This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

addressing him. He took charge of the scene with breathless efficiency. Shooing Trainee Svärd out of the burned house, Hult ordered her to walk the driveway for evidence. He seemed most interested in the relatively intact corpus lying sprawled near the chalet, dead from either smoke inhalation or as a result of a smashed skull.

Engmark stuck to Hult, kneeling with him beside the corpse. Taking the initiative, the constable introduced a pen into the mouth of the deceased, hoping to find whether any fire effect was pre- or post-mortem. Hult gently batted the forensic attempt away.

“I’d say the head injury alone was enough, wouldn’t you agree?” The wound gaped, brain matter clearly visible, but now collecting a light frosting of snow from the persistent flurries in the air.

“The Mercedes sedan?” Hult asked. “Any intel on that?”

“Norwegian plates, registered to an Oslo import-export concern.” Engmark said, glad he could at least demonstrate his investigative prowess by offering this bit of information.

“Has anyone checked with the border control station at Västra Malmagen, to see when the car might have come across?”

Brilliant! Engmark thought. Hult deserved all his awards and accolades. A true genius of a police detective!

“I was just doing that when you arrived,” Engmark lied. He wondered why the Stockholm detective had not inquired about the other burned out hulk, the Volvo SUV.

Hult took a last look at the victim, closely examining the head wound, then rose to his feet.

“Your forensic team,” Engmark asked, rising with him, “is it by any chance coming to examine the torched vehicles?”

“Oh, I’m here ‘all by my lonesome,’” Hult said, pronouncing the phrase in English. “I happened to be in the area and heard the call go out.”

Engmark marveled. Masterful! What a man! A real bloodhound—not in from Stockholm at all—happened to be in the area!

From her position halfway up the drive, Lovisa Svärd whistled, the type of loud piercing sound for which Engmark had never developed the knack. She gestured off into the dense forest on the far side of the burned-out chalet.

“Something happening over there,” she called.

They skirted the trees at the edge of the property. A faint track in broken snow ran off to the west. Svärd had a head start. Engmark followed behind Hult as they forced their way through thigh-high drifts.

“Trainee!” the constable shouted ahead. “Halt your progress!”

Odd that Engmark hadn’t discovered the strange, bloody scene before, in the woods only a hundred meters from the cottage. The sound of it was certainly loud enough. When they got closer the sight proved garish.

“Oh, lord,” the atheist Engmark murmured. “Another body.”

Crows and ravens several dozen strong picked at something half covered in the snow, something blood-streaked and large. A pair of pine martens, perched comically on their back haunches, watched from a safe distance, but skedaddled on the approach of the humans.

The birds, however, had to be scared off by Trainee Svärd. Several swooped at their harasser before retreating. They settled on branches of the surrounding birches and pines, looking on with their blank, dark eyes.

“An animal,” Svärd reported. “Dead.”

“We can see that, Lovisa,” Engmark said.

Hult gazed down silently at the crow-ravaged form.

“That’s the biggest damned wolf I’ve ever seen,” Engmark said.

“It’s not a wolf,” Hult returned. Then he did an odd thing. Hult physically and roughly herded the constable and his trainee backward, away from the scene.

He addressed Engmark and Svärd in the dry, domineering manner of a military man commanding subordinates. “Listen to me very carefully.”

The two nodded, caught by his tone.

“I want an absolute embargo on this,” he said. “No one, I mean nobody outside the three of us, hears about it. You keep your damned mouths shut, do you understand?”

“Yes, Detective Hult,” the two uniformed cops mumbled.

After that, the mood at the crime scene changed. Hult instructed Svärd to cordon off the area where the dead animal lay. By the time an elite team of investigators showed up, Hult had already sent the constable and his trainee back to Hede village. He made them swear, as they departed, to total silence about what they had seen in the woods.

44.

So many came from so far. Varzha had never seen such a gathering of travelers, hundreds of men, women, and children who appeared as if summoned to Dollar Boy’s funeral by a higher authority. They crowded into the big rented dance hall in Spånga, a suburb on the far edges of Stockholm.

She was proud of her people. Some of the cars pulled up in front of the hall were beautiful and expensive, including late model Volvos, Mercedes, a Lexus, even a Rolls Royce. Sure there were battered old wrecks that blew smoke, too, and mud-splattered pickup trucks. Many of the attendees traveled by public transport, but everyone turned out in their best finery. Tradition called for white symbolizing purity, or red, which represented vitality. Some now chose to wear black, the universal color of mourning.

The beauty of the Roma was on display. In keeping with the deceased boy’s nickname, American dollar bills covered Lash Mirga’s casket. How had people found so many? Varzha wondered. She herself had trouble coming up with a single bill, until her brother Vago reminded her that he had kept a cache of useless foreign currency collected during their stints of street begging.

The bloody scene at the Hede River kept intruding in her mind, the shock of seeing dead bodies while Moro’s strong arms lifted her above it all. The images would not relent.

She remembered something Moro Part had told her when she was barely eleven years old, recently removed from the violence she had witnessed in her village in Romania. The attack on her parents had been ugly. Vago raged forward to stop it, and he, too, was beaten savagely. She still heard the angry bellows of the crowd, still felt the heat of the fire incinerating those she loved. Since then there was a stone where her heart had been.

“We must take our destiny in our own hands, Varzha,” Moro