The Last Grudge

Book 3: A Ghosts of the Past Novel

by Max Seeck

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

While her colleagues investigate the brutal murder of a prominent businessman, Jessica Niemi must battle demons from her past in this terrifying new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Witch Hunter.

Powerful executive Eliel Zetterborg has been found murdered in his upscale Helsinki home. What at first seems like a straightforward case soon proves to be anything but when it becomes clear the murderer has other targets. The only clue the police have is a photo of Zetterborg with three men whose faces have all been scratched off.
 
Detective Jessica Niemi has taken some time off from her work with the Helsinki police to track down the coven that nearly killed her, and her partner, Yusuf, is assigned to lead the investigation. But as Yusuf delves into the case, he realizes he needs Jessica’s help. And as they dig deeper, they realize that the evil they’ve been hunting all along has returned and is lying in wait for the right moment to strike.

Release date: February 7, 2023

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 448

Sample

1

The car of the old elevator thunks between floors. The cable hums at the ceiling.

Greedy old shit.

Eliel Zetterborg catches a whiff of his bodyguard's powerful aftershave and turns up his nose. He thinks about the words painted on the placards he saw through the Maybach's tinted windows an hour ago.

He clenches and unclenches his fists; his hands feel weak. Those ungrateful idiots don't know what they're talking about.

Eliel steps out of the elevator and crosses the short distance to his front door, key in hand. Joonas shuts the elevator gate behind him. Eliel feels a pang of nostalgia when he hears the metal clank. The sound reminds him of the mechanical equipment of days gone by, iron and metal parts that smelled of lubricant and were powered by springs, steam, or mere gravity to perform work on people's behalf. In contrast, present-day technology is completely odorless and tasteless. Machines you could touch with your hand have turned into a series of elegant algorithms and mechanisms whose functioning is guided by principles so abstract that advertising and marketing professionals have to create beautiful stories around them to inject the tiniest hint of life. Even then, customers have only the faintest idea of how they work. No matter what these millennials say, things were better in the old days.

You killed this town, Zetterborg.

When Eliel Zetterborg founded EZEM Pipes Co. with Eetu Monto fifty years ago to the day, the name of a company still communicated its primary business. Back then, no one fiddled with computers at the machine works in the Herttoniemi industrial area; they hammered and turned parts used to build something real, something tangible. Not circuits or transistors, but industry that reeked of blood and sweat. Heavy industry-in its most literal sense.

Eliel shuts his eyes and imagines the sweet smell of red-hot metal, hears the splatter of welding at the rear of the manufacturing hall on the south side of Puusepänkatu.

"Will you be all right?" Joonas says with a discreet glance around the stairwell.

Joonas Lamberg is Eliel's long-term driver and bodyguard and is escorting his employer to his front door on this evening as on every other. He will then wait at the wheel of the Maybach down on the street until Eliel is ready. Then Joonas will drive Eliel to tonight's dinner venue, a restaurant located only a block from the latter's apartment. Joonas would typically be heading home at this point, but the times are exceptional: so many members of the general public hate Eliel Zetterborg and the board of RealEst from the bottom of their hearts that it's best to keep Joonas close at hand all evening.

"Yes, thank you. I'll see you downstairs in a minute," Eliel says, then opens the door to his apartment and taps the code into the alarm system.

Joonas gives a curt nod, peers up to the top floor, then starts descending the stairs. He does so every evening because he wants to make sure no one who doesn't belong there has snuck into the stairwell. Joonas is loyal and conscientious. He's a former SWAT unit officer and still dangerous, despite being almost fifty and unarmed.

Eliel Zetterborg knocks his shoes against the mat in the entryway and takes off his coat, the shoulders damp from the walk between the car and the building entrance. The apartment smells like a new fabric softener he asked the cleaner to buy. It masks the cloying, stale odor of antiques and upholstery dating from the war, as the scent has recently begun to repel Eliel. It reminds him that he is old and that he-just like everyone else on the planet-is condemned to die sooner or later. In his case sooner, no doubt. Ever since Anne-Marie passed, his days have felt like a slow slide toward death; it's as if his heart is beating less and less frequently, until one night it will stop and release him from his pain.

Eliel's eyes strike on a yellow plastic bag on the floor of the entryway. The cleaner was supposed to return the books to the Rikhardinkatu Library that morning and pick up the new ones he had reserved.

Hell's bells. That woman is getting careless.

Eliel steps into the living room, stands there with his hands in his pockets, and lets out a deep sigh. The company's anniversary has put him in a nostalgic mood.

Half a century. Over that time, RealEst has grown into a global corporation, and it's difficult these days to find any similarities to the small machine shop he and Eetu founded fifty years before.

The year 1970 was like a different reality in every respect: under the Finlandization policeis of President Urho Kekkonen, the country was a very different place from what it is today, for better or for worse. In his parents' view, no doubt the latter. Eliel Zetterborg's father covered politics for Finland's largest daily, Helsingin Sanomat, and was a huge champion of freedom of the press. His mother enjoyed a prominent career as a playwright. The artistic, liberal Zetterborgs experienced the postwar atmosphere as oppressive and regressive, perhaps partly because their only son, Eliel, actively opposed the self-censorship the Finnish government practiced when it came to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, EZEM Pipes Co.-which became RealEst, Ltd., through a merger and IPO that took place in the spring of 1990-benefited greatly, especially in the 1980s, from bilateral trade between Finland and its eastern neighbor, a development that shaped Eliel's views of the Soviet Union in a significantly more positive way. As long as Finland's neighbor to the east was satisfied, business was good.

Opportunistic traitor.

Eliel knows he is a prime example of how ideology is cast aside in hopes of the fast profits offered by capitalism. Over the years, he has been accused of selling out his principles so many times by so many people that he doesn't let it get to him anymore. Besides, the accusations are true-even if decades have passed since then. But he regrets nothing, not for a second. His decisions made it possible for Anne-Marie and him to live a life of extreme privilege, and for Axel to be raised-unlike Eliel-in a wealthy, luxurious home. Sometimes Eliel wonders if rockier soil would have produced a different sort of son. Is their relationship difficult because their lives started out in such dissimilar circumstances?

Eliel pauses at the large mirror and gazes at the furrowed face hidden behind the white beard. His phone is flashing on top of the console, but Eliel doesn't intend to answer. His phone has been ringing off the hook today. Journalists, well-wishers, professional and amateur politicians, almost-friends, backstabbers. Parasites. It's a big day for Finnish industry and RealEst: at this very moment, the company's middle management is celebrating in a massive tent erected at Hietalahti Square, complete with a program of entertainment. The upper management and board of directors, on the other hand, are gathering for dinner with their spouses in the private dining room at Saslik, the venerable Russian restaurant right around the corner, in honor of the day.

Job killer.

Eliel closes his eyes and tries to forget.

He can still see them, the white placards reflecting the bright sunshine. There are dozens of them, and they are being held by hundreds of hands. Every insult in the world has been scrawled on them in large letters. Thousands of people have amassed outside the factory, and none of them are there to celebrate the company's fifty-year success story. The din raised by the angry throng is earsplitting, and the union man at the front is conducting this racket with a megaphone.

Eliel opens his eyes and feels his heart hammering. The ingrates. Of course it's a radical measure, but it was not taken lightly. If the factory could have been spared, it would have been. The board's decision to shut down the Kouvola unit had nothing to do with saving production costs; plumbing-material operations are being ramped down for the simple reason that they're not profitable. The factory, which employs nearly three thousand people, has been a money pit for a decade now, and the positive results in the other divisions are not sufficient justification to continue keeping it on life support into the hazy future. Presumably a bigger problem than the closing of the factory is that those who lose their jobs will be nearly impossible to place in the company's other divisions. That's how significantly RealEst, Ltd.'s operations have changed over the last ten years. Even if the company pays for costly training, there is no way a fifty-year-old metalworker is going to learn how to produce a single line of code. At least not fast enough.

Get out of Finland, you capitalist pig.

Eliel sighs. He reads the text message he received fifteen minutes ago. It's from Axel.

On my way to the restaurant. Please don't be late.

He considers his son. The boy's fine features and unique voice, which is surprisingly high. It has a tinge of jazzy whisky bass, just like that of Anne-Marie, from whom the boy also inherited his beautiful face and his birdlike build.

The curious heartburn that troubled Eliel throughout the drive has started again. The visit to Kouvola was not, he will admit, particularly pleasant. He knows he will not be serving as chair of the RealEst board for even a year, which is the precise reason he was prepared to take this bullet. The condemnation of the entire nation. His successor will start from a clean slate and perhaps even have the backing of the labor unions. That will make it possible to steer RealEst on to future success.

Eliel considers his reply, then settles for tapping an OK into the text field.

Just then he feels a sharp pain in his chest. For a moment he feels as if he can't breathe. He collapses onto the stool in the entryway.

Damn it.

Eliel is in splendid physical condition for a seventy-four-year-old-he recently ran a half-marathon in the senior division in two hours and fourteen minutes-but the idea of long restaurant dinners with ten-course menus and the accompanying wines wearies him body and soul. He probably ought to have his heart checked again, but Eliel looks askance at doctor visits and avoids them to the last. Damn it all to hell. If it weren't the company's fiftieth anniversary today, he would sink to the couch with a glass of whisky and watch Emmerdale.

Eliel advances slowly down the entry hall and into the living room. The long floor planks, stained brown, creak under his merino wool socks. He touches the light switch and the chandelier hanging from the ceiling comes to life. He undoes his cuff links and lets his sleeves dangle over his hands.

The needle of the record player lowers to the black disc. Johann Sebastian Bach: Siciliano, Concerto in D minor, Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis 596. Eliel thinks it the most beautiful piece of music ever composed. Listening to it feels almost masochistic-that's how wistful and melancholy it makes him. The concerto brings him back to Anne-Marie's funeral, when Axel's cousin played it on the piano at the beginning of the memorial service, here in this very room three or so years ago. More than a thousand long days and nights have passed since then, but the apartment still smells of Anne-Marie. In the end, it makes no difference what brand of fabric softener the cleaner buys.

Anne-Marie.

He ought to wear something tonight that reminds him of Anne-Marie.

Eliel walks past the grand piano to the sofa set and pauses in front of the oil painting that hangs there. The depiction of a capercaillie hinges outward to reveal a safe embedded in the wall. Eliel taps in the code, and the safe beeps and opens.

He takes from the top shelf what is perhaps his most prized possession: a Vacheron Constantin Genève with an eighteen-karat gold casing. The watch probably has little monetary worth, but it has all the more sentimental value: Anne-Marie gave it to him as a wedding present in 1969.

Eliel senses the weight of the watch on his wrist; it feels foreign yet familiar. He returns to the grand piano and gazes at the spacious living room: the Persian carpets covering the floor, the furniture fashioned by hand long ago, the large oil paintings ensconced in decorative gilt frames.

Eliel has no interest in attending the party tonight. Not without his wife.

And then he hears something above the music.

He has stopped at the liquor cabinet next to the piano, but the floor is still creaking. As if there were a second-long lag between his footfalls and the sound they produced.

He holds his breath. Suddenly he's sure he's not alone in the apartment. He glances back, but the arch leading into the kitchen is empty. The kitchen is dark; the only glimmer comes from the windows facing the Russian embassy. Eliel shakes his head. It's just the Jugendstil building; old structures live a life of their own.

J. S. Bach is playing in the background as beautifully as it does every night.

My mind is playing tricks on me. It's been a long day.

Eliel opens the bar, reaches for the masculine, broad-shouldered bottle of Macallan Reflexion. If the sensation in his chest grows unbearable, he'll cancel his attendance at tonight's dinner. That's one good thing about growing old: there's always an acceptable excuse for getting out of doing things one would prefer not to do. Age itself. No one can have anything to say about that.

The brown liquor burbles to the bottom of the glass like water from a pure tundra stream.

And the wooden floor is creaking again, this time more distinctly. He tosses back the contents of the glass, and the plummy whisky burns his throat.

"Hello?" Eliel says forcefully, despite knowing there will be no reply. The last time he did so, Anne-Marie was still alive. On a night he came home and wasn't sure if his wife was there or out.

Eliel lowers the tumbler to the liquor cabinet and coughs into his fist.

Of course he's home alone. The alarm was on when he stepped in, and he would have heard the front door open.

"Hello?" he hears himself say again. He knows he wouldn't if he were a hundred percent certain there was no one else in the apartment. The doubt is like a rapier at his breast. "Who's there?"

This time the creak comes from the other side of the wall, from the kitchen. A dragging sound that ends in an abrupt clunk. A kitchen drawer.

Eliel feels a shiver surge up his spine to his neck.