Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read online

  “in passing, the glow of a cigarette, can already hear the sizzle, can already smell the stench, but i can never predict the pain, only”

  “April 19. What power they have now, can’t resist any longer”

  “grandma dead. Okay. A package came. Just crap, except for a letter. Going to read it soon. The handwriting is worrying.”

  “earth a grave, people maggots, where is the corpse? is it the dead god we eat up?”

  “stairs out of nothing in nothing, like a dream. Comes in flashes now, like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal”

  “just go there, say i’m sick, try to get help”

  “if the images can become a story”

  “July 27. Who am i trying to kid? There is only one help. The Aztecs killed in order to live. Human sacrifices. I”

  “follow the shadow, the arm of a jacket has gotten caught, a door, stairs”

  “theletterislyingthereimwaitingicantitwontwork”

  “Grandma dead. Try again. Grandma dead. Okay.”

  “The light behind the door like the frame of an icon, a darker darkness, have to get out, have to plead”

  “the stairs straight down, can’t follow, only flashes”

  “the cellar the cellar the cellar”

  “sick SOB at the bar, Arkaius, fucking name, bragging bragging bragging, tons of houses all over the world, suck him off, dead as a doornail, need the address now, reward”

  “open the letter, read, i knew it, it was impossible for him to be”

  “open the door, into the light. Chaos, have to get out, have to”

  “glow of a cigarette, our little secret, our little hell”

  “why us in the middle of all this perfection, the tiniest mollusk is more adapted to life on earth, can’t feel pain”

  As they read, they sneaked glances at each other.

  When they were all finished, Larner said, “This is why it didn’t all fit together. This is a classic serial killer of the more intellectual sort, incredibly wounded, very intelligent. It couldn’t be reconciled with the early coldness. I ought to have realized. On July twenty-seventh we have a date. On July twenty-seventh, 1997, the prostitute Sally Browne was murdered in Manhattan. That was Lamar Jennings’s first murder. It starts there: ‘The Aztecs killed in order to live.’ Any other thoughts?”

  “Arkaius,” said Kerstin Holm. “Robert Arkaius is a Swedish tax exile. He owns the cabin where Lamar committed his first murder in Sweden. Apparently he got the address in exchange for sexual favors. Arkaius couldn’t return to Sweden anyway. Of course, he didn’t know that his former lover’s son, Andreas Gallano, had holed up there after he’d escaped from prison.”

  Larner nodded mutely.

  Schonbauer said, “That must have been after he opened that letter and found out that his father was in Sweden, when he had already started the murders. He goes out and looks for Swedes in sketchy bars in order to get his hands on a good place to stay in Stockholm. Sex doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, other than that. The trauma seems to have occurred before puberty.”

  “Our reconstruction of his profile,” said Larner, “is quite close to the one you’ve already done, Yalm. As a child, he is abused by his father—that’s probably the glowing cigarettes we see. Sure enough, the culmination comes when he goes down some stairs and opens that door and sees his professional murderer of a father at work. After that, he is never the same again. Then comes blow after blow. His father dies, his mother commits suicide after a few years, possibly because of that letter that reaches her in some unknown way and ends up in an untouched box at his grandmother’s house. When his grandmother dies, the letter ends up in the hands of the now-twenty-four-year-old son in New York, where he—as the apartment indicates—lives half-outcast from society. It confirms what he’s suspected all along: his father is alive. His tormentor still exists; he hovers over him and possesses him.

  “His repressed images of the past start to return, moving in a certain direction, ‘like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal.’ Finally the images drive him down to that door. He opens it and is confronted with the most repressed image of all, his father above a victim who’s foaming at the mouth, with the micropincers in his neck. He has to get rid of it, and that can only happen with homeopathic magic: like pleads to like. He has the pincers; now he can use them. The image in his memory is exact; he knows exactly what to do. As soon as the images appear, he must go out and kill. It calms him: ‘if the images can become a story.’ The murders make the lightninglike, hardhitting pictures into a more easily handled story.

  “But as you said, Yalm, at the same time it’s about preparing himself for the big, decisive murder. He has to get rid of his father, he must die by his own methods, the very ones that haunt him. He’s finally gotten hold of the address of a safe house in the Stockholm area—it’s time. Apparently the letter has revealed that his father is in Stockholm, and even more important, it’s revealed what he calls himself—otherwise the whole project is hopeless. The techs have to be finished with the burned letter soon. If we’re lucky, the name will be there.

  “Anyway, he gets a fake passport under the name Edwin Reynolds and goes to Newark Airport. Annoyingly, the next flight to Stockholm is fully booked. It’s not really a catastrophe, but somehow he happens to stumble upon Lars-Erik Hassel. Maybe the images came to him again in the airport; maybe he decides to kill two birds with one stone: getting his hands on a ticket, and simultaneously getting rid of the images and having a peaceful flight; avoiding six hours of inferno might be worth the relatively minor risks. Hassel somehow reveals himself as a traveler to Stockholm who hasn’t yet checked in, which means his seat can be made available. Jennings gets Hassel and his luggage into the janitor’s closet and does his deed; maybe he uses sex as a temptation again. Then he snatches Hassel’s ticket, calls and cancels in his name, books himself the seat with Reynolds’s name, and has a nice, calm flight.

  “Presumably he has no idea how close you are to catching him at Arlanda. All he has is carry-on luggage—he just goes right through, gets in a taxi, stops somewhere on the way and buys some food, and goes straight to the cabin. Your drug dealer happens to be there, but by now Lamar Jennings is a practiced killer. He gets in easily and murders the drug dealer; the sight now and then of the body in the cellar is enough to keep the images at bay as he searches for his father and plans the best way to deal with him. What happens next is your business.”

  No one had any objections. That was surely how it happened.

  In the meantime, Hjelm’s thoughts had gone in a slightly different direction. “Was there a cellar on Wayne Jennings’s farm?”

  Larner looked at him. He had expected to be able to catch his breath after his account, but now he had to make a sharp turnaround. “There was a small cellar, yes. But it was a sort of rec room, a cozy room with a fireplace, and we checked it several times. It wasn’t the scene of the murder.”

  “Who lives there now?”

  “I seem to recall that it went round and round in the media for so long that it became unsellable. After his wife died, it was left to rot. It’s deserted.”

  “There’s something about a closet that Lamar apparently wants to tell us. A shadow in the closet at night, a door that’s gotten caught on ‘the arm of a jacket,’ then the stairs. Might there have been another cellar, a secret one? The very origin of the entire story of the Kentucky Killer?”

  Larner thought it over, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Bill, how long is the letter going to take? Okay. I’m going to Kentucky. Jerry will hold down the fort here.”

  He hung up and looked at them urgently. “Well, are you coming?”

  They flew to Louisville, Kentucky, in a flash. At the airport, an FBI helicopter was waiting to carry them eastward. A tall mountain range towered up in the distance.

  “Cumberland Plateau,” Larner said, pointing.

  The helicopter landed at the e
dge of a tobacco field, and Larner and three bundles of muscle from the FBI, along with the two Swedes, jogged through the field and out onto the country road along. A grove of tall, unidentifiable deciduous trees lent shadow to a decaying farm a ways out on the wilderness land; there wasn’t a neighbor for miles.

  Seen at a closer distance, the farmhouse looked haunted. Fifteen years had left their mark. Houses always seem to do their best when inhabited—otherwise they wither. Wayne Jennings’s farm had withered. It didn’t look as if it had felt very well from the start, but by now it had reached a state of complete abandonment. The front door was crooked and warped, and it took the efforts of the collective FBI muscle mass to tear it open, which was the same as tearing it apart.

  They entered the hall. The house hadn’t been airtight. Everything was covered in a thin layer of sand. Each step was followed by a small, rising puff of sand. They passed the kitchen; dishes were laid out under the layer of sand, as though time had stopped in the middle of a regular day. They passed the stairway that led down to the small cellar; Hjelm cast a glance down the steps. Three beer bottles stood on a small table. The sand had glued itself along their edges; they were like three pillars of salt in a salt desert. They entered a room with a bed. A few disintegrating posters were still clinging to the wall: Batman, a baseball team. A book lay open on the desk: Mary Poppins. On the pillow sat a threadbare teddy bear, covered with sand. Kerstin lifted it up; one leg remained on the bed. She blew it off and studied it. Her heart seemed about to break.

  They went from Lamar’s room to his parents’; it was farthest off toward the wide-open spaces, which stretched on, flat, toward Cumberland Plateau. Larner pointed at the double bed; in the place of one pillow there was a large hole; down was still floating in the sandy air.

  “This is where Lamar found his mother one hot summer morning,” he said quietly. “A shotgun. Her head was almost completely blown off.”

  They went back out into the hallway and through the next door entered a guest room, which had its own entrance from the terrace.

  “It has to be here,” Larner said.

  He went over to the closet and opened the door. The assembled FBI forces stepped in with sturdy tools and instruments of measurement. They pulled a microphone along the wall. “Here,” said one of the FBI men. “There’s empty space behind here.”

  “See if you can find the mechanism.” Larner moved back. They kept looking; he sat down on the bed, where the Swedes were already sitting.

  “You can probably put that down now,” he said.

  Holm stared down at the teddy bear that was sitting in her lap. She placed it on the bed. Sand had run out of the hole at the leg until it was just a fake shell of skin. She held up the scrap.

  “The things we do to our children,” was all she said.

  “I warned you,” said Larner.

  It took time, almost fifteen minutes of intense, scientific searching. But finally they found a complicated mechanism, behind a piece of iron that had been screwed into place. Apparently Wayne Jennings hadn’t wanted anyone to make their way down there after his so-called death. But his son evidently had—and had retrieved his pincers.

  A thick iron door slid open inside the closet; Hjelm even thought he could see the jacket arm that had gotten stuck one night and kept the door from closing again as it should. He walked over to the door to the guest room and crouched down, simulating the view a ten-year-old would have. Lamar had stood here; from here he had seen the shadow glide into the closet, and then he had followed. The thick metal door hadn’t closed properly.

  Larner went into the closet and pulled open the door; the mechanism was a bit rusty and creaked in a way it surely hadn’t twenty years earlier. He turned on a powerful flashlight and disappeared. They followed him.

  The narrow stone staircase had an iron handrail. Sand crunched under their feet as they made their way down the staircase, which was surprisingly long. Finally they came to a massive, rusty iron door. Larner opened it and shone his powerful flashlight around.

  It was a shabby cellar, cramped, almost absurdly small, a concrete cube far belowground in the wilderness. In the middle a large iron chair was welded to more iron in the floor; leather bands hung slack from the armrests and chair legs. There was also a solid workbench, like a carpenter’s bench. That was all. Larner pulled out the drawers under the bench. They were empty. He sat in the iron chair as the little concrete cube filled with people; the last FBI man didn’t even fit and had to stand on the stairs.

  “These walls have seen a lot,” said Larner.

  For a second Hjelm thought he had made contact with all the suffering that the walls guarded: a hot and simultaneously ice-cold wind went through him. But it was beyond words.

  Larner stood and clapped his hands. “Well, we’ll do a complete crime-scene investigation, but there’s no doubt that this is where most of the Kentucky Killer’s victims met their long-awaited deaths.”

  They went back upstairs—claustrophobia wasn’t far off.

  What had happened when ten-year-old Lamar had stepped into the torture chamber? How had Wayne reacted? Had he beaten him unconscious? Threatened him? Did he try to comfort him? The only person to ask was Wayne Jennings himself, and Hjelm promised himself and the world that he would ask him.

  For he was becoming more and more certain that if father and son confronted each other in Sweden, the father would be victorious. He would kill his son for a second time.

  They took the helicopter back to Louisville and caught a flight back to New York. The whole foray had only taken a few hours. It was afternoon at JFK, a long, hot afternoon. They took a taxi back to FBI headquarters, where they found Jerry Schonbauer sitting with his legs dangling, leafing through a pile of papers as though nothing had happened.

  But it had.

  “Good timing,” said Schonbauer. “I’ve just received a preliminary crime-scene report, including a preliminary reconstruction of the burned letter. That’s the only thing of interest. The rest of the investigation didn’t turn up anything—the apartment was completely clean. Here are your copies of the letter.”

  It had been possible to make out the date: April 6, 1983. Almost a year after Wayne Jennings faked his death. It was a letter he wouldn’t have needed to write nor, presumably, been able to write. That he had done it anyway revealed a trace of humanity that Hjelm didn’t really want to see.

  “When did his wife kill herself?” he asked.

  “The summer of 1983,” said Larner. “Apparently it took a few months for her to understand the extent of the whole thing.”

  The envelope had been among the burned remains. The Stockholm postmark had been clear. The address was that of the farm; apparently Wayne Jennings had been relatively certain that the FBI wasn’t reading his widow’s mail a year after his death.

  What could be reconstructed read as follows (with the technicians’ comments in brackets):

  Dear Mary Beth. As you can see, I’m not dead. I hope one day to be able to expla [break, burned] see you in another life. Maybe in a few years it will be p [break, burned] have been absolutely necessary. We were forced to give me this dis [break, burned] pe that you can live with this knowledge and [break, burned] ucky Killer is me and yet it’s no [break, burned] now go by the name [break, cut out] ty that Lamar is better off without me, I wasn’t always [break, burned] lutely must burn this letter immedia [break, burned]. Always, your W.

  “Lamar didn’t want to give us the name.” Larner put down the letter. “Maybe he did want to give us the rest—it depends on how seriously we should take this half-failed incineration. But he didn’t want to give us the name—he cut it out before he set fire to the letter.”

  “A loving husband,” said Holm.

  “What does it actually say here?” said Hjelm. “ ‘The Kentucky Killer is me and yet it’s not’—is that how we should interpret it? And: ‘We were forced to give me this—disguise’? ‘We’?”

  “That could mean Jenni
ngs was a professional killer, employed by someone else,” said Larner pensively. “Suppose, in the late seventies, it was suddenly necessary to get a great number of people to talk—engineers, researchers, journalists—and a whole cadre of unidentified people, probably foreigners. They called in their torture experts, who may have been on ice since the Vietnam War. They had to disguise the whole thing as the actions of a madman. The serial killer was born. And the consequences were plentiful.”

  It hung in the air. No one said it. Finally Hjelm cleared his throat. “CIA?”

  “We’ll have to attend to that bit.” Larner sighed. “It won’t be easy.”

  Kerstin and Paul looked at each other. Maybe the good old KGB theory hadn’t been so far off target after all. Maybe it was top-level politics. But it was the victims who were KGB. Maybe.

  “If I were you,” said Larner, “I’d look closely at Sweden’s immigration register for 1983. The last victim died in the beginning of November 1982. The letter was written from Stockholm in April 1983. Maybe you’ll find him listed among the immigrants during that interval.”

  An FBI man looked in. “Ray, Mrs. Stewart has come up with a picture.”

  They stood in unison and followed him. Now they would find out what Lamar Jennings looked like.

  Chief inspector Jan-Olov Hultin looked skeptical. “ ‘Get out of here’?” he said. “ ‘Beat it’?”

  “That’s what he said,” said Viggo Norlander.

  He was lying in a hospital bed at Karolinska, dressed in a bizarre county council hospital gown. He had a large compress on the wound in his neck and still felt a bit groggy.

  “So in other words, he spoke Swedish?” Hultin ventured pedagogically, bending down toward the once-again-defeated hero.

  “Yes,” Norlander said sleepily.

  “You don’t remember anything else?”

  “He was dressed all in black. A balaclava. His hand didn’t shake so much as a fraction of an inch when he sighted me with the pistol. He must have missed on purpose when he fired. Then he took off in a pretty large car, maybe a Jeep, maybe brown.”