Bad Blood

22

A wasp had come into the room to die. How it had survived the storms of the past few days was a mystery. Perhaps, more dead than alive, it had managed to hide from the madness in some musty hole but hadn’t died there. Instead it had come out with its stinger drawn, ready to wound even in the last moments of its life. A doomed survivor with all its senses but the sixth gone: the sixth sense, that of a killer.

The wasp made a few wobbly rounds of the fluorescent tube light up on the ceiling, as unaffected by heat as it was by light. It buzzed suddenly; it was no longer the usual drone of a wasp but was duller, more aggressive. Then it rushed downward, a last kamikaze attack with its stinger raised. It came closer.

Chavez executed a mercy killing. A precise backhand using a yellowed issue of Expressen sent the body into the corner under the churning old dot-matrix printer; the stinger stuck straight up from the crumpled body. The body would almost certainly lie there until next year, when a light spring breeze would reveal it to be a collection of dust that stuck together only out of habit.

As he stared at the wasp, he had a lightninglike but wordless insight. For a split second he thought he saw the core of the case, crystal clear.

Then reality returned and concealed his clarity with a data list that was growing and curling up on itself, on the floor over the wasp. A shroud of everyday, routine work enveloped the detective’s stroke of genius.

The printer stopped printing. Chavez got up, tore off the list, tore at his hair, and observed his own future as though in an utterly trivial crystal ball. The list of dark blue Volvo station wagons with license numbers that started with B and that were registered in Sweden was long, surprisingly long. He was bored with this task before he’d even started.

He would start by crossing out all those Volvos that were older than fifteen and newer than five years old. After that he would concentrate on those in the Stockholm area. That would bring the cars down to a manageable number-sixty-eight.

Jorge Chavez threw the list down onto his desk and picked up a list he had made himself. There he wrote, as point number three, “The Volvo shit.” Point number one was “The cabin shit”: to return to the nightmarish cabin in Riala in full daylight to assist the industrious technicians, who, to their vociferous surprise, had not found a single strand of hair at the site of the murder and therefore were continuing their intensive search. Point number two was “The Hall shit”: to go to Hall and talk to Andreas Gallano’s fellow inmates and go through his belongings, which he had left behind after his escape a month ago.

Chavez, in other words, had drawn Gallano in the lottery, and as if that weren’t enough, the damn Volvo had been assigned to him, too. This was the work he’d inherited from Kerstin, and he couldn’t help harboring an envious grudge; he and Hjelm could damn sure have been of much greater use to the FBI. They were, after all, the ones for whom things had been moving along; first with Laban Hassel, then with Andreas Gallano.

He wondered, in his not-entirely-peaceful conscience, what he had done to earn the dunce cap. He hadn’t run over small children at Arlanda or groped chicks in the passport check. He hadn’t taken off for Tallinn on a purge à la Charles Bronson and ended up on the floorboards like a fallen version of the only begotten son. And yet here he sat with the worst crap job of all while that nobody Norlander was gathering up the few brain cells he had and destroying the next most stimulating job: taking on John Doe. That job demanded the right man-and Norlander was definitely not that man.

Chavez’s modest request for a change had brought him two things: an icily neutral look from Hultin and a list of two hundred dark blue Volvos.

He turned on the coffeemaker with the tip of his toe and watched the spout until the first drop hit his freshly ground Colombian beans. Then he gazed across the desk, where Hjelm was conspicuous by his absence.

The man with the golden helmet, Chavez thought maliciously. The fake Rembrandt. Perhaps the most admired of the master’s paintings, and it turned out to have been done by an anonymous pupil.

He missed him already.

Then he gave a deep sigh, artfully poured the coffee while the hot water was still bubbling, and dove into the Volvo inferno.

The future was not his.