TUVESSON, LILJA, AND MOLANDER were sitting around the oval table, eating chicken salads out of plastic take-out containers and waiting for Klippan, who had called the meeting, to show up. Tuvesson couldn’t believe three small pieces of chicken, dry iceberg lettuce, a little canned corn, and a few olives constituted a “gourmet chicken salad” these days. She decided to balance out the scanty contents of her take-out with a cigarette after lunch.
“Has anyone heard from Risk?” Molander asked.
Tuvesson shook her head. “No, why would we? He’s on vacation.”
Molander nodded mutely.
“Ingvar, what was I supposed to do? I had no choice,” Tuvesson explained.
“I know. It’s just a little... unfortunate.”
“You’re definitely not the only one with that opinion,” she said.
“Just so you all know, I took the liberty of checking up on Risk,” said Lilja. “Did any of you know he was fired from his previous job in Stockholm?”
Molander shook his head.
Tuvesson sighed. “Shouldn’t your hands be full enough with this investigation?”
“I just wanted to know a bit about his background. I thought it would be helpful if we were going to be working together.”
“Irene, what are you suggesting? Yes, he used poor judgement and went too far, but don’t you think you might have done the same thing in his position?”
“You mean if I were in love with the victim’s wife?” Lilja said.
“That was a teenage crush. We have no idea how he feels about her now.”
“That’s exactly the problem — we don’t know. And it doesn’t seem to have been a one-time thing. I’ve seen the Stockholm police department’s investigation into him from last winter, and if you read between the lines he went rogue up there, too.”
“What did he do?” Molander asked.
“For one thing —”
“Irene, let it go,” Tuvesson said, deciding to have at least two cigarettes when she got the chance.
“But —”
“Great, you’re all here already,” Klippan said as he walked in.
Tuvesson secretly thanked Klippan for changing the subject. Lilja was right, of course: this behaviour was exactly what Stockholm had warned her about when she’d initially inquired about Risk. Most of his colleagues had been in agreement about him: Risk was a good police officer, one of the best, but he did things his own way, and you never knew what he was up to or what the consequences might be. Tuvesson had wanted those characteristics in a police officer. She thought the others had become far too comfortable, although she would never say it out loud. Her officers were certainly professional and dependable, but they acted like they no longer had anything to prove, and they’d stopped taking risks or thinking outside the box, which was where Risk came in. Their almost-zero margin of error might look good in all the reports, but the reality was another story — in certain cases, it was necessary to take risks and push the limits. Sometimes you ended up on the wrong side of the boundary.
Klippan told them a female employee from the McDonald’s in Åstorp had contacted him about someone she thought could be the perpetrator. He passed around a composite sketch based on her description. “She was working last Thursday night and didn’t recognize Schmeckel or Mällvik.”
They were thinking about Schmeckel and Mällvik as if they were two different people, two different killers, Tuvesson contemplated. And now a sketch of a possible third perpetrator was travelling around the table. How many possible suspects would they have before they were finished?
“Who are we looking at here?” Molander asked, holding up the sketch.
“Apparently he went to the McDonald’s just after midnight last Thursday. He ordered a Chili McFeast Deluxe meal, which is only served on Thursdays, but Thursday had just become Friday at that point.”
“So they refused to give him a Chili McFeast?” Lilja asked. Klippan nodded.
“I suppose they were just following orders,” said Molander.
“But this guy wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Klippan went on. “He argued that it was still Thursday when he got in line and insisted on being allowed to order his meal. The girl at the counter tried to explain to him that she didn’t make the rules. She was already serving the next customer when he gave her a warning.”
“What sort of warning?” Tuvesson asked.
“He warned her not to ignore him.”
The others exchanged glances.
“He was angry because she skipped him and served the next customer instead?”
Klippan nodded.
“What happened next?”
“He got his Chili McFeast.”
“So that’s how you do it,” Molander said with a grin.
“She didn’t think it was an empty threat. It was clear he was serious.”
Tuvesson took the composite sketch and studied it. As usual, Klippan had asked Gudrun Scheele, a half-blind, wheelchair-bound art teacher who had retired more than fifteen years ago, to do the portrait. She lived in the same retirement home as Klippan’s mother. He had seen some of her portraits once on a visit and asked if she could help them with the sketch of a rapist who had been going after jogging women in Pålsjö forest. The man was identified three hours after they published Gudrun’s picture, and they were able to apprehend him soon after. Since then, the Helsingborg police had employed her regularly, and the officers helped each other ignore the fact that she might die any day now.
Gudrun usually worked in charcoal, and today was no exception. Tuvesson couldn’t help being impressed by Gudrun’s talent. It ought to have been physically impossible for her even to hold a pencil with those trembling hands, but she sure could draw, and most of the time it took only a few strokes of the charcoal for her to bring forth a personality from a few extremely vague witness statements. Yet there was something that differentiated this portrait from all her previous composite sketches. Aside from the eyes, which were staring straight at her and looked truly threatening, the face lacked a clear personality. The man was so ordinary looking that Tuvesson thought she wouldn’t have been able to recognize him even if he were sitting right in front of her — a common problem with composite sketches. You could see almost anyone in a sketch if you tried hard enough because they were so vague, but this was the first time she had experienced it with one of Gudrun’s pictures.
“Are you going to release the sketch?” Molander asked Tuvesson.
“I’ll check with Högsell,” said Tuvesson, “but I’m leaning toward holding off. This feels so nonspecific that it could match more or less anyone. And, besides, there are too many variables in the equation. The cashier didn’t recognize Schmeckel or Mällvik; she came up with an entirely different person who happened to look threatening, which doesn’t get us very far.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a different person,” Molander said. “He’s changed his appearance before, so maybe this is a new look?”
Silence descended over the table. A few minutes later, Tuvesson realized that the composite sketch perfectly matched the feelings she was having about the perpetrator: they were searching for a phantom, an evasive creature who seemed to be just an arm’s length away one second, only to go up in smoke the next. He could be anyone: a Claes, a Rune, or whatever else he was calling himself.