Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read online

  “Is this customer service at Sparbanken? Hi, my name is Kerstin Holm, National Criminal Police. Do you have a central register of your safe-deposit box customers? Or do I have to … okay, I’ll hold.… Hi, the police here, Kerstin Holm, National Criminal Police. Do you have a central register of your safe-deposit box customers? Or do I have to go to each individual branch?… Okay, excellent.… It’s Lundberg, Benny. Spelled like it sounds.… No, okay. Thanks for your help.”

  She called a few more banks with the help of directory assistance. Finally she got a nibble. Handelsbanken on Götgatan, near Slussen. Thank goodness. She took the notepad and the safe-deposit box key with her; that would have to do.

  She yanked the door open without warning. Not unexpectedly, Benny’s mom was standing right outside, polishing a spot on the doorjamb.

  “Do you have a recent picture of Benny?” Holm asked briskly.

  The mom looked for a while and found one of the whole family. Benny was standing in the middle with his arms around his parents, who looked undeniably small. His smile was wide and a bit fake. Okay, that would have to do.

  When she left the parents with their crippling grief—and what grief isn’t crippling?—the father was still installed on the sofa, as if he were petrified.

  She took the subway to Slussen, a brief trip, then battled her way up Peter Myndes Hill in the pouring rain. She turned onto Götgatan, walked a few feet further, passed the ATMs, and reached Handelsbanken. She ignored the queue ticket machine, resulting in audible protests from the lunchtime patrons, and held up her police ID.

  “I’m here about a safe-deposit box,” she said to a teller.

  “That will be over there.” The teller pointed to a man in a tie who was cleaning his nails in the middle of the lunchtime rush. He stood up automatically when he saw her police ID.

  “Safe-deposit box. Benny Lundberg,” she said briskly.

  “Again?” said the man.

  She gave a start. “What do you mean, again?”

  “His father was just here, right after we opened, visiting the box. He had a signed power of attorney in good order and both his own and his son’s IDs.”

  “Shit,” she said. “What did he look like? Like this?” She held up the photo of the Lundberg family.

  The bank employee took it but handed it back immediately. “Absolutely not. This is a work … a completely different type of person.”

  “This is Benny Lundberg’s father,” she said. The man’s face fell. “What did he look like?”

  “An older, distinguished man with a beard.”

  “There you have it,” she said. “A beard and everything. Come along to police headquarters and help us with a composite sketch.”

  “But I’m working.”

  “Not anymore. First I’ll take a quick look at the safe-deposit box, which will probably be empty. Number?”

  “Two fifty-four,” said the man, showing her the way.

  Benny Lundberg’s safe-deposit box was indeed empty. Absolutely.

  She brought the bank employee outside and got in a taxi. Time for another composite sketch. She was starting to get tired of sketchy types.

  Viggo Norlander had a headache. Gunnar Nyberg had a headache. Norlander had gathered up his things, moved into Nyberg’s office, and quickly taken over Kerstin Holm’s spot. They were both there now, avoiding putting their clever heads together.

  A thick list of data lay between them: the immigrants of 1983, gathered in one place, like an extremely compressed and thorough ghetto. The names were arranged in chronological order. Chavez, who had produced the printout, had made sure that the names of American immigrants had a star next to them.

  There were thousands of names, but only about a hundred Americans. It still took time. A lot of information had to be sorted through, checking sex against age and this and that.

  Norlander felt ill. He had left the hospital way too soon. The microscopic lines of text were dancing before him. That damn overzealous Chavez creep must have deliberately picked out a font that would sustain headaches and promote nausea. He ran out and threw up.

  Nyberg heard him through the open door. It was a splendid cascade, the sound waves echoing through police headquarters.

  “That did the trick,” Norlander said when he came back.

  “Go home and sleep,” said Nyberg, fingering the bandage on his nose.

  “I will if you do.”

  “Okay, let’s get to it. No more breaks.”

  Norlander gave him a murderous look and kept working.

  In the end, a list of twenty-eight people crystallized: American immigrant men who claimed to be born around 1950. Sixteen of them had been in the Stockholm area in 1983. Then they checked those names against the national registry to see which of them were currently still in Sweden and in the Stockholm region. There were fourteen.

  “Are diplomats included on this list?” said Nyberg.

  “Don’t know. I don’t think so. They aren’t immigrants, after all.”

  “Could he have ended up with the American embassy?”

  “The Kentucky Killer? Surely that’s taking it a bit too far?”

  “Yes. It was just a thought.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Guest researchers, then? This list isn’t complete.”

  “I have to get out.” Norlander, like a chameleon, had begun to take on the color of his bandage. “I’ll take the top half, up to—what does it say?—Harold Mallory in Vasastan. A to Ma. You take the bottom half.”

  Norlander rushed off before Nyberg had time to warn him against taking the car. He didn’t want to find him, quote, “exceptionally under the influence of drugs” in Dalshammar.

  Gunnar Nyberg studied Norlander’s chicken scratches, a transcribed list of seven American immigrants from 1983. Morcher, Orton-Brown, Rochinsky, Stevens, Trast, Wilkinson, and Williams. Trast was Swedish for thrush, like the bird. Could Trast be a name? Daddy blackbird. Did it even mean the same thing in English?

  Nyberg didn’t really feel relieved, although he should have. To him the grunt work felt hopeless, routine. He wanted to go out and punch the killer in the face. He had worked past the shock of encountering Benny Lundberg, but he still could not digest the fact that Wayne Jennings had been allowed to knock him down.

  No one knocked Gunnar Nyberg down. That was rule number one.

  He went over to the wall and observed his face in the mirror. His bandage had been reduced to a nose cone, a plastic splint of the sort that heroic soccer players wear after the doctor stops the flow of blood. It was held in place with bizarre rubber bands around his neck. Bruises were still spreading out around the cone. He refrained from imagining what it looked like under there. Why the hell did he always have to look like a battlefield just when a case was moving toward its conclusion?

  Because this case was moving toward its conclusion, right?

  He returned to his desk and sank down into his chair. It creaked alarmingly. He had heard ghost stories about office chairs that had gone crazy and transformed into horrible instruments of torture, mechanisms that flew up eighteen inches through your rectum. He thought of his broken bed and rocked lightly in the chair. It actually did sound a bit murderous. Revenge of the Office Chair IV. The Hollywood blockbuster that played to sold-out houses. Worn-out movie-theater chairs jubilated and shot off springs that drilled into the screen. Not a single monitor was dry. Curtains blew their noses on themselves. Office after office revolted throughout the entire United States.

  Distracted was an understatement. There was usually a reason for his attacks of distraction. Something, somewhere was chafing, irritating him. Something was causing him not to be really one hundred percent satisfied with the list.

  He sorted the names, to come up with a suitable priority ranking. Three were in the inner city, two in the northern suburbs, one in the southern suburbs. They were probably working now. So, places of work. Huddinge, two in Kista, two at the Royal Institute of Technology, Nynäshamn,
Danderyd. Order of priority: Danderyd, the Tech, Kista, Huddinge, Nynäshamn. Or Kista, Danderyd, the Tech, Huddinge, Nynäshamn. Maybe that was better.

  He put the list aside and stared at the wall. He tried his voice, working his way through a scale. An ugly, nasal tone. This injury too had affected his singing voice. Something about that made him uncomfortable. Punishment? Reminder? A reminder, maybe. A commemoration.

  Suddenly they were there again. Gunilla. The burst eyebrows. Tommy and Tanja’s eyes, as large as platters. Do you have to come right now?

  His past had a single redeeming feature: he had never touched the children, had never lifted a hand against Tommy and Tanja.

  Was that why he always took beatings that distorted his voice? So that he would never forget why he sang? For the very reason that it came at such an incredibly inconvenient time, he seized the opportunity.

  There were two Tommy Nybergs in Uddevalla. He called the first one. He was seventy-four and deaf as a post. He called the other. A woman answered. An infant was crying in the background. A grandchild? he thought.

  “I’m looking for Tommy Nyberg,” he said in a surprisingly steady voice.

  “He’s not home,” said the woman. She had a lovely voice. Mezzo-soprano, he guessed.

  “May I just ask, how old is Tommy?”

  “Twenty-six,” she said. “Who is this?”

  “His father,” he said.

  “His father is dead. Come off it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Dead as a doornail. I’m the one who found him. Stop fucking with me, you fucking old creep.” She threw the phone down.

  Okay, Tommy wasn’t necessarily still living in Uddevalla. Besides, he was twenty-four, he quickly calculated. Fucking old creep? he thought, laughing. Gallows humor. He had one chance left.

  There was a Tanja Nyberg-Nilsson. Married. And not a word.

  He called. A woman’s voice answered, “Tanja.” Sweet. Tranquil.

  Who was he to disturb the peace? Hang up, hang up, hang up, said a voice. Your bridges are burned. It’s too late.

  “Hello,” he said, swallowing heavily.

  “Hello, who is this?”

  Yes, who was it? He had tossed out the word father to a strange woman without thinking it over. Was it really a title he had earned?

  “Gunnar,” he said, for lack of anything else.

  “Gunnar who?” said the woman, in a west coast dialect. It sounded like the Gothenburg dialect and yet did not. “Gunnar Trolle?” she said a bit suspiciously. “Why are you calling? It’s been over for a long time, you know that.”

  “Not Gunnar Trolle,” he said “Gunnar Nyberg.”

  Silence. Had she hung up?

  “Dad?” she said, almost inaudibly.

  Her eyes, large as platters. Was it possible to keep going?

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Why …”

  She fell silent.

  “I’ve been thinking of you all recently,” he said.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  Yes, it’s something completely enormous.

  “No. No, I—don’t know. I just have to make sure—that I didn’t completely destroy you. That’s all.”

  “You promised never to contact us, Mom said.”

  “I know. I kept my promise. The two of you are grown up now.”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “We never talked about you. It was like you never existed. Bengt became our dad. Our real dad.”

  “Bengt is your real dad,” he said. Who the hell was Bengt? “I’m something different. I would like to see you.”

  “I only remember yelling and violence,” she said. “I don’t know what difference it would make.”

  “Me neither. Would you forbid me to come?”

  She was quiet. “No,” she said at last. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re married,” he said, to hide the rejoicing inside him.

  “Yes,” she said. “No kids yet. No grandchildren.”

  “That’s not why I’m calling,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “How is Tommy?”

  “Good. He lives in Stockholm. Östhammar. He has a son. There’s your grandchild.”

  He received the small blows right on his nose cone, with a smile.

  “And Gunilla?” he said hesitantly.

  “She still lives in the house, with Dad. They’re thinking about switching to an apartment and getting a summer place.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “Well, see you. I’ll be in touch.”

  “ ’Bye,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

  He would. More than ever before. That soft Uddevala dialect. The girl who had spoken such pronounced Stockholmish. He remembered her little Stockholm-accented vowels so well. It was possible to become someone else. To change dialects and become someone else.

  Then it hit him. There and then, it hit him.

  There and then Gunnar Nyberg caught the Kentucky Killer.

  He didn’t have to be an American. It would even have been more convenient to become some other nationality. Maybe not a Norwegian or a Kenyan, but something plausible.

  He paged frantically through the lists. He went through name after name after name and ignored the stars.

  Hjelm came in and regarded the intensely reading giant with surprise. An enormous aura of energy was rising up above him like a thunderhead.

  “Hi yourself,” Hjelm said.

  “Shut up,” Nyberg said amiably.

  Hjelm sat down and shut up. Nyberg kept reading. Fifteen, twenty minutes went by.

  April, May. May 3: Steiner, Wilhelm, Austria, born 1942; Hün, Gaz, Mongolia, born 1964; Berntsen, Kaj, Denmark, born 1956; Mayer, Robert, New Zealand, born 1947; Harkiselassie, Winston, Ethiopia, born 1960; Stankovski, B—

  Gunnar Nyberg stopped short.

  “Bing bang boom,” he roared. “The famous Kentucky Killer. Get a photo of Wayne Jennings. Now!”

  Hjelm stared at him and slunk out, suddenly immeasurably subordinate. Nyberg stood up and paced, no ran, around the room, like an overfed rat in a tiny hamster wheel.

  Hjelm returned and tossed the large portrait of Wayne Jennings as a young man onto the desk.

  “Haven’t you seen it before?” he said.

  Nyberg stared at it. The youth with a broad smile and steel-blue eyes. He placed his hands on the photo, letting only the eyes peer out. He had seen those eyes before. In his mind he made the hair gray and moved the hairline up. He added a few wrinkles.

  “Meet Robert Mayer,” he said, “chief of security at LinkCoop.”

  Hjelm looked at the photo, and then at Nyberg. “Are you sure?”

  “There was something familiar about him, but I didn’t put it together. He must have undergone some sort of plastic surgery, but you can’t get rid of your eyes and your gaze that easily. It’s him.”

  “Okay.” Hjelm tried to calm down. “We have to get confirmation. It would be logical for you to contact him after the Benny Lundberg incident.”

  “Me?” Nyberg gaped. “I’d just give him a whupping.”

  “If anyone else goes, he’ll get suspicious. It has to be you. And it has to seem routine. Play dumb—that ought to work. Bring along some lousy, unrelated photo.” He rummaged in the desk drawer for a photograph of a man, any man at all. He found a passport photo of a man in his sixties smiling serenely. “This will be good,” he said. “Who is it?”

  Nyberg looked at the picture. “It’s Kerstin’s pastor.”

  Hjelm stopped short. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that he was sitting at Kerstin’s desk. “Do you know about it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Nyberg. “She told me.”

  Hjelm felt a little twinge and fingered the picture clumsily. “Okay. It’ll have to do. We’ll wipe it, and then you make sure to get Mayer’s fingerprints.”

  “Can’t we just bring him in? Once we get the fingerprints, it’s over.”


  “We might not get that far. There are powerful interests involved. A lawyer could get him released before they even get to fingerprints. And we can’t ask him—he’ll run. I’ll check with Hultin.”

  He called Hultin, who came right in, as though he had been waiting outside. He quickly got a clear picture of the situation, then nodded at Hjelm.

  “Okay, let’s do it. Gunnar will go back to Frihamnen. Mayer ought to see it as pure chance that Gunnar and Viggo showed up in Frihamnen, which it is—he’s had the idea to check the rest of the storage spaces there. He shouldn’t have any idea how far we’ve gotten. Provided it doesn’t leak at the FBI. I just got a report from Holm—she’s on her way. Benny Lundberg had some secrets in a safe-deposit box, but they were picked up this morning, probably also by this Robert Mayer with a ridiculous fake beard. We’re getting a composite sketch.”

  “How will we do the fingerprint checks?” said Hjelm. “There are these new microvariants, you know.”

  “Can you do them?”

  “No. Jorge can.”

  “Get him. We’ll all go together. In case he tries to run when Gunnar is there.”

  Hjelm ran into his office and found Chavez contemplating “Nurse Gregs has wooden legs” and “Brother Kate’s breasts are great.” Were those children’s rhymes?

  “Get a laptop with fingerprint equipment,” said Hjelm. “We’re going to take K.”

  The children’s rhymes dissipated, and Chavez got a move on. He was the last one to arrive at Hultin’s service car and threw himself into the backseat beside Hjelm, placing the small computer on his lap. Hultin drove like a madman toward Täby. Gunnar Nyberg was in the passenger seat. He had pulled himself together and called LinkCoop, sounding perfectly blasé. Robert Mayer was there. He would be available for another couple of hours. Nyberg asked to discuss last night’s incidents with him. He needed to show him a photo.

  That was fine.

  They turned off of Norrtäljevägen, drove past Täby’s city center, which they could vaguely see through the drizzle, and arrived on a small side street.

  “This isn’t good,” Nyberg said. “They have megasecurity. Sentry boxes at the gates. Monitoring systems. He’ll see everything.”