Bad Blood

27

The next morning, strangely enough, everyone in the A-Unit was in their place. Only two should have been present, besides Hultin: Chavez and Söderstedt. But the old, experienced comedy duo Yalm & Halm arrived straight from the airport with red eyes, and in the back sat a fresh duo: everyone’s favorite bandage-skulls, NN; it would have taken a lot to keep Norlander and Nyberg on the bench now.

Hultin didn’t look like he’d been celebrating any triumphs of sleep, either, but his glasses were where they should be, and so was his sharp look.

“A lot has happened,” he said. “We’re nipping at his heels. Has everyone had a chance to take a look at the summary I put together last night with the help of a little conference-calling across the Atlantic?”

“I’ve accidentally pulled out that phone they have in the armrests a lot of times, but this was the first time I used it,” Hjelm said sleepily.

“Have you had a chance to look through it?” Hultin repeated.

Everyone appeared to nod, if a bit sluggishly here and there.

“Then you know what our main task is: to find out Wayne Jennings’s Swedish name. Besides that, the questions are, one: Why has he been using a warehouse at LinkCoop to carry out his business? Apparently it was a habit; otherwise his son wouldn’t have copied the key. Two: Why did he torture Benny Lundberg, the security guard? Three: How does the failed break-in at LinkCoop relate to the murders of Eric Lindberger and Lamar Jennings, at the same time, about ten doors away? Four: Why was Eric Lindberger killed? Five: Did it have anything to do with his links to the Arab world? Six: Is Justine Lindberger at risk, too? I’m putting her under surveillance for safety’s sake. Seven: Can we find Wayne Jennings in the immigration register for 1983? Eight: The difficult and delicate question-is Wayne Jennings CIA?”

“We could always go the official route,” said Arto Söderstedt, “and just ask the CIA.”

“I’m afraid that if we do, we’ll guarantee that he’ll disappear one way or another.”

“As far as I can tell from this,” Chavez said, waving Hultin’s summary papers, “he could just as easily belong to military intelligence. Or he could have been recruited by the opposing side or the Mafia or a drug syndicate or some nasty maverick organization.”

“Agreed,” Hultin said. “It’s far too early to identify him as CIA as any sort of main theory. Anything else in general?… No? Then to details. Arto keeps working on Lindberger, Jorge on the Volvo. Viggo and Gunnar can stay in today-take on the immigrations. Paul can go down to Frihamnen and sniff around. Kerstin can take on Benny Lundberg. How’s it going with Lindberger, Arto?”

“Eric Lindberger left behind a lot of notes, which I’ve checked out, and they contain no mysteries. But his calendar includes an extremely interesting entry: a meeting scheduled for the night before his death. His corpse was loaded into the Volvo in Frihamnen by Wayne Jennings at two-thirty in the morning on September twelfth, we know that. At ten o’clock the night before, the entry for the appointment says ‘Riche’s Bar’-unfortunately nothing more. I went down and waltzed around Riche’s yesterday afternoon, trying to find someone who had been working at the bar at ten that night. There are a lot of staff members, so it was hard, but finally I found a bartender, Luigi Engbrandt. He racked his brains to remember, but it’s a busy bar. He thinks he might remember Lindberger; if he’s right, he hung around the bar for a while, waiting for someone. Unfortunately, Luigi has no memory of anyone ever coming. I also checked Eric’s bank account. He leaves behind a decent but not exceptional fortune, six hundred thousand kronor altogether. Today I’m going to see Justine.”

“Why Justine?” said Norlander. “Leave her alone.”

“Discrepancies,” said Söderstedt. “The large apartment, the spouses’ collaboration, a few strange things she said when we last spoke. There are also some interesting items in her Filofax that I’d like her to comment on.”

“Okay,” said Hultin. “Did you get any farther with the cars, Jorge?”

“The cars.” Chavez made a face. “As you know, I’ve set a whole fucking armada of foot soldiers to work. Soon they will have gone through all the cars. Volvos seem to be owned by dependable, average middle-class Swedes as a rule. None of the ones we’ve checked so far has been stolen or was loaned out the night of the murder. Stefan Helge Larsson, the small-time criminal whose car had disappeared along with him, has returned from a month-long stay in Amsterdam. The traffic cops in Dalshammar, wherever that is, caught him, quote, ‘exceptionally under the influence of drugs’ on the E4. He was driving the wrong way down the highway. My interest is focused more and more on the car that’s registered to a nonexistent business. That’s what I’m going to work on today.”

“I think everything else is settled,” Hultin said briskly. “Let’s go. We have to get him. Preferably yesterday, as stressed-out businessmen like to joke.”

“What’s going on in the media?” said Kerstin Holm.

“The witch hunt continues,” said Hultin. “Sales of locks, weapons, and German shepherds have increased considerably. Orders have been given for platters containing the heads of those responsible. Mainly mine. Mörner’s too. He’s in a full-time panic. Do you want me to call him down so he can give you a little morale-boosting speech?

“Better than a blowtorch in your ass,” he remarked to the now-empty Supreme Central Command.

Arto Söderstedt called Justine Lindberger right away. The widow was home. Her voice sounded surprisingly peppy.

“Justine,” she said.

“Söderstedt here, with the police.”

“Oh.”

“Do you think I could take a peek at your planner?”

“My Filofax, you mean? It’s still at my office, I’m afraid. And I don’t understand what that could have to do with anything.”

“I can pick it up there, if it’s too tough for you to go.”

“No! No thank you-I don’t want the police nosing around in my desk. I’ll have them send it here by messenger. Then you can come and have a peek.”

“Right away?”

“I’m hardly awake. It’s ten after nine. How’s eleven?”

“Great. See you then.”

So she has time to make a few adjustments, he thought slyly.

The next step was to call her bank. The same bank as her late spouse. The same bank officer. He called. “Hello, this is Söderstedt,” he said in his singsong voice.

“Who?”

“The policeman. Yesterday you kindly gave me access to the deceased Eric Lindberger’s accounts. Today I need to look at his wife Justine’s.”

“That’s different. I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.”

“It’s possible,” he sang. “I can go the official route, but I don’t have time, and if it comes out that you’ve held up the most important murder investigation in modern Sweden, I’m sure your boss will be very pleased.”

It was quiet for a minute. “I’ll fax it,” said the bank officer.

“Like yesterday,” Söderstedt sang. “Thanks much!”

He hung up and tapped the fax machine. It soon began to spit out pages decorated with numbers. While it did, he called the housing cooperative and found out about the ownership of the apartment. He called the vehicle registry, the tax authorities, the boat registry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the land registry. And he called the men who were to watch Justine Lindberger.

“You’ll come along with me to Lindberger’s at eleven,” he said. “From that moment on, you can’t let her out of your sight.”

Then he half-danced out the door.

At eleven on the dot he was at the door intercom on Riddargatan. One minute later he was sitting on Justine Lindberger’s sofa.

“Nice apartment,” he said.

“Here’s my Filofax.” She handed it to him. He skimmed through it and seemed unconcerned, but his brain was working overtime. There had been seven mysterious celebrities in her uncensored agenda, which he had copied at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: G every other Monday at ten; PS on Sundays at four; S, who showed up at various times in the evenings; Bro, who appeared every Tuesday at different times; PPP on September 6 at 1:30; FJ all day on August 14; and CR on September 28 at 7:30 p.m. He had them all in his head and was struggling to look dumb as he battled his way through the official version of the Filofax.

“What’s G?” he said. “And PS?”

She looked embarrassed. “G is manicures; my manicurist’s name is Gunilla. PS means parents; we have a family dinner at four o’clock every Sunday. I have a large family.”

“PPP and FJ? How can you keep all these abbreviations straight?”

“PPP was a girls’ lunch on the sixth, with Paula, Petronella, and Priscilla, to be exact. FJ was a conference day at work, foreign journalism. Aren’t you about finished?”

“CR?” he persisted.

“Class reunion,” she said. “I’m going to see my old class from upper secondary.”

“S and Bro?” he said.

She looked like she’d been struck by lightning. “There’s nothing like that,” she said, trying to remain calm.

He elegantly returned the Filofax. “S on occasional evenings, Bro every Tuesday at various times,” he said with a chivalrous smile.

“You’ve got a screw loose.”

“Those entries were in there, in ink, so you had to go out and buy a whole new Filofax to replace the pages with S and Bro. What does S mean, and what does Bro mean?”

“You had no right to go through my things,” she said, close to tears. “I’ve lost my husband.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but actually I had every right. This is a murder case of enormous proportions. Talk to me now.”

She closed her eyes. And didn’t say anything.

“This apartment is yours,” he said quietly. “It was purchased two years ago, and you paid 9.2 million kronor cash. You also own an apartment in Paris that’s worth two million, a summer home on Dalarö worth 2.6 million, two cars worth 700,000, and all together you are worth 18.3 million kronor. You’re twenty-eight years old and you earn 31,000 kronor a month at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, you get substantial expense allowances when you’re abroad. You come from a reasonably wealthy family, but none of them have the kind of money you do. Can you explain that? How did you explain it to Eric?”

She looked up. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying, yet.

“Eric accepted it without questions. My family is rich, I said, and he was satisfied with that. You should be, too. He was satisfied with anything that brought a little joy into this life. Well-invested money. Superior money. If you have a fortune, it works for you. Money is what earns money in this country now; people like you have to accept that, too.”

“I don’t,” said Söderstedt, without changing his tone.

“It’s best that you do!” she shouted.

“What do S and Bro mean?” he said.

“Bro means Bro!” she yelled. “Every Tuesday I met a man by the name of Herman in Bro. We fucked. Okay?”

“Did that bring joy into Eric’s life, too?”

“Stop it!” she cried. “Don’t you think I feel guilty enough about it? He knew what I was doing-he accepted it.”

“And S?”

She stared at him fiercely. Her body seemed to contract. Had he pressed too hard?

“That’s when I jog,” she said calmly, exhaling. “That’s my jogging session. I work so much that I have to schedule my jogging.”

“S as in ‘jogging’?”

“S as in ‘stretching.’ It takes longer to stretch than to jog.”

He looked at her with amusement. “You schedule stretching? And you want me to believe that?”

“Yes.”

“And the money?”

“Successful gambles in the stock market. It’s possible to earn money in Sweden again, thank God.”

“And it has nothing to do with shady Arab transactions?”

“No.”

“Excellent. Fifteen minutes ago you were placed under watch by the guard unit of the National Criminal Police. We are of the opinion that you are in mortal danger.”

She glared at the crafty Finland Swede, full of hate. “Protection or surveillance?” She maintained her calm.

“Take your pick,” said Arto Söderstedt, and took his leave of her.

It could have gone a little better, but he was satisfied.

Jorge Chavez had put one hundred cars on the shelf and was now concentrating on a single one. He was taking a bit of a chance. The nonexistent company’s name was Café Havreflarnet, which sounded harmless-it was named after a cookie-and was therefore an excellent front. It was supposed to be located on Fredsgatan in Sundbyberg, but there was no fucking Café Havreflarnet there, just a boring old Konsum grocery.

He pored with his usual intensity over the patent office’s business register and finally came upon the name of an authorized signatory, a Sten-Erik Bylund, who had been living on Råsundavägen in Stockholm when the business was established in 1955. The National Social Insurance Board showed that the firm had gone bankrupt, and Chavez was obliged to consult a large manual register and page through lists of bankrupt estates. Finally he found Café Havreflarnet and learned that it had gone bankrupt in 1986. The Volvo with the B license plate had been registered three years later, in 1989. So even then the practically nonexistent business had been the owner of the car. Taxes and insurance were paid up, but the money didn’t come from Café Havreflarnet.

He tracked down a current address for Sten-Erik Bylund in Rissne. Without further ado, he set out to meet force with force, but that tactic turned out to be inadequate, because the address belonged to a long-term-care institution, and Bylund was a seriously senile ninety-three-year-old. He didn’t give up; rather, he sat across from the snacking elderly man and watched him stick bananas in his armpits and pour blueberry soup over his bald skull. Perhaps the café was not a CIA front after all.

“Why did you register your Volvo station wagon under the name Café Havreflarnet, even though the business had gone bankrupt three years earlier? Who pays the bills? Where is the car?”

Sten-Erik Bylund bent toward him, as though he were about to tell him a state secret. “Nurse Gregs has wooden legs,” he said. “And my father was a strict old woman who liked a quickie or two on the go.”

“On the go?” Chavez said, fascinated. Could it be a code?

“Yes indeed. He ran like a bitch in heat among the mutts. Brother Kate’s breasts are great.”

Although he was still suffering from speed-blindness, Chavez was beginning to have his doubts, not least when Bylund stood up and exposed his genitals to an old woman, who only yawned loudly.

“It was different with my Alfons,” she said to her neighbor at the table. “He was well hung, let me tell you. A real hunk of beef just hanging there jiggling. Unfortunately, it just hung there jiggling.”

“Well, dearie,” her neighbor replied, “one time my Oliver and I were sitting there necking in the dark, and he reached it out to me. I said, ‘No thank you, dear, I don’t really feel like a smoke.’ But he could go on for hours and hours until a person was really tender, you know, dearie. Even though a person had seen bigger, if you know what I mean.”

Chavez’s mouth was hanging open.

As he left he heard the women tittering, “Wasn’t that the new doctor, darling? Why, he must be from Lebanon. The smaller the body, the bigger the member-that’s what they say down there in the tropics, you know.”

“I think it was Oliver. He visits me sometimes. For being dead, he’s kept his backside in very good shape, dearie.”

Paul Hjelm shivered. He’d crossed many borders in the past twenty-four hours, but the weather transition was the most awful. As he stood under an umbrella with police logos, he saw LinkCoop’s long row of warehouses standing out against the streaky perpetual-motion machine that was the rain. He understood what Nyberg had meant when he talked about fallen skyscrapers. A downtown skyscraper in Täby and a slum skyscraper in Frihamnen. Both had fallen over.

He passed the sentry box with his ID raised, then moved to the right along the building with its loading dock. Hell had many manifestations, he thought. He had been in a crack house in Harlem, in Lamar Jennings’s dismal Queens apartment, in a torture chamber in Kentucky: so alike, yet so different. And now this dismal, gray warehouse in Frihamnen, where the only upgrade that had been done in decades was the business logo, which glimmered and flashed in spectacularly spectral spectra. Here Eric Lindberger had had his hell, Benny Lundberg his, and Lamar Jennings his.

He peered behind the blue-and-white police tape that surrounded the door on the far right end of the long row of buildings. Beyond the curtain of rain he could see crime scene techs moving back and forth carrying various tools. He entered and went down the stairs to the storage area-and found a setup surprisingly reminiscent of Wayne Jennings’s secret torture chamber in Kentucky. The cast-iron chair that was welded to the floor appeared to be identical, as did the cement walls and the bare lightbulb.

“How’s it going?” he called to the technicians.

“Pretty good,” one of them called back. “Lots of organic material here. Mostly the victim’s, I expect, but since the perp didn’t have time to clean up after himself, we might get lucky.”

Seen in daylight, Hjelm thought, the premises looked relatively harmless, defused. So this was where the confrontation had taken place, he mused. Lamar Jennings had gotten in with the key made from a clay imprint, stationed himself behind the boxes in the corner, and awaited his father; that seemed the most likely scenario. Wayne Jennings arrived with Eric Lindberger, who was either unconscious or not, placed him in the chair, took out the pincers, and set to work. For Lamar, the sight of the diabolical father he’d thought was dead for fifteen years, performing the very actions that had given rise to the most horrifying of his mental images, was too much; he couldn’t keep his cool and showed himself. Wayne heard him, took out his pistol, and executed him.

So they could hardly call it a confrontation. It was more like a quick elimination, without reflection, as when you kill a mosquito without interrupting your lawn mowing. A fitting end.

Hjelm strode back over to the entrance, under the large, grotesque LinkCoop logo, and spoke with the receptionist, a tanned forty-five-year-old woman who was dressed in overalls because she was also the warehouse’s organizer.

“What kind of warehouse is the one at the far end?” Hjelm asked.

“It’s a resource building,” she said without looking up; apparently she had already said this a few times today. “That means it’s empty. If we get a larger delivery than expected, we have a little extra space. We have a few like that.”

“Is there anyone who often hangs out there?”

“You don’t hang out in a warehouse,” she rebuffed him. “You keep things there.”

He chatted idly with the warehouse workers. None of them knew anything; none understood anything. Break-in, yes, we’ve had those before, but murder-that’s insane.

He grew tired and went home.

Home to police headquarters.

Kerstin Holm didn’t feel up to holding a difficult, demanding conversation, such as one with Benny Lundberg’s parents. Not only was she feeling her jet lag, she had a stressful work week behind her. She wanted to sleep. Instead she was sitting in a small apartment in Bagarmossen at the home of shocked and grieving parents who blamed her personally for their son’s ill fortune.

“The police are falling apart,” said the father, who kept up the resentful facade even as his every word revealed the depth of his sorrow. “If they would fight crime instead of devoting themselves to affirmative action and other shit, our son wouldn’t be lying there like a fucking vegetable that you can only shoot out of mercy. Every other fucking cop is a woman. I’m just an old, fat school janitor, but I would easily be able to get ten cop chicks off me and scram, believe me.”

“I believe you,” said the cop chick, trying to move on.

“Let the men do their thing and the women do theirs, for fuck’s sake.”

“It was a man who assaulted your son, not a woman.”

“Thank God for that!” the father yelled, disconcerted. “A man’s home is his castle. Everything is going downhill.”

“Stop it!” she finally had to bark. “Sit down!”

The large man stared at her, struck speechless in mid-speech, and plopped down like a chastised little mischief-maker.

“I am truly very sorry about your grief,” Holm continued, “but what Benny is going to need is your help to come back, not a mercy shooting.”

“Lasse would never do that,” sniffled the small, shrunken mother. “He’s just so-”

“I know,” Holm interrupted. “It’s okay, just take it easy and try to answer my questions. Benny lived here at home. He had vacation in August. Do you know why he took vacation almost immediately again?”

The father sat there, stiff. The mother trembled but answered, “He was on Crete with some friends from the military in August. He hadn’t planned any more vacation. But he hardly talks to us these days.”

“Didn’t he say anything about why he took more vacation?”

“He had gotten extra vacation time. That was all he said. A bonus.”

“A bonus for what?”

“He didn’t say.”

“How did he seem the last few days?”

“Happy. Happier than he had been for a long time. Like he was expecting something. Like he had won some money at Bingolotto or something.”

“Did he say anything about why?”

“No. Nothing. We didn’t ask, either. I was a little nervous that he was up to some sort of trouble, now that he’d finally gotten a proper job.”

“Had he been in trouble before?”

“No.”

“I’m here to catch his”-she was about to say murderer-“his tormentor, not to put him away. Tell me.”

“Benny was a skinhead, before. Then he went through coastal commando training and became a new person. He tried to become a career officer and applied to the police college, but his grades weren’t good enough. Then he got that security guard job. It was wonderful.”

“Is he in the criminal registry?” she said, cursing her own laziness; she should have found out ahead of time instead of asking the parents. Couldn’t someone who was more familiar with this aspect of the case have taken care of it? Gunnar Nyberg wanted nothing more than to go out into the field, after all. She had just come straight from the United States, after all. Old bastard, she thought, thinking of Hultin.

“A few assault convictions in his teen years,” the mother said, embarrassed. “But just against blackheads.”

God in heaven, thought Kerstin Holm. “Nothing since then?”

“No.”

“Okay. What can you tell me about yesterday?”

“He was pretty tense. Stayed closed up in his room and talked on a phone a lot.”

“You didn’t happen to hear what he was saying?”

“Do you think I eavesdrop on my own son?”

Yes, thought Holm. “No, of course not. But you can just happen to hear things.”

“No, you can’t.”

Not her too, thought Holm, groaning, imagining that she kept most of her groan internal. “I’m sorry. Then what happened?”

“He went out around five. He didn’t say where he was going, but he seemed nervous and keyed up. Like he was going to pick up some Bingolotto winnings or something.”

“Did he say anything that might give some hint as to where he was going or what he was doing?”

“He said one thing: ‘Soon you’ll be able to move out of here, Mom.’ ”

“Have you touched anything in his room?”

“We’ve been at the hospital all night. No, I haven’t touched anything.”

“May I look at it?”

She was shown to the door of what seemed to be a teenage boy’s room. Old, peeling stickers from packs of gum covered the surface.

Once inside the room, she thanked the mother and closed the door in her face. An enormous Swedish flag covered two of the walls; it was creased in the middle, behind the bed. She lifted the fabric and peered behind it. A few banners were hidden there. She couldn’t really see them, but she recognized the black, white, gold, and red stripes; they were probably miniature Nazi flags. She flipped through the CDs. Mostly heavy metal, but also some white power albums. Benny Lundberg hadn’t broken very radically with his skinhead past, that much was certain.

She went to the telephone on the nightstand and looked for a notepad. She found it on the floor. It was blank, but she could see impressions on the top page-something for the crime-scene techs to sink their teeth into, she thought, feeling as if she were quoting someone. She lifted the receiver and pressed redial. The speaking clock rattled off numbers in her ear. She was disappointed. The only thing she found out from this was that Lundberg had had an appointment that he didn’t want to miss for any reason.

She dialed a number.

“Teleservice? This is Kerstin Holm, National Criminal Police. Do you see the number I’m calling from on the screen? Good. Can you run a quick check on outgoing and incoming calls for the past twenty-four hours and e-mail it to chief inspector Jan-Olov Hultin, NCP? Top priority. Thanks.”

She did a quick check of the cluttered desk. Comic books, porno magazines out in the open-what would Mom say? Company pens, military magazines, trash. In the top drawer were two items of interest: a small bag of pills, doubtless good old pinkies, anabolic steroids; and a small jar of keys, probably spares: house key, car key, bike key, bike lock key, suitcase key, and then a key that seemed vaguely familiar. Was it to a safe-deposit box? What could Benny Lundberg have in a safe-deposit box? A weapon? Surely there was a whole arsenal under the floorboards. No, a safe-deposit box didn’t really fit the profile. She lifted the receiver of the phone again and dialed.

“Is this customer service at Sparbanken? Hi, my name is Kerstin Holm, National Criminal Police. Do you have a central register of your safe-deposit box customers? Or do I have to… okay, I’ll hold… Hi, the police here, Kerstin Holm, National Criminal Police. Do you have a central register of your safe-deposit box customers? Or do I have to go to each individual branch?… Okay, excellent… It’s Lundberg, Benny. Spelled like it sounds… No, okay. Thanks for your help.”

She called a few more banks with the help of directory assistance. Finally she got a nibble. Handelsbanken on Götgatan, near Slussen. Thank goodness. She took the notepad and the safe-deposit box key with her; that would have to do.

She yanked the door open without warning. Not unexpectedly, Benny’s mom was standing right outside, polishing a spot on the doorjamb.

“Do you have a recent picture of Benny?” Holm asked briskly.

The mom looked for a while and found one of the whole family. Benny was standing in the middle with his arms around his parents, who looked undeniably small. His smile was wide and a bit fake. Okay, that would have to do.

When she left the parents with their crippling grief-and what grief isn’t crippling?-the father was still installed on the sofa, as if he were petrified.

She took the subway to Slussen, a brief trip, then battled her way up Peter Myndes Hill in the pouring rain. She turned onto Götgatan, walked a few feet further, passed the ATMs, and reached Handelsbanken. She ignored the queue ticket machine, resulting in audible protests from the lunchtime patrons, and held up her police ID.

“I’m here about a safe-deposit box,” she said to a teller.

“That will be over there.” The teller pointed to a man in a tie who was cleaning his nails in the middle of the lunchtime rush. He stood up automatically when he saw her police ID.

“Safe-deposit box. Benny Lundberg,” she said briskly.

“Again?” said the man.

She gave a start. “What do you mean, again?”

“His father was just here, right after we opened, visiting the box. He had a signed power of attorney in good order and both his own and his son’s IDs.”

“Shit,” she said. “What did he look like? Like this?” She held up the photo of the Lundberg family.

The bank employee took it but handed it back immediately. “Absolutely not. This is a work… a completely different type of person.”

“This is Benny Lundberg’s father,” she said. The man’s face fell. “What did he look like?”

“An older, distinguished man with a beard.”

“There you have it,” she said. “A beard and everything. Come along to police headquarters and help us with a composite sketch.”

“But I’m working.”

“Not anymore. First I’ll take a quick look at the safe-deposit box, which will probably be empty. Number?”

“Two fifty-four,” said the man, showing her the way.

Benny Lundberg’s safe-deposit box was indeed empty. Absolutely.

She brought the bank employee outside and got in a taxi. Time for another composite sketch. She was starting to get tired of sketchy types.

Viggo Norlander had a headache. Gunnar Nyberg had a headache. Norlander had gathered up his things, moved into Nyberg’s office, and quickly taken over Kerstin Holm’s spot. They were both there now, avoiding putting their clever heads together.

A thick list of data lay between them: the immigrants of 1983, gathered in one place, like an extremely compressed and thorough ghetto. The names were arranged in chronological order. Chavez, who had produced the printout, had made sure that the names of American immigrants had a star next to them.

There were thousands of names, but only about a hundred Americans. It still took time. A lot of information had to be sorted through, checking sex against age and this and that.

Norlander felt ill. He had left the hospital way too soon. The microscopic lines of text were dancing before him. That damn overzealous Chavez creep must have deliberately picked out a font that would sustain headaches and promote nausea. He ran out and threw up.

Nyberg heard him through the open door. It was a splendid cascade, the sound waves echoing through police headquarters.

“That did the trick,” Norlander said when he came back.

“Go home and sleep,” said Nyberg, fingering the bandage on his nose.

“I will if you do.”

“Okay, let’s get to it. No more breaks.”

Norlander gave him a murderous look and kept working.

In the end, a list of twenty-eight people crystallized: American immigrant men who claimed to be born around 1950. Sixteen of them had been in the Stockholm area in 1983. Then they checked those names against the national registry to see which of them were currently still in Sweden and in the Stockholm region. There were fourteen.

“Are diplomats included on this list?” said Nyberg.

“Don’t know. I don’t think so. They aren’t immigrants, after all.”

“Could he have ended up with the American embassy?”

“The Kentucky Killer? Surely that’s taking it a bit too far?”

“Yes. It was just a thought.”

“Forget it.”

“Guest researchers, then? This list isn’t complete.”

“I have to get out.” Norlander, like a chameleon, had begun to take on the color of his bandage. “I’ll take the top half, up to-what does it say?-Harold Mallory in Vasastan. A to Ma. You take the bottom half.”

Norlander rushed off before Nyberg had time to warn him against taking the car. He didn’t want to find him, quote, “exceptionally under the influence of drugs” in Dalshammar.

Gunnar Nyberg studied Norlander’s chicken scratches, a transcribed list of seven American immigrants from 1983. Morcher, Orton-Brown, Rochinsky, Stevens, Trast, Wilkinson, and Williams. Trast was Swedish for thrush, like the bird. Could Trast be a name? Daddy blackbird. Did it even mean the same thing in English?

Nyberg didn’t really feel relieved, although he should have. To him the grunt work felt hopeless, routine. He wanted to go out and punch the killer in the face. He had worked past the shock of encountering Benny Lundberg, but he still could not digest the fact that Wayne Jennings had been allowed to knock him down.

No one knocked Gunnar Nyberg down. That was rule number one.

He went over to the wall and observed his face in the mirror. His bandage had been reduced to a nose cone, a plastic splint of the sort that heroic soccer players wear after the doctor stops the flow of blood. It was held in place with bizarre rubber bands around his neck. Bruises were still spreading out around the cone. He refrained from imagining what it looked like under there. Why the hell did he always have to look like a battlefield just when a case was moving toward its conclusion?

Because this case was moving toward its conclusion, right?

He returned to his desk and sank down into his chair. It creaked alarmingly. He had heard ghost stories about office chairs that had gone crazy and transformed into horrible instruments of torture, mechanisms that flew up eighteen inches through your rectum. He thought of his broken bed and rocked lightly in the chair. It actually did sound a bit murderous. Revenge of the Office Chair IV. The Hollywood blockbuster that played to sold-out houses. Worn-out movie-theater chairs jubilated and shot off springs that drilled into the screen. Not a single monitor was dry. Curtains blew their noses on themselves. Office after office revolted throughout the entire United States.

Distracted was an understatement. There was usually a reason for his attacks of distraction. Something, somewhere was chafing, irritating him. Something was causing him not to be really one hundred percent satisfied with the list.

He sorted the names, to come up with a suitable priority ranking. Three were in the inner city, two in the northern suburbs, one in the southern suburbs. They were probably working now. So, places of work. Huddinge, two in Kista, two at the Royal Institute of Technology, Nynäshamn, Danderyd. Order of priority: Danderyd, the Tech, Kista, Huddinge, Nynäshamn. Or Kista, Danderyd, the Tech, Huddinge, Nynäshamn. Maybe that was better.

He put the list aside and stared at the wall. He tried his voice, working his way through a scale. An ugly, nasal tone. This injury too had affected his singing voice. Something about that made him uncomfortable. Punishment? Reminder? A reminder, maybe. A commemoration.

Suddenly they were there again. Gunilla. The burst eyebrows. Tommy and Tanja’s eyes, as large as platters. Do you have to come right now?

His past had a single redeeming feature: he had never touched the children, had never lifted a hand against Tommy and Tanja.

Was that why he always took beatings that distorted his voice? So that he would never forget why he sang? For the very reason that it came at such an incredibly inconvenient time, he seized the opportunity.

There were two Tommy Nybergs in Uddevalla. He called the first one. He was seventy-four and deaf as a post. He called the other. A woman answered. An infant was crying in the background. A grandchild? he thought.

“I’m looking for Tommy Nyberg,” he said in a surprisingly steady voice.

“He’s not home,” said the woman. She had a lovely voice. Mezzo-soprano, he guessed.

“May I just ask, how old is Tommy?”

“Twenty-six,” she said. “Who is this?”

“His father,” he said.

“His father is dead. Come off it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Dead as a doornail. I’m the one who found him. Stop fucking with me, you fucking old creep.” She threw the phone down.

Okay, Tommy wasn’t necessarily still living in Uddevalla. Besides, he was twenty-four, he quickly calculated. Fucking old creep? he thought, laughing. Gallows humor. He had one chance left.

There was a Tanja Nyberg-Nilsson. Married. And not a word.

He called. A woman’s voice answered, “Tanja.” Sweet. Tranquil.

Who was he to disturb the peace? Hang up, hang up, hang up, said a voice. Your bridges are burned. It’s too late.

“Hello,” he said, swallowing heavily.

“Hello, who is this?”

Yes, who was it? He had tossed out the word father to a strange woman without thinking it over. Was it really a title he had earned?

“Gunnar,” he said, for lack of anything else.

“Gunnar who?” said the woman, in a west coast dialect. It sounded like the Gothenburg dialect and yet did not. “Gunnar Trolle?” she said a bit suspiciously. “Why are you calling? It’s been over for a long time, you know that.”

“Not Gunnar Trolle,” he said “Gunnar Nyberg.”

Silence. Had she hung up?

“Dad?” she said, almost inaudibly.

Her eyes, large as platters. Was it possible to keep going?

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Why…”

She fell silent.

“I’ve been thinking of you all recently,” he said.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

Yes, it’s something completely enormous.

“No. No, I-don’t know. I just have to make sure-that I didn’t completely destroy you. That’s all.”

“You promised never to contact us, Mom said.”

“I know. I kept my promise. The two of you are grown up now.”

“Pretty much,” she said. “We never talked about you. It was like you never existed. Bengt became our dad. Our real dad.”

“Bengt is your real dad,” he said. Who the hell was Bengt? “I’m something different. I would like to see you.”

“I only remember yelling and violence,” she said. “I don’t know what difference it would make.”

“Me neither. Would you forbid me to come?”

She was quiet. “No,” she said at last. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“You’re married,” he said, to hide the rejoicing inside him.

“Yes,” she said. “No kids yet. No grandchildren.”

“That’s not why I’m calling,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“How is Tommy?”

“Good. He lives in Stockholm. Östhammar. He has a son. There’s your grandchild.”

He received the small blows right on his nose cone, with a smile.

“And Gunilla?” he said hesitantly.

“She still lives in the house, with Dad. They’re thinking about switching to an apartment and getting a summer place.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Well, see you. I’ll be in touch.”

“ ’Bye,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

He would. More than ever before. That soft Uddevala dialect. The girl who had spoken such pronounced Stockholmish. He remembered her little Stockholm-accented vowels so well. It was possible to become someone else. To change dialects and become someone else.

Then it hit him. There and then, it hit him.

There and then Gunnar Nyberg caught the Kentucky Killer.

He didn’t have to be an American. It would even have been more convenient to become some other nationality. Maybe not a Norwegian or a Kenyan, but something plausible.

He paged frantically through the lists. He went through name after name after name and ignored the stars.

Hjelm came in and regarded the intensely reading giant with surprise. An enormous aura of energy was rising up above him like a thunderhead.

“Hi yourself,” Hjelm said.

“Shut up,” Nyberg said amiably.

Hjelm sat down and shut up. Nyberg kept reading. Fifteen, twenty minutes went by.

April, May. May 3: Steiner, Wilhelm, Austria, born 1942; Hün, Gaz, Mongolia, born 1964; Berntsen, Kaj, Denmark, born 1956; Mayer, Robert, New Zealand, born 1947; Harkiselassie, Winston, Ethiopia, born 1960; Stankovski, B-

Gunnar Nyberg stopped short.

“Bing bang boom,” he roared. “The famous Kentucky Killer. Get a photo of Wayne Jennings. Now!”

Hjelm stared at him and slunk out, suddenly immeasurably subordinate. Nyberg stood up and paced, no ran, around the room, like an overfed rat in a tiny hamster wheel.

Hjelm returned and tossed the large portrait of Wayne Jennings as a young man onto the desk.

“Haven’t you seen it before?” he said.

Nyberg stared at it. The youth with a broad smile and steel-blue eyes. He placed his hands on the photo, letting only the eyes peer out. He had seen those eyes before. In his mind he made the hair gray and moved the hairline up. He added a few wrinkles.

“Meet Robert Mayer,” he said, “chief of security at LinkCoop.”

Hjelm looked at the photo, and then at Nyberg. “Are you sure?”

“There was something familiar about him, but I didn’t put it together. He must have undergone some sort of plastic surgery, but you can’t get rid of your eyes and your gaze that easily. It’s him.”

“Okay.” Hjelm tried to calm down. “We have to get confirmation. It would be logical for you to contact him after the Benny Lundberg incident.”

“Me?” Nyberg gaped. “I’d just give him a whupping.”

“If anyone else goes, he’ll get suspicious. It has to be you. And it has to seem routine. Play dumb-that ought to work. Bring along some lousy, unrelated photo.” He rummaged in the desk drawer for a photograph of a man, any man at all. He found a passport photo of a man in his sixties smiling serenely. “This will be good,” he said. “Who is it?”

Nyberg looked at the picture. “It’s Kerstin’s pastor.”

Hjelm stopped short. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that he was sitting at Kerstin’s desk. “Do you know about it?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Nyberg. “She told me.”

Hjelm felt a little twinge and fingered the picture clumsily. “Okay. It’ll have to do. We’ll wipe it, and then you make sure to get Mayer’s fingerprints.”

“Can’t we just bring him in? Once we get the fingerprints, it’s over.”

“We might not get that far. There are powerful interests involved. A lawyer could get him released before they even get to fingerprints. And we can’t ask him-he’ll run. I’ll check with Hultin.”

He called Hultin, who came right in, as though he had been waiting outside. He quickly got a clear picture of the situation, then nodded at Hjelm.

“Okay, let’s do it. Gunnar will go back to Frihamnen. Mayer ought to see it as pure chance that Gunnar and Viggo showed up in Frihamnen, which it is-he’s had the idea to check the rest of the storage spaces there. He shouldn’t have any idea how far we’ve gotten. Provided it doesn’t leak at the FBI. I just got a report from Holm-she’s on her way. Benny Lundberg had some secrets in a safe-deposit box, but they were picked up this morning, probably also by this Robert Mayer with a ridiculous fake beard. We’re getting a composite sketch.”

“How will we do the fingerprint checks?” said Hjelm. “There are these new microvariants, you know.”

“Can you do them?”

“No. Jorge can.”

“Get him. We’ll all go together. In case he tries to run when Gunnar is there.”

Hjelm ran into his office and found Chavez contemplating “Nurse Gregs has wooden legs” and “Brother Kate’s breasts are great.” Were those children’s rhymes?

“Get a laptop with fingerprint equipment,” said Hjelm. “We’re going to take K.”

The children’s rhymes dissipated, and Chavez got a move on. He was the last one to arrive at Hultin’s service car and threw himself into the backseat beside Hjelm, placing the small computer on his lap. Hultin drove like a madman toward Täby. Gunnar Nyberg was in the passenger seat. He had pulled himself together and called LinkCoop, sounding perfectly blasé. Robert Mayer was there. He would be available for another couple of hours. Nyberg asked to discuss last night’s incidents with him. He needed to show him a photo.

That was fine.

They turned off of Norrtäljevägen, drove past Täby’s city center, which they could vaguely see through the drizzle, and arrived on a small side street.

“This isn’t good,” Nyberg said. “They have megasecurity. Sentry boxes at the gates. Monitoring systems. He’ll see everything.”

Hultin drove to a bus stop and pulled over. He thought for a moment, turned around, and drove back. It was incredibly frustrating. In the garage at police headquarters, Nyberg changed cars-he hopped into his own good old Renault. Then he followed them to Täby.

Hultin’s Volvo turned off into a parking spot next to an industrial building a few hundred feet before LinkCoop’s gate. There it stayed, in the storm.

When Nyberg drove up to the sentry box, everything was just as it had been at his last visit. On the surface.

The twin receptionists were the same too. Although he insisted that he could find his way to Mayer’s office himself, one of them walked ahead of him through the stylistically pure building; he became more convinced than ever that this was a well-thought-out marketing strategy. This time, however, his interest in the miniskirt and what it hid was minimal. Incredibly tense, he entered chief of security Robert Mayer’s office with the blinking-monitor walls.

Mayer fixed him with his ice-blue gaze, Wayne Jennings’s gaze, while Nyberg made the utmost effort to seem effortless. Mayer was otherwise relaxed; only his gaze was firmly focused, and it seemed to see right through him. The evening before, Mayer had tortured Benny Lundberg, beaten Viggo Norlander unconscious, and broken Nyberg’s own nasal bones in three places. Mayer himself seemed fresh as a daisy.

“That doesn’t look good,” he said, tapping his nose lightly.

“It’s a tough job,” Nyberg said, shaking Mayer’s extended hand. He refrained from using his Mr. Sweden grip this time.

“I’ve been looking more closely at what that building has been used for recently,” said Mayer, sitting down and folding his hands behind his head. “It really has been empty-all that’s there is old empty boxes. So it’s been accessible to anyone at all. And apparently for any purpose at all.”

Nyberg was blinded by Mayer’s professionalism. “It’s a horrible story.”

“It really is,” Mayer said sympathetically.

Nyberg felt like he was going to throw up. “Naturally, this places the break-in in a slightly different light.”

Mayer nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Benny reports a break-in in one place while at the same time the Kentucky Killer is at work nearby. Then he’s nearly murdered himself in that very same spot. What do you make of that?”

“Nothing, for the time being,” Nyberg said nonchalantly. “But one wonders what Benny Lundberg was up to.”

“It certainly seems very strange,” said Mayer. “We knew, of course, that he had a past as a skinhead, but we thought he deserved a chance at a new life. I suppose most of this would now indicate that he had something to do with the break-in.”

“I don’t quite understand,” said Nyberg with meticulous stupidity.

“I’m not going to get involved in your work,” Mayer said briskly. “That’s hardly necessary. You were close to getting him, after all.”

“It would be nice to have that honor, but the truth is that we were only down there doing a routine check of all the buildings in the vicinity.” Nyberg took out the photo of Kerstin Holm’s deceased pastor and extended it to Mayer. Upside down.

Mayer took it and had to turn it around. He glanced at it and shook his head.

Nyberg took the photo back and put it in his wallet.

“I’m sorry,” said Mayer. “Should I recognize him?”

“We picked him up in a car that was leaving Frihamnen at high speed. One of the warehouse workers thought he recognized him. That he might have worked at LinkCoop.”

“No, I don’t recognize him.”

Nyberg nodded doggedly and stood. He extended his hand toward Mayer, and they shook in a civilized fashion.

He had to check himself so that he didn’t run through the corridors. He smiled at the twin receptionists and received a double dividend. His car rolled calmly out through the gates and rounded the curve slowly.

Then for the last twenty yards he stepped on the gas; he thought he could allow himself that much. He bolted over to Hultin’s car and got in, dripping.

“Everything okay?” asked Hultin.

“I think so.” He handed the photo to Chavez in the backseat.

Hjelm watched the hand-off. There was something deeply macabre about the Kentucky Killer’s fingerprints being on the timid, cancer-ridden pastor’s face.

Wearing plastic gloves, Chavez put the photo into a little scanner fastened to the side of the laptop. Everything had been prepared in advance. Nyberg’s fingerprints had been fed in, as had Jennings’s. After an uncomfortably long time, the computer beeped. “Match” was blinking on the screen.

“We have a match for Gunnar Nyberg’s fingerprints,” said Chavez.

No one answered. They waited. The time dragged unbearably. Each second was a step toward hopelessness.

Then another ding-another match.

“Not Nyberg again?” said Hjelm.

“Match for Robert Mayer,” said Chavez. “Wayne Jennings and Robert Mayer are the same person.”

A silvery gray turbo Volvo in an industrial parking lot in Täby heaved a sigh of relief.

“We can’t just storm in,” said Hultin. “He’d see us at least two minutes beforehand. I imagine that ten seconds would be enough for him to disappear into thin air.”

They were quiet for a moment. Their thinking could have been called brainstorming if a storm hadn’t been howling as if through the skulls of the dead.

“I’ll have to take him myself,” said Nyberg. “I think I seemed dumb enough to have forgotten something.”

“You have a concussion,” said Hultin.

“That is correct,” said Nyberg, hopping over to his car. He rolled down the window. “Be prepared. I’ll call as soon as anything happens.”

“Be careful,” said Hultin. “This is one of the most experienced professional killers in the world.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Nyberg waved, irritated, and drove off.

At the sentry box he said he’d forgotten to ask about something; he was let in. By this point Mayer-Jennings had had him in sight for fifteen seconds; he might already be gone. He hoped with all his heart that he had given the impression of being useless, a sloppy cop. The twin receptionists smiled and announced him, and he managed to resist the dancing miniskirt; at least she wouldn’t die. Ideas and plans teemed through him. How should he act? In all likelihood, Mayer would have access to a weapon within a tenth of a second. At any hint of a threat, he would immediately kill Nyberg, who wouldn’t have a chance.

But he wanted to meet his grandchild. He made a decision.

Mayer stood waiting in the corridor outside his office; he looked a bit suspicious, which probably meant that he was roiling with suspicions.

Nyberg lit up when he saw him. “I’m sorry,” he said breathlessly, tilting his head. “I remembered that there was one more thing.”

Mayer raised an eyebrow and was ready. His hand moved a fraction of an inch toward the lapel of his jacket and pulled back.

Gunnar Nyberg delivered a tremendous uppercut that tossed Mayer through the corridor. His head crunched into the wall. He didn’t get up.

And that was that.