Joona walks across the wide stretch of tarmac and hears the electronic gates clang shut behind him.
He walks into the shadow of the dirty yellow wall of the prison, stops ten metres from the command centre and makes one last attempt to reach Carlos. A recorded voice informs him that the Chief of Police is busy and will be unavailable all day.
As he is checked back in, it feels like time is slowing down. His hands move sluggishly as they place his watch, wallet, car keys and phone in the blue plastic tray.
A guard with nicotine-stained fingers counts his money, then signs a receipt for the amount.
Joona gets undressed and walks naked through the security scanner. Big bruises have blossomed like thunderclouds across his chest, and the wound from the axe has swollen, making the black stitches stick out.
‘I see you had fun out there,’ the guard says.
Joona sits down on the worn wooden bench and puts on the colourless prison clothes and trainers.
‘It says here that you’re going to be put in solitary confinement,’ the guard goes on.
‘What for? I didn’t request isolation,’ Joona says, taking the grey sack containing linen and hygiene items.
Another prison guard takes Joona to his new section.
The empty tunnel smells like damp concrete and the only sound is the guard’s radio.
Joona tells himself to stop worrying about the killer, he knows he’s going to be cut off from the outside world from now on.
He isn’t involved in the investigation.
He’s no longer a police officer.
They emerge into the isolation unit and he is signed in. He has the rules explained to him, then is led along a silent hallway to his new room, the confined space where he will be spending every hour of the day without any contact with the other inmates.
When the door of the isolation cell slams shut behind him, he goes over to the heavily barred window and stares out at the yellow wall.
‘Olen v?synyt t?han hotelliin,’ Joona says to himself in Finnish.
He puts the grey sack on the bunk and thinks about the fact that the killer had rabbits’ ears tied around his head like trophies, or fetishised symbols.
Perhaps hunting and killing rabbits was a form of ritual preparation before the murder.
He’s killed William Fock and is planning to kill Absalon Ratjen, Joona thinks, picking two pieces of grit from the floor and putting them on the narrow windowsill.
Two victims.
He leans over and looks more closely: one piece of grit is yellowish quartz, with a pointed end, and the other has a shiny surface, like a fish-scale.
Joona thinks about the recording of the child’s voice, and the rhyme about the rabbits going to hell, one after the other.
Ten little rabbits, he says to himself.
Joona looks under the bed, picks up another eight pieces of grit and lines them up on the windowsill beside the others.
The perpetrator is hunting rabbits. He’s going to kill all ten of them.
Time doesn’t really seem to reach the isolation cell.
People in prison are dying almost imperceptibly.
Joona stands still and watches the light move slowly across the row of tiny stones. The shadows get longer, turn like the hands of a clock.
Every piece of grit is its own sundial.
The Security Police thought they were hunting terrorists.
A terrorist would have been a hell of a lot easier than an elite soldier who’s cracked, he thinks.
A spree killer.
A trained terrorist would never leave a witness alive, but for spree killers it’s important not to kill the wrong people.
He could have a religious or political motive, just like a terrorist. The biggest difference is that he doesn’t answer to anyone but himself.
And that’s what makes him so hard to predict.
Joona runs a hand through his unruly hair.
The chrome around the hatch in the door is full of fingerprints. The light-switch is grimy with dirt, and there are pale lumps of chewing tobacco stuck to the ceiling.
It doesn’t really make any difference if the police are hunting a serial killer, a rampage killer or a spree killer. The decisive factor is the way that their motivation and behaviour fit together.
A particular background can nudge someone in a particular direction, which leads to a particular modus operandi.
A ‘spree killer’ is ‘a person who commits two or more murders without any cooling-off period’, according to the FBI.
No killer is going to fit any definition perfectly, but some of the pieces of the puzzle can become easier to slot into place with the right knowledge.
A mass murderer commits his killings in one place, whereas a spree killer moves around.
A serial killer often sexualises his murders, whereas a spree killer rationalises his.
The gap between killings is rarely longer than seven days.
Joona looks at the grains of grit on the windowsill.
Ten little rabbits.
The police are dealing with a killer harbouring a sort of rage that in certain circumstances makes him crack and start killing the people he holds responsible.
He’s either selecting his victims very precisely, or is targeting a specific group, killing as many members of it as possible.
What initially tends to look coincidental usually turns out to be the exact opposite.
Joona looks at the grains of grit in the window, then walks impatiently across the floor, over to the door, then back to the window, eight paces in total.
If this killer is picking his targets carefully, and if he fits the definition of a spree killer, then there’s still something that doesn’t make sense, he thinks.
There’s a gap in the logic.
Without doubt, they’re dealing with an intelligent murderer: he cut a hole in the glass door of the Foreign Minister’s home to evade the alarms, he knew where the cameras were, and left no evidence behind.
And the countdown in the rabbit rhyme suggests that he’s already decided who’s going to die.
He’s planned ten murders – and starts with the Foreign Minister.
Why does he do that?
That’s where the problem is.
It doesn’t make sense.
The killer must have realised that the police would devote a huge amount of resources to their hunt for him. He must have realised that his plan would become a great deal harder to carry out if he started with that murder.
The spree killer starts with the Foreign Minister, Joona thinks. And plans to move on to a high-school teacher in Sk?vde.
The Foreign Minister and the teacher, he thinks.
Very carefully, Joona touches the first two grains of grit, then puts his finger on the third, and suddenly knows the answer to the riddle.
‘The funeral,’ he whispers, then walks over to the door and bangs on it.
That’s why he killed the Foreign Minister first. His funeral is a trap. One of the people on the killer’s list is an even harder target than William Fock.
The murderer knows that it will take a funeral of this calibre to lure his next target into the open.
‘Hello! Come here!’ Joona calls, knocking on the steel door. ‘Hello!’
The spyhole goes dark and Joona moves away. The rectangular hatch opens and he sees the bearded guard’s face through the thick glass.
‘What’s going on?’ the guard asks.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ Joona says.
‘This is the isolation unit, and that means—’
‘I know,’ Joona interrupts. ‘But I don’t want to be here, I want to get back to D-wing, I haven’t asked to be isolated.’
‘No, but the management committee thought you needed protection.’
‘Protection? What happened?’
‘This is none of my business,’ the man says, lowering his voice. ‘But Marko’s dead … I’m sorry. I understand that you were friends.’
‘How could he …?’
Joona falls silent, thinking of how Marko said he’d take the blame for the fight in the yard so that Joona wouldn’t lose his leave. The last Joona saw of his Finnish friend was when the guards knocked him out and cuffed his hands.
‘The Brotherhood?’ Joona asks.
‘That’s being investigated.’