Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (22 page)

Halfway through the torrent of words, Söderstedt was at the telephone. He was about to call for an ambulance when Justine Lindberger suddenly went quiet and sat down. To be sure, her hands were still twisting around in her lap, but she was calm enough to announce, “I took a few tranquilizers in the bathroom. They’re starting to work now. Continue.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Continue.”

Söderstedt returned a bit clumsily to the sofa. Now he too was sitting on the edge of the furniture. “What did you mean by saying you should have died instead?”

“He was a happier person than I am.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s not just that. It would have been enormously fortunate for the world if I had died instead.”

Söderstedt thought of the minute difference in the wedding pictures on the couple’s respective office desks and was secretly happy for hitting the nail on the head. “Can you expand on that a little?”

“Everything was so easy for Eric—he floated along without a care in the world. I don’t do that. Not at all. I don’t want to say more than that.”

Söderstedt decided not to push her, out of concern for her condition. Instead he asked, “Can you think of any reason he would have been at Frihamnen at two-thirty in the morning?”

“None at all. I don’t believe he went there on his own. He must have been taken there.”

He changed track, partly because he was flustered: “What is the situation like in Saudi Arabia now?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, surprised.

“In regard to fundamentalism, for example.”

She eyed him somewhat suspiciously but answered professionally: “It’s there. But for the time being, it doesn’t cause any hurdles for business. The government keeps it in check, often with rather tough measures.”

“What about the women? Aren’t there a few compulsory veils?”

“Don’t forget that fundamentalism is a popular movement, and what seems compulsory to Western eyes may not always be so. We’re a little too quick to believe that our norms are the only correct ones. There are actually still considerably more people who wipe their asses with their left hand than there are people who shake hands with their right.”

“Of course,” said Söderstedt, bracing himself. “But isn’t it the case that the Gulf War had a much different effect than intended? The Americans concentrated their efforts against Saddam Hussein, who is more of a secularized dictator; they uninhibitedly murdered civilians, women and children; they kept Saddam in power; they united the Muslims; and they threw so many resources at Saudi Arabia, for the sake of oil, that a large portion of that money benefited Saudi fundamentalism. Saudi fundamentalism is, after all, the richest and best-organized system in
the Arab world, the spider in the worldwide net, and it’s been supported to a great extent by American funds. Isn’t that ironic?”

Justine Lindberger stared in amazement at the strange, chalk-white, slender Finland-Swedish policeman who was candidly airing his political theories. At last she said in a measured tone, “Maybe you ought to become a politician.”

“No, thanks,” said Arto Söderstedt.

The biblical flood refused to end. The rain’s eternally drumming gloom drowned out every spark of clarity, and dampness found its way into every corner and rotting, moldy hole. It seeped rapidly into the core, into the very source, a shaking, roaring inferno, the birthplace of the biblical flood; a deeper darkness, thoroughly incomprehensible. And then the plane came out the other side, to clarity, serenity, light; to the broad view that made the earlier darkness seem so small, distant, and understandable.

Paul Hjelm wished life were like a plane taking off in an autumn storm.

Or at least that this case were like that.

The sun was as blinding as darkness for the snow-blind. It lit up the tops of the pitch-black masses of clouds and made them shine with a Renaissance-bronze color, like Rembrandt’s backgrounds.

He couldn’t tear himself away from the play of colors; colors had been missing for so long. In real time, the autumn storm had been going on for only a few days, but real time had nothing to do with it—the rain had erased all his memories of
summer in one fell swoop. His memory had stopped with the Kentucky Killer’s arrival in Sweden, which swept everything that had come before into darkness.

He hoped that the successive encounters with the sun that would come during the flight would mean a clear sort of nontime; the plane would land at approximately the same time it had taken off. If it didn’t crash.

He was scarcely afraid of flying, yet those seconds when the acceleration ceases and the wheels leave the ground always caused him a deep thrill, as he unconditionally put his life in the hands of a stranger.

Only after fifteen minutes of losing himself in pure fascination did he even think of turning to Kerstin Holm. When he did, she was still there. He recognized the expression he had never seen on himself, but which, after the fact, he realized he must have had. When the drinks cart went by, they exchanged something like a normal glance, but they were still far from words.

Here the serial killer had sat, maybe in this very seat, staring out not into the blinding sun but into the equally blinding darkness. What had he thought about? What had he felt, experienced? He had just murdered a person—what had flowed through his darkened soul?

And why had he come to Sweden? In the answer to that question, after all, lay the solution to this strange and elusive case. He tried to recap it roughly. In the late 1970s, a man starts to murder people in the American Midwest, in a manner reminiscent of a torture method used by a special task force in Vietnam called Commando Cool. The victims, eighteen of them in four years and primarily in Kentucky, have mostly remained unidentified. Most of the ones who are identified are academics, both foreign and American. The FBI focuses on the special task force’s squad leader, Wayne Jennings; possibly they also try to find Commando Cool’s unknown commander, who goes
by the name Balls. Jennings dies in a car accident after sixteen murders have been committed. Two more murders follow; after that there’s a timeout for more than a decade.

Then the murders start again. All signs point to the same perpetrator. This time he is active in the northeastern United States, especially in New York. And this time the victims are all identified, and they come from very different backgrounds. The pattern seems more random this time. After the sixth murder in the second round, the twenty-fourth overall, the murder of the Swede Lars-Erik Hassel, the killer suddenly leaves the country and arrives in Stockholm on a fake passport. There he goes to drug dealer Andreas Gallano’s secret cabin, about forty miles north of Stockholm, which, according to the latest information, is free of fingerprints and fibers, meticulously cleaned. About a week later, he sets off from the cabin in Gallano’s Saab, leaving behind Gallano, who has been murdered in the serial killer’s distinctive method. Probably the killer leaves the cabin at night. He goes to Frihamnen, where he murders two more people: Erik Lindberger of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a still-unidentified twenty-five-year-old. Lindberger has been tortured to death in the same way, but the unknown man, the John Doe, is shot to death. This is the only known occasion when the murderer deviates from his usual method and uses a firearm. Presumably he changes now-patriotic cars, from the Saab to a ten-year-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a license number that starts with B. There’s been no sign of him since.

How the hell did it all fit together?

“How the hell does all this fit together?” said Kerstin Holm, her first words since the plane had taken off from Arlanda and set course for New York. She and Hjelm were apparently on the same wavelength.

“I don’t know,” said Paul Hjelm.

Then it was quiet.

The sun shone blindly, as though it belonged to no particular season, outside the trembling Plexiglas airplane windows; it could just as easily have been a winter sun as a summer one—but it was an autumn sun. They found themselves in a detached moment. It was a journey through time, the only possible kind. Time passed and no time passed. It was a place for contemplation.

He would have liked to have a whiskey and soda and listen to music and read a book. All of that would have to wait.

Should he use the time to develop hypotheses, then? No, those would have to wait. This was more a time to establish openness, a critical receptiveness, to all the information and impressions that would come streaming toward them in the new world. They would have to keep the questions coming without trying to answer them too quickly. For there were so many questions.

Why does he kill? Is it for the same reasons before and after his break? Why did he take a break for almost fifteen years? Is it really the same killer? Why does everyone feel there’s something wrong with the image of him as a classic serial killer? Why was Lars-Erik Hassel murdered at the airport? Why did the murderer go to Sweden? Why did he use a thirty-two-year-old’s passport if he is over fifty? How did he find Gallano’s cabin in Riala? Why did he change cars in Frihamnen? Was it because he
wanted
Gallano’s corpse to be traced via his car? After all, Lindberger’s corpse was easy to find, too. Does he, like most serial killers, want to display his art for an audience? Why did he murder Lindberger, an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? What was Lindberger doing in Frihamnen in the middle of the night? Where was he murdered? Is the failed break-in at the computer company LinkCoop’s warehouse connected to the case? Why did the killer shoot John Doe instead of torturing
him? Who the hell is this John Doe, who can’t be found in any international registry? Are we asking the right questions?

The last question was perhaps the most important. Was there a link between all these questions, something you couldn’t see until you got up high enough and looked down at the darkness in the crystal-clear sunlight, and then it would be obvious?

Right now it didn’t feel like it.

But at least they were on their way.

A wasp had come into the room to die. How it had survived the storms of the past few days was a mystery. Perhaps, more dead than alive, it had managed to hide from the madness in some musty hole but hadn’t died there. Instead it had come out with its stinger drawn, ready to wound even in the last moments of its life. A doomed survivor with all its senses but the sixth gone: the sixth sense, that of a killer.

The wasp made a few wobbly rounds of the fluorescent tube light up on the ceiling, as unaffected by heat as it was by light. It buzzed suddenly; it was no longer the usual drone of a wasp but was duller, more aggressive. Then it rushed downward, a last kamikaze attack with its stinger raised. It came closer.

Chavez executed a mercy killing. A precise backhand using a yellowed issue of
Expressen
sent the body into the corner under the churning old dot-matrix printer; the stinger stuck straight up from the crumpled body. The body would almost certainly lie there until next year, when a light spring breeze would reveal it to be a collection of dust that stuck together only out of habit.

As he stared at the wasp, he had a lightninglike but wordless
insight. For a split second he thought he saw the core of the case, crystal clear.

Then reality returned and concealed his clarity with a data list that was growing and curling up on itself, on the floor over the wasp. A shroud of everyday, routine work enveloped the detective’s stroke of genius.

The printer stopped printing. Chavez got up, tore off the list, tore at his hair, and observed his own future as though in an utterly trivial crystal ball. The list of dark blue Volvo station wagons with license numbers that started with B and that were registered in Sweden was long, surprisingly long. He was bored with this task before he’d even started.

He would start by crossing out all those Volvos that were older than fifteen and newer than five years old. After that he would concentrate on those in the Stockholm area. That would bring the cars down to a manageable number—sixty-eight.

Jorge Chavez threw the list down onto his desk and picked up a list he had made himself. There he wrote, as point number three, “The Volvo shit.” Point number one was “The cabin shit”: to return to the nightmarish cabin in Riala in full daylight to assist the industrious technicians, who, to their vociferous surprise, had not found a single strand of hair at the site of the murder and therefore were continuing their intensive search. Point number two was “The Hall shit”: to go to Hall and talk to Andreas Gallano’s fellow inmates and go through his belongings, which he had left behind after his escape a month ago.

Chavez, in other words, had drawn Gallano in the lottery, and as if that weren’t enough, the damn Volvo had been assigned to him, too. This was the work he’d inherited from Kerstin, and he couldn’t help harboring an envious grudge; he and Hjelm could damn sure have been of much greater use to the FBI. They were, after all, the ones for whom things had been moving along; first with Laban Hassel, then with Andreas Gallano.

He wondered, in his not-entirely-peaceful conscience, what he had done to earn the dunce cap.
He
hadn’t run over small children at Arlanda or groped chicks in the passport check.
He
hadn’t taken off for Tallinn on a purge à la Charles Bronson and ended up on the floorboards like a fallen version of the only begotten son. And yet here he sat with the worst crap job of all while that nobody Norlander was gathering up the few brain cells he had and destroying the next most stimulating job: taking on John Doe. That job demanded the right man—and Norlander was definitely not that man.

Chavez’s modest request for a change had brought him two things: an icily neutral look from Hultin and a list of two hundred dark blue Volvos.

He turned on the coffeemaker with the tip of his toe and watched the spout until the first drop hit his freshly ground Colombian beans. Then he gazed across the desk, where Hjelm was conspicuous by his absence.