The Postcard Killers (15 page)

The medical officer arrived and Jacob stepped out into the corridor to make room for him.

He noted that there was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

Then he left the scene of the crime. There was nothing else he could do here.

Chapter 63

BY LUNCHTIME, SECURITY HAD BEEN stepped up in all public places in the Stockholm region that were frequented by tourists, and especially by young people.

All available personnel had been sent out to look for anyone resembling the composite picture from the clerk at NK, or any of the people on the security recordings from the Museum of Modern Art and the pawnbroker’s on Kungsholmstorg.

When a preliminary blood test showed that the Dutch couple had smoked marijuana just before they died, sniffer dogs were brought in from around the country to join in the search.

Throughout Stockholm, young people fifteen and over were asked to empty their bags, purses, and knapsacks.

Most of them did as they were asked without protest. Those who refused were arrested.

Dessie was standing in Gabriella’s office, looking out across Kronoberg Park.

Four uniformed police officers and a large Alsatian dog had blocked one of the entrances to the park, a popular shortcut for people heading for the beach or the shops and underground station on Fridhemsplan. Picnic baskets, bags of swimming gear, and expensive attaché cases were all carefully checked without any distinction between them.

The sight ought to have made her feel more secure, but she simply felt guilty.

Jacob came into the room with three plastic wrappers containing sandwiches he had found in a vending machine somewhere.

“Where’s Gabriella?”

“She went down to the video suite to get the recordings from the Grand,” Dessie said, collapsing onto a chair.

Jacob tore open one of the packets and with a healthy appetite took a large bite of the bread and tuna plus mayonnaise. Dessie looked at him and cringed.

“How can you eat?” she asked. “Doesn’t all the violence you see ever affect you?”

“Of course it does,” Jacob said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “I was just thinking about how sick these murders are. But it won’t help the Dutch couple if I faint from low blood sugar.”

Dessie leaned her face down into her hands. “I shouldn’t have written that bloody letter.”

Jacob carried on chewing.

“I thought we’d gotten past that.”

She had her cell phone out.

“And now it’s started,” she said. “Just as I thought it would.”

“What has?” Jacob wondered.

“I’m getting calls from the trade press, asking why I’m doing the police’s work for them.”

Jacob gestured with his hand toward the pictures of the dead couple in the hotel room.

“That’s your reality,” he said. “What you’re talking about is pretentious bullshit.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And what if I’m the one who made that reality happen?”

He groaned.

“It’s true,” she said in a low voice. “You said so yourself. They’ve broken their pattern — they’ve killed again in the same city. If I hadn’t let myself be persuaded, this Dutch couple would still be alive.”

“You don’t know that,” Jacob said. “And if they hadn’t died, other young people would have, in some other city.”

She took her hands away from her face.

“What do you mean? That the Dutch couple were sacrificed to a noble cause? What does your lot usually call it,
collateral damage?
”

The American wiped his fingers on his jeans. His expression had grown dark.

“I never think like that,” he said. “The Dutch couple’s deaths were a tragedy. But you have to lay the blame where it belongs. You didn’t kill them, and neither did I. Those bastards on the recordings did that, and we’re soon going to catch them. Right here in Stockholm. It ends here.”

Chapter 64

THE SUSPECTS FROM THE MUSEUM of Modern Art were identified almost immediately on the security recordings from the Grand Hôtel. They appeared on four different film files: two from the lobby and two from the corridor on the fourth floor.

The fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman were caught on camera in the hotel lobby at 2:17 on the afternoon of June 15.

They were with a couple who were quickly identified as Peter Visser and Nienke van Mourik.

The four of them disappeared together into an elevator.

Two minutes later all four reappeared on another recording, in the corridor outside the Dutch couple’s room on the fourth floor. They all went into room 418 and the door closed.

Forty-three minutes later, the fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman came out into the corridor again.

After another two minutes, they passed the reception desk and left the hotel.

The detectives who had been out to Millesgården came back with results as well.

A woman who worked as a gardener thought she recognized the fair-haired man. She had noticed him as he walked around with a woman in the sculpture garden. At first glance she thought it was the actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

The recordings from the exhibit rooms at Millesgården were requisitioned and were now being checked down in the basement.

Prosecutor Evert Ridderwall had signed an arrest warrant in the pair’s absence.

“This is completely incredible,” Gabriella said excitedly. She was walking up and down in Mats Duvall’s office, two red spots flushing her cheeks.

Jacob was staring at prints made from the recordings from the Grand Hôtel, tearing at his hair.

Something was fundamentally wrong here. Was he the only one who saw it?

Why had the killers suddenly dropped all safety precautions?

Why were they showing themselves so openly?

It was too easy.

“We’ve got them now,” Evert Ridderwall said happily. “They’ll never get away. I don’t see how they can.”

Even Mats Duvall looked pleased.

“It’s just a matter of time before they’re arrested,” he agreed.

Jacob looked through the pictures again. Both the fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman were clearly visible in all the pictures. There was no doubt that they would be recognized. A national alert had been put out for the couple.

Interpol would be releasing these same pictures internationally within half an hour. Every police patrol in the Stockholm region had already received the printouts.

Sara Höglund came into the room.

“We’ve released their pictures to the media. They ought to be up on their websites in a few minutes.”

Mats Duvall turned to his computer and quickly logged into
Aftonposten
’s website.

“Sometimes they’re really quick,” he said, turning the screen toward the others.

The headline was in a size usually reserved for world wars and Swedish victories in the ice hockey world championships.

“Police Suspects: These Are the POSTCARD KILLERS.”

Underneath was a picture of the fair-haired man and the dark-haired woman.

Chapter 65

THE SQUARE OUTSIDE STOCKHOLM’S CENTRAL Station was filled with police, their dogs, and cordons.

Mac was walking slowly toward the train terminal’s main entrance with his arm around Sylvia’s shoulders. They could hear the beeping and crackling voices of police radios wherever they went.

Two long-haired boys were picked up with their back pockets full of grass just a few meters ahead of them. What idiots!

“Sorry, guys,” Sylvia said.

No one thought to stop the couple.

No one asked to look in their bags, because they didn’t have any.

They had been walking around the streets, looking at their reflections in plate-glass windows, admiring their work. Mac tried on a new leather jacket at Emporio Armani. Sylvia sampled different perfumes in Kicks. She smelled nice now. Fresh and sexy for her man.

A police car glided slowly past them. Sylvia took off her sunglasses and smiled at the officer in the car. He smiled back and drove on.

An elderly woman started yelling when two officers asked to go through her handbag. Three teenage boys ran past like the hounds of hell were after them, followed by two plainclothes policemen.

“Come on, let’s go in,” Sylvia said. “These people, the police, are so stupid.”

Mac hesitated at the entrance.

Sylvia gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “You’re such a star, Mac.”

With their fingers laced together, they walked into the lion’s den.

Children were crying, dogs barking, adults complaining. Loudspeaker announcements about delays and canceled trains followed one after another. The crowd got thicker and more agitated with every step they took. Some people had already missed trains because of the mindless searches.

After just ten meters or so they reached the first police checkpoint.

Mac stiffened when he caught sight of his own portrait in the hands of a well-built policeman with a big Alsatian panting at his side, but Sylvia pushed her way through to the policeman and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but what’s going on?”

The policeman turned around, looked right at her, and quite literally jumped.

“I see you’ve got my picture there,” she said, wide-eyed, pointing to it. “What’s this all about?”

Chapter 66

THEY WERE AMERICAN CITIZENS, THEIR names Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, from Santa Barbara, California.

Their arrest was entirely undramatic.

They went right along to the police station without protest to clear up what was obviously a misunderstanding. They were both very calm, if a little curious and perhaps a little anxious, but no more than might be expected.

Naturally,
they wanted to cooperate in any way they could to sort out the
mix-up
.

The premises of the Stockholm police had no rooms equipped with one-way mirrors. Instead, Jacob and Dessie, together with Gabriella and the rest of the investigative team, were shown into a control room where the recorded interview was being shown live.

Jacob’s hands were trembling, his mouth completely dry.
There they were.
After all the months spent searching, all the cities he’d been in.

He stood at the back of the room, worried that he might otherwise attack the television screens with his fists.

The fair-haired male, Malcolm Rudolph, was already sitting down, nervously rubbing his hands. He was stunningly handsome, no doubt about that.

Jacob couldn’t take his eyes off this man.

It was him,
Jacob was sure of it. There he was: the bastard who had killed Kimmy.

The door of the interrogation room opened and Mats Duvall and Sara Höglund entered and sat down opposite the man.

Mats Duvall jabbered his way through the formalities about time and location. Then Sara Höglund leaned across the table and began the first interview.

“Malcolm,” she said calmly, “do you understand why you’re here?”

The young man bit his lip.

“The police at the Central Station had our pictures,” he said. “I guess you’ve been looking for us, that you think we’ve done something.”

“Do you know what?”

He shook his head. “No, not at all.”

“It’s about Nienke van Mourik and Peter Visser,” the head of the unit said. “They were found dead in their room in the Grand Hôtel this morning.”

Malcolm Rudolph’s face registered shock and alarm.

“That can’t be true,” he protested. “Nienke and Peter? But we just saw them, what, yesterday afternoon! We’re all going on a cruise to Finland together this weekend!”

Jacob let out a noise that sounded like a purr.

“So you maintain you don’t know anything about their deaths?” Höglund asked.

“Are they really dead?”

Malcolm Rudolph began to cry.

Chapter 67

THE YOUNG AMERICAN WAS SOBBING as if his heart were about to break, as if he had just lost his best friends in the world.

“And you think
we
had something to do with it? That
we
could have harmed Peter and Nienke? How could you even
think
that?”

Sara Höglund and Mats Duvall let him cry for a few minutes.

Then they asked if he wanted a lawyer present. They had to do this. He had the right to one under Swedish law, the same as in America.

The murder suspect merely shook his head. He didn’t need legal representation. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He couldn’t understand how anyone could suspect him of anything so terrible. The Dutch couple had been happy and full of life when he and Sylvia had left them in their hotel room the previous day.

What were they doing in the hotel room? Did they eat or drink anything?

“No,” Malcolm Rudolph said with a sniff. “Well, actually we did. Peter had a Coke that I drank a bit of.”

“No champagne?”

“Champagne? In the middle of the afternoon?” The question seemed to strike him as absurd.

“Did you smoke anything in their room? Marijuana, for instance?”

“Marijuana is illegal here, isn’t it? And Sylvia and I don’t smoke, anyway.”

He slumped down on the table and started crying again. The questions kept coming.

When did you arrive in Sweden?

How long have you been traveling in Europe?

Can you tell us about Peter and Nienke?

“They were so much fun, so nice. We were really looking forward to the trip to Finland with them. We had a great lunch at that place in the Old Town…”

The detectives’ questions bounced off him, many unanswered, then into the control room.

Where were you on November twenty-seventh last year?

December thirtieth?

January twenty-sixth this year? February ninth? March fourth?

The interrogation was stopped after just forty-three minutes. To be humane, and to be lawful.

Malcolm Rudolph was led away to a cell in Kronoberg Prison.