by Arne Dahl
The banner of biology waved grandly nowadays. It didn’t seem to matter anymore what people were subjected to; everything was preprogrammed in their genes. This ought to have given Paul Hjelm some comfort: maybe it wasn’t his fault that his son associated with drug dealers. Maybe there was a gene for drug abuse that made his upbringing irrelevant. But he refused to believe it. Somehow or another Danne’s behavior was his fault, but how? What the fuck was the problem? That he hadn’t been able to change diapers without throwing up? That he chose to converse in relatively masculine jargon? That he was a policeman? What the fuck was it?
He knew that there wasn’t one answer. That was one advantage of his job. For each case there was one answer, one guilty person. Your focus narrowed, filtering out anything ambiguous and complicated.
The rain poured down.
Two hunters traveled north on Norrtäljevägen.
Two pieces of paper burned in two pockets.
Riala had a small downtown, but the district was spread out across a large area in heavy pine woods, and the map took them farther and farther from the downtown. In the end, the road was nothing more than a cow path through virgin forest.
“Stop here,” Hjelm said with his eyes on the detailed police atlas.
Chavez stopped the car.
“Two hundred yards or so. Up the rise and then to the right. It’s isolated.”
Chavez nodded, took out his service weapon, checked it, and put it back into his shoulder holster. “Do we dare leave the car unlocked?” He grinned.
Hjelm gave a weak smile and hurled himself out into the pouring rain. It was past five o’clock. The waterlogged skies were made more ominous by the suggestion of dusk; the forest lay in a dense gloom.
Hunching slightly, they ran through the autumn storm. The crowns of the trees danced above their heads and released copious needles, which the rain carried through their hair. A bolt of lightning lit up the forest with piercing clarity. For a fraction of a second, the trunks of the trees were separate from one another; when the thunder came, hard and heavy, only a few seconds later, they merged again.
The cabin was wedged among trees up on a hill; if they hadn’t known it was there, they probably would have missed it. It was small, brown, and dark. From where they stood, not a single sign of life was visible.
They made their way up to the door, their weapons raised, ready.
Next to the door was a glass pane with a round hole in it. Hjelm pressed the door handle down silently. The door was locked.
He extended his hand through the hole in the glass pane and turned the lock. Then he kicked the door open, and they rushed in.
Even before Chavez found the light switch and the light blinded them, the stench struck them. They exchanged glances. Both knew immediately what it was.
They bustled around the cabin; it didn’t take long to get through the living room, the kitchen nook, and the tiny bedroom. Everything was empty, unused. Had it not been for the hole in the glass and the stench, they would have put their pistols away.
There was another door, just next to the sink. Hjelm cracked it open carefully. A dark cement staircase led down to a cellar. There was no light switch. Keeping close to each other with their weapons raised, they trod carefully down the stairs.
They could see nothing. Then they were down. The stench intensified.
They felt their way along the ice-cold stone wall. Finally, Chavez found a light switch.
A naked, faint lightbulb on the ceiling lit up.
In a chair sat Andreas Gallano.
His eyes stared lifelessly at them. A pain that was beyond words remained in his eyes.
In his bare neck were two small holes.
They went back upstairs. Hjelm sat on the floor and, his hand trembling, dialed Hultin’s cell number. Meanwhile Chavez leaned over the sink and splashed water on his face. Both of them still had their service weapons in hand.
Chavez stared out into the loud darkness for a moment. A flash of lightning lit up the forest. It looked horribly insignificant.
He sat down next to Hjelm. The crash of thunder came. He moved a bit closer. Hjelm didn’t move away. Their shoulders were rubbing. They needed it.
Almost simultaneously they fished their pieces of paper out of their pockets and, with effort, unfolded them.
Chavez’s read “Corpse with holes in its neck.” Hjelm’s read “Neck-perforated stiff.” They smiled weakly at each other.
Such good teamwork.
16
Retired. He tried the word in his mouth a few times on his way down to the boathouse. He still hadn’t really gotten used to it.
A life full of activity. Always in a tight spot. The conference rooms. The meetings. The trips. That suppressed jubilation when the contract was signed.
He missed it all. It was a fact that was impossible to run away from.
Now there was only the boat. His wife had been dead for many years; he hardly remembered her, a vague fluttering somewhere on the edges of the landscape of his past.
Everything was fixated on the boat now. His pride and joy. A fine old two-masted wooden yacht of the classic and tragically forgotten brand Hummelbo. From 1947, in superb condition.
But only because it was so well cared for.
Twice a day he went down to the boathouse. He had turned into the boat club’s unpaid guard.
Not even the worst autumn storm could stop him. It didn’t usually look like this in September, did it? Had the greenhouse effect started to show its ugly mug? He rejected the thought—he didn’t believe in it. An infantile fantasy of the green movement. They were always blaming industry and cars. Didn’t they understand what industry and cars had done for the Western world? Did they want to live without them? By the way, how much shit did Greenpeace’s old ships release?
But the autumn storm was irrefutable. He fought his way down toward the Lidingö coast and entered the boat club’s grounds with the help of a robust set of keys. Another couple of keys got him out on the pier.
He could hardly see his own hand in front of him. He was standing right next to his Hummelbo yacht before he could see it at all. Every time the same little jolt of happiness and pride coursed through him. His life in a nutshell.
He checked the locks. The chain was in place; the trap—which resembled a bear trap—was in its place. He got down on his knees, hunched forward, and let his hand slide across the well-polished stem.
Such a pleasure.
He bent a bit farther forward, and his hand slid along the stem until it reached the waterline. He caught something in his hand. The incredibly stubborn rain meant that he couldn’t really see what it was. Sticky. Like seaweed.
Seaweed? But he had cleaned the stem of seaweed as recently as this morning.
He got a good grip on the bunch of seaweed and lifted it upward.
And stared into a pair of open eyes.
He immediately let go of the body and screamed.
As the body splashed back down into the water, he noticed two small red holes in the pale white neck.
Vampires in Lidingö?
17
Viggo Norlander was back on his dunce task, but he hadn’t realized until now that it had nothing to do with dunces. Quite the opposite: it was important work, and he had been placed there because of his competence.
He had arrived at his spot in the pathology department before the new corpse did, which he considered to be of merit. This time, unfortunately, he wasn’t alone.
He didn’t really understand how it had happened, but several of the unpleasant morning’s visitors were already present.
The Johnsson couple were there, the ones who dreamed of finding their son-in-law in the morgue at Karolinska instead of in his Bahraini harem. The old rapids-shooter Egil Högberg, accompanied by a new aide, was there, ceaselessly repeating “My son, my son.” And Justine Lindberger, the young civil servant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was there, intensely missing her missing husband. Norlander did
his best to cool down the heated atmosphere.
By the time old Sigvard Strandell peeked out of the loathsome cold chamber and gave Norlander a quick nod, the latter had already decided to prioritize Justine Lindberger.
She appeared to have collected herself after the morning’s breakdown, but Norlander made sure that there were still medical personnel on site.
He led her carefully into the cold chamber. As had not been the case with the unidentified corpse from Frihamnen, the new body had not yet been placed in a cooler box; it was lying on a gurney in the middle of the room, covered by a genuine county council sheet. Strandell was there to make sure that no damage was done to his future working material. It was he who pulled the sheet aside for Justine Lindberger.
This corpse was a man almost as young as the previous, unidentified one. The dark hair gave a ghostly contrast against the whitish-blue face, slightly swollen from its stay in the water—and it had two small holes in the neck.
Justine Lindberger squeaked, nodded, and ran out into the hallway. The staff outside were ready, caught her up, and gave her an injection. Before it took effect, Norlander had time to ask the unnecessary question: “Do you recognize the dead man?”
“It’s my husband,” said Justine Lindberger faintly. “Eric Lindberger.”
And then a gradually developing mist brought her long, horrible day to a merciful end.
18
Supreme Central Command finally lost its quotation marks. The decisive indication was that the whiteboard had been set up behind Hultin’s desk. It was time for brainstorming. The markers lying there seemed to be simmering with impatience.
The case had let out a giant blob of ketchup. First came nothing, then nothing—and then everything. So far perhaps only a little of America’s favorite condiment garnished the Swedish bread. Perhaps the sandwich would soon be covered in sticky red sludge.
In any case, the Kentucky Killer had begun. Two definite victims had, in the course of a few hours, been added to the probable one. Things had been set in motion, possibly in escalating motion.
It was after nine o’clock at night. Everyone was there. No one even thought of complaining about the unreasonable working hours.
Jan-Olov Hultin was rummaging through his papers, then found what he was looking for, stood, grabbed a marker, and got the meeting going.
“So,” he said evenly, drawing squares and arrows on the whiteboard, “at eight-ten on the third of September, the Kentucky Killer arrived in Stockholm under the name Edwin Reynolds after having murdered the literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel at Newark International Airport outside New York during the night. After his arrival, it seems he promptly went to Riala in Roslagen; the degree of decomposition of drug dealer Andreas Gallano’s body suggests that he was murdered just over a week ago, which matches up quite well with the Kentucky Killer’s arrival in Sweden. Andreas Gallano had escaped from Hall and apparently taken shelter in a cabin that, by way of various fronts, belongs to a tax evader named Robert Arkaius, who had once been Gallano’s mother’s lover. What happened in the cabin we don’t know, other than that the Kentucky Killer put Gallano to death with the method he is in the habit of using. There is reason to believe that he then lived there for over a week with an increasingly stinking corpse in the cellar. That he almost immediately made his way to such a perfect hiding place indicates previous contact with Gallano or his drug syndicate. This must be verified.
“Then what happened? Here it gets complicated. Gallano’s beige Saab is discovered near the site of a double murder. Of course, it may have been there for a long time, for completely unrelated reasons, but for the time being, all signs indicate that, the night before last, on the twelfth of September, the Kentucky Killer took Gallano’s car to Frihamnen. There with his usual pincers he murdered two more people: an as-yet-unidentified man, whom we’ll call John Doe as the Americans do, with four shots to the heart; and a thirty-three-year-old civil servant with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eric Lindberger. Just as Hjelm and Chavez were finding Gallano, Lindberger’s corpse was discovered at a Lidingö boat club by the retired executive Johannes Hertzwall. Eric Lindberger has the same vampire bite on his neck as Gallano and Hassel did. An examination by Strandell has shown that he died at about the same time as John Doe; that is, less than twenty-four hours ago, and the boat club is situated a reasonable distance from Frihamnen. So it is extremely likely that Eric Lindberger is the corpse that was seen being shoved into a decade-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a license number that starts with B by a man with a balaclava at two-thirty in the morning.”
Hultin paused. His students were like lit lightbulbs, in front of the horribly growing diagram on the whiteboard.
“May I suggest a scenario?” he continued. “The Kentucky Killer goes to Frihamnen to commit a pair of seemingly well-planned murders. He travels there in Gallano’s car, but has another one waiting.
“He commits his crimes in some deserted cellar, wraps the victims in blankets, and starts to load them into the second car. Then he’s surprised by a gang of attorneys who are lost, brandishing bandy sticks and bottles of vodka. That means that he has time to load only one of the bodies—Lindberger. He leaves behind the other, our unidentified twenty-five-year-old John Doe. Convinced that his car has been reported to the police, he thinks he has to get out of there quickly and hurries to Lidingö, where he dumps the victim rather carelessly and scrams.”
“In this scenario,” said Gunnar Nyberg, “you’re assuming that the break-in at LinkCoop’s warehouse doesn’t have anything to do with the murders.”
“I can’t get a failed break-in at a warehouse to fit. Does anyone here have an opinion? … No? No, I think it’s an irrelevant event. One thought, of course, is that the break-in failed because the burglars happened to witness a considerably worse crime and got out of there.”
“Or maybe this,” said Kerstin Holm thoughtfully. “You’re probably right that it was a well-planned crime, but only for Lindberger. Sure enough, the poor guy had a visit from the pincers in the neck. But if the Kentucky Killer shot someone in the heart, too, then that’s the first time he’s broken the pattern. It could be that our John Doe is the burglar, and that he happened to see the murderer as he was dragging his victim, and was discovered and shot. I would bet the Lindberger murder was planned, but the John Doe murder wasn’t.”
Hultin nodded calmly. “Back to basics, then. Why did the Kentucky Killer come to Sweden? He obviously knew Gallano in some way, but was Gallano the reason he emigrated? Once he’d done what he came to do—murder Gallano—wasn’t the rest just a matter of continued bloodthirstiness? That after nine claustrophobic days of increasing corpse stench, his desire became too strong, and it was time to kill again? Or was Gallano more of a means than an end? Was Eric Lindberger the real target? The strange murder location would suggest it—you don’t just go down to the deserted Frihamnen at night to search for victims. No, he knew Lindberger would be there. So Eric Lindberger must also be carefully investigated.”
“Of course, it’s not at all certain that Eric Lindberger was there,” said Kerstin Holm. “He could have been brought there. The killer could have randomly chosen him as a victim in the city, chloroformed him, and brought him to a deserted place with suitable buildings. Or perhaps they planned to meet for one reason or another, and Lindberger came along willingly. Both the victim and the location might very well be random.”
Hultin nodded; he was getting used to his scenarios being torn to shreds. Was he starting to lose his edge? Was it time to hand the controls over to his first officer? And Kerstin Holm (who many years later would actually become his successor) was very much a first officer at present.
“We need to find the site of the murder,” he said. “There must be hundreds of places just in the block near where we found John Doe.”
“Well, LinkCoop is closest,” said Nyberg, remembering his visit to Täby.
Hultin gathered his strength. “The problem is, we know to
o little about the Kentucky Killer,” he said. “You have the best idea of what’s up, Kerstin. Isn’t there a lot missing?”
“If we’re going to have a chance of finding the Swedish link,” she said, “we’ll probably have to go to the United States and consult the FBI and Ray Larner. That’s my assessment. It’s not at all certain that the Americans would recognize a Swedish link if it jumped up and bit them on the ass. They hardly know where Sweden is. Swiss watches and polar bears in the street …” Holm paused. “He’s slipped through our hands this time, thanks to your lost attorneys. We can investigate Gallano, the drug syndicate, Lindberger, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and LinkCoop all we want, but I think the only reasonable path is the American one. We have to know who he is and what he’s doing in Sweden. Once we understand these things, we can catch him. We can’t otherwise.”
“Now it’s been confirmed that he’s here,” said Hultin. “It wouldn’t have been possible for us to waste the taxpayers’ money on a visit to America before it was certain. Now it is. And now we have quite a bit to work with—and, for that matter, to offer the FBI. Tomorrow I’ll ask Mörner for permission to send a pair of you to the United States. One would be the person who knows the material best. That’s you, Kerstin. And the second would be a more, hmm”—he mumbled, giving Hjelm a sidelong glance—“a more action-oriented person.”
Hjelm gave a start. Against his will he was being yanked away just as things were starting to move. He had just discovered a horribly tortured and rotten corpse in a basement in the wilderness; tonight when he went home, he would have to find out whether his son was a junkie; and now he was being given notice of a trip to the United States. Along with Kerstin, of all people. It was too much.
