Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (37 page)

For a while they worried that Nyberg had actually killed Mayer, which might not have been legally justifiable. But the man was a professional even in that respect. In the small, sterile, and nearly secret cell in the basement at police headquarters, he came to after half an hour. No one else actually knew he was there; Hultin had chosen to keep an extremely low profile, even internally. The staff doctor confirmed a concussion as well as a cracked jaw and cheekbone. In other words, no broken jaw—Mayer could speak. But he didn’t.

Hultin made the first attempt. Hjelm sat on a chair behind him and to the side, while Viggo Norlander and Jorge Chavez sat by the door. Along the other wall were Arto Söderstedt and
Kerstin Holm. The whole gang. No one wanted to miss this—except for Gunnar Nyberg. He bowed out.

“My name is Chief Inspector Jan-Olov Hultin,” Hultin said politely. “Perhaps you’ve seen my name in the papers. They’re demanding my head on a platter.”

Robert Mayer sat, bound to a fixed table with handcuffs, and regarded him neutrally.
A competitor
, thought Hultin.

“Wayne Jennings,” he said. “Or should I say the Kentucky Killer? Or perhaps K?”

The same icy gaze. And the same silence.

“So far no one seems to be missing you at LinkCoop, and we’ve arranged it so that the press doesn’t get wind of the story. As soon as your name comes out in the papers, things will be a bit different, you see. Not even your superiors at LinkCoop know you’re here. So tell us what’s going on.”

Wayne Jennings’s icy gaze was truly unsettling. It seemed to nail you down. You felt like you were in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight.

“Come on, now. What are you up to? Who do you work for?”

“I have the right to make a phone call.”

“In Sweden we have a number of controversial terrorist laws that I personally dislike, but they are actually quite useful in situations like these. In other words, you do not have the right to make a phone call.”

Jennings said nothing more.

“Benny Lundberg,” said Hultin. “What did he have in his safe-deposit box?”

No answer was forthcoming.

He held up a drawing of Jennings with a beard. “Why a beard?”

Nothing, not a movement.

“May I suggest a scenario?” Hjelm said from his corner. “My
name is Paul Hjelm, by the way. We have an acquaintance in common. Ray Larner.”

Jennings’s head turned an inch to the side, and for the first time Paul Hjelm met Wayne Jennings’s eyes. He understood how the Vietcong must have felt in the jungles of Vietnam. And how Eric Lindberger must have felt. And Benny Lundberg. And tens of other people who had met their death with these eyes as their last point of human contact.

“The night of September twelfth was tough for you,” Hjelm began. “Several unexpected things happened. You had Eric Lindberger, a civil servant with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with you in your private torture chamber in Frihamnen. Incidentally, it’s very similar to the one under your farm in Kentucky. Did you bring along your personal architect?”

Jennings’s eyes might have narrowed a little. Possibly they took on a new sharpness.

“We’ll come back to Lindberger, because that’s the whole point in continuing this case. Anyway, you make sure that he loses consciousness, and you fasten him into the chair. Maybe you have time to start the procedure. You drive your pincers into Lindberger’s neck with surgical precision. Then suddenly the empty boxes fall down. A young man is crouching behind the boxes. You take him out immediately. Bang bang bang bang, four shots to the heart. But who the hell is he? Are the police on your trail? Already? How is it possible?

“He has no ID, none at all. You search his bag. You find—a set of vocal cord pincers and a set of nerve pincers. Maybe you even recognize your own tools. What was this? Did you know who he was even then, or did you think he was a competitor? An admirer? A copycat? We’ll get back to that.

“You finish torturing Lindberger and are forced to get away from there with two corpses instead of one, and what’s more, you’re surprised by a busload of drunken lawyers, so you have
to leave the strange man behind. You’re certain that the busload has called the police and reported your license plate number, so you have to hurry. You drive out to Lidingö and dump Lindberger in the reeds.

“At the same time, you know that the police are going to show up and search the warehouses and find your torture chamber. This means that you have to redirect their attention. There’s only one thing to do. Benny Lundberg. In your capacity as chief of security, you call the sentry box and order him to fake a break-in at one of the other storage units. You promise him money and vacation. Sure enough, the police go to the place where Benny’s fake break-in has occurred and are satisfied. The corpse can be assumed to be left over from the break-in. Everything ought to be just fine.

“But Benny Lundberg has other plans. He tries to extort money from you. He has hidden a letter in some unknown place, in which he’s written in detail about the night’s events, as life insurance. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know that your specialty is getting people to talk. You get him to do just this, right before two police officers arrive on the scene. You injure the officers, but you don’t kill them. One of them gets a bit angry and knocks you out. And now you’re here.”

Jennings’s gaze was fixed throughout the account. Wheels were turning behind the cold blue eyes. His face swelled and colored; it didn’t seem to concern him.

“So there are two basic questions,” Hjelm continued. “One, what was Eric Lindberger expected to reveal? And two, do you know who you shot and killed?”

Pause. Nothing. Nothing at all.

“The second one is a trick question,” Hjelm continued. “Because it was the Kentucky Killer.”

The icy eyes narrowed. Or Hjelm thought they narrowed. Perhaps it was an illusion.

“You know, of course, that there has been a copycat running riot in New York for a year. Someone got hold of your old pincers and went out on the town. You’ve also read in the Swedish media that he’s come to Sweden; no one can have missed that. He was twenty-five years old, and he was out to get you. You shot him in cold blood. Do you know who he was?”

Jennings held him with his gaze. Was there a trace of curiosity in there? Had he really not guessed?

“You’re not going to like it,” said Hjelm. “His name was Lamar Jennings.”

Wayne Jennings leaned backward four inches. It was a lot in a situation like this. The icy gaze wavered, then flew up toward the ceiling. And then it returned. Steady as a rock.

“No,” he said. “You’re lying.”

“Think about it. What happened to your pincers after you fooled Larner and went underground? You left them behind in the cellar. A striking blunder. If you were going to keep killing and put Larner away, you needed them. They had to be identical, so they would leave identical marks and prove that K was still alive. Without them, you had to manufacture new ones and make sure they were identical, with the same scratches and idiosyncrasies. That must have been pretty tricky.”

Jennings stared at the wall.

“Your son surprised you one night down in the torture chamber in Kentucky. It was the culmination of several years of abuse. Why the hell did you do that to him? A child? Don’t you understand what you created? A monster. He copied you. He came here to give you a taste of your own medicine, and you shot him like a dog. Bad blood always comes back around.”

“It’s ‘what goes around comes around,’ ” said Jennings.

“Well, now it’s ‘Bad blood always comes back around.’ You’ve changed a proverb.”

“Was it really Lamar?”

“Yes. I’ve read his diary. Hellish stuff, just hellish. You murdered him twice. What did you do to him when he startled you down in the cellar? A ten-year-old, for Christ’s sake! What did you do to him?”

“Hit him, of course,” Wayne Jennings said tonelessly.

He closed his eyes. There was an enormous amount of activity behind his eyelids.

When they finally opened, it was as though his eyes belonged to someone else, both more single-minded and more resigned.

“I was war weary,” he said. “You can’t imagine what that’s like—in this country you haven’t had to fight a war for two hundred years. He was a reminder of what I’d once been, just a regular weakling. He got on my nerves. I only burned him a little, with cigarettes. He became my outlet. I wasn’t that much different from my own father.”

“Tell us,” said Hjelm.

Jennings leaned forward. He had made a decision. “You were right not to let this get out to the public. It would have been devastating. I’m the good guy. You don’t believe it, but I’m actually on the right side. The uglier parts of the right side. I’m distasteful but necessary. It was all about getting enemies to talk.”

“In what way was Eric Lindberger an enemy?”

Jennings fixed his eyes on Hjelm’s. “Wait on that. I have to think about the consequences.”

“Okay. How did all this start?”

Jennings braced himself and began.

“I don’t know if you can understand what patriotism is. I went to war to escape from my father. I was seventeen. Poor white southern trash. I was a child who killed other children. I noticed that I had a talent for killing. Others realized it, too. I quickly rose through the ranks. And then suddenly I’m called to Washington and I’m standing eye to eye with the president, at just a little over twenty years old. I’m going to be in charge
of an extremely secret special task force in Vietnam, one that will be directly below the president. Civilians train me to use a new secret weapon. I become an expert. Then I train the others in the group. I’m the only one who has contact with the civilians. The whole time it’s just me—I don’t know who they are. After the war, all they say is ‘Keep yourself available’ and pay my salary. It’s extremely strange. I’m completely destroyed when I come back. I can’t get close to my wife. I badger my son. Then they suddenly contact me. They emerge.”

“CIA?” said Hultin.

Hjelm widened his eyes in surprise.

Jennings shook his head. “We’ll hold off on that,” he said. “In any case, I suddenly realized what was expected of me. At this point, in the late seventies, the Cold War was moving into a new phase—I can’t go into it in detail, but it was truly war. There was an immediate threat—they needed information, lots of information. The same thing was happening on the other side. One by one I picked up the agents who were under surveillance. Professional spies and traitors alike. Academics who sold state secrets. Soviet agents. KGB. I got an incredible amount of vital information out of them.

“Someone got the brilliant idea that it would be handy if it looked like the work of a madman, I don’t know who, so I had to play serial killer, even if it meant I got caught. And that’s how I got Larner on my case. You have no idea how hard that man worked to find out about Commando Cool. He was a threat to national security.

“On the political front, the Cold War started to calm down. Brezhnev died, the Soviet Union was on its way to dissolution, and other enemies were emerging. I would be more useful in some border state between east and west, where the trade exchange of the future would take place, and in my escape I would bring down Larner, make a laughingstock of him.”

“So it was time to escape. Your teeth and someone’s remains were in the car.”

“It took weeks of preparation. A lot of night work out there in the wilderness. Colleagues who were ready to go at any time. Rigged equipment. A perfect set of teeth. A disguised Soviet agent whose teeth had been extracted. A concealed hole in the ground that I could roll into, along with some colleagues, and stay for a day or two. Everything is possible; the impossible takes a bit longer.”

Hjelm, satisfied, still had to ask, “What kind of ideal are you working toward? What does the life that you’re defending with all this violence look like?”

“Like yours,” said Wayne Jennings without hesitation. “Not like mine, like yours. I have no life. I died in Vietnam. Do you believe that you live this freely and with this much privilege at no cost? Do you believe that Sweden is alliance-free and neutral?”

He paused and looked at the wall, then moved his gaze toward Norlander. He met eyes filled with hate. It was hardly the first time. He ignored it.

“Where is Gunnar Nyberg?” he asked.

“Taking care of his broken hand. Why?”

“No one has ever taken me out before. And no one has ever fooled me like that. I thought he was an idiot.”

“He identifies with Benny Lundberg. He sat with him as he was going through the worst of his suffering. His warmth saved Benny’s life. Is that something you can understand?”

“Warmth saves more than cold. Unfortunately, cold is also necessary. Otherwise we would have an eternally cold earth.”

“Is that what the Lindberger story is about—eternal cold? Nuclear weapons? Chemical or biological ones? Or is it LinkCoop? Computers, or control devices for nuclear weapons? Saudi Arabia?”

He smiled inwardly. Maybe he was even a little impressed
by the Swedish police—and by Paul Hjelm. “I’m still thinking about it. I could ask you to contact a certain authority, but I don’t know. There are risks.”

“Are you aware that you are sitting here because you committed twenty murders and one attempted murder? That you are a criminal? An enemy of humanity? Someone who destroys all the human worth that we have spent several thousand years building up? Or do you think you can get out at any time? Do you think you can just choose the right second to get up from the chair, free yourself from the handcuffs, and tear my head off?”

Jennings smiled again, that smile that never reached his eyes. “People should never make murder machines out of other people.”

Hjelm looked at Hultin. Suddenly they began to feel threatened. After all, the only thing that separated them from a murder machine was a set of handcuffs.

“You don’t kill police officers,” Hultin said with bombproof certainty.

“I weigh the pros and cons of every situation. The alternative with the most pros wins. If I had killed that policeman”—he nodded toward Norlander—“you wouldn’t have handled me this mildly today. And then we would have had a problem.”