Bad Blood: A Crime Novel

by Arne Dahl

  “And then one might ask,” Kerstin Holm added, “if he would really risk first going up to the counter and getting a no, then calling in Hassel’s name, and then returning to the counter a few minutes later and asking the same question, only to get a yes this time. A man who has been eluding the FBI for twenty years would hardly take such a risk of attracting attention and being directly linked to a corpse that could be discovered at any moment.”

  Hultin seemed a bit thrilled by two such keen objections to his scenario and countered his opponents: “On the other hand, there is an obvious moment of risk in what he actually did. If they had gotten hold of a data expert eleven minutes earlier, we would have had him. It was far from an idiot-proof plan.”

  “I still think the evidence points to Sweden being his goal when he set out for the airport,” Chavez persisted. “But when he arrives, it turns out the flight is fully booked. Then his plan takes shape. Why not combine work and pleasure? Somehow he locates a solo traveler to Arlanda, murders him in his usual, pleasurable way, and takes his place, even though this involves a definite but limited risk. The risk of discovery, on the other hand, is an important ingredient in a serial killer’s enjoyment.”

  “Then what does that suggest?” Hultin asked pedagogically.

  “That his desire to come here to Sweden was so strong that it caused him to take a risk that he probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise. And in that case, he has a very definite goal here.”

  “Ice-cold calculation combined with impulsiveness and a craving for pleasure. Something to sink our teeth into …”

  “There’s nothing to indicate Sweden in his profile?” Arto Söderstedt wondered with exemplary precision.

  “Not according to the FBI.” Hultin paged through the file. “Leaving the United States at all doesn’t really fit with his profile. His history is as follows.

  “It all started twenty years ago in Kentucky, where victims who had been killed in the same awful manner began to show up. The wave then spread all over the Midwest. It blew up in the media, and soon the notorious killer was going by the name the Kentucky Killer. Within today’s deeply alarming serial killer cult, he’s a legend, one of the original characters, and he’s thought to have inspired many budding practitioners. He committed a series of eighteen murders in four years, then stopped abruptly for a decade and a half. Just over a year ago a new series began with exactly the same MO, this time in the northeastern United States. Hassel was his sixth victim in this latest series, his twenty-fourth overall. His twenty-fourth known victim, I should probably add.”

  “A break of almost fifteen years,” Kerstin Holm mused aloud. “Is it really the same person and not a—what’s it called?”

  “A copycat,” said Hjelm, using the English word.

  Hultin shook his head. “The FBI has ruled that out. There are details of the MO that have never been made public and that only a few authorities at the bureau know of. Either he’s hidden his victims well for fifteen years, or else he quit and maybe settled down, before his craving for blood got the best of him once again. That’s the FBI’s scenario, anyway. That was why the bulletin went out for a white middle-aged man. Probability says that he was just under twenty-five when he began, so he’s just under forty-five now.”

  “And ‘white’ is also based on probability, I assume?” said the chalk-white Söderstedt.

  “Almost all serial killers are white men,” said Kerstin Holm. “A much-debated phenomenon. Maybe it’s some sort of hereditary compensation for the many hundreds of years of world domination that they are about to lose.”

  “Haphazard fascism” came flying out of Hjelm.

  The A-Unit considered this expression for a few long seconds. Even Hultin looked contemplative.

  “What kinds of victims were they, in fact?” Chavez asked at last.

  Hultin’s resumed page turning caused Hjelm to ponder the advantages of the Internet and encrypted e-mail, something that wasn’t too common yet. That was Jorge and Kerstin’s domain. They were also the ones who looked most irritated when information was slow in coming.

  “Let’s see,” said Hultin after a long pause.

  Chavez groaned quietly, which brought him a look that could mean yet another stain on his work record.

  “There’s a lot of diversity in the victims,” their wise leader said at last. “Twenty-four people of diverse backgrounds. Five foreign citizens, including Hassel. Primarily white middle-aged men, to be sure, which an alert officer who’s familiar with feminism could easily interpret as implied self-contempt.”

  “If it weren’t for the fact that he wasn’t middle-aged at all when he began murdering,” Kerstin Holm countered promptly.

  The icy chill in Hultin’s long look could have been fatal. “Quite a few of them remain unidentified,” he finally continued. “Even though the list of missing persons in the United States is a book as thick as the Bible, the number still seems disproportionately large—ten out of twenty-four.”

  “Is that something that’s changed?” Söderstedt asked alertly.

  Yet another look from Hultin. Then he paged frenetically and got a hit. “All six victims in the second round have been identified. That means that ten of eighteen in the first round remain unidentified. A majority. Maybe some sort of conclusion can be drawn from that. However, I’m not ready to do that right now.”

  “Could it be the case that the MO itself has made identification difficult?” asked Hjelm.

  Clearly their minds were sharp. Many of them had been waiting a long time for this very moment. To a person, they ignored the degree of cynicism inherent in this wait.

  “No,” Hultin answered. “The atrocities don’t include torn-out teeth or chopped-off fingertips.”

  “What do they include, then?” Nyberg asked.

  “Wait.” Chavez was staring down into his overflowing notebook. “We weren’t quite finished. Who were the identified victims? Does he concentrate on some particular social class?”

  Hultin once again swung his mental machete through the jungle of paper. While he searched, he said, “Many of your questions will be answered by the complete FBI report, which Special Agent Larner is going to fax over this afternoon, but okay, we might as well anticipate the events.…”

  Then he found what he was looking for.

  “The eight people identified in the first wave were relatively highly educated. He seems to have a weakness for academics. The six in the second wave were more varied. Maybe he’s gone and become a democrat.”

  “Get to sex sometime,” said Kerstin Holm abruptly.

  A moment of bewildered silence ensued among the male audience. Then Hultin understood: “A single woman in the first group, out of eighteen. Two out of six in the second.”

  “There are a few differences after all,” Holm summarized.

  “Like I said,” said Hultin, “perhaps he’s become a democrat when it comes to sex, too. Let’s wait and see what Larner has to say about it. He’s followed the case from the very start. In the seventies, based on the MO, they narrowed it down to a group of, if not suspects, then at least potential perpetrators. It turned out to have certain similarities to a method of torture from, believe it or not, the Vietnam War. A specific and extremely unofficial American task force used it to get the Vietcong to talk without screaming. An utterly silent method of torture, tailor made for the jungle. Since the existence of the task force was officially denied and brushed off as just another Vietnam myth, it was extremely difficult for Larner to get names. He hinted that he was stepping on quite a few tender and highly placed toes, and likely he was making a fool of himself and destroying his chances for promotion to boot. But slowly and surely, he tracked down the task force, which went by the disagreeable code name ‘Commando Cool,’ and ferreted out the names of those involved. Above all, one person who could almost have been called a suspect crystallized: the group leader, a Wayne Jennings, from none other than Kentucky. There was never any proof, but Larner followed Jenning
s wherever he went. Then something unanticipated happened. Jennings got tired of the surveillance and tried to evade the FBI—and he got into a head-on car collision. Larner was there himself and saw him burn up.”

  “Did the murders continue after that?” Chavez asked.

  “Yes, unfortunately. There were two more in quick succession, and then they stopped. Larner was blamed for having hounded an innocent man to death. There was a trial. He survived it, sure, but he fell in the hierarchy. And it didn’t get any better for him when, after fifteen years of walking into a headwind, he realized that the killer had started up again. For just over a year now, Ray Larner has been back where he started with the elusive Kentucky Killer. I don’t envy him.”

  “You should,” said Söderstedt. “He isn’t Larner’s responsibility anymore—he’s yours. He’s the one who’s free, not you.” Söderstedt paused, then continued maliciously: “You’re taking over from scratch after twenty years of intensive FBI investigations that had resources equivalent to the Swedish GDP.”

  Hultin observed him neutrally.

  “So what was so special about Commando Cool’s modus operandi?” Gunnar Nyberg tried. “How did that literary critic die?”

  Hultin turned to him with an expression that could have been interpreted as suppressed relief. “The point is that it’s two different things,” he said. “The serial killer makes use of what we can call a personal application of Commando Cool’s method. The method is based on a single special instrument: specially designed micromechanical pincers that, when closed, closely resemble a terrifying cannula. A big syringe. It’s driven into the throat from the side. With the help of small control wires, tiny claws unfurl inside the trachea and grip the vocal cords in a manner that makes it impossible for any sound to escape the lips of the victim. He or she is rendered completely silent. Even in a tight spot in the jungle with Vietcong soldiers in the bushes all over, you can see to a bit of refreshing torture.

  “Once the victim is silenced, you can then heap on the conventional methods, best directed at fingernails and genitals, where small, quiet motions incur the most pain. And then you just release the grip around the vocal cords a tiny bit so that something like a whisper can slip out. The victim can reveal his secret, quietly, quietly. For this purpose, Commando Cool developed related pincers, based on the same principles as the vocal cord pincers, but these other ones were aimed at the central ganglia in the neck, which are tugged and pulled a little bit from the inside, at which point an appalling pain radiates up into the head and down through the body. The two holes in the neck with their associated internal injuries have been discovered on all twenty-four victims of the Kentucky Killer, and there have also been distinctive torture wounds on their genitals and fingers.

  “Larner has been a bit secretive about what distinguishes the workings of our friend from those of the commando task force, but obviously it has to do with the design of the two micropincers. It’s as though something like an industrial development process was used to make the pincers even more perfect for their atrocious purpose.”

  Hultin looked down at his lectern.

  “I want you to restrain yourselves for a second now, so you can absorb all this,” he said gravely. “Lars-Erik Hassel died one of the most horrific deaths a person can die. I would like you to think carefully about what we’re up against. It doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever had to deal with in our whole lives. There’s not an ounce of similarity to our good old Power Murderer. It isn’t really possible to imagine such ice-cold indifference to other people’s lives and such twisted pleasure at their suffering. This is a seriously damaged person of the sort that the American system seems to produce on an assembly line, and that they would have been welcome to refrain from exporting. But now he’s here. And the only thing we can really do is to wait for him to start. It could be a long time; it could be tomorrow. But it will happen, and we have to be prepared.”

  Hultin stood to go to the restroom. He had held it for a surprisingly long time for someone who was incontinent. As he left, he said to the dispersing group, “As soon as I receive Ray Larner’s material, you’ll get copies. The outcome of this case hinges on you all studying it diligently.” He nodded at them and hurried toward his private, special door.

  Jorge Chavez interrupted his departure: “How old is Edwin Reynolds, according to the passport?”

  Hultin made a stiff face, dug through his pile of papers with his legs in a need-to-pee stance, and brought out a copy of the photographed passport page. “Thirty-two this year.”

  Chavez nodded. “Of course the passport was fake,” he said, “but why choose to play fifteen years younger than he must, in all likelihood, be?”

  “An element of risk, maybe,” said Hultin against his better judgment, and rushed off with papers floating through the air.

  Chavez and Hjelm looked at each other.

  Hjelm shrugged. “Well, he could have bought or stolen a ready-made fake passport.”

  “Possibly,” said Chavez.

  But no one could really shake the feeling that something was wrong. Utterly wrong.

  6

  There really wasn’t anything they could do.

  Naturally, there was a microscopic possibility that this was all coincidental, that the Kentucky Killer had been at Newark Airport not to flee the country but only to look for a new victim; that poor Lars-Erik Hassel had canceled his trip all on his own and had thrown his ticket away; and that just after that, a completely unrelated man with a fake passport had popped up with a last-minute booking. The combination of all these things, however, verged on the unbelievable. There was no real doubt that the Kentucky Killer had come to Sweden. The only question was why.

  FBI agent Ray Larner’s more exhaustive report had come in. According to the timetable, the plane had taken off from Newark at 18:20 local time. At 17:03 a man who called himself Lars-Erik Hassel had called and canceled his ticket, and at 17:08 an Edwin Reynolds had managed to get the extra ticket; thus he had waited five risky minutes so he wouldn’t attract attention. Around midnight a janitor had made the macabre discovery in a cleaning closet—just under two hours before the plane would land in Sweden. A few minutes later an Officer Hayden had appeared from the airport’s local police station; he recognized the two small holes on the victim’s neck and contacted FBI headquarters in Manhattan, which in turn contacted the Kentucky Killer specialist Ray Larner and got confirmation that it was a hallmark of the famous serial killer. After examining Hassel’s belongings, Hayden had been smart enough to conclude that the murderer had in all likelihood taken a seat on the victim’s flight to Stockholm-Arlanda. After a while he received verbal confirmation from the night staff at the SAS ticket counter that a ticket had been canceled too late to have been rebooked, at which point the tired ground hostess also remembered that there had been a late booking. She could access only the passenger manifesto, however, and not the specific data of when each person had booked. While the FBI frantically searched for someone who had access to that data, Hayden had contacted the National Criminal Police in Stockholm and ended up with Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin via the head of the NCP. At that point, it was 07:09 in Sweden. Hayden swiftly faxed over all the material he had, and this turned into a portion of the pile of papers Hultin had brought along to the quick meeting before the helicopter ride to Arlanda.

  Nothing in FBI agent Ray Larner’s newly arrived, scrupulous report indicated any departure from what had been said earlier; nor did it indicate any imaginable ties to Sweden. Thus there was nothing they could really do, other than wait for the first victim, and that was unbearable.

  Therefore they devoted themselves to mental preparation for the intensive burst of activity that lay ahead. They spent the rest of the afternoon on small tasks that not only gave them the illusion of meaningful work, the sensation of doing something, but also involved individual activity. Each of them seemed to need to digest the state of things on their own.

  Hultin continue
d to collect and organize the material from the FBI. Holm returned to Arlanda to see if any of the staff had been struck by a flashback or a flash of genius, anything at all. The cabin crew of flight SK 904 would, they had heard, also be there, and she prepared herself for her specialty: conversations, interviews, interrogations. Nyberg returned to his usual routine: he set off for the underworld of Stockholm to sound out the situation there. Söderstedt shut himself up in his office and called all the places that he could in any way imagine might be sheltering this Reynolds, who was surely no longer called Reynolds. Chavez threw himself into the world of the Internet; what he thought he could find there was a mystery to the uninitiated. Hultin set Norlander to the task of scrubbing all the toilets in the police station with an electric toothbrush, which was viewed as a technical achievement within the noble art of punishment.

  And Hjelm set out on his own assignment. Just as small as the likelihood that the Kentucky Killer had remained in the United States was the likelihood that the literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel’s past had anything to do with the case. Nevertheless Hjelm set off for the large newspaper office that had been Hassel’s workplace.

  He allowed himself to walk there—a little habit that the relative idleness of the past year had permitted him to develop. He walked down to Norr Mälarstrand by way of Kungsholmstorg. The rainy weather from Arlanda, he couldn’t help thinking, was biding its time, waiting in the wings, getting ready to sweep the city in autumn. But for now the sun was still shining, if more weakly with every day that went by. On the other side of Riddarfjärden, an enormous cat stretched out and purred contentedly in the white rays of late-summer sunshine: the head—Mariaberget—lapped Lake Mälaren’s waters with the tongue that was Söderleden, while its body—Skinnarviksberget—twisted greedily and stretched down toward its elegant back legs, Långholmen, where the tail, formed by Västerbro, pointed the way to Marieberg and the newspaper complex.