Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (26 page)

Their nausea was abrupt and mutual. They very nearly had to run from the room.

“Spender was the first victim,” Schonbauer continued expressionlessly, “a computer engineer at Macintosh in Louisville. Found by a berry-picker in the woods in northwestern Kentucky about two weeks after his death. Went missing from his workplace after lunch on September fourth, 1978. Was discovered on the afternoon of the nineteenth, sixty miles from his hometown. Worked on the development of the first big Apple computer.”

The next victim was unidentified, a large man with Slavic features. The picture was a bit more stomach-friendly. He was dressed, but his fingers and genitals were disfigured.

“Looks a bit Russian,” Hjelm said, thinking of the absurd KGB theory.

“Without a doubt,” said Schonbauer. “As soon as it was possible, we sent the fingerprints to the Russian police, but it didn’t result in anything. We don’t have any information at all, except that he was found in southern Kentucky about two months
after Spender. In an old outhouse near a deserted farm. He had been dead for over a week.”

The next picture showed another unidentified victim. A thin, fit white man in his sixties, naked, disfigured in the same way as Spender. The picture was gruesome. It was dusk, there was a dim light above the treetops, and the only thing that gleamed was the body, sitting straight up on a rock in the woods. Rigor mortis. The arms were sticking straight out from the body, as though they had been lifted by an inner, irresistible force; the bones were sticking straight out of the hands, like nails that had been driven out from the inside. The eyes stared, openly accusing.

Hjelm didn’t get used to it; on the contrary, he felt even closer to throwing up.

They rolled on, a terrible cavalcade of the remains of suffering. It was beyond the limits of human comprehension. The very quantity made the crimes even more gruesome. Slowly but surely, the extent of the case became clear to them—the incredible accumulation of human suffering. Holm cried out twice, silently; Hjelm felt her shoulder lightly nudging his. He cried out once too, but more loudly.

“Do you want me to stop?” Schonbauer asked calmly. “I couldn’t make it all the way through till my third try. I’m pretty used to it now.”

Larner was snoring audibly next to them.

“No, keep going,” said Hjelm, trying to convince himself that he had recovered.

“We have so many of them,” Schonbauer said in a subdued voice. “So incredibly many serial killers, and no one can really understand a single one of them. Least of all themselves.”

In the end their defense mechanisms kicked in, and although they never started snoring, they slowly became indifferent. Like a horrible conclusion, Lars-Erik Hassel woke them up. He
was sitting on his chair with shredded fingers, sprawling in all directions; his genitals were a swamp of half-floating remnants. Through the small window in the background, they could see part of a large aircraft.

His head was craned back; he stared at them upside-down, his pain mixed with disgust, his suffering with paradoxical relief.

Maybe
, Hjelm thought,
he was relieved that it wasn’t Laban
.

The lights came up again. Schonbauer returned to the table and sat with his legs dangling once again like a teenage girl’s. Larner awoke in mid-snore with a start and snuffled loudly. Hjelm rolled his shoulders. Holm was sitting stock-still. No one looked at anyone else for some time.

Larner stood, yawned, and stretched until his compact body creaked. “And now, do you two have some dessert for this party?”

Kerstin handed over the Swedish folders wordlessly.

Larner opened them, skimmed through the pictures, and gave them to Schonbauer, who would soon add them to the series of images. Then he got up to leave.

Kerstin and Paul thanked Schonbauer, who gave a curt nod, and they all followed Larner out. Walking through the corridors, they came to a door without a name on it. Larner opened it. They stepped into an empty room.

“Your workroom,” he said with a gesture. “I hope you can work together.”

The office looked exactly like Larner’s, minus all the signs of life. The question was how much of their own they could offer. The desk had been pulled out from the wall and furnished with two chairs, one on each side. Two computers rubbed shoulders on the desk next to a telephone and a short call list. Larner picked it up.

“My number”—he pointed—“Jerry’s number, my pager, Jerry’s pager. You can always get hold of us. Below are names of the files in question, descriptions of them, personal passwords,
and guest passes with codes so you can get in, but only in here. Locked doors are doors that you don’t have admittance to. You have no reason to leave this corridor, nor any possibility of doing so. Bathrooms, women’s and men’s, are a few doors down. There are a couple of cafeterias—I recommend La Traviata two floors down. Any questions?”

No questions. Or an endless number, depending on how you looked at it. None were asked, in any case.

“It’s six p.m. now,” Larner continued. “If you like, you can work for a few hours. I stay till about six. Unfortunately I’m busy tonight, otherwise we could eat dinner together. Jerry has offered to eat with you and show you around town, if you’d like. You can let him know.

“So all that’s left is to wish you good luck. You don’t need to worry about getting into the wrong things on the computers—they’re customized for you, and everything confidential is elsewhere. Contact me or Jerry if problems or questions come up. ’Bye.”

He disappeared. They were alone.

Holm rubbed her eyes. “I don’t actually know if I can handle this,” she said. “It’s midnight Swedish time. Shall we accept Swedish time and go back to the inn?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t leave right away,” said Hjelm. “We have to continue being diplomatic.”

She sensed a slightly sarcastic bite and smiled. “Yeah, yeah, curiosity got the better of me, I admit it. My strategy went to hell.”

“CIA—”

“Okay, okay, rub it in. I made the judgment that he wouldn’t be angry.”

“I don’t think he was. More like relieved. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. But I understand why he got stuck on Jennings.”

“But he’s right that we have to think past him.”

“Are you sure?”

They looked at each other. Their jet lag, combined with the overdose of impressions, made them giggle foolishly. Their exhaustion was about to get the better of them. Hjelm liked the irresponsible stubbornness that had fallen upon them; their defense mechanisms were starting to be taken out of the game.

“Shall we say to hell with Schonbauer’s tour?” he asked.

“Can you be diplomatic and let him know in a nice way?”

“You’re the diplomat.”

“In theory. This is in practice. You were much better at it than I was.”

“I was just absent-minded,” he said, dialing Schonbauer’s number. “Jerry, this is Paul. Yalm, yes, Yalm. We’re going to try to work on this as long as we can manage, and then we’ll let our jet lag take over. Can we put our tour of Manhattan off until tomorrow? Good. Okay. ’Bye.”

He hung up and exhaled. “I think he was relieved.”

“Good,” said Holm. “Should we get an overview of what we have and let the details wait? I’ve had enough details for today.”

The computers contained all the necessary information. Detailed lists of all the victims. Folders with all the crime-scene investigations. Folders for every individual case investigation. Expert psychological profiles of perpetrators. Folders with all the autopsy results. Folders with all the press cuttings. Files with descriptions of weapons, FYEO.

“What does that mean?” Hjelm asked.

“For your eyes only. This must be where he has the top-secret details that connect the first round with the second.”

They glanced through the files; an incredible amount of information. How the hell could they add to this enormous investigation even a tiny bit? It seemed hopeless enough to motivate
them to stop working. They turned their computers off after the countdown “one potato two potato three potato four!” and felt blissfully frivolous.

“Do you think we can run away from the FBI?” said Kerstin Holm.

Of course it would have been an experience to get out and see New York by night, but they weren’t disappointed that they’d declined Jerry Schonbauer’s offer. They enjoyed a quiet dinner in the hotel restaurant instead. It was two a.m. in Sweden, nine o’clock local time, when they came down to the lobby and looked for the restaurant
in
the restaurant. It was, in other words, very small.

Skipper’s Inn continued to play at being an English inn. What the restaurant lacked in variety and elaborateness, it made up for in quality. They chose one of the two possible entrées, beef Wellington, and a bottle of Bordeaux in an unfamiliar brand, Château Germaine. They sat at a window table and got at least a small, indirect view of Manhattan’s street life. The little restaurant, where they had been the first guests, filled up, and soon all twelve tables were occupied.

Paul Hjelm was struck by another sensation of déjà vu. Last time they had sat alone, enjoying a quiet dinner in a restaurant in an unfamiliar place, the consequences had been unmistakable. He squirmed slightly, thinking of Cilla and the children and the sense of family that they had so strenuously won back. He thought of the extreme temptation that the woman on the other side of the table still represented, of how she invaded his dreams and remained a pressing mystery. She had put on a modest but noticeable amount of makeup and had changed into a little black dress with tiny straps that crisscrossed her otherwise-bare back. She was so small and thin, and her face
seemed smaller than usual within the frame of her dark, slightly messy pageboy. Had she fixed herself up on purpose?

He couldn’t help saying, “Do you remember the last time we sat like this?”

She nodded and smiled, incredibly attractively. “Malmö.”

That husky Gothenburg alto. Her duets with Gunnar Nyberg echoed in his ears. Schubert
Lieder
. Goethe poems. Was he trying to get away or to get closer? When he opened his mouth, he didn’t know what his next step would be. He let it happen.

“That was one and a half years ago,” he said.

“Soon,” she said.

“You remember?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You know …”

The social wreckage bobbed on the surface. He tried to force it down and said abruptly, “What was it that happened?”

She could interpret that as she wished. She was quiet, then said at last, “I had to go another way.”

“Where to, then?”

“As far as possible from work. I was close to quitting.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No one knew besides me.”

Not even him?
He thanked his creator that he didn’t say it.

“Not even him,” she said.

He didn’t question it. She could go whatever way she wanted or needed to.

“After you and your agonizing over decisions, I planned to live without a man,” she said quietly. “I needed time to think. Then I met him, a silly coincidence. He kept calling at work, too, so soon everyone knew I had a new man. What no one knew was that he was sixty and a pastor in the Church of Sweden.”

Hjelm said nothing.

With her eyes on her fork, she poked distractedly at the half-eaten
beef Wellington. “No one thinks you can have a passionate relationship with a sixty-year-old pastor in the Church of Sweden. But that’s what it was. That’s the only kind of relationship I seem able to handle these days.”

She looked out to the crowds of people on West Twenty-fifth Street. “He’d been a widower for twenty years,” she continued in the same slightly droning, toneless voice. “The pastor in the church where I sang in the choir. He cried when I sang, came up, and kissed my hand. I felt like a schoolgirl who finally got some attention. I was a daughter and a mother at the same time. After a while, out of that, a woman was reborn.”

She continued to avoid his gaze.

“There was so much unfinished in that man, but he finished a little of it with me. He carried so much quiet and lovely life wisdom—I don’t know if it’s possible to understand—an ability to enjoy the little gift of every day. If nothing else, he taught me that.”

“What happened?”

She finally looked at him for a split second, her eyes slightly veiled but very much alive. “He died.”

He took her hand and held it, unmoving. Both looked out onto the street. Time nearly stopped.

“He was already dying when we met,” she continued quietly. “I didn’t realize that until now. He had so much life in him and wanted to pass it on. Give a farewell gift to the living. I hope he got a little bit of me to take with him. Some passion, if nothing else.”

He had stopped thinking of how he ought to act and just listened. It was nice.

“It went quickly. He was actually supposed to go through his third round of chemotherapy. He didn’t bother—he chose one last period of health instead of a fight to the finish. I kept a vigil over him for a week, every day after work. That was last
spring. It was like he just shrank up. But he smiled almost the entire time. That was strange. I don’t know if it was the giving or the taking that made him happy. Maybe just the exchange. As though he had received one last insight into the mysteries of life and could await the big mystery without fear.”

She turned to him for another split second, as if to make sure he was listening. He was. She turned away again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Those pictures today … you think you can prepare yourself, but you can’t. You think you’ve seen everything, but you haven’t. It’s like there were different deaths. My pastor friend was in pain, too, horrible pain, but he smiled. There were no smiles here, just the horrific faces of suffering, like a frieze of horrible medieval pictures of Christ, made to strike terror into the viewer. A warning. Like he’s trying to warn us away from life, as medieval prelates were. And he almost succeeds.”

“I don’t know,” Hjelm tried. “I don’t really see a message in what he does. I think looking at those bodies is more like being confronted with waste products, remainders, industrial waste, if you know what I mean. It feels like the mechanical, industrial deaths of Auschwitz. If anything can ever feel like that …”