Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (29 page)

“The impulse,” he said with sudden calm. “Clear as a bell.”

He turned abruptly and went over to Larner, who was regarding him with deep skepticism.

“I’ve got him,” he said, his eyes boring into Larner’s.

Then he rushed down the stairs. Larner looked at Holm, bewildered. She nodded, and they rushed after him. He was outside on the street with Schonbauer, who had just shoved a substantial drug manufacturer into one of the black cars.

Schonbauer got into the driver’s seat in one of the other cars; Hjelm hopped in, and Holm and Larner scrambled into the back. They drove off. Hjelm didn’t say a word.

“What are we doing?” Larner said after fifteen minutes.

“Looking at a picture,” said Hjelm.

They said no more on the way back to the FBI building. When they arrived, they reached the corridor, and Hjelm got to Larner’s office ahead of the others. He grabbed Wayne Jennings’s thick file and flipped through the photographs. He found the horrible picture of Jennings and the Vietnamese man and placed it to the side. Then he held up the photo of Jennings with a child on his lap.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Jennings’s son,” Larner said, surprised. “Lamar.”

Hjelm placed the picture on the desk. Jennings was dressed like a cowboy, minus the hat: jeans; a red, white, and blue flannel shirt; and sandy brown snakeskin boots. He had his hand on his son’s head, but he wasn’t smiling; his face was expressionless, and the ice-cold blue gaze penetrated the camera. You might almost get the impression that he was pressing his son’s head down, as if to hold him in place. The son was perhaps ten years old, just as blond and blue-eyed, but his eyes hardly seemed to see. Upon closer examination, one could make out an absentness in them, as if he were only a shell.

“This is K,” Hjelm said. “Both of them.”

His manic state ending, he shed the dramatic persona and became a policeman again. He cleared his throat. “What happened to Jennings’s family after he died?”

“They lived in the same place for a few years. Then his wife
killed herself. The boy ended up in an orphanage and then with foster parents.”

“How old was the boy?”

“He was eleven, I think, when Jennings died.”

“He must have seen it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Hjelm ran his hand through his hair and collected himself. “He must have seen it. He must have seen his father in action.”

He took a deep breath.

“That explains the difference between the first and second rounds, and it explains why he went to Sweden. The first round was Wayne Jennings’s work, just as you thought all along, Ray. They are executions, professional jobs—we can come back to why. But the second round is the work of a seriously damaged person. It is the work of his son.

“He must have surprised his father, while he was torturing someone, when he was around nine or ten. It destroyed him—what else could it have done? We have to assume that it was the culmination of a hellish childhood of abuse and iciness, the whole shebang. When his father dies, the son gets his hands on his pincers; he’s seen him do the worst with them, the most nightmarish deeds imaginable, and he knows every little movement. They become heirlooms, but he doesn’t know what to do with them; he’s no murderer, he’s the murdered. Then at some point something happens. I bet he somehow finds out … that his father is alive.

“I’m convinced that Wayne Jennings is alive, that he faked that car accident. It took some resources, but he had a lot of resources behind him. He went underground and committed another couple of murders, mostly, I think, to punish you, Ray, for your stubbornness and in order, so to speak, to posthumously prove his innocence. Murders number seventeen and eighteen resulted in your ending up in a trial.

“Then Jennings flees the country. The wave of murders
stops. Jennings’s so-called widow kills herself; either she knows that her husband is the Kentucky Killer and has known it the whole time and can’t take it any longer, or else she figures it out and kills herself in horror. Much later when their son is an adult, he finds out his father is alive, and he realizes that even his mother’s suicide was the work of his father. In addition, he now has a culprit to blame for his own suffering.

“He is already broken, beyond all hope; now he becomes a murderer as well. His are crimes of insanity; he’s letting off steam or murdering for lust, we don’t know which, but he’s practicing, too: practicing for the real murder, the only important murder, the murder of his father. Somehow, he finds out that his father is living abroad—in Sweden—and decides to hunt him down. He somehow obtains an address in Sweden—it’s a hidden cabin some forty miles north of Stockholm. He travels there with a fake passport. What happens next is unclear—but in any case, we don’t have just one Kentucky Killer in Sweden—we have two.”

Larner sank down into his chair, closed his eyes, and thought.

“I remember that boy so well,” he said slowly. “He seemed pretty disturbed—you’re right about that. Always sat in his mom’s lap, never said a word, seemed almost autistic. And it would explain an awful lot. What do you think, Jerry?”

Schonbauer sat on the desk, dangling his legs; apparently this was his thinking position. He was silent for a bit while his legs were swinging. The table creaked alarmingly.

“It’s a long shot,” he said. “But it might be worth looking into.”

“It might be easy, too,” said Holm. “Do you have a phone book?”

Chuckling, Larner tossed an enormous phone book up onto the desk.

Holm paged through it. Then, without asking permission,
she tore out a page. “There’s one Lamar Jennings in New York,” she said. “In Queens.”

“Let’s go,” Larner said.

On the way to the car, Larner led them into an area with quadruple safety locks and triple PIN codes. Out of a large metal cabinet he took two complete shoulder holsters and tossed them to the Swedes.

“Special permission,” he said. They strapped themselves in for a journey into the heart of darkness and followed Larner out to the car.

It was a nondescript apartment building in an immense, fortresslike row of identical buildings on a cross street of Queens’s enormous Northern Boulevard. The neighborhood was poor, but not dilapidated; a slum, but not a ghetto. The stairwell was dark and cluttered. Pieces of junk were strewn around the stairwell; no one had cleaned here for a long time.

They crept up the stairs, flight after flight. The stairwell became darker and warmer, bathed in a stagnant, dusty, dry heat. They were dripping with sweat.

Finally they were standing outside a door that bore an ordinary nameplate that said “Jennings.”

All four of them drew their weapons. Their jaws were tense, their breathing suspended. They feared for the welfare of their souls more than their bodies. They were on their way into the lion’s den. What gross distortions of human life would they encounter in there?

Schonbauer rang the bell. No one answered, and they heard no movement inside. He carefully pulled on the door handle. Locked. He looked at Larner, who nodded slightly. Schonbauer kicked the door in, causing splinters to fly. One kick was enough. He rushed in; they followed as if he were an enormous shield.

No one was home. The meager light that followed them in through the busted door was the first light that had been there in a long time. As their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, the room’s contents emerged slowly—it was perplexingly empty, naked, blank. The air was still and hot. Motes of floating dust swirled in pirouettes. There were no human skins hung up on the wall, no rotten heads on stakes, no signs of the devil at all, just a bare studio apartment with a shabby desk and bed, an empty kitchen nook, and an empty bathroom. A black Venetian blind was pulled down over the only window.

Larner raised it. The sun sent in its unfiltered rays. But the almost obscene light unveiled few signs of life, Lamar Jennings’s American legacy.

Hjelm glanced over the desk’s bare surface and saw a pile of ashes and half-burned paper that had eaten its way into the wood. Maybe, in a final task, Jennings had intended to set the apartment on fire. A farewell fire. Hjelm reached for the remains of paper in the pile.

“Don’t touch anything,” Larner stopped him, and put on a pair of plastic gloves. “You two are still observers. Jerry, can you check the neighbors?”

Jerry left. Larner considered the pile of ashes.

“Was he planning to start a fire?” Hjelm said.

“I don’t think so,” Larner said, touching the paper remnants lightly. “It’s something for the crime-scene techs to get their teeth into. Must not be moved a fraction of an inch.”

He took a cell phone out of his pocket and punched in a number.

“Crime techs, first unit,” he said briskly. “One forty-seven Harper Street, Queens, eighth floor. ASAP.”

He put the phone back in his pocket. “Go around to the other side of the desk, carefully,” he continued. “The tiniest breeze could cost us a word.”

Hjelm moved carefully. Larner pulled out the top desk drawer. It contained a single object, but that was plenty. It was a portrait of Wayne Jennings, wearing a youthful smile. A pin nailed the photo to the desk drawer through the man’s throat, as if he were a mounted butterfly. It hardly seemed an exaggeration.

Larner chuckled mildly and shook his head. “It’s for me,” he muttered. “Twenty years. How the hell did you do it? I saw you burn. I saw your teeth.”

He pulled out another drawer. In it were several torn-up pieces of paper, small fragments a quarter-inch wide. A date was visible on one of them.

“A diary?” said Hjelm.

“He’s left just enough for us,” said Larner. “Enough to give us a hint of the hell he lived through. But no more.”

They found nothing else in the apartment, nothing at all.

Jerry Schonbauer came back in with a small, nearly transparent old woman who came up to the vicinity of his hip. They stopped in the entryway.

“Yes?” said Larner.

“This is the only neighbor I’ve found who knew anyone lived here at all,” said Schonbauer. “Mrs. Wilma Stewart.”

Larner walked over and greeted the old woman. “Mrs. Stewart, what can you tell us?”

She looked around the room. “This is exactly how he was,” she said. “Expressionless, anonymous. Tried to avoid being seen. Reluctant to say hello. I invited him for a cup of tea once. He declined, not politely, not impolitely, just said no thanks and left.”

Larner made a small face.

“What has he done?” said Mrs. Stewart.

“Do you think you could help us make a portrait?” said Larner. “We’d be very grateful.”

“He could have murdered me,” she said quietly and insightfully.

Larner gave her a small parting smile, and Schonbauer escorted her to the door.

In the hallway, they met a small army of crime-scene technicians. One of them approached Larner, standing in the doorway. “We’ll take it from here,” he said briskly.

Larner nodded.

He waved the Swedes over. “Now we have to wait,” he said, “as though we haven’t done enough of that.” They all began working their way down the eight flights of stairs.

A few flights down he turned to them. “The devil’s lair never looks like you expect,” he said.

When two heads that were not usually the cleverest were put together, something new was born. Viggo Norlander was working on John Doe; Gunnar Nyberg was working on LinkCoop. At a certain juncture, their laboriously struggling thoughts met, and the world took on a new shape.

At first Norlander got nowhere with his unknown body. He had incredibly little to go on. He sat in his office and read through the autopsy report, time after time.

Directly across from him sat the considerably more swiftly working Arto Söderstedt, who had obtained his very own whiteboard and was playing mini-Hultin.

“What the hell are you working on?” Norlander said, irritated.

“The Lindbergers.” Söderstedt said distractedly, continuing to draw.

“Do you need a whiteboard for that?”

“Hmm, need … He left behind a lot of notes that have to be sorted out. And she had some, too …”

“She? You swiped
her
notes?”

Söderstedt looked up with a scornful smile. “Not swiped, Viggo. A policeman never steals. Just as a policeman never harasses female immigration officers and never runs down little girls.”

“Idiot!”

“A policeman never steals. He makes copies.” He continued to fill in his squares.

“Like that’s any better,” said Norlander.

Söderstedt stopped again. “It’s much better. Not least because you can compare what you’ve copied with what she chooses to share. The difference is what’s essential. As soon as I’m finished with this, I’m going to ask to look at her planner and see if she’s removed anything.
Comprende?
”

“That’s a grieving woman, for fuck’s sake! Leave her alone.”

Söderstedt put down his marker. “Something feels wrong about them. They’re in their thirties and live in an enormous apartment in Östermalm—eleven rooms, two kitchens. Both of them work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and are gone half the year. In Saudi Arabia. If they’re up to something in the Arab world, and if it has anything to do with Eric’s death, then she is quite possibly the next victim. I’m not trying to harass her, Viggo. I’m trying to protect her.”

Norlander made a tired face. “Then put her under watch.”

“It’s still too vague. I have to figure it out.
If
I get the chance.”

Norlander threw out his arms. “I’m very fucking sorry,” he said.

He tried to return to the autopsy report but couldn’t. Thoughts of his unknown son, who was only just coming into being, wouldn’t let go. He stared out through the window.

It was late afternoon; soon it would be time to go home.
Outside the darkness was thick; rain was still drowning Stockholm. He thought of the flood in Poland a year or two earlier, the one that had contaminated the Baltic Sea. How much rain would it take for Lake Mälaren to run over?

The door flew open, and Chavez put his head in. “Hi, middle-aged white men,” he said cheerfully. “How’s it going?”