“She told me that you called and complained.”
“I didn’t complain. And it was for your own good. What you did was out of order. It may be hot as hell, but you keep your emotions in check.”
“Don’t call her anymore. Stay away from her.”
“How far away? You said I wasn’t supposed to leave town, remember?”
“I’ll be in touch, Benny,” Winter said, and hung up the receiver. His hand was sticky.
He stood and pulled off his blazer and hung it over the back of the chair, then rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, missing his summer outfit of T-shirt and cutoffs. Donning an expensive suit of armor for work sent out signals. What signals were those?
“They’re signals of weakness,” his sister had said the night before. “Anyone who has to take cover behind an Armani or Boss suit isn’t really comfortable in his own skin.”
“Baldessarini,” he had said. “Cerutti. Not Armani or Boss-that’s what you wear when you’re working on your car. Could just be that I like to be well dressed,” he had said. “That there’s nothing more to it.”
“There is more to it,” she had said.
And he had told her: About the fear that took hold of him when he came close to evil’s darkest core, about how that fear had intensified his own fragility like a bubble expanding with air. The knowledge that he couldn’t do anything else with his life, didn’t want to do anything else, became a burden when he knew what that involved. When nighttime came around he couldn’t set aside the day, just take it off and hang it up like one of his jackets and pull on a comfy tracksuit and think about something else. That goddamn Cerutti suit stayed with him all the way into bed.
But there was also something else there. His beautiful clothes were at the same time a form of protection against the apprehension that constantly threatened to force its way into his body.
“That could be one interpretation,” she had said. The problem was that his exterior seldom helped with his interior. “Think about that when you’re ironing your armored shirts,” she had said in the waning night that was moving toward morning.
The surface of the water was a sparkling layer of silver, with glints that looked as if they had been strewn by hand across the lake. It stung Winter’s eyes when he looked to the north.
He walked along the wooded path to the edge of the bog. Crickets were chirping all around him: the sound of intense prolonged heat. A faint breeze brought with it a damp smell from the nearly dried-out bog holes within the dark terrain. Winter saw no one moving around in there, but he knew there were police officers combing the lakeside for clues and people who lived along the water’s edge.
It was nearly twelve o’clock. Few cars could be heard from the highway above and beyond him. From where he stood, beneath the trees, he could count up to twenty different shades of green. Even the rays of sunlight shone green. The very sky to the east was green through the leaves and between the branches. Only the symbol painted onto the bark, eight inches from his nose, was red. Winter took it for just that, a symbol. A symbol for what?
Winter heard a noise behind him and turned around. The outline of a man was moving in his direction. When the silhouette stepped out of the sunlight, Winter saw that it was Halders.
“So you’ve got the time to stand around here, huh, boss?” Halders was wearing short sleeves, his shirt hanging outside his trousers, and his face was partly in the shade, but Winter could see the sweat glinting on the high forehead that continued upward into Halders’s close-cropped skull. “This is a pleasant spot, sort of still.”
“Did you come from Helenevik? I didn’t hear a car.”
“It’s standing right there,” Halders said, and turned around and pointed behind him as if he wanted to prove that he hadn’t trekked three miles in the intense heat. “I guess I had the same feeling you did. That I wanted a look at the place, seeing as I was in the area anyway.”
Winter didn’t answer. He turned his gaze to the tree. Halders came closer.
“So this is that damn marking. Couldn’t some kids have daubed it up there?”
“Sure. We just need to get that confirmed.”
“And it’s definitely paint?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no way it could be blood?”
“No.”
“But it may have been intended to be blood,” Halders said. “I mean, to look like it was blood and that we should think of it as blood.”
“That’s possible,” Winter said. “How were the folks in Helenevik?”
“Nice and friendly.”
“Oh yeah?”
“A couple in this huge house over there tried to invite me in for drinks.”
“That was nice, but they didn’t succeed?”
“I told them I was on duty.”
“You might have missed an opportunity to find out something really important.”
“About what? You want me to go back?”
Winter shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“There was something else. But it’s probably my imagination. Might have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick, so to speak,” Halders said.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. Otherwise, going door-to-door around here has produced about as little as you might expect. No one’s seen or heard anything.”
“The kennel guy heard and saw something,” Winter said.
“He’s a nutcase.”
“They’re sometimes the ones that prove the most helpful.”
They both heard the sound of an outboard from the lake. A plastic boat with a ten-horsepower motor came from the north and steered in toward the inlet fifty yards from where they were standing. The motor cut out and the boat glided into shore, outside the cordon.
They could see two boys climb out, and Halders headed over to them along the path. He returned five minutes later with the two of them, who looked to be in their lower teens. They were carrying at least two fishing poles each, as if they refused to leave anything behind in the boat. Winter had heard Halders ask them why they’d left their boat there. They had said that it was their spot. Their usual spot.
“There wasn’t a boat there early yesterday morning,” Winter said.
“No, it was gone,” one of the boys said and both looked down at the ground.
“What did you just say?” Halders said, and the boys seemed to tremble inside their life vests.
“When was the boat missing?” asked Winter and discreetly gestured to Halders to back off.
“This morning,” said the one that was doing the talking.
“You came here this morning and noticed that the boat was missing?”
“Yes.”
“When was that?”
“Eigh-quarter past eight, around there.”
Winter eyed his watch. That was exactly four hours ago.
“What did you do then?” Halders asked.
The boys looked at each other.
“We went looking for the boat, of course.”
“With all your gear?”
“What?”
“All your goddamn fishing gear,” Halders said. “Did you lug all that stuff around with you when you went out looking for your boat?”
“We left it here,” the talkative one said softly.
“Where did you find the boat?” Winter asked.
“On the other side,” the boy said, and gestured toward the water through the branches.
“So it was just lying there?” Halders said. “With the motor and everything.”
“No. We always take the motor with us.”
“How about the oars? Do you take those with you too?”
One of the boys, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, started to giggle nervously and fell silent after two seconds.
“So someone could have rowed the boat?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you have a lock on it?”
“It’s busted,” said the boy who had giggled. He had regained his ability to speak.
“Busted,” Halders repeated. “Does that happen often?”
“It hasn’t happened to us before. But others,” the boy said, and made a gesture that included all the other boat owners around the Big and Little Delsjö lakes.