finished overtaking and pulled back into the right lane.
“How long have you been back in Sweden?” Julia took her eyes off the traffic for a few seconds. High time for a bit of mundane chat with the civilian. Get him to reveal who he was and, more importantly, what he was doing on her team, in her murder investigation.
“Three weeks, give or take,” Amante muttered distantly.
“UN or Foreign Office?”
Amante shook his head. “Europol. Lampedusa. An Italian island in the Mediterranean.”
“Yes, I know. Where all the refugee boats from North Africa end up.”
Underestimating her general knowledge was a black mark, a big one that more than swallowed up the feeble plusses he had managed to scrape together so far. But she thought she’d give him a chance to correct his mistake. Or commit another one so that she could comfortably and guiltlessly file him away in the box marked Dry Academics, Type 1A.
“So you worked on refugee issues?”
“Yep. For two years,” he said with an awkward little smile. He seemed to have realized that he’d come across as patronizing.
“And now you’re here with us.”
She paused, waiting for him to explain why. But Amante merely sat there without speaking. Clearly she was going to have to try a different tactic.
“We could certainly do with some fresh blood in the Violent Crime Unit.”
That was perfectly true. The head of the unit, Pärson, held his protective hand over the old Tic Tac guys. He let them drink their way surreptitiously toward retirement at the end of the corridor. Or toward a fatal heart attack. The old men blocked the paths of other people’s careers as successfully as they did their own arteries, so the division was roughly fifty-fifty.
“We’ve been on our knees since Skarpö,” she added.
Amante looked up. “I was out of the country. Missed most of that. There were a lot of fatalities, weren’t there? Two police officers?”
“Nine dead in total. And even more injured. Several different criminal gangs clashed out there, and three of our colleagues got in the way. We still don’t really know why.”
“Oh.” Amante looked out of the side window. He wasn’t taking any of the juicy bait she was dangling right in front of his nose. He seemed more interested in the buildings swishing past along Sankt Eriksgatan.
Strange. Pretty much every police officer Julia knew wanted to talk about Skarpö. Tried to get the details out of her, anything that, against all odds, hadn’t yet been dissected and analyzed in the media or on the internal gossip network. About the gangsters and officers who had died out there, and above all about David Sarac, the heroic police officer who had survived.
“So what do you think of Eva Swensk, then?” she said in an attempt to find a fresh topic of conversation. “Our new national police chief,” she added, in a poorly disguised imitation of his dry tone of voice.
Amante turned his head toward her. “Do you know her?”
The traffic ahead of them slowed down. Julia changed lanes again and accelerated past a few more cars before skillfully pulling back into a gap. She gained five car lengths by the maneuver.
“No, I can’t really claim I do. We’ve only met a few times. I listened to a couple of her talks when she was regional police chief. She’s got a reputation for being tough and efficient. But I was still a bit surprised when Stenberg gave her the job. I thought it was going to be yet another man.”
Or, to be more accurate, one particular man, she thought. For some reason Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin had lost the race to Eva Swensk. Wallin had done all the dirty work of the reorganization only to find himself unexpectedly—and to the delight of many—pushed aside when it was time for the minister of justice to appoint a new national police chief. She still wondered what had actually happened. But Wallin wasn’t the sort of man you called up for a chat, so she’d had to contain her curiosity. It had been several months since she last heard from him, which left her feeling slightly disappointed.
Wallin was one of the few police officers she regarded as a role model. Someone who, even though he was only four or five years older than she was, had managed to make a rapid ascent through the otherwise sluggish police hierarchy. She had hoped to be able to follow him up to the top. But instead she was sitting here, babysitting an inexperienced civilian.
“The minister of justice doesn’t seem afraid to try new tactics,” Amante said, breaking her train of thought. “Did you read the article in Dagens Nyheter last week? Stenberg’s on the offensive.”
Amante’s tone was a bit more engaged now, less robotic. This subject clearly interested him more than a straightforward massacre and a couple of dead officers.
“It’ll certainly be interesting to see how many of Stenberg’s ideas can actually be put into practice,” he went on. “Anonymous witnesses, expanded possibilities to use infiltration, amnesties, or reduced sentences for perpetrators who stand witness against their fellow criminals.”
“You don’t believe in all that, then?” Julia said. “It already works that way in a ton of other countries. The police need more effective tools against organized crime; you have to admit that, surely?”
Amante shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t really matter what I think. But people are saying that the Bar Association is likely to try to stop a number of the proposals. And if the opposition wins the election this autumn—”
Amante broke off abruptly. He blushed slightly, as if he’d suddenly realized he was talking too much. Julia put her foot down and changed lanes again, gaining a few more places in the queue. The maneuver made Amante grab hold of the handle above the passenger door. Julia smiled to herself. Just wait until we get the lights and sirens on. But that presupposed he’d be sticking around, which she doubted. Amante clearly wasn’t an expert in either violent crime or murder investigations, and didn’t seem remotely interested in the subject. He must have been recruited to the unit for some other reason. Because someone wanted or needed him there. Superintendent Pärson was a keen adherent to the path of least resistance. Everyone knew that the fat little bastard supplemented his horse-racing pot by tipping off the evening tabloids about ongoing investigations at advantageous moments. Yet no one was ever able to catch him. He knew exactly how often he needed to change his pay-as-you-go cell phone and Western Union account. And, perhaps most importantly of all, which people to stay on the good side of: whom he ought to do favors for, and when.
She glanced surreptitiously at Amante as they approached the heavy gates leading down into the garage of Police Headquarters at Kronoberg. She couldn’t quite make sense of the rhythm she had picked up from him so far. His age was difficult to determine; she guessed at thirty-five or so. But he spoke in a rather stilted way, like someone considerably older, more like a politician than a cop. And the way he dressed was something else. A blue blazer with the gilded emblem of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club on top of a coral-colored sweater with a designer logo, just frayed enough at the collar to suggest that its owner had worn it when he sailed around Gotland. Pale slacks with a neat crease and hand-sewn boating shoes. But in place of the slicked-back, sun-bleached hair that would have matched his well-to-do summer wardrobe perfectly, Amante’s dark hair was cut short. And he didn’t have a salt-splashed suntan from Båstad or Sandhamn with lighter patches left by his sunglasses either. Amante’s skin was swarthy, like someone from southern Europe. Or even farther south. His whole rhythm was full of contradictions, a syncopated beat that was hard to follow.
“Your surname,” she said. “Is it Italian?”
“Spanish,” he replied, slightly too quickly.
An image flashed through her mind. Something on the news, a row of smartly dressed EU politicians, something about the legal system. An articulate man making critical remarks about the government and minister of justice.
“Victor