Bad Blood

21

The biblical flood refused to end. The rain’s eternally drumming gloom drowned out every spark of clarity, and dampness found its way into every corner and rotting, moldy hole. It seeped rapidly into the core, into the very source, a shaking, roaring inferno, the birthplace of the biblical flood; a deeper darkness, thoroughly incomprehensible. And then the plane came out the other side, to clarity, serenity, light; to the broad view that made the earlier darkness seem so small, distant, and understandable.

Paul Hjelm wished life were like a plane taking off in an autumn storm.

Or at least that this case were like that.

The sun was as blinding as darkness for the snow-blind. It lit up the tops of the pitch-black masses of clouds and made them shine with a Renaissance-bronze color, like Rembrandt’s backgrounds.

He couldn’t tear himself away from the play of colors; colors had been missing for so long. In real time, the autumn storm had been going on for only a few days, but real time had nothing to do with it-the rain had erased all his memories of summer in one fell swoop. His memory had stopped with the Kentucky Killer’s arrival in Sweden, which swept everything that had come before into darkness.

He hoped that the successive encounters with the sun that would come during the flight would mean a clear sort of nontime; the plane would land at approximately the same time it had taken off. If it didn’t crash.

He was scarcely afraid of flying, yet those seconds when the acceleration ceases and the wheels leave the ground always caused him a deep thrill, as he unconditionally put his life in the hands of a stranger.

Only after fifteen minutes of losing himself in pure fascination did he even think of turning to Kerstin Holm. When he did, she was still there. He recognized the expression he had never seen on himself, but which, after the fact, he realized he must have had. When the drinks cart went by, they exchanged something like a normal glance, but they were still far from words.

Here the serial killer had sat, maybe in this very seat, staring out not into the blinding sun but into the equally blinding darkness. What had he thought about? What had he felt, experienced? He had just murdered a person-what had flowed through his darkened soul?

And why had he come to Sweden? In the answer to that question, after all, lay the solution to this strange and elusive case. He tried to recap it roughly. In the late 1970s, a man starts to murder people in the American Midwest, in a manner reminiscent of a torture method used by a special task force in Vietnam called Commando Cool. The victims, eighteen of them in four years and primarily in Kentucky, have mostly remained unidentified. Most of the ones who are identified are academics, both foreign and American. The FBI focuses on the special task force’s squad leader, Wayne Jennings; possibly they also try to find Commando Cool’s unknown commander, who goes by the name Balls. Jennings dies in a car accident after sixteen murders have been committed. Two more murders follow; after that there’s a timeout for more than a decade.

Then the murders start again. All signs point to the same perpetrator. This time he is active in the northeastern United States, especially in New York. And this time the victims are all identified, and they come from very different backgrounds. The pattern seems more random this time. After the sixth murder in the second round, the twenty-fourth overall, the murder of the Swede Lars-Erik Hassel, the killer suddenly leaves the country and arrives in Stockholm on a fake passport. There he goes to drug dealer Andreas Gallano’s secret cabin, about forty miles north of Stockholm, which, according to the latest information, is free of fingerprints and fibers, meticulously cleaned. About a week later, he sets off from the cabin in Gallano’s Saab, leaving behind Gallano, who has been murdered in the serial killer’s distinctive method. Probably the killer leaves the cabin at night. He goes to Frihamnen, where he murders two more people: Erik Lindberger of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a still-unidentified twenty-five-year-old. Lindberger has been tortured to death in the same way, but the unknown man, the John Doe, is shot to death. This is the only known occasion when the murderer deviates from his usual method and uses a firearm. Presumably he changes now-patriotic cars, from the Saab to a ten-year-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a license number that starts with B. There’s been no sign of him since.

How the hell did it all fit together?

“How the hell does all this fit together?” said Kerstin Holm, her first words since the plane had taken off from Arlanda and set course for New York. She and Hjelm were apparently on the same wavelength.

“I don’t know,” said Paul Hjelm.

Then it was quiet.

The sun shone blindly, as though it belonged to no particular season, outside the trembling Plexiglas airplane windows; it could just as easily have been a winter sun as a summer one-but it was an autumn sun. They found themselves in a detached moment. It was a journey through time, the only possible kind. Time passed and no time passed. It was a place for contemplation.

He would have liked to have a whiskey and soda and listen to music and read a book. All of that would have to wait.

Should he use the time to develop hypotheses, then? No, those would have to wait. This was more a time to establish openness, a critical receptiveness, to all the information and impressions that would come streaming toward them in the new world. They would have to keep the questions coming without trying to answer them too quickly. For there were so many questions.

Why does he kill? Is it for the same reasons before and after his break? Why did he take a break for almost fifteen years? Is it really the same killer? Why does everyone feel there’s something wrong with the image of him as a classic serial killer? Why was Lars-Erik Hassel murdered at the airport? Why did the murderer go to Sweden? Why did he use a thirty-two-year-old’s passport if he is over fifty? How did he find Gallano’s cabin in Riala? Why did he change cars in Frihamnen? Was it because he wanted Gallano’s corpse to be traced via his car? After all, Lindberger’s corpse was easy to find, too. Does he, like most serial killers, want to display his art for an audience? Why did he murder Lindberger, an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? What was Lindberger doing in Frihamnen in the middle of the night? Where was he murdered? Is the failed break-in at the computer company LinkCoop’s warehouse connected to the case? Why did the killer shoot John Doe instead of torturing him? Who the hell is this John Doe, who can’t be found in any international registry? Are we asking the right questions?

The last question was perhaps the most important. Was there a link between all these questions, something you couldn’t see until you got up high enough and looked down at the darkness in the crystal-clear sunlight, and then it would be obvious?

Right now it didn’t feel like it.

But at least they were on their way.