Page 50 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)
Shortly after the sun dips below the horizon, the blue glow of the atmosphere begins to emerge. The ultramarine light is reflected in the thin layer of snow among the houses, almost as though the ground itself were illuminated.
Joona pulls up to the police cordon and is quickly waved through. He drives along the row of stationary patrol cars and parks behind the command unit. After getting out, he makes his way over to the inner cordon, holds up his ID and, once he is allowed to pass, continues down the drive.
A large white forensic tent has been erected on the driveway, lit up from the inside like a marquee at a crayfish party.
Joona watches as an officer in uniform vomits to one side of the garage while his partner rubs his back.
Forensic technicians wearing protective suits over their thick winter coats are busy photographing the ground, and their flashes light up the snow with an aggressive brightness.
Joona says hello to an officer with a red nose standing guard outside the tent, and asks for Erixon.
‘Knock, knock,’ the officer says as he pushes back the rustling material.
‘Who’s there?’ a woman’s voice replies.
‘Police.’
‘Police who?’ she asks without looking up.
‘Police, open the door,’ he says with a grin.
Joona ducks down and steps into the tent. He greets the woman from the National Forensic Centre and sees her blush.
There is a whirring space heater on the ground, and the hot air is making the roof of the tent bulge upwards.
The biggest of the two tables is cluttered with BioPack bags, storage envelopes, boxes, OH film, transport sleeves, bottles of Basic Yellow 40 and gelatine lifters.
Erixon is working on his laptop computer at the other table. The burly forensic technician is wearing white coveralls and a hairnet, a face mask hanging around his neck.
‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ he sighs, looking up from the screen.
‘Far from it,’ Joona replies.
‘The responding officers forced entry,’ Erixon explains with a nod towards the broken front door. ‘The killer had screwed it shut from the outside .?.?. We haven’t touched anything, just photographed, numbered things and secured prints .?.?.’
Erixon continues, telling Joona that the perpetrator also seems to have taken a sturdy piece of wood from a pile at the rear of the house and screwed it above the garage door, preventing it from opening any more than about twenty-five centimetres.
‘We can talk again once you’re done,’ he rounds off. ‘I’ll keep working till then.’
Joona pulls on a pair of coveralls and shoe protectors and heads into the house.
Picking his way across the step plates, he crosses a lounge and continues up the stairs.
For some reason, news of the murdered woman in Stocksund had fallen between the cracks, when it should really have reached him as soon as the call came in.
He assumes the delay is precisely because, for the first time, the victim was female.
It wasn’t until Erixon arrived at the scene and asked whether Joona had already stopped by that the mistake was realised.
Joona cuts through the kitchen and into the cold bedroom, pausing in the middle of the floor. He turns back to look at the splintered door and listens to the recording of the emergency call.
Ida has locked herself in her room, and the sound of the axe hitting the door is audible in the background as she talks to the operator. She sounds desperate and afraid.
‘What do you mean by a madwoman?’
‘A woman with an axe, she’s broken in.’
The minute the operator understood the seriousness of the situation, he asked for an address to dispatch a car, but the call ended as he was trying to ascertain other, vital information.
The air in the bedroom is the same temperature as outside.
Joona glances out onto the balcony.
There are no footprints in the snow, just small pockmarks from the shards of glass that fell when the glass in the door broke.
The bed has been heaved onto its side against one wall.
Joona opens the door to the linen cupboard and studies the passageway for a moment, then leaves the bedroom and heads through to the nursery.
The large toy cupboard is at an odd angle, away from the wall.
This must be how Ida got out, he thinks.
The killer broke through the bedroom door, realised the room was empty and smashed the door to the balcony.
Joona steps over a small toy crocodile and makes his way back out into the kitchen. There is a broken wineglass on the brown-tiled floor, he notices.
He goes back down the stairs and says hello to the forensic technician working in the lounge.
‘The lock was drilled out,’ the man says, nodding to the sliding patio doors.
Joona thanks him for the information, turns back out of the lounge and opens the door to the boiler room.
The killer sealed every exit and got into the house via the deck.
Joona moves past the humming ground source heat pump.
The forensic technicians’ lights from the garage seep into the room through the cracks around the door up ahead.
In addition to the axe, the killer had a power tool and a drill bit with a hardened tip.
Joona opens the door to the garage and pauses on the first step plate, dazzled by the glare.
Every inch of the room is illuminated, banishing any shadows beneath the bikes with flat tyres, skis and gardening tools.
Erixon comes into the garage with a folding chair beneath his arm. Without a word, he sits down, sighs and looks around the crime scene.
The air is heavy with the stench of blood and faeces.
It is as though time has ground to a halt here.
More than half the floor is covered in blood, and there are also spatters on the walls and across the ceiling, on the stacks of car tyres and a blue roof box.
Dark blood has also trickled down the side of a plastic box full of baubles.
A red-and-blue children’s bicycle with pictures of Spider-Man on the frame stands as some sort of mute spectator to the massacre, the tread marks from its tyres visible at the very edge of the pool of blood.
Joona composes himself and forces his eyes to linger on every detail, piecing together the sequence of events in his mind.
The dismemberment that took place here is the most brutal to date.
The woman’s head has been severed from her body and chopped into several pieces, and her fingers are scattered across the rough concrete floor, alongside segments of her arm and legs and feet.
The lower half of her torso is lying belly down, with bare buttocks, while the top half is slumped on its side, wrapped in a purple silk robe.
On a segment of leg, stretching from thigh to knee, there are a number of visible cuts and superficial axe wounds.
Joona attempts to read the room, methodically working his way between ragged flesh, blood-drenched cuts, bone marrow, cartilage and brain tissue.
‘I’m so sorry this happened to you,’ he says as he pulls on a new pair of latex gloves.
‘You’re still talking to the dead, I see,’ Erixon mumbles.
‘Sometimes.’
Joona isn’t sure why he does it. Perhaps it is simply his way of showing respect to the victim, however cold and clinical the crime scene investigation might be.
He wants to tell Ida that he sees her as an individual, as someone in need of integrity, dignity, and some form of justice.
There is a soft squelching sound as Joona moves forward and gently turns the two pieces of her torso over.
As a result of the sheer amount of blood she has lost, the livor mortis is practically non-existent, nothing but a small, pale cloud where the upper section of her thigh was touching the floor.
She has grazes on her hips, and her blonde pubic hair is matted with blood.
Her robe has fallen open to reveal a creamy white breast, and above her belly button, there are two cuts in the shape of a V.
A few centimetres of her crudely severed spine are visible, and thick blood is still seeping out of the mangled tissue.
The killer seems to have been overcome by an almost chaotic rage.
It reminds Joona of the kind of atrocities sometimes committed by soldiers after being whipped up into a frenzied thirst for revenge, with the key difference being that this deed has nothing sexual about it. None of the wounds are directed at the genitals, anus, breasts or mouth.
Ida hasn’t been tortured, but this time the dismemberment was central.
She fled to the garage, and the door hit the plank of wood screwed to the outside, preventing her from escaping. She tried to crawl through the gap, was dragged back inside and killed almost immediately, Joona thinks as he takes off his gloves.
‘Done already?’ Erixon asks.
‘No, but the case has just taken a pretty sharp turn, and I need to talk to the team before heading over to Uppsala to speak to Hugo Sand again.’
Erixon makes a half-hearted gesture to the body parts and blood on the floor.
‘You didn’t look, but there aren’t any defensive wounds on her arms,’ he says.
‘Of course not.’
‘No?’
‘She was killed too quickly for that.’
‘With a blow to the spine or the back of her head, you think?’
‘Her spine,’ Joona replies as he leaves the garage.