Knock Knock Page 14

  “Ewert—I’d like to introduce you to some folks you should have met a while ago.”

  Marina Hermansson grabbed his shirtsleeve and pulled him toward two very young people in uniform, who had the kind of clear eyes that only exist in those who’ve just started their journey.

  “Lucas and Amelia. They’re in their final semester at the police academy. They’ve been doing their training here in the homicide unit, under my supervision. Amelia did her first training period at county criminal and Lucas just joined us from the gang task force in Tumba. They were the ones who helped me—or helped you, Ewert—analyze the folder of blank paper. And considering how things look here . . . well, I thought it was good if they saw it, too.”

  The scene would have seemed bizarre to any outside observer: three people being introduced to each other near the feet of a corpse whose eyes seemed to be on them.

  “Lucas? Amelia? This is Ewert Grens, detective superintendent and my boss. Technically speaking, he’s your boss too while you’re here. And he’s not half so dangerous as he’s trying to look.”

  Mariana Hermansson smiled at Grens, who shook the two outstretched hands, both a bit too soft, but they’d harden over time.

  “You’re basically the same age.”

  “Excuse me?”

  They spoke in unison, Lucas and Amelia.

  So anxious to do the right thing. Or at least to avoid making any mistakes.

  “The same age I was when I saw my first dead body. DB. That’s what we called them. Don’t think many people use that expression anymore.”

  “Nobody at the academy. But that’s why we’re here, Superintendent. For the reality.”

  He looked at two young people who had no idea that one day their time as a police officer would come to an end.

  Reality?

  Was that where he spent his time?

  And if so—what were those three hundred and ten dead bodies?

  “Ewert?”

  Sven Sundkvist had left the stairwell when his phone rang and gone outside for a better connection, and through the small round windows Grens had caught glimpses of him pacing, seen the slender back of his most loyal colleague. A back the detective superintendent knew so well, whose hunching over and tightening of the shoulders could only mean bad news.

  “Yes?”

  “It was the officer in charge.”

  “We’ve already got our hands full, Sven.”

  “That’s why he called. He knew we were here and why. So when he got a new alarm about ten minutes ago, he presumed we should take that, too.”

  Ewert Grens moved aside to make way for the forensic technicians photographing the dead man from various angles. But when that didn’t satisfy them, since he was still casting shadows on their object, he took a couple more long steps into the darkness of the stairwell and waved for Sven to follow.

  “What are you talking about? There’s surely someone else who can investigate whatever needs investigating. Like I said, we’re full up here.”

  “Ewert, the on-duty officer received a call from a tenant in an apartment building on Oden Street near Vasa Park. Early this morning, a middle-aged woman thought she heard ‘two loud bangs’ from the apartment above hers. When she got out of bed a few hours later, she decided to go upstairs and knock on her neighbor’s door and discovered it was open. So she went inside. And in the hall there was a man stretched out on his back with two big holes in his head, one a little to the right on his forehead and one just below his left temple.”

  Dejan Pejović’s unkempt hair, thin mustache, and liver spots that formed a face within the face were now more than that. Born in Podgorica at a time when the Montenegrin city was still in Yugoslavia. Convicted twice in his homeland—manslaughter and assault, served time in Pozarevac, Serbia’s largest and toughest prison. Immigrated to Sweden twenty-two years ago, became a Swedish citizen eight years later. A search of the police records using his social security number yielded fifty-nine hits under the key term KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED, then another twenty-four hits listed as a suspect connected to organized crime, but only one single conviction—a few months with an ankle monitor for a minor assault charge: Pejović had spit on the shoe of a police officer. The numbers of investigations and prosecutions, however, were plentiful: charges of third-degree murder and manslaughter and attempted murder and assault and battery, always in connection to notorious arms dealers, and which ended up with a lack of evidence or witnesses who refused to cooperate or who quite simply disappeared.

  Ewert Grens stretched out on his uncomfortably comfortable corduroy sofa, grabbed a new stack of papers from his wobbly coffee table, and added them to the pile already lying on his stomach. He, along with Sven, Mariana, and the young cadets, had gotten to know the dead man fairly well throughout the day—but they still had no clue about a perpetrator. No witnesses. No shoe or fingerprints. No traces of a struggle, no blood or fibers on the victim’s skin and clothing, no scrap of skin beneath the victim’s nails.

  Two executions.

  The murderer had made sure they knew that’s exactly what they were.

  Just a few hours and kilometers between them.

  The first in a stairwell on Brännkyrka Street 56. The second—Grens stretched for another pile, and sure, he could fit that on his stomach, too—in an apartment at Oden Street 88. That’s where they were called to next. Branko Stojanović. That was—had been his name. Another man lying motionless on his back. Stretched over a herringbone floor in a penthouse apartment. Jacketed bullets, half lead and half titanium, just like seventeen years ago, just like an hour ago. The two men had led similar lives as well.

  Branko Stojanović was just five months older, had grown up in Danilovgrad just a couple of dozen miles northwest of Dejan Pejović’s home in Podgorica. They served their first sentences at the same time in the same prison in Pozarevac, immigrated to Sweden the same week, and received citizenship the same month. Stojanović’s name also stood next to Pejović’s in an interrogation in the red-flagged investigation—as one of his many informal and violent collaborators.

  Their lives echoed each other as closely as any two possibly could.

  And yet there was no way they could have known they’d end up naked and side by side in forensic medicine, autopsied on the very same morning.

  Ewert Grens shifted the piles back to the table, got out of his sofa, and gently stretched his arms and stiff back while heading out into the hallway. Dark. Silent. The whole department had transformed in the late hour, other than the coffee machine. It roared just like always, stubborn and unrhythmic, like the heart of a newly operated upon person that was getting to know its pacemaker. One last cup of coffee then he’d head home. Not to sleep, he did that much better here at the station, but now and then even the hardest-working detective needs to change his clothes, water his plants, and check his mail.

  A warm and windless summer night. Pleasant to walk through. It would take him twenty-five minutes to go by foot from the station to his empty apartment on Svea Road. Once, long ago, they would have covered this ground in fifteen minutes—Anni holding his hand tight as he adjusted his pace so he could always stay close to her. He took the same path no matter the season. Kungsholms Street, Scheele Street, and then as he crossed over Barnhus Bridge and the train tracks, he started, as he so often did, to sing. An elderly couple holding hands turned in surprise, a cyclist rang his bell at the man singing too loud and off-key. Always something from the sixties, tonight it was “Lucky Lips” and perhaps there was even a dance step or two, like the ones he’d once seen Cliff Richard take. He sang, and he remembered different times, all those days that made up his life as a police officer. Half a year left. And then what? How would he ever find that rush again, find meaning, when he’d never bothered to look for it anywhere else? He let his worries swirl away with the chorus and the dance steps, and his collar was getting a little d
amp by the time he turned onto Observatorie Street. Just a few hundred meters later he caught sight of his darkened kitchen windows.

  Grens used to avoid his building’s tiny ancient elevator—the cables creaked and complained and swayed ominously—but his leg was sore, and so the detective pulled open the elevator door with the same anxious feeling as when he entered an airplane—the one that meant losing the control that held his world together.

  He saw it as soon as he stepped out onto the fourth floor and took out his keys.

  Someone had tried to get into his home.

  He froze, trying to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. Was he so deep inside the case that he’d started living it? Thrown back to another apartment where a little girl hopped around her murdered parents and siblings?

  Some of his colleagues left fluorescent wires between their doors and doorframes whenever they left home, and when they came back they used a UV flashlight to find out if anyone had opened the door and broken the thread. Looking for two pieces curled up like snakes on the floor. That was too advanced for an old detective like him. Besides, he didn’t need it. Sometimes the old methods were good enough—for example, always leaving a worn-out door handle perpendicular. Whenever Grens left his home, he would push up the handle slightly and make sure it hung parallel to the floor. And if someone else were to push it down while he was away, well, this is exactly how it would look.

  A little off, a little tired, an old handle with an old spring that couldn’t quite manage to stay upright on its own.

  Someone had tried to enter his home.

  Grens took his service weapon out of his shoulder holster and held it in front of him as he stepped into a darkened hall.

  One and a half steps. Then he stopped, listened.

  Silence.

  No movements, no breathing.

  He continued walking, one slow step at a time.

  Past the bedroom. The bathroom. His office.

  Nothing.

  Until he got to the kitchen.

  He couldn’t really see or hear anyone inside, but he sensed it.

  Somebody was in there.

  He held the gun with both hands. A much longer step, maintaining his balance. Then a rapid swing of his upper body around the corner of the wall.

  “Hold your hands . . .”

  At the kitchen table. A shape in the darkness.

  “. . . very fucking still!”

  Which suddenly moved.

  “I repeat: hands still or I shoot!”

  Grens stood at the doorstep of his own kitchen, gun pointed at a shadow sitting on one of his kitchen chairs.

  “Grens—it’s me.”

  “Hands on the table, nice and easy where I can see them!”

  “Goddamnit, Grens, lower your weapon, it’s . . .”

  It wasn’t easy to make out in the dark, but Ewert Grens was pretty sure that the figure in front of him was slowly rising from the table, maybe even stretching out a hand.

  “Don’t move, you bastard, or I’ll shoot! Last warning!”

  Then the ceiling light turned on. The intruder had been trying to reach the switch.

  “Grens, calm down, for fuck’s sake! It’s me. Piet Hoffmann.”

  Ewert Grens took the very last step into his kitchen.

  “I know what Piet Hoffmann looks like. You two couldn’t even be cousins.”

  The detective superintendent stood close to the table now, less than a meter between his gun and the intruder’s head, who had dark hair and brown eyes and puffy cheeks and a slightly crooked nose.

  “So whoever the hell you are—move again, and I’ll shoot your head. You made a big fucking mistake when you broke into a police officer’s home.”

  It was an inviting kitchen. Grand. High ceilings with sturdy, white wooden cabinets, dual ovens and shiny knobs, and in one corner there was a narrow hall whose beautifully carved wooden moldings led into a maid’s chamber. But neither visitor was thinking of that—their eyes were only on each other. Ewert Grens was staring angrily at the stranger who’d broken into his home. And the stranger continued to make small gestures to the detective superintendent without wanting to provoke the finger resting lightly on the trigger.

  “Grens—listen: I am Piet Hoffmann.”

  “You don’t look like Piet Hoffmann. You don’t sound like Piet Hoffmann. But you are guilty of breach of domiciliary peace. Unlawful intrusion into another person’s living quarters. Criminal law, chapter twenty-four, first paragraph.”

  “Grens, if you’ll just let me show you my hands . . .”

  “Keep them where I can see them, goddamnit! Palms on the table!”

  Grens hadn’t fired his service weapon very many times. He wasn’t even sure he was particularly good at it anymore. But right now he was ready to shoot, wouldn’t hesitate.

  And the man who had broken into his home had no one to blame but himself.

  “I have to be able to move my hands, Grens, so I can make you understand.”

  “Go ahead. And I’ll shoot you in the shoulder first. And if that’s not enough to stop you, I’ll aim for the heart.”

  The stranger with the crooked nose and puffy cheeks inhaled, slowly, exhaled, as if trying to slow his pulse, stabilize his voice.

  “Okay. You see, right? I’ve got my hands on your kitchen table. Just the way you want. No reason to shoot. And if I can’t show you my hands, we’ll try another way. Let’s talk.”

  “Oh you’ll talk. In court. With a defense lawyer at your side.”

  “The first time we met, Grens, was during a hostage negotiation in a maximum security prison. And you did exactly what you’re doing now—pointed a gun at my head. You even fired it! A shot that took exactly three seconds.”

  “You—whoever the hell you are—that doesn’t tell me anything other than that some fool I don’t know broke into my apartment, into my home, and sat himself down at the kitchen table where I drink my morning coffee. In my fucking chair!”

  The stranger looked down at his hands. Nodding to them again and then to the detective superintendent, as if asking permission once more to move them. Grens didn’t nod, he shook his head.

  “Just keep them frozen. If you value your life.”

  “Okay. Okay. Let’s talk some more.”

  The man’s voice seemed distressed, as if it might not hold—as if it caused him pain to keep talking.

  “The second time, Grens, we met for real. Bogotá. Gaira Café. I taught you to drink aguapanela. Sugarcane pulp and hot water. And we were no longer two freight trains headed straight for each other. I needed your help, Grens, we didn’t fight each other—we fought side by side.”

  Ewert Grens smiled. A smile that lacked any warmth. He was barely listening. He was too tired for this bullshit.

  “I’m calling a patrol car to come pick you up. Until then, you better sit there and wait just like you are now. I’ve got six months until retirement, and I’m in no mood to deal with a corpse on my kitchen floor.”

  His right hand still on his gun, pointed straight at the intruder’s head, he used his left hand to reach into his jacket’s inner pocket and pull out his phone.

  “Please calm down, Grens, for fuck’s sake.”

  “I am calm. As long as you’re calm.”

  Then he cocked his gun.

  As if to emphasize his point.

  “Listen. Listen, Grens! The last time we met it was the other way around! You sought me out, you needed my help—forced me to infiltrate a human smuggling operation in Libya and . . .”

  “Hermansson? Ewert here.”

  Grens had flipped open his phone and pressed one of its few saved numbers.

  “I’m currently standing in my kitchen and with my service weapon aimed at a burglar. I want you to send a car.”

  The female voice at the othe
r end was unexpectedly loud. Or maybe it was Grens who had the volume turned up. Or maybe he’d just turned the phone in such a way that the other side of the conversation could seep out.

  “Ewert, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. And in order to ensure that this fucking intruder also remains fine, I need you to send a car immediately.”

  “To your home address?”

  “To my home address.”

  Ewert Grens smiled. Still not particularly warmly.

  “Ten minutes. Then you’ll be in handcuffs in the back seat of a police car. I’m gonna take pleasure in testifying against you.”

  “There was a bloodstain in my kitchen, Detective, when I came home after our last meeting. It wasn’t mentioned in any of the police reports.”

  “Do yourself a favor and shut up.”

  “And in the weapon’s case in my basement. I kept my gun there, a Radom, and it was pointing in the wrong direction because somebody used it. A bullet was missing. And that too wasn’t in any of your police reports, Grens.”

  The bloodstain on the floor. The secret weapon’s case.

  And maybe now Ewert Grens started to listen.

  “And then there’s what Rasmus and Hugo like to call checkered pancakes. Something you apparently made for them, Grens, that I still haven’t really figured out. But who would know that outside my family?”

  “Checkered pancakes?”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze.

  The stranger stared at him and never looked away. Grens was starting to recognize it.

  “You said that. Checkered pancakes.”

  “Yes. I said that.”

  Ewert Grens de-cocked his gun, lowered it.

  And pulled out the other kitchen chair.

  “Hoffmann?”