THEY MISSED THE most important thing. . . .
What the hell am I supposed to see from here?
Jessica bites her lip and tries to concentrate. She is exhausted, but she’ll stand here staring out this damn window until dawn if it will help them solve the case. The Malleus Maleficarum stamped into the roof of the Koponens’ house is nothing more than a wan memory in the wake of above-zero temperatures, a fresh layer of snow, and the technical investigators, like graffiti someone tried to scrub off and paint over. She sees the street, the surrounding houses, the Koponens’ large lot. The frozen sea, the islands hundreds of meters out. What the hell am I not getting?
Jessica looks at the street outside the Koponens’ house, where she gave chase to the murderer in white coveralls the night before. The hedge. She imagines the horned figure on the ice raising his hand to greet her from the darkness.
Gradually Jessica grasps that the light in the room is preventing her from seeing clearly. Everything outside mingles distractingly with the reflection of Mrs. Adlerkreutz’s bedroom: the bed, the mirror, the writing desk, the chair. The Persian rug, the small chandelier, Mrs. Adlerkreutz standing in the doorway. Jessica herself.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Could you please turn off the lights?” Jessica says in passing, and tries to focus her vision out the window. A few seconds pass, but nothing happens.
“Could you please turn off the lights, just for a moment?”
Jessica takes another look at the old woman’s reflection in the window. Then at herself. The mirror image is blurry, a bad copy that only remotely resembles a woman named Jessica von Hellens. A woman who doesn’t exist. Her eye sockets are like two enormous black saucers, deep wells that lead to some strange dark place. She sees horns sprouting from her head. And then she sees a girl lying motionless on the bed in the hotel room in Murano, every single cell of her body on fire, from her fingertips to her toes. It’s as if she is lying in the middle of an inferno. She stares at the ceiling, the stucco detailing, and hates herself and her life. The fact that she has a vast fortune doesn’t make it the least bit more tolerable, maybe just the opposite. Everything she touches turns to shit. Jessica feels the steak knife from room service at her wrist—the knowledge that she could put an end to all of this at any moment is a relief. All that’s needed is a tiny movement, and she could rest forever in this suite of a mediocre hotel in this city that stinks like a fish market.
Tears well up in Jessica’s eyes. Not from sorrow or poignancy but fear.
She now understands that she has come to this room to see her own reflection. Just as her mother urged her to do in the dream. She is looking in the mirror.
Jessica slowly turns around and puts her hand on her holster. Mrs. Adlerkreutz is still standing in the doorway, hands crossed over her breast. She is not looking at Jessica. She is looking around the bedroom in apparent satisfaction. Then Mrs. Adlerkreutz lowers her eyelids, inhales the old-house smells of wood and tar.
Jessica hears her phone ring, but she doesn’t answer. She knows she needs two free hands now. She has to get out of here. Yusuf is still downstairs.
Jessica gulps and takes a step closer to the old woman. “We’re going now.”
“You’re just like your mother.” Now Mrs. Adlerkreutz smiles almost tenderly.
Jessica senses the goose bumps forming on her skin, feels her heart skip a beat and then compensate by pounding like crazy. “What?” she mumbles, unlocking her holster.
The old woman is no longer frail and sleepy. “You have it too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your brain. It’s unique. It’s why you are the way you are.”
“I’m leaving now. Yusuf!” Jessica shouts hoarsely, but there’s no response from downstairs. “Yusuf!” she shouts again, more loudly this time, and steps toward Mrs. Adlerkreutz.
Then footfalls carry from somewhere. But they aren’t coming from the stairwell; they’re coming from somewhere closer. A door creaks.
“Theresa was ill,” Mrs. Adlerkreutz says as Jessica wraps her hand around the pistol.
“Yusuf!”
“And even so, she was still my favorite pupil.” The old woman lets out a little laugh.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jessica’s voice is trembling. She aims the gun at Mrs. Adlerkreutz and the doorway behind her. My favorite pupil. The photographs from the corridor and the stairwell crash into Jessica’s consciousness. Her grip on the pistol tightens. “Move!”
At the same instant, two figures appear in the doorway. Jessica can make out curved horns in the darkened hallway, and a wail escapes her lips. The gun becomes an unsteady extension of her hand as she backs up to the window.
“Yusuf!”
“Yusuf isn’t coming,” Mrs. Adlerkreutz says as one of the men steps past her and into the room. “And that pistol of yours . . . you might as well lower it. It has been rendered harmless.”
Jessica feels panic wash over her; her ears roar, and her vision blurs. Then she feels the pain. She aims her pistol at the leg of the slowly approaching horned monster, but the trigger won’t move: the firing pin is jammed. What the hell? Micke checked the gun. The pistol falls to her feet. She feels a large man’s arms around her and a wet towel on her face. As she struggles with every ounce of strength she can muster, she senses herself gradually sinking somewhere deep: into an ever-murkier pond impenetrable to the sun’s rays.
“Everything’s fine, sweetheart.”