Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (31 page)

Looking down a set of stairs, he saw Benny Lundberg, the guard. He was naked and tied to a chair. Blood was streaming from his shredded fingertips. A needle was threaded through his genitals. And out of his neck stuck two gently quivering syringes.

Gunnar Nyberg stiffened. His own pain vanished immediately. He took his hand from his face and let the blood flow out of his nose. He went down the stairs. He was trembling. A small, bare lightbulb radiated a ghastly glow over the macabre scene.

Benny Lundberg was alive. His eyes had rolled back; only the whites were visible. Spasmodic jerks passed through his face. Convulsions were ripping through the pumped-up body. White foam bubbled out of his mouth. No hint of sound.

Gunnar Nyberg was looking at pain beyond words.

His large body shook. What could he do? He didn’t dare touch the horrible pincers in Lundberg’s neck. Any movement could have disastrous consequences. He didn’t even dare to unfasten the leather straps around his arms and legs. What would happen if Lundberg convulsed and fell to the floor? The only thing he could do in the way of a small attempt at care was to pull the long needle out of his male organ. He did so.

Then he got his cell phone out of his inside pocket, and, with concentration, managed to dial the number. He didn’t recognize his own voice as it asked for an ambulance. “A doctor has to come too,” it said. “A neck specialist.”

Then he bent toward Lundberg. He placed his hand on the shaking cheek. He tried to speak comfortingly to him. He embraced him. He tried to be as brotherly as he could.

“There, there, Benny, take it easy. Help is on the way. You can do it. Hang in there, Benny. There. Everything is okay. Nice and easy.”

The spasms and twitches began to subside. Benny Lundberg grew calmer—or was he about to die in his arms?

Gunnar Nyberg realized he was crying.

Norlander ran after the man in black. He was in good shape these days, and he was gradually gaining on the man. But the man was quick and lithe. He threw himself down from the loading dock and kept running, past the sentry box. Just as Norlander ran by, the guard peered out. “Call the police!” he bellowed as he ran.

The man in black dashed onto a cross street and vanished from sight for an instant. Norlander approached the spot. He saw the man disappear behind a building about ten yards away. Without thinking, he ran that way. His weapon was dangling
from his hand. The man in the balaclava peeked out and shot at him.

Norlander threw himself forward into the mud. He checked himself out for a second, then was up again. His pistol was muddy. He tried to wipe it off as he ran. He raced up to the corner and carefully peered around it. It was empty back there, an alley. Crouching, he ran to the next corner and peered around it. Empty again. Up to the next corner. Peer around it carefully.

One step was all he heard behind him, a faint splash. Then an incredible pain on the back of his neck. He fell into the mud like a pig. He was nearly unconscious. He looked up into the rain clouds. Everything was dancing. The man in black was staring down at him through his balaclava. He couldn’t make out his eyes. The only thing he could see was the silencer on the barrel of the pistol that was pointed at his face.

“Get out of here,” the man hissed. “Beat it.”

Then he was gone. Norlander heard a motor start up. He stood and peered around the corner of the building. He was dazed. The world was spinning. Very, very vaguely he could see the contours of a car in the middle of the centrifuge. Maybe brown, maybe a jeep.

Then he fell down into the sludge.

The sun in New York had become as insane as the rain was in Stockholm. Time was out of joint. All that was missing was for horses with two heads and jackdaws with beaks sticking out of their asses to be born.

It was excessively hot. Not even the FBI’s hypermodern air
conditioning could combat it. Hjelm could have testified that Eenie meenie miney moe didn’t work either. He was bored; he felt as if he had been stopped midstep.

They waited. Waiting never promotes tolerance for irritation. Everyone was irritating everyone else. Even Jerry Schonbauer had a fit and tore off his soaking wet shirt, causing his buttons to fly off. When one of the buttons knocked the contact lens out of Holm’s left eye, he resumed his timid self and begged for forgiveness.

“I didn’t know you wore lenses,” Hjelm said after a while.

“ ‘Wore’ is right.” She examined the two pieces of the contact, which were stuck to her thumb and index finger respectively. “Now you’ll get to see me in glasses.”

She took out her right contact and threw it away. Then she dug out a pair of classic round glasses and secured them on her exquisite nose. To avoid bursting into confidence-shattering peals of laughter, he concentrated on being irritated with the heat.

It didn’t work. He burst into laughter.

“Look at that funny bird,” he said unconvincingly, pointing out the window.

“I’m glad I can be of service,” she said sulkily, pushing the glasses up toward her forehead.

They had been to visit the young computer expert Bernhard Andrews, who hacked his way into every branch of the Internet on the hunt for Lamar Jennings. Maybe he would find a photo. But as expected, he was nowhere. Not one single tiny directory could produce anything at all on Jennings; he had kept himself out of the monitoring systems of society for twenty-five years. The only thing that turned up was his birth certificate. It seemed that he hadn’t existed since his birth.

Mrs. Wilma Stewart had failed miserably to create a portrait of Lamar Jennings. As the image took shape on the computer
screen, the old woman had shaken her head time after time. “Thicker lips.… Thinner lips, I said, young man.… Listen here. I said thicker lips.”

The heat claimed another victim. She nodded off in front of the computer and promised to come back later and try again.

Finally the crime techs dropped off the first of the materials they had finished processing from Lamar Jennings’s apartment. They had attempted to reconstruct the pages of Lamar Jennings’s diary from the remains they had found and made four copies. Each of the four took one and began reading. Schonbauer sat on Larner’s desk, dangling his legs, clad in a ridiculous net undershirt that had been revealed after the shirt catastrophe. Larner sat in his chair with his legs on the desk beside Schonbauer. Yalm & Halm sat in visitors’ chairs at a respectable distance from each other.

The fragments were incoherent, like key words out of a life story. Apparently Larner had been right in saying that Lamar Jennings had left just enough to indicate the depths of his pain. Each fragment bore a small amount of information.

As they read, they sneaked glances at each other.

When they were all finished, Larner said, “This is why it didn’t all fit together. This is a classic serial killer of the more intellectual sort, incredibly wounded, very intelligent. It couldn’t be reconciled with the early coldness. I ought to have realized. On July twenty-seventh we have a date. On July twenty-seventh, 1997, the prostitute Sally Browne was murdered in Manhattan. That was Lamar Jennings’s first murder. It starts there: ‘The Aztecs killed in order to live.’ Any other thoughts?”

“Arkaius,” said Kerstin Holm. “Robert Arkaius is a Swedish tax exile. He owns the cabin where Lamar committed his first murder in Sweden. Apparently he got the address in exchange for sexual favors. Arkaius couldn’t return to Sweden anyway. Of course, he didn’t know that his former lover’s son, Andreas Gallano, had holed up there after he’d escaped from prison.”

Larner nodded mutely.

Schonbauer said, “That must have been after he opened that letter and found out that his father was in Sweden, when he had already started the murders. He goes out and looks for Swedes in sketchy bars in order to get his hands on a good place to stay in Stockholm. Sex doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, other than that. The trauma seems to have occurred before puberty.”

“Our reconstruction of his profile,” said Larner, “is quite close to the one you’ve already done, Yalm. As a child, he is abused by his father—that’s probably the glowing cigarettes we see. Sure enough, the culmination comes when he goes down some stairs and opens that door and sees his professional murderer of a father at work. After that, he is never the same again. Then comes blow after blow. His father dies, his mother commits
suicide after a few years, possibly because of that letter that reaches her in some unknown way and ends up in an untouched box at his grandmother’s house. When his grandmother dies, the letter ends up in the hands of the now-twenty-four-year-old son in New York, where he—as the apartment indicates—lives half-outcast from society. It confirms what he’s suspected all along: his father is alive. His tormentor still exists; he hovers over him and possesses him.

“His repressed images of the past start to return, moving in a certain direction, ‘like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal.’ Finally the images drive him down to that door. He opens it and is confronted with the most repressed image of all, his father above a victim who’s foaming at the mouth, with the micropincers in his neck. He has to get rid of it, and that can only happen with homeopathic magic: like pleads to like. He has the pincers; now he can use them. The image in his memory is exact; he knows exactly what to do. As soon as the images appear, he must go out and kill. It calms him: ‘if the images can become a story.’ The murders make the lightninglike, hardhitting pictures into a more easily handled story.

“But as you said, Yalm, at the same time it’s about preparing himself for the big, decisive murder. He has to get rid of his father, he must die by his own methods, the very ones that haunt him. He’s finally gotten hold of the address of a safe house in the Stockholm area—it’s time. Apparently the letter has revealed that his father is in Stockholm, and even more important, it’s revealed what he calls himself—otherwise the whole project is hopeless. The techs have to be finished with the burned letter soon. If we’re lucky, the name will be there.

“Anyway, he gets a fake passport under the name Edwin Reynolds and goes to Newark Airport. Annoyingly, the next flight to Stockholm is fully booked. It’s not really a catastrophe, but somehow he happens to stumble upon Lars-Erik Hassel. Maybe
the images came to him again in the airport; maybe he decides to kill two birds with one stone: getting his hands on a ticket, and simultaneously getting rid of the images and having a peaceful flight; avoiding six hours of inferno might be worth the relatively minor risks. Hassel somehow reveals himself as a traveler to Stockholm who hasn’t yet checked in, which means his seat can be made available. Jennings gets Hassel and his luggage into the janitor’s closet and does his deed; maybe he uses sex as a temptation again. Then he snatches Hassel’s ticket, calls and cancels in his name, books himself the seat with Reynolds’s name, and has a nice, calm flight.

“Presumably he has no idea how close you are to catching him at Arlanda. All he has is carry-on luggage—he just goes right through, gets in a taxi, stops somewhere on the way and buys some food, and goes straight to the cabin. Your drug dealer happens to be there, but by now Lamar Jennings is a practiced killer. He gets in easily and murders the drug dealer; the sight now and then of the body in the cellar is enough to keep the images at bay as he searches for his father and plans the best way to deal with him. What happens next is your business.”

No one had any objections. That was surely how it happened.

In the meantime, Hjelm’s thoughts had gone in a slightly different direction. “Was there a cellar on Wayne Jennings’s farm?”

Larner looked at him. He had expected to be able to catch his breath after his account, but now he had to make a sharp turnaround. “There was a small cellar, yes. But it was a sort of rec room, a cozy room with a fireplace, and we checked it several times. It wasn’t the scene of the murder.”