probably believed he had succeeded.

8

monday, december 7: night

Joona Linna stepped out into the cold wind, over the shivering black-and-yellow crime tape, and into his car. The boy is alive, he thought. I have to meet the surviving witness.

From his car, Joona traced Josef Ek to the neurosurgical unit at Karolinska University Hospital in Solna. The forensic technicians from Linköping had supervised the securing of biological evidence taken from the boy’s person. His condition had since deteriorated.

It was after one in the morning when Joona headed back to Stockholm, arriving at the intensive care section of Karolinska Hospital just past two. After a fifteen-minute wait, the doctor in charge, Daniella Richards, appeared.

“You must be Detective Linna. Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Daniella Richards.”

“How is the boy, doctor?”

“He’s in circulatory shock,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“He’s lost a lot of blood. His heart is attempting to compensate for this and has started to race—”

“Have you managed to stop the bleeding?”

“I think so, I hope so, and we’re giving him blood all the time, but the lack of oxygen could taint the blood and damage the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys.”

“Is he conscious?”

“No.”

“It’s urgent that I get a chance to interview him.”

“Detective, my patient is hanging on by his fingernails. If he survives his injuries at all, it won’t be possible to interview him for several weeks.”

“He’s the sole eyewitness to a multiple murder,” said Joona. “Is there anything you can do?”

“The only person who might possibly be able to hasten the boy’s recovery is Erik Maria Bark.”

“The hypnotist?” asked Joona.

She gave a big smile, blushing slightly. “Don’t call him that if you want his help. He’s our leading expert in the treatment of shock and trauma.”

“Do you have any objections if I ask him to come in?”

“On the contrary. I’ve been considering it myself,” she said.

Joona searched in his pocket for his phone, realised he had left it in the car, and asked if he could borrow Daniella’s. After outlining the situation to Erik Maria Bark, he called Susanne Granat at Social Services and explained that he was hoping to be able to talk to Josef Ek soon. Susanne Granat knew all about the family. The Eks were on their register, she said, because of the father’s gambling addiction, and because they had had dealings with the daughter three years ago.

“With the daughter?” asked Joona.

“The older daughter,” explained Susanne.

“So there is a third child?” Joona asked impatiently.

“Yes, her name is Evelyn.”

Joona ended the conversation and immediately called his colleagues in the Reconnaissance Division to ask them to track down Evelyn Ek. He emphasised repeatedly that it was urgent, that she risked being killed. But then he added it was also possible that she was dangerous, that she could actually have been involved in the triple homicide in Tumba.

9

tuesday, december 8: morning

Detective Joona Linna orders a large sandwich with Parmesan, bresaola, and sun-dried tomatoes from the little breakfast bar called Il Caffè on Bergsgatan. The café has just opened, and the girl who takes his order has not yet had time to unpack the warm bread from the large brown bags in which it’s been delivered from the bakery.

Having inspected the crime scenes in Tumba late the night before, and in the middle of the night visited the hospital in Solna and spoken to the two doctors Daniella Richards and Erik Maria Bark, he had called Reconnaissance once more. “Have you found Evelyn?” he’d asked.

“No.”

“You realise we have to find her before the murderer does.”

“We’re trying, but—”

“Try harder,” Joona had growled. “Maybe we can save a life.”

Now, after three hours of sleep, Joona gazes out the steamed-up window, waiting for his breakfast. Sleet is falling on the town hall. The food arrives. Joona grabs a pen on the glass counter, signs the credit slip, and hurries out.

The sleet intensifies as he makes his way along Bergsgatan, the warm sandwich in one hand and his indoor hockey stick and gym bag in the other.

“We’re playing Recon Tuesday night,” Joona had told his colleague Benny Rubin. “We have no chance. They’re going to kill us.”

The National CID indoor hockey team loses whenever they play the local police, the traffic police, the maritime police, the national special intervention squad, the SWAT team, or Recon. But it gives them a good excuse to drown their sorrows together in the pub, as they like to say, afterwards.

Joona has no idea as he walks alongside police headquarters and past the big entrance doors that he will neither play hockey nor go to the pub this Tuesday. Someone has scrawled a swastika on the entrance sign to the courtroom. He strides on towards the Kronoberg holding cells and watches the tall gate close silently behind a car. Snowflakes are melting on the big window of the guardroom. Joona walks past the police swimming pool and cuts across the yard toward the gabled end of the vast complex. The façade resembles dark copper, burnished but underwater. Flags droop wetly from their poles. Hurrying between two metal plinths and beneath the high frosted glass roof, Joona stamps the snow off his shoes and swings open the doors to the National Police Board.

The central administrative authority in Sweden, the National Police Board is made up of the National Criminal Investigation Department, the Security Service, the Police Training Academy, and the National Forensic Laboratory. The National CID is Sweden’s only central operational police body, with the responsibility for dealing with serious crime on a national and international level. For nine years, Joona Linna has worked here as a detective.

Joona walks along the corridor, taking off his cap and shaking it at his side, glancing in passing at the notices on the bulletin board about yoga classes, somebody who’s trying to sell a camper, information from the trade union, and scheduling changes for the shooting club. The floor, which was mopped before the snowstorm began, is already soiled with bootprints and dried, muddy slush.

The door of Benny Rubin’s office is ajar. A sixty-year-old man with a grey moustache and wrinkled, sun-damaged skin, he is involved in the work around communication headquarters and the change-over to Rakel, the new radio system. He sits at his computer with a cigarette behind his ear, typing with agonising slowness.