The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [79]
That question had been argued back and forth and Ottosson had noticed a certain desperation behind all the contributions.
Ottosson decided to sleep on it and to discuss the question with Ann first thing in the morning.
Asta was reading in bed but lowered her book and gave him a searching look. Ottosson knew he had to first try the idea out on his wife. For decades they had discussed police cases without Ottosson feeling as if he was breaking any code of silence. He knew she would never pass anything along.
Asta Ottosson had almost the same objections that he had raised and that he knew Ann Lindell would come up with.
After Ottosson had taken off his clothes and brushed his teeth, he sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and let out a sigh. Asta put her hand on his back. He turned his head and looked at her. It would be wrong to say she was as beautiful as a lily—that might have been true thirty years ago—but at that moment he fell in love with her all over again.
“You’re something, you,” he said and smiled.
“Come on, you old lug, get into bed,” she said.
They lay as close to each other as two people can get.
Before Ottosson fell asleep he thought that Asta and Silvia were probably the same age but that was the extent of their similarities.
Sammy Nilsson refused to look at the clock but he knew it had to be close to one.
His brain was rinsed as clean as a dead tree root at the edge of a northern reservoir. Sometimes he got this image in front of his eyes when he associated something decayed and joyless. It was a childhood memory from the time when he and his father would go fishing in southern Lappland. Once they had gone past a dammed-up lake and stopped for a break. The artificial shore was littered with tree corpses. Hundreds of twisted, white-yellow tree stumps stood out as horrifying as dead animals whose bones bore witness to a slaughter of inconceivable proportions.
These stumps often returned to him in nightmares. The three murder cases that, reasonably speaking, had to be classified as one, appeared to him as something equally terrifying.
Everyone tried in their own way. Sammy’s way was to be systematic. He had an instrument, just like the ViCLAS coordinator at the Uppsala Police. He had long been skeptical about the system but in time the resistance had weakened and now he tried to view the system as the support it was intended to be.
ViCLAS was a Canadian model developed in order to aid in the collection of data so that the investigators could discover similarities in different crime cases. It was thought to deepen and help the investigative work.
When, according to his own application of the ViCLAS system’s extensive format, Sammy Nilsson now at this late hour made a data search in his clean-swept tree-stump brain, four factors came ticking out: access to a car, local knowledge, rapid chain of events, and the absence of a traditional deadly weapon.
The access to a car implicated a large portion of Uppsala’s population, but most likely the killer was not an eighteen-year-old who had borrowed his dad’s Volvo in order to go off on a murder rampage, nor was it a retired person. Probably the perpetrator was between thirty and sixty.
It was most likely a man; few women were serial killers. Sammy Nilsson had seen the statistics.
None of the cases involved a robbery. The motive must have been revenge. But revenge for what? The driving force must have been enormously strong in someone who systematically clubbed three elderly people to death. Three older men, none of whom were known to have an extensive love life or any financial difficulties. He bit his pen and stared out in front of him.
Motive? He stared at the six letters. An honor killer, he thought.