Two Soldiers by Anders Roslund

Author:Anders Roslund [Roslund, Anders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2014-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

He opened a blue-and-white door, got out of the car that belonged to Västerort Police, looked in through the window at the glove compartment that didn’t contain the two cassettes that for so long he hadn’t been able to part with.

Now they had been burned to cinders, a voice on a piece of plastic had melted in the flames.

Grens and Sundkvist bounded up to Solna coroner’s office in three short steps and already caught a glimpse of the body through the window. A young woman in a uniform on her back on a table and Grens imagined for a moment another young woman in another uniform, he had just been to visit her, the white cross in the grass in a corner of the kilometer-square graveyard, carefully watered the purple bush that had a name he’d heard and promptly forgotten. He wondered whether she too had lain on her back on a table, he had been so far away for so long and hadn’t even tried to find out—if someone who was going to meet her for the first time, met her like this.

Nils Krantz, the forensic scientist, was standing on one side of the body, and Ludvig Errfors, the forensic pathologist, on the other. Grens went closer, whereas Sven stayed in the doorway.

“So you’re here as well? Shouldn’t you be done and back in your lab with your microscopes, busy analyzing? I told you that we didn’t have much time.”

Krantz cut away the tape around the woman’s wrists with a scalpel, her arms in front when the tape loosened, crossed over her chest and stomach, as if she was protecting her heart.

“I was the one who wanted to see how she was lying before the tape and clothes were removed.”

The forensic pathologist had recognized the detective superintendent’s frustration and wanted to avoid adding to it. Grens heard him but his eyes didn’t leave Krantz’s hands cutting another layer of thick tape and then pushing it down into the paper bag.

“You want four stages of technical evidence that can link them, him, as you said, to the car and body. I’ve already got the first, DNA, from the scrapings from between her teeth and sent that over to the NLFS for analysis.”

“When?”

The National Laboratory of Forensic Science. Grens’s body was shaking. The NLFS means Linköping and competition with other analyses.

“I’ve used our own transport. And I’ve asked them to prioritize us. And I’m guessing . . . you’ll have an answer by this evening, at the latest.”

“Nils, for Christ’s sake, I said that you had to be fast!”

Krantz opened the bag and held it out.

“And this is the start of the second piece of evidence, fingerprints. Why the rush?”

Ewert Grens didn’t look at the brown paper bag or the gray tape.

“Because they’ve murdered once already, because they’re on the run, because they’ve crossed the line and will murder again, because—”

“That doesn’t make this case any different from any others.”

Grens was shaking even more, an arm pointing without knowing where, and a head with blazing red cheeks up close.

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