The Preacher: A Novel, page 37
“You have all the power that Johannes had. But you don’t dare use it, Gabriel. That’s the difference between you two. But believe me, it’s there.”
For the first time in all their years together she saw tears in his eyes. Not even when Jacob’s illness was at its worst had he dared let go. She took his hand and he gripped hers hard.
Gabriel said, “I can’t promise forgiveness. But I can promise to try.”
“I know. Believe me, Gabriel, I know.” She placed his hand on her cheek.
Erica’s worry was growing with each hour that passed. She had a grinding pain in the small of her back, and she massaged the spot absentmindedly with her fingertips. All morning she had tried to call Anna at home and on her cell, but she got no answer. From Information she’d gotten hold of Gustav’s cell, but he could tell her only that he’d sailed Anna and the children down to Uddevalla the day before and then they’d taken the train from there. They should have arrived in Stockholm that evening. It bothered Erica that he didn’t sound a bit worried. He calmly came up with a bunch of logical explanations: they may have been tired and unplugged the jack, the battery in the cell had run down or, he laughed, maybe Anna hadn’t paid her telephone bill. That comment made Erica boil, and she simply hung up on him. If she hadn’t been worried enough before, she certainly was now.
She tried to call Patrik to ask his advice, or at least receive some support, but he didn’t answer either his cell or his office phone. She called the switchboard and Annika said that he was out on a call and she didn’t know when he’d be back.
Frantically Erica kept making calls. The grinding feeling wouldn’t go away. Just as she was about to give up someone answered Anna’s cell.
“Hello?” A kid’s voice. Must be Emma, Erica thought.
“Hi, darling, it’s your aunt. Tell me, where are you?”
“In Stockholm,” Emma lisped. “Did the baby come yet?”
Erica smiled. “No, not yet. Look, Emma, could I talk to your mamma?”
Emma ignored the question. Now that she was lucky enough to have her mamma’s telephone and even answer a call, she didn’t intend to give it up so easily.
“You know wha-a-a-t?” said Emma.
“No, I don’t,” said Erica, “but, darling, we can talk about it later. I’d really like to talk to your mamma now.” Her patience was running out.
“You know wha-a-a-t?” Emma repeated stubbornly.
“No, what?” Erica sighed wearily.
“We moved!”
“Yes, I know, you did that a while ago.”
“No, today!” Emma said triumphantly.
“Today?”
“Yes, we moved back home with Pappa,” Emma announced.
The room started to spin before Erica’s eyes. But before she could say anything else she heard Emma say, “Bye, I have to go play now.” Then the connection was cut. With a sinking feeling in her heart Erica hung up.
Patrik knocked loudly on the door at Västergården. Marita opened it.
“Hello, Marita. We have a warrant to search your house.”
“But you’ve already done that,” she said, looking puzzled.
“We’ve uncovered some new information. I have a team with me, but I’ve asked them to wait a short distance away until you’ve had a chance to take the children with you. It’s not necessary for them to see all the police and be frightened.”
She nodded mutely. Worrying about Jacob had used up all her strength, and she had no energy left to object. She turned to go and fetch the children, but Patrik stopped her with another question.
“Are there any other buildings on the grounds than the ones we can see in this area?”
She shook her head. “No, just the house, the barn, the tool shed and the playhouse. That’s all.”
Patrik nodded and let her go.
Fifteen minutes later the house was empty. They could start their search. Patrik gave some brief instructions in the living room.
“We’ve been here once before without finding anything, but this time we’re going to do a more thorough job. Search everywhere, and I mean everywhere. If you need to tear up boards in the floor or from the walls, then do it. If you need to break up furniture then do that too. Understood?”
They all nodded. There was a sense that they were about to do something fateful, but everyone was ready to go to work. Before they went in, Patrik had given them a brief rundown of developments in the case. Now they wanted nothing more than to get started.
After they had worked for an hour with no results, the house looked like a disaster zone. Everything had been torn up and hauled outside. But there were still no leads. Patrik was helping out in the living room when Gösta and Ernst came in the door and looked around wide-eyed.
“What the hell is going on here?” said Ernst.
Patrik ignored the question. “Did it go well with Kennedy?”
“Yep, he confessed without beating around the bush, and he’s now behind bars. Damn snot-nosed kid.”
Stressed, Patrik merely nodded.
“So what’s happening here? It feels like we’re the only ones who are in the dark. Annika wouldn’t tell us anything. She just said that we were supposed to come out here and you would fill us in.”
“I can’t explain everything to you right now,” Patrik said impatiently. “For the time being you should know that all indications point to Jacob as the one who kidnapped Jenny Möller. We have to find something that tells us where she is.”
“But then he wasn’t the one who killed the German,” said Gösta. “Because the blood test showed …” He looked bewildered.
With growing irritation Patrik said, “No, he probably was the one who killed Tanja.”
“Then who murdered the other girls? He was too young back then …”
“It wasn’t him. But we’ll go over all that later. Now, lend us a hand here!”
“What are we looking for?” said Ernst.
“The search warrant is on the kitchen table. There’s a description of the things we’re interested in finding.” Then Patrik turned and continued searching the bookshelf.
Another hour passed without anyone finding anything of interest. Patrik began to lose heart. Imagine if they didn’t find anything. He had moved on from the living room and was searching the home office, with no result. Now he stood with his hands on his hips, forced himself to take a few deep breaths and let his eyes wander around the room. The office was small but neat. Shelves with binders and folders, all neatly labeled. No papers lay loose on top of the big antique bureau, and in the drawers everything was in order. Pensively Patrik let his gaze wander back to the bureau. He frowned. An antique. Having never missed a single episode of Antiques Roadshow on TV, his thoughts turned naturally to secret compartments when he looked at the old piece of furniture. He should have thought of that before. He started with the part above the writing surface, the part that had numerous small drawers. He pulled them out one by one and cautiously stuck his finger in the holes behind them. When he came to the last drawer he felt something. A little metal object was sticking up, and it moved when he pressed on it. With a clack the wall of the cavity behind it fell away and a secret compartment was revealed. His pulse quickened. Inside he found an old notebook in black leather. He pulled on some plastic gloves and carefully lifted out the book. With rising horror he read the contents. There was no time to lose in finding Jenny.
He remembered a paper he’d seen when he was searching through the drawers of the secretary. He pulled out the correct drawer and found it after leafing through some other documents. A county council routing stamp in one corner showed who the sender was. Patrik skimmed the few lines and read the name at the bottom. Then he took out his cell and called the station.
“Annika, it’s Patrik. Listen, I want you to check on something for me.” He explained briefly. “The one you should ask for is Dr. Zoltan Czaba. In the cancer unit, yes. Call me back as soon as you know something.”
The days had stretched interminably before them. Several times a day Kerstin and Bo Möller would call the police station in the hope of hearing some news, but in vain. When Jenny’s face appeared on flyers, their cell phones began ringing almost nonstop. Friends, relatives, acquaintances. Everyone voiced dismay, but in the midst of their own worry they tried to infuse hope in Jenny’s parents. Several had offered to come to Grebbestad to be with them, but the Möllers had declined politely but firmly. They thought it would make the situation seem even worse; they would be unable to forget that something was terribly wrong. If they simply stayed here in the camper and waited, sitting across from each other at the little table, sooner or later Jenny would walk through the door and everything would go back to normal.
So there they sat, day after day, cloaked in their own anxiety. This day had been, if possible, more excruciating than any before. All night Kerstin had had horrible dreams. Sweating, she had tossed and turned in her sleep as images that were hard to decipher flickered inside her eyelids. She saw Jenny several times. Mostly as a little girl. At home on the front lawn. On a beach at a campground. But the images were always replaced by dark, strange shapes, and she couldn’t make any sense of them. It was cold and dark, and something was brooding at the periphery of her vision. She could never quite see it, even though in her dream she reached out for the shadow, time after time.
When she awoke in the morning she had a sinking feeling in her breast. As the hours passed and the temperature climbed inside the little camper, she sat quietly facing Bo, trying desperately to conjure up the feeling of Jenny’s infant body in her arms. But exactly as in the dream, it seemed just beyond her reach. She remembered the sensation, which had been so strong the whole time Jenny had been missing, but she could no longer feel it. Slowly the realization dawned on her. She raised her eyes from the tabletop and looked at her husband.
Then she said, “She’s gone now.”
He didn’t question what she said. As soon as she said the words he felt inside himself that it was true.
12
SUMMER 2003
The days merged into one another as if in a haze. She was tortured in a way that she never thought possible, and she couldn’t stop cursing herself. If only she hadn’t been so stupid as to hitchhike, this would never have happened. Mamma and Pappa had told her so many times never to get into a strange car, but she had felt invulnerable.
It seemed like so long ago. Jenny tried to conjure that feeling again, wanting to enjoy it again, even if only for a brief moment. The feeling that nothing in the world could get the better of her, that bad things might befall others but not her. Whatever happened now, she would never get back that feeling.
She lay on her side, scratching her fingers in the dirt. Her other arm was unusable, but she forced herself to move the healthier one to keep her circulation going. She dreamed that like a heroine in a film she would cast herself upon him and overpower him the next time he came down here. She would leave him unconscious on the floor and escape out to the waiting crowd, which had been searching for her everywhere. It was a magnificent but impossible dream. Her legs were no longer any good for walking.
Life was slowly trickling out of her. She had an image of her life running into the ground beneath her and giving sustenance to the organisms below. Worms and larvae greedily sucking up her vital energy.
As the last of her strength ebbed away she saw that she would never get a chance to ask her parents’ forgiveness for being so impossible during the past few weeks. She hoped they would understand.
He had been sitting with her in his arms all night. She had gradually grown colder and colder. A dense darkness surrounded them. He hoped that she had found the darkness as safe and comforting as he had. It was like a big black blanket enfolding him.
For a second Jacob saw the children before him. But that image reminded him too much of reality, and he pushed it aside.
Johannes had shown the way. Johannes and Ephraim and himself. They were a trinity; he had always known that. They possessed a gift that Gabriel could never share. That’s why he would never understand. Johannes and Ephraim and himself. They were unique. They stood closer to God than anyone else. They were special. That’s what Johannes had written in his book.
It was no accident that he had found Johannes’s black notebook. Something had led him to it, drawing him like a magnet toward what he saw as Johannes’s bequest to him. He had been moved by the sacrifice that Johannes had been ready to make to save his life. He, as much as anyone could, understood what Johannes had wanted to achieve. Imagine the irony that it had turned out to be unnecessary. Grandpa Ephraim was the one who came to save him. It pained him that Johannes had failed. It was a shame that the girls had died. But he had more time at his disposal than Johannes ever had. He would not fail. He would try over and over again until he found the key to his inner light. The light that Grandpa Ephraim had told him that he also possessed, hidden deep within. Just like Johannes, his father.
Regretfully Jacob stroked the girl’s cold arm. It wasn’t that he didn’t mourn her death. But she was an ordinary person, and God would give her a special place because she had sacrificed herself for one of God’s chosen. A thought occurred to Jacob: perhaps it was that God expected a number of sacrifices before He would allow him to have the key. Perhaps it had been that way for Johannes too. It wasn’t that they had failed, it was only that the Lord expected further proof of their faith before He would show them the way.
That idea brightened Jacob’s mood. That must be the answer. He had always believed more in the God of the Old Testament. The God who demanded blood sacrifice.
One thing still gnawed at his conscience, however. How forgiving would God be that he hadn’t been able to resist the lust of the flesh? Johannes had been stronger. He had never been tempted, and Jacob admired him for that. Jacob himself had felt the soft, smooth skin against his, and something deep inside had awoken. For a brief time the devil had overpowered him and he had given in. But he had deeply regretted it afterward, and surely God must have noticed this. He who could see straight into his heart must be able to see that his remorse was righteous and grant him the forgiveness that He bestowed on all sinners.
Jacob rocked the girl in his arms. He brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen in her face. She was beautiful. As soon as he’d seen her by the road, her thumb stuck out for a lift, he had known she was the right one. The first girl had been the sign he’d been waiting for. For years he had read with fascination Johannes’s words in the book. When the girl showed up at his door asking about her mother, the same day that he himself had received the Judgment, he realized that it was a sign.
He wasn’t disheartened by the fact that he hadn’t been able to find the power with her help. Johannes had been unsuccessful with her mother, too. The important thing was that, with that first girl, Jacob had set out on the path that had been determined for him. To follow in his father’s footsteps.
Placing the girls together in the King’s Cleft had been a way to demonstrate this to the world. A proclamation that he was now continuing what Johannes had started. He didn’t think that anyone else would understand. It was enough that God understood and found it good.
If Jacob had needed any final proof of that, he’d received it last night. When they began talking about the results of the blood tests, he was sure that he would be locked up as a criminal. He had forgotten that the devil had also made him leave traces on the body.
But he had laughed right in the devil’s face. To his great surprise the police had told him that the tests exonerated him. That was the final proof he needed to be convinced that he was on the right path and that nobody could stop him. He was special. He was protected. He was blessed.
Slowly he stroked the hair once more. He would have to find a new one.
It took only ten minutes before Annika called back.
“It was like you said. Jacob has cancer again. But this time it isn’t leukemia, but a big tumor in his brain. He’s been informed that there’s nothing they can do, it’s too far advanced.”
“When did he get the news?”
Annika looked at the notes she had jotted down. “The same day that Tanja went missing.”
Patrik sank down on the sofa in the living room. He knew it yet had a hard time believing it was true. The house breathed such peace, such calm. There was not a trace of the evil for which he held the proof in his hands. Only deceptive normality. Flowers in a vase, children’s toys spread across the floor, a half-read book on the coffee table. No skulls, no blood-spattered clothes, no black candles burning.
Over the mantelpiece there was even a painting of Jesus, on his way up to heaven after the resurrection, with a halo around his head and people praying on the ground before him, looking up.
How could anyone justify the most evil of actions with the thought that he had carte blanche from God? Although perhaps it wasn’t so strange after all. Down through the ages millions of people had been murdered in God’s name. There was something tempting about that power, something that intoxicated human beings and misled them.
Patrik wrenched himself out of his theological musings and found that the team was now standing around looking at him, waiting for more instructions. He had shown them what he’d found, and one of them was now struggling not to think of the horrors that Jenny might be going through at that very moment.
The problem was that they had no idea where she could be. During the time Patrik was waiting for Annika to call back, they had continued an even more feverish search through the house. At the same time he had called the manor and asked Marita, Gabriel and Laine whether there was anywhere they thought Jacob might go. He brusquely brushed off their counter-questions. There was no time for that right now.
He ruffled his hair, which was already standing on end. “Where the hell can he be? We can’t keep searching the whole county, inch by inch. He could be hiding her near the farm in Bullaren instead, or somewhere in between. What the hell are we going to do?” he said in frustration.
For the first time in all their years together she saw tears in his eyes. Not even when Jacob’s illness was at its worst had he dared let go. She took his hand and he gripped hers hard.
Gabriel said, “I can’t promise forgiveness. But I can promise to try.”
“I know. Believe me, Gabriel, I know.” She placed his hand on her cheek.
Erica’s worry was growing with each hour that passed. She had a grinding pain in the small of her back, and she massaged the spot absentmindedly with her fingertips. All morning she had tried to call Anna at home and on her cell, but she got no answer. From Information she’d gotten hold of Gustav’s cell, but he could tell her only that he’d sailed Anna and the children down to Uddevalla the day before and then they’d taken the train from there. They should have arrived in Stockholm that evening. It bothered Erica that he didn’t sound a bit worried. He calmly came up with a bunch of logical explanations: they may have been tired and unplugged the jack, the battery in the cell had run down or, he laughed, maybe Anna hadn’t paid her telephone bill. That comment made Erica boil, and she simply hung up on him. If she hadn’t been worried enough before, she certainly was now.
She tried to call Patrik to ask his advice, or at least receive some support, but he didn’t answer either his cell or his office phone. She called the switchboard and Annika said that he was out on a call and she didn’t know when he’d be back.
Frantically Erica kept making calls. The grinding feeling wouldn’t go away. Just as she was about to give up someone answered Anna’s cell.
“Hello?” A kid’s voice. Must be Emma, Erica thought.
“Hi, darling, it’s your aunt. Tell me, where are you?”
“In Stockholm,” Emma lisped. “Did the baby come yet?”
Erica smiled. “No, not yet. Look, Emma, could I talk to your mamma?”
Emma ignored the question. Now that she was lucky enough to have her mamma’s telephone and even answer a call, she didn’t intend to give it up so easily.
“You know wha-a-a-t?” said Emma.
“No, I don’t,” said Erica, “but, darling, we can talk about it later. I’d really like to talk to your mamma now.” Her patience was running out.
“You know wha-a-a-t?” Emma repeated stubbornly.
“No, what?” Erica sighed wearily.
“We moved!”
“Yes, I know, you did that a while ago.”
“No, today!” Emma said triumphantly.
“Today?”
“Yes, we moved back home with Pappa,” Emma announced.
The room started to spin before Erica’s eyes. But before she could say anything else she heard Emma say, “Bye, I have to go play now.” Then the connection was cut. With a sinking feeling in her heart Erica hung up.
Patrik knocked loudly on the door at Västergården. Marita opened it.
“Hello, Marita. We have a warrant to search your house.”
“But you’ve already done that,” she said, looking puzzled.
“We’ve uncovered some new information. I have a team with me, but I’ve asked them to wait a short distance away until you’ve had a chance to take the children with you. It’s not necessary for them to see all the police and be frightened.”
She nodded mutely. Worrying about Jacob had used up all her strength, and she had no energy left to object. She turned to go and fetch the children, but Patrik stopped her with another question.
“Are there any other buildings on the grounds than the ones we can see in this area?”
She shook her head. “No, just the house, the barn, the tool shed and the playhouse. That’s all.”
Patrik nodded and let her go.
Fifteen minutes later the house was empty. They could start their search. Patrik gave some brief instructions in the living room.
“We’ve been here once before without finding anything, but this time we’re going to do a more thorough job. Search everywhere, and I mean everywhere. If you need to tear up boards in the floor or from the walls, then do it. If you need to break up furniture then do that too. Understood?”
They all nodded. There was a sense that they were about to do something fateful, but everyone was ready to go to work. Before they went in, Patrik had given them a brief rundown of developments in the case. Now they wanted nothing more than to get started.
After they had worked for an hour with no results, the house looked like a disaster zone. Everything had been torn up and hauled outside. But there were still no leads. Patrik was helping out in the living room when Gösta and Ernst came in the door and looked around wide-eyed.
“What the hell is going on here?” said Ernst.
Patrik ignored the question. “Did it go well with Kennedy?”
“Yep, he confessed without beating around the bush, and he’s now behind bars. Damn snot-nosed kid.”
Stressed, Patrik merely nodded.
“So what’s happening here? It feels like we’re the only ones who are in the dark. Annika wouldn’t tell us anything. She just said that we were supposed to come out here and you would fill us in.”
“I can’t explain everything to you right now,” Patrik said impatiently. “For the time being you should know that all indications point to Jacob as the one who kidnapped Jenny Möller. We have to find something that tells us where she is.”
“But then he wasn’t the one who killed the German,” said Gösta. “Because the blood test showed …” He looked bewildered.
With growing irritation Patrik said, “No, he probably was the one who killed Tanja.”
“Then who murdered the other girls? He was too young back then …”
“It wasn’t him. But we’ll go over all that later. Now, lend us a hand here!”
“What are we looking for?” said Ernst.
“The search warrant is on the kitchen table. There’s a description of the things we’re interested in finding.” Then Patrik turned and continued searching the bookshelf.
Another hour passed without anyone finding anything of interest. Patrik began to lose heart. Imagine if they didn’t find anything. He had moved on from the living room and was searching the home office, with no result. Now he stood with his hands on his hips, forced himself to take a few deep breaths and let his eyes wander around the room. The office was small but neat. Shelves with binders and folders, all neatly labeled. No papers lay loose on top of the big antique bureau, and in the drawers everything was in order. Pensively Patrik let his gaze wander back to the bureau. He frowned. An antique. Having never missed a single episode of Antiques Roadshow on TV, his thoughts turned naturally to secret compartments when he looked at the old piece of furniture. He should have thought of that before. He started with the part above the writing surface, the part that had numerous small drawers. He pulled them out one by one and cautiously stuck his finger in the holes behind them. When he came to the last drawer he felt something. A little metal object was sticking up, and it moved when he pressed on it. With a clack the wall of the cavity behind it fell away and a secret compartment was revealed. His pulse quickened. Inside he found an old notebook in black leather. He pulled on some plastic gloves and carefully lifted out the book. With rising horror he read the contents. There was no time to lose in finding Jenny.
He remembered a paper he’d seen when he was searching through the drawers of the secretary. He pulled out the correct drawer and found it after leafing through some other documents. A county council routing stamp in one corner showed who the sender was. Patrik skimmed the few lines and read the name at the bottom. Then he took out his cell and called the station.
“Annika, it’s Patrik. Listen, I want you to check on something for me.” He explained briefly. “The one you should ask for is Dr. Zoltan Czaba. In the cancer unit, yes. Call me back as soon as you know something.”
The days had stretched interminably before them. Several times a day Kerstin and Bo Möller would call the police station in the hope of hearing some news, but in vain. When Jenny’s face appeared on flyers, their cell phones began ringing almost nonstop. Friends, relatives, acquaintances. Everyone voiced dismay, but in the midst of their own worry they tried to infuse hope in Jenny’s parents. Several had offered to come to Grebbestad to be with them, but the Möllers had declined politely but firmly. They thought it would make the situation seem even worse; they would be unable to forget that something was terribly wrong. If they simply stayed here in the camper and waited, sitting across from each other at the little table, sooner or later Jenny would walk through the door and everything would go back to normal.
So there they sat, day after day, cloaked in their own anxiety. This day had been, if possible, more excruciating than any before. All night Kerstin had had horrible dreams. Sweating, she had tossed and turned in her sleep as images that were hard to decipher flickered inside her eyelids. She saw Jenny several times. Mostly as a little girl. At home on the front lawn. On a beach at a campground. But the images were always replaced by dark, strange shapes, and she couldn’t make any sense of them. It was cold and dark, and something was brooding at the periphery of her vision. She could never quite see it, even though in her dream she reached out for the shadow, time after time.
When she awoke in the morning she had a sinking feeling in her breast. As the hours passed and the temperature climbed inside the little camper, she sat quietly facing Bo, trying desperately to conjure up the feeling of Jenny’s infant body in her arms. But exactly as in the dream, it seemed just beyond her reach. She remembered the sensation, which had been so strong the whole time Jenny had been missing, but she could no longer feel it. Slowly the realization dawned on her. She raised her eyes from the tabletop and looked at her husband.
Then she said, “She’s gone now.”
He didn’t question what she said. As soon as she said the words he felt inside himself that it was true.
12
SUMMER 2003
The days merged into one another as if in a haze. She was tortured in a way that she never thought possible, and she couldn’t stop cursing herself. If only she hadn’t been so stupid as to hitchhike, this would never have happened. Mamma and Pappa had told her so many times never to get into a strange car, but she had felt invulnerable.
It seemed like so long ago. Jenny tried to conjure that feeling again, wanting to enjoy it again, even if only for a brief moment. The feeling that nothing in the world could get the better of her, that bad things might befall others but not her. Whatever happened now, she would never get back that feeling.
She lay on her side, scratching her fingers in the dirt. Her other arm was unusable, but she forced herself to move the healthier one to keep her circulation going. She dreamed that like a heroine in a film she would cast herself upon him and overpower him the next time he came down here. She would leave him unconscious on the floor and escape out to the waiting crowd, which had been searching for her everywhere. It was a magnificent but impossible dream. Her legs were no longer any good for walking.
Life was slowly trickling out of her. She had an image of her life running into the ground beneath her and giving sustenance to the organisms below. Worms and larvae greedily sucking up her vital energy.
As the last of her strength ebbed away she saw that she would never get a chance to ask her parents’ forgiveness for being so impossible during the past few weeks. She hoped they would understand.
He had been sitting with her in his arms all night. She had gradually grown colder and colder. A dense darkness surrounded them. He hoped that she had found the darkness as safe and comforting as he had. It was like a big black blanket enfolding him.
For a second Jacob saw the children before him. But that image reminded him too much of reality, and he pushed it aside.
Johannes had shown the way. Johannes and Ephraim and himself. They were a trinity; he had always known that. They possessed a gift that Gabriel could never share. That’s why he would never understand. Johannes and Ephraim and himself. They were unique. They stood closer to God than anyone else. They were special. That’s what Johannes had written in his book.
It was no accident that he had found Johannes’s black notebook. Something had led him to it, drawing him like a magnet toward what he saw as Johannes’s bequest to him. He had been moved by the sacrifice that Johannes had been ready to make to save his life. He, as much as anyone could, understood what Johannes had wanted to achieve. Imagine the irony that it had turned out to be unnecessary. Grandpa Ephraim was the one who came to save him. It pained him that Johannes had failed. It was a shame that the girls had died. But he had more time at his disposal than Johannes ever had. He would not fail. He would try over and over again until he found the key to his inner light. The light that Grandpa Ephraim had told him that he also possessed, hidden deep within. Just like Johannes, his father.
Regretfully Jacob stroked the girl’s cold arm. It wasn’t that he didn’t mourn her death. But she was an ordinary person, and God would give her a special place because she had sacrificed herself for one of God’s chosen. A thought occurred to Jacob: perhaps it was that God expected a number of sacrifices before He would allow him to have the key. Perhaps it had been that way for Johannes too. It wasn’t that they had failed, it was only that the Lord expected further proof of their faith before He would show them the way.
That idea brightened Jacob’s mood. That must be the answer. He had always believed more in the God of the Old Testament. The God who demanded blood sacrifice.
One thing still gnawed at his conscience, however. How forgiving would God be that he hadn’t been able to resist the lust of the flesh? Johannes had been stronger. He had never been tempted, and Jacob admired him for that. Jacob himself had felt the soft, smooth skin against his, and something deep inside had awoken. For a brief time the devil had overpowered him and he had given in. But he had deeply regretted it afterward, and surely God must have noticed this. He who could see straight into his heart must be able to see that his remorse was righteous and grant him the forgiveness that He bestowed on all sinners.
Jacob rocked the girl in his arms. He brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen in her face. She was beautiful. As soon as he’d seen her by the road, her thumb stuck out for a lift, he had known she was the right one. The first girl had been the sign he’d been waiting for. For years he had read with fascination Johannes’s words in the book. When the girl showed up at his door asking about her mother, the same day that he himself had received the Judgment, he realized that it was a sign.
He wasn’t disheartened by the fact that he hadn’t been able to find the power with her help. Johannes had been unsuccessful with her mother, too. The important thing was that, with that first girl, Jacob had set out on the path that had been determined for him. To follow in his father’s footsteps.
Placing the girls together in the King’s Cleft had been a way to demonstrate this to the world. A proclamation that he was now continuing what Johannes had started. He didn’t think that anyone else would understand. It was enough that God understood and found it good.
If Jacob had needed any final proof of that, he’d received it last night. When they began talking about the results of the blood tests, he was sure that he would be locked up as a criminal. He had forgotten that the devil had also made him leave traces on the body.
But he had laughed right in the devil’s face. To his great surprise the police had told him that the tests exonerated him. That was the final proof he needed to be convinced that he was on the right path and that nobody could stop him. He was special. He was protected. He was blessed.
Slowly he stroked the hair once more. He would have to find a new one.
It took only ten minutes before Annika called back.
“It was like you said. Jacob has cancer again. But this time it isn’t leukemia, but a big tumor in his brain. He’s been informed that there’s nothing they can do, it’s too far advanced.”
“When did he get the news?”
Annika looked at the notes she had jotted down. “The same day that Tanja went missing.”
Patrik sank down on the sofa in the living room. He knew it yet had a hard time believing it was true. The house breathed such peace, such calm. There was not a trace of the evil for which he held the proof in his hands. Only deceptive normality. Flowers in a vase, children’s toys spread across the floor, a half-read book on the coffee table. No skulls, no blood-spattered clothes, no black candles burning.
Over the mantelpiece there was even a painting of Jesus, on his way up to heaven after the resurrection, with a halo around his head and people praying on the ground before him, looking up.
How could anyone justify the most evil of actions with the thought that he had carte blanche from God? Although perhaps it wasn’t so strange after all. Down through the ages millions of people had been murdered in God’s name. There was something tempting about that power, something that intoxicated human beings and misled them.
Patrik wrenched himself out of his theological musings and found that the team was now standing around looking at him, waiting for more instructions. He had shown them what he’d found, and one of them was now struggling not to think of the horrors that Jenny might be going through at that very moment.
The problem was that they had no idea where she could be. During the time Patrik was waiting for Annika to call back, they had continued an even more feverish search through the house. At the same time he had called the manor and asked Marita, Gabriel and Laine whether there was anywhere they thought Jacob might go. He brusquely brushed off their counter-questions. There was no time for that right now.
He ruffled his hair, which was already standing on end. “Where the hell can he be? We can’t keep searching the whole county, inch by inch. He could be hiding her near the farm in Bullaren instead, or somewhere in between. What the hell are we going to do?” he said in frustration.
