Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (27 page)

Now she looked into his eyes. She had gotten what she needed. There and then, in her deep, distressed, empty eyes, he saw the spark ignite again. The fabulous inexhaustibility of her eyes.

He wondered what she saw in his face. A clown who runs around trying to hide his erection? He hoped there was a trace of something more.

“Maybe they’re not incompatible,” she said, and her newfound energy didn’t erase her thoughtful tone. “Expressing contempt for life and clinical perfection in one and the same action. It
is
one and the same action, after all.”

They sank into pondering. The professional and the private
blended uncontrollably into each other. Nothing in this life was isolated.

He sensed that it was his turn. He took her hand again.

She didn’t resist.

“Was what we had before just sex?” he asked without quavering. “Is there such a thing as ‘just sex’?”

She smiled a bit grimly and kept hold of his hand.

“There probably isn’t,” she said. “And in any case, what we had wasn’t that. It was—confusing. Too confusing. I had just gotten out of a hellish relationship with a man who raped me without understanding that that’s what he was doing. He was a policeman, you know that much, and then I ended up with another policeman who was the complete opposite. Hard-boiled and full of bright ideas as a cop, tender and awkward privately. The pictures got all mixed up. I had to get away from it. You fled back into the bosom of your family. I didn’t have anything like that, so I fled in my own way.”

“In one way, life is easier than ever,” said Paul. “In another, it’s harder.”

She looked into his eyes. “How do you mean?”

“I don’t really know. I have this feeling that the walls are closing in around us. We’ve cracked open the door, but now it’s being closed again. And the walls are beginning to creep in.” He was searching for words, but it was going slowly. He was trying to formulate things he had never formulated before. “I don’t know if it’s comprehensible.”

“I think it is,” she said. “You actually have changed.”

“A little bit, maybe,” he said, and paused. “Just a little on the surface, but it has to start somewhere. Our inherited patterns of habit break us down before we even get a chance to
start
living. I haven’t gone through any revolutionary outer changes, as you have; it’s actually been a pretty uneventful year. But a few new possibilities have opened up.”

She nodded. The conversation died away but seemed to be continuing inside them. Their eyes drifted away into nothing. Finally she said, “I’m starting to understand how important it is that we catch him.”

He nodded. He knew what she meant.

They left the restaurant and walked hand in hand up the stairs. They stopped outside his room.

“What should we say?” she said. “Seven?”

He sighed and smiled. “Okay, breakfast at seven o’clock.”

“I’ll knock on your door. Try not to be in the shower.”

He chuckled. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went to her room. He remained standing in the corridor for a few minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He called Larner and asked.

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

“Was that when you started thinking CIA?”

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

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

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

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

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

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