Killing Moon полностью

Katrine and Sung-min squeezed through the rotating bars of the turnstile. A guard held open the door leading into the corridors between the detention cells.

The door of cell 14 was open. Even in the corridor she could smell the stench of vomit.

She stopped in the doorway. Over the shoulders of the two medics, she saw the face of the person lying on the floor. Or rather, what should have been a face but was now only a bloody mass, the front of a head where fragments of nasal bone were the only white in a red pulp of flesh. Like a... Katrine didn’t know where the words came from... blood moon.

Her eyes moved to the spot on the brick wall the man had obviously dashed his head against. He must have done it recently, because half-coagulated blood was still making its way down the wall.

‘Inspector Bratt,’ she said. ‘We just got the message. Is he...?’

The doctor looked up. ‘Yes. He’s dead.’

She shut her eyes and cursed to herself. ‘Is it possible to say anything about the cause of death?’

The doctor grinned grimly and shook his head wearily, as though it were an idiotic question. Katrine felt anger bubbling up. She saw the Médecins Sans Frontières logo on his jacket, he was probably one of those doctors who had spent a few weeks in some war zone and played the role of hardcore cynic the rest of his life.

‘I asked—’

‘Miss,’ he interrupted, his voice sharp, ‘as you can see, it’s not even possible to tell who he is.’

‘Shut up and let me finish my question,’ she said. ‘Then you can open your mouth. Now, how—’

The doctor without borders laughed, but she could see the vein in his neck become more pronounced and more colour come into his face. ‘You may be an inspector, but I’m a doctor and—’

‘And have just declared our prisoner dead, so your job here is done, Pathology will take care of the rest. You can either answer here or be locked up in one of the neighbouring cells. OK?’

Katrine heard Sung-min clear his throat softly beside her. She ignored the discreet admonition about having gone too far. Fuck it, their party was ruined, she could already see the newspaper headlines — Murder Suspect Dies in Police Custody. The biggest murder case she had ever had would probably never be completely resolved now that the central figure couldn’t talk. The families would never know what had really happened. And here was this puffed-up doctor guy trying to play cool?

She breathed in. Out. Then in again. Sung-min was of course right. That was the old Katrine Bratt who had surfaced, the one this Katrine had hoped was buried for good.

‘Sorry.’ The doctor sighed and looked up at her. ‘I’m being childish. It’s just that it looks like he was suffering for a long time without anything being done, and then... then I react emotionally and blame you lot. Sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ Katrine said. ‘My own apology was close on the heels of yours. Can you say anything about the cause of death?’

He shook his head. ‘It could have been that.’ He nodded at the blood on the whitewashed wall. ‘But I’ve yet to see someone manage to take their own life by banging their head against a wall. So maybe the pathologist should check that out as well.’ He pointed to the yellowish-green pool of vomit on the floor. ‘I heard he’d been in pain.’

Katrine nodded. ‘Any other possibilities?’

‘Well,’ the doctor said, getting to his feet, ‘possibly someone killed him.’

Reaction speed

It was seven o’clock, and at the Forensic Medical Institute the only lights on were those in the laboratory. Harry stared first at the scalpel in Helge’s hand and then at the eyeball lying on one of the glass plates.

‘Do you really...?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I have to get to the inside,’ Helge said and cut.

‘Yeah, well,’ Harry said. ‘The funeral is over, I suppose, no one in the family is going to see her again.’

‘Well, actually they’re going there tomorrow,’ Helge said, placing the piece he had cut away under the microscope. ‘But the guy from the undertakers had already put in a glass eye and will just put in one more. Look at this.’

‘You see something?’

‘Yeah. Gondii parasites. Or at least something similar. Look...’

Harry leaned forward and peered into the microscope. Was he imagining things, or did he detect an almost imperceptible odour of musk?

He asked Helge.

‘It could be from the eye,’ he said. ‘In which case you have an exceptional sense of smell.’

‘Mm. I have parosmia, I can’t smell corpses. But maybe it means I smell other things all the better. Like with blindness and hearing, you know?’

‘You believe that?’

‘No. I do, however, believe that the killer might have used the parasite to render Susanne fearless, and that she felt sexually attracted to him.’

‘No way. That he’s made himself the primary host, you mean?’

‘Yeah. Why no way?’