Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (12 page)

Hjelm was silent. He told himself he was planning his next step. In reality, he was crying.

Bad blood always comes back around
.

In the taxi to Pilgatan, they didn’t say much. “It’s lucky she didn’t check the times,” said Chavez. “I was at least five minutes off.”

“I don’t think she was planning to let us leave without a confession,” said Hjelm. Then he added, “You did an excellent job.”

He didn’t have to tell Chavez where they were going. On their way up the stairs of the stately building on Pilgatan, between Fridhemsplan and Kungsholmstorg, he said, “You remember the password, don’t you?”

Chavez nodded. When they arrived at the top floor, Hjelm took out a set of keys and unlocked the three locks on the door marked “Hassel.” They stepped into a gym; the entire enormous hall had been converted into an exercise room.

Apparently, in a previous life, Lars-Erik Hassel had been an alchemist on the hunt for the fountain of youth.

They walked past modern glass vases and ceramic pots and arrived at modernity: a computer on an antique desk in the middle of the living room.

Chavez turned it on and settled into the grandiose easy chair that functioned as a desk chair.

“Do you think he has a personal password?” Hjelm asked, leaning over the seated hacker.

“No, not at home,” said Chavez. “If he does, we might have a problem.”

Hassel did have one. The computer blinked out a scornful
ENTER PASSWORD
.

“I guess we’ll try the same one.” Chavez typed in the letters L-A-B-A-N.

The scornful blinking of the computer halted. They were in.

“Strange for a father and son to live so close to each other,” Chavez said as the computer coughed to life.

Hjelm peeked out through the window toward the beautiful old county council building, which seemed to shiver in the shadow of the clouds. If the window were placed at a slightly different angle, he could have looked straight up at Kungsklippan.

Autumn seemed to arrive in just an hour. Heavy clouds rolled up over a fast-descending sky. Wind whined through the elegant gardens of the council building, tearing both green and gold leaves from the trees. A few raindrops spattered the windowpane.

While Chavez pecked at the keyboard, Hjelm explored Lars-Erik Hassel’s apartment thoroughly. Not only was it a bourgeois turn-of-the-century flat, Hassel seemed to have wanted to return it to its original condition. In the living room, each detail seemed modeled on a Biedermeier aesthetic. He had a hard time associating this almost ironically exaggerated bourgeois taste with the critic who despised literature.

“Well, look at that,” Chavez said after a while. “I don’t even need to go into his trash. He has a folder called ‘hate.’ ”

“I thought he might.” Hjelm came up to the computer. “Are the e-mails there?”

A gigantic list unfurled across the screen. At the bottom left corner it said “126 items,” and the 126 files were numbered.

“Year, date, time,” said Chavez. “Complete records.”

“Look at the first one.”

The message was short but to the point.

“Dated the end of January,” said Chavez. “The most recent ones are from August twenty-fifth.”

Hjelm nodded. “The same day Hassel went to the United States.”

“He didn’t save any after that, of course. If more e-mails showed up when Hassel was in the States—and it’s probably pretty important to know whether this bully kept threatening him while he was gone—they disappeared when Elisabeth deleted them. If the author of the e-mails
is
the murderer, or hired the murderer, then he ought to have realized that this was the final threat.”

“Let’s look at it.”

The writer’s writing had, without a doubt, evolved during the past months. The very last saved e-mail read

Hjelm and Chavez looked at each other and saw their own thoughts reflected back. New York, the Metropolitan: a striking knowledge of details. Still, such information was relatively easy to come by.

But splitting the vocal cords and “No one will be able to hear you scream”—things were heating up.

How had the writer known a week before it happened that Lars-Erik Hassel’s vocal cords would be taken out of commission and that no one would be able to hear him scream?

“Didn’t someone suspect that this had nothing to do with the Kentucky Killer?” Chavez said self-righteously.

“Go back a bit,” Hjelm said. His focus had narrowed considerably.

A random selection of the 126-file-strong “hate” folder flew by:

They had read enough.

“Are there any diskettes here?” asked Hjelm.

Chavez nodded and saved the whole “hate” folder onto one of them.

“What do you say?” Hjelm asked.

“The choice of words seems familiar.” Chavez put the diskette into his pocket. “What would the scenario look like? Was he so personally familiar with the Kentucky Killer’s habits that he could copy them perfectly? In that case, where did he get the information?”

“Wouldn’t your Fans of American Serial Killers have it? And he seems to be familiar with computers.”

“So he found out exactly when Hassel’s trip back to Sweden was booked and waited for him at the Newark airport? The rest was a coincidence?”

“Or the opposite: he planned it in great detail. Strictly speaking, Edwin Reynolds could have been Laban Jeremias Hassel.”

Chavez was quiet for a moment, sorting through his impressions. Hjelm thought he could see his focus narrowing. Then Chavez summed it up: “He arrives at Newark from Sweden on
an earlier flight, waits an hour or so at the airport, strikes, and comes back with a false passport. It’s entirely possible. Although he might just as easily have hired a professional.”

They considered this scenario.

“Shall we go?” Hjelm asked at last.

Chavez nodded.

They passed through the deserted neighborhood via Hantverkargatan and cut diagonally across Kungsholmstorg and up Pipersgatan; it was like coming full circle. Or tying up a sack. The rain whipped at them sideways.

They reached the stairs, climbed up to Kungsklippan, and went into the building. Outside the apartment door, Chavez took out his pistol and said, “She may have warned him.”

Hjelm drew his service weapon too and rang the bell.

Laban Hassel opened the door right away. He stared expressionlessly into the barrels of the pistols and said quietly, “Don’t make fools of yourselves.”

Their scenario collapsed like a house of cards. Laban Hassel was either extremely cunning or completely harmless.

They followed him into the darkness; the shades were down again, and the computer screen emitted its listless light. Chavez raised the blinds again; this time there was no sun to stun them. Laban hardly blinked as the pale light filtered into his eyes—it was as though he were beyond all earthly reactions.

He took a seat at the rotten table. Everything was familiar, yet everything had changed. The two policemen remained standing and kept their service weapons up. Laban let himself be frisked without protest.

“Elisabeth Berntsson from the newspaper called,” he said calmly. “She thought I should run away.”

“ ‘Don’t look over your shoulder,’ ” Hjelm quoted as he took a seat and put his pistol into his holster.

Laban Hassel gave a crooked smile. “Eloquent, isn’t it?”

“Did you kill him?” Hjelm asked.

Laban raised his eyes, stared intensely into Hjelm’s, and said, “That is a very, very good question.”

“Is there a very, very good answer?”

But Laban said no more. He just looked fixedly at the table and kept his mouth shut.

Hjelm tried again. “What happened in January?”

Absolute silence.

Another attempt: “We know that you registered at the university three years ago but didn’t complete a single course. Perhaps you were able to cheat your way into student loans for a while. But for the next two years—what did you live on then?”

“CSU,” said Laban Hassel. “Cash Support for Unemployment, I think it means. Then it ran out.”

“In January this year,” said Hjelm.

Hassel looked at him. “Do you know how demeaning it is to apply for welfare? Do you know what it’s like to be openly distrusted and then meticulously investigated? Do you know what it feels like when they find out that your father is too well known and well-to-do for you to qualify for welfare? It’s not enough that he’s been hanging over me like a repressive shadow all my life—now because of him, I can’t even get money to survive.”

“That added to your hatred.”

“The first threat was spontaneous. I just vented on the computer. Then I realized that I could send my outburst as an e-mail. Then it became an idée fixe.”

“Why did you threaten your half-brother Conny?”

The look on Laban Hassel’s face could not be described as anything other than self-loathing. “That’s the only thing I regret.”

“Cut the throat of a six-year-old and fuck the severed throat?”

“Please stop. I wasn’t threatening the boy, only my father.”

“Have you met Conny?”

“I see him now and then. We’re friends. His mother, Ingela, seems to like me. We’re almost the same age. Do you know when I saw her for the first time?”

“No.”

“I was probably about fourteen, fifteen. I was out walking with my mom along Hamngatan. And as if it weren’t bad enough to be out walking with your mom at that age, we caught sight of my father on the other side of the street. With Ingela. He saw us, but far from being embarrassed by the seventeen-year-old at his side, he started crudely making out with her in the middle of the street. Mom and I got a private show.”

“Was that before the divorce?”

“Yes. Sure, all our relationships were hellish at home, but from the outside we still looked like a family. That day ripped the veil from the illusion.”

“Hellish in what way?”

“People seem to think that it’s much worse for children if the parents argue rather than shutting up and pretending to be friends. But that’s the worst kind of hypocrisy, because children can always see through it. Our house was dominated by an icy silence. Hell isn’t warm, it’s cold. Absolute zero. I went frostbitten through the polar landscape of my childhood. And besides that, he could go missing at any time: soccer matches he promised to come to but never showed up at, always the same thing. And then he’d come home only to freeze the whole fucking apartment.”

“You have literary talent,” said Hjelm, “I can hear that. Why waste it on hate letters to your dad?”

“I think it was an exorcism,” Laban said thoughtfully. “I had to get that bastard out of my blood. That cold bastard. But I might as well have chosen not to send that shit to him.”

“It could have been a novel.”

Laban looked into Hjelm’s eyes and blinked intensely. Perhaps some sort of connection was forming between them.

“Maybe,” he said. “On the other hand, I wanted to see how he’d react. I wanted to see if I could notice anything in him when we met. Maybe I also had some sort of vain hope that he would confide in his son. If he had hinted that he was being threatened even once, I would have stopped right away, I’m sure of that. But nothing. He showed no trace. He spouted the same old, tired jargon every time we met. I don’t even think he ever considered that the evil that the letters accused him of committing had to do with his role as a father.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Chavez from over by the window. “Do you know what the password on his computer was?”

Laban Hassel looked over his shoulder.

“Laban,” said Chavez. “L-A-B-A-N.”

“Why do you think Elisabeth Berntsson called you?” Hjelm asked. “She was prepared to take the blame herself in order to keep you out of it. Why do you think she suspected you?”

“Why do you think your father saved all your e-mails in a folder called ‘hate’?” Chavez asked. “Every single file we looked at had been accessed at least ten times.”

“You were waiting for
him
to take the first step,” said Hjelm. “And
he
was waiting for
you
to.”