ERNE IS SITTING at the table, gazing at his clenched fists. It’s a quarter past eleven at night, and the team is gathered in the conference room again. Rasmus is sitting at the table, looking solemn; he appears to be counting his fingers. Nina has locked her weary eyes on the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling.
Over the course of his lengthy career in law enforcement, Erne Mikson has come across many cases that, despite dogged efforts, have not been solved. But this one is too big to bury in the Unsolved folder. If the worst comes to happen, the investigation will continue long after disease has claimed his life. Suddenly the terminal illness feels like a verdict of not guilty, a ticket to some better place where evil has no power.
The door opens, and Mikael enters the room.
“Well?” Erne asks. Nina and Rasmus still look pale.
“I got hold of the food delivery guy. And I told the restaurant to close their doors. The manager assured me the food was handed off straight from the kitchen to the delivery guy, and that there’s no way the teeth would have gotten into the food in their kitchen.”
“At what stage—”
“At any stage. We’ll be able to hear what the delivery person has to say soon.” Mikael sits down. “Where are the teeth?”
“Photographed and delivered to Sarvilinna. I don’t know if she’s going to be able to get anything useful out of them.”
The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling flicker a few times.
“This is so damn sick, Erne,” Mikael says, rubbing his knuckles. “How long are we supposed to put up with this?”
Erne raises an eyebrow. “Why are you asking me? I’m not the one who sprinkled a dead man’s teeth into your burger,” he snaps.
“It was a pita sandwich,” Rasmus mumbles.
“It could be a jerkoff sandwich for all I care,” Erne thunders, then coughs a few times into his fist and continues in his earlier, hoarser voice: “Apparently you want to bring in Karlstedt and Lehtinen. I don’t think it’s going to change anything.”
“But, Erne, you have to admit,” Nina now says reflectively, without the slightest hint of disrespect, “that the clock is ticking. Having those men under surveillance might have been a good idea earlier today, but in light of everything that has happened, I don’t think we’re going to win anything that way anymore.”
“Especially since they know we’re listening. That became clear beyond a doubt when—”
“When we listened to the recordings,” Erne interrupts Rasmus, and hacks into his fist. He can taste the phlegm coughed up from his trachea, taste the blood on his tongue.
“How many more people have to die?” Mikael asks him.
Erne looks at the trio sitting around the table and feels utterly empty. Maybe the call from the doctor really has made everything meaningless. He shuts his eyes and suddenly realizes the worst thing isn’t awareness of your own death but knowing when it will come. That you can try to forget your mortality until the day you’re given an excruciatingly precise timeline of the life left to you. A deadline. He might have wanted to depart the world suddenly after all, a healthy man. A heart attack on the ski track, or while he was asleep. A car crash while listening to good music.
“Let’s talk about that in a minute, after Jessica and Yusuf get here,” Erne says, and the others grunt their approval. It’s clear that the wolf pack has smelled his frailty. The sniping and ignoring of direct orders would have been unheard-of just a little while ago.
“Rasmus,” Erne finally says, swallowing down the foul taste in his mouth.
At that moment, the door opens and Jessica steps in, followed by Yusuf.
Erne casts a pregnant glance at the principal investigator but decides to save the tirade he has prepared for a better moment. All he says is: “Sit. Rasse has the floor.”
Rasmus presses his eyeglasses more firmly to his nose and picks hesitantly at the collar of his sweater. In the course of the day, Rasmus has scooped himself a generous serving of self-confidence from somewhere, but the way he glances around like a dog expecting to be disciplined hasn’t gone anywhere.
“The fact of the matter is that a correlation for the seamstress’ death, despite it not being a ritual murder, can also be found in the books.” Rasmus reaches under a thick stack of papers and pulls out a paperback, its pages adorned with a plumage of dozens of multicolored Post-its. Then he gulps audibly and reads out loud.
But the eerie shadow drew back to where it had emerged from a moment earlier. So smoothly and swiftly that Esther was no longer sure she’d even seen it. Esther knew she was alone, because she had locked the door after her last customer left. She had never been afraid in her shop before, never allowed her imagination to gallop away with her, steer her thoughts. Something had changed. Maybe it was because of what she had seen earlier that day. Only now did she understand it was no coincidence. And then Esther feels a cold wave wash over her. Before she has time to make sense of what she has just realized, she looks out the glass doors and sees something that doesn’t belong there. For a moment the contours line up with those of her reflection. But then the figure moves, transforming into a distinct entity of its own.
“In the next chapter, the police find Esther dead in her shop. She’d been killed by a blow to the head,” Rasmus says, shutting the book.
“Why didn’t this come up earlier? That a dressmaker—”
Rasmus laughs so sharply that Yusuf leaves the sentence unfinished.
“Esther is not a dressmaker. And there aren’t any other similarities between the instances either. Only the MO. A blow to the head, which happens to be the most common way in the world of murdering someone.”
“But it said in the book that she’d seen something, the meaning of which she understood right before someone killed her.”
Hearing Jessica’s voice rouses Erne from his state of deep concentration. “Yes, that’s the motive for the murder in Koponen’s book, but it doesn’t have any similarities to what happened today. In the book, Esther sees the priest in charge of the Inquisition kissing a woman suspected of being a witch.”
“And the priest kills her?”
“Yes. The priest can’t allow his relationship with the suspected witch to come out, so he creeps into Esther’s bakery and gets rid of her.”
“So Irma Helle was killed by a female priest who’s having a secret affair with the cantor?”
Mikael’s quip earns him a few smiles.
“It seems likely that this murder was committed for one reason: because Esther the baker was killed in the book,” Rasmus says, rolling his tongue around his mouth as if he is searching it for something.
“One body is still missing,” Erne says suddenly.
“That’s true,” Rasmus continues. “No one has been stabbed with a dagger yet.”
Erne nods lazily, lifts his elbows to the table, and leans his head into his hands. “So we can assume that at this moment a man is lying somewhere in Finland—presumably the metropolitan Helsinki area—with a dagger in his chest. We just haven’t found him yet.”
“Who says the crime has already happened?” Rasmus counters, lowers his gaze to the table, and jots down something in his notebook.
“You heard what Rasse said, Erne,” Mikael says, pulling out a brand-new pack of gum. “Bringing those two assholes into the station might help us save some poor guy’s life.”
Erne replies calmly: “How were you planning on extracting the information about the next victim from them? Beating it out of them?”
“If that means an innocent man doesn’t die. Sure.”
“Hup! Let’s go with that for a minute.” Erne stabs a finger at Mikael. “An innocent man. Are we sure the victims are truly innocent?”
Nina frowns. “And aren’t guilty of, say, being witches?”
“Maria Koponen ordered not only her own death dress, but those of several other people as well. That doesn’t sound completely innocent to me.”
“I agree. It’s really fucking weird,” Yusuf says, tracing his life line with a fingertip. “But I would still start from the assumption that Maria Koponen was following someone else’s instructions and didn’t have the slightest idea what the black dresses she ordered from Irma Helle were for.”
“Her husband’s instructions, of course,” Mikael interjects.
“Maybe,” Erne says, and stands. “I think you guys need to talk to Laura Helminen one more time. Poke, pry, understand, comfort, pressure . . . get her to open up. Because if Helminen’s hiding something, if she has a connection to the other victims, we need to find out, damn it.”
“You’re right, Erne.” Jessica taps her fingertips together under her chin. “If whatever connects the witch hunters’ victims is in some way illicit or even illegal . . . then Laura Helminen might have a reason to lie.”
“Exactly.”
“Yusuf and I will handle it.”
“Be careful, Jessica. Nothing has changed since this afternoon. Make sure she doesn’t throw a fit again,” Erne says.
“What about Karlstedt and Lehtinen?” Mikael asks.
Erne turns and glowers at his subordinate. Masticating his gum, Mikael looks like a big, harmless cow. Maybe he’s right. They have to start taking risks now. He might as well ditch the battle for predominance.
“Fine. Make sure they’re picked up from their homes at exactly the same time.”