Bad Blood

5

That afternoon the A-Unit reconvened in the room that had once been called “Supreme Central Command,” whose quotation marks had become less and less ironic as the Power Murders investigation had gone on. Now a secret wish for a similar course of events whistled through the somewhat stale air. Otherwise the dominant atmosphere was relatively well-controlled fear; there was no question about the gravity of the situation.

Jan-Olov Hultin came out of the bathroom absorbed in some papers that looked as though he had used them and forgotten to flush them. He settled into his well-worn armchair and, after ten seconds, began. “The results of the Arlanda debacle are discouraging. The only concrete result is three complaints against officers. Two are against Viggo.”

Norlander’s expression managed to unite shame with pride.

“The first complaint is from the immigration officer at passport control,” Hultin continued without looking up. “She found your attention far too intense but says she’ll be satisfied if you are reprimanded. If we didn’t have other things to worry about, I wouldn’t have settled for that. Bonehead. The second complaint is in regard to a little girl you ran over while you were chasing the seriously drug-smuggling Robert E. Norton. You have a real flair for handling the fairer sex, one could say. Double bonehead. The third complaint is a bit hard to interpret. An officer from Märsta has been reported for having been, quote, ‘out of control’ in the concourse bar.”

Arto Söderstedt laughed shrilly and abruptly. “Sorry,” he said, calming himself. “His name is Adolfsson.”

Since further clarification was not forthcoming, Hultin continued neutrally. “So, on to the essentials. Edwin Andrew Reynolds does not exist. Naturally, the passport was a fake. And despite the laborious efforts of our data technicians, the passport photo is still not helpful.”

He turned the computer monitor around on the desk, to show an enlargement of a completely dark face. One could make out the shape of the face and a few contours; possibly he was blond. Otherwise it was unrevealing, and the man was anonymous.

“We don’t even know if he used his own picture. They will accept ten-year-old photos, of course, and it’s really not that hard to use a photo that has only some reasonable resemblance. In any case, customs’ new photo devices were wasted-all the pictures they took look about the same. They’re blaming this failure on the fact that the technology is brand new, and they didn’t have enough time to prepare properly, and so on.

“It’s a given that information about our man has gone out to hotels, Swedish Railways, airports, ferries, dung heaps, et cetera. I hardly think we should count on anything from those sources, but of course we will keep looking. One plus is that the media doesn’t know anything, even though the TV cameras showed up quickly at Arlanda. I imagine you’ll see the results tonight. Our most esteemed boss Mörner appeared and gave a statement, which guarantees some sort of quality TV, at least. Questions, anyone?”

“What happened with the roadblocks?” asked Gunnar Nyberg.

“The only thing we accomplished was a few hours of complete traffic chaos on the E4. The Arlanda traffic in every direction is quite simply too dense. In addition, it took a hell of a long time to set up the roadblocks. Only a true amateur would have been caught. We’re trying to identify all the taxi and bus drivers who were working around Arlanda at the time in question, but as you know, deregulation has made the taxi traffic in Stockholm unmanageable, so we’ll probably have to admit defeat on that point. Anything else?”

“Not a question, really,” said Kerstin Holm. “Just some information. According to the data register, our man was number eighteen to pass through my passport control. I’ve tried to get my impressions in order, and I’ve talked to the immigration officer, but neither of us has any memory of him at all. Maybe something will come up eventually.”

Hultin nodded and continued mysteriously. “To be on the safe side, I’ve made sure that all deaths reported to the police in the country, from now on, are reported directly to us, and the same goes for all suspected crimes against Americans in Sweden. If there’s the least suspicion of foul play, our brains must unanimously think: Could this have anything to do with our serial killer? This is our case now, even in an official sense, and it’s our only one, and the whole unit is part of it, and it is top-top secret, and no one around you must even catch a whiff of the words bestial-American-serial-killer-loose-in-Sweden. Wherever you are, think: Could the serial killer have anything to do with this bus being late? Might he have any connection at all to this bike accident or to that man’s incredibly spastic movements or to your better half’s increasingly loud snores? In other words, full focus.”

They understood.

“I have kept in rather intensive contact with the authorities in the United States,” Hultin continued. “Special Agent Ray Larner with the FBI has supplied us with a detailed account of last night’s events and a brief profile of the perpetrator. Concerning the results at Arlanda, more information will be streaming in during the next few days. Here is the broad outline as it stands right now.

“The Swedish literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel was tortured to death just before midnight Swedish time in a janitor’s closet at the Newark airport outside New York. It was a few hours before he was found. He had no ticket on him, but a flight to Arlanda that same night was found to be written down in his agenda. In other words, it was likely that the killer had taken his ticket, but a person can’t check in if the name on the ticket doesn’t match the name on the passport, so they took a chance and checked with SAS to see if Hassel’s ticket had been canceled. Why steal the ticket otherwise? His wallet and agenda and everything else were still there, after all. And they got lucky-they got hold of a ticket agent who remembered a late cancellation by phone, which was quickly followed by a late booking. But of course this all happened at night New York time, and in order to find the name of the person who booked last, they needed a data expert who could go into the computer and get exact booking times. They finally managed to tear someone matching that description from the arms of his sweetheart, and he dug up the name, after which it was delivered to us. Eleven minutes too late.”

Hultin paused and let the A-Unit’s slightly overloaded brains absorb this information.

“This caused us to face certain problems. The likely scenario is that the killer murdered Hassel, called in his name to cancel his ticket, then called again and booked the recently canceled spot in his own fake name. What does this tell us?”

Since everyone realized that the question was rhetorical, no one was interested in answering it. Hultin complicated the laws of rhetoric by answering it himself, with another question: “The basic issue is, of course: Why Sweden? What kind of evil thing have we done for this to happen to us? Let us assume the following. A notorious serial killer finds himself in an airport. His intention is to flee the country, hence the fake passport. Maybe he can feel the FBI breathing down his neck. But in his excitement, his desire to kill is acutely intensified. He waits in a suitable place until a suitable victim comes close. He does his deed, finds the ticket, and gets it into his head that it’s a suitable place to flee to; the plane is leaving soon, after all. But when he calls to book his seat, it turns out the plane is full. He knows, however, that one seat is definitely free. He takes a peek at the ticket, finds the difficult-to-pronounce name Lars-Erik Hassel along with a booking number, and calls to cancel, at which point a spot is vacant. What is wrong with this picture?”

“Spot the difference,” said Hjelm. No one laughed.

“It is actually almost possible to find several,” Chavez said with an unintentional but hardly career-boosting dig at Hultin, who didn’t blink. “The most important part of your scenario, Jan-Olov, is the coincidence. If he truly didn’t get the idea to travel to Sweden until after the murder, one might ask if he would really go to that much trouble to get to such an arbitrarily chosen country. The traffic to and from Newark is nonstop, after all. Why not just as well fly to Düsseldorf five minutes later or Cagliari eight minutes later?”

“Cagliari?” said Nyberg.

“It’s on Sardinia,” Hjelm said helpfully.

“It was just an example,” Chavez said impatiently. “The point is, Sweden doesn’t seem to have been chosen randomly at all. It feels a little extra unpleasant.”

“And then one might ask,” Kerstin Holm added, “if he would really risk first going up to the counter and getting a no, then calling in Hassel’s name, and then returning to the counter a few minutes later and asking the same question, only to get a yes this time. A man who has been eluding the FBI for twenty years would hardly take such a risk of attracting attention and being directly linked to a corpse that could be discovered at any moment.”

Hultin seemed a bit thrilled by two such keen objections to his scenario and countered his opponents: “On the other hand, there is an obvious moment of risk in what he actually did. If they had gotten hold of a data expert eleven minutes earlier, we would have had him. It was far from an idiot-proof plan.”

“I still think the evidence points to Sweden being his goal when he set out for the airport,” Chavez persisted. “But when he arrives, it turns out the flight is fully booked. Then his plan takes shape. Why not combine work and pleasure? Somehow he locates a solo traveler to Arlanda, murders him in his usual, pleasurable way, and takes his place, even though this involves a definite but limited risk. The risk of discovery, on the other hand, is an important ingredient in a serial killer’s enjoyment.”

“Then what does that suggest?” Hultin asked pedagogically.

“That his desire to come here to Sweden was so strong that it caused him to take a risk that he probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise. And in that case, he has a very definite goal here.”

“Ice-cold calculation combined with impulsiveness and a craving for pleasure. Something to sink our teeth into…”

“There’s nothing to indicate Sweden in his profile?” Arto Söderstedt wondered with exemplary precision.

“Not according to the FBI.” Hultin paged through the file. “Leaving the United States at all doesn’t really fit with his profile. His history is as follows.

“It all started twenty years ago in Kentucky, where victims who had been killed in the same awful manner began to show up. The wave then spread all over the Midwest. It blew up in the media, and soon the notorious killer was going by the name the Kentucky Killer. Within today’s deeply alarming serial killer cult, he’s a legend, one of the original characters, and he’s thought to have inspired many budding practitioners. He committed a series of eighteen murders in four years, then stopped abruptly for a decade and a half. Just over a year ago a new series began with exactly the same MO, this time in the northeastern United States. Hassel was his sixth victim in this latest series, his twenty-fourth overall. His twenty-fourth known victim, I should probably add.”

“A break of almost fifteen years,” Kerstin Holm mused aloud. “Is it really the same person and not a-what’s it called?”

“A copycat,” said Hjelm, using the English word.

Hultin shook his head. “The FBI has ruled that out. There are details of the MO that have never been made public and that only a few authorities at the bureau know of. Either he’s hidden his victims well for fifteen years, or else he quit and maybe settled down, before his craving for blood got the best of him once again. That’s the FBI’s scenario, anyway. That was why the bulletin went out for a white middle-aged man. Probability says that he was just under twenty-five when he began, so he’s just under forty-five now.”

“And ‘white’ is also based on probability, I assume?” said the chalk-white Söderstedt.

“Almost all serial killers are white men,” said Kerstin Holm. “A much-debated phenomenon. Maybe it’s some sort of hereditary compensation for the many hundreds of years of world domination that they are about to lose.”

“Haphazard fascism” came flying out of Hjelm.

The A-Unit considered this expression for a few long seconds. Even Hultin looked contemplative.

“What kinds of victims were they, in fact?” Chavez asked at last.

Hultin’s resumed page turning caused Hjelm to ponder the advantages of the Internet and encrypted e-mail, something that wasn’t too common yet. That was Jorge and Kerstin’s domain. They were also the ones who looked most irritated when information was slow in coming.

“Let’s see,” said Hultin after a long pause.

Chavez groaned quietly, which brought him a look that could mean yet another stain on his work record.

“There’s a lot of diversity in the victims,” their wise leader said at last. “Twenty-four people of diverse backgrounds. Five foreign citizens, including Hassel. Primarily white middle-aged men, to be sure, which an alert officer who’s familiar with feminism could easily interpret as implied self-contempt.”

“If it weren’t for the fact that he wasn’t middle-aged at all when he began murdering,” Kerstin Holm countered promptly.

The icy chill in Hultin’s long look could have been fatal. “Quite a few of them remain unidentified,” he finally continued. “Even though the list of missing persons in the United States is a book as thick as the Bible, the number still seems disproportionately large-ten out of twenty-four.”

“Is that something that’s changed?” Söderstedt asked alertly.

Yet another look from Hultin. Then he paged frenetically and got a hit. “All six victims in the second round have been identified. That means that ten of eighteen in the first round remain unidentified. A majority. Maybe some sort of conclusion can be drawn from that. However, I’m not ready to do that right now.”

“Could it be the case that the MO itself has made identification difficult?” asked Hjelm.

Clearly their minds were sharp. Many of them had been waiting a long time for this very moment. To a person, they ignored the degree of cynicism inherent in this wait.

“No,” Hultin answered. “The atrocities don’t include torn-out teeth or chopped-off fingertips.”

“What do they include, then?” Nyberg asked.

“Wait.” Chavez was staring down into his overflowing notebook. “We weren’t quite finished. Who were the identified victims? Does he concentrate on some particular social class?”

Hultin once again swung his mental machete through the jungle of paper. While he searched, he said, “Many of your questions will be answered by the complete FBI report, which Special Agent Larner is going to fax over this afternoon, but okay, we might as well anticipate the events…”

Then he found what he was looking for.

“The eight people identified in the first wave were relatively highly educated. He seems to have a weakness for academics. The six in the second wave were more varied. Maybe he’s gone and become a democrat.”

“Get to sex sometime,” said Kerstin Holm abruptly.

A moment of bewildered silence ensued among the male audience. Then Hultin understood: “A single woman in the first group, out of eighteen. Two out of six in the second.”

“There are a few differences after all,” Holm summarized.

“Like I said,” said Hultin, “perhaps he’s become a democrat when it comes to sex, too. Let’s wait and see what Larner has to say about it. He’s followed the case from the very start. In the seventies, based on the MO, they narrowed it down to a group of, if not suspects, then at least potential perpetrators. It turned out to have certain similarities to a method of torture from, believe it or not, the Vietnam War. A specific and extremely unofficial American task force used it to get the Vietcong to talk without screaming. An utterly silent method of torture, tailor made for the jungle. Since the existence of the task force was officially denied and brushed off as just another Vietnam myth, it was extremely difficult for Larner to get names. He hinted that he was stepping on quite a few tender and highly placed toes, and likely he was making a fool of himself and destroying his chances for promotion to boot. But slowly and surely, he tracked down the task force, which went by the disagreeable code name ‘Commando Cool,’ and ferreted out the names of those involved. Above all, one person who could almost have been called a suspect crystallized: the group leader, a Wayne Jennings, from none other than Kentucky. There was never any proof, but Larner followed Jennings wherever he went. Then something unanticipated happened. Jennings got tired of the surveillance and tried to evade the FBI-and he got into a head-on car collision. Larner was there himself and saw him burn up.”

“Did the murders continue after that?” Chavez asked.

“Yes, unfortunately. There were two more in quick succession, and then they stopped. Larner was blamed for having hounded an innocent man to death. There was a trial. He survived it, sure, but he fell in the hierarchy. And it didn’t get any better for him when, after fifteen years of walking into a headwind, he realized that the killer had started up again. For just over a year now, Ray Larner has been back where he started with the elusive Kentucky Killer. I don’t envy him.”

“You should,” said Söderstedt. “He isn’t Larner’s responsibility anymore-he’s yours. He’s the one who’s free, not you.” Söderstedt paused, then continued maliciously: “You’re taking over from scratch after twenty years of intensive FBI investigations that had resources equivalent to the Swedish GDP.”

Hultin observed him neutrally.

“So what was so special about Commando Cool’s modus operandi?” Gunnar Nyberg tried. “How did that literary critic die?”

Hultin turned to him with an expression that could have been interpreted as suppressed relief. “The point is that it’s two different things,” he said. “The serial killer makes use of what we can call a personal application of Commando Cool’s method. The method is based on a single special instrument: specially designed micromechanical pincers that, when closed, closely resemble a terrifying cannula. A big syringe. It’s driven into the throat from the side. With the help of small control wires, tiny claws unfurl inside the trachea and grip the vocal cords in a manner that makes it impossible for any sound to escape the lips of the victim. He or she is rendered completely silent. Even in a tight spot in the jungle with Vietcong soldiers in the bushes all over, you can see to a bit of refreshing torture.

“Once the victim is silenced, you can then heap on the conventional methods, best directed at fingernails and genitals, where small, quiet motions incur the most pain. And then you just release the grip around the vocal cords a tiny bit so that something like a whisper can slip out. The victim can reveal his secret, quietly, quietly. For this purpose, Commando Cool developed related pincers, based on the same principles as the vocal cord pincers, but these other ones were aimed at the central ganglia in the neck, which are tugged and pulled a little bit from the inside, at which point an appalling pain radiates up into the head and down through the body. The two holes in the neck with their associated internal injuries have been discovered on all twenty-four victims of the Kentucky Killer, and there have also been distinctive torture wounds on their genitals and fingers.

“Larner has been a bit secretive about what distinguishes the workings of our friend from those of the commando task force, but obviously it has to do with the design of the two micropincers. It’s as though something like an industrial development process was used to make the pincers even more perfect for their atrocious purpose.”

Hultin looked down at his lectern.

“I want you to restrain yourselves for a second now, so you can absorb all this,” he said gravely. “Lars-Erik Hassel died one of the most horrific deaths a person can die. I would like you to think carefully about what we’re up against. It doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever had to deal with in our whole lives. There’s not an ounce of similarity to our good old Power Murderer. It isn’t really possible to imagine such ice-cold indifference to other people’s lives and such twisted pleasure at their suffering. This is a seriously damaged person of the sort that the American system seems to produce on an assembly line, and that they would have been welcome to refrain from exporting. But now he’s here. And the only thing we can really do is to wait for him to start. It could be a long time; it could be tomorrow. But it will happen, and we have to be prepared.”

Hultin stood to go to the restroom. He had held it for a surprisingly long time for someone who was incontinent. As he left, he said to the dispersing group, “As soon as I receive Ray Larner’s material, you’ll get copies. The outcome of this case hinges on you all studying it diligently.” He nodded at them and hurried toward his private, special door.

Jorge Chavez interrupted his departure: “How old is Edwin Reynolds, according to the passport?”

Hultin made a stiff face, dug through his pile of papers with his legs in a need-to-pee stance, and brought out a copy of the photographed passport page. “Thirty-two this year.”

Chavez nodded. “Of course the passport was fake,” he said, “but why choose to play fifteen years younger than he must, in all likelihood, be?”

“An element of risk, maybe,” said Hultin against his better judgment, and rushed off with papers floating through the air.

Chavez and Hjelm looked at each other.

Hjelm shrugged. “Well, he could have bought or stolen a ready-made fake passport.”

“Possibly,” said Chavez.

But no one could really shake the feeling that something was wrong. Utterly wrong.