The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [83]
“I’ll come by your place at five thirty. Okay?”
He nodded. More snow fell. Lindell knew what she was doing was wrong, but Lennart might have some valuable information. He clearly had no confidence in Sammy, and it was possible that he would tell her something he wasn’t willing to share with her colleague. Her desire to work made her willing to bend the rules.
“Are you still at the same address?”
He nodded and returned to the street. Micke’s head could be seen high above them. Despite the distance, Lennart could tell he was irritated. Lennart gestured placatingly with his hands and deliberately walked out into the very middle of the street.
Twenty-seven
Ola Haver studied the knife. It was roughly twenty centimeters long with a black shaft and a sharp edge. Who used a knife like this? Haver had checked with a few officers who liked to hunt and they had judged the knife too cumbersome for hunting and fishing. The same verdict had been issued by the riffraff in town: the knife was too big to be easily concealed in clothing. It might be a knife some teenager would use to impress his friends, but it would never become something you carried habitually. Berglund had proposed the idea that it was a weapon someone had bought as a tourist. Maybe the sheath, which they had not recovered, was finely decorated and that was what had tempted the owner to buy it in the first place.
Haver turned it this way and that. He had questioned the young man again, the one who claimed to have stolen it from a pickup truck parked in the hospital garage. Haver was inclined to believe him, because he had seen fear and not lies in his eyes. Mattias was no killer, even if he was a small-time thief and troublemaker. You could only hope he would have second thoughts about the way his life was headed after finding himself dragged into a murder case.
Haver had asked Lundin to check who normally parked in the garage, which turned out to yield a daunting number. Hospital employees parked in a reserved area, and the rest was open to patients, friends, and relatives. Hundreds of people parked in the garage every day. Haver remembered that he himself had parked there one day a few years ago when he had seen the orthopedic surgeon.
They had talked about trying to compile a list of all the people who would have had reason to park there on that day, but finally decided it would take too long. The only thing they had to go on was Mattias’s vague recollection of a pickup, maybe red and white. When they had taken him to the parking garage to point out the place where the car had been parked, he had started wavering about whether or not the truck had had a hard or soft tonneau cover. In other words, they were talking about a dozen different possible makes and models. The only thing Mattias had been really sure about was the color red.
Had the killer been wounded and had to go to the hospital? They had checked with the ER and surgery, but that had yielded nothing.
Finding the murder weapon often gave way to more leads, but in this case it seemed like a dead end. The knife would become important only if they fixed on a suspect and could tie the person to the weapon.
Haver put the knife back in the plastic bag and leaned back in his chair, letting his thoughts move alternately from the investigation to Ann Lindell. Their kiss had ballooned into a cloud over his head. A gnawing feeling of uncertainty gripped him. For the first time in his marriage with Rebecka there was real doubt. The squabbles and conflicts of the fall, punctuated by equally wearying periods of silence and unasked questions, had escalated to the level of warfare. Rebecka hadn’t said anything else about his visit to Ann Lindell or the flour on his clothes. She had simply given him a cold look, moved quickly and nonchalantly around the house, avoiding him mainly. She had spent most of the morning in the bathroom, showering for an unusually long time, and in the bedroom. They had not had breakfast at the same