Bad Blood

8

Arto Söderstedt lived with his wife and five children in the inner city and thought it wonderful. He was convinced that the children thought it wonderful too, from the three-year-old to the thirteen-year-old. Every time he dropped them off at day care and school, he found himself surrounded by self-tormentors who were convinced that their children’s greatest dream was to have their own garden patch to romp around in. He often thought about the psychosocial mechanisms that caused the majority of inner-city parents to have a constant guilty conscience.

The suburban parents he met were different. All of them made an extreme effort to convince their friends that they had found heaven on earth. As a rule, upon closer inspection, the heaven that was suburbia turned out to consist of three things: one, you could let the children out in the yard and avoid being in their vicinity; two, it was easier to park your car; and three, you could grill outdoors.

The tension-loaded contradiction between thwarted conscience and inflated self-esteem often resulted in yet another family moving van heading north, south, or west.

Söderstedt had seen the grass on both sides of the fence. When the A-Unit was made permanent, his family had moved from Västerås, with its private homes, to Bondegatan on Södermalm. Personally, he didn’t miss the forced interaction with neighbors he had nothing in common with, nor the competition-oriented self-righteousness that came with homeownership, nor the fixation on the car, nor the enormous distance to everything, nor the useless public transportation system, nor the barbecue parties, nor the tranquil state of vegetation, nor the artificial proximity to nature, nor the predictable discussions about hoses, nor the lawn and the garden that sucked up more time than money, nor the architecture that lacked history and fantasy, nor the empty roads, nor the absolute lack of culture. And when it came to the children, he had produced a small list of arguments for use by inner-city parents when aggressive suburbanites pressed them up against the wall with accusations of child abuse. Memories of childhood follow a person throughout his entire life, and if these memories are of playgrounds, gravel lots, and lonely roads rather than diverse building facades, church steeples, and people, then that’s a deciding factor. In the city the likelihood that a child will get a good education is greater, visits to the theater and museums are considerably more numerous, access to activities is enormous, encounters with people of all sorts are legion. In general, in the city one’s powers of observation and vigilance are developed in a way that lacks a counterpart outside.

What struck Söderstedt now, as he sauntered through this very city, was that this whole manner of thinking was dictated by a drummed-in guilty conscience.

What kind of societal stereotypes truly determined the picture of happiness?

Not, in any case, the five-room apartment on Bondegatan where the seven-person household was without doubt a bit cramped. The question was whether it really mattered that much.

Since Anja had taken care of the day’s deliveries of their children, he permitted himself to walk from Söder to Kungsholmen; he had a feeling that it would be the last time he would be allowed that luxury for a long time. When he stepped into the police station on that beautiful early-autumn morning, he continued straight to the service vehicle pool and checked out a robust Audi. He pocketed the keys and stepped into the elevator.

Arto Söderstedt caught a glimpse of himself in the elevator mirror. He’d made it through another summer without getting skin cancer, he thought, looking for some wood to knock on. He had the kind of skin that only Finns and Englishmen have, he thought with jovial prejudice, the absolutely white-through kind that doesn’t have a chance of turning anything other than red in the sun. It was the fourth of September, and he had just managed to take the crucial leap from SPF 15, the variety for newborns, to SPF 12.

Actually, he liked autumn best.

Except maybe not this autumn.

He had read up on serial killers in connection with the Power Murders, and as usual he found himself giving a few lectures to the group. Since then he had rationed them out. He was afraid that the time for rationing would soon be over. Sweden’s last levee had broken, and violent crime of an international character, to cite a familiar source, had arrived. It would hardly be an isolated incident.

The fact was, he recognized the Kentucky Killer. He had read about him and vaguely remembered him. He had been one of the first in a long series of such killers.

There was something strange about his modus operandi, something that didn’t really match up with the profile of a serial killer. Those terrifying pincers… he couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was wrong. He needed to speak directly with Ray Larner at the FBI, but he didn’t know how to get past Hultin. Certainly Hultin was the best boss he’d ever worked under, but he lacked Söderstedt’s own insights into the gray areas of the workings of justice. Söderstedt had once been a defense attorney, one of the most prominent in Finland, and he had defended the worst of the worst in the upper echelons. Then his conscience had rebelled; he’d quit, fled to Sweden, enrolled in police college at a slightly advanced age, and settled down as a policeman in Västerås. He had gotten it into his head that an attorney’s role as a vicarious criminal could be useful in this case. There had to be some sort of identification in order to catch a serial killer, he knew that.

So lost was he in his reflections about inner-city parents and serial killers that he didn’t notice he was late. Which wasn’t like him. So he was quite surprised to open the door to “Supreme Central Command” and find not only everyone already gathered there but Waldemar Mörner himself sitting at Hultin’s lectern, drumming his fingers.

Because he hadn’t had a chance to prepare himself for the confrontation, he burst into spontaneous peals of laughter. This didn’t go over very well. Mörner looked audaciously fresh, unaffected by the incident at Arlanda, but Söderstedt’s laughter caused him to put a small, permanent mental mark on Söderstedt’s record. He wrinkled one eyebrow for a short but murderous second. Then he was himself again.

“I hope lateness won’t become a habit for you, Söderstedt,” he said sternly. “We’re facing a task of a nature we have never come close to in modern times in this country. But tempus fugit, and we will too. Don’t allow the four complaints from Arlanda to disturb your work; instead let’s move forward with the extensive investigation.”

“Four?” said Norlander.

“Currently,” Hultin said neutrally.

Mörner didn’t hear them but continued with glowing passion: “After extensive work in the upper echelons, I have persuaded them that this case should be entrusted into your warm hands, and I sincerely hope that you don’t fall short of the confidence that I have placed in you. Inasmuch as a mustering of strength is needed, I urge you to develop expanded horizons and widened scopes. Your joint capital is firmly rooted in the visions of the management team, and the future looks bright. The light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Ahead of your great burden lies a fair reward. Seize the day, make the most of every minute, pull out all the stops. Work hard now, gentlemen. And lady, of course. Lady. The welfare of Sweden rests in your hands.”

With these words of wisdom, Mörner departed, glancing at the clock.

The room fell silent. Language itself seemed to have become constipated. After this address, no word would be innocent. Any one might become a weapon of murder aimed at the heart of the Swedish language.

“With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Hultin said neutrally, grasping wisely at a proverb in order to normalize the linguistic situation. “I have spent the night with the Kentucky Killer,” he continued.

“Then he ought to be easy to locate,” said Söderstedt, who hadn’t quite collected himself yet.

Hultin ignored him. “A summary has been distributed to your offices. There is an enormous amount of material, and somewhere in there is the hidden link to Sweden. My examination didn’t turn up anything new, but if you have extra time, you can study it in detail. I’m afraid, however, that the killer will have to start up again for us to obtain any adequate clues.”

“What if he’s come here to retire?” Gunnar Nyberg longed profoundly for retirement himself. “Then we’d sit here twiddling our thumbs until we’re retired.”

The thought did not seem entirely repellent to Nyberg. He had been shot in the throat during the hunt for the Power Murderer. The industrious church vocalist had been close to having sung his last note. After six months’ convalescence, he had returned to the Nacka church choir; his bass had become deeper, taken on a more extensive tone, and these days he sang in jubilation, less at the benevolence of God, even if that were in his thoughts, than at the fact that he had a voice at all. For Nyberg, the Kentucky Killer’s vocal cord pincers were identical to the devil’s pitchfork. He ran the risk of becoming personally engaged in a way that he carefully avoided these days, in anticipation of his retirement. His problem was that that lay twenty years in the future.

“He came here with fresh blood on his hands,” Hultin answered. “I don’t think that’s how a person ends his career. He could very well have slunk in completely unnoticed, but his craving got the upper hand. No, he has some sort of target-”

“That’s something I’ve been thinking about,” said the other church singer, Kerstin Holm. She was dressed in black as always, with a little black leather skirt of the type that Hjelm couldn’t help reacting to. It suddenly threw him back in time to just over a year ago. Yesterday’s homey feeling seemed to have opened the forbidden doors, and he found himself wondering how she really felt, who the new man in her life was, and what she thought of him now, afterward. Their relationship had been intense but unreal. Did she hate him? Sometimes he imagined so. Had he left her? Or was she the one who had left him? Everything was still shrouded in mist. Misterioso, he thought.

He was abruptly brought back to reality by her words. “Serial killing is about being seen,” she said thoughtfully. Her contributions always resonated in a slightly different way. A womanly way, maybe. “The victims are meant to see their tormentor and therefore their murderer. A person doesn’t commit serial murders and then hide the victims. That would be something else. What are things like on that front? Has our man ever hidden a victim?”

Hultin flipped through pages again. “It doesn’t seem like it, based on a quick look, but if you think it’s important, you should investigate further.”

“I think pretty much all of us have had a vague sense that something is a bit wrong. Not a lot, but a little. He is bestially bloodthirsty but takes a fifteen-year break. He brings a fake passport to the airport but hasn’t booked a seat. He murders Hassel in the middle of the evening rush at one of the largest airports in the world without leaving a trace, but he doesn’t hide the body. He has all the attributes of a classic serial killer, but at the same time there’s a bit of a clinical hit-man professionalism to him. Does he really want to be seen? Or was he telling us where he was going? Can we also find a clue as to why he came here? We’ve discussed it before, but the combination seems not only dangerous but also wrong. Somehow.”

It was that somehow, if anything, that everyone could get on board with.

“Does it have something to do with Hassel personally, after all?” Hjelm dared to ask. “I’ve looked at his Maoist writings from the seventies, and they’re no trifling matter.” He picked at his bandaged eyebrow. “Let’s toy with the thought that the Kentucky Killer is KGB and that the wave of American murders is the result of Soviet imports. Hence the many unidentified victims. Did Hassel have some sort of information from the good old seventies that he couldn’t be allowed to divulge? Was he just one in a series of security risks or traitors or double agents? Maybe we could check unofficially with Larner to see if that idea has come up before.”

“In any case,” Kerstin Holm replied eagerly, “that could explain the long break. He-or maybe a whole cadre-was quite simply called home sometime shortly after Brezhnev’s death in the early eighties. The KGB decreased its activity then; that fits quite nicely. Then fifteen years later discontent spreads in Russia, the Communists make headway, agents are taken out of the deep freeze, and our friend is sent back to the United States to start afresh.”

“He’s finished with the American list and switches over to the Swedish one,” Hjelm took up the baton of their appealing relay. “He weighs the risks with professional precision: ‘How can I get the message to the intended victims that I’m coming, without getting caught myself?’ Because it obviously is a matter of being seen, but in a different way than we first thought; this is a matter of being seen by those who are to be punished. He’s on a crusade; his goal is to strike fear in the hearts of all traitors. They must be informed that the state isn’t dead, that it’s never possible to flee the Soviet state; that it’s in good health as a state within a state.”

“On the other hand,” Holm added, “he’s aware that initially the message will reach only the police. That means he’s now either waiting for the usual old leaks to start and for everything to come out, or else he’s aiming for the police and, if that’s the case, a very small group of police: just the ones he knows in advance will take up the case.”

“If anyone here in the A-Unit, or higher up, has a past that is similar to Lars-Erik Hassel’s,” Hjelm continued, “then he should probably be on guard.”

“And come forward,” said Holm.

“Come out of the closet,” said Hjelm.

It was quiet. Suddenly they had not only taken the leap to international politics and the aftermath of the Cold War-they had also dragged in the A-Unit personally. Could the Kentucky Killer really be that sophisticated?

Was he after one of them?

“What do we know about Mörner’s background?” Hjelm said wickedly.

In among the suspicious, sweeping glances, he caught Kerstin’s. It was the first time in a long time they’d exchanged pleased looks, which hid a great deal. She smiled a reserved and captivating smile.

Hultin did not smile. “Mörner is hardly a security risk for anyone other than himself,” he said sternly. “Is there anyone else who feels like coming out of the closet?”

No one else felt like it.

Hultin continued silkily, “All due respect to speculations, but this one deserves the paranoia prize of the year. From the banal fact that the body was discovered before the plane landed, you are drawing the elegant conclusion that the KGB is targeting the A-Unit, that the entire wave of serial murders in the United States is based on Soviet indoctrination, that the twenty-four victims, whom you have in no way investigated more closely, were Soviet traitors, that all of this has gone over the heads of the FBI, and that one of your close colleagues has had contact with the KGB. You really covered a lot.”

“But wasn’t it fun?” Hjelm said just as silkily.

Hultin ignored this rejoinder and raised his voice: “If this has anything to do with international political power plays, then we are a very, very small piece in the game. Neither Larner nor I has overlooked that risk. But if it is the case, it hardly looks the way you’re describing it. We wouldn’t be able to see more than the contours of it.”

“Anyway, the point is,” said Holm, “that there’s a lot we can’t see.”

“Let’s do this,” said Hultin in a conciliatory tone. “You, Kerstin, take on the American victims: make a close study of who they actually were and what the FBI says about them, and see if there is any sort of link among them, or between them and Sweden. See if you can find anything from your point of view that the FBI might have missed from theirs. It’s a hard nut to crack, so to speak, but blame yourself.”

Hultin rummaged through his papers and seemed, for a second, to be as disorganized as they were. Then he pulled himself together. “This meeting was actually meant for Jorge, who spent the whole night surfing the Internet.”

Chavez was sitting in a corner, exhausted. For a person who spent a lot of time on the Net, with all its virtual cross-connections, paranoia was always a temptation, and he appeared tempted. But also very, very tired.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know if we can bear to listen to much more right now. But I’ve chatted for several hours with a group that is well hidden on the Net, namely FASK, Fans of American Serial Killers, a shady organization whose Web site required some finesse and, I’ll admit it, a financial contribution to get into. The Kentucky Killer goes quite simply by the designation K, and the crazies in FASK consider him to be a great hero. They knew that K had killed again but not, as far as I could tell, that he had made his way to Sweden, which probably indicates that their contacts, fortunately, don’t go that high up.”

“I hope you didn’t leave behind a bunch of tracks that would lead here,” said Hultin, who had only moderate insights into the ring-dance of the Web.

“I was well disguised,” Chavez said laconically. “Anyway, they had a whole bunch of theories about K that it might be good for us to be aware of. Most of them were crazy ideas like Kerstin and Paul’s, but others were more sensible. Even they think there’s some sort of professionalism involved. A few think he’s high up in the military. Apparently there was a secret commander behind the Vietnam task force Commando Cool who was somehow directly below the president. His identity is unknown; that was the only thing Larner never caught, but in these circles he goes by the name Balls; apparently they’ve never seen The Pink Panther. The rumor is that Balls personally invented the notorious vocal cord pincers, and that since then he has occupied a central position within the Pentagon. Larner’s suspect, the guy with the country singer name, who died in the car crash-”

“Wayne Jennings. Not Waylon,” corrected Hultin.

“Thanks. According to FASK, he was just Balls’s henchman. The truly important operations in Vietnam were carried out under the personal leadership of Balls. Again, according to FASK. They’re also convinced that Balls is K. Apparently he’s a general at this point. According to the serial killers’ cheerleaders, he stopped killing when he was transferred to Washington, D.C., and got Vietnam out of his blood, and he started up again when he retired. The reasoning itself seems pretty coherent, I think.”

“But it can hardly be your Balls who’s come here,” Hultin said. “He was traveling with a thirty-two-year-old’s passport.”

Chavez nodded with as much enthusiasm as his exhaustion would allow.

“Exactly. That gives us a little perspective on the FBI’s reasoning. The whole theory that the Kentucky Killer has come to Sweden actually rests on pretty flimsy grounds. It was a quick, smart conclusion under the circumstances, but it is based on something as trivial as Hassel not having a ticket on him. Then the speedy hypothesis became an axiom. We don’t even know when Hassel was murdered. Our literary critic could very well have had some whim at the airport, thought of something else he had to do, and decided to stay another night or two. Maybe he called to cancel his own ticket, then threw it away. Maybe he stuck around for a while and had a few drinks. On the way to the toilet he was attacked and murdered. Meanwhile a young criminal with a fake passport arrived at the airport, maybe on the run from angry bookies or something, and wanted to get the first international flight he could find a seat on. The plane to Stockholm was going to take off in about an hour, and he hopped on. In which case, the Kentucky Killer never left the country. Does that sound unreasonable?”

Hultin looked around the room. Since no one else seemed willing, he raised the objections himself. He did so honorably.

“Aside from the fact that there are a few too many coincidences, it seems pretty bizarre that Hassel would have gone to the airport only to change his mind once he was already there, not bother to check in an hour ahead of time as is required, wait for at least half an hour, and then call to cancel instead of just walking up to the ticket counter.”

“To my ears it sounds like classic alcoholic behavior,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “Maybe he arrived too late, wandered about aimlessly, realized he had missed the check-in deadline, thought that meant he’d missed the flight, and called the desk in order to avoid facing the contempt of the ground agent. Then he kept boozing at the airport and picked a fight with the wrong person. In which case, Jorge’s hypothesis would work better.”

“The problem,” Hultin said coldly, “is that the autopsy didn’t show any elevated alcohol levels in the blood. And no drugs. You would know that if you’d followed orders and read Larner’s report.”

“What happened to his luggage?” Nyberg asked, as if to confirm Hultin’s theory that he had read inadequately.

“It was recovered next to him,” Hultin said, “which bolsters the image of a cold-blooded murder. Not only did he silently carry Hassel into a closet in the middle of the rush of people at Newark; he also managed to get the luggage in.” He sighed. “Let’s try to apply some ice-cold logic here. The cancellation came seventeen minutes before departure. The employees obviously assumed that it was Hassel calling, and that he was calling from outside the airport. But if he was calling from outside to cancel, then why would he have gone to the airport? Because it’s clear that he did: for one thing, the crime scene investigation shows that the closet was indisputably the site of the murder; for another, it wouldn’t have been possible to carry a corpse in through a busy airport corridor. Okay? So two possibilities remain. One: that he himself called from the airport, which is ruled out by its own absurdity, because in that case he (a) would have made it to the plane-after all, Reynolds did, and he arrived five minutes later-or (b) changed his mind on a whim at the last minute, and then why call at all-if he was sober? Why not just turn around and take a taxi back to Manhattan? And two: that someone else called in his name-and if so, then this other person had a good reason to do so, and the best reason seems, at the moment, to be that he wanted to get on the flight to Stockholm at any price. Hayden’s intuitive hypothesis still seems to be a valid working hypothesis, if not yet an axiom.”

“Okay.” Chavez was acting as though he had sniffed some ammonia during his break in the round. “It wasn’t my hypothesis, anyway. Mine’s based on Balls. If our man is now a retired general, it shouldn’t be too big a problem for him to put down some false tracks; there would be lots of ambitious thirty-two-year-old officers at his disposal to use as less-than-scrupulous stand-ins. For some reason, Balls felt that now was the time to be rid of the FBI; maybe he thought Larner’s persistence was becoming irritating. So then, what is the safest way to render the FBI harmless? You leave the country. The FBI is not the CIA; the FBI’s domain is very distinct: within the borders of the United States. So if you carefully choose a country where the police have scanty resources, where the priorities are incomprehensible, where the directors are appointed with strange methods, and where the police are, to put it bluntly, likely to be bumbling, and you then murder a citizen of that country, steal his ticket home, and make sure that your stand-in is capable of suggesting that you have arrived in the country in question, then the FBI’s conclusion is that you have gotten away. Just like Paul and Kerstin, I am of the opinion that there might be a message in the somewhat curious sequence of events at the airport, but that it is directed at the FBI rather than at Sweden, and that the entire Swedish part of this case might well be faked. I have my doubts that he’s here. The stand-in came in, switched passports, and went back without leaving Arlanda, and waiting at home was a retired but far-from-powerless general who made sure the stand-in advanced a few steps in his career.”

The A-Unit looked listless, about to hit a wall. So many hypotheses had whizzed around during the past hour that the team needed fresh air. Viggo Norlander, the only one who had remained quiet, wearing a mental dunce cap after his own little sequence of airport events, got to summarize the whole thing: “In other words, we’re spinning our wheels.”

“That’s exactly right,” Hultin said good-naturedly.