ALSO BY LARS KEPLER
The Joona Linna Series
The Hypnotist
The Nightmare
The Fire Witness
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Translation copyright © 2014 by Neil Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Sweden as Sandmannen by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, in 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Lars Kepler. Published by agreement with the Salomonsson Agency. This translation was originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Blue Door, an imprint of HarperCollins UK, London, in 2014.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kepler, Lars, author. | Smith, Neil (Neil Andrew), translator.
Title: The sandman / by Lars Kepler ; translated by Neil Smith.
Other titles: Sandmannen. English.
Description: New York : Knopf, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024978 (print) | LCCN 2017021057 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732257 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732240 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Criminal investigation—Sweden—Fiction. | Serial murders—Sweden—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PT9877.21.E65 (print) | LCC PT9877.21.E65 S2613 2018 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024978
Ebook ISBN 9781524732257
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph © Henry Steadman / Photolibrary / Getty Images
Cover design by Henry Steadman and Carol Devine Carson
v5.2
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Lars Kepler
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
Chapter 169
Chapter 170
Chapter 171
Chapter 172
Chapter 174
Chapter 175
Chapter 176
Chapter 177
Chapter 178
Chapter 179
Chapter 180
Chapter 181
Epilogue
A Note About the Author
It’s the middle of the night, and snow is blowing in from the sea. A young man is walking across a high railroad bridge, toward Stockholm. His face is as pale as misted glass. His jeans are stiff with frozen blood. He is walking between the rails, stepping from tie to tie. Fifty meters beneath him, the ice on the water is just visible, like a strip of cloth. A blanket of snow covers the trees. Snow is swirling in the glow from the container crane far below, and the oil tanks at the harbor are barely visible.
Blood trickles down the man’s lower left arm and drips from his fingertips.
The rails sing as a night train approaches the two-kilometer-long bridge.
The young man
sways and sits down on the rail, then gets to his feet again and carries on walking.
The air is turbulent in front of the train, and the view is obscured by the billowing snow. The locomotive has already reached the middle of the bridge when the engineer catches sight of the man on the track. He blows his horn and the figure almost falls. The man takes a long step to the left, onto the other track, and grabs hold of the flimsy railing.
His clothes flap around his body. The bridge shakes violently under his feet. He stands still with his eyes wide open, his hands on the railing.
Everything is swirling snow and enveloping darkness.
His name is Mikael Kohler-Frost. He went missing thirteen years ago and was officially declared dead six years later.
1
The steel gate closes behind the new doctor with a heavy clang. The sound echoes down the spiral staircase.
Everything suddenly goes quiet, and Anders Rönn feels a shiver run down his spine.
Today is his first day working in the Secure Criminal Psychology Unit at Löwenströmska Hospital.
For the past thirteen years, the strictly isolated bunker has been home to the aging Jurek Walter.
The young doctor doesn’t know much about his patient, except the diagnoses: Schizophrenia, nonspecific. Chaotic thinking. Recurrent acute psychosis, with erratic and extremely violent episodes.
Anders shows his ID at the entrance, removes his cell phone, and hangs the key to the gate in his locker before the guard opens the first steel security door. He goes in and waits for the door to close before walking to the next door. When a signal sounds, the guard opens the second door. Anders walks along the corridor toward the isolation ward’s staffroom.
Chief Physician Roland Brolin is a thickset man in his fifties, with sloping shoulders and cropped hair. He is smoking under the exhaust fan in the kitchen, leafing through an article on the pay gap between men and women in the health-care industry.
“Jurek Walter must never be alone with any member of staff,” he says. “He must never meet other patients. He never has any visitors, and he’s never allowed out into the exercise yard. Nor is he—”
“Never?” Anders asks. “Surely it’s not policy to keep someone…”
“No, it isn’t,” Roland says sharply.
“So what’s he actually done?”
“Nothing but nice things,” Roland says, heading toward the corridor.
Even though Jurek Walter has committed the most heinous crimes of any serial killer in Swedish history, he is completely unknown to the public. The proceedings against him in the Central Court House and at the Court of Appeal were held behind closed doors, and all the files are strictly confidential.
Anders and Roland pass through another security door, and a young woman with tattooed arms and pierced cheeks winks at them.
“Come back in one piece,” she says cheerily.
“There’s no need to worry,” Roland says to Anders in a low voice. “Jurek Walter is a quiet elderly man. He doesn’t fight, and he doesn’t raise his voice. Our cardinal rule is that we never go into his cell. But Leffe, who was on the night shift last night, noticed that he had made some sort of knife and hidden it under his mattress, so, obviously, we have to confiscate it.”
“How do we do that?” Anders asks.
“We break the rules.”
“We’re going into Jurek’s cell?”
“You’re going in. To ask nicely for the knife.”
“I’m going in?”
Roland laughs loudly and explains that they’re going to pretend to give the patient his normal injection of risperidone but will actually be giving him an overdose of Zypadhera.
The chief runs his card through yet another reader and taps in a code. There’s a bleep, and the lock of the security door whirrs.
“Wait,” Roland says, holding out a little box of yellow earplugs.
“What are these for?”
Roland looks at his new colleague with weary eyes, and sighs.
“Jurek Walter will talk to you, quite calmly, probably perfectly reasonably,” he says in a grave voice. “He will convince you to do some things you’ll regret. His words will play in your mind over and over again, and later this evening, when you’re driving home, you’ll swerve into oncoming traffic and smash into a semi, or you’ll stop off at the hardware store to buy an ax before you pick the kids up from preschool.”
“Should I be scared now?” Anders smiles and puts a pair of the earplugs in his pocket.
“No, but hopefully you’ll be careful,” Roland says.
Anders doesn’t think of himself as lucky, but when he saw the advertisement in a medical journal for a full-time, long-term position at Löwenströmska Hospital, he had a good feeling. It’s only a twenty-minute drive from home, and it could well lead to a permanent appointment. Since working as an intern at Skaraborg Hospital and in a health center in Huddinge, he has had to get by on temporary positions at the regional clinic of Sankt Sigfrids Hospital. The long drives to Växjö and the irregular hours proved difficult to manage with Petra’s job in the Parks Department and Agnes’s autism.
Only two weeks ago, Anders and Petra had been sitting at the kitchen table trying to work out what on earth they were going to do.
“We can’t go on like this,” Anders had said.
“But what alternative do we have?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Anders replied, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
Agnes’s teaching assistant at her preschool had told them that Agnes had had a difficult day. She had refused to let go of her milk glass, and the other children had laughed. She hadn’t been able to accept that break time was over, because Anders hadn’t come to pick her up as he usually did. He had driven straight back from Växjö but hadn’t reached the preschool until six o’clock. Agnes was still sitting in the dining room with her hands around the glass when he arrived.
When they got home, Agnes had stood in her room, staring at the wall beside the dollhouse, clapping her hands in that introverted way she had. They don’t know what she can see there, but she says that gray sticks keep appearing, and she has to count them, and stop them. She does that when she’s feeling particularly anxious. Sometimes ten minutes is enough, but that evening she stood there for more than four hours before they could get her into bed.
2
The last security door closes, and they head down the corridor to the isolation cells. The fluorescent light in the ceiling reflects off the linoleum floor. The textured wallpaper has a groove worn into it from the rail on the food cart.
Roland puts his pass card away and lets Anders walk ahead of him toward the heavy metal door.
Through the reinforced glass, Anders can see a thin man sitting on a plastic chair. He is dressed in blue jeans and a denim shirt. The man is clean-shaven, and his eyes seem remarkably calm. The many wrinkles covering his pale face look like the cracked clay at the bottom of a dried-up riverbed.
Jurek Walter was found guilty of only two murders and one attempted murder, but there’s compelling evidence linking him to nineteen others.
Thirteen years ago, he was caught red-handed in Lill-Jan’s Forest, on Djurgården, in Stockholm, forcing a fifty-year-old woman back into a coffin in the ground. She had been kept in the coffin for almost two years, but was still alive. The woman had sustained terrible injuries, she was malnourished, her muscles had withered away, she had appalling pressure sores and frostbite, and she had suffered severe brain damage. If the police hadn’t followed and arrested Jurek Walter beside the coffin, he might never have been stopped.
Now Roland takes out three small glass bottles containing yellow powder, puts some saline into each of the bottles, shakes them carefully, then draws the contents into a syringe.
He puts his earplugs in and opens the small hatch in the door. There’s a clatter of metal, and a heavy smell of concrete and dust hits them.
In a dispassionate voice, Roland tells Jurek that it’s time
for his injection.