Lazarus: A novel by Lars Kepler

Author:Lars Kepler [Kepler, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

48

Saga walks through the operating room with her pistol raised and pushes open the door to a small bedroom. The bed is neatly made with a crocheted bedspread. There’s a pillbox on the bedside table, next to a Bible.

They go into the kitchen, which contains a pine table and four rib-backed chairs with red cushions tied to them. Above the sink is an old-fashioned storage unit, with glass scoops for flour, sugar, and oats tucked into wooden cubbyholes. A stained coffee cup and a plate with crumbs on it are sitting in the sink.

“He’s taken her,” she says.

“Amanda will be here with the dogs in an hour,” Nathan says.

Saga lowers her pistol, pauses for a few seconds, then puts it back in her holster. She walks slowly over to the window and looks out at the huge pine tree and the stepladder lying in the grass.

The forest isn’t particularly large, possibly no more than a thousand hectares, but it’s started to get dark, and the search will take time.

They return to the living room and stop in front of the protective plastic that’s been spread out on top of the fitted carpet beneath the operating table.

“Should we call Forensics?” Nathan asks.

“Yes,” she sighs.

Saga looks at the closed curtains. Someone could already be standing outside, watching them, and they wouldn’t even know it.

“So this was where Jurek ended up after you shot him,” Nathan says.

Saga nods and goes over to a tall glass cabinet; she looks at the array of saws, scalpels, hooked suture needles, and hemostats. On the top shelf is an old-fashioned bound journal. The acrid smell of disinfectant hits her as she opens the cabinet and takes the book out.

On one page, in the column headed “Admission Date,” Cornelia had written the date when Saga thought she had killed Jurek, and in the column for “Name and Place of Abode,” she’d written “Andersson.”

The most common last name in Sweden.

That’s followed by a fifteen-page handwritten account of the first four months, followed by three pages of sporadic notes of treatment leading up to this summer.

Saga and Nathan stand side by side, reading about everything that happened in this room. They grow more and more astonished at the accuracy of Joona’s guesses.

Cornelia had been standing in the nature reserve’s parking lot by the water, smoking, when her dog picked up a scent. A body had been swept along on the current and stranded in the shallows just before the river made a wide curve.

She thought he was dead when she backed her Jeep down the gentle slope and out into the water. It wasn’t until she lifted him onto the back of the Jeep that she realized he was conscious. In spite of the cold and his serious bullet wounds, he had somehow managed to persuade her not to take him to a hospital.

She must have realized from the gunshot wounds that he was probably wanted by the police, but still saw it as her duty to try to save his life.

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