Bad Blood

24

They came, they saw, they conquered-their jet lag. But hardly anything else. Their focus narrowed surprisingly, cutting out all of New York, targeted at two computers on a desk.

Sure enough, there was a gigantic amount of material, thousands of pages with impressive detail that extended to ten-page interviews with truly unimportant people, like those who had found bodies and neighbors of neighbors; pedantically scientific comparisons with earlier and contemporary serial killers; immensely elaborate maps of the crime scenes, sociopolitical analyses by university professors, autopsy reports that made note of the victims’ incipient gum problems and developing kidney stones, extremely carefully executed crime-scene investigations, and Ray Larner’s laboriously compiled description of Commando Cool’s actions in the Southeast Asian jungles.

It probably wasn’t the right place to start, but Hjelm picked the last item. If Larner had gotten hold of the truth, which was in no way certain, President Nixon had created Commando Cool by direct order, after he received information about the steadfastness of the NLF soldiers who had been captured in the field; they tended to die before they had time to talk. What was needed was a small, secret, active-service, mobile group of torturers with combat experience, even if the word torturer was, of course, never mentioned. The task of creating it went to military counterintelligence-and here Larner had placed quite a few question marks-which collected eight top men, each one younger than the last, and forced the operation into existence. It was in constant use during the final stages of the war. Where the pincers came from was uncertain, and Hjelm read “CIA” between Larner’s lines.

He opened the top-secret file about the pincers. There they were, in black and white: to the left a photograph of Commando Cool’s vocal cord pincers; to the right a sketched reconstruction of K’s pincers. Their function was the same in principle, but the differences were striking. K’s pincers were of an advanced, refined design, which seemed to have undergone some sort of industrial process of improvement. Scrupulous descriptions of their function followed: how the microwires moved through the tube with the help of miniature wheels, penetrated the throat, and fastened themselves around the vocal cords with small barbs, putting the vocal cords out of commission. A slight turn of one of the two small wheels then made it possible for whispers to force their way out. When they had forced their way out, all one had to do was turn the wheel again and end the job, in complete silence. The version on the right, K’s, was designed so that it was easier to make a puncture correctly. But Commando Cool had never used it during the war; it kept using the older model to the very end. The differences between the sets of pincers meant two things: one, that it was not at all certain that K was someone from Commando Cool; and two, that the horrible invention from the Vietnam War had been further developed. Why? And by whom? There were no hypotheses in Larner’s report.

After this came the second pincers, the pincers of pure torture, the one that twisted and pried at the cluster of nerves in the neck. This one had changed, too; someone had located new points on the nerves that were capable of increasing the pain even more, thus making the pincers even more effective. Here, too, the file provided a scrupulous description of the exact progression of pain, how it shot down to the back and shoulders and then up into the brain itself, resulting in explosive attacks.

The point was that the same pincers had been used in the first and second waves; they weren’t just identical models-certain characteristics of the wound formation indicated that the exact same pincers were used, and this was invoked as justification for saying that the perpetrator was the same. K.

If the pincers were the result of an industrial improvement process, then many people must have been involved in the task of development, whether it was military counterintelligence or the CIA or something else. But at this very point, where a considerable number of further suspects could have been sifted out, Larner had hit a wall of silence. Had he and the hacker, Andrews, invented Balls because he suspected that there actually was a Balls, a secret commander who would have been promoted all the way up into the Pentagon to effectively choke off all access to information? How had Larner obtained the information about the members of Commando Cool when he hadn’t gotten anything else?

He called Larner and asked.

“All that was a strange process,” Larner answered on the phone. “It took a lot of bribes and string pulling and veiled threats. After running into every wall imaginable, I worked my way to an anonymous official who, for several thousand dollars, copied the entire top-secret file on Commando Cool for me. Everything ought to have been there, but the only thing it contained was a list of the group members. The military just didn’t have the rest of it.”

“Was that when you started thinking CIA?”

Larner chuckled. “I guess I had been thinking that the whole time,” he said, and hung up.

Kerstin pulled up the list of victims and printed it out. The macabre inventory contained the sparsest amount of information imaginable: name, race, age, job, place of residence, site of discovery, and approximate time of death.

1) Michael Spender, white, 46, civil engineer at Macintosh, resident of Louisville, found in NW Kentucky, died around September 5, 1978.

2) Unidentified white male, 45-50 years of age, found in S Kentucky, died in early November 1978.

3) Unidentified white male, approximately 60, found in E Kentucky, died around March 14, 1979.

4) Yin Li-Tang, Taiwanese citizen, 28, resident of Lexington, biologist at University of Kentucky in Lexington, found on campus, died on May 9, 1979.

5) Robin Marsh-Eliot, white, 44, resident of Washington, D.C., foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, found in Cincinnati, Ohio, died in June or July 1979.

6) Unidentified white female, about 35, found in S Kentucky, died around September 3, 1979.

7) Unidentified white male, about 55 years of age, found in S Illinois, died between January and March 1980.

8) Unidentified Indian male, about 30, found in SW Tennessee, died between March 13 and 15, 1980.

9) Andrew Schultz, white, 36, resident of New York, pilot for Lufthansa, found in E Kentucky, died October 1980.

10) Unidentified white male, about 65, found in Kansas City, died December 1980.

11) Atle Gundersen, white, Norwegian citizen, 48, resident of Los Angeles, nuclear physicist at UCLA, found in SW West Virginia, died May 28, 1981.

12) Unidentified white male, 50-55, found in Frankfort, Kentucky, died August 1981.

13) Tony Barrett, white, 27, resident of Chicago, chemical engineer at Brabham Chemicals, Chicago, found in SW Kentucky, died between August 24 and 27, 1981.

14) Unidentified white male, 30-35, found in N Kentucky, died in October or November 1981.

15) Unidentified white male, 55-60, found in S Indiana, died January 1982.

16) Lawrence B. R. Carp, white, 64, resident of Atlanta, vice president of RampTech Computer Parts, found in his home in Atlanta, Georgia, died March 14, 1982. [Death of primary suspect Wayne Jennings, July 3, 1982]

17) Unidentified black male, 44, found in SW Kentucky, died October 1982.

18) Richard G. deClarke, white, South African citizen, 51, resident of Las Vegas, owner of a Las Vegas porn club, found in E Missouri, died between November 2 and 5, 1982.

[Nearly fifteen-year break]

19) Sally Browne, white, 24, resident of New York, prostitute, found in the East Village, Manhattan, died July 27, 1997.

20) Nick Phelps, white, 47, resident of New York, unemployed carpenter, found in SoHo, Manhattan, died November 1997.

21) Daniel “Dan the Man” Jones, black, 21, resident of New York, rapper, found in Brooklyn, died between March and April 1998.

22) Alice Coley, white, 65, resident of Atlantic City, New Jersey, on disability, found in her home, died between May 12 and 14, 1998.

23) Pierre Fontaine, white, French citizen, 23, resident of Paris, tourist, university student, found in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, died July 23-24, 1998.

24) Lars-Erik Hassel, white, Swedish citizen, 58, resident of Stockholm, literary critic, found at Newark International Airport, died September 2, 1998.

25) Andreas Gallano, white, Swedish citizen, resident of Alby, drug dealer, found in Riala, died between September 3 and 6, 1998.

26) Eric Lindberger, white, Swedish citizen, 33, resident of Stockholm, civil servant with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, found on Lidingö, died September 12, 1998.

27) Unidentified white male, 25-30 years of age, found in Stockholm, died September 12, 1998.

Kerstin Holm broke off. Could no other conclusions really be drawn from this list, other than those that Larner had drawn? She was struck by a short, brutal suspicion that Larner hadn’t put all his cards on the table.

She turned to the psychological profile. A group of experts had made an attempt to explain the fifteen-year gap. Apparently it hadn’t been simple; she perceived that they had had differences in opinion that they tried to bring into line with one another, and the result was fascinating. She wondered why the profile hadn’t been part of what Larner had delivered to Sweden.

The first murders, according to the group of experts, suggested a rather young man’s hatred of authority, personified in an older, well-educated man. His inferiority complex turns into delusions of grandeur when he is able to silence the voices that have kept him down and possibly denied him admittance to the university. It makes the inaccessible accessible, and it makes them feel the same pain he felt. He can even control how much of the pain they express; all he has to do is turn a wheel. Because wasn’t that how they had behaved toward him, denying him the opportunity to speak, keeping him, with one fell swoop, from the higher education that would have made it possible for him to understand and express his suffering? His behavior is a distorted variation on “an eye for an eye”; his retaliation imitates what he feels he has been subjected to. He wins back the power. The great number of victims indicates not that he is becoming increasingly bloodthirsty-there is no real acceleration-but rather hints at the degree of oppression he has experienced. It takes eighteen deaths for him to get his nose above the water so that he can take his place in human society. For perhaps his bloodthirstiness gradually diminishes, and he reaches equilibrium; the murders have a truly therapeutic effect. He reaches the point where he feels he has attained a balance in status between himself and authority, and then he can stop and work his way to a position of authority himself. That is what he does during these fifteen years.

He gets the upper hand. Perhaps he has managed to get an education and become a leader or boss. But naturally his past has not left him unscathed. Now he has become the oppressor himself; that is what he trained to be. And then he cracks down on those who are weaker. His hatred of authority is revealed as envy-he was envious of their power. And now he is the one who strikes first; he pokes out the first eye, instead of just getting revenge. He plays a decisive role. His actions no longer only reflect those of the more powerful, he is more powerful. And this can go on forever.

Thus the Kentucky Killer is likely a white man in a position of power who has had to fight his way up against all odds. This was the gist of the expert group’s report.

Kerstin Holm once again neglected to be diplomatic and called Larner.

“Ray, Kerstin here. Halm, yes, Halm, dammit.” This last word was in Swedish. “I’m wondering why we didn’t have the opportunity to read the expert group’s psychological profile earlier.”

“Because it’s bullshit,” the phone reverberated.

“What do you mean? There are a lot of aspects we haven’t thought of in here.”

“I was in the group of experts. I agree that it’s a coherent narrative. It works. But the story swallowed up the troublesome objections from the police officer in the group. The desire to create unity forced the most fundamental fact to the side.”

“And what’s that?”

“K’s professionalism.”

“What do you mean?”

“K isn’t trying to even out any positions; it’s not a process but rather an ice-cold series of exterminations. He leaves no red-hot evidence behind, only frostbitten remains. The corpses are ruins, not buildings.”

She didn’t say anything-she recognized the argument. She thanked him and hung up.

“He agrees with you,” she said.

Paul Hjelm, who had just been scrutinizing the delicate line between the pincers, gave a start. “What are you talking about?” he said, irritated.

“Nothing,” she said, and tried to press on through the material.

It didn’t really work. She called Larner again and got straight to the point. “Is it really professionalism in the second round?”

“As you have surely noticed”-his voice remained patient-“I have very little to say about the second round. I don’t understand it. It is the same professionalism, the exact same course of action. The victims are what has changed character.”

“But why?” she nearly shouted. “Why did he go from engineers and researchers to prostitutes and retired people?”

“Solve that, and you’ve solved the case,” Larner said calmly. “But is the distinction really that clear-cut? After all, you’ve recently had literary critics and diplomats and drug dealers die. Both kinds, one might say.”

“I’m sorry,” she said remorsefully. “It’s just so frustrating.”

“When you’ve worked on it for twenty years, you’ll see what frustration is.”

She hung up and reluctantly went on. The difficult thing was not to come up with hypotheses, to resist venting them and just get to work. To expand their horizons instead of narrowing them. To wait for the right moment.

They devoted the whole day to getting a reasonable overview. As well as the evening. Their tour of Manhattan would have to wait yet another day.

The next day they began to narrow their focus and take a fine-toothed comb to the thousand pages to find possible Swedish threads. Why had the killer gone to Sweden? Somewhere in these pages was the solution.

Hjelm took upon himself the investigation of the eleventh victim, the Norwegian, the nuclear physicist Atle Gundersen; there might be something there. He contacted UCLA and tried to find potential Swedish colleagues from the early 1980s; he contacted the family in Norway. He burned up half a day but drew a blank.

Holm turned to the descendant of Swedes in Commando Cool, Chris Anderson. She even called him. He sounded exhausted. He had been grilled many times and was sick and tired of it. Vietnam was far away now; weren’t they ever going to let him bury the memories that still haunted him at night? They had done terrible things, but it was war, and they had worked almost directly under the president, so what could they have done? No, he didn’t know exactly how the chain of command and the issuing of orders had worked; it should be in the reports. Yes, he had been close friends with Wayne Jennings, but they had drifted apart after the war. And now Anderson had no contact at all with the land of his forefathers-he didn’t even talk to his parents.

They searched on, intensely. As soon as any tiny, burning question appeared, Larner threw his patiently smothering blanket over the flame. He seemed to have thought of everything after all. They began to reevaluate his work. The lack of hypotheses and ideas seemed more and more to be because there were none to find. He had kept a cool head and hadn’t let wild hypotheses take over in the absence of sensible ones.

Moving forward without having any clues to follow was the most difficult balancing act in their line of work.

And yet they felt-and they talked a lot about it, talked too much in general, were on their way to becoming friends instead of lovers-that all they needed was one small, crucial piece for the whole puzzle to become coherent; they felt frustratingly close without having the slightest reason for such a feeling.

“There’s something we’ve missed,” Paul said one evening in the hotel restaurant. By now they had no thoughts of placing their bodies anywhere but at the FBI building, in the taxi, or in the hotel. It was becoming a routine. He kept acceptable amounts of contact with Cilla and his family in Sweden; at first, before he knew how it was going to go with him and Kerstin, he hadn’t felt very motivated to call-something had held him back. But as they became more and more like pure police officers, his uneasiness fell away, and his conversations with Cilla felt completely normal. He missed her sometimes-when there was time.

“What do you mean ‘missed’?” Kerstin said, biting into a braised filet of cod. “We miss things all the time. The more we find, the more we miss.”

Paul watched her sip her wine. Had he gotten so close to her that she had stopped being beautiful? He contemplated her larynx as the wine ran down. No, he hadn’t. But perhaps his lust had found an alternative route that hadn’t been on his map earlier. He was treading upon virgin territory-and the intractability of fucking metaphorical language.

“I always have the feeling that we don’t need to know more,” he said.

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Looking for the little surge of impulse that runs through it all and brings it together.”

“You romantic.” She smiled.

Had he seen that smile so often that it had stopped being captivating? A ridiculous thought.

They stopped counting the days, simply swam like two fish in an aquarium. One early morning, Larner appeared in the door. He was worked up, and with his service weapon in place under his armpit.

“Are you tired of this?” he called, exhilarated.

Four square eyes looked at him skeptically.

“What do you say to some real police work? Want to be foreign observers at a raid on a drug den?”

They exchanged a glance. Maybe that was what they needed.

“Okay,” Larner said as they half-ran through the corridor behind Jerry Schonbauer; the floor shook substantially, as though his steps had transplanted the fault line from the west coast to the east. “We’re on loan to ATF. They don’t really know what do with us now that you guys are working on K. The rest of the state’s serial killers are in other hands. We’re going to a crack house in Harlem-you’ll have a chance to stare American reality in the eye. Come along.”

They were out on the street. Big black American cars drove up, and Hjelm and Holm threw themselves into one of them alongside Larner and Schonbauer, all four in the backseat. The two agents pulled on jackets with luminous yellow letters on the back: ATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Like a funeral procession out to prevent the gravesite from being stolen, the caravan forced its way through the New York traffic and reached northern Manhattan, the hopeless neighborhoods, the sacrificed and buried neighborhoods. The building facades became more and more dilapidated; finally it looked like a bombed-out city. Shadows of Dresden. The faces in the streets became darker and darker, till finally they were only black. It was a terrible but logical transformation, a gradual transition from the white downtown to the black Harlem. There was no possibility of trying to explain it away. That was just how it was.

The cars stopped in a well-mannered line. Equally well-mannered lines of ATF-clad experts poured out with weapons drawn, then ran through a ragged, burnt garden, ravaging what plants were there.

“Stay back,” Larner said, joining the ravagers. They gathered in a more or less invisible line along the sidewalk on the next block. All eyes were on one single building, a ramshackle house, one of two buildings that remained in the rubble of the neighborhood. It was already surrounded by a well-organized series of ATF men with submachine guns. They were everywhere, pressed up against dirty stucco walls that seemed to crackle in the desertlike sun. The asphalt quavered. It was silent and desolate amid, instead of black faces, black jackets with yellow letters. A few pigeons flapped up and flew around the house in strangely rising circles, as though aiming for the sun. The sole streak of cloud broke up before their eyes.

Everyone was in position, as in a photograph, a still image. Then all at once, everyone moved, streaming into the ruin, an army of superior ants intent on taking over the disintegrating anthill. Finally Hjelm and Holm were alone on the street, a vulnerable duo of foreign observers who might at any moment be dragged into a doorway and given a liberal taste of American reality. They heard sporadic gunshots from inside the house, muffled, somehow unreal, as though Hollywood had supplied some sound effects. A few submachine gun rounds. Individual shots. A minor explosion. It only took a minute, then silence. A figure popped out the door, black with a black jacket, and waved in their direction. It took a moment for them to realize that it was waving at them, and even longer for them to realize that it was Larner. They made their way over to him.

“Come on,” he said, waving his pistol. “This is reality.”

Inside a light haze of dust met them, crystallike, with the sun dazzling through it-it stung in their throats. Gradually they realized that the cloud that they were breathing in was drugs-crack. Big black men were lying on the floor with their hands behind their heads. The bodyguards, disarmed. Two were without their hands on their heads; their torsos were half-lying against the walls, their legs and spines at strange angles. Blood oozed out of an open wound, drop by drop, looking increasingly viscous until the last drop hung in the air and seemed to be sucked back in.

They went up to the second floor. Room after room looked like one chemistry lab after another, with shattered flasks, overturned bottles, flickering Bunsen burners-and thicker clouds of dust. A dead body lay among the shards on a table, shot to pieces, segmented, half-covered in white dust that became pinker and pinker until it finally turned to red and ran into a body upon the body. People were on the floor here, too, with their hands on the backs of their necks. All was silent. The calm after the storm. The silence of the storm warning.

The next floor, the third. Chemistry workshops here too, with different devices. Packs of plastic bags with white contents, half-open, the dust still rising, like a fog sliding over a lake. Hands on necks. A dead person half-hanging out the window, a piece of glass like a shark’s fin straight up through the trunk. Windows were opened. The cloud of dust was carried out over the city. Drugged pigeons cooed audibly. A white wind swept through the house, reaching well-wrapped bundles of dollars in the room farthest in, the inner room. The paper band around one bundle was torn; the wind caught the green bills, and they whirled about the room, were seized.

The room spun. A brown spot spread out around a prostrate jeans-clad backside. They were all the way in, in the very innermost room. Larner smiled, and his smile seemed to split his head. Half his skull flew up eighteen inches and then fell back. His skin was drawn down from his head, his skull flopped around, his skin was sucked back up.

Hjelm staggered toward the open window and greedily inhaled the dirty but uncrystalline air.

“You’ll be drugged for a few seconds,” said Larner. “It’ll pass.”

Holm sat down on the floor next to the window and hugged herself. Hjelm leaned out through the window, tried to find stability, to focus his eyes. Everything was flying around. The still image was heaving behind them. The silence died. People were being moved out, with shouts and bellows. They didn’t see it.

A pair of pigeons descended unexpectedly from the sky and landed gently on the slightly lower roof of the neighboring building. Hjelm stared at them as they sat placidly on the ridge of the roof. A fixed point in the spinning world.

“You have to avoid inhaling for a while,” Larner said behind him. “You learn from your mistakes. Trial by error.”

He was punishing them-Hjelm realized that now. He kept his eyes on the pigeons. They flew off a ways and pecked at something, then took off again but stayed within sight. He followed their flight; they were doing aerobatics, mimicking each other precisely. When they reached the stinking crater of the crack house, they swept upward, then glided down through the filthy air and stopped on a windowsill on the top floor of the building next door. The window shone like gold in the sun. Hjelm looked through the dirty but golden windowpane and saw a man and a boy. As if in slow motion, the father lifted his hand and struck his son, a classic, traditional box on the ear, several times, using exactly the same motion, as though a minute in time were being repeated again and again, just for him, demanding his attention, and each image ended up on top of the last in a fabulous multiple projection. The son’s expression after the blows, peering up at his father, inexhaustible. It was like Laban Hassel, looking up at his father; like Danne, looking up at his; then Gunnar Nyberg’s children, looking up at theirs. Finally K. The very last in the bunch, K looking up at K.

Bad blood always comes back around.

“Holy shit!” he yelled.

Holm staggered over and saw that he had it.

“This is it!” he yelled again, like an idiot.

The collective glares of the ATF men ate into the back of his neck. He didn’t give a damn.

“What is it?” Holm shouted in a strange, muted voice.

“The impulse,” he said with sudden calm. “Clear as a bell.”

He turned abruptly and went over to Larner, who was regarding him with deep skepticism.

“I’ve got him,” he said, his eyes boring into Larner’s.

Then he rushed down the stairs. Larner looked at Holm, bewildered. She nodded, and they rushed after him. He was outside on the street with Schonbauer, who had just shoved a substantial drug manufacturer into one of the black cars.

Schonbauer got into the driver’s seat in one of the other cars; Hjelm hopped in, and Holm and Larner scrambled into the back. They drove off. Hjelm didn’t say a word.

“What are we doing?” Larner said after fifteen minutes.

“Looking at a picture,” said Hjelm.

They said no more on the way back to the FBI building. When they arrived, they reached the corridor, and Hjelm got to Larner’s office ahead of the others. He grabbed Wayne Jennings’s thick file and flipped through the photographs. He found the horrible picture of Jennings and the Vietnamese man and placed it to the side. Then he held up the photo of Jennings with a child on his lap.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Jennings’s son,” Larner said, surprised. “Lamar.”

Hjelm placed the picture on the desk. Jennings was dressed like a cowboy, minus the hat: jeans; a red, white, and blue flannel shirt; and sandy brown snakeskin boots. He had his hand on his son’s head, but he wasn’t smiling; his face was expressionless, and the ice-cold blue gaze penetrated the camera. You might almost get the impression that he was pressing his son’s head down, as if to hold him in place. The son was perhaps ten years old, just as blond and blue-eyed, but his eyes hardly seemed to see. Upon closer examination, one could make out an absentness in them, as if he were only a shell.

“This is K,” Hjelm said. “Both of them.”

His manic state ending, he shed the dramatic persona and became a policeman again. He cleared his throat. “What happened to Jennings’s family after he died?”

“They lived in the same place for a few years. Then his wife killed herself. The boy ended up in an orphanage and then with foster parents.”

“How old was the boy?”

“He was eleven, I think, when Jennings died.”

“He must have seen it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Hjelm ran his hand through his hair and collected himself. “He must have seen it. He must have seen his father in action.”

He took a deep breath.

“That explains the difference between the first and second rounds, and it explains why he went to Sweden. The first round was Wayne Jennings’s work, just as you thought all along, Ray. They are executions, professional jobs-we can come back to why. But the second round is the work of a seriously damaged person. It is the work of his son.

“He must have surprised his father, while he was torturing someone, when he was around nine or ten. It destroyed him-what else could it have done? We have to assume that it was the culmination of a hellish childhood of abuse and iciness, the whole shebang. When his father dies, the son gets his hands on his pincers; he’s seen him do the worst with them, the most nightmarish deeds imaginable, and he knows every little movement. They become heirlooms, but he doesn’t know what to do with them; he’s no murderer, he’s the murdered. Then at some point something happens. I bet he somehow finds out… that his father is alive.

“I’m convinced that Wayne Jennings is alive, that he faked that car accident. It took some resources, but he had a lot of resources behind him. He went underground and committed another couple of murders, mostly, I think, to punish you, Ray, for your stubbornness and in order, so to speak, to posthumously prove his innocence. Murders number seventeen and eighteen resulted in your ending up in a trial.

“Then Jennings flees the country. The wave of murders stops. Jennings’s so-called widow kills herself; either she knows that her husband is the Kentucky Killer and has known it the whole time and can’t take it any longer, or else she figures it out and kills herself in horror. Much later when their son is an adult, he finds out his father is alive, and he realizes that even his mother’s suicide was the work of his father. In addition, he now has a culprit to blame for his own suffering.

“He is already broken, beyond all hope; now he becomes a murderer as well. His are crimes of insanity; he’s letting off steam or murdering for lust, we don’t know which, but he’s practicing, too: practicing for the real murder, the only important murder, the murder of his father. Somehow, he finds out that his father is living abroad-in Sweden-and decides to hunt him down. He somehow obtains an address in Sweden-it’s a hidden cabin some forty miles north of Stockholm. He travels there with a fake passport. What happens next is unclear-but in any case, we don’t have just one Kentucky Killer in Sweden-we have two.”

Larner sank down into his chair, closed his eyes, and thought.

“I remember that boy so well,” he said slowly. “He seemed pretty disturbed-you’re right about that. Always sat in his mom’s lap, never said a word, seemed almost autistic. And it would explain an awful lot. What do you think, Jerry?”

Schonbauer sat on the desk, dangling his legs; apparently this was his thinking position. He was silent for a bit while his legs were swinging. The table creaked alarmingly.

“It’s a long shot,” he said. “But it might be worth looking into.”

“It might be easy, too,” said Holm. “Do you have a phone book?”

Chuckling, Larner tossed an enormous phone book up onto the desk.

Holm paged through it. Then, without asking permission, she tore out a page. “There’s one Lamar Jennings in New York,” she said. “In Queens.”

“Let’s go,” Larner said.

On the way to the car, Larner led them into an area with quadruple safety locks and triple PIN codes. Out of a large metal cabinet he took two complete shoulder holsters and tossed them to the Swedes.

“Special permission,” he said. They strapped themselves in for a journey into the heart of darkness and followed Larner out to the car.

It was a nondescript apartment building in an immense, fortresslike row of identical buildings on a cross street of Queens’s enormous Northern Boulevard. The neighborhood was poor, but not dilapidated; a slum, but not a ghetto. The stairwell was dark and cluttered. Pieces of junk were strewn around the stairwell; no one had cleaned here for a long time.

They crept up the stairs, flight after flight. The stairwell became darker and warmer, bathed in a stagnant, dusty, dry heat. They were dripping with sweat.

Finally they were standing outside a door that bore an ordinary nameplate that said “Jennings.”

All four of them drew their weapons. Their jaws were tense, their breathing suspended. They feared for the welfare of their souls more than their bodies. They were on their way into the lion’s den. What gross distortions of human life would they encounter in there?

Schonbauer rang the bell. No one answered, and they heard no movement inside. He carefully pulled on the door handle. Locked. He looked at Larner, who nodded slightly. Schonbauer kicked the door in, causing splinters to fly. One kick was enough. He rushed in; they followed as if he were an enormous shield.

No one was home. The meager light that followed them in through the busted door was the first light that had been there in a long time. As their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, the room’s contents emerged slowly-it was perplexingly empty, naked, blank. The air was still and hot. Motes of floating dust swirled in pirouettes. There were no human skins hung up on the wall, no rotten heads on stakes, no signs of the devil at all, just a bare studio apartment with a shabby desk and bed, an empty kitchen nook, and an empty bathroom. A black Venetian blind was pulled down over the only window.

Larner raised it. The sun sent in its unfiltered rays. But the almost obscene light unveiled few signs of life, Lamar Jennings’s American legacy.

Hjelm glanced over the desk’s bare surface and saw a pile of ashes and half-burned paper that had eaten its way into the wood. Maybe, in a final task, Jennings had intended to set the apartment on fire. A farewell fire. Hjelm reached for the remains of paper in the pile.

“Don’t touch anything,” Larner stopped him, and put on a pair of plastic gloves. “You two are still observers. Jerry, can you check the neighbors?”

Jerry left. Larner considered the pile of ashes.

“Was he planning to start a fire?” Hjelm said.

“I don’t think so,” Larner said, touching the paper remnants lightly. “It’s something for the crime-scene techs to get their teeth into. Must not be moved a fraction of an inch.”

He took a cell phone out of his pocket and punched in a number.

“Crime techs, first unit,” he said briskly. “One forty-seven Harper Street, Queens, eighth floor. ASAP.”

He put the phone back in his pocket. “Go around to the other side of the desk, carefully,” he continued. “The tiniest breeze could cost us a word.”

Hjelm moved carefully. Larner pulled out the top desk drawer. It contained a single object, but that was plenty. It was a portrait of Wayne Jennings, wearing a youthful smile. A pin nailed the photo to the desk drawer through the man’s throat, as if he were a mounted butterfly. It hardly seemed an exaggeration.

Larner chuckled mildly and shook his head. “It’s for me,” he muttered. “Twenty years. How the hell did you do it? I saw you burn. I saw your teeth.”

He pulled out another drawer. In it were several torn-up pieces of paper, small fragments a quarter-inch wide. A date was visible on one of them.

“A diary?” said Hjelm.

“He’s left just enough for us,” said Larner. “Enough to give us a hint of the hell he lived through. But no more.”

They found nothing else in the apartment, nothing at all.

Jerry Schonbauer came back in with a small, nearly transparent old woman who came up to the vicinity of his hip. They stopped in the entryway.

“Yes?” said Larner.

“This is the only neighbor I’ve found who knew anyone lived here at all,” said Schonbauer. “Mrs. Wilma Stewart.”

Larner walked over and greeted the old woman. “Mrs. Stewart, what can you tell us?”

She looked around the room. “This is exactly how he was,” she said. “Expressionless, anonymous. Tried to avoid being seen. Reluctant to say hello. I invited him for a cup of tea once. He declined, not politely, not impolitely, just said no thanks and left.”

Larner made a small face.

“What has he done?” said Mrs. Stewart.

“Do you think you could help us make a portrait?” said Larner. “We’d be very grateful.”

“He could have murdered me,” she said quietly and insightfully.

Larner gave her a small parting smile, and Schonbauer escorted her to the door.

In the hallway, they met a small army of crime-scene technicians. One of them approached Larner, standing in the doorway. “We’ll take it from here,” he said briskly.

Larner nodded.

He waved the Swedes over. “Now we have to wait,” he said, “as though we haven’t done enough of that.” They all began working their way down the eight flights of stairs.

A few flights down he turned to them. “The devil’s lair never looks like you expect,” he said.