Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Page 19

  “I was in the shower,” he said, gesturing awkwardly. “I didn’t think it was time yet.”

  “But you’re dry,” she said skeptically.

  “The heat. Everything dries right away.”

  “It isn’t time yet,” she said in a more professional tone, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I just thought we could talk through our strategy.”

  “Strategy?” He bent over the suitcase on the other side of the bed. His towel wasn’t on tightly, so he had to hold it with one hand and undo the straps of the suitcase with the other. It wasn’t all that easy.

  “That looks hard,” she said maternally, turning away. “Let go of the towel. I promise not to look.”

  Relieved, he let go of the towel, took out fresh clothes, and put them on. “Why do we need a strategy?”

  “It’s the FBI we’re going to meet with. They’re going to see us as the country cousins on a visit to the big city. They’ll consider it to be their primary task to make sure we don’t get run over or robbed and murdered or become junkies. We have to know exactly what we want to do here and stand firm. They’re the ones who are going to supply us with tasks, not the other way around; the killer is on our turf. So what is it we’re actually doing here?”

  He took out a narrow purple tie and started to tie it. “We’re going to fish for clues and see if they’ve missed anything.”

  “But we can’t put it that way … Are you going to wear that?”

  He looked down himself. “What?”

  “We probably shouldn’t look more countrified than we are. We are from a big city, after all, even if it is a small one.”

  “What’s wrong?” he said, mystified.

  “What color is your shirt?” she said pedagogically.

  “Blue,” he said.

  “It’s closer to azure. And your tie?”

  “Purple?”

  “Do those go together?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Come here.” He obeyed her. She untied the tie and started to unbutton his shirt.

  Control yourself, he ordered his unruly nether regions. “What are you doing?” he asked calmly.

  “Since I’m assuming you have only one tie with you, we’ll have to change the shirt. What have you got?” She rooted around in his suitcase and took out a white one. “This’ll have to do.” She tossed it to him.

  “No,” she said, changing the subject abruptly, “we can’t present it as though we’re here to correct their mistakes. That might be a sensitive subject—if not for Larner, then for his superiors.”

  “So we ought to focus on the Swedish stuff?” he said, buttoning his shirt.

  “I think so, yes. But first and foremost we ought to share our information liberally. It could be that they’ll be able to add something, of course, but above all it’s a goodwill gesture. If we lay our cards on the table, maybe we’ll get a few cards back.”

  “So our strategy is, one: unconditionally blurt out everything we have, and two: say we want to go through the material to try to find a Swedish connection.”

  “And assure them that we’re here to work on it only from a Swedish perspective. We won’t step on any toes. We’ll be diplomatic. Can you handle that?”

  He ought to have felt insulted, but this was the first thing she’d said that approached a personal remark. “Yes.”

  “As you know, I’ve gone through all the material we’ve had access to pretty carefully. I don’t know how complete it is, but Larner seems to have latched on to Wayne Jennings a little too early. When Jennings disappeared from the scene, all the ideas disappeared, too. There’s not a single tiny hypothesis among the material from after the break. Maybe I’m being unfair, but Larner seemed to give up after his failure with Jennings. Now he’s just collecting facts. It feels like there should be a lot more to do, not least with the later portion of the case.”

  He nodded. Even with his considerably scantier knowledge of the details, he saw that the American side was at a loss when faced with the Kentucky Killer’s return after fifteen years.

  “So you don’t think we ought to mention the KGB theory?” he said seriously.

  “We can hold off on that for a bit,” she said, just as seriously.

  Ray Larner’s lunch consisted of a magnificently authentic pasta carbonara at a little restaurant annex called Divina Commedia on Eleventh Street. Paul and Kerstin were surprised to see the meal served with Loka brand bottled water, but as people said, the world was getting smaller. Larner was in top form and talked exclusively about the art of Italian cooking; he waved off everything else as irrelevant. A long and painfully prestige-loaded argument over whether the world’s best olive oil came from Spain or Italy ended in a thrown game when Kerstin suddenly remembered her diplomatic strategy and let Italy win. Hjelm countered with Greece but scored no goals. Australia got a few unexpected points from a neighboring table.

  “When I retire, I’m moving to Italy,” Larner said loudly. “The privileges of a retired widower are endless. I’m going to die with my mouth full of pasta, olive oil, garlic, and red wine. Anything else is unimaginable.”

  It was no exaggeration to say that he deviated from the stereotypical image of an FBI special agent.

  “So you’re a widower?” Holm said with soft sincerity.

  “My wife died about a year ago,” Larner said, chewing good-naturedly. “Fortunately the sadness is followed by an almost rash feeling of freedom—if you don’t kill yourself or become an alcoholic. And that’s almost always what happens.”

  “Do you have any children?” Hjelm asked.

  “No,” said Larner. “We talked about it up until I took on K. He robbed me of all my faith in humanity. You can’t bring children into a world that can create a K. But that’s a line of reasoning you’ve heard before.”

  “I have,” Hjelm said. “Had children, that is.”

  “You had no K then. Wait and see if you have any grandchildren.”

  “Children were born despite Hitler,” said Holm.

  Larner was quiet for a moment, then leaned toward her. “Do you have kids, Halm?”

  She shook her head.

  “What I’m going to show you this afternoon”—Larner leaned back in his chair—“will keep you from doing it for all time.”

  Zero tolerance was a term that played an important part in New York’s new spirit. A euphemism for intolerance, it worked extremely well. Quite simply, the police were ordered not to tolerate any behavior that fell outside the bounds of the law. Committing the slightest offense meant that one would immediately be taken into custody. The theory behind it was a sort of vertical domino effect: if the little criminals fall, the big ones will too. It was based on the idea that those who commit serious crimes also commit a great many minor ones, and that’s when it’s possible to catch them.

  As a federal officer, Ray Larner was outside the operations of the state police and hence this project. Although he worked in the heart of New York, he observed its workings at a distance. His candor, of which they had already seen ample proof, never extended an inch into controversial territory. Yet something in his tone of voice grated a bit as he described the results of the New York spirit alongside Jerry Schonbauer in the FBI car. Did a trace of a grim view of the future surface in his intonation?

  A few years ago, law enforcement had been forced to do something about the state of things in the largest city in the United States. Crime had run amok. There were countless murders. The police and the justice system were at a loss and faced a choice between a long-term path and a short-term one, prevention and punishment. Unfortunately, they had let the situation become so acute that they really only had one alternative. It was too late to equip people with enough self-esteem that they would see an alternative to drugs and easy money. Not only would that approach take too long, but it would also require a break with a centuries-old tradition. The best solution seemed to be a synthesis that would unite the short term with the long term: prevention b
y punishment.

  “Community policing” turned out to be more successful than expected. Suddenly there were police on every corner, and in the rankings of the world’s most murder-heavy cities, New York fell from a pole position to almost last place. The decent citizens—that is, the somewhat well-to-do—were of course thrilled. Once again you could jog through Central Park without getting a switchblade between your sixth and seventh ribs; you could take the subway without needing ten seats. In general, it was once again possible to move around the city.

  But how high a price did the city pay? First and foremost, it required an absolute acceptance of the status quo. The thought that criminals could better themselves in one way or another vanished. The city was no longer interested in making sure people didn’t become criminals—it just wanted to banish them once they had. In the past the prevention side had at least managed to snap up a few crumbs of resources, but now the whole tiny pie was allocated to the punishment side. No one in his right mind spoke any longer of America’s old central idea—equal opportunity—and the vision of a melting pot was transformed into a sheer myth; nowhere were people so separate as in the United States. The new police strategy—to be able to show up anywhere, at any time—without a doubt carried historic baggage. The question was whether inequality was already so severe that the police state was the only available method of upholding law and order.

  In addition, there had been an uncomfortable shift in the view of human rights when it came to the death penalty. Thirty-eight of the states had capital punishment, and recently the country had seen an unprecedented increase in the number of death sentences handed down and carried out. The latest stroke of genius was the policy according to which no one who opposed the death penalty on principle could be permitted to serve on a jury in in a trial where the death penalty was a possible sentence. This “death-qualified jury” quite simply disqualified any liberal layperson from the legal process and paved the way for rash and hasty verdicts. The fact was that the crime rate was no lower in states that had the death penalty than in the minority that still resisted it. So the most important argument for the death penalty—that it was a deterrent to crime—was lost, and the only remaining argument in its favor was the victims’ desire for retribution. Revenge.

  Larner’s neutral demeanor when he explained this situation rivaled Hultin’s. The question was, did it conceal as much anger? Or did Larner—as Holm had suggested—quite simply dedicate himself to the collection and reporting of facts?

  Hjelm was about to query Larner on his opinion of the death penalty—the test that, in his opinion, constituted a fundamental dividing line between two sorts of people. But just then, the car reached the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Larner cut short his own explanation and said, “Look out the back now.”

  They turned around, and Manhattan, bathing in sunlight, stretched out its fabulous cityscape before their eyes.

  “A strange kind of beauty, isn’t it? Every time I drive this way I think about the eternity of beauty. Would our forefathers also have found it beautiful? Or would they have thought it disgusting? Is there such a thing as eternal beauty?”

  The sight was overwhelming. Hjelm didn’t return to the question of the death penalty. The view of Manhattan had, in some strange way, opened the door to the city, and he eagerly awaited their arrival at the FBI’s New York field office.

  Schonbauer drove them to the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, then turned the car around and drove back they way they’d come; apparently he had brought them there only for the sake of the view. They followed the bridge back and headed to the majestic City Hall, turned down one of Manhattan’s few diagonal streets, Park Row, which bordered City Hall Park, came out onto Broadway, passed City Hall again, and after a few cross streets arrived at Federal Plaza, where a garage door opened and they glided in.

  This was the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters, 26 Federal Plaza. The bureau also had local offices for Brooklyn-Queens, on Long Island, and at JFK.

  The foursome strolled through corridors that did not much resemble the ones in police headquarters on Kungsholmen. Everything was bigger, cleaner, and more clinical. Hjelm wondered if he would be ever able to work here—the place seemed immune to the wild kind of thinking that he considered his specialty.

  Hjelm soon stopped counting the number of security doors they went through with the help of various cards and codes. Schonbauer acted as gate boy while Larner rambled on, uninterrupted, spouting information of the sort one might find in a brochure: the number of employees, the departments, the nature of basic training, the expert groups, everything but what was relevant.

  Finally they approached one last security door, which opened on its monumental hinges, and then they were standing before a system of corridors that belonged to the serial killer squad at the FBI’s New York division. Larner’s and Schonbauer’s names were inscribed on two adjacent doors. Schonbauer went into his office without a sound, and the rest of them stepped into Larner’s.

  “Jerry’s going to prepare a little multimedia show for you,” Larner explained, sitting down at his desk. The office was small and lived in, Hjelm noted gratefully; it had at least a shade of the personal touch. The walls had bulletin boards instead of wallpaper, it seemed, and tacked up on them were all kinds of notes. Behind Larner stood a whiteboard, and the familiar pattern of arrows, rectangles, and lines could have been mistaken for Hultin’s.

  “Well, here we have everything in concentrate.” Larner followed Hjelm’s gaze. “Twenty-four rectangles with tortured bodies. Forty-eight holes in twenty-four necks. A sober outline of the un-outlineable. Gruesome terror reduced to a few blue lines. What else can we do? The rest of it, we carry inside us.”

  Hjelm looked at Larner. Without a doubt, the FBI agent carried a great deal inside himself.

  “One question first,” said Larner calmly. “Is it true that you think he shot one of the victims?”

  “It seems so,” said Hjelm.

  “If it is, it changes in one blow the minimal psychological profile we’ve scraped together.”

  “On the other hand,” said Kerstin Holm, “your original theory was that he was a Vietnam veteran. They aren’t usually too far from firearms.”

  Larner made a face. “You know what happened to that theory.”

  “Of course,” said Holm, and Hjelm almost thought she blushed. A diplomatic faux pas in her first remark. He could tell that she was cursing herself. But she didn’t seem to want to give up. “Could you explain why you let all the other members of Commando Cool go?” she asked. “They weren’t analyzed in the material you sent to Sweden.”

  Larner stretched and gathered the information from the considerable archive in his brain. “The group seems to have been made up of eight members, all specially trained. Its focus was torture in the field—a somewhat brutal way to put it, I suppose. Once someone explained to me that its more official purpose was ‘active-service collection of information,’ but I got the sense that they invented this term specifically for me—it was never the plan that even a tiny crumb of information would leave the inner circle.”

  “Who was in the inner circle? Was it the military in general?”

  Larner gave her a sharp look. “Military intelligence.”

  There was more on his mind, she noticed. “That was all?” she prompted.

  “Commando Cool—just the obnoxious name suggests it wasn’t meant to become public.… Anyway, Commando Cool was somehow directly below Nixon. It was established during his administration, toward the end of the war, and you get the impression that it was done out of desperation. Publicly its role was said to be military intelligence, but other powers were at work behind the scenes.”

  “The CIA?” Holm seemed to have left her diplomatic mask at the hotel.

  Ray Larner swallowed and gave her a look that indicated that their relationship had changed—not necessarily for the worse.

  “With many layers of top-secret stamps, yes, possibly. You have to understand
how tense the relationship between the CIA and the FBI is. And if it in any way gets out that I’ve said this, I can forget ever having a pension. My personal phone has been monitored, and I can only hope there aren’t any bugs in this room. They’re always a step ahead of me. But you understand, I’ve already said too much. Try to forget it.”

  “Already have,” said Holm. “We’re just here to find links to Sweden. Nothing else will end up in our reports.”

  Larner regarded each of them for a minute, then nodded briskly. “It had eight members,” he resumed.

  “What about Balls?” Kerstin interjected recklessly.

  Larner burst out laughing. “Have you been consulting FASK? Fans of American Serial Killers, on the Internet?”

  They looked at each other.

  “Follow me.” Larner leaped to his feet and rushed out into the corridor. A few offices down, he knocked on a door marked BERNHARD ANDREWS and ushered them in.

  A seemingly out-of-place young man in his early twenties, with jeans and a T-shirt, looked up through round glasses from a huge computer and smiled broadly. “Ray,” he said cheerfully, holding out a printout. “Yesterday’s haul. A cotton executive in West Virginia, a golf club in Arkansas, and a couple other little goodies.”

  “Barry,” said Larner, taking the list and scanning through it, “these are officers Yalm and Halm from Sweden. They’re here about K.”

  “Aha,” said Bernhard Andrews jovially. “Colleagues of Jorge Chavez?”

  Their jaws dropped.

  “Born in Sweden in 1968,” Andrews continued. “In Ragswede, right? To Chilean parents with left-leaning associations.”

  “It’s called Rågsved,” Hjelm said, bewildered.

  “Chavez was in the FASK site a week ago,” Andrews explained smugly. “He had a good but slightly transparent disguise. He put up a hundred and thirty dollars of taxpayers’ money to get in. A little development aid from the Swedish people to the American tax coffers.”

  They gaped at him, their jaws rattling against their kneecaps.