Bad Blood

26

The sun in New York had become as insane as the rain was in Stockholm. Time was out of joint. All that was missing was for horses with two heads and jackdaws with beaks sticking out of their asses to be born.

It was excessively hot. Not even the FBI’s hypermodern air conditioning could combat it. Hjelm could have testified that Eenie meenie miney moe didn’t work either. He was bored; he felt as if he had been stopped midstep.

They waited. Waiting never promotes tolerance for irritation. Everyone was irritating everyone else. Even Jerry Schonbauer had a fit and tore off his soaking wet shirt, causing his buttons to fly off. When one of the buttons knocked the contact lens out of Holm’s left eye, he resumed his timid self and begged for forgiveness.

“I didn’t know you wore lenses,” Hjelm said after a while.

“ ‘Wore’ is right.” She examined the two pieces of the contact, which were stuck to her thumb and index finger respectively. “Now you’ll get to see me in glasses.”

She took out her right contact and threw it away. Then she dug out a pair of classic round glasses and secured them on her exquisite nose. To avoid bursting into confidence-shattering peals of laughter, he concentrated on being irritated with the heat.

It didn’t work. He burst into laughter.

“Look at that funny bird,” he said unconvincingly, pointing out the window.

“I’m glad I can be of service,” she said sulkily, pushing the glasses up toward her forehead.

They had been to visit the young computer expert Bernhard Andrews, who hacked his way into every branch of the Internet on the hunt for Lamar Jennings. Maybe he would find a photo. But as expected, he was nowhere. Not one single tiny directory could produce anything at all on Jennings; he had kept himself out of the monitoring systems of society for twenty-five years. The only thing that turned up was his birth certificate. It seemed that he hadn’t existed since his birth.

Mrs. Wilma Stewart had failed miserably to create a portrait of Lamar Jennings. As the image took shape on the computer screen, the old woman had shaken her head time after time. “Thicker lips… Thinner lips, I said, young man… Listen here. I said thicker lips.”

The heat claimed another victim. She nodded off in front of the computer and promised to come back later and try again.

Finally the crime techs dropped off the first of the materials they had finished processing from Lamar Jennings’s apartment. They had attempted to reconstruct the pages of Lamar Jennings’s diary from the remains they had found and made four copies. Each of the four took one and began reading. Schonbauer sat on Larner’s desk, dangling his legs, clad in a ridiculous net undershirt that had been revealed after the shirt catastrophe. Larner sat in his chair with his legs on the desk beside Schonbauer. Yalm & Halm sat in visitors’ chairs at a respectable distance from each other.

The fragments were incoherent, like key words out of a life story. Apparently Larner had been right in saying that Lamar Jennings had left just enough to indicate the depths of his pain. Each fragment bore a small amount of information.

“don’t know why i’m writing, pleading? am i trying to stop myself before i have time”

“a grave in the great perfection of futility”

“the old neighbor woman wanted to have me for tea, said no, thanks, would have vomited on her, gotten permission to”

“they are so small, they don’t want to understand how”

“stronger and stronger. Why do they get stronger and st”

“in the middle of the night, shadow in the closet, it’s stuck, invisible hinges”

“reduced to nothing, less than zero, there is a life under zero”

“in passing, the glow of a cigarette, can already hear the sizzle, can already smell the stench, but i can never predict the pain, only”

“April 19. What power they have now, can’t resist any longer”

“grandma dead. Okay. A package came. Just crap, except for a letter. Going to read it soon. The handwriting is worrying.”

“earth a grave, people maggots, where is the corpse? is it the dead god we eat up?”

“stairs out of nothing in nothing, like a dream. Comes in flashes now, like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal”

“just go there, say i’m sick, try to get help”

“if the images can become a story”

“July 27. Who am i trying to kid? There is only one help. The Aztecs killed in order to live. Human sacrifices. I”

“follow the shadow, the arm of a jacket has gotten caught, a door, stairs”

“theletterislyingthereimwaitingicantitwontwork”

“Grandma dead. Try again. Grandma dead. Okay.”

“The light behind the door like the frame of an icon, a darker darkness, have to get out, have to plead”

“the stairs straight down, can’t follow, only flashes”

“the cellar the cellar the cellar”

“sick SOB at the bar, Arkaius, fucking name, bragging bragging bragging, tons of houses all over the world, suck him off, dead as a doornail, need the address now, reward”

“open the letter, read, i knew it, it was impossible for him to be”

“open the door, into the light. Chaos, have to get out, have to”

“glow of a cigarette, our little secret, our little hell”

“why us in the middle of all this perfection, the tiniest mollusk is more adapted to life on earth, can’t feel pain”

As they read, they sneaked glances at each other.

When they were all finished, Larner said, “This is why it didn’t all fit together. This is a classic serial killer of the more intellectual sort, incredibly wounded, very intelligent. It couldn’t be reconciled with the early coldness. I ought to have realized. On July twenty-seventh we have a date. On July twenty-seventh, 1997, the prostitute Sally Browne was murdered in Manhattan. That was Lamar Jennings’s first murder. It starts there: ‘The Aztecs killed in order to live.’ Any other thoughts?”

“Arkaius,” said Kerstin Holm. “Robert Arkaius is a Swedish tax exile. He owns the cabin where Lamar committed his first murder in Sweden. Apparently he got the address in exchange for sexual favors. Arkaius couldn’t return to Sweden anyway. Of course, he didn’t know that his former lover’s son, Andreas Gallano, had holed up there after he’d escaped from prison.”

Larner nodded mutely.

Schonbauer said, “That must have been after he opened that letter and found out that his father was in Sweden, when he had already started the murders. He goes out and looks for Swedes in sketchy bars in order to get his hands on a good place to stay in Stockholm. Sex doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, other than that. The trauma seems to have occurred before puberty.”

“Our reconstruction of his profile,” said Larner, “is quite close to the one you’ve already done, Yalm. As a child, he is abused by his father-that’s probably the glowing cigarettes we see. Sure enough, the culmination comes when he goes down some stairs and opens that door and sees his professional murderer of a father at work. After that, he is never the same again. Then comes blow after blow. His father dies, his mother commits suicide after a few years, possibly because of that letter that reaches her in some unknown way and ends up in an untouched box at his grandmother’s house. When his grandmother dies, the letter ends up in the hands of the now-twenty-four-year-old son in New York, where he-as the apartment indicates-lives half-outcast from society. It confirms what he’s suspected all along: his father is alive. His tormentor still exists; he hovers over him and possesses him.

“His repressed images of the past start to return, moving in a certain direction, ‘like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal.’ Finally the images drive him down to that door. He opens it and is confronted with the most repressed image of all, his father above a victim who’s foaming at the mouth, with the micropincers in his neck. He has to get rid of it, and that can only happen with homeopathic magic: like pleads to like. He has the pincers; now he can use them. The image in his memory is exact; he knows exactly what to do. As soon as the images appear, he must go out and kill. It calms him: ‘if the images can become a story.’ The murders make the lightninglike, hardhitting pictures into a more easily handled story.

“But as you said, Yalm, at the same time it’s about preparing himself for the big, decisive murder. He has to get rid of his father, he must die by his own methods, the very ones that haunt him. He’s finally gotten hold of the address of a safe house in the Stockholm area-it’s time. Apparently the letter has revealed that his father is in Stockholm, and even more important, it’s revealed what he calls himself-otherwise the whole project is hopeless. The techs have to be finished with the burned letter soon. If we’re lucky, the name will be there.

“Anyway, he gets a fake passport under the name Edwin Reynolds and goes to Newark Airport. Annoyingly, the next flight to Stockholm is fully booked. It’s not really a catastrophe, but somehow he happens to stumble upon Lars-Erik Hassel. Maybe the images came to him again in the airport; maybe he decides to kill two birds with one stone: getting his hands on a ticket, and simultaneously getting rid of the images and having a peaceful flight; avoiding six hours of inferno might be worth the relatively minor risks. Hassel somehow reveals himself as a traveler to Stockholm who hasn’t yet checked in, which means his seat can be made available. Jennings gets Hassel and his luggage into the janitor’s closet and does his deed; maybe he uses sex as a temptation again. Then he snatches Hassel’s ticket, calls and cancels in his name, books himself the seat with Reynolds’s name, and has a nice, calm flight.

“Presumably he has no idea how close you are to catching him at Arlanda. All he has is carry-on luggage-he just goes right through, gets in a taxi, stops somewhere on the way and buys some food, and goes straight to the cabin. Your drug dealer happens to be there, but by now Lamar Jennings is a practiced killer. He gets in easily and murders the drug dealer; the sight now and then of the body in the cellar is enough to keep the images at bay as he searches for his father and plans the best way to deal with him. What happens next is your business.”

No one had any objections. That was surely how it happened.

In the meantime, Hjelm’s thoughts had gone in a slightly different direction. “Was there a cellar on Wayne Jennings’s farm?”

Larner looked at him. He had expected to be able to catch his breath after his account, but now he had to make a sharp turnaround. “There was a small cellar, yes. But it was a sort of rec room, a cozy room with a fireplace, and we checked it several times. It wasn’t the scene of the murder.”

“Who lives there now?”

“I seem to recall that it went round and round in the media for so long that it became unsellable. After his wife died, it was left to rot. It’s deserted.”

“There’s something about a closet that Lamar apparently wants to tell us. A shadow in the closet at night, a door that’s gotten caught on ‘the arm of a jacket,’ then the stairs. Might there have been another cellar, a secret one? The very origin of the entire story of the Kentucky Killer?”

Larner thought it over, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Bill, how long is the letter going to take? Okay. I’m going to Kentucky. Jerry will hold down the fort here.”

He hung up and looked at them urgently. “Well, are you coming?”

They flew to Louisville, Kentucky, in a flash. At the airport, an FBI helicopter was waiting to carry them eastward. A tall mountain range towered up in the distance.

“Cumberland Plateau,” Larner said, pointing.

The helicopter landed at the edge of a tobacco field, and Larner and three bundles of muscle from the FBI, along with the two Swedes, jogged through the field and out onto the country road along. A grove of tall, unidentifiable deciduous trees lent shadow to a decaying farm a ways out on the wilderness land; there wasn’t a neighbor for miles.

Seen at a closer distance, the farmhouse looked haunted. Fifteen years had left their mark. Houses always seem to do their best when inhabited-otherwise they wither. Wayne Jennings’s farm had withered. It didn’t look as if it had felt very well from the start, but by now it had reached a state of complete abandonment. The front door was crooked and warped, and it took the efforts of the collective FBI muscle mass to tear it open, which was the same as tearing it apart.

They entered the hall. The house hadn’t been airtight. Everything was covered in a thin layer of sand. Each step was followed by a small, rising puff of sand. They passed the kitchen; dishes were laid out under the layer of sand, as though time had stopped in the middle of a regular day. They passed the stairway that led down to the small cellar; Hjelm cast a glance down the steps. Three beer bottles stood on a small table. The sand had glued itself along their edges; they were like three pillars of salt in a salt desert. They entered a room with a bed. A few disintegrating posters were still clinging to the wall: Batman, a baseball team. A book lay open on the desk: Mary Poppins. On the pillow sat a threadbare teddy bear, covered with sand. Kerstin lifted it up; one leg remained on the bed. She blew it off and studied it. Her heart seemed about to break.

They went from Lamar’s room to his parents’; it was farthest off toward the wide-open spaces, which stretched on, flat, toward Cumberland Plateau. Larner pointed at the double bed; in the place of one pillow there was a large hole; down was still floating in the sandy air.

“This is where Lamar found his mother one hot summer morning,” he said quietly. “A shotgun. Her head was almost completely blown off.”

They went back out into the hallway and through the next door entered a guest room, which had its own entrance from the terrace.

“It has to be here,” Larner said.

He went over to the closet and opened the door. The assembled FBI forces stepped in with sturdy tools and instruments of measurement. They pulled a microphone along the wall. “Here,” said one of the FBI men. “There’s empty space behind here.”

“See if you can find the mechanism.” Larner moved back. They kept looking; he sat down on the bed, where the Swedes were already sitting.

“You can probably put that down now,” he said.

Holm stared down at the teddy bear that was sitting in her lap. She placed it on the bed. Sand had run out of the hole at the leg until it was just a fake shell of skin. She held up the scrap.

“The things we do to our children,” was all she said.

“I warned you,” said Larner.

It took time, almost fifteen minutes of intense, scientific searching. But finally they found a complicated mechanism, behind a piece of iron that had been screwed into place. Apparently Wayne Jennings hadn’t wanted anyone to make their way down there after his so-called death. But his son evidently had-and had retrieved his pincers.

A thick iron door slid open inside the closet; Hjelm even thought he could see the jacket arm that had gotten stuck one night and kept the door from closing again as it should. He walked over to the door to the guest room and crouched down, simulating the view a ten-year-old would have. Lamar had stood here; from here he had seen the shadow glide into the closet, and then he had followed. The thick metal door hadn’t closed properly.

Larner went into the closet and pulled open the door; the mechanism was a bit rusty and creaked in a way it surely hadn’t twenty years earlier. He turned on a powerful flashlight and disappeared. They followed him.

The narrow stone staircase had an iron handrail. Sand crunched under their feet as they made their way down the staircase, which was surprisingly long. Finally they came to a massive, rusty iron door. Larner opened it and shone his powerful flashlight around.

It was a shabby cellar, cramped, almost absurdly small, a concrete cube far belowground in the wilderness. In the middle a large iron chair was welded to more iron in the floor; leather bands hung slack from the armrests and chair legs. There was also a solid workbench, like a carpenter’s bench. That was all. Larner pulled out the drawers under the bench. They were empty. He sat in the iron chair as the little concrete cube filled with people; the last FBI man didn’t even fit and had to stand on the stairs.

“These walls have seen a lot,” said Larner.

For a second Hjelm thought he had made contact with all the suffering that the walls guarded: a hot and simultaneously ice-cold wind went through him. But it was beyond words.

Larner stood and clapped his hands. “Well, we’ll do a complete crime-scene investigation, but there’s no doubt that this is where most of the Kentucky Killer’s victims met their long-awaited deaths.”

They went back upstairs-claustrophobia wasn’t far off.

What had happened when ten-year-old Lamar had stepped into the torture chamber? How had Wayne reacted? Had he beaten him unconscious? Threatened him? Did he try to comfort him? The only person to ask was Wayne Jennings himself, and Hjelm promised himself and the world that he would ask him.

For he was becoming more and more certain that if father and son confronted each other in Sweden, the father would be victorious. He would kill his son for a second time.

They took the helicopter back to Louisville and caught a flight back to New York. The whole foray had only taken a few hours. It was afternoon at JFK, a long, hot afternoon. They took a taxi back to FBI headquarters, where they found Jerry Schonbauer sitting with his legs dangling, leafing through a pile of papers as though nothing had happened.

But it had.

“Good timing,” said Schonbauer. “I’ve just received a preliminary crime-scene report, including a preliminary reconstruction of the burned letter. That’s the only thing of interest. The rest of the investigation didn’t turn up anything-the apartment was completely clean. Here are your copies of the letter.”

It had been possible to make out the date: April 6, 1983. Almost a year after Wayne Jennings faked his death. It was a letter he wouldn’t have needed to write nor, presumably, been able to write. That he had done it anyway revealed a trace of humanity that Hjelm didn’t really want to see.

“When did his wife kill herself?” he asked.

“The summer of 1983,” said Larner. “Apparently it took a few months for her to understand the extent of the whole thing.”

The envelope had been among the burned remains. The Stockholm postmark had been clear. The address was that of the farm; apparently Wayne Jennings had been relatively certain that the FBI wasn’t reading his widow’s mail a year after his death.

What could be reconstructed read as follows (with the technicians’ comments in brackets):

Dear Mary Beth. As you can see, I’m not dead. I hope one day to be able to expla [break, burned] see you in another life. Maybe in a few years it will be p [break, burned] have been absolutely necessary. We were forced to give me this dis [break, burned] pe that you can live with this knowledge and [break, burned] ucky Killer is me and yet it’s no [break, burned] now go by the name [break, cut out] ty that Lamar is better off without me, I wasn’t always [break, burned] lutely must burn this letter immedia [break, burned]. Always, your W.

“Lamar didn’t want to give us the name.” Larner put down the letter. “Maybe he did want to give us the rest-it depends on how seriously we should take this half-failed incineration. But he didn’t want to give us the name-he cut it out before he set fire to the letter.”

“A loving husband,” said Holm.

“What does it actually say here?” said Hjelm. “ ‘The Kentucky Killer is me and yet it’s not’-is that how we should interpret it? And: ‘We were forced to give me this-disguise’? ‘We’?”

“That could mean Jennings was a professional killer, employed by someone else,” said Larner pensively. “Suppose, in the late seventies, it was suddenly necessary to get a great number of people to talk-engineers, researchers, journalists-and a whole cadre of unidentified people, probably foreigners. They called in their torture experts, who may have been on ice since the Vietnam War. They had to disguise the whole thing as the actions of a madman. The serial killer was born. And the consequences were plentiful.”

It hung in the air. No one said it. Finally Hjelm cleared his throat. “CIA?”

“We’ll have to attend to that bit.” Larner sighed. “It won’t be easy.”

Kerstin and Paul looked at each other. Maybe the good old KGB theory hadn’t been so far off target after all. Maybe it was top-level politics. But it was the victims who were KGB. Maybe.

“If I were you,” said Larner, “I’d look closely at Sweden’s immigration register for 1983. The last victim died in the beginning of November 1982. The letter was written from Stockholm in April 1983. Maybe you’ll find him listed among the immigrants during that interval.”

An FBI man looked in. “Ray, Mrs. Stewart has come up with a picture.”

They stood in unison and followed him. Now they would find out what Lamar Jennings looked like.

Chief inspector Jan-Olov Hultin looked skeptical. “ ‘Get out of here’?” he said. “ ‘Beat it’?”

“That’s what he said,” said Viggo Norlander.

He was lying in a hospital bed at Karolinska, dressed in a bizarre county council hospital gown. He had a large compress on the wound in his neck and still felt a bit groggy.

“So in other words, he spoke Swedish?” Hultin ventured pedagogically, bending down toward the once-again-defeated hero.

“Yes,” Norlander said sleepily.

“You don’t remember anything else?”

“He was dressed all in black. A balaclava. His hand didn’t shake so much as a fraction of an inch when he sighted me with the pistol. He must have missed on purpose when he fired. Then he took off in a pretty large car, maybe a Jeep, maybe brown.”

“This is an insane serial killer with many lives on his conscience. And he’s shot people before. Why didn’t he kill you?”

“Thanks for your support at this difficult time,” Norlander said, and conked out.

Hultin got up and went over to the other bed in the hospital room.

In it was yet another once-again-defeated hero. Both of his bundles of muscle had been flattened by the same man; that didn’t feel so great.

Gunnar Nyberg’s bandage was more extensive. His nasal bones were cracked in three places; he found it incredible that such small bones could be cracked in so many places. But his soul hurt much worse. He knew that no matter how hard he tried, he would never get that horrible image of Benny Lundberg out of his mind. He would probably die with it before his eyes.

“How’s he doing?” he asked.

Hultin sat in the visitor’s chair with a little groan. “Viggo? He’s recovering.”

“Not Viggo. Benny Lundberg.”

“Aha. Well, the latest news isn’t good. He’s alive, and he’ll survive. But his vocal cords are seriously injured, and the nerve paths in his neck are one big mess. He’s on a respirator. Worst of all, he’s in a state of extreme shock. The perpetrator literally terrified him out of his wits. He pushed him over the line of sanity, and the question is whether there’s any way back.”

Hultin placed an incongruous bunch of grapes on Nyberg’s table. “Your clear-headedness saved his life,” he said. “You should know that. If you’d tried to pull out the pincers, he almost certainly would have died right away. That neck doctor you got there struggled for over an hour. He had to operate at the scene. It was good that it was you and not Viggo who went in; I guess I can say that now that he’s out.”

Hultin looked into Nyberg’s eyes. Something had changed. “Are you okay, by the way?” he said quietly.

“No, I’m not okay,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “I’m furious. I’m going to put a stop to this guy if it’s the last thing I do.”

Hultin was of two minds about that. Certainly, it was excellent that Nyberg was coming out of his recent apathy toward work and his longing for retirement; but a furious Nyberg was like a runaway steam engine.

“Come back as soon as you can,” Hultin said. “We need you.”

“I’d be back already if it weren’t for this damn concussion.”

“That’s something we’ve got plenty of right now,” Hultin said neutrally.

They had been mistaken, thought Nyberg. It wasn’t two cases of pneumonia that had sailed through the air to find their rightful owners, it was two concussions.

“If we hadn’t stopped to eat, we could have saved him,” he said bitterly.

Hultin looked at him for a moment, then said goodbye, and stepped into the corridor. Before he stepped out into the evening’s downpour, he opened an umbrella with police logos, which kept the deluge in check until he reached his turbo Volvo, the only privilege of his rank that he accepted.

He drove through the pitch-black city, up St. Eriksgatan, then Fleminggatan and Polhemsgatan, but at this moment he was an unfit driver. Mixing facts with intuitions as he was, he was a grave danger in traffic; fortunately, though, the nighttime traffic was nonexistent. Why Benny Lundberg? What had the security guard seen or done that night? After all, Hultin had been there and talked to him that same night, and everything had seemed normal. And yet there must have been something strange about that break-in. Immediately afterward Lundberg had taken vacation time and was later discovered half-murdered by the Kentucky Killer, who had spoken Swedish, flattened two solid, professional policemen, and refrained from killing Norlander even though he’d had him in his sights. If they hadn’t had the background information on the killer, Hultin would have immediately thought: inside job, a criminal cop.

He went into the dark police building. Everything was still. The rain’s uninterrupted rumble had been absorbed into the normal background noise; when the rain stopped sometime in the future, something would feel wrong, like a disturbance in the normal state of things.

He arrived in the A-Unit’s corridor. A little light was shining-he realized where from. Chavez hopped out from his office and rushed up to his boss.

“Come take a look at this shit,” he said, as hyper as a seven-year-old.

Jan-Olov Hultin wanted to think, not look at shit. He had been doing quite enough of that during the past few weeks. He felt like a grumpy old man-which, it struck him, he was. He followed Chavez without protest.

In Hjelm’s place at the desk sat a small older man with Mediterranean looks. His face was illuminated by the large computer monitor in front of him.

“This is Christo Kavafis,” said Chavez, “the locksmith. I took the liberty of bringing him in. Christo, this is Jan-Olov Hultin, my boss.”

“My pleasure,” said Christo Kavafis.

Hultin nodded and looked with surprise at Chavez, who hurried over to the Greek man.

“I was struck by a flash of genius when I heard that John Doe’s key allowed admittance to the site of the murder,” Chavez said eagerly. “Everything seems to indicate that the American who got into Sweden under the name Edwin Reynolds looks-like this.” He turned the computer monitor a quarter of the way around.

Hultin stared into the face of the Kentucky Killer. It was John Doe, their unidentified body.

He was silent for a minute. The pieces were starting to fall into place. “So there are two Kentucky Killers,” he said.

“Now there’s just one,” said Chavez.

Hultin picked up his cell phone and dialed Hjelm’s number in the United States. It was busy. Very strange-the number was to be used solely for this purpose.

Kerstin and Paul approached the computer monitor above Wilma Stewart’s small, nodding head.

“That’s just what he looked like,” said the old woman. “Just like that. Lamar Jennings.”

Kerstin and Paul stared into the face of the Kentucky Killer.

It was John Doe, their unidentified body.

Hjelm took out his cell phone and dialed Hultin’s number in Sweden. It was busy. Very strange-the number was to be used solely for this purpose.

Hultin didn’t give up. He called again. This time he got through.

“Hjelm,” Hjelm answered on the other side of the Atlantic.

“John Doe is the Kentucky Killer,” Hultin said abruptly.

“One of them,” said Hjelm.

“I’m looking at composite of him right now.”

“Me too.”

Hultin gave a start. “I just tried to call.”

“Me too.”

Hjelm had difficulty getting everything straightened out. Hultin kept talking instead of explaining.

“Norlander and Nyberg almost got him. The second one. He speaks Swedish.”

“He’s lived in Sweden since 1983. How close did they get?”

“Close enough to take a licking, both of them. In LinkCoop’s warehouse. He had Viggo in his sights but didn’t kill him. Is he a police officer?”

“Sort of. We’ll talk about that later. So he’s free?”

“Yes, but just by a hair. We have the pincers. And a half-dead guard.”

“Benny Lundberg?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, he’s probably going to be a vegetable. Can you explain all this?”

“There are two killers, Jennings father and son. The son went to Sweden to kill the father. Their roles were reversed.”

“So it was Wayne Jennings… that means he’s alive?”

“He’s been living in Sweden for fifteen years. It’s his son Lamar who’s dead; we know that now. That explains why he shot John Doe without torturing him. Presumably Lamar was waiting in ambush and saw his father Wayne torturing Eric Lindberger. It turned into a horrific déjà vu. The son discovered the father and got shot. It’s likely that Wayne Jennings doesn’t even know it was his son he shot.”

“So Wayne was the one who was surprised by the bandy-playing lawyers.”

“Yes. There are two different perpetrators for the Swedish victims. Hassel and Gallano were chosen at random, one for his plane ticket and the other for the cabin. John Doe was their murderer-Lamar Jennings. Lamar was murdered in turn by Wayne, also randomly. What we have left is Lindberger. His death is not random; Wayne doesn’t kill at random-he’s a professional.”

“Professional killer and ‘sort of’ a police officer? Your insinuations reek of…”

“Don’t say it. But it’s right.”

“Okay. I need everyone at full capacity now. It sounds like you’re starting to wrap it up. Can you two come home?”

“Now?”

“If possible.”

“Okay.”

“Say hi to Larner, and thank him.”

“Absolutely. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Hjelm hung up and stared at the telephone. The unit had been close to getting Wayne Jennings. Norlander and Nyberg, of all people.

“Did you hear?” he said to Holm who was leaning over him.

“Yes,” she said. “He goes to Sweden to avenge a ‘life under zero,’ as he wrote, once and for all. He prepares extremely carefully, locates his father, follows him, and waits for the right moment to strike. Then he wavers somehow-and he’s killed immediately. A second time. By his father. Who doesn’t even know it. There’s some horrible irony here.”

“Don’t think about it too much. We’re going home. Now. To get him.”

She nodded.

They went to see Larner and explained the situation.

“So he threatened him?” His tone was measured. “He had your colleague in his sights but refrained from shooting him. A professional through and through, you have to admit.”

“Yes,” said Hjelm. “But we’re going to get him.”

“I’m actually starting to believe you will. You came sweeping in here like cousins from the boonies and solved the case in a few days. I’m feeling really old and rusty. But you lifted a burden from my shoulders.”

“It was pure chance,” said Hjelm. “And you were the one who solved the case-don’t think otherwise. Your stubbornness got him to leave; you were the one who drove him to flee the country. That he then forgot an old truth is another matter.”

“And what old truth is that?”

“Bad blood always comes back around.”