Free Stalker by Lars Kepler Page B

you’d lose your job.’
    ‘I know what I did was wrong, it’s tormented me ever since, but I’ve always been utterly convinced that I stopped a murderer.’
    ‘Shit,’ she mutters.
    He picks up the business card from his desk and begins to dial the superintendent’s number.
    ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
    ‘I need to tell her about Rocky’s alibi, and the whole business about the hand and the ear, and—’
    ‘Go ahead,’ she interrupts. ‘But what if you were right, what if his alibi wasn’t real? Then any similarities are just coincidence.’
    ‘I don’t care.’
    ‘Then ask yourself what you’re going to do with the rest of your life,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to give up being a doctor, you’ll lose your income, you might even face charges, all the scandal and gossip in the papers—’
    ‘It’s my own fault.’
    ‘Find out if the alibi checks out first – if it does, then I’ll report you myself.’
    ‘Thanks,’ he laughs.
    ‘I’m being serious,’ she says.

18
    Erik leaves the car in front of the garage, hurries up the path to his dark house, unlocks the door and goes inside. He turns the light on in the hall but doesn’t take his outdoor clothes off, just carries on down the steep staircase to the cellar that contains his extensive archive.
    In the locked steel cabinets he keeps all the documents from his years in Uganda, from the major research project at the Karolinska Institute, and about his patients at the Psychology Clinic. All the written material is collected in the form of logbooks, personal journals and extensive notes. The recordings of his sessions have been saved on eight external hard-drives.
    Erik’s heart is thumping as he unlocks one of the cabinets and searches back in time to the year when his life crossed paths with that of Rocky Kyrklund.
    He pulls the file out of a black box and hurries upstairs to his study. He switches the lamp on, glances at the black window, removes the elastic band round the file, and opens it on the desk in front of him.
    It was nine years ago, and life was very different. Benjamin was still in primary school, Simone was writing her dissertation in art history, and he himself had just started working at the Crisis and Trauma Centre with Professor Sten W Jakobsson.
    He no longer remembers the exact details of how he was contacted and invited to join a team for a forensic psychology project. He had actually decided not to take part in anything like that again but, given the particular circumstances, changed his mind when his colleague Nina Blom asked for his help.
    Erik remembers spending the evening in his new office, reading the material the prosecutor had sent over. The man who was going to be evaluated was a Rocky Kyrklund, and he was vicar of the parish of Salem. He was being held in custody on suspicion of having murdered Rebecka Hansson, a forty-three-year-old woman who had attended Mass and then stayed behind to speak to him in private on the Sunday before she was murdered.
    The murder had been extremely aggressive, fuelled by hatred. The victim’s face and arms had been destroyed. She was found lying on the linoleum floor of her bathroom, with her right hand around her neck.
    There was fairly persuasive forensic evidence. Rocky had sent her a number of threatening text messages, and his fingerprints and strands of his hair were found in her home, and traces of Rebecka’s blood were found on his shoes.
    An arrest warrant was issued and he was eventually picked up seven months later in conjunction with a serious traffic accident on the motorway at Brunnby. He had stolen a car at Finsta and was heading for the airport at Arlanda.
    In the accident Rocky Kyrklund suffered serious brain damage which led to epileptic seizures in the frontal and temporal lobes of his brain.
    He would suffer recurrent bouts of automatism and memory loss for the rest of his life.
    When Erik met Rocky Kyrklund, his face was criss-crossed with red scars