Postcard killers

Chapter 4

Friday, June 11

Stockholm, Sweden

The postcard lay next to a harmless invitation to a boules tournament – the newsroom against a rival newsroom – and another invitation to a wine-tasting evening with the culture crowd.

Dessie Larsson groaned out loud and tossed the cards for the pointless social events into the recycling bin. If people paid more attention to their work instead of playing with bal s and scratching one another's back, maybe this newspaper would have a future.

She was about to get rid of the postcard the same way but stopped and picked it up.

Who sent postcards these days, anyway?

She looked at the card.

The picture on the front was of Stortorget, the main square in Stockholm's Old Town. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. People were eating ice cream on the benches, and the fountain in the middle was purling with water.

Two cars, a Saab and a Volvo, stood parked in front of the entrance to the Stock Exchange Building.

Dessie turned the card over.

What sort of insane crap was this?

She turned the card over and looked at the picture once more, as if it might give her a clue to the cryptic words on the back.

Ice cream was licked, water purled. Neither the Volvo nor the Saab had moved.

People need to get a life, she thought as she tossed the card into the recycling bin.

Then she went over to her desk in the crime section.

"Has anything happened in Stockholm today? Anything at al?" she asked Forsberg, her dumpy, disheveled news editor, as she put her backpack on the desk and set her bicycle helmet down next to it.

Forsberg looked up over his glasses for a fraction of a second, then went back to the newspaper in front of him.

"Hugo Bergman has written a big piece. The People's Party want a European FBI. And they've found another pair of young lovers murdered. In Berlin this time."

What sort of nonsense has Hugo Bergman come up with now? Dessie thought, sitting down at her desk. She took her laptop out of her backpack and logged into the paper's network.

"Anything you want me to do more work on, boss man?" she wondered out loud, clicking on the news about the double murder in Berlin.

"Talk about sick bastards, these kil ers," the news editor said. "What the hel 's wrong with people like that?"

"Don't ask me. I specialize in petty criminals," Dessie said. "Not serial kil ers. Nothing big and important like that."

Forsberg stood up to get a cup of coffee from the machine.

The victims in Berlin were Australians, Dessie read. Karen and Wil iam Cowley, both twenty-three and married for a couple of years. They'd come to Europe to get over the death of their infant son. Instead, they had run into the notorious murderers who were kil ing couples al over Europe.

The postcard had been sent to a journalist at a local paper. The picture was of the site of Hitler's bunker, and there had been a Shakespeare quote on the back.

Dessie suddenly gasped. She felt almost like she was having a heart attack, or how she imagined that might feel.

To be or not to be…

Her eyes were pinned to the recycling bin in front of her.

"Forsberg," she said, sounding considerably calmer than she felt. "I think 11 they've arrived in Stockholm."