Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (25 page)

“The CIA?” Holm seemed to have left her diplomatic mask at the hotel.

Ray Larner swallowed and gave her a look that indicated that their relationship had changed—not necessarily for the worse.

“With many layers of top-secret stamps, yes, possibly. You have to understand how tense the relationship between the CIA and the FBI is. And if it in any way gets out that I’ve said this, I can forget ever having a pension. My personal phone has been monitored, and I can only hope there aren’t any bugs in this room. They’re always a step ahead of me. But you understand, I’ve already said too much. Try to forget it.”

“Already have,” said Holm. “We’re just here to find links to Sweden. Nothing else will end up in our reports.”

Larner regarded each of them for a minute, then nodded briskly. “It had eight members,” he resumed.

“What about Balls?” Kerstin interjected recklessly.

Larner burst out laughing. “Have you been consulting FASK? Fans of American Serial Killers, on the Internet?”

They looked at each other.

“Follow me.” Larner leaped to his feet and rushed out into the corridor. A few offices down, he knocked on a door marked
BERNHARD ANDREWS
and ushered them in.

A seemingly out-of-place young man in his early twenties, with jeans and a T-shirt, looked up through round glasses from a huge computer and smiled broadly. “Ray,” he said cheerfully, holding out a printout. “Yesterday’s haul. A cotton executive in West Virginia, a golf club in Arkansas, and a couple other little goodies.”

“Barry,” said Larner, taking the list and scanning through it, “these are officers Yalm and Halm from Sweden. They’re here about K.”

“Aha,” said Bernhard Andrews jovially. “Colleagues of Jorge Chavez?”

Their jaws dropped.

“Born in Sweden in 1968,” Andrews continued. “In Ragswede, right? To Chilean parents with left-leaning associations.”

“It’s called Rågsved,” Hjelm said, bewildered.

“Chavez was in the FASK site a week ago,” Andrews explained smugly. “He had a good but slightly transparent disguise. He put up a hundred and thirty dollars of taxpayers’ money to get in. A little development aid from the Swedish people to the American tax coffers.”

They gaped at him, their jaws rattling against their kneecaps.

“Barry’s a hacker,” said Larner calmly, “one of the best in the country. He can get in anywhere. We were lucky to grab him. Also, he’s FASK.”

“Fans of American Serial Killers,” said Andrews. “Nice meeting you.”

“Barry set up FASK as a way to attract potential serial killers.” Larner waved the printout. “No matter how hard they try to disguise themselves, he catches them. We’ve caught three with FASK’s help. I would venture to say that Barry is the country’s most obscure hero.”

Bernhard Andrews smiled broadly.

“So Balls doesn’t exist?” said Kerstin Holm, who was quicker on the uptake than Hjelm.

“I got it from
The Pink Panther
,” said Andrews. “The expert in disguise whom Inspector Clouseau hires and who survives every bombing attack. When it comes to serial killers and their fans, the only thing that’s certain is that they have no sense of humor. Humor seems to be the antidote to everything.”

“He used the name Balls to fish out a protest from someone who knew better,” said Larner. “But so far we haven’t had a bite.”

They said goodbye to Fans of American Serial Killers, who gave them another broad smile and waved.

In the corridor, Larner said, “Very little is as it seems in the world today.”

He led them back to his office and sat at his desk. “I didn’t think you had ethnic minorities in your police corps,” he said, putting his finger precisely on a Swedish sore spot. “But not even Chavez can be told about FASK. Barry is one of our most important secret weapons in the fight against serial killers.”

He pulled out a drawer and took out a few sheets of paper, laid them on the desk, and placed an FBI pen on each sheet.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but my superiors have prepared these papers for you. It’s an oath of confidentiality that, if broken, will result in penalties in accordance with American law. Please read through them and sign them.”

They read. The small print was difficult to interpret. Both Hjelm and Holm felt an instinctive aversion to putting their signatures on such ambiguous papers, but diplomacy reaped yet another victory—they signed.

“Excellent,” said Larner. “Where were we? Commando Cool. Eight members, no Balls. The team leader was the very young Wayne Jennings, who was already a veteran when they netted him—twenty-five years old and with six years of war behind him and God knows how many dead. All the best and most formative years of his life spent in the service of death. Twenty-seven when the war ended, thirty when K began to be active. Returned after the war to his dead father’s farm in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of the Cumberland Plateau, if that means anything to you. Didn’t do much farming, just lived on his veteran’s pension. He was without a doubt the most likely suspect; according to statements, he was very skilled at handling the pincers. The third body was found just thirteen miles from his home.

“As for the others in Commando Cool, three died in the final stages of the war. Besides Jennings, there were four left; you’ll find their names in the complete material, which you’ll have access to. One came from Kentucky, Greg Androwski, a childhood friend of Jennings’s, but he fell apart and died a junkie in 1986. He was alive during K’s four years in the Midwest, but he was pretty worn down and quite unlikely to be a killer. Completely destroyed by Vietnam.

“Three left. One came to New York, Steve Harrigan, who became a stockbroker and was one of the wizards of Wall Street during the 1980s. Another went to Maine: Tony Robin Garreth, who makes his living taking tourists on fishing tours. Both were pretty safeguarded against suspicions. The last one, Chris Anderson, moved to Kansas City and sold used cars.”

“Swedish background?” said Kerstin.

Larner smiled faintly. “Four generations back. His great-great-grandfather
came from someplace called Kalmar, if you’ve heard of that. But Anderson was actually number two on our list, Jennings’s second-in-command, just as icy, just as destroyed by the war. But his alibis were a tiny bit better than Jennings’s. And Jennings was nastier—that was my main argument, just based on a feeling, that is. I managed to push the whole thing pretty far.”

“How sure were you, really, about Jennings?”

Larner leaned back in his chair with his hands on the back of his neck. He deliberated for a moment. “Completely,” he said. “One hundred percent.” He fished a thick folder out of an old-fashioned file cabinet that stood next to the whiteboard.

Jerry Schonbauer peeked into the room. “It’s ready,” he said.

“Five minutes.” Larner tossed the folder to Holm, who opened it. A small bundle of photographs unfolded like a fan. The first one was a portrait. Jennings in his thirties, a young, fresh-looking man with light blond hair and a broad smile. But he also had a steely blue coolness in his eyes, which sharply divided the picture into two parts. Kerstin held her hand over the upper part of his face and saw a happily smiling young person; but when she moved her hand to the lower part, she saw the icy gaze of a man who was hard as nails.

“That’s it,” Larner said almost enthusiastically. “That’s exactly it. When we first visited him, he was pretty amiable, really pleasant—the lower half. As we persisted, we saw more and more of the upper half.”

They looked through the rest of the photographs. A teenage Jennings in uniform, Jennings slightly older in a circle of identical field uniforms, Jennings with a big tuna fish, Jennings pointing a Tommy gun at the camera with a fake attack face, Jennings at a dance with a beautiful southern woman with two first names, Jennings with a small child on his lap, Jennings making out with a Vietnamese prostitute—and then Jennings
roaring with laughter as he presses a pistol to the temple of a grimacing, naked, kneeling Vietnamese man who is pissing himself in a deep hole in the ground. Holm lifted it up toward Larner.

“Yes, that,” he said. “It’s like it makes you forget the others. It’s a fucking awful picture. I would get a lot of money if I sold it to
Time
magazine. I don’t understand how he could keep it. We found all of these pictures when we raided his house after he died.”

“What happened when he died,” Holm said, “exactly?”

“Well,” Larner began, “at the end we had him under surveillance twenty-four hours a day—”

“For how long?” she interrupted.

“It had been going on for a month when he died.”

“Were any murders committed during that time?”

“The bodies were usually found in a state of decay that made them hard to date. But all sixteen that preceded his death had been found by then. It was one reason I was so persistent, even though every imaginable authority was against me: the longer we watched twenty-four hours a day and no new victims were found, the more likely it was that he was the murderer. May I continue now?”

“Of course,” said Holm, ashamed. “Sorry.”

“I tried to be there in the car as often as possible, and I was there that day, the third of July 1982. It was broiling hot, almost unbearable. Jennings came rushing out of the house and yelled at us; he’d been doing that for the last few days. He seemed at the end of his rope. Then he rushed over to his car and tore off. We followed him north along a county road for maybe ten miles, at a crazy speed. After a while, a bit ahead on the road, past a long curve, an incredible cloud of smoke rose up. When we got there, we saw that Jennings had crashed head-on into a truck. Both vehicles were ablaze. I got as close as I could and saw him moving a little in the car, burned up.”

“So you didn’t see the collision itself?” said Holm.

Larner smiled again, the same smile of understanding and indulgence that had become characteristic of their relationship. Hjelm felt a bit like an outsider.

“I know why you’re persisting in this, Halm,” said Larner. “No. We were a few hundred yards back, and there was a curve in the road. And no, I didn’t see his face as he burned up. Did he fake the accident and flee the scene? No. For one thing, there was nowhere for him to go, just flat, deserted earth all around, and no other vehicle was in the vicinity; and for another—and this is crucial—the teeth from the body in the car were his. I had to spend a great deal of time convincing myself that he actually died in that car.

“But he did. Don’t believe anything else. Don’t do what I did and get stuck on Jennings. It destroyed any chance of moving forward on this case. I can’t even come up with a sensible hypothesis anymore. K remains a mystery. He must have been sitting somewhere, laughing out loud, while I harassed a tired, unemployed war veteran and drove him to his death. Then, just to show me how wrong I’d been, he killed two people within six months; both of them died long after Jennings did. And then vanished into thin air.”

Larner closed his eyes.

“I thought I was done with him,” he said slowly. “I kept working on the case, going through every little detail with a fine-toothed comb for several years after the eighteenth and final murder. More than a decade went by. I started working on other things, chasing racists in the South, taking on drug traffickers in Vegas, but he hung over me the whole time. And then that bastard started again. He’d moved to New York. He was mocking me.”

“And you’re dead certain that it’s him?”

Larner touched his nose, tired. “For security reasons, we make sure that only a very tiny number of agents know the crucial
details of each case. For K, it was me and a man by the name of Camerun. Don Camerun died of cancer in 1986. Not even Jerry Schonbauer knows this particular detail—I’m the only one in the bureau who does—it’s about the pincers. It’s the same pincers, and they’re inserted in the same, exact, exceedingly complicated way. Because it’s your case now, you two will also be given access to the description; I strongly recommend that no one else learns about it.”

“What happened with this Commando Cool character who moved to New York?” Holm persisted. “The stockbroker?”

Larner laughed. “Apparently all of my old thoughts are floating in the air and you’re catching them, Halm.”

“Kerstin,” she said.

“Okay, Charstin. You’re absolutely right, Steve Harrigan isn’t mentioned in the report I sent you. But I’ve checked up on him. He’s in the complete material that you’ll get to look at. Harrigan is a billionaire, always on the go. He’s been abroad during each and every one of the six murders in the second round. And he is definitely not in Sweden now. So now that considerably more than five minutes have passed, let’s join Jerry in the showroom and watch a movie.”

He led them through the corridors and into an auditorium that, sure enough, resembled an actual movie theater. The giant man was sitting on a table up front, below the screen, dangling his feet. His pant legs were pulled up a bit, exposing a pair of extremely hairy calves above the regulation black socks. When he saw them, he hopped down and showed them to seats in the front.

“Jerry had just come in from the Kentucky office, when the second round started,” Larner said, wiggling into one of the sleep-inducing chairs. “He’s a damn good agent. Took Roger Penny alone, if you’ve heard of him. Go ahead, Jerry. I’m gonna take a nap. It’s awful at first, but you’ll get used to it.”

The lights went down with a dimmer function; it really did feel like a movie theater.

The special effects did, too. Unfortunately, they were not Hollywood brand.

“Michael Spender.” Schonbauer’s bass accompanied a picture of a man whose only whole body part was his head, under which two conspicuous red dots shone from his neck like lanterns. His head was canted backward, white and swollen. He was naked. The look in the dead eyes had retained the same horrible pain as Andreas Gallano’s. The nails on his hands and feet had been ripped away, the skin had been cut from his trunk in narrow stripes, and his penis had been split down the middle from glans to base and lay open, two bloody rags, one on each side of his groin.