Bad Blood

9

The day went by.

Another day or two went by.

A few more days went by.

Nothing happened. The media blared no headline sirens. The A-Unit was allowed to work in undisturbed peace, which, in its own way, made their idleness even more frustrating. They quite simply had nothing to do, not even shoo off stubborn reporters, which at least would have brought a sort of bittersweet satisfaction.

All Swedish deaths that were reported to the police came trickling in-as did all the reports of Americans suspected of crimes. None of them seemed particularly promising as leads. If the Kentucky Killer hadn’t abruptly adapted to Swedish circumstances and started surreptitiously murdering dementia patients, which someone seemed to be up to at the moment in a nursing home in Sandviken, then he was lying low. If he wasn’t a twelve-year-old who had kicked a pregnant woman to the ground on the street so that her broken rib killed the fetus, if he hadn’t raped and murdered a sixty-two-year-old prostitute and put her into a portable luggage trunk, stuck a one-year-old into a freezer, killed himself with nose spray, mistaken sulfuric acid for moonshine, or attacked his neighbor with something as strange as a recently sharpened rake. Officially, Nyberg was the one who kept track of the odd deaths; unofficially, the A-Unit didn’t give a shit about them. Nyberg preferred to stick to the underworld, where he could terrorize old-guard small-time criminals in peace.

Things were about the same when it came to the potential criminal behavior of visiting Americans. There Norlander was the one holding the nonexistent reins; he thought it was taking an unusually long time for the mental dunce cap to wear off. A man who was unwise enough to call himself Reynold Edwins attracted Norlander’s attention, more because of his name than because of his activities, which consisted of going around to primary schools in Malmö and picking up girls for porn films. Three American businessmen purchased sexual favors at porn clubs in Gothenburg and, when picked up, firmly maintained that it was illegal for this to be illegal. An unidentified American had had a forbidden key copied at a shoe repair shop in Gärdet; the owner hadn’t called the police until afterward, which resulted in charges being brought against him, too. Another unidentified American had been seen dealing hash on Narvavägen; apparently he had a bad map. A third naïvely exposed himself in Tantolunden and was assaulted by a women’s soccer team. A fourth bought a sailboat with thousand-kronor notes that had been badly photocopied; unfortunately the owner had been so drunk that it took him a day to realize it, and by then the American had already performed the unlikely achievement of driving the sailboat through a shop window in Vaxholm.

And so it went, uninteresting through and through.

Chavez became more and more virtual; Söderstedt drove around in his Audi, personally investigating Americans staying in lodgings fit for both princes and paupers; and Hultin endured long, chaotic crisis meetings with Mörner and the national police commissioner, during which he entertained himself by thinking about what sort of wrenches the young Communist Mörner could conceivably have thrown into the works of the KGB.

Kerstin Holm worked intensively with the material from the FBI, but the descriptions of the victims from the 1970s had faded considerably, and the KGB hypothesis seemed less plausible. She noted with some interest that Hjelm was in her presence a bit more often than usual. They reasoned back and forth but never got further than they had in that single associative minute when they helped each other deliver a joint hypothesis that no one really believed.

Without his virtual office mate, Hjelm turned to Kerstin, and to his surprise, the very fact that he and Cilla were doing better than they had for a long time made him draw closer to Kerstin. There were so many things he wanted to ask her, but all that came out were indirect insinuations, such as when he played the tape of the interviews with Lars-Erik Hassel’s two exes. First the ex-wife:

“You were together during his more political period, right?”

“Political… hmm…”

“He did take an active interest in the weaker members of society…”

“Well… I don’t know…”

“An active, genuine interest.”

“Yes… well… um… What are you getting at?”

“And then his interest in literature. Incredibly strong.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

It had been a catastrophe, and he very much deserved the stern side-glance he received from Kerstin. Then he fast-forwarded the tape to the other ex, the young woman who had left Hassel before he had time to meet his second son:

“Has he seen his son since?”

“Yes… well… um…”

“Has he ever met him at all?”

“I don’t think you could say he has. I’m not one hundred percent sure that he knew he existed.”

Rewind, and back to the first:

“Did he have any enemies?”

“Well, there are enemies and then there are enemies… You can’t be a critic for that long without attracting someone’s hatred, that’s for sure.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Throughout the years there have been a few, three of them. And more recently I’m quite sure he received a steady stream of hate e-mails, all from the same nut job.”

“Hate e-mails?”

“Hate letters via e-mail.”

“How do you know that? Did you still see each other?”

“Laban told me. They saw each other once or twice a month.”

“Your son?”

“Yes. There was some kind of crazy person who sent him e-mail. That’s all I know.”

Then fast-forward again to the younger woman.

“How old is your son now?”

“Six. His name is Conny.”

“Why did you leave him? It happened so quickly, after all. He didn’t even have time to see his son.”

“He had absolutely no desire to see him. My water broke as he was packing to go to the book fair in Gothenburg. He called for two taxis, one to Arlanda for himself, one to Karolinska for me. Gallant, huh? Then he fucked around like a madman down there, while his son was being born. Maybe he had time to fertilize another one before the first one came out. Always a bun in the oven.”

“How do you know that? That he-was so sexually active in Gothenburg?”

“One of his colleagues called me, actually. A woman. I don’t remember her name.”

“She called you? At the hospital? To tell you your husband was fucking around? So tasteful.”

“Yes. No, not very-tasteful.”

“Didn’t you think it was a bit strange?”

“Yes, actually. But she sounded convincing, and besides, I could see when he left that it was over. He thought one kid was enough. Conny was an accident, but I didn’t want to have an abortion.”

“Can you remember what this colleague’s name was?”

“I’m pretty sure her first name was Elisabeth. After that, I don’t know. Bengtsson? Berntsson? Baklava? Biskopsnäsa?”

And rewinding again. Kerstin watched him rewind with raised eyebrows.

“Do you know if these hate e-mails are still on the computer?”

“No. The only thing I know is that Laban said that they upset Lars-Erik. I can’t really picture it, but that’s what he said.”

“How old is Laban?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Does he live at home?”

“He has an apartment on Kungsklippan, if you want to verify my statement, or whatever it’s called. Laban Jeremias Hassel.”

“What does he do?”

“Now don’t laugh. [Pause.] He studies literature.”

Hjelm pressed stop again and was just about to fast-forward when Kerstin pressed his very own stop button; it seemed necessary. “That’s enough.”

He stared at her strangely, as though from another world, then stopped reluctantly and returned to the present. He sank down into the chair across from her and scanned the room. It was the office that Kerstin shared with Gunnar Nyberg, the choir room. A serene but chilly autumn light streamed in through its always-half-open windows. Sometimes they sat here and practiced scales and sang in harmony, a cappella, he with his strong bass, she with her husky alto. Hjelm compared it to his own office, where Chavez surfed the Internet full time and where the conversation these days mostly seemed to involve soccer. He felt short of breath. He needed a little John Coltrane. And maybe he would be brave enough to return to Kafka, even though the worth of literature had been drastically devalued during the last few days.

But most of all he needed to tell Kerstin something.

He wondered what it was.

“Can’t you give me a summary instead?” she said.

He looked at her. She didn’t turn away. Neither of them understood the other’s look.

“Three things,” he said professionally. “One: pay a visit to the twenty-three-year-old literature-student son, Laban Hassel. Two: find out more about the colleague Elisabeth Biskopsnäsa, the one who called the hospital and tattled. Three: check whether those threatening e-mails are still on the computer, either at home or at the newspaper office.”

“Have you been to Hassel’s home at all?”

“I swung by. No obvious KGB signs fluttering around like vampires. A tasteful, large Kungsholm apartment with a few bachelor touches. And exercise equipment. Do you want to take a peek?”

She shook her head. “There’s something I have to check on. Try to get Jorge out into the sunlight.”

He nodded, hesitated at the door for a second, and cast a quick glance at the tape player. Then he left it with her.

She regarded it for a while. She looked at the closed door, then back at the tape player.

She fast-forwarded to a point in between the passages that Hjelm had so frantically toggled. Paul had asked the ex-wife:

“Who is your new husband?”

“Surely that has nothing to do with this.”

“I just want to know what you’ve got instead of Hassel. What you looked for instead. The differences. It might tell me a few things about him.”

“I live with a man who works in the travel industry. We do well together. He works hard but leaves work at work and devotes his time to me when we’re home. We have a normal life together. Was that the answer you were looking for?”

“I think so.”

Kerstin Holm looked at the closed door.

For a long time.

Hjelm did get Chavez out into the sunlight. At a moment when his desk mate complained about increasing bum sweat, he jumped at the opportunity, and the two former Power Murder heroes left police headquarters to the hands of more permanently accomplished medalists like Waldemar Mörner. They hadn’t been able to find out exactly what had happened with the complaint from the news reporter, who had received, quote, “massive lip injuries” when Mörner shoved the microphone into his mouth. Presumably the complaint had been considerably easier to digest.

Out on the street, yet another sparklingly clear late-summer afternoon offered up its free services. Autumn had arrived in Arlanda, but it was delaying its appearance in Stockholm. The somewhat tired symbolism could hardly escape anyone.

Chavez could still comfortably wear his old linen jacket, which needed washing more than its camouflaging gray color cared to admit. He stretched his compact Latin body intensely as they walked along Kungsholmsgatan and crossed Scheelegatan.

“The Internet,” he said dreamily. “Endless possibilities. And endless amounts of shit.”

“Like life,” Hjelm said philosophically.

They turned onto Pipersgatan, trudged up the hill, and started up the steep steps toward Kungsklippan, where the rows of houses tried to eclipse one another’s views of Stockholm. Some stared out over City Hall and police headquarters-they were hardly the most attractive ones-while others cast covetous glances past Kungholms Church to Norr Mälarstrand and Riddarfjärden; still others peered a bit disdainfully out over the muddle of the city and beyond, to upper Östermalm. Lars-Erik Hassel’s son from his first marriage lived in one of these last.

They rang the doorbell. After a while a young man with a thin goatee, a sleeveless T-shirt, and baggy pants appeared.

“The cops,” he said expressionlessly.

“Yes indeed,” said the cops in unison, above their IDs. “May we come in?”

“I guess it would be shooting myself in the foot to say no,” said Hassel Junior, admitting the two ex-heroes.

It was a little studio with a kitchen nook. A frayed navy blue window shade kept the late-summer sun at bay. A computer spread a bluish flicker across the walls closest to the desk; otherwise the apartment was coal black.

Chavez pulled the cord, and the window shade flew up with a squeak that was strongly reminiscent of the one Mörner had produced when Robert E. Norton kicked him in the rear. “This isn’t opened very often,” Chavez observed. “With a view like this, maybe you should look outside once in a while.” Beyond the window, Kungsklippan plunged down toward the junction between island and mainland.

“Were you working?” Hjelm asked. “Your mom said you study literature.”

Laban Jeremias Hassel squinted at the apparently violently attacking sun and smiled with indoor pallor. “The irony of fate…”

“In what way?” Hjelm lifted an upside-down coffee mug from the tiny counter. He shouldn’t have done it-a whiff of the moldy fumes nearly flung him across the apartment.

“My father was one of Sweden’s leading literary critics,” said Laban Jeremias, observing Hjelm’s actions indifferently. “The irony is that I was born with a literary silver spoon in my mouth. But really, my interest in literature is a rebellion against my father. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand,” he added quietly, lowering himself onto a thready, 1960s-style lavender sofa.

The furniture in the little apartment was both sparse and slovenly. Here lived a person without much interest in the outside world-that much was clear.

“I think I understand,” said Hjelm, even if he couldn’t really reconcile Laban’s trendy appearance with the inner chaos that seemed to rule him. “Your view of literature is the exact opposite of your father’s.”

“He never understood the importance of improving oneself,” Laban Hassel mumbled, contemplating a birch table that actually seemed to have rotted through. “Literature was and remained a decadent bourgeois phenomenon for my father. So he felt no need to learn about it. Just tear it apart. And that continued long after he himself had become the most bourgeois of the bourgeois.”

“He didn’t like literature.” Hjelm nodded.

Laban lifted his eyes to him for a moment with surprise. “I do,” he whispered. “Without it, I’d be dead.”

“Your childhood wasn’t happy,” Hjelm continued in the same balanced, calm, certain tone. A father’s tone, he thought.

Or a mediocre psychologist’s.

“He disappeared so soon,” Laban said, indicating that the situation wasn’t new for him. Many hours of therapy, it seemed, were behind him. He started over. “He disappeared so soon. Left us. And so he became a hero to me, a personal myth of this great, well-known, unapproachable thinker. And as I began to read books, he became more and more interesting, with absolutely no participation on his part. I decided to wait to read his works until I felt ready. Then I would read them, and everything would be revealed.”

“And was it?”

“Yes. But in the exact opposite way from what I had imagined. His whole cultural veneer was exposed.”

“And yet you kept in touch up until the end?”

Laban shrugged and seemed to fall into a trance. Then it came out. “I waited and waited for him to reveal something important, something crucial from the past. But it never came. He always managed to keep up a raw-but-warm tone between us. It felt like stepping right into the AIK locker room. Disgusting guy talk. No chinks in the armor. I waited for them in vain. Maybe they were there at the moment of his death.”

“If I understand you correctly, your contact was extremely superficial.”

“To say the least.”

“And still he confided in you that he had received threatening e-mails.”

Laban Hassel kept his eyes on the rotting table. He seemed broken. He said, short and to the point: “Yes.”

“Tell us everything you know.”

“I know just what he said-that there was someone terrorizing him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. That was all. He just tossed it out in passing.”

“And yet you found it worth telling your mom?”

Laban looked at him in earnest for the first time. It wasn’t a look to mess with. It held a bottomless intensity that was rare among twenty-three-year-olds. That look set the unemployed but ready-for-action detective inside Hjelm into motion.

“My mother and I have a very good relationship,” Laban Hassel said.

Hjelm didn’t push him any further; he would need a new angle of attack before he returned. Because he would return. He and Chavez thanked the young man and left.

In the stairwell, Chavez said, “What the fuck did you bring me along for?”

“Kerstin thought you needed to get out in the sun,” Hjelm said heartily.

“Not much sun in there.”

“To be honest, I needed a sounding board, someone without any preconceived notions about Lars-Erik Hassel at all. So?”

They wandered down the stairs to Pipersgatan. The sun got caught up in some stubborn bits of cloud and cast the northern half of City Hall in shadow. The result was a strange optical double exposure.

“Right or left?” Chavez asked.

“Left,” said Hjelm. “We’re going to Marieberg.”

They walked quietly down Pipersgatan. Down at Hantverkargatan they turned right, wandered past Kungsholmstorg, and stopped at the bus stop.

“Well,” Chavez returned to conversing, “I wonder how Laban’s literature studies are going.”

“Check,” Hjelm said.

The bus had almost made it to Marieberg before Chavez, calling on his cell, managed to get past the switchboard at Stockholm University and reach the department of literature, whose telephone-answering hours were of the irregular variety. Hjelm followed the phone-call spectacle from a distance, like a director laughing covertly at the efforts of the actors. They were crammed into different parts of the overcrowded bus, Hjelm in the aisle in back, Chavez in the middle, leaning over a baby carriage that was cutting into his diaphragm. Every time he half-yelled into his phone, the baby in the carriage screamed back three times as loud, accompanied by the equally crammed-in mother’s increasingly acid remarks. By the time Chavez stepped off the bus at Västerbroplan, he had a vague idea of what hell was like.

“Well?” Hjelm said again.

“You are an evil person,” Chavez hissed.

“It’s a difficult line of business,” said Hjelm.

“Laban Hassel was registered for basic studies in literature three years ago. There are no results listed in the register today. No courses at all.”

Hjelm nodded. They had arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. He was pleased with the synchronicity.

They reached the newspaper building. This time the elevator worked. They walked into the arts and leisure offices purposefully. If everything went well, this whole thing would be solved before the A-Unit’s evening meeting.

Erik Bertilsson was leaning over a jammed fax machine. Hjelm cleared his throat half an inch from the man’s red-mottled scalp. Bertilsson gave a start, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. Which, Hjelm thought, wasn’t far from the truth.

“We could use a little help,” Hjelm said with a neutrality that would have given Hultin’s a run for its money. “Can you get us into Hassel’s e-mail inbox? If it still exists.”

Bertilsson gaped wildly at the man upon whom he had unloaded his life’s disappointments, and who he had thought was out of his life. He didn’t move a muscle. Finally he managed to say, “I don’t know his password.”

“Is there someone here who knows it?” A shadow of a thought flew through Bertilsson’s diffuse consciousness. He shuffled over to a computer ten or so yards away, where he exchanged a few words with an overweight woman in her early forties. Her long hair, which was hanging free, was raven black; her tiger-striped glasses were oval; her flowery summer dress was tight. She sent a long, frosty look over at the duo of heroes and returned to her computer.

Bertilsson came back and pecked in a password; Chavez observed the keyboard concert attentively.

Bertilsson didn’t get in. Access denied. He hit the screen in an outburst of rage and returned to the woman with a substantially longer stride. A short palaver played out that Hjelm and Chavez observed in pantomime. The woman threw up her hands and let the corners of her mouth fall-her entire massive form radiated indifference. Then she lit up with a flash of inspiration, stabbed her index finger into the air, and uttered a word.

Bertilsson came back and wordlessly pecked out the key to the electronic remains of the deceased.

“You can leave us now,” Hjelm said, unmoved. “But don’t leave the office. We’ll need to talk with you some more in a bit.”

Chavez felt immediately at home in front of the monitor, but no exhibition of professionalism was forthcoming. He dug around a bit in the in- and outboxes and consulted “deleted messages” but found only empty pages.

“There’s nothing left here,” he said.

“Okay.” Hjelm waved to Bertilsson, who arrived like a dog that has been punished into loyalty.

“Why are all of Hassel’s messages gone?” Hjelm asked.

Bertilsson, looking at the monitor rather than at Hjelm, shrugged. “He’s probably deleted them.”

“No one else has cleaned them out?”

“Not that I know of. Either the whole mailbox and all the addresses should be gone, or else they should still be there. And that is probably everything. Maybe he was in the habit of cleaning it all out-what do I know?”

“There are no shortcuts?” Hjelm asked Chavez. “And no chance of finding out who deleted them?”

“Not from here,” said Chavez. “Network trashes are hard to manage.”

Since Chavez was speaking in tongues, Hjelm had to accept this remark without understanding, like a true believer. He turned to Bertilsson again. “Who is your colleague Elisabeth B something? Is she still in the office?”

“Everyone is still here,” Bertilsson said, in a tone of Everyone is always still here. Then he roused himself: “You’re talking about Elisabeth Berntsson, I assume.”

“Probably,” said Hjelm. “Is she here now?”

“She was the one I was just talking to.”

Hjelm glanced over toward the black-haired woman, who was typing like mad. “What was her relationship with Hassel like?”

Bertilsson cast a nervous glance around, one that ought to have triggered the curiosity of anyone who wasn’t asleep. But no one reacted. Möller, sitting behind his glass doors, was staring out the window. He didn’t appear to have moved an inch since Hjelm’s previous visit.

“You’ll have to ask her,” Bertilsson said resolutely. “I’ve said more than enough.”

They walked over to the writing woman, who looked up from her computer. “Elisabeth Berntsson?” Hjelm said. “We’re with the police.”

She peered at them over her glasses. “Your names?” she said in a slightly hoarse smoker’s voice, clearly experienced at this.

“I’m Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm. This is Detective Inspector Jorge Chavez. From the National Criminal Police.”

“Aha,” she said, recognizing their names from the headlines. “That means there’s more behind Lars-Erik’s death than we’re allowed to know.”

“Can we go somewhere a bit more private?”

She raised an eyebrow, stood, and walked toward a glass door. They followed her into an empty office that was a carbon copy of Möller’s.

“Have a seat.” She sat down behind the desk.

They found a pair of chairs sticking up among the mess of papers and took a seat.

Hjelm jumped straight in. “Why did you call the maternity ward at Karolinska Hospital during the book fair in 1992 to inform the mother of Lars-Erik Hassel’s newborn son that her husband was engaged in copious amounts of sexual relations in Gothenburg while her son was being born?”

Her jaw ought to have dropped, but it remained as steady as her gaze. “Well, what do you know, in medias res,” she said, not missing a beat. “Very effective.”

“It ought to have been,” Hjelm replied. “But apparently you’ve been expecting the question.”

“Because you two are who you are, I realized that you would have ferreted it out.” Had she said it in another tone, they could have taken it as a compliment.

“What was it? Revenge?” Hjelm asked abruptly.

Elisabeth Berntsson took off her glasses, folded them up, and placed them on the desk. “No,” she said. “Drunkenness.”

“Maybe as a catalyst. Hardly as a reason.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Hjelm switched tactics. “Why did you delete all of Hassel’s e-mails?”

Chavez pointed out, “That wasn’t very difficult to trace.”

Hjelm gave him a look that he hoped would not be too easily interpreted as grateful.

Elisabeth Berntsson, however, seemed to have other things on her mind. An inner battle was being waged behind the naked concentration on her hardened face. Finally she said, “The copious relations you were talking about took place primarily with me. Larsa needed something a bit more solid than that twenty-year-old. It was practically over already; all I did was hurry the process up a little. A catalyst,” she said with a sardonic touch.

“And then? Was it the two of you forever and ever amen?”

Berntsson snorted. “Neither of us was particularly interested in forever and ever amen. I suppose we were both too scarred by the downsides of cohabitation. And had developed a taste for the alternative. One-night stands are really nothing to sneeze at. Me, I lead an active social life and want to be free to do what I want. And Larsa’s tastes were probably more in the vein of… the younger age groups. For me, he was a decent lover and a more or less reliable part of my life. Like a TV show, maybe. Same time, same channel. And I do mean channel.”

Hjelm made a quick decision. “Did he let you read the threatening e-mails?”

“I got tired of them. They were all different variations on the same theme. An almost unbelievable amount of persistence. A fixation. Someone had found a scapegoat he could lay all his life’s frustrations on.”

“He?”

“Everything suggested it was a man. Male language, if that makes sense.”

“How many were there?”

“There were only scattered sprinklings of them for the first six months. During the past month, they accelerated into a veritable flash flood.”

“So it’s been going on for just over six months?”

“About that.”

“How did Hassel react?”

“At first he was pretty shaken up. But when he realized that they seemed to be written mostly for therapeutic purposes, he became more thoughtful. As though he were pondering his past actions and what he was being punished for. But later, when they started to come more frequently, he got scared again and decided to fly the coop for a while. That’s how the New York idea was born.”

Hjelm didn’t comment on the cost of this escape. Instead he said, “Can you describe the contents of the e-mails in greater detail?”

“Very explicit descriptions of how evil Larsa was and, above all, what would be done to his body. They said nothing about what wrong he had actually committed. That was what made him nervous, I think: that the source was so vague.”

“Who do you think it was?”

She fingered her eyeglasses, turning them at different angles on the desk. Then she finally said, “It must have been an author.”

“Why?”

“You’ve read what Larsa wrote.”

“How do you know that?”

“Möller told me. Which means you know that he didn’t mince words about things he disliked. That was what made him stand out as a critic. That was how he built up his nationwide reputation. But when you do that, you hurt people. And sometimes when people are hurt, they never get back on their feet. Bad blood always comes back around.”

Hjelm wondered at her strange final comment. Was she quoting someone?

“Did the sender write like an author?” he asked.

“A fallen author. Yes.”

Hjelm usually didn’t touch his cheek in public, but now he scratched his blemish absentmindedly. A small flake of skin floated down toward his pant leg. Elisabeth Berntsson watched it expressionlessly.

He gave Chavez a meaningful glance, then said, “So we’re back where we started: why did you delete all of Hassel’s e-mails?”

“I didn’t.”

Hjelm sighed and turned to Chavez. His partner had had enough time to fabricate a story, but Hjelm wasn’t sure he was in on the plan; after all, they’d gotten a little rusty.

Chavez was in. “We arrived here at the editorial office at 15:37. At 15:40, Bertilsson asked you about Hassel’s password. At 15:41, he entered it; it was wrong. He went back to you, and you came up with the correct password at 15:43. We got into Hassel’s inbox at 15:44. By then everything had been deleted. I found the time stamp of the deletion: 15:42, two minutes after you had learned what we were doing and given us the wrong password.”

Chavez had done his homework and had outdone his teacher by a mile: if you’re going to lie, lie in great detail.

Elisabeth Berntsson stared deep down into her desk.

Hjelm leaned toward her. “If you weren’t the one who wrote them, then why delete them? To salvage Larsa’s reputation? Hardly. Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”

“Not in Newark,” she said quietly.

“Have you been going around hating him all these years? How did you have time to write all this hate mail? Did you do it during working hours?”

Elisabeth picked up her glasses, unfolded the earpieces, and settled them onto her distinguished nose. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to meet Hjelm’s. The gaze he saw was a completely new one.

“I suppose you could say I loved him. The hate mail was about to break me.”

“So you hired a hit man to make the pain end?”

“Of course not.”

“But he told you who he suspected was behind them, right? And you deleted everything to protect his murderer. Sort of strange behavior toward the dear departed, isn’t it?”

Now she looked determined, but not in a self-confident way; rather, she was determined not to speak at any price. She wasn’t going to say anything more.

But she said more than words could have: “It’s private.”

Then she broke down. It was unexpected for everyone present, including herself, but the repressed sadness came tumbling out in long, sweeping waves.

When they stood up, Hjelm realized he liked her. He would have liked to place a comforting arm around her, but he knew the comfort he was capable of offering wouldn’t go very far. Her sorrow was much deeper than that.

They left her alone with her pain.

In the elevator, Chavez said, “A pyrrhic victory-isn’t that what it’s called? Another victory like that, and I’m done for.”

Hjelm was silent. He told himself he was planning his next step. In reality, he was crying.

Bad blood always comes back around.

In the taxi to Pilgatan, they didn’t say much. “It’s lucky she didn’t check the times,” said Chavez. “I was at least five minutes off.”

“I don’t think she was planning to let us leave without a confession,” said Hjelm. Then he added, “You did an excellent job.”

He didn’t have to tell Chavez where they were going. On their way up the stairs of the stately building on Pilgatan, between Fridhemsplan and Kungsholmstorg, he said, “You remember the password, don’t you?”

Chavez nodded. When they arrived at the top floor, Hjelm took out a set of keys and unlocked the three locks on the door marked “Hassel.” They stepped into a gym; the entire enormous hall had been converted into an exercise room.

Apparently, in a previous life, Lars-Erik Hassel had been an alchemist on the hunt for the fountain of youth.

They walked past modern glass vases and ceramic pots and arrived at modernity: a computer on an antique desk in the middle of the living room.

Chavez turned it on and settled into the grandiose easy chair that functioned as a desk chair.

“Do you think he has a personal password?” Hjelm asked, leaning over the seated hacker.

“No, not at home,” said Chavez. “If he does, we might have a problem.”

Hassel did have one. The computer blinked out a scornful ENTER PASSWORD.

“I guess we’ll try the same one.” Chavez typed in the letters L-A-B-A-N.

The scornful blinking of the computer halted. They were in.

“Strange for a father and son to live so close to each other,” Chavez said as the computer coughed to life.

Hjelm peeked out through the window toward the beautiful old county council building, which seemed to shiver in the shadow of the clouds. If the window were placed at a slightly different angle, he could have looked straight up at Kungsklippan.

Autumn seemed to arrive in just an hour. Heavy clouds rolled up over a fast-descending sky. Wind whined through the elegant gardens of the council building, tearing both green and gold leaves from the trees. A few raindrops spattered the windowpane.

While Chavez pecked at the keyboard, Hjelm explored Lars-Erik Hassel’s apartment thoroughly. Not only was it a bourgeois turn-of-the-century flat, Hassel seemed to have wanted to return it to its original condition. In the living room, each detail seemed modeled on a Biedermeier aesthetic. He had a hard time associating this almost ironically exaggerated bourgeois taste with the critic who despised literature.

“Well, look at that,” Chavez said after a while. “I don’t even need to go into his trash. He has a folder called ‘hate.’ ”

“I thought he might.” Hjelm came up to the computer. “Are the e-mails there?”

A gigantic list unfurled across the screen. At the bottom left corner it said “126 items,” and the 126 files were numbered.

“Year, date, time,” said Chavez. “Complete records.”

“Look at the first one.”

The message was short but to the point.

You evil bastard. Your body will be found in eight different places, all over Sweden, and no one will know that this head belongs with that leg; this arm with that cock. And they don’t, either. See you. Don’t look over your shoulder.

“Dated the end of January,” said Chavez. “The most recent ones are from August twenty-fifth.”

Hjelm nodded. “The same day Hassel went to the United States.”

“He didn’t save any after that, of course. If more e-mails showed up when Hassel was in the States-and it’s probably pretty important to know whether this bully kept threatening him while he was gone-they disappeared when Elisabeth deleted them. If the author of the e-mails is the murderer, or hired the murderer, then he ought to have realized that this was the final threat.”

“Let’s look at it.”

The writer’s writing had, without a doubt, evolved during the past months. The very last saved e-mail read

You tried to change your e-mail address again. There’s no point. I can see you; I can always see you; I will always be able to see you. I know you’re going to New York, you evil bastard. Do you think you’re safe there? Do you think I can’t reach you there? Death is on your heels. You will be found in every state, with your cock in deep-freeze in Alaska and your bowels rotten with shit in the swamps of Florida. I will tear out your tongue and split open your vocal cords. No one will be able to hear you scream. What you have done can never be undone. I am watching over you. Enjoy the Metropolitan. I will be there, on the bench behind you. Don’t look over your shoulder.

Hjelm and Chavez looked at each other and saw their own thoughts reflected back. New York, the Metropolitan: a striking knowledge of details. Still, such information was relatively easy to come by.

But splitting the vocal cords and “No one will be able to hear you scream”-things were heating up.

How had the writer known a week before it happened that Lars-Erik Hassel’s vocal cords would be taken out of commission and that no one would be able to hear him scream?

“Didn’t someone suspect that this had nothing to do with the Kentucky Killer?” Chavez said self-righteously.

“Go back a bit,” Hjelm said. His focus had narrowed considerably.

A random selection of the 126-file-strong “hate” folder flew by:

You evil bastard. You are the most bourgeois of the bourgeois. Your repulsive remains will rot in small silver jars and then be distributed to your cast-off mistresses one by one, and they will be forced to masturbate with your deceased organ.

You tried to change your e-mail address. Don’t do that. There’s no point. One day the source of all the excrement you produce will be exposed. Everyone will be able to see the defective digestive system of your rotten soul. Your intestines will be wound around the glass cock on Sergels Torg. All will be revealed. Those intestines held the only intellect you ever had. Never look over your shoulder.

I am going to slit the throat of your little son. His name is Conny, and he’ll be six years old soon. I know where he lives. I have the code to their door. I know what school he goes to. I’m going to fuck his cut-open throat, and you will be called to identify your son, but because you’ve never seen your son, you won’t recognize him. You will deny both head and body. It has happened before. Your whole cultural veneer will be exposed.

There are cracks in your rotten wall. At the moment of death you will see them. They will overwhelm you when I torture you to death.

They had read enough.

“Are there any diskettes here?” asked Hjelm.

Chavez nodded and saved the whole “hate” folder onto one of them.

“What do you say?” Hjelm asked.

“The choice of words seems familiar.” Chavez put the diskette into his pocket. “What would the scenario look like? Was he so personally familiar with the Kentucky Killer’s habits that he could copy them perfectly? In that case, where did he get the information?”

“Wouldn’t your Fans of American Serial Killers have it? And he seems to be familiar with computers.”

“So he found out exactly when Hassel’s trip back to Sweden was booked and waited for him at the Newark airport? The rest was a coincidence?”

“Or the opposite: he planned it in great detail. Strictly speaking, Edwin Reynolds could have been Laban Jeremias Hassel.”

Chavez was quiet for a moment, sorting through his impressions. Hjelm thought he could see his focus narrowing. Then Chavez summed it up: “He arrives at Newark from Sweden on an earlier flight, waits an hour or so at the airport, strikes, and comes back with a false passport. It’s entirely possible. Although he might just as easily have hired a professional.”

They considered this scenario.

“Shall we go?” Hjelm asked at last.

Chavez nodded.

They passed through the deserted neighborhood via Hantverkargatan and cut diagonally across Kungsholmstorg and up Pipersgatan; it was like coming full circle. Or tying up a sack. The rain whipped at them sideways.

They reached the stairs, climbed up to Kungsklippan, and went into the building. Outside the apartment door, Chavez took out his pistol and said, “She may have warned him.”

Hjelm drew his service weapon too and rang the bell.

Laban Hassel opened the door right away. He stared expressionlessly into the barrels of the pistols and said quietly, “Don’t make fools of yourselves.”

Their scenario collapsed like a house of cards. Laban Hassel was either extremely cunning or completely harmless.

They followed him into the darkness; the shades were down again, and the computer screen emitted its listless light. Chavez raised the blinds again; this time there was no sun to stun them. Laban hardly blinked as the pale light filtered into his eyes-it was as though he were beyond all earthly reactions.

He took a seat at the rotten table. Everything was familiar, yet everything had changed. The two policemen remained standing and kept their service weapons up. Laban let himself be frisked without protest.

“Elisabeth Berntsson from the newspaper called,” he said calmly. “She thought I should run away.”

“ ‘Don’t look over your shoulder,’ ” Hjelm quoted as he took a seat and put his pistol into his holster.

Laban Hassel gave a crooked smile. “Eloquent, isn’t it?”

“Did you kill him?” Hjelm asked.

Laban raised his eyes, stared intensely into Hjelm’s, and said, “That is a very, very good question.”

“Is there a very, very good answer?”

But Laban said no more. He just looked fixedly at the table and kept his mouth shut.

Hjelm tried again. “What happened in January?”

Absolute silence.

Another attempt: “We know that you registered at the university three years ago but didn’t complete a single course. Perhaps you were able to cheat your way into student loans for a while. But for the next two years-what did you live on then?”

“CSU,” said Laban Hassel. “Cash Support for Unemployment, I think it means. Then it ran out.”

“In January this year,” said Hjelm.

Hassel looked at him. “Do you know how demeaning it is to apply for welfare? Do you know what it’s like to be openly distrusted and then meticulously investigated? Do you know what it feels like when they find out that your father is too well known and well-to-do for you to qualify for welfare? It’s not enough that he’s been hanging over me like a repressive shadow all my life-now because of him, I can’t even get money to survive.”

“That added to your hatred.”

“The first threat was spontaneous. I just vented on the computer. Then I realized that I could send my outburst as an e-mail. Then it became an idée fixe.”

“Why did you threaten your half-brother Conny?”

The look on Laban Hassel’s face could not be described as anything other than self-loathing. “That’s the only thing I regret.”

“Cut the throat of a six-year-old and fuck the severed throat?”

“Please stop. I wasn’t threatening the boy, only my father.”

“Have you met Conny?”

“I see him now and then. We’re friends. His mother, Ingela, seems to like me. We’re almost the same age. Do you know when I saw her for the first time?”

“No.”

“I was probably about fourteen, fifteen. I was out walking with my mom along Hamngatan. And as if it weren’t bad enough to be out walking with your mom at that age, we caught sight of my father on the other side of the street. With Ingela. He saw us, but far from being embarrassed by the seventeen-year-old at his side, he started crudely making out with her in the middle of the street. Mom and I got a private show.”

“Was that before the divorce?”

“Yes. Sure, all our relationships were hellish at home, but from the outside we still looked like a family. That day ripped the veil from the illusion.”

“Hellish in what way?”

“People seem to think that it’s much worse for children if the parents argue rather than shutting up and pretending to be friends. But that’s the worst kind of hypocrisy, because children can always see through it. Our house was dominated by an icy silence. Hell isn’t warm, it’s cold. Absolute zero. I went frostbitten through the polar landscape of my childhood. And besides that, he could go missing at any time: soccer matches he promised to come to but never showed up at, always the same thing. And then he’d come home only to freeze the whole fucking apartment.”

“You have literary talent,” said Hjelm, “I can hear that. Why waste it on hate letters to your dad?”

“I think it was an exorcism,” Laban said thoughtfully. “I had to get that bastard out of my blood. That cold bastard. But I might as well have chosen not to send that shit to him.”

“It could have been a novel.”

Laban looked into Hjelm’s eyes and blinked intensely. Perhaps some sort of connection was forming between them.

“Maybe,” he said. “On the other hand, I wanted to see how he’d react. I wanted to see if I could notice anything in him when we met. Maybe I also had some sort of vain hope that he would confide in his son. If he had hinted that he was being threatened even once, I would have stopped right away, I’m sure of that. But nothing. He showed no trace. He spouted the same old, tired jargon every time we met. I don’t even think he ever considered that the evil that the letters accused him of committing had to do with his role as a father.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Chavez from over by the window. “Do you know what the password on his computer was?”

Laban Hassel looked over his shoulder.

“Laban,” said Chavez. “L-A-B-A-N.”

“Why do you think Elisabeth Berntsson called you?” Hjelm asked. “She was prepared to take the blame herself in order to keep you out of it. Why do you think she suspected you?”

“Why do you think your father saved all your e-mails in a folder called ‘hate’?” Chavez asked. “Every single file we looked at had been accessed at least ten times.”

“You were waiting for him to take the first step,” said Hjelm. “And he was waiting for you to.”

Laban seemed to disappear into himself again, but they didn’t let him go completely. “What happened a month ago?” Hjelm asked. “Why did you suddenly start firing off more e-mails?”

Laban slowly raised his eyes; it seemed like an enormous, purely physical effort. His gaze fastened on Hjelm.

“That was when I got close to Ingela. She told me about Conny, about his birth, that he had never even wanted to see him.”

“ ‘Got close to’? How close?”

“I decided to murder him for real.”

Hjelm and Chavez held perfectly still. Hjelm tried to formulate the right question, which ended up being “You started piling on threatening e-mails with the intent of murdering him?”

“Yes.”

“And in the last one, you let him know that you knew about his New York plans and that you were going to kill him in a way that would make it impossible for him to scream out his pain? Do you know how he died?”

“He was murdered.”

“But the details?”

“No.”

“He was tortured to death, and his vocal cords were cut so that no one could hear him scream. When did you go to New York?”

“I haven’t-”

“When? Were you there waiting for him, or did you arrive just as the plane was about to take off?”

“I-”

“How did you learn about the Kentucky Killer’s MO?”

“Where did you get the Edwin Reynolds passport?”

“How did you sneak past the police at Arlanda?”

Laban Hassel gaped into the crossfire.

Hjelm leaned forward and said emphatically, “Where were you on the night of the second and third of September?”

“In hell,” Laban Hassel said almost inaudibly.

“Then you must have run into your father there,” said Chavez. “I don’t think any living person could come closer to hell than he was right then.”

In the dramaturgy of investigative techniques, Laban should, at this point, either have broken down or clammed up. What happened was something in between. His lips hardly moving, he said to the table flatly, “I can’t understand it. I had almost made up my mind to take that step, and then he died. Then someone else murdered him. It was completely crazy. Or rather completely logical. Divine justice. A desire so strong that it materialized. It couldn’t be a coincidence; it had to be fate, a fate as grotesque as life itself. A message from above. And only now, now that nothing can be taken back, do I realize that I never would have killed him. And that I didn’t even want to. On the contrary, I only wanted to punish him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to get him to show some tiny trace of remorse.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Hjelm repeated, “Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”

“I was in Skärmarbrink,” Laban whispered, “at Ingela and Conny’s place.”

And Chavez repeated: “What happened a month ago? How close to Ingela did you get?”

“Very close,” said Laban calmly. “Too close. It’s not enough that I slept with my brother’s mother, not enough that she slept with the son of her son’s detested father, and that these insights slugged us hard in the face. We were also confronted with something we had in common, something horrible with the same root cause, and that was what caused me to make my decision. That was what made me send more and more letters. By then it was mutual.”

“And what was it that you had in common?”

Laban Hassel bent his neck way back and stared up at the ceiling. As his little goatee bobbed, he said, “We had both been sterilized.”

Hjelm looked at Chavez.

Chavez looked at Hjelm.

“Why?” they said in unison.

Laban got up, walked to the window, and opened it.

Dusk had fallen. Rain clouds swept across the city, borrowing a bit of street light now and then. A gust of autumn blew through Laban’s hair and into the musty room.

“Bad blood always comes back around,” said Laban Hassel.