Bad Blood

23

The nontime had passed. The hours that didn’t exist no longer existed. They landed at Newark in a broiling-hot noonday sun that embraced the entire unending system of runways; from up in the sky, they had glittered in the sun like an inexperienced fly fisherman’s tangle of lines.

Paul and Kerstin hadn’t exchanged many words during the flight, not only because they had been contemplating the case; the disruptions in their relationship seemed to keep spreading-although neither of them thought much about it.

They were shepherded through passport control and had to wait more than half an hour for their luggage. After clearing customs, they finally entered the enormous arrivals hall, where a crowd of people were holding signs with the names of their unfamiliar arriving guests. After a few minutes, they realized that a sign in the hand of a tall suit-clad man, with the Lewis Carroll-inspired text “Yalm, Halm,” must be directed at them. The renowned comedy duo of Yalm & Halm politely greeted the gigantic man, whose name they made out as Jerry Schonbauer, and who shepherded them to a slightly calmer part of the arrivals hall.

Waiting there was an equally well dressed but slightly less stiff and slightly less FBI-like black man in his fifties. As the enormous Schonbauer took his place in the hierarchy just behind him, the black man extended his hand with a genuinely welcoming smile. “Ray Larner, FBI. You must be officers Yalm and Halm from Stockholm.”

“Paul Hjelm,” said Yalm.

“Kerstin Holm,” said Halm.

“So he’s started again now?” said Larner with a regretful smile. “A pair of fresh eyes is probably what this case needs.”

“It’s basically a matter of adding our information to your vast archive of knowledge,” said Kerstin with gently ingratiating humility.

Larner nodded. “As you know, I’ve devoted a great deal of my professional life to this character, and yet I still don’t know what he’s up to. He is the most mysterious of all our serial killers. With most of them, you can come up with an approximate motive and psychological profile pretty quickly, but K deviates from almost all the usual norms. You will have seen my report, of course.”

They nodded. Larner called the Kentucky Killer “K,” as did the diehards in FASK, Fans of American Serial Killers, with whom Chavez had Internet contact. They shivered a joint shiver.

Jerry Schonbauer picked up their luggage, which hanging from his fists looked like toiletry bags. As they started walking, Larner asked them, “What do you say to the following schedule? We’ll drive you to the hotel so you can freshen up after your journey. Then we’ll have a late lunch at my favorite restaurant. And then we’ll start work. But first”-he nodded at Schonbauer, who was drifting with their bags toward an exit glimmering in the distance-“a little guided tour of Newark International Airport.”

Larner took them up the stairs to the check-in hall. They wandered for quite some time through an indoor landscape that never seemed to change; even the steady stream of travelers remained static.

Finally they stopped at a small door amid the sea of people. Larner pulled out a bunch of keys, slipped one in, and yanked it open. It was a janitor’s closet, large model: fluorescent lights on the low ceiling, clean, whitewashed floors, and shelves with meticulously arranged cleaning equipment-rags, brushes, buckets, towels. They made their way around the shelves to a more open area with a chair and a desk with a few old sandwiches on it. On the wall above was a tiny window through which one could see the giant bodies of arriving and departing planes sweeping past.

This was where Lars-Erik Hassel spent the last hour of his life.

And what an hour.

Hjelm and Holm looked around the closet. There wasn’t much to see. It was a clinical place in which to die a clinical death.

Larner pointed at the chair. “We’ve taken the original chair, of course. Aside from Mr. Hassel’s bodily fluids, there wasn’t a trace on it. There never is.”

“Never?” said Kerstin Holm.

“When we began, of course, there weren’t any real possibilities for DNA testing.” Larner shrugged. “But judging by the six murders in this new series, we probably weren’t missing anything. The closet is spotless. Like he’s superhuman. K.”

This last word was just a letter, but his tone took it to astronomical heights.

“Nine,” said Kerstin Holm.

Larner looked closely at her and nodded.

As they left the closet, Hjelm lingered for a few seconds in the open area. He wanted to be alone there. He sat in the chair and looked around. So sterile-such an American brand of sterile efficiency. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine just a tiny bit of the horrible, silent pain that these walls had encircled, tried to make some telepathic contact with Lars-Erik Hassel’s suffering.

It didn’t work.

It was there, but it was beyond words.

Agent Schonbauer drove with a practiced hand through chaotic traffic of abnormal dimensions. Larner sat next to him, talking to Hjelm and Holm in the backseat: about the late-summer heat in New York, about “community policing,” the city’s new and successful model for fighting crime, about the structure and strange priorities of the Swedish police system, about the autumn storm in Stockholm, and extremely superficially, about the FBI and the Kentucky Killer. Throughout Hjelm watched Larner, whose body language said something different than what the official, dark FBI costume projected. His controlled, cheerful relaxation and smooth, exact motions seemed to beg forgiveness for his getup. Hjelm amused himself by comparing expected and actual appearances. First and foremost, he had not expected Larner to be black; embedded in that assumption, of course, was a whole package of prejudices. But he hadn’t expected him to be so alert, either, after all the setbacks with K: the futile search twenty years ago; the pursuit of the apparently innocent Commando Cool leader Wayne Jennings, which had ended in Jennings’s death; the resultant lawsuit and Larner’s demotion; and then the reboot, when everything started up again. But Larner seemed detached, as if he were watching the spectacle with an indulgent smile. He seemed to possess the divine gift of being able to separate his professional and personal lives; he radiated, in some way, a happy home life.

They entered the gigantic Holland Tunnel, passed under the Hudson River, and came out on Canal Street, then turned left into SoHo. They drove up Eighth Avenue and arrived at a small hotel by the name of Skipper’s Inn near Chelsea Park. Because a free parking spot was as rare as a Swiftian utopia, they were dropped off on the sidewalk after being informed that Larner would return in an hour and a half. They climbed the stairs to the peculiarly long, narrow building that was crammed like a turn-of-the-century relic between two considerably glitzier Manhattan complexes of pearly glass.

They were given adjoining rooms, each with a window facing out onto West Twenty-fifth Street, and thus took up a quarter of the sixth floor of this lodging house, which actually succeeded in feigning resemblance to an English inn-or rather, several inns stacked on top of one another. Their rooms were small and cozy, with a rustic touch, if you could ignore the roar outside the nonfunctional, quadruple-paned windows. Although the air conditioning was spurting air at full force and was competing with the racket from the street, it wasn’t able to cool the room below body temperature.

Hjelm lay down on the bed, which rocked precariously. He had never been to the United States before, but there were two things he associated with the country: air conditioning and ice. Where was the ice? He got up and went over to the mini-bar. The top half of the small refrigerator was a freezer, and sure enough, it was filled with ice cubes. He took a few, returned to the bed, and let the ice cubes balance like horns on his forehead until they fell to his ears.

How he had longed for the sun in the Stockholm rain! Now he longed for the Stockholm rain. The grass is always greener, he thought, clichéd; his brain felt mushy.

In American films, New York was either sparkling with hysterical but happy Christmas snow, or it was boiling like a cauldron in the midsummer sun. Now he understood why. In mid-September, the happy Christmas snow was months away.

He made his way to the shabby but amicably shabby bathroom. There was a shower in a grungy little bathtub, and he made use of it, without preparing toiletries or a change of clothes-he just went straight in, satisfied that he’d remembered to take off what he was wearing. When he was finished, he didn’t dry off but went over to the sink and drank from it. After five gulps it struck him that perhaps he shouldn’t drink the water, and he spat and sputtered. The last thing he needed was to get a juicy case of travelers’ diarrhea.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. In keeping with the style of the room, it was properly cracked. His reflection somewhat split, he met his own gaze a bit cubistically. The blemish on his cheek was the same as ever, but he gave thanks to various creators that it had at least stopped growing. For a while he had worried that it would end up covering his whole face.

Why did Kerstin’s presence always make him think of that blemish?

He wandered into the bedroom, naked, and by the time he covered the twelve feet, he was dry; when he lay down on the bed, the sweat began to return. He lay there and pondered his male organ. He considered masturbating-that was always a way to make oneself feel at home-but the circumstances weren’t right. Instead, he practiced an appropriate breathing method, as strength-preserving as possible, and quickly fell asleep.

In his dream, just at the right moment, Kerstin popped in. He was in a different hotel room. He was sleeping in his sleep and dreaming in his dream. Or rather, in his dream, he found himself in a state between dream and wakefulness. Then she came in. From nowhere, her small, dark figure sailed through the room. In his dream they had talked about sex earlier that evening, a bit tipsily, but openly, maturely, modernly. It didn’t have to result in anything.

He had happened-if you could call it happened-to mention his favorite fantasy, and now she was lying beside him and masturbating, just a few feet away. His subconscious had pedantically stored the memory of each of her movements, and for a year it had drawn them forth at night, every little singularity in the way she touched herself, every caress; and a whole collection of his desires and longings were interspersed with every movement. Then there was a knock, and she drew her hand down through the triangle of hair like a harrow; there was a knock, and she slowly, slowly spread her legs; there was a knock, and she caught hold of…

There was a knock.

He shot straight up in bed and looked down at his erection.

“Paul?” a feminine whisper came through the door. “Are you awake?”

“Yes! I’m naked!” He was almost awake. “Awake!” he called a bit louder, hoping that the door was resistant to Freudian slips. “Is it time already?”

“Not really,” said Kerstin. “Will you let me in?”

“Hold on,” He was finally awake. His erection was still awfully stiff. He came up with a white lie: “I’m in the shower, wait a minute!”

Why couldn’t he work with this woman without making her into a sex object? Was he not a grown man? He thought he had a relatively healthy view of equality and women’s rights and all, but lust was a tyrant that would always live on. If anything, he thought, he was making her into a sex subject, but where the fuck was the limit?

Ridiculously, his erection didn’t give up. He laughed at himself. What a fool! And the fool had to make a choice: put her off, and risk burning up the last vestiges of their built-up trust, or else be honest-and risk burning up the last vestiges of their built-up trust.

He teetered on the brink for a few seconds, then: “I’ve got an erection.”

“What the hell are you saying? Let me in.”

He grabbed a towel from in the bathroom and wrapped it around himself. It looked so pathetic that it no longer was pathetic by the time he reached the door and turned the key. She stepped in, clad in an elegant, tight little black dress.

“What did you say?” she asked the more or less presentable newly showered person.

“I was in the shower,” he said, gesturing awkwardly. “I didn’t think it was time yet.”

“But you’re dry,” she said skeptically.

“The heat. Everything dries right away.”

“It isn’t time yet,” she said in a more professional tone, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I just thought we could talk through our strategy.”

“Strategy?” He bent over the suitcase on the other side of the bed. His towel wasn’t on tightly, so he had to hold it with one hand and undo the straps of the suitcase with the other. It wasn’t all that easy.

“That looks hard,” she said maternally, turning away. “Let go of the towel. I promise not to look.”

Relieved, he let go of the towel, took out fresh clothes, and put them on. “Why do we need a strategy?”

“It’s the FBI we’re going to meet with. They’re going to see us as the country cousins on a visit to the big city. They’ll consider it to be their primary task to make sure we don’t get run over or robbed and murdered or become junkies. We have to know exactly what we want to do here and stand firm. They’re the ones who are going to supply us with tasks, not the other way around; the killer is on our turf. So what is it we’re actually doing here?”

He took out a narrow purple tie and started to tie it. “We’re going to fish for clues and see if they’ve missed anything.”

“But we can’t put it that way… Are you going to wear that?”

He looked down himself. “What?”

“We probably shouldn’t look more countrified than we are. We are from a big city, after all, even if it is a small one.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, mystified.

“What color is your shirt?” she said pedagogically.

“Blue,” he said.

“It’s closer to azure. And your tie?”

“Purple?”

“Do those go together?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Come here.” He obeyed her. She untied the tie and started to unbutton his shirt.

Control yourself, he ordered his unruly nether regions. “What are you doing?” he asked calmly.

“Since I’m assuming you have only one tie with you, we’ll have to change the shirt. What have you got?” She rooted around in his suitcase and took out a white one. “This’ll have to do.” She tossed it to him.

“No,” she said, changing the subject abruptly, “we can’t present it as though we’re here to correct their mistakes. That might be a sensitive subject-if not for Larner, then for his superiors.”

“So we ought to focus on the Swedish stuff?” he said, buttoning his shirt.

“I think so, yes. But first and foremost we ought to share our information liberally. It could be that they’ll be able to add something, of course, but above all it’s a goodwill gesture. If we lay our cards on the table, maybe we’ll get a few cards back.”

“So our strategy is, one: unconditionally blurt out everything we have, and two: say we want to go through the material to try to find a Swedish connection.”

“And assure them that we’re here to work on it only from a Swedish perspective. We won’t step on any toes. We’ll be diplomatic. Can you handle that?”

He ought to have felt insulted, but this was the first thing she’d said that approached a personal remark. “Yes.”

“As you know, I’ve gone through all the material we’ve had access to pretty carefully. I don’t know how complete it is, but Larner seems to have latched on to Wayne Jennings a little too early. When Jennings disappeared from the scene, all the ideas disappeared, too. There’s not a single tiny hypothesis among the material from after the break. Maybe I’m being unfair, but Larner seemed to give up after his failure with Jennings. Now he’s just collecting facts. It feels like there should be a lot more to do, not least with the later portion of the case.”

He nodded. Even with his considerably scantier knowledge of the details, he saw that the American side was at a loss when faced with the Kentucky Killer’s return after fifteen years.

“So you don’t think we ought to mention the KGB theory?” he said seriously.

“We can hold off on that for a bit,” she said, just as seriously.

Ray Larner’s lunch consisted of a magnificently authentic pasta carbonara at a little restaurant annex called Divina Commedia on Eleventh Street. Paul and Kerstin were surprised to see the meal served with Loka brand bottled water, but as people said, the world was getting smaller. Larner was in top form and talked exclusively about the art of Italian cooking; he waved off everything else as irrelevant. A long and painfully prestige-loaded argument over whether the world’s best olive oil came from Spain or Italy ended in a thrown game when Kerstin suddenly remembered her diplomatic strategy and let Italy win. Hjelm countered with Greece but scored no goals. Australia got a few unexpected points from a neighboring table.

“When I retire, I’m moving to Italy,” Larner said loudly. “The privileges of a retired widower are endless. I’m going to die with my mouth full of pasta, olive oil, garlic, and red wine. Anything else is unimaginable.”

It was no exaggeration to say that he deviated from the stereotypical image of an FBI special agent.

“So you’re a widower?” Holm said with soft sincerity.

“My wife died about a year ago,” Larner said, chewing good-naturedly. “Fortunately the sadness is followed by an almost rash feeling of freedom-if you don’t kill yourself or become an alcoholic. And that’s almost always what happens.”

“Do you have any children?” Hjelm asked.

“No,” said Larner. “We talked about it up until I took on K. He robbed me of all my faith in humanity. You can’t bring children into a world that can create a K. But that’s a line of reasoning you’ve heard before.”

“I have,” Hjelm said. “Had children, that is.”

“You had no K then. Wait and see if you have any grandchildren.”

“Children were born despite Hitler,” said Holm.

Larner was quiet for a moment, then leaned toward her. “Do you have kids, Halm?”

She shook her head.

“What I’m going to show you this afternoon”-Larner leaned back in his chair-“will keep you from doing it for all time.”

Zero tolerance was a term that played an important part in New York’s new spirit. A euphemism for intolerance, it worked extremely well. Quite simply, the police were ordered not to tolerate any behavior that fell outside the bounds of the law. Committing the slightest offense meant that one would immediately be taken into custody. The theory behind it was a sort of vertical domino effect: if the little criminals fall, the big ones will too. It was based on the idea that those who commit serious crimes also commit a great many minor ones, and that’s when it’s possible to catch them.

As a federal officer, Ray Larner was outside the operations of the state police and hence this project. Although he worked in the heart of New York, he observed its workings at a distance. His candor, of which they had already seen ample proof, never extended an inch into controversial territory. Yet something in his tone of voice grated a bit as he described the results of the New York spirit alongside Jerry Schonbauer in the FBI car. Did a trace of a grim view of the future surface in his intonation?

A few years ago, law enforcement had been forced to do something about the state of things in the largest city in the United States. Crime had run amok. There were countless murders. The police and the justice system were at a loss and faced a choice between a long-term path and a short-term one, prevention and punishment. Unfortunately, they had let the situation become so acute that they really only had one alternative. It was too late to equip people with enough self-esteem that they would see an alternative to drugs and easy money. Not only would that approach take too long, but it would also require a break with a centuries-old tradition. The best solution seemed to be a synthesis that would unite the short term with the long term: prevention by punishment.

“Community policing” turned out to be more successful than expected. Suddenly there were police on every corner, and in the rankings of the world’s most murder-heavy cities, New York fell from a pole position to almost last place. The decent citizens-that is, the somewhat well-to-do-were of course thrilled. Once again you could jog through Central Park without getting a switchblade between your sixth and seventh ribs; you could take the subway without needing ten seats. In general, it was once again possible to move around the city.

But how high a price did the city pay? First and foremost, it required an absolute acceptance of the status quo. The thought that criminals could better themselves in one way or another vanished. The city was no longer interested in making sure people didn’t become criminals-it just wanted to banish them once they had. In the past the prevention side had at least managed to snap up a few crumbs of resources, but now the whole tiny pie was allocated to the punishment side. No one in his right mind spoke any longer of America’s old central idea-equal opportunity-and the vision of a melting pot was transformed into a sheer myth; nowhere were people so separate as in the United States. The new police strategy-to be able to show up anywhere, at any time-without a doubt carried historic baggage. The question was whether inequality was already so severe that the police state was the only available method of upholding law and order.

In addition, there had been an uncomfortable shift in the view of human rights when it came to the death penalty. Thirty-eight of the states had capital punishment, and recently the country had seen an unprecedented increase in the number of death sentences handed down and carried out. The latest stroke of genius was the policy according to which no one who opposed the death penalty on principle could be permitted to serve on a jury in in a trial where the death penalty was a possible sentence. This “death-qualified jury” quite simply disqualified any liberal layperson from the legal process and paved the way for rash and hasty verdicts. The fact was that the crime rate was no lower in states that had the death penalty than in the minority that still resisted it. So the most important argument for the death penalty-that it was a deterrent to crime-was lost, and the only remaining argument in its favor was the victims’ desire for retribution. Revenge.

Larner’s neutral demeanor when he explained this situation rivaled Hultin’s. The question was, did it conceal as much anger? Or did Larner-as Holm had suggested-quite simply dedicate himself to the collection and reporting of facts?

Hjelm was about to query Larner on his opinion of the death penalty-the test that, in his opinion, constituted a fundamental dividing line between two sorts of people. But just then, the car reached the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Larner cut short his own explanation and said, “Look out the back now.”

They turned around, and Manhattan, bathing in sunlight, stretched out its fabulous cityscape before their eyes.

“A strange kind of beauty, isn’t it? Every time I drive this way I think about the eternity of beauty. Would our forefathers also have found it beautiful? Or would they have thought it disgusting? Is there such a thing as eternal beauty?”

The sight was overwhelming. Hjelm didn’t return to the question of the death penalty. The view of Manhattan had, in some strange way, opened the door to the city, and he eagerly awaited their arrival at the FBI’s New York field office.

Schonbauer drove them to the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, then turned the car around and drove back they way they’d come; apparently he had brought them there only for the sake of the view. They followed the bridge back and headed to the majestic City Hall, turned down one of Manhattan’s few diagonal streets, Park Row, which bordered City Hall Park, came out onto Broadway, passed City Hall again, and after a few cross streets arrived at Federal Plaza, where a garage door opened and they glided in.

This was the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters, 26 Federal Plaza. The bureau also had local offices for Brooklyn-Queens, on Long Island, and at JFK.

The foursome strolled through corridors that did not much resemble the ones in police headquarters on Kungsholmen. Everything was bigger, cleaner, and more clinical. Hjelm wondered if he would be ever able to work here-the place seemed immune to the wild kind of thinking that he considered his specialty.

Hjelm soon stopped counting the number of security doors they went through with the help of various cards and codes. Schonbauer acted as gate boy while Larner rambled on, uninterrupted, spouting information of the sort one might find in a brochure: the number of employees, the departments, the nature of basic training, the expert groups, everything but what was relevant.

Finally they approached one last security door, which opened on its monumental hinges, and then they were standing before a system of corridors that belonged to the serial killer squad at the FBI’s New York division. Larner’s and Schonbauer’s names were inscribed on two adjacent doors. Schonbauer went into his office without a sound, and the rest of them stepped into Larner’s.

“Jerry’s going to prepare a little multimedia show for you,” Larner explained, sitting down at his desk. The office was small and lived in, Hjelm noted gratefully; it had at least a shade of the personal touch. The walls had bulletin boards instead of wallpaper, it seemed, and tacked up on them were all kinds of notes. Behind Larner stood a whiteboard, and the familiar pattern of arrows, rectangles, and lines could have been mistaken for Hultin’s.

“Well, here we have everything in concentrate.” Larner followed Hjelm’s gaze. “Twenty-four rectangles with tortured bodies. Forty-eight holes in twenty-four necks. A sober outline of the un-outlineable. Gruesome terror reduced to a few blue lines. What else can we do? The rest of it, we carry inside us.”

Hjelm looked at Larner. Without a doubt, the FBI agent carried a great deal inside himself.

“One question first,” said Larner calmly. “Is it true that you think he shot one of the victims?”

“It seems so,” said Hjelm.

“If it is, it changes in one blow the minimal psychological profile we’ve scraped together.”

“On the other hand,” said Kerstin Holm, “your original theory was that he was a Vietnam veteran. They aren’t usually too far from firearms.”

Larner made a face. “You know what happened to that theory.”

“Of course,” said Holm, and Hjelm almost thought she blushed. A diplomatic faux pas in her first remark. He could tell that she was cursing herself. But she didn’t seem to want to give up. “Could you explain why you let all the other members of Commando Cool go?” she asked. “They weren’t analyzed in the material you sent to Sweden.”

Larner stretched and gathered the information from the considerable archive in his brain. “The group seems to have been made up of eight members, all specially trained. Its focus was torture in the field-a somewhat brutal way to put it, I suppose. Once someone explained to me that its more official purpose was ‘active-service collection of information,’ but I got the sense that they invented this term specifically for me-it was never the plan that even a tiny crumb of information would leave the inner circle.”

“Who was in the inner circle? Was it the military in general?”

Larner gave her a sharp look. “Military intelligence.”

There was more on his mind, she noticed. “That was all?” she prompted.

“Commando Cool-just the obnoxious name suggests it wasn’t meant to become public… Anyway, Commando Cool was somehow directly below Nixon. It was established during his administration, toward the end of the war, and you get the impression that it was done out of desperation. Publicly its role was said to be military intelligence, but other powers were at work behind the scenes.”

“The CIA?” Holm seemed to have left her diplomatic mask at the hotel.

Ray Larner swallowed and gave her a look that indicated that their relationship had changed-not necessarily for the worse.

“With many layers of top-secret stamps, yes, possibly. You have to understand how tense the relationship between the CIA and the FBI is. And if it in any way gets out that I’ve said this, I can forget ever having a pension. My personal phone has been monitored, and I can only hope there aren’t any bugs in this room. They’re always a step ahead of me. But you understand, I’ve already said too much. Try to forget it.”

“Already have,” said Holm. “We’re just here to find links to Sweden. Nothing else will end up in our reports.”

Larner regarded each of them for a minute, then nodded briskly. “It had eight members,” he resumed.

“What about Balls?” Kerstin interjected recklessly.

Larner burst out laughing. “Have you been consulting FASK? Fans of American Serial Killers, on the Internet?”

They looked at each other.

“Follow me.” Larner leaped to his feet and rushed out into the corridor. A few offices down, he knocked on a door marked BERNHARD ANDREWS and ushered them in.

A seemingly out-of-place young man in his early twenties, with jeans and a T-shirt, looked up through round glasses from a huge computer and smiled broadly. “Ray,” he said cheerfully, holding out a printout. “Yesterday’s haul. A cotton executive in West Virginia, a golf club in Arkansas, and a couple other little goodies.”

“Barry,” said Larner, taking the list and scanning through it, “these are officers Yalm and Halm from Sweden. They’re here about K.”

“Aha,” said Bernhard Andrews jovially. “Colleagues of Jorge Chavez?”

Their jaws dropped.

“Born in Sweden in 1968,” Andrews continued. “In Ragswede, right? To Chilean parents with left-leaning associations.”

“It’s called Rågsved,” Hjelm said, bewildered.

“Chavez was in the FASK site a week ago,” Andrews explained smugly. “He had a good but slightly transparent disguise. He put up a hundred and thirty dollars of taxpayers’ money to get in. A little development aid from the Swedish people to the American tax coffers.”

They gaped at him, their jaws rattling against their kneecaps.

“Barry’s a hacker,” said Larner calmly, “one of the best in the country. He can get in anywhere. We were lucky to grab him. Also, he’s FASK.”

“Fans of American Serial Killers,” said Andrews. “Nice meeting you.”

“Barry set up FASK as a way to attract potential serial killers.” Larner waved the printout. “No matter how hard they try to disguise themselves, he catches them. We’ve caught three with FASK’s help. I would venture to say that Barry is the country’s most obscure hero.”

Bernhard Andrews smiled broadly.

“So Balls doesn’t exist?” said Kerstin Holm, who was quicker on the uptake than Hjelm.

“I got it from The Pink Panther,” said Andrews. “The expert in disguise whom Inspector Clouseau hires and who survives every bombing attack. When it comes to serial killers and their fans, the only thing that’s certain is that they have no sense of humor. Humor seems to be the antidote to everything.”

“He used the name Balls to fish out a protest from someone who knew better,” said Larner. “But so far we haven’t had a bite.”

They said goodbye to Fans of American Serial Killers, who gave them another broad smile and waved.

In the corridor, Larner said, “Very little is as it seems in the world today.”

He led them back to his office and sat at his desk. “I didn’t think you had ethnic minorities in your police corps,” he said, putting his finger precisely on a Swedish sore spot. “But not even Chavez can be told about FASK. Barry is one of our most important secret weapons in the fight against serial killers.”

He pulled out a drawer and took out a few sheets of paper, laid them on the desk, and placed an FBI pen on each sheet.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but my superiors have prepared these papers for you. It’s an oath of confidentiality that, if broken, will result in penalties in accordance with American law. Please read through them and sign them.”

They read. The small print was difficult to interpret. Both Hjelm and Holm felt an instinctive aversion to putting their signatures on such ambiguous papers, but diplomacy reaped yet another victory-they signed.

“Excellent,” said Larner. “Where were we? Commando Cool. Eight members, no Balls. The team leader was the very young Wayne Jennings, who was already a veteran when they netted him-twenty-five years old and with six years of war behind him and God knows how many dead. All the best and most formative years of his life spent in the service of death. Twenty-seven when the war ended, thirty when K began to be active. Returned after the war to his dead father’s farm in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of the Cumberland Plateau, if that means anything to you. Didn’t do much farming, just lived on his veteran’s pension. He was without a doubt the most likely suspect; according to statements, he was very skilled at handling the pincers. The third body was found just thirteen miles from his home.

“As for the others in Commando Cool, three died in the final stages of the war. Besides Jennings, there were four left; you’ll find their names in the complete material, which you’ll have access to. One came from Kentucky, Greg Androwski, a childhood friend of Jennings’s, but he fell apart and died a junkie in 1986. He was alive during K’s four years in the Midwest, but he was pretty worn down and quite unlikely to be a killer. Completely destroyed by Vietnam.

“Three left. One came to New York, Steve Harrigan, who became a stockbroker and was one of the wizards of Wall Street during the 1980s. Another went to Maine: Tony Robin Garreth, who makes his living taking tourists on fishing tours. Both were pretty safeguarded against suspicions. The last one, Chris Anderson, moved to Kansas City and sold used cars.”

“Swedish background?” said Kerstin.

Larner smiled faintly. “Four generations back. His great-great-grandfather came from someplace called Kalmar, if you’ve heard of that. But Anderson was actually number two on our list, Jennings’s second-in-command, just as icy, just as destroyed by the war. But his alibis were a tiny bit better than Jennings’s. And Jennings was nastier-that was my main argument, just based on a feeling, that is. I managed to push the whole thing pretty far.”

“How sure were you, really, about Jennings?”

Larner leaned back in his chair with his hands on the back of his neck. He deliberated for a moment. “Completely,” he said. “One hundred percent.” He fished a thick folder out of an old-fashioned file cabinet that stood next to the whiteboard.

Jerry Schonbauer peeked into the room. “It’s ready,” he said.

“Five minutes.” Larner tossed the folder to Holm, who opened it. A small bundle of photographs unfolded like a fan. The first one was a portrait. Jennings in his thirties, a young, fresh-looking man with light blond hair and a broad smile. But he also had a steely blue coolness in his eyes, which sharply divided the picture into two parts. Kerstin held her hand over the upper part of his face and saw a happily smiling young person; but when she moved her hand to the lower part, she saw the icy gaze of a man who was hard as nails.

“That’s it,” Larner said almost enthusiastically. “That’s exactly it. When we first visited him, he was pretty amiable, really pleasant-the lower half. As we persisted, we saw more and more of the upper half.”

They looked through the rest of the photographs. A teenage Jennings in uniform, Jennings slightly older in a circle of identical field uniforms, Jennings with a big tuna fish, Jennings pointing a Tommy gun at the camera with a fake attack face, Jennings at a dance with a beautiful southern woman with two first names, Jennings with a small child on his lap, Jennings making out with a Vietnamese prostitute-and then Jennings roaring with laughter as he presses a pistol to the temple of a grimacing, naked, kneeling Vietnamese man who is pissing himself in a deep hole in the ground. Holm lifted it up toward Larner.

“Yes, that,” he said. “It’s like it makes you forget the others. It’s a fucking awful picture. I would get a lot of money if I sold it to Time magazine. I don’t understand how he could keep it. We found all of these pictures when we raided his house after he died.”

“What happened when he died,” Holm said, “exactly?”

“Well,” Larner began, “at the end we had him under surveillance twenty-four hours a day-”

“For how long?” she interrupted.

“It had been going on for a month when he died.”

“Were any murders committed during that time?”

“The bodies were usually found in a state of decay that made them hard to date. But all sixteen that preceded his death had been found by then. It was one reason I was so persistent, even though every imaginable authority was against me: the longer we watched twenty-four hours a day and no new victims were found, the more likely it was that he was the murderer. May I continue now?”

“Of course,” said Holm, ashamed. “Sorry.”

“I tried to be there in the car as often as possible, and I was there that day, the third of July 1982. It was broiling hot, almost unbearable. Jennings came rushing out of the house and yelled at us; he’d been doing that for the last few days. He seemed at the end of his rope. Then he rushed over to his car and tore off. We followed him north along a county road for maybe ten miles, at a crazy speed. After a while, a bit ahead on the road, past a long curve, an incredible cloud of smoke rose up. When we got there, we saw that Jennings had crashed head-on into a truck. Both vehicles were ablaze. I got as close as I could and saw him moving a little in the car, burned up.”

“So you didn’t see the collision itself?” said Holm.

Larner smiled again, the same smile of understanding and indulgence that had become characteristic of their relationship. Hjelm felt a bit like an outsider.

“I know why you’re persisting in this, Halm,” said Larner. “No. We were a few hundred yards back, and there was a curve in the road. And no, I didn’t see his face as he burned up. Did he fake the accident and flee the scene? No. For one thing, there was nowhere for him to go, just flat, deserted earth all around, and no other vehicle was in the vicinity; and for another-and this is crucial-the teeth from the body in the car were his. I had to spend a great deal of time convincing myself that he actually died in that car.

“But he did. Don’t believe anything else. Don’t do what I did and get stuck on Jennings. It destroyed any chance of moving forward on this case. I can’t even come up with a sensible hypothesis anymore. K remains a mystery. He must have been sitting somewhere, laughing out loud, while I harassed a tired, unemployed war veteran and drove him to his death. Then, just to show me how wrong I’d been, he killed two people within six months; both of them died long after Jennings did. And then vanished into thin air.”

Larner closed his eyes.

“I thought I was done with him,” he said slowly. “I kept working on the case, going through every little detail with a fine-toothed comb for several years after the eighteenth and final murder. More than a decade went by. I started working on other things, chasing racists in the South, taking on drug traffickers in Vegas, but he hung over me the whole time. And then that bastard started again. He’d moved to New York. He was mocking me.”

“And you’re dead certain that it’s him?”

Larner touched his nose, tired. “For security reasons, we make sure that only a very tiny number of agents know the crucial details of each case. For K, it was me and a man by the name of Camerun. Don Camerun died of cancer in 1986. Not even Jerry Schonbauer knows this particular detail-I’m the only one in the bureau who does-it’s about the pincers. It’s the same pincers, and they’re inserted in the same, exact, exceedingly complicated way. Because it’s your case now, you two will also be given access to the description; I strongly recommend that no one else learns about it.”

“What happened with this Commando Cool character who moved to New York?” Holm persisted. “The stockbroker?”

Larner laughed. “Apparently all of my old thoughts are floating in the air and you’re catching them, Halm.”

“Kerstin,” she said.

“Okay, Charstin. You’re absolutely right, Steve Harrigan isn’t mentioned in the report I sent you. But I’ve checked up on him. He’s in the complete material that you’ll get to look at. Harrigan is a billionaire, always on the go. He’s been abroad during each and every one of the six murders in the second round. And he is definitely not in Sweden now. So now that considerably more than five minutes have passed, let’s join Jerry in the showroom and watch a movie.”

He led them through the corridors and into an auditorium that, sure enough, resembled an actual movie theater. The giant man was sitting on a table up front, below the screen, dangling his feet. His pant legs were pulled up a bit, exposing a pair of extremely hairy calves above the regulation black socks. When he saw them, he hopped down and showed them to seats in the front.

“Jerry had just come in from the Kentucky office, when the second round started,” Larner said, wiggling into one of the sleep-inducing chairs. “He’s a damn good agent. Took Roger Penny alone, if you’ve heard of him. Go ahead, Jerry. I’m gonna take a nap. It’s awful at first, but you’ll get used to it.”

The lights went down with a dimmer function; it really did feel like a movie theater.

The special effects did, too. Unfortunately, they were not Hollywood brand.

“Michael Spender.” Schonbauer’s bass accompanied a picture of a man whose only whole body part was his head, under which two conspicuous red dots shone from his neck like lanterns. His head was canted backward, white and swollen. He was naked. The look in the dead eyes had retained the same horrible pain as Andreas Gallano’s. The nails on his hands and feet had been ripped away, the skin had been cut from his trunk in narrow stripes, and his penis had been split down the middle from glans to base and lay open, two bloody rags, one on each side of his groin.

Their nausea was abrupt and mutual. They very nearly had to run from the room.

“Spender was the first victim,” Schonbauer continued expressionlessly, “a computer engineer at Macintosh in Louisville. Found by a berry-picker in the woods in northwestern Kentucky about two weeks after his death. Went missing from his workplace after lunch on September fourth, 1978. Was discovered on the afternoon of the nineteenth, sixty miles from his hometown. Worked on the development of the first big Apple computer.”

The next victim was unidentified, a large man with Slavic features. The picture was a bit more stomach-friendly. He was dressed, but his fingers and genitals were disfigured.

“Looks a bit Russian,” Hjelm said, thinking of the absurd KGB theory.

“Without a doubt,” said Schonbauer. “As soon as it was possible, we sent the fingerprints to the Russian police, but it didn’t result in anything. We don’t have any information at all, except that he was found in southern Kentucky about two months after Spender. In an old outhouse near a deserted farm. He had been dead for over a week.”

The next picture showed another unidentified victim. A thin, fit white man in his sixties, naked, disfigured in the same way as Spender. The picture was gruesome. It was dusk, there was a dim light above the treetops, and the only thing that gleamed was the body, sitting straight up on a rock in the woods. Rigor mortis. The arms were sticking straight out from the body, as though they had been lifted by an inner, irresistible force; the bones were sticking straight out of the hands, like nails that had been driven out from the inside. The eyes stared, openly accusing.

Hjelm didn’t get used to it; on the contrary, he felt even closer to throwing up.

They rolled on, a terrible cavalcade of the remains of suffering. It was beyond the limits of human comprehension. The very quantity made the crimes even more gruesome. Slowly but surely, the extent of the case became clear to them-the incredible accumulation of human suffering. Holm cried out twice, silently; Hjelm felt her shoulder lightly nudging his. He cried out once too, but more loudly.

“Do you want me to stop?” Schonbauer asked calmly. “I couldn’t make it all the way through till my third try. I’m pretty used to it now.”

Larner was snoring audibly next to them.

“No, keep going,” said Hjelm, trying to convince himself that he had recovered.

“We have so many of them,” Schonbauer said in a subdued voice. “So incredibly many serial killers, and no one can really understand a single one of them. Least of all themselves.”

In the end their defense mechanisms kicked in, and although they never started snoring, they slowly became indifferent. Like a horrible conclusion, Lars-Erik Hassel woke them up. He was sitting on his chair with shredded fingers, sprawling in all directions; his genitals were a swamp of half-floating remnants. Through the small window in the background, they could see part of a large aircraft.

His head was craned back; he stared at them upside-down, his pain mixed with disgust, his suffering with paradoxical relief.

Maybe, Hjelm thought, he was relieved that it wasn’t Laban.

The lights came up again. Schonbauer returned to the table and sat with his legs dangling once again like a teenage girl’s. Larner awoke in mid-snore with a start and snuffled loudly. Hjelm rolled his shoulders. Holm was sitting stock-still. No one looked at anyone else for some time.

Larner stood, yawned, and stretched until his compact body creaked. “And now, do you two have some dessert for this party?”

Kerstin handed over the Swedish folders wordlessly.

Larner opened them, skimmed through the pictures, and gave them to Schonbauer, who would soon add them to the series of images. Then he got up to leave.

Kerstin and Paul thanked Schonbauer, who gave a curt nod, and they all followed Larner out. Walking through the corridors, they came to a door without a name on it. Larner opened it. They stepped into an empty room.

“Your workroom,” he said with a gesture. “I hope you can work together.”

The office looked exactly like Larner’s, minus all the signs of life. The question was how much of their own they could offer. The desk had been pulled out from the wall and furnished with two chairs, one on each side. Two computers rubbed shoulders on the desk next to a telephone and a short call list. Larner picked it up.

“My number”-he pointed-“Jerry’s number, my pager, Jerry’s pager. You can always get hold of us. Below are names of the files in question, descriptions of them, personal passwords, and guest passes with codes so you can get in, but only in here. Locked doors are doors that you don’t have admittance to. You have no reason to leave this corridor, nor any possibility of doing so. Bathrooms, women’s and men’s, are a few doors down. There are a couple of cafeterias-I recommend La Traviata two floors down. Any questions?”

No questions. Or an endless number, depending on how you looked at it. None were asked, in any case.

“It’s six p.m. now,” Larner continued. “If you like, you can work for a few hours. I stay till about six. Unfortunately I’m busy tonight, otherwise we could eat dinner together. Jerry has offered to eat with you and show you around town, if you’d like. You can let him know.

“So all that’s left is to wish you good luck. You don’t need to worry about getting into the wrong things on the computers-they’re customized for you, and everything confidential is elsewhere. Contact me or Jerry if problems or questions come up. ’Bye.”

He disappeared. They were alone.

Holm rubbed her eyes. “I don’t actually know if I can handle this,” she said. “It’s midnight Swedish time. Shall we accept Swedish time and go back to the inn?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t leave right away,” said Hjelm. “We have to continue being diplomatic.”

She sensed a slightly sarcastic bite and smiled. “Yeah, yeah, curiosity got the better of me, I admit it. My strategy went to hell.”

“CIA-”

“Okay, okay, rub it in. I made the judgment that he wouldn’t be angry.”

“I don’t think he was. More like relieved. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. But I understand why he got stuck on Jennings.”

“But he’s right that we have to think past him.”

“Are you sure?”

They looked at each other. Their jet lag, combined with the overdose of impressions, made them giggle foolishly. Their exhaustion was about to get the better of them. Hjelm liked the irresponsible stubbornness that had fallen upon them; their defense mechanisms were starting to be taken out of the game.

“Shall we say to hell with Schonbauer’s tour?” he asked.

“Can you be diplomatic and let him know in a nice way?”

“You’re the diplomat.”

“In theory. This is in practice. You were much better at it than I was.”

“I was just absent-minded,” he said, dialing Schonbauer’s number. “Jerry, this is Paul. Yalm, yes, Yalm. We’re going to try to work on this as long as we can manage, and then we’ll let our jet lag take over. Can we put our tour of Manhattan off until tomorrow? Good. Okay. ’Bye.”

He hung up and exhaled. “I think he was relieved.”

“Good,” said Holm. “Should we get an overview of what we have and let the details wait? I’ve had enough details for today.”

The computers contained all the necessary information. Detailed lists of all the victims. Folders with all the crime-scene investigations. Folders for every individual case investigation. Expert psychological profiles of perpetrators. Folders with all the autopsy results. Folders with all the press cuttings. Files with descriptions of weapons, FYEO.

“What does that mean?” Hjelm asked.

“For your eyes only. This must be where he has the top-secret details that connect the first round with the second.”

They glanced through the files; an incredible amount of information. How the hell could they add to this enormous investigation even a tiny bit? It seemed hopeless enough to motivate them to stop working. They turned their computers off after the countdown “one potato two potato three potato four!” and felt blissfully frivolous.

“Do you think we can run away from the FBI?” said Kerstin Holm.

Of course it would have been an experience to get out and see New York by night, but they weren’t disappointed that they’d declined Jerry Schonbauer’s offer. They enjoyed a quiet dinner in the hotel restaurant instead. It was two a.m. in Sweden, nine o’clock local time, when they came down to the lobby and looked for the restaurant in the restaurant. It was, in other words, very small.

Skipper’s Inn continued to play at being an English inn. What the restaurant lacked in variety and elaborateness, it made up for in quality. They chose one of the two possible entrées, beef Wellington, and a bottle of Bordeaux in an unfamiliar brand, Château Germaine. They sat at a window table and got at least a small, indirect view of Manhattan’s street life. The little restaurant, where they had been the first guests, filled up, and soon all twelve tables were occupied.

Paul Hjelm was struck by another sensation of déjà vu. Last time they had sat alone, enjoying a quiet dinner in a restaurant in an unfamiliar place, the consequences had been unmistakable. He squirmed slightly, thinking of Cilla and the children and the sense of family that they had so strenuously won back. He thought of the extreme temptation that the woman on the other side of the table still represented, of how she invaded his dreams and remained a pressing mystery. She had put on a modest but noticeable amount of makeup and had changed into a little black dress with tiny straps that crisscrossed her otherwise-bare back. She was so small and thin, and her face seemed smaller than usual within the frame of her dark, slightly messy pageboy. Had she fixed herself up on purpose?

He couldn’t help saying, “Do you remember the last time we sat like this?”

She nodded and smiled, incredibly attractively. “Malmö.”

That husky Gothenburg alto. Her duets with Gunnar Nyberg echoed in his ears. Schubert Lieder. Goethe poems. Was he trying to get away or to get closer? When he opened his mouth, he didn’t know what his next step would be. He let it happen.

“That was one and a half years ago,” he said.

“Soon,” she said.

“You remember?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You know…”

The social wreckage bobbed on the surface. He tried to force it down and said abruptly, “What was it that happened?”

She could interpret that as she wished. She was quiet, then said at last, “I had to go another way.”

“Where to, then?”

“As far as possible from work. I was close to quitting.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No one knew besides me.”

Not even him? He thanked his creator that he didn’t say it.

“Not even him,” she said.

He didn’t question it. She could go whatever way she wanted or needed to.

“After you and your agonizing over decisions, I planned to live without a man,” she said quietly. “I needed time to think. Then I met him, a silly coincidence. He kept calling at work, too, so soon everyone knew I had a new man. What no one knew was that he was sixty and a pastor in the Church of Sweden.”

Hjelm said nothing.

With her eyes on her fork, she poked distractedly at the half-eaten beef Wellington. “No one thinks you can have a passionate relationship with a sixty-year-old pastor in the Church of Sweden. But that’s what it was. That’s the only kind of relationship I seem able to handle these days.”

She looked out to the crowds of people on West Twenty-fifth Street. “He’d been a widower for twenty years,” she continued in the same slightly droning, toneless voice. “The pastor in the church where I sang in the choir. He cried when I sang, came up, and kissed my hand. I felt like a schoolgirl who finally got some attention. I was a daughter and a mother at the same time. After a while, out of that, a woman was reborn.”

She continued to avoid his gaze.

“There was so much unfinished in that man, but he finished a little of it with me. He carried so much quiet and lovely life wisdom-I don’t know if it’s possible to understand-an ability to enjoy the little gift of every day. If nothing else, he taught me that.”

“What happened?”

She finally looked at him for a split second, her eyes slightly veiled but very much alive. “He died.”

He took her hand and held it, unmoving. Both looked out onto the street. Time nearly stopped.

“He was already dying when we met,” she continued quietly. “I didn’t realize that until now. He had so much life in him and wanted to pass it on. Give a farewell gift to the living. I hope he got a little bit of me to take with him. Some passion, if nothing else.”

He had stopped thinking of how he ought to act and just listened. It was nice.

“It went quickly. He was actually supposed to go through his third round of chemotherapy. He didn’t bother-he chose one last period of health instead of a fight to the finish. I kept a vigil over him for a week, every day after work. That was last spring. It was like he just shrank up. But he smiled almost the entire time. That was strange. I don’t know if it was the giving or the taking that made him happy. Maybe just the exchange. As though he had received one last insight into the mysteries of life and could await the big mystery without fear.”

She turned to him for another split second, as if to make sure he was listening. He was. She turned away again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Those pictures today… you think you can prepare yourself, but you can’t. You think you’ve seen everything, but you haven’t. It’s like there were different deaths. My pastor friend was in pain, too, horrible pain, but he smiled. There were no smiles here, just the horrific faces of suffering, like a frieze of horrible medieval pictures of Christ, made to strike terror into the viewer. A warning. Like he’s trying to warn us away from life, as medieval prelates were. And he almost succeeds.”

“I don’t know,” Hjelm tried. “I don’t really see a message in what he does. I think looking at those bodies is more like being confronted with waste products, remainders, industrial waste, if you know what I mean. It feels like the mechanical, industrial deaths of Auschwitz. If anything can ever feel like that…”

Now she looked into his eyes. She had gotten what she needed. There and then, in her deep, distressed, empty eyes, he saw the spark ignite again. The fabulous inexhaustibility of her eyes.

He wondered what she saw in his face. A clown who runs around trying to hide his erection? He hoped there was a trace of something more.

“Maybe they’re not incompatible,” she said, and her newfound energy didn’t erase her thoughtful tone. “Expressing contempt for life and clinical perfection in one and the same action. It is one and the same action, after all.”

They sank into pondering. The professional and the private blended uncontrollably into each other. Nothing in this life was isolated.

He sensed that it was his turn. He took her hand again.

She didn’t resist.

“Was what we had before just sex?” he asked without quavering. “Is there such a thing as ‘just sex’?”

She smiled a bit grimly and kept hold of his hand.

“There probably isn’t,” she said. “And in any case, what we had wasn’t that. It was-confusing. Too confusing. I had just gotten out of a hellish relationship with a man who raped me without understanding that that’s what he was doing. He was a policeman, you know that much, and then I ended up with another policeman who was the complete opposite. Hard-boiled and full of bright ideas as a cop, tender and awkward privately. The pictures got all mixed up. I had to get away from it. You fled back into the bosom of your family. I didn’t have anything like that, so I fled in my own way.”

“In one way, life is easier than ever,” said Paul. “In another, it’s harder.”

She looked into his eyes. “How do you mean?”

“I don’t really know. I have this feeling that the walls are closing in around us. We’ve cracked open the door, but now it’s being closed again. And the walls are beginning to creep in.” He was searching for words, but it was going slowly. He was trying to formulate things he had never formulated before. “I don’t know if it’s comprehensible.”

“I think it is,” she said. “You actually have changed.”

“A little bit, maybe,” he said, and paused. “Just a little on the surface, but it has to start somewhere. Our inherited patterns of habit break us down before we even get a chance to start living. I haven’t gone through any revolutionary outer changes, as you have; it’s actually been a pretty uneventful year. But a few new possibilities have opened up.”

She nodded. The conversation died away but seemed to be continuing inside them. Their eyes drifted away into nothing. Finally she said, “I’m starting to understand how important it is that we catch him.”

He nodded. He knew what she meant.

They left the restaurant and walked hand in hand up the stairs. They stopped outside his room.

“What should we say?” she said. “Seven?”

He sighed and smiled. “Okay, breakfast at seven o’clock.”

“I’ll knock on your door. Try not to be in the shower.”

He chuckled. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went to her room. He remained standing in the corridor for a few minutes.