“It’s still the case that Olsen’s ex-partner, Linda Lokind, is the most interesting for our purposes,” said Blomberg. “It turns out that Lokind has a history of anxiety and depression. She first sought psychiatric treatment as a teenager and since then she’s been bouncing from clinic to clinic more or less continuously.”
This didn’t exactly surprise me. Linda Lokind was a young woman with a damaged self-image. She reminded me in many ways of other women I’d met who were victims of domestic abuse. I knew Linda had lied to me, but I was uncertain of the extent. Could her entire story of Chris Olsen’s violence really have been fabricated? A terrible way of getting revenge on her cheating former boyfriend? I doubted that Linda Lokind was capable of doing something like that. But that meant she had to be hiding something else.
“It’s completely absurd that the police aren’t properly investigating Lokind,” I said. “You have to push them!”
“It’s becoming more and more common for this sort of thing to land on attorneys’ desks,” said Blomberg. “I want you to know my people are capable. But we need to get something concrete on Linda Lokind to move forward.”
Something concrete?
“Her shoes,” I said.
Ulrika and Blomberg stared.
It just slipped out of me. We needed something concrete, and I knew what it was.
“What shoes?” Blomberg asked, leaning forward.
I sighed and felt Ulrika stiffen beside me. There was no way out but to reveal the truth.
“Linda Lokind has the same shoes as Stella. The same kind of shoes that left that print at the scene of the crime.”
Blomberg raised his eyebrows.
“How do you know that?”
I looked at Ulrika. Her face was impassive.
“I went to her house.”
Both of them seemed to hold their breath as I told them about my visit to Linda Lokind’s place on Tullgatan. I had seen those shoes close up and was one hundred percent sure of myself.
Silence fell and I found myself caught between the piercing glares of the two lawyers.
“What is wrong with you?” Ulrika burst out. “You went to her house?”
“I had to do something. Stella is in jail! I can’t just sit around and watch as our lives come crashing down!”
Ulrika didn’t say anything. Blomberg looked at her, and then the two of them dropped their eyes. Naturally, they understood me.
35
I took another walk through the neighborhood, this time with a cap on my head, eyes on the ground, scared I might have to stop and chat with someone. I dashed around the corner and into the driveway and closed the door behind me.
Ulrika was hunched over her desk, wielding a highlighter over a heap of documents.
“What is that you’re working on?” I asked.
“The Stockholm case Michael gave me. It helps me take my mind off things.”
I didn’t know if that was such a good idea. Why should we think about other things when Stella was in jail?
“Close the door behind you, please,” said Ulrika.
I curled up on the sofa and took out my phone. My hands were shaking. I could hear Ulrika’s voice from upstairs. She was on the phone.
I poured a whiskey, drank it down, and poured another. Back on the sofa I googled for new information about what the media was now calling the “playground murder.”
I started with the websites of the evening tabloids, but soon allowed myself, against my own better judgment, to be led into the gladiator arenas of the internet, where I was forced to acquaint myself with the most horrid types of speculation about Stella. Someone who claimed to have had a brief relationship with her declared in all seriousness, for the entire world, that Stella Sandell was “a perverted sleazeball” and there could be no doubt that she had murdered the thirty-two-year-old. Others writing in the same forum clearly knew Stella personally, which made the whole thing that much creepier. One contributor, who went by the screen name Grrlie, gave a detailed account of things that had happened during Stella’s school days. According to Grrlie, Stella was an ADD kid who thought she owned the whole world, but this person still considered it highly unlikely that she would have killed anyone.
It was horrifying to read and yet I couldn’t tear myself away. Against all odds, it was possible that something useful would turn up. On several occasions I felt like I was a bystander, my hands tied, watching as my little girl was carted off to slaughter.
There wasn’t much gossip about the victim. Someone declared laconically that he had been both rich and attractive. Another called him a “typical psychopath,” which made me think of Linda Lokind. Was this where she’d picked up Stella’s name?