Page 30 of Hunt

“Well, you know the way,” she said, pointing to the stairs, overly cheerful to disguise her nervousness at seeing me, the dark, brooding one with a scar on my forehead and tattoos up my forearms. I knew I looked like a guy you didn’t want to stumble across down a dark alleyway, and that’s on a good day.

“Thank you,” I said, swallowing back the rising anxiety buzzing in my stomach. Numbness replaced with anxiety, the closer we got to my room.

“So, here we are,” Danny stated, holding his phone to record me as I walk back in time. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I told him. With the different décor and scents in here, and my bedroom transformed into a sewing room, I struggled to envision my belongings in this space when I was a kid - posters on the walls, toys and books on the shelves - but I think the wall color was the same. My mom liked plain, white walls to layer colors with drapes, ornaments, and rugs.

“Take it slowly,” he said calmly.

“I’m good,” I assured him, stepping to the window and looking onto the road.

“Take a deep breath and try to remember what the first sound that alerted you was,” Danny began softly.

“A gunshot,” I answered, seeing the black van in my mind pull up. “No. Wait. It was my father’s voice that I heard first talking to the people in the van that lured me to the window. It happened fast. I don’t know how long he was talking to them first, before they shot him, but there were a few seconds from when I went to the window and when the gun fired.”

“Then what happened?” he asked, filming me as I stood at the window, before scanning the view outside.

“I ran downstairs…no, wait, I came out here into the hall and Anni,” I swallowed over a lump in my throat. Annika came out of her room simultaneously, wondering what the loud bang had been.

“So, she wasn’t in your room when your father was shot?” he reiterated. “Because the police transcripts said she was here with you and heard loud voices outside and saw Mikael in the van window pull a gun on your father.”

Anger thudded in my chest, and I breathed deeply to ease the ache. “She was one hundred percent not with me. As I said, when I stepped out of my bedroom in a panic, she emerged from her room simultaneously. Our eyes met in the hallway.”

“There’s no way you were mistaken,” he asked, and I felt I was back in the courtroom again, testifying, and the prosecution lawyer was asking the same questions. They do that so you doubt yourself and muddle your memory, and then they can’t use your witness statement because it seems flawed.

But I was sure and answered with conviction, yet somehow, they still imprisoned Mikael on little evidence, Annika’s testimony of lies, which was also why our lawyers got him released three years later.

“There was no way in hell she was in my bedroom,” I asserted. I was nuts over Annika; if she were near me when my father was shot, I’d remember.

“Okay. Let’s walk through it. What happened next?” he urged me to retrace my steps.

“Annika followed me down the stairs,” I stated, pausing at her room, where I twitched to go inside, but there was no point. Every last speck of her would be gone. Vacuumed and dusted away, painted over…gone, leaving no trace, but a memory that haunted my young mind.

Turning away from the closed door that led into her room, I ran down the stairs to the kitchen, where the lady was waiting, her hands clasped together. “I walked out the front door to find Mom standing over him, screaming.”

I screwed my face up and stalled at the front door, seeing the scene played out before me as if I was living it in real time. But I came all this way to tell him what he already knew. I doubted that I added anything new.

“And was Annika still following you when you came outside?” Danny asked, standing on the spot where my father lay, trembling violently in the last few seconds of his life as blood poured from his wounds.

“I think so, although I can’t entirely remember as I was focused more on dad…” I told him as he gazed up at my window.

“In the court transcripts, the prosecution stated that it would have been impossible for you to see the crime scene from your bedroom window because the tree would block your view,” he explained, flicking his dark eyes from the tree stump to my window.

“I know,” I assured him. “But I could. I could see the van but not the people inside the cab. I could see my father falling backward as the van drove away, but I missed the registration plate number.”

“They dumped the van anyway,” he pointed out.

“Really? They found the van?” I was surprised by this. “I thought they didn’t have enough details on it.”

Danny replied, “They discovered a van of the same description, dumped on the side of the road outside of town, that was reported stolen the day before.” Unfortunately, we didn’t have a description of the van thieves, so it came to a dead end.”

“Did they screen the van for DNA at least?” I questioned, knowing what the answer was.

He shot me a tight smile. “No.”

“Because they had someone else in mind to arrest, right?” I insisted. “Do you think the cops ignored evidence and witness statements because they wanted to pin it on Mikael?”

He shook his head. “I prefer to have evidence that occurred before I admit to anything,” he replied professionally, but he must find it baffling that my father’s phone was allegedly damaged. He glanced down the road at the large houses behind fences. “Neighbors are too afraid to talk. On Mr. Kaiser’s demand, I called the daughter of the neighbor who witnessed the shooting and offered her money, and she still won’t speak.”

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