Bad Blood: A Crime Novel

by Arne Dahl

  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.

  28

  “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 loa
ded Mayer into the trunk. Then Hjelm, too, left LinkCoop via the reception area. The twin receptionists were indeed sparklingly lovely.

  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.”