Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (36 page)

“Are you sick?” she asked.

Yes, it’s something completely enormous.

“No. No, I—don’t know. I just have to make sure—that I didn’t completely destroy you. That’s all.”

“You promised never to contact us, Mom said.”

“I know. I kept my promise. The two of you are grown up now.”

“Pretty much,” she said. “We never talked about you. It was like you never existed. Bengt became our dad. Our real dad.”

“Bengt
is
your real dad,” he said. Who the hell was Bengt? “I’m something different. I would like to see you.”

“I only remember yelling and violence,” she said. “I don’t know what difference it would make.”

“Me neither. Would you forbid me to come?”

She was quiet. “No,” she said at last. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“You’re married,” he said, to hide the rejoicing inside him.

“Yes,” she said. “No kids yet. No grandchildren.”

“That’s not why I’m calling,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“How is Tommy?”

“Good. He lives in Stockholm. Östhammar. He has a son. There’s your grandchild.”

He received the small blows right on his nose cone, with a smile.

“And Gunilla?” he said hesitantly.

“She still lives in the house, with Dad. They’re thinking about switching to an apartment and getting a summer place.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Well, see you. I’ll be in touch.”

“ ’Bye,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

He would. More than ever before. That soft Uddevala dialect. The girl who had spoken such pronounced Stockholmish. He remembered her little Stockholm-accented vowels so well. It was possible to become someone else. To change dialects and become someone else.

Then it hit him. There and then, it hit him.

There and then Gunnar Nyberg caught the Kentucky Killer.

He didn’t have to be an American. It would even have been more convenient to become some other nationality. Maybe not a Norwegian or a Kenyan, but something plausible.

He paged frantically through the lists. He went through name after name after name and ignored the stars.

Hjelm came in and regarded the intensely reading giant with surprise. An enormous aura of energy was rising up above him like a thunderhead.

“Hi yourself,” Hjelm said.

“Shut up,” Nyberg said amiably.

Hjelm sat down and shut up. Nyberg kept reading. Fifteen, twenty minutes went by.

April, May. May 3: Steiner, Wilhelm, Austria, born 1942; Hün, Gaz, Mongolia, born 1964; Berntsen, Kaj, Denmark, born 1956; Mayer, Robert, New Zealand, born 1947; Harkiselassie, Winston, Ethiopia, born 1960; Stankovski, B—

Gunnar Nyberg stopped short.

“Bing bang boom,” he roared. “The famous Kentucky Killer. Get a photo of Wayne Jennings. Now!”

Hjelm stared at him and slunk out, suddenly immeasurably subordinate. Nyberg stood up and paced, no
ran
, around the room, like an overfed rat in a tiny hamster wheel.

Hjelm returned and tossed the large portrait of Wayne Jennings as a young man onto the desk.

“Haven’t you seen it before?” he said.

Nyberg stared at it. The youth with a broad smile and steel-blue eyes. He placed his hands on the photo, letting only the eyes peer out. He had seen those eyes before. In his mind he made the hair gray and moved the hairline up. He added a few wrinkles.

“Meet Robert Mayer,” he said, “chief of security at LinkCoop.”

Hjelm looked at the photo, and then at Nyberg. “Are you sure?”

“There was something familiar about him, but I didn’t put it together. He must have undergone some sort of plastic surgery, but you can’t get rid of your eyes and your gaze that easily. It’s him.”

“Okay.” Hjelm tried to calm down. “We have to get confirmation. It would be logical for you to contact him after the Benny Lundberg incident.”

“Me?” Nyberg gaped. “I’d just give him a whupping.”

“If anyone else goes, he’ll get suspicious. It has to be you. And it has to seem routine. Play dumb—that ought to work. Bring along some lousy, unrelated photo.” He rummaged in the desk drawer for a photograph of a man, any man at all. He found a passport photo of a man in his sixties smiling serenely. “This will be good,” he said. “Who is it?”

Nyberg looked at the picture. “It’s Kerstin’s pastor.”

Hjelm stopped short. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that he was sitting at Kerstin’s desk. “Do you know about it?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Nyberg. “She told me.”

Hjelm felt a little twinge and fingered the picture clumsily. “Okay. It’ll have to do. We’ll wipe it, and then you make sure to get Mayer’s fingerprints.”

“Can’t we just bring him in? Once we get the fingerprints, it’s over.”

“We might not get that far. There are powerful interests involved. A lawyer could get him released before they even get to fingerprints. And we can’t ask him—he’ll run. I’ll check with Hultin.”

He called Hultin, who came right in, as though he had been waiting outside. He quickly got a clear picture of the situation, then nodded at Hjelm.

“Okay, let’s do it. Gunnar will go back to Frihamnen. Mayer ought to see it as pure chance that Gunnar and Viggo showed up in Frihamnen, which it is—he’s had the idea to check the rest of the storage spaces there. He shouldn’t have any idea how far we’ve gotten. Provided it doesn’t leak at the FBI. I just got a report from Holm—she’s on her way. Benny Lundberg had some secrets in a safe-deposit box, but they were picked up this morning, probably also by this Robert Mayer with a ridiculous fake beard. We’re getting a composite sketch.”

“How will we do the fingerprint checks?” said Hjelm. “There are these new microvariants, you know.”

“Can you do them?”

“No. Jorge can.”

“Get him. We’ll all go together. In case he tries to run when Gunnar is there.”

Hjelm ran into his office and found Chavez contemplating “Nurse Gregs has wooden legs” and “Brother Kate’s breasts are great.” Were those children’s rhymes?

“Get a laptop with fingerprint equipment,” said Hjelm. “We’re going to take K.”

The children’s rhymes dissipated, and Chavez got a move on. He was the last one to arrive at Hultin’s service car and threw himself into the backseat beside Hjelm, placing the small computer on his lap. Hultin drove like a madman toward Täby. Gunnar Nyberg was in the passenger seat. He had pulled himself together and called LinkCoop, sounding perfectly blasé. Robert Mayer was there. He would be available for another couple of hours. Nyberg asked to discuss last night’s incidents with him. He needed to show him a photo.

That was fine.

They turned off of Norrtäljevägen, drove past Täby’s city center, which they could vaguely see through the drizzle, and arrived on a small side street.

“This isn’t good,” Nyberg said. “They have megasecurity. Sentry boxes at the gates. Monitoring systems. He’ll see everything.”

Hultin drove to a bus stop and pulled over. He thought for a moment, turned around, and drove back. It was incredibly frustrating. In the garage at police headquarters, Nyberg changed cars—he hopped into his own good old Renault. Then he followed them to Täby.

Hultin’s Volvo turned off into a parking spot next to an
industrial building a few hundred feet before LinkCoop’s gate. There it stayed, in the storm.

When Nyberg drove up to the sentry box, everything was just as it had been at his last visit. On the surface.

The twin receptionists were the same too. Although he insisted that he could find his way to Mayer’s office himself, one of them walked ahead of him through the stylistically pure building; he became more convinced than ever that this was a well-thought-out marketing strategy. This time, however, his interest in the miniskirt and what it hid was minimal. Incredibly tense, he entered chief of security Robert Mayer’s office with the blinking-monitor walls.

Mayer fixed him with his ice-blue gaze, Wayne Jennings’s gaze, while Nyberg made the utmost effort to seem effortless. Mayer was otherwise relaxed; only his gaze was firmly focused, and it seemed to see right through him. The evening before, Mayer had tortured Benny Lundberg, beaten Viggo Norlander unconscious, and broken Nyberg’s own nasal bones in three places. Mayer himself seemed fresh as a daisy.

“That doesn’t look good,” he said, tapping his nose lightly.

“It’s a tough job,” Nyberg said, shaking Mayer’s extended hand. He refrained from using his Mr. Sweden grip this time.

“I’ve been looking more closely at what that building has been used for recently,” said Mayer, sitting down and folding his hands behind his head. “It really has been empty—all that’s there is old empty boxes. So it’s been accessible to anyone at all. And apparently for any purpose at all.”

Nyberg was blinded by Mayer’s professionalism. “It’s a horrible story.”

“It really is,” Mayer said sympathetically.

Nyberg felt like he was going to throw up. “Naturally, this places the break-in in a slightly different light.”

Mayer nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Benny reports a break-in in
one place while at the same time the Kentucky Killer is at work nearby. Then he’s nearly murdered himself in that very same spot. What do you make of that?”

“Nothing, for the time being,” Nyberg said nonchalantly. “But one wonders what Benny Lundberg was up to.”

“It certainly seems very strange,” said Mayer. “We knew, of course, that he had a past as a skinhead, but we thought he deserved a chance at a new life. I suppose most of this would now indicate that he had something to do with the break-in.”

“I don’t quite understand,” said Nyberg with meticulous stupidity.

“I’m not going to get involved in your work,” Mayer said briskly. “That’s hardly necessary. You were close to getting him, after all.”

“It would be nice to have that honor, but the truth is that we were only down there doing a routine check of all the buildings in the vicinity.” Nyberg took out the photo of Kerstin Holm’s deceased pastor and extended it to Mayer. Upside down.

Mayer took it and had to turn it around. He glanced at it and shook his head.

Nyberg took the photo back and put it in his wallet.

“I’m sorry,” said Mayer. “Should I recognize him?”

“We picked him up in a car that was leaving Frihamnen at high speed. One of the warehouse workers thought he recognized him. That he might have worked at LinkCoop.”

“No, I don’t recognize him.”

Nyberg nodded doggedly and stood. He extended his hand toward Mayer, and they shook in a civilized fashion.

He had to check himself so that he didn’t run through the corridors. He smiled at the twin receptionists and received a double dividend. His car rolled calmly out through the gates and rounded the curve slowly.

Then for the last twenty yards he stepped on the gas; he
thought he could allow himself that much. He bolted over to Hultin’s car and got in, dripping.

“Everything okay?” asked Hultin.

“I think so.” He handed the photo to Chavez in the backseat.

Hjelm watched the hand-off. There was something deeply macabre about the Kentucky Killer’s fingerprints being on the timid, cancer-ridden pastor’s face.

Wearing plastic gloves, Chavez put the photo into a little scanner fastened to the side of the laptop. Everything had been prepared in advance. Nyberg’s fingerprints had been fed in, as had Jennings’s. After an uncomfortably long time, the computer beeped. “Match” was blinking on the screen.

“We have a match for Gunnar Nyberg’s fingerprints,” said Chavez.

No one answered. They waited. The time dragged unbearably. Each second was a step toward hopelessness.

Then another ding—another match.

“Not Nyberg again?” said Hjelm.

“Match for Robert Mayer,” said Chavez. “Wayne Jennings and Robert Mayer are the same person.”

A silvery gray turbo Volvo in an industrial parking lot in Täby heaved a sigh of relief.

“We can’t just storm in,” said Hultin. “He’d see us at least two minutes beforehand. I imagine that ten seconds would be enough for him to disappear into thin air.”

They were quiet for a moment. Their thinking could have been called brainstorming if a storm hadn’t been howling as if through the skulls of the dead.

“I’ll have to take him myself,” said Nyberg. “I think I seemed dumb enough to have forgotten something.”

“You have a concussion,” said Hultin.

“That is correct,” said Nyberg, hopping over to his car. He
rolled down the window. “Be prepared. I’ll call as soon as anything happens.”

“Be careful,” said Hultin. “This is one of the most experienced professional killers in the world.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Nyberg waved, irritated, and drove off.

At the sentry box he said he’d forgotten to ask about something; he was let in. By this point Mayer-Jennings had had him in sight for fifteen seconds; he might already be gone. He hoped with all his heart that he had given the impression of being useless, a sloppy cop. The twin receptionists smiled and announced him, and he managed to resist the dancing miniskirt; at least she wouldn’t die. Ideas and plans teemed through him. How should he act? In all likelihood, Mayer would have access to a weapon within a tenth of a second. At any hint of a threat, he would immediately kill Nyberg, who wouldn’t have a chance.

But he wanted to meet his grandchild. He made a decision.

Mayer stood waiting in the corridor outside his office; he looked a bit suspicious, which probably meant that he was roiling with suspicions.

Nyberg lit up when he saw him. “I’m sorry,” he said breathlessly, tilting his head. “I remembered that there was one more thing.”

Mayer raised an eyebrow and was ready. His hand moved a fraction of an inch toward the lapel of his jacket and pulled back.

Gunnar Nyberg delivered a tremendous uppercut that tossed Mayer through the corridor. His head crunched into the wall. He didn’t get up.

And that was that.

“Brilliant plan,” Jan-Olov Hultin said sternly.

“Well, it worked,” said Gunnar Nyberg, grimacing. Three fingers on his right hand were broken. The cast had hardly had time to dry.

Nyberg had dragged Mayer into his office and called Hultin. They decided to keep the media at bay so as not to limit the space they had to work in. Together they came up with a strategy. Hjelm, saying he needed to get hold of his colleague Nyberg, had gotten into LinkCoop and followed one of the dance-happy twins through the corridor. Together the somewhat injured duo had located a handy back door, out of which they moved Mayer. While Hjelm stood guard, Nyberg walked coolly back through the corridor and left the premises in due order; his smile at the twin receptionists had been a bit forced. He drove his car around to the back of the building, and he and Hjelm loaded Mayer into the trunk. Then Hjelm, too, left LinkCoop via the reception area. The twin receptionists were indeed sparklingly lovely.