Postcard killers

Chapter 62

Nienke Van Mourik and Peter Visser, with separate addresses in Amsterdam, had checked into the Grand Hotel 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 cel in the hostel, when it was darkest and the alcohol in the bottle was running out.

He didn't know the works of art Gabriel a 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. Al the kil ings were coldly planned, and arranged with little respect. In Harlem, people murdered out of jealousy, passion, revenge, or for money. People kil ed because of drugs, love, or debts, not to create art exhibitions.

He rubbed his face with his hands. Mats Duval 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 surveil ance 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," Gabriel a said. "One empty, the other half ful. Four glasses, too, al with remnants of light yel ow 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 stil 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 al 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.