Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (8 page)

Neither of them could really understand how multitasking could be so quickly upgraded.

“What’s going on?” Cilla asked with a flashing spark of attention as sleep tried to envelop her.

“Nothing yet,” Paul said as he unpacked a few books onto
the nightstand. “But the risk that something will happen has increased.”

“And what about the wound on your lip?” she said more faintly.

“The TV celebrity,” he snickered. “The one who kicked Mörner in the ass.”

“Is it really all about drugs?”

“No,” he sighed. “This thing kills faster.”

She was already halfway into the realm of sleep. “A weapon?”

“Not exactly. It’s best if I don’t say more. But there’s a risk that I’ll have to put in some overtime. Good thing summer’s over.”

Then she was asleep.

He patted her cheek, then turned to the pile of books on the nightstand. On his way back from Marieberg he had stopped by the library at Fridhemsplan and looked up “Hassel, Lars-Erik,” in the new computer system. He got hold of the Maoist manifesto from 1971 and two parts of the somewhat later documentary novels.

The manifesto was unreadable—not for ideological reasons, but because it presupposed an understanding of the technical terminology of dialectical materialism. Hjelm didn’t understand a word. And this was written by the man who later freely lambasted Swedish authors with accusations of elitism.

The documentary novels, though, were profoundly educational. The plot of one centered on a manor in Västmanland at the turn of the century. Step by step the reader could follow each class, from the landowner, whose inherited brutality was hidden behind fancy upper-class manners, to the oppressed farm laborers’ heroic struggle for their daily bread. Hjelm was vaguely familiar with the concept. The problem was that everything was hyperidealized. The message overshadowed the characterizations. The uneducated masses had to be schooled in
politics. It was like a medieval allegory, an undisguised textbook in the true faith. The censorship of sleepiness was relentless.

The day on which one of Sweden’s last levees broke ended with yet another assault on a police officer. Just as the living room clock struck midnight, Lars-Erik mounted a posthumous attack on Paul Hjelm: the right corner of
The Parasite of Society
struck his left eyebrow.

The Kentucky Killer’s visit to Sweden entered its second day.

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.”