by Arne Dahl
“Barry’s a hacker,” said Larner calmly, “one of the best in the country. He can get in anywhere. We were lucky to grab him. Also, he’s FASK.”
“Fans of American Serial Killers,” said Andrews. “Nice meeting you.”
“Barry set up FASK as a way to attract potential serial killers.” Larner waved the printout. “No matter how hard they try to disguise themselves, he catches them. We’ve caught three with FASK’s help. I would venture to say that Barry is the country’s most obscure hero.”
Bernhard Andrews smiled broadly.
“So Balls doesn’t exist?” said Kerstin Holm, who was quicker on the uptake than Hjelm.
“I got it from The Pink Panther,” said Andrews. “The expert in disguise whom Inspector Clouseau hires and who survives every bombing attack. When it comes to serial killers and their fans, the only thing that’s certain is that they have no sense of humor. Humor seems to be the antidote to everything.”
“He used the name Balls to fish out a protest from someone who knew better,” said Larner. “But so far we haven’t had a bite.”
They said goodbye to Fans of American Serial Killers, who gave them another broad smile and waved.
In the corridor, Larner said, “Very little is as it seems in the world today.”
He led them back to his office and sat at his desk. “I didn’t think you had ethnic minorities in your police corps,” he said, putting his finger precisely on a Swedish sore spot. “But not even Chavez can be told about FASK. Barry is one of our most important secret weapons in the fight against serial killers.”
He pulled out a drawer and took out a few sheets of paper, laid them on the desk, and placed an FBI pen on each sheet.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but my superiors have prepared these papers for you. It’s an oath of confidentiality that, if broken, will result in penalties in accordance with American law. Please read through them and sign them.”
They read. The small print was difficult to interpret. Both Hjelm and Holm felt an instinctive aversion to putting their signatures on such ambiguous papers, but diplomacy reaped yet another victory—they signed.
“Excellent,” said Larner. “Where were we? Commando Cool. Eight members, no Balls. The team leader was the very young Wayne Jennings, who was already a veteran when they netted him—twenty-five years old and with six years of war behind him and God knows how many dead. All the best and most formative years of his life spent in the service of death. Twenty-seven when the war ended, thirty when K began to be active. Returned after the war to his dead father’s farm in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of the Cumberland Plateau, if that means anything to you. Didn’t do much farming, just lived on his veteran’s pension. He was without a doubt the most likely suspect; according to statements, he was very skilled at handling the pincers. The third body was found just thirteen miles from his home.
“As for the others in Commando Cool, three died in the final stages of the war. Besides Jennings, there were four left; you’ll find their names in the complete material, which you’ll have access to. One came from Kentucky, Greg Androwski, a childhood friend of Jennings’s, but he fell apart and died a junkie in 1986. He was alive during K’s four years in the Midwest, but he was pretty worn down and quite unlikely to be a killer. Completely destroyed by Vietnam.
“Three left. One came to New York, Steve Harrigan, who became a stockbroker and was one of the wizards of Wall Street during the 1980s. Another went to Maine: Tony Robin Garreth, who makes his living taking tourists on fishing tours. Both were pretty safeguarded against suspicions. The last one, Chris Anderson, moved to Kansas City and sold used cars.”
“Swedish background?” said Kerstin.
Larner smiled faintly. “Four generations back. His great-great-grandfather came from someplace called Kalmar, if you’ve heard of that. But Anderson was actually number two on our list, Jennings’s second-in-command, just as icy, just as destroyed by the war. But his alibis were a tiny bit better than Jennings’s. And Jennings was nastier—that was my main argument, just based on a feeling, that is. I managed to push the whole thing pretty far.”
“How sure were you, really, about Jennings?”
Larner leaned back in his chair with his hands on the back of his neck. He deliberated for a moment. “Completely,” he said. “One hundred percent.” He fished a thick folder out of an old-fashioned file cabinet that stood next to the whiteboard.
Jerry Schonbauer peeked into the room. “It’s ready,” he said.
“Five minutes.” Larner tossed the folder to Holm, who opened it. A small bundle of photographs unfolded like a fan. The first one was a portrait. Jennings in his thirties, a young, fresh-looking man with light blond hair and a broad smile. But he also had a steely blue coolness in his eyes, which sharply divided the picture into two parts. Kerstin held her hand over the upper part of his face and saw a happily smiling young person; but when she moved her hand to the lower part, she saw the icy gaze of a man who was hard as nails.
“That’s it,” Larner said almost enthusiastically. “That’s exactly it. When we first visited him, he was pretty amiable, really pleasant—the lower half. As we persisted, we saw more and more of the upper half.”
They looked through the rest of the photographs. A teenage Jennings in uniform, Jennings slightly older in a circle of identical field uniforms, Jennings with a big tuna fish, Jennings pointing a Tommy gun at the camera with a fake attack face, Jennings at a dance with a beautiful southern woman with two first names, Jennings with a small child on his lap, Jennings making out with a Vietnamese prostitute—and then Jennings roaring with laughter as he presses a pistol to the temple of a grimacing, naked, kneeling Vietnamese man who is pissing himself in a deep hole in the ground. Holm lifted it up toward Larner.
“Yes, that,” he said. “It’s like it makes you forget the others. It’s a fucking awful picture. I would get a lot of money if I sold it to Time magazine. I don’t understand how he could keep it. We found all of these pictures when we raided his house after he died.”
“What happened when he died,” Holm said, “exactly?”
“Well,” Larner began, “at the end we had him under surveillance twenty-four hours a day—”
“For how long?” she interrupted.
“It had been going on for a month when he died.”
“Were any murders committed during that time?”
“The bodies were usually found in a state of decay that made them hard to date. But all sixteen that preceded his death had been found by then. It was one reason I was so persistent, even though every imaginable authority was against me: the longer we watched twenty-four hours a day and no new victims were found, the more likely it was that he was the murderer. May I continue now?”
“Of course,” said Holm, ashamed. “Sorry.”
“I tried to be there in the car as often as possible, and I was there that day, the third of July 1982. It was broiling hot, almost unbearable. Jennings came rushing out of the house and yelled at us; he’d been doing that for the last few days. He seemed at the end of his rope. Then he rushed over to his car and tore off. We followed him north along a county road for maybe ten miles, at a crazy speed. After a while, a bit ahead on the road, past a long curve, an incredible cloud of smoke rose up. When we got there, we saw that Jennings had crashed head-on into a truck. Both vehicles were ablaze. I got as close as I could and saw him moving a little in the car, burned up.”
“So you didn’t see the collision itself?” said Holm.
Larner smiled again, the same smile of understanding and indulgence that had become characteristic of their relationship. Hjelm felt a bit like an outsider.
“I know why you’re persisting in this, Halm,” said Larner. “No. We were a few hundred yards back, and there was a curve in the road. And no, I didn’t see his face as he burned up. Did he fake the accident and flee the scene? No. For one thing, there was nowhere for him to go, just flat, deserted earth all around,
and no other vehicle was in the vicinity; and for another—and this is crucial—the teeth from the body in the car were his. I had to spend a great deal of time convincing myself that he actually died in that car.
“But he did. Don’t believe anything else. Don’t do what I did and get stuck on Jennings. It destroyed any chance of moving forward on this case. I can’t even come up with a sensible hypothesis anymore. K remains a mystery. He must have been sitting somewhere, laughing out loud, while I harassed a tired, unemployed war veteran and drove him to his death. Then, just to show me how wrong I’d been, he killed two people within six months; both of them died long after Jennings did. And then vanished into thin air.”
Larner closed his eyes.
“I thought I was done with him,” he said slowly. “I kept working on the case, going through every little detail with a fine-toothed comb for several years after the eighteenth and final murder. More than a decade went by. I started working on other things, chasing racists in the South, taking on drug traffickers in Vegas, but he hung over me the whole time. And then that bastard started again. He’d moved to New York. He was mocking me.”
“And you’re dead certain that it’s him?”
Larner touched his nose, tired. “For security reasons, we make sure that only a very tiny number of agents know the crucial details of each case. For K, it was me and a man by the name of Camerun. Don Camerun died of cancer in 1986. Not even Jerry Schonbauer knows this particular detail—I’m the only one in the bureau who does—it’s about the pincers. It’s the same pincers, and they’re inserted in the same, exact, exceedingly complicated way. Because it’s your case now, you two will also be given access to the description; I strongly recommend that no one else learns about it.”
“What happened with this Commando Cool character who moved to New York?” Holm persisted. “The stockbroker?”
Larner laughed. “Apparently all of my old thoughts are floating in the air and you’re catching them, Halm.”
“Kerstin,” she said.
“Okay, Charstin. You’re absolutely right, Steve Harrigan isn’t mentioned in the report I sent you. But I’ve checked up on him. He’s in the complete material that you’ll get to look at. Harrigan is a billionaire, always on the go. He’s been abroad during each and every one of the six murders in the second round. And he is definitely not in Sweden now. So now that considerably more than five minutes have passed, let’s join Jerry in the showroom and watch a movie.”
He led them through the corridors and into an auditorium that, sure enough, resembled an actual movie theater. The giant man was sitting on a table up front, below the screen, dangling his feet. His pant legs were pulled up a bit, exposing a pair of extremely hairy calves above the regulation black socks. When he saw them, he hopped down and showed them to seats in the front.
“Jerry had just come in from the Kentucky office, when the second round started,” Larner said, wiggling into one of the sleep-inducing chairs. “He’s a damn good agent. Took Roger Penny alone, if you’ve heard of him. Go ahead, Jerry. I’m gonna take a nap. It’s awful at first, but you’ll get used to it.”
The lights went down with a dimmer function; it really did feel like a movie theater.
The special effects did, too. Unfortunately, they were not Hollywood brand.
“Michael Spender.” Schonbauer’s bass accompanied a picture of a man whose only whole body part was his head, under which two conspicuous red dots shone from his neck like lanterns. His head was canted backward, white and swollen. He was naked. The look in the dead eyes had retained the same horrible pain as Andreas Gallano’s. The nails on his hands and feet had been ripped away, the skin had been cut from his trunk in narrow stripes, and his penis had been split down the middle from glans to base and lay open, two bloody rags, one on each side of his groin.
Their nausea was abrupt and mutual. They very nearly had to run from the room.
“Spender was the first victim,” Schonbauer continued expressionlessly, “a computer engineer at Macintosh in Louisville. Found by a berry-picker in the woods in northwestern Kentucky about two weeks after his death. Went missing from his workplace after lunch on September fourth, 1978. Was discovered on the afternoon of the nineteenth, sixty miles from his hometown. Worked on the development of the first big Apple computer.”
The next victim was unidentified, a large man with Slavic features. The picture was a bit more stomach-friendly. He was dressed, but his fingers and genitals were disfigured.
“Looks a bit Russian,” Hjelm said, thinking of the absurd KGB theory.
“Without a doubt,” said Schonbauer. “As soon as it was possible, we sent the fingerprints to the Russian police, but it didn’t result in anything. We don’t have any information at all, except that he was found in southern Kentucky about two months after Spender. In an old outhouse near a deserted farm. He had been dead for over a week.”
The next picture showed another unidentified victim. A thin, fit white man in his sixties, naked, disfigured in the same way as Spender. The picture was gruesome. It was dusk, there was a dim light above the treetops, and the only thing that gleamed was the body, sitting straight up on a rock in the woods. Rigor mortis. The arms were sticking straight out from the body, as though they had been lifted by an inner, irresistible force; the bones were sticking straight out of the hands, like nails that had been driven out from the inside. The eyes stared, openly accusing.
Hjelm didn’t get used to it; on the contrary, he felt even closer to throwing up.
They rolled on, a terrible cavalcade of the remains of suffering. It was beyond the limits of human comprehension. The very quantity made the crimes even more gruesome. Slowly but surely, the extent of the case became clear to them—the incredible accumulation of human suffering. Holm cried out twice, silently; Hjelm felt her shoulder lightly nudging his. He cried out once too, but more loudly.
“Do you want me to stop?” Schonbauer asked calmly. “I couldn’t make it all the way through till my third try. I’m pretty used to it now.”
Larner was snoring audibly next to them.
“No, keep going,” said Hjelm, trying to convince himself that he had recovered.
“We have so many of them,” Schonbauer said in a subdued voice. “So incredibly many serial killers, and no one can really understand a single one of them. Least of all themselves.”
In the end their defense mechanisms kicked in, and although they never started snoring, they slowly became indifferent. Like a horrible conclusion, Lars-Erik Hassel woke them up. He was sitting on his chair with shredded fingers, sprawling in all directions; his genitals were a swamp of half-floating remnants. Through the small window in the background, they could see part of a large aircraft.
His head was craned back; he stared at them upside-down, his pain mixed with disgust, his suffering with paradoxical relief.
Maybe, Hjelm thought, he was relieved that it wasn’t Laban.
The lights came up again. Schonbauer returned to the table and sat with his legs dangling once again like a teenage girl’s. Larner awoke in mid-snore with a start and snuffled loudly. Hjelm rolled his shoulders. Holm was sitting stock-still. No one looked at anyone else for some time.
Larner stood, yawned, and stretched until his compact body creaked. “And now, do you two have some dessert for this party?”
Kerstin handed over the Swedish folders wordlessly.
Larner opened them, skimmed through the pictures, and gave them to Schonbauer, who would soon add them to the series of images. Then he got up to leave.
Kerstin and Paul thanked Schonbauer, who gave a curt nod, and they all followed Larner out. Walking through the corridors, they came to a door without a name on it. Larner opened it. They stepped into an empty room.
“Your workroom,” he said with a gesture. “I hope you can work together.”
The office looked exactly like Larner’s, minus all the signs of life. The question was how much of their own they could offer. The de
sk had been pulled out from the wall and furnished with two chairs, one on each side. Two computers rubbed shoulders on the desk next to a telephone and a short call list. Larner picked it up.
“My number”—he pointed—“Jerry’s number, my pager, Jerry’s pager. You can always get hold of us. Below are names of the files in question, descriptions of them, personal passwords, and guest passes with codes so you can get in, but only in here. Locked doors are doors that you don’t have admittance to. You have no reason to leave this corridor, nor any possibility of doing so. Bathrooms, women’s and men’s, are a few doors down. There are a couple of cafeterias—I recommend La Traviata two floors down. Any questions?”
No questions. Or an endless number, depending on how you looked at it. None were asked, in any case.
“It’s six p.m. now,” Larner continued. “If you like, you can work for a few hours. I stay till about six. Unfortunately I’m busy tonight, otherwise we could eat dinner together. Jerry has offered to eat with you and show you around town, if you’d like. You can let him know.
“So all that’s left is to wish you good luck. You don’t need to worry about getting into the wrong things on the computers—they’re customized for you, and everything confidential is elsewhere. Contact me or Jerry if problems or questions come up. ’Bye.”
He disappeared. They were alone.
Holm rubbed her eyes. “I don’t actually know if I can handle this,” she said. “It’s midnight Swedish time. Shall we accept Swedish time and go back to the inn?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t leave right away,” said Hjelm. “We have to continue being diplomatic.”
She sensed a slightly sarcastic bite and smiled. “Yeah, yeah, curiosity got the better of me, I admit it. My strategy went to hell.”
“CIA—”
“Okay, okay, rub it in. I made the judgment that he wouldn’t be angry.”
“I don’t think he was. More like relieved. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. But I understand why he got stuck on Jennings.”
