Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (28 page)

Thus the Kentucky Killer is likely a white man in a position of power who has had to fight his way up against all odds. This was the gist of the expert group’s report.

Kerstin Holm once again neglected to be diplomatic and called Larner.

“Ray, Kerstin here. Halm, yes, Halm, dammit.” This last word was in Swedish. “I’m wondering why we didn’t have the opportunity to read the expert group’s psychological profile earlier.”

“Because it’s bullshit,” the phone reverberated.

“What do you mean? There are a lot of aspects we haven’t thought of in here.”

“I was in the group of experts. I agree that it’s a coherent narrative. It works. But the story swallowed up the troublesome objections from the police officer in the group. The desire to create unity forced the most fundamental fact to the side.”

“And what’s that?”

“K’s professionalism.”

“What do you mean?”

“K isn’t trying to even out any positions; it’s not a process but rather an ice-cold series of exterminations. He leaves no red-hot evidence behind, only frostbitten remains. The corpses are ruins, not buildings.”

She didn’t say anything—she recognized the argument. She thanked him and hung up.

“He agrees with you,” she said.

Paul Hjelm, who had just been scrutinizing the delicate line between the pincers, gave a start. “What are you talking about?” he said, irritated.

“Nothing,” she said, and tried to press on through the material.

It didn’t really work. She called Larner again and got straight to the point. “Is it really professionalism in the second round?”

“As you have surely noticed”—his voice remained patient—“I have very little to say about the second round. I don’t understand it. It is the same professionalism, the exact same course of action. The victims are what has changed character.”

“But why?” she nearly shouted. “Why did he go from engineers and researchers to prostitutes and retired people?”

“Solve that, and you’ve solved the case,” Larner said calmly. “But is the distinction really that clear-cut? After all, you’ve recently had literary critics and diplomats and drug dealers die. Both kinds, one might say.”

“I’m sorry,” she said remorsefully. “It’s just so frustrating.”

“When you’ve worked on it for twenty years, you’ll see what frustration is.”

She hung up and reluctantly went on. The difficult thing was
not
to come up with hypotheses, to resist venting them and just get to work. To expand their horizons instead of narrowing them. To wait for the right moment.

They devoted the whole day to getting a reasonable overview. As well as the evening. Their tour of Manhattan would have to wait yet another day.

The next day they began to narrow their focus and take a fine-toothed comb to the thousand pages to find possible Swedish threads. Why had the killer gone to Sweden? Somewhere in these pages was the solution.

Hjelm took upon himself the investigation of the eleventh victim, the Norwegian, the nuclear physicist Atle Gundersen; there might be something there. He contacted UCLA and tried to find potential Swedish colleagues from the early 1980s; he contacted the family in Norway. He burned up half a day but drew a blank.

Holm turned to the descendant of Swedes in Commando Cool, Chris Anderson. She even called him. He sounded exhausted. He had been grilled many times and was sick and
tired of it. Vietnam was far away now; weren’t they ever going to let him bury the memories that still haunted him at night? They had done terrible things, but it was war, and they had worked almost directly under the president, so what could they have done? No, he didn’t know exactly how the chain of command and the issuing of orders had worked; it should be in the reports. Yes, he had been close friends with Wayne Jennings, but they had drifted apart after the war. And now Anderson had no contact at all with the land of his forefathers—he didn’t even talk to his parents.

They searched on, intensely. As soon as any tiny, burning question appeared, Larner threw his patiently smothering blanket over the flame. He seemed to have thought of everything after all. They began to reevaluate his work. The lack of hypotheses and ideas seemed more and more to be because there were none to find. He had kept a cool head and hadn’t let wild hypotheses take over in the absence of sensible ones.

Moving forward without having any clues to follow was the most difficult balancing act in their line of work.

And yet they felt—and they talked a lot about it, talked too much in general, were on their way to becoming friends instead of lovers—that all they needed was one small, crucial piece for the whole puzzle to become coherent; they felt frustratingly close without having the slightest reason for such a feeling.

“There’s something we’ve missed,” Paul said one evening in the hotel restaurant. By now they had no thoughts of placing their bodies anywhere but at the FBI building, in the taxi, or in the hotel. It was becoming a routine. He kept acceptable amounts of contact with Cilla and his family in Sweden; at first, before he knew how it was going to go with him and Kerstin, he hadn’t felt very motivated to call—something had held him back. But as they became more and more like pure police officers, his uneasiness fell away, and his conversations with Cilla
felt completely normal. He missed her sometimes—when there was time.

“What do you mean ‘missed’?” Kerstin said, biting into a braised filet of cod. “We miss things all the time. The more we find, the more we miss.”

Paul watched her sip her wine. Had he gotten so close to her that she had stopped being beautiful? He contemplated her larynx as the wine ran down. No, he hadn’t. But perhaps his lust had found an alternative route that hadn’t been on his map earlier. He was treading upon virgin territory—and the intractability of fucking metaphorical language.

“I always have the feeling that we
don’t
need to know
more
,” he said.

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Looking for the little surge of impulse that runs through it all and brings it together.”

“You romantic.” She smiled.

Had he seen that smile so often that it had stopped being captivating? A ridiculous thought.

They stopped counting the days, simply swam like two fish in an aquarium. One early morning, Larner appeared in the door. He was worked up, and with his service weapon in place under his armpit.

“Are you tired of this?” he called, exhilarated.

Four square eyes looked at him skeptically.

“What do you say to some real police work? Want to be foreign observers at a raid on a drug den?”

They exchanged a glance. Maybe that was what they needed.

“Okay,” Larner said as they half-ran through the corridor behind Jerry Schonbauer; the floor shook substantially, as though his steps had transplanted the fault line from the west coast to the east. “We’re on loan to ATF. They don’t really know what do with us now that you guys are working on K. The rest
of the state’s serial killers are in other hands. We’re going to a crack house in Harlem—you’ll have a chance to stare American reality in the eye. Come along.”

They were out on the street. Big black American cars drove up, and Hjelm and Holm threw themselves into one of them alongside Larner and Schonbauer, all four in the backseat. The two agents pulled on jackets with luminous yellow letters on the back: ATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Like a funeral procession out to prevent the gravesite from being stolen, the caravan forced its way through the New York traffic and reached northern Manhattan, the hopeless neighborhoods, the sacrificed and buried neighborhoods. The building facades became more and more dilapidated; finally it looked like a bombed-out city. Shadows of Dresden. The faces in the streets became darker and darker, till finally they were only black. It was a terrible but logical transformation, a gradual transition from the white downtown to the black Harlem. There was no possibility of trying to explain it away. That was just how it was.

The cars stopped in a well-mannered line. Equally well-mannered lines of ATF-clad experts poured out with weapons drawn, then ran through a ragged, burnt garden, ravaging what plants were there.

“Stay back,” Larner said, joining the ravagers. They gathered in a more or less invisible line along the sidewalk on the next block. All eyes were on one single building, a ramshackle house, one of two buildings that remained in the rubble of the neighborhood. It was already surrounded by a well-organized series of ATF men with submachine guns. They were everywhere, pressed up against dirty stucco walls that seemed to crackle in the desertlike sun. The asphalt quavered. It was silent and desolate amid, instead of black faces, black jackets with yellow letters. A few pigeons flapped up and flew around the house in
strangely rising circles, as though aiming for the sun. The sole streak of cloud broke up before their eyes.

Everyone was in position, as in a photograph, a still image. Then all at once, everyone moved, streaming into the ruin, an army of superior ants intent on taking over the disintegrating anthill. Finally Hjelm and Holm were alone on the street, a vulnerable duo of foreign observers who might at any moment be dragged into a doorway and given a liberal taste of American reality. They heard sporadic gunshots from inside the house, muffled, somehow unreal, as though Hollywood had supplied some sound effects. A few submachine gun rounds. Individual shots. A minor explosion. It only took a minute, then silence. A figure popped out the door, black with a black jacket, and waved in their direction. It took a moment for them to realize that it was waving at them, and even longer for them to realize that it was Larner. They made their way over to him.

“Come on,” he said, waving his pistol. “This is reality.”

Inside a light haze of dust met them, crystallike, with the sun dazzling through it—it stung in their throats. Gradually they realized that the cloud that they were breathing in was drugs—crack. Big black men were lying on the floor with their hands behind their heads. The bodyguards, disarmed. Two were without their hands on their heads; their torsos were half-lying against the walls, their legs and spines at strange angles. Blood oozed out of an open wound, drop by drop, looking increasingly viscous until the last drop hung in the air and seemed to be sucked back in.

They went up to the second floor. Room after room looked like one chemistry lab after another, with shattered flasks, overturned bottles, flickering Bunsen burners—and thicker clouds of dust. A dead body lay among the shards on a table, shot to pieces, segmented, half-covered in white dust that became pinker and pinker until it finally turned to red and
ran into a body upon the body. People were on the floor here, too, with their hands on the backs of their necks. All was silent. The calm after the storm. The silence of the storm warning.

The next floor, the third. Chemistry workshops here too, with different devices. Packs of plastic bags with white contents, half-open, the dust still rising, like a fog sliding over a lake. Hands on necks. A dead person half-hanging out the window, a piece of glass like a shark’s fin straight up through the trunk. Windows were opened. The cloud of dust was carried out over the city. Drugged pigeons cooed audibly. A white wind swept through the house, reaching well-wrapped bundles of dollars in the room farthest in, the inner room. The paper band around one bundle was torn; the wind caught the green bills, and they whirled about the room, were seized.

The room spun. A brown spot spread out around a prostrate jeans-clad backside. They were all the way in, in the very innermost room. Larner smiled, and his smile seemed to split his head. Half his skull flew up eighteen inches and then fell back. His skin was drawn down from his head, his skull flopped around, his skin was sucked back up.

Hjelm staggered toward the open window and greedily inhaled the dirty but uncrystalline air.

“You’ll be drugged for a few seconds,” said Larner. “It’ll pass.”

Holm sat down on the floor next to the window and hugged herself. Hjelm leaned out through the window, tried to find stability, to focus his eyes. Everything was flying around. The still image was heaving behind them. The silence died. People were being moved out, with shouts and bellows. They didn’t see it.

A pair of pigeons descended unexpectedly from the sky and landed gently on the slightly lower roof of the neighboring
building. Hjelm stared at them as they sat placidly on the ridge of the roof. A fixed point in the spinning world.

“You have to avoid inhaling for a while,” Larner said behind him. “You learn from your mistakes. Trial by error.”

He was punishing them—Hjelm realized that now. He kept his eyes on the pigeons. They flew off a ways and pecked at something, then took off again but stayed within sight. He followed their flight; they were doing aerobatics, mimicking each other precisely. When they reached the stinking crater of the crack house, they swept upward, then glided down through the filthy air and stopped on a windowsill on the top floor of the building next door. The window shone like gold in the sun. Hjelm looked through the dirty but golden windowpane and saw a man and a boy. As if in slow motion, the father lifted his hand and struck his son, a classic, traditional box on the ear, several times, using exactly the same motion, as though a minute in time were being repeated again and again, just for him, demanding his attention, and each image ended up on top of the last in a fabulous multiple projection. The son’s expression after the blows, peering up at his father, inexhaustible. It was like Laban Hassel, looking up at his father; like Danne, looking up at his; then Gunnar Nyberg’s children, looking up at theirs. Finally K. The very last in the bunch, K looking up at K.

Bad blood always comes back around
.

“Holy shit!” he yelled.

Holm staggered over and saw that he had it.

“This is it!” he yelled again, like an idiot.

The collective glares of the ATF men ate into the back of his neck. He didn’t give a damn.

“What is it?” Holm shouted in a strange, muted voice.