Sixty-Five

It was five o’clock in the morning when Sammy Nilsson and Ola Haver stepped into the Arlanda police headquarters. The combination of morning fatigue with the tension that had mounted the previous day meant that neither one of them was particularly talkative during the short ride to the airport.

Now they were greeted by a shamelessly alert colleague. He introduced himself as Åke Holmdahl. Sammy Nilsson had a vague memory of having seen him before. Maybe they had been at school at the same time?

“Hi there, Nilsson. So you’re still around.”“Got no choice.”

“I see that the daily special is one or two Mexican delicacies. This should be a real pleasure. And your name is Haver? Gud som haver barnen kär,” Holmdahl quoted the well-known psalm “God who holds the children dear.” “But you must have heard that one before? Okay, let me tell you a little bit about how we’ve planned things out. We have people outside and in the hall, next to Avis as well as the check-in. Two officers have been stationed by the gate and two canine units are on call. All personnel have been briefed and instructed not to act until further orders. Maybe you saw them on the way in?”

Sammy Nilsson shook his head.

“Fantastic!” Holmdahl snorted. “But maybe you saw a car pulled over with engine troubles? That’s Olofsson. That’s usually his role. He will report to us if an Opel Zafira goes by. We have a couple of more cars in motion.”

Ola Haver nodded.

“Our Norrtälje colleagues are also in place. It’s their man, after all. If Alavez, number one or two, turn up we’ll nab him.”

Sammy Nilsson’s mood was gradually improving. It was as if his colleague’s enthusiasm and confidence were catching.

“Is there any coffee?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?” Holmdahl said, and Sammy Nilsson realized that even he had teenage children.

“Come with me and we’ll get you some. Have you had breakfast?”

Holmdahl led Nilsson and Haver to a small kitchen.

“The plane leaves at a quarter past eight, isn’t that right?” Ola Haver asked.

“BA to London and then on to Mexico City.”

Ola Haver gave a big yawn.

“I wish I had a ticket,” he said.

At half past nine they concluded their failure. Manuel Alavez had neither returned the rental car nor checked in for the flight to London.

Åke Holmdahl was muted. Sammy Nilsson and Ola Haver were grumpy. They felt duped.

“We should have known,” Haver said. “He wouldn’t have been this stupid.”

“We’ll have to try something else,” Holmdahl said.

Sammy Nilsson suddenly remembered where he had seen him. The Arlanda colleague had worked in the patrol division at Uppsala for a brief period of time.

Both of the Uppsala detectives took the motorway north. They had already called a disappointed Ann Lindell and told her they had come up with nothing.

When they were just passed the exit to Knivsta, Lindell called back.

Sammy Nilsson answered and then pulled over by the side of the road, looked around and started to back up to the exit.

“What are you doing?” Haver said perplexed.

“We missed him,” Sammy Nilsson said. “I’ll bet you anything that Alavez was at Arlanda, but somehow he spotted our welcoming committee. The rental car has turned up in Rotebro.”

He reached the Knivsta exit, turned down, went under the E4, then drove up onto the motorway again, this time in a southerly direction.

They arrived just after Tomas Ahlinder from forensics in Uppsala. The Opel was neatly parked not far from the commuter train station. Next to the car was a policeman in uniform and a man in civilian dress, whom Haver and Nilsson assumed was a colleague.

The latter, who said his name was Persson, turned out to be the one who had noticed the car. He lived in Rotebro and every day he took the commuter train to his office in Kungsholmen, in Stockholm.

“Sometimes my brain works,” he said with a laugh. “I happened to see the APB yesterday. I remember thinking that it was an unusual make for a rental car. And then today I catch sight of a Zafira with a somewhat odd license plate number.”

Sammy Nilsson looked at the plates, on which three letters formed the word RAR.

“What do you say, Ahlinder?”

“I’ll do an initial search and then we’ll tow it to Uppsala. If that’s all right,” he added.

“No problem for me,” the uniformed policeman said. “We’re just happy to be rid of it. Are there drugs in the car?”

Sammy Nilsson nodded. He circled the car and looked in through the windows but saw nothing of interest.

“When was it left here?” he asked.

“Late last night or this morning, if I have to guess,” Persson said. “I walked by here around seven o’clock last night and I don’t think it was here then.”

“Okay,” Nilsson said. “We’ll ask around. It’s possible someone saw something.”

He nodded at the small grocery store directly across the street.

“I’ll start there,” he said. “Ola, can you take the kiosk over there?”

One hour later, Nilsson and Haver decided to head back. A tow truck had already loaded up the Opel onto the flatbed for transport to Uppsala.

The door-to-door efforts in the neighborhood had already yielded results. It was the manager of the small grocery who, shortly before seven that morning, had observed a light-haired man next to the car. He had noticed that the man was wearing sunglasses even though it was not a sunny morning. As the grocer was setting up an advertisement on the sidewalk, he had seen the man walk toward the commuter train station.

That was all.

“Light-haired,” Sammy Nilsson said as they overtook the towtruck on the motorway. “Can it have been an accomplice?”

“If he had something to do with the car,” Ola Haver said. “We don’t know if he was the one who parked it there.”

“It’s thin,” Sammy Nilsson agreed. “But if the car really was left there early in the morning then it could work. Alavez parks the car, because he doesn’t want the car to be sighted near Arlanda, gets himself to the airport somehow, sees something that makes him suspicious, and skips the flight.”

“It doesn’t add up,” Haver objected.

“What?”

“It just doesn’t add up,” Haver maintained, without explaining what he meant.

“No, I know,” Sammy Nilsson said with resignation.

When they reached the police station there was a certain commotion in the division. Fredriksson and Bea were in Ottosson’s office.

“Has something happened?” Sammy asked, reading the excitement in their eyes.

“A guy who claims to be Armas’s son has just turned up,” Ottosson said. “Lindell is talking to him right now.”

“Did he seek us out of his own accord?” Haver asked.

“Is he blond?” Sammy wondered.

“No, he has a shaved head, and he came here on his own,” Ottosson replied.

“What did he say?”

“That he wanted to talk to someone who was investigating the murder of his father.”

“Does he speak Swedish?”

“English,” Ottosson said. “We’ll have to wait for Lindell’s report.”

Sammy Nilsson told him about the Opel in Rotebro and how little they had managed to find out. Maybe, just maybe, a blond man with sunglasses could be tied to the car.

“An accomplice,” Fredriksson said and Sammy sighed heavily.

Lindell came back ten minutes later. She shook her head as soon as she saw her colleagues gathered in the lunchroom.

“I need something strong,” she said and sat down.

“What did he say?”

Lindell told them that Armas’s son was thirty-two years old and named Anthony Wild. He was born in England. His mother was English, and missing for many years. Her son thought she was living in Southeast Asia. Armas and Anthony had never lived under the same roof. Armas left when the mother was pregnant, but they had intermittent contact. The last time was about a year ago. Anthony had been in Sweden once before. That was over twenty years ago when he had visited his father who lived in Copenhagen. They had taken the ferry across to Malmö for the day.

“Did you ask about the video?” Fredriksson interrupted.

Lindell smiled. Yes, Anthony had been an “actor” for several years. He admitted to having participated in porn films and did not seem particularly embarrassed about it. In fact, he had bragged that he was one of the more successful ones in the business.

“What does he want?” Ottosson asked.

“To claim his inheritance, I’d say, even if he did also seem genuinely griefstruck. He returned several times to the question of how Armas had died. And then he wanted to talk to Slobodan. They had never met but Anthony knew that Armas and Slobodan had worked together for many years. Maybe he thought Armas owned part of the restaurants, what do I know?”

“Has he been to Mexico?”

Lindell felt as if she was at a press conference, where the questions came from all directions. This time it was Bea.

“Several times. He said that if you live in southern California you often travel down to what he called ‘Basha.’”

“Ba-ha,” Haver corrected.

“Ba-ha,” Lindell repeated in an exaggerated way, and then went on. “Wild had never been to Guadalajara or our friend the tattoo artist, and he did not know that Armas and Slobodan had been to Mexico.”

“How did he find out Armas was dead?”

“Through the film company. We made several inquiries with them and then we mentioned Armas’s death in order to create more urgency for them to give us a name.”

“Is he trustworthy?” Ottosson asked.

“He appeared honest to me. A little flaky, maybe. Not a wholesome person, as you would put it, Otto, but …”

“He’s an actor,” Sammy Nilsson reminded them.

“Does it make your mouth water?” Fredriksson asked.

Everyone looked at him in astonishment. It was a Sammy-comment that he had made and nothing that one would expect of someone normally so rigid about moral topics, and predictably enough he blushed deeply at his own spontaneous remark.

“Sure,” Sammy said, “with a delicious morsel like that around, of course I get a little peckish.”

Everyone laughed except Bea.

They continued to talk for a while longer. Naturally they would question Anthony Wild several more times. He was planning to remain in town for at least a week in order to go through Armas’s apartment and take care of the legal aspects of the inheritance. He was also going to visit Dakar and Alhambra to see the places where his father had worked. In addition, he had requested to visit the scene where his father had been killed.

They did not know if he would obtain permission to meet Slobodan, but Ottosson could not see any obstacles. There was a legitimate and reasonable interest on the part of the son to speak with the murdered father’s best friend, even if the latter was being held under arrest for a drug crime.

Ann Lindell withdrew to her office. The conversation with Armas’s son had at first made her hopeful and then increasingly disappointed. Anthony Wild’s tactfully formulated and yet clearly stated critical comment about the murderer still remaining at large had struck her with unexpected force. All technical evidence, DNA, fingerprints, and tire marks were there. They had skillfully unraveled the question of the tattoo’s removal and clarified the Mexican connection. With the Mexican’s existence revealed, and now also documented on the Norrtälje prison’s videotape, she had assumed that Manuel Alavez would quickly be caught.

He had all the odds against him, and yet he was still at large. It contradicted all logic. Manuel Alavez was a statistical abnormality, a relationship that was strengthened when Patricio Alavez escaped and most likely joined forces with his brother.

Lindell had difficulties evaluating the find of the car in Rotebro. It was natural to dump the car that Alavez most likely understood was hot, but how were they getting around now? Assuming they even had any plans, what were they? To leave the country? But how and when? Patricio had no passport and both brothers were wanted in all of Europe.

Her chain of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Yes!” she called out, more loudly and harshly than she had intended.

Ottosson opened the door a crack.

“The operation was a success,” he said.

It took a while until she realized he meant Berglund.

“Come in!”

Ottosson stepped inside, sat down, and told her that Berglund’s brain tumor had turned out to be benign and easy to remove. Berglund’s wife had called from the hospital.

“Thank God!” Lindell exclaimed. “Finally some good news.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Ottosson said, who had grown teary by his own words.