The Postcard Killers

by James Patterson

  Dessie stayed where she was until Mats Duvall, Gabriella, and Jacob Kanon arrived at the office. They got there less than five minutes apart, Duvall and Gabriella looking white as paper.

  “What have I done?” she said, looking up at Jacob. “What damage have I caused?”

  He looked at her with a surprisingly calm expression.

  “Aren’t you crediting yourself with a bit too much? They did this, not you.”

  She quickly stood up, aiming for the restroom, but Jacob caught her with a firm grasp on her upper arm.

  “Stop it,” he said. “This is a blow, but it’s not your fault. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, help us.”

  “The conference room,” Mats Duvall said, moving past them. “Right now, all of you.”

  Gabriella walked after the superintendent, giving Jacob a sharp look. Dessie, who was suddenly extremely conscious of Jacob’s hand on her arm, shook herself free and followed the police through the sports section of the room.

  Mats Duvall raised an eyebrow in surprise when she sat down with the investigating team around the table.

  “Our work is covered by confidentiality laws,” he said.

  “First the killers dragged me into this nightmare,” Dessie said. “Then you did the same. So now I’m here, whether you like it or not.”

  The superintendent frowned.

  Jacob threw his arms out.

  “So let her join in. How hard can it be? She’s been useful so far. We owe her something.”

  Mats Duvall straightened his back.

  “If you stay as an observer only. You can’t write anything about what we talk about. You’re clear about that?”

  “Unless you order me to, right?” Dessie said sharply.

  The superintendent let the subject drop. One of the detectives handed around enlarged copies of the latest photograph.

  “Okay, we’ve got another double murder,” Mats Duvall said, “but so far no bodies. So what do we have? Can anyone identify the scene of the photograph?”

  Chapter 60

  DESSIE TOOK A DEEP BREATH and stared hard at the photograph in front of her.

  A naked young man was lying on his stomach along the back of what looked like a leather Chesterfield-style sofa. Both of his hands were stretched above his head. On the left side of the sofa sat a young woman with her hands placed demurely in her lap.

  On her head she was wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

  The sofa was in front of a large window. The picture had been taken from a low angle, meaning that the bodies were shot with the daylight coming from behind them.

  “Millesgården,” Gabriella said.

  Mats Duvall looked at her.

  “Do you recognize the setting?”

  She nodded her head.

  “The artwork they’re imitating. The man is supposed to be the flying statue in the garden outside. The woman might represent one of the animal sculptures that were in an exhibition there this past winter.”

  “Get the security recordings from Millesgården,” the superintendent said, and one of the detectives disappeared through the door. “What does this business with works of art mean in this context?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Gabriella said. “So far it’s just a theory.”

  Dessie squinted and held the picture closer to her face. Either she needed glasses or the picture was bad.

  “I don’t know, but maybe… ,” she said hesitantly.

  “What?” Jacob said.

  She pointed at a shadow next to the man’s forehead.

  “There,” she said. “That could be a balustrade or a railing. Because it’s so high up, it must be on the roof of a tall building.”

  “And?”

  “Railings like that are unusual on residential buildings in Stockholm, unless they’re to stop snow from sliding off the roof. This must be some official building.”

  “For instance?”

  She hesitated and fiddled with her pen.

  “Well, I might be wrong…”

  “Jesus!” Jacob shouted. “Spit it out!”

  Dessie jumped and dropped her pen.

  “The Royal Palace,” she said.

  Jacob blinked.

  “The Royal Palace? How’s that? Have the killers checked in with the king?”

  She shook her head.

  “The palace is in the background. That’s what I see. The murder scene is exactly opposite.”

  Mats Duvall stood up.

  “The Grand Hôtel,” he said on his way to the door.

  Chapter 61

  THE FIVE-STAR HOTEL BY THE harbor on Södra Blasieholmshamnen had 366 rooms and 43 suites spread over eight floors. About half of them had a view of the water and the Royal Palace.

  The hotel manager was calm but stern, even with the police, even with homicide.

  “Naturally we’re happy to cooperate,” she said. “But I hope the search can be conducted with discretion.”

  Mats Duvall ordered all available staff on the investigation to take part in the search.

  Jacob and Gabriella didn’t wait for the reinforcements to arrive from headquarters.

  They headed for the second floor and methodically went to room after room on the side facing the water. They were accompanied by a receptionist holding a digital hotel register.

  Jacob knocked, and whenever there was an answer, he moved on at once. The killers were hardly going to be sitting with the bodies, just waiting to be discovered. That much was clear.

  In the rooms where there was no reply, the majority of them, Gabriella opened the door with a master key.

  The suspense was like a drug. Jacob realized that he was holding his breath every time a new door opened.

  The search on the second floor gave them nothing.

  They ran up the stairs to the third floor.

  “What have the other hotels looked like?” Gabriella asked, slightly out of breath as she chased after Jacob along the guest corridor. “Have they been as upscale as this? The Grand Hôtel is the finest in Stockholm.”

  Jacob knocked on the door at the far end and got an irritated “Oui?” in reply.

  “Sorry,” he said, “wrong room,” as he moved on to the next.

  He knocked, no reply.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing in this price range. Not even close.”

  Gabriella put the key card in the door, and the lock clicked. Jacob opened the door and got a gruff “What the fuck?” from the bed in response.

  “Sorry,” he said again and closed it.

  “There are cameras everywhere,” Gabriella said, pointing at the ceiling.

  “Hasn’t been like that anywhere else,” Jacob said, striding on. “They’re breaking their pattern.”

  At that moment, Gabriella’s cell rang. She answered with her usual grunt, listened for seven seconds, then hung up.

  “Fourth floor,” she said. “Two Dutch tourists.”

  Chapter 62

  NIENKE VAN MOURIK AND PETER Visser, with separate addresses in Amsterdam, had checked into the Grand Hôtel on Saturday evening, June 11, for four nights.

  They would never get to check out.

  Jacob studied their dead bodies with detached concentration. There was no room for anything else, not here, not right now. Sorrow and grief for their wasted lives could come later, at night in his terrible prison cell in the hostel, when it was darkest and the alcohol in the bottle was running out.

  He didn’t know the works of art Gabriella had referred to, but the bodies had definitely been arranged. The dead woman’s toy ears affected him particularly badly. Maybe because Kimmy had loved Mickey Mouse and had had a similar pair of ears when she was little.

  He turned away.

  God, these murders were so messed up, horrible in every way he could imagine, inhuman.

  The 32nd District of New York police had the highest murder stats in Manhattan, but he’d never seen anything like this. All the killings were coldly planned, and arranged with little respect. In Harlem
, people murdered out of jealousy, passion, revenge, or for money. People killed because of drugs, love, or debts, not to create art exhibitions.

  He rubbed his face with his hands. Mats Duvall glanced over at him and turned to one of his detectives.

  “Get the recordings from the camera in the corridor,” he said. “Check what the surveillance is like in the lobby and the elevators. Has the medical officer arrived yet? We need a time of death as soon as possible.”

  “There are two champagne bottles in the bathroom,” Gabriella said. “One empty, the other half full. Four glasses, too, all with remnants of light yellow liquid in the bottom.”

  They would find cyclopentolate in two of the glasses, Jacob thought, looking around the hotel room.

  It wasn’t very big, maybe twenty by sixteen, he guessed. Several of the other hotel rooms had been bigger, but this was still a break from the norm. No other crime scene had been anywhere as elegant as this, but that was just a superficial difference. There was something else here, something that made this murder different from all the others, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  The medical officer arrived and Jacob stepped out into the corridor to make room for him.

  He noted that there was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

  Then he left the scene of the crime. There was nothing else he could do here.

  Chapter 63

  BY LUNCHTIME, SECURITY HAD BEEN stepped up in all public places in the Stockholm region that were frequented by tourists, and especially by young people.

  All available personnel had been sent out to look for anyone resembling the composite picture from the clerk at NK, or any of the people on the security recordings from the Museum of Modern Art and the pawnbroker’s on Kungsholmstorg.

  When a preliminary blood test showed that the Dutch couple had smoked marijuana just before they died, sniffer dogs were brought in from around the country to join in the search.

  Throughout Stockholm, young people fifteen and over were asked to empty their bags, purses, and knapsacks.

  Most of them did as they were asked without protest. Those who refused were arrested.

  Dessie was standing in Gabriella’s office, looking out across Kronoberg Park.

  Four uniformed police officers and a large Alsatian dog had blocked one of the entrances to the park, a popular shortcut for people heading for the beach or the shops and underground station on Fridhemsplan. Picnic baskets, bags of swimming gear, and expensive attaché cases were all carefully checked without any distinction between them.

  The sight ought to have made her feel more secure, but she simply felt guilty.

  Jacob came into the room with three plastic wrappers containing sandwiches he had found in a vending machine somewhere.

  “Where’s Gabriella?”

  “She went down to the video suite to get the recordings from the Grand,” Dessie said, collapsing onto a chair.

  Jacob tore open one of the packets and with a healthy appetite took a large bite of the bread and tuna plus mayonnaise. Dessie looked at him and cringed.

  “How can you eat?” she asked. “Doesn’t all the violence you see ever affect you?”

  “Of course it does,” Jacob said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “I was just thinking about how sick these murders are. But it won’t help the Dutch couple if I faint from low blood sugar.”

  Dessie leaned her face down into her hands. “I shouldn’t have written that bloody letter.”

  Jacob carried on chewing.

  “I thought we’d gotten past that.”

  She had her cell phone out.

  “And now it’s started,” she said. “Just as I thought it would.”

  “What has?” Jacob wondered.

  “I’m getting calls from the trade press, asking why I’m doing the police’s work for them.”

  Jacob gestured with his hand toward the pictures of the dead couple in the hotel room.

  “That’s your reality,” he said. “What you’re talking about is pretentious bullshit.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And what if I’m the one who made that reality happen?”

  He groaned.

  “It’s true,” she said in a low voice. “You said so yourself. They’ve broken their pattern—they’ve killed again in the same city. If I hadn’t let myself be persuaded, this Dutch couple would still be alive.”

  “You don’t know that,” Jacob said. “And if they hadn’t died, other young people would have, in some other city.”

  She took her hands away from her face.

  “What do you mean? That the Dutch couple were sacrificed to a noble cause? What does your lot usually call it, collateral damage?”

  The American wiped his fingers on his jeans. His expression had grown dark.

  “I never think like that,” he said. “The Dutch couple’s deaths were a tragedy. But you have to lay the blame where it belongs. You didn’t kill them, and neither did I. Those bastards on the recordings did that, and we’re soon going to catch them. Right here in Stockholm. It ends here.”

  Chapter 64

  THE SUSPECTS FROM THE MUSEUM of Modern Art were identified almost immediately on the security recordings from the Grand Hôtel. They appeared on four different film files: two from the lobby and two from the corridor on the fourth floor.

  The fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman were caught on camera in the hotel lobby at 2:17 on the afternoon of June 15.

  They were with a couple who were quickly identified as Peter Visser and Nienke van Mourik.

  The four of them disappeared together into an elevator.

  Two minutes later all four reappeared on another recording, in the corridor outside the Dutch couple’s room on the fourth floor. They all went into room 418 and the door closed.

  Forty-three minutes later, the fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman came out into the corridor again.

  After another two minutes, they passed the reception desk and left the hotel.

  The detectives who had been out to Millesgården came back with results as well.

  A woman who worked as a gardener thought she recognized the fair-haired man. She had noticed him as he walked around with a woman in the sculpture garden. At first glance she thought it was the actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

  The recordings from the exhibit rooms at Millesgården were requisitioned and were now being checked down in the basement.

  Prosecutor Evert Ridderwall had signed an arrest warrant in the pair’s absence.

  “This is completely incredible,” Gabriella said excitedly. She was walking up and down in Mats Duvall’s office, two red spots flushing her cheeks.

  Jacob was staring at prints made from the recordings from the Grand Hôtel, tearing at his hair.

  Something was fundamentally wrong here. Was he the only one who saw it?

  Why had the killers suddenly dropped all safety precautions?

  Why were they showing themselves so openly?

  It was too easy.

  “We’ve got them now,” Evert Ridderwall said happily. “They’ll never get away. I don’t see how they can.”

  Even Mats Duvall looked pleased.

  “It’s just a matter of time before they’re arrested,” he agreed.

  Jacob looked through the pictures again. Both the fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman were clearly visible in all the pictures. There was no doubt that they would be recognized. A national alert had been put out for the couple.

  Interpol would be releasing these same pictures internationally within half an hour. Every police patrol in the Stockholm region had already received the printouts.

  Sara Höglund came into the room.

  “We’ve released their pictures to the media. They ought to be up on their websites in a few minutes.”

  Mats Duvall turned to his computer and quickly logged into Aftonposten’s website.

  “Sometimes they’re really quick,” he said, turning the screen toward the others.r />
  The headline was in a size usually reserved for world wars and Swedish victories in the ice hockey world championships.

  “Police Suspects: These Are the POSTCARD KILLERS.”

  Underneath was a picture of the fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman.

  Chapter 65

  THE SQUARE OUTSIDE STOCKHOLM’S CENTRAL Station was filled with police, their dogs, and cordons.

  Mac was walking slowly toward the train terminal’s main entrance with his arm around Sylvia’s shoulders. They could hear the beeping and crackling voices of police radios wherever they went.

  Two long-haired boys were picked up with their back pockets full of grass just a few meters ahead of them. What idiots!

  “Sorry, guys,” Sylvia said.

  No one thought to stop the couple.

  No one asked to look in their bags, because they didn’t have any.

  They had been walking around the streets, looking at their reflections in plate-glass windows, admiring their work. Mac tried on a new leather jacket at Emporio Armani. Sylvia sampled different perfumes in Kicks. She smelled nice now. Fresh and sexy for her man.

  A police car glided slowly past them. Sylvia took off her sunglasses and smiled at the officer in the car. He smiled back and drove on.

  An elderly woman started yelling when two officers asked to go through her handbag. Three teenage boys ran past like the hounds of hell were after them, followed by two plainclothes policemen.

  “Come on, let’s go in,” Sylvia said. “These people, the police, are so stupid.”

  Mac hesitated at the entrance.

  Sylvia gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “You’re such a star, Mac.”

  With their fingers laced together, they walked into the lion’s den.

  Children were crying, dogs barking, adults complaining. Loudspeaker announcements about delays and canceled trains followed one after another. The crowd got thicker and more agitated with every step they took. Some people had already missed trains because of the mindless searches.

  After just ten meters or so they reached the first police checkpoint.