Page 58 of The Living and the Dead

Gerd sounded gloomy. Siri opened her mouth to say something but didn’t quite know how to putit.

“So, listen,” Gerd said instead. “Now I’m thinking Killian Persson has a motive, after what we saw yesterday. If he’s with Felicia, and Mikael forced himself on her, then…”

Gerd didn’t finish her sentence. Siri tried to find the right words, but nothing useful came to her. She looked at theBook of Enigmas,which she was still holding.

“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly.”

“Maybe we should bring him in. When we get the test results.”

The words stung. “I just want you to know that, I mean, what we did yesterday, and the way we did it, I’m not going to go along with something like that again.”

Silence. A grunt. “But we got the sample. That’s how we’ve done it forever.”

“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t okay, and you know it. We had no legal right to take that sample.”

“Who cares?” Gerd scoffed. “As long as we move the case forward? We needed to do it. We can’t just stand around twiddling our thumbs.”

“Halmstad’s going to be furious. After all, when it comes down to it, this is their investigation.”

“Halmstad is always furious,” said Gerd. “Goes with the territory.”

Long seconds passed.

“I just needed to say that,” Siri said.

“And now you have.”

A click. Siri sat there on her parents’ bed.

Out in the living room, something broke and one of the kids started crying, a loud and pitiful wail.

43

The swelling on Killian’s nose had subsided. All that was left was a scab of dried blood. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt under his unzipped winter jacket. The path to the cabin had been shoveled after the day’s snowfall. As the cold swept in, the ground turned to ice.

On the table in the cabin was a wrapped present. The paper was red with silver curlicues and said “Merry Xmas” in English. The ribbon had spirals of white.

He picked it up and held it out to Sander.

“Merry Christmas.”

Sander stared at the present, feeling feverish. Killian clearly hadn’t wrapped it himself; his packages always looked like someone had sat down on them by mistake. He wondered if Felicia had doneit.

“But I don’t have anything for you,” Sander said without takingit.

“That’s okay.” Killian smiled uncertainly. “Here. Merry Christmas.”

Sander hesitantly accepted the gift but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t very heavy. He considered throwing it at the wall.

“What did you want?”

He had been blinded to all but his own feelings until now, but Sander was starting to realize that something really was wrong. Even so, he found himself unable to care.

“The cops were here yesterday, late last night, and they took asample of my blood. They’re going to compare it to the blood on the steering wheel in the car.”

He fell silent, as if trying to read what this might mean in his friend’s face. But Sander revealed nothing.

“Okay,” he said, with neither judgment nor sympathy—just as a statement.