The Shadow Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

The only thing missing is a helicopter, he thought.
    He drove under the viaduct and passed the café and the parking lot at the Kallebäck recreation area and continued on J A Fagerbergs Väg until he saw the tunnel beneath the Boråsleden highway. He pulled over in front of the parking lot, to the side of the entrance, as far away as possible from where the body had been found. Far too many of his fellow police officers were gathered. There were two technicians and the deputy head of forensics, which was good, and the medical examiner, which maybe was a good thing too. But it was enough to have the crime scene unit and at most one curious uniformed officer. God knows how many of them had trampled around the victim.
    A uniformed officer was waiting at the police cordon. He was young and pale.
    Winter flashed his ID. “Were you the first one on the scene?”
    “Yes. We got the call and came straight over.”
    “The guy who called. Is he here?”
    “He’s sitting over there.” The uniformed officer nodded toward the darkness.
    Winter could see the silhouette of a head in the dawn light.
    “Is everything cordoned off?” Winter asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Good. What about the cars?”
    There were five cars in the parking lot, in addition to the two radio cars and the two cars that the forensic team and its boss had arrived in. Next to the entrance was a road sign prohibiting the parking of mobile homes.
    “What?”
    “Did you take down the plates?”
    “Take dow—”
    “Have you written down the license plate numbers and started running a check on the owners and put a cordon around the cars?” Winter asked, as gently as he could.
    “Not yet.”
    “Well, get to it,” Winter said. “Our fellow officers over there seem to need something to do.” He looked over toward the witness’s silhouette. “Were there any other people here when you arrived?”
    “Just that guy over there.”
    “Nobody driving off when you got here?”
    “No.”
    Winter felt a sudden chill in his body, as if it had only just occurred to him what he was here for and what lay ahead of him. He needed a cup of coffee.
    “Where can I walk?”
    “What?”
    “Where’s the path in?”
    The young officer didn’t understand. Winter looked around. All the activity was taking place about fifty yards away, maybe seventy. He raised a hand and someone broke away from the group and walked toward the spot where Winter was standing.
    “I just arrived,” Detective Inspector Göran Beier said. “She’s lying over here.”
    They walked between two cars and across the parking lot, carefully picking their way along the wide path, up to a ditch that was partially hidden by a pine tree and a few birches.
    Winter heard the sound of a vehicle and looked around. He saw headlights whose usefulness was fast diminishing as daylight returned to the sky. Ringmar’s car.
    Winter turned back toward the ditch. A woman was lying there, on her back, behind the pine tree. She might have been twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five years old. Her hair seemed fair, but it was hard to tell since it was damp from the morning dew. She was wearing a short skirt and blouse and a cardigan or a sweater, and her clothes didn’t seem to be in disarray. She was staring up at the pale sky. Winter leaned in even closer and thought he could see the red pinpoints on her ears and the hemorrhaging in her open eyes. He guessed that she’d been strangled, but he was no expert. It was light enough now that he could see that her face was discolored and probably swollen. Her teeth were exposed, as if she were about to say something.
    The forensic technicians had immediately called for the medical examiner. Winter thought that was good, but he knew Ringmar wouldn’t like it. Ringmar felt that visiting the body dump site created preconceived notions, and that the medical examiner ought to meet a body for the first time on a steel table at the pathologist’s.
    He nodded to Pia Erikson Fröberg,