The Postcard Killers (23 page)

This one was different, though.

The walls were several feet high, unwelcoming, granite gray. They stretched as far as he could see up toward the hills. They protected the house and grounds so well that he had no idea what might be on the other side.

The Mansion, my ass. More like the Fortress. To protect what secrets?

He got out of the car and went up to the phone to the left of the gate.

“Sí?”
a crackling voice said.

So it wasn’t entirely uninhabited.

“Hola,”
Jacob said. “Speak English?” He had many good qualities, but a talent for languages wasn’t one of them.

“
Sí.
Yes.”

“Jacob Kanon, NYPD. New York City police. I’d like to ask a few questions about the Rudolph family. It’s important that I speak to someone.”

“Can you hold your ID up to the camera beside the phone?”

Opening his wallet, Jacob pulled out his badge and held it up to the camera.

“Come in!” the crackling voice said, and the tall gates started to glide apart.

A small Tudor-style gatekeeper’s lodge was situated some fifty yards in on the left. The door opened and an elderly man limped out onto the drive.

Jacob stopped the car again and climbed out.

“You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting,” the man said, holding his hand out and saying that he was Carlos Rodríguez.

“What for?” Jacob said, surprised.

The man hastily crossed himself. “The killing of Mr. Simon and Mrs. Helen has been unsolved for too long! It is like a heavy weight I carry.”

“So you knew the Rudolphs?” Jacob asked.

“Knew?” Carlos Rodríguez exclaimed. “I’ve been the gardener here for more than thirty years. I was here the night it happened. I called the police.”

Chapter 104

CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ AND HIS wife, Carmela, had lived in the small gatekeeper’s lodge at the Mansion ever since he returned from the Vietnam War in the spring of 1975. Both of their children had grown up there.

“Children are the future,” Rodríguez said. “Do you have children?”

“No,” Jacob said, putting his ID back in his wallet. “But I’m interested in the Rudolphs’ children. What happened to them after the murder?”

The gardener sucked his teeth.

“The twins were looked after by Señor Blython,” he said. “He took them down to Los Angeles, to the big house he bought in Beverly Hills.”

The man moved closer to Jacob and lowered his voice, as if someone might overhear him.

“Señorita and Junior didn’t really want to move,” he said. “They wanted to stay in their house here, but it was up to Señor Blython to decide. He was their legal guardian, after all.”

“Who owns this place these days?” Jacob asked.

He remembered that Lyndon said it had been in the hands of a bankruptcy agency.

Rodríguez’s face darkened.

“The children inherited it, along with everything else: paintings, jewelry, stock shares, and small businesses. Señor Blython was charged with managing these assets until the children were twenty-one. But when that day came, the money was gone.”

Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Their guardian defrauded them?”

“He took every last penny. The house was sold at an executive auction. The company that bought it was going to turn it into a conference center. But they went bankrupt in the financial crisis.”

“What did Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph say about what happened?”

The man’s gaze wavered.

“They couldn’t stay on at UCLA. There was no money, not even for the fees. So they had to get jobs. But they managed,” he said. “They’re very resourceful.”

Jacob’s jaw tightened. If the old man only knew.

“When did you last see them?” he asked.

Carlos Rodríguez didn’t need to think about the answer. “The weekend before the house was sold at auction,” he said. “They came to collect a few mementos, photo albums and things like that.”

“They were both here?”

“And Sandra,” the gardener said. “Sandra Schulman, Sylvia’s best friend. They only stayed a few hours on that last visit, and then they left, in the middle of the night…”

“And then Señor Blython was murdered,” Jacob said.

Carlos Rodríguez snorted.

“If you hang around with
putas
in Los Angeles…,” he said.

Jacob nodded and let the subject drop. The gardener had told him more than he had expected.

“The main building,” he said, “is it still here?”

Carlos Rodríguez’s face broke into a smile again.

“
Pero claro que sí!
I’m not formally employed anymore, of course. I get a little from the bank. Mostly we live on my pension. But I look after the Mansion.”

“Could you show me around?” Jacob asked.

“
Sí, claro!
Of course I can.”

Chapter 105

LYNDON WAS RIGHT.

The house was enormous, and it looked like something from a horror film set in the English countryside. Señor Rodríguez may have done his best to keep the building in good condition, but his lame old body had no chance against the wind, the damp, the weeds, and the ivy. One window frame had slipped its hinge and was squeaking in the wind.

This was where it all began, wasn’t it? The murders — the mystery of the Rudolphs.

“The electricity has been cut off in the main house,” the gardener said apologetically as he unlocked the oak door.

Jacob’s footsteps echoed in the grand stone hallway. Doors stood half open, leading into high-ceilinged rooms and down long, dark corridors.

He took a quick look into the various rooms where Sylvia and Malcolm had once lived.

The whole building seemed to have been emptied of its contents. Jacob noticed a single curtain in a library that was empty of books.

“The master bedroom is on the second floor. Follow me.”

A magnificent curved staircase led up to the more private parts of the mansion.

Pale rectangles on the walls revealed where paintings had once hung. A battered rococo sofa, its stuffing hanging out, stood alone and dusty on the first landing.

“Straight ahead,” Carlos Rodríguez said.

The bed was still there, an ornate four-poster without curtains or bedclothes. Otherwise the room was empty.

“So this was where it happened?” Jacob said.

The gardener nodded.

“And you were here that night?”

He nodded again.

“What did you see? Tell me anything you remember. Please. It’s important.”

The man swallowed.

“Terrible things,” he said. “Blood all over this room. Mr. and Mrs. were lying dead in that bed. They must have been asleep when it happened.”

“Did you see their injuries close up?”

The man ran his index finger like a knife across his throat.

“Deep cuts,” he said. “Almost through to the bone at the back of the neck.”

He gave an involuntary shudder as Jacob watched him closely.

“How did you come to be here, in your employers’ room in the middle of the night? I don’t understand.”

The man took a deep breath, then spoke.

“I was asleep with my family when Señorita rang. I hurried here straightaway.”

“It wasn’t you who found them?”

“No, no. It was little Sylvia.”

Chapter 106

Monday, June 21
Copenhagen, Denmark

THERE WAS STILL A pattern here. It had just changed slightly.

Dessie kept thinking she could see it clearly, just for a few seconds. Then it would slide out of her reach again.

She was sitting on the unmade bed in her hotel room with all the pictures and postcards around her, all of Jacob’s crumpled copies. She picked them up, even though she had seen them a hundred times, maybe more. All the buildings and people and details were already imprinted in her memory.

The postcard from Amsterdam of the plain building on Prinsengracht 267: the house where Anne Frank was hidden during the war, where she wrote her famous diary.

Then Rome and Madrid: the Coliseum and Las Ventas, gladiatorial combat and bullfights. Arenas for theater based on killing.

The Paris card was of La Conciergerie, the legendary antechamber of the guillotine.

Berlin was a view of the bunker built by Hitler, the most famous failed artist in history.

Stockholm showed the main square, Stortorget, the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath.

But she couldn’t make three of the cards fit the pattern of the others.

The Tivoli pleasure gardens in Copenhagen.

The Olympic stadium from the Athens games of 2004.

And that anonymous shopping street in Salzburg.

What did they have to do with death?

Dessie let the pictures fall to the bed again.

Was she imagining this pattern?

Was it foolish to try to give any sort of order to the way these sick bastards thought?

She stood up and went over to the window. The rain had given way to mist and fog. Cars and bicycles were crossing Kongens Nytorv below her.

Why was she really bothering? Jacob had left her. The newspaper hadn’t been in touch for days now. No one missed her.

To be or not to be.

As if you could choose to live or die.

Could you? And in that case, what sort of life would it be?

She knew she could do just as she liked, continue digging around in this story or go home: get involved or let go. Quite regardless of what other people thought, and what they thought about her, what did
she
actually want to do now?

She turned around and looked at the mess on the bed.

Jacob hadn’t managed to contact the Austrian reporter. He had never gotten hold of a copy of the picture of the bodies in Salzburg either.

She walked toward her mobile phone, then picked it up and held it to her chest for a few seconds before dialing International Directory Inquiries.

A minute later the phone rang at the reception desk of the
Kronen Zeitung.

“Ich suche Charlotta Bruckmoser, bitte,”
Dessie said.

Chapter 107

THERE WERE SEVERAL CLICKS on the line, then the Austrian reporter was there.

Dessie introduced herself as a fellow reporter from Stockholm.

“Before I start, I want to apologize for phoning and disturbing you,” she said in her rusty schoolgirl German.

“I was the one who received the postcard and picture in Sweden,” she explained. “I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

“I haven’t got anything to say,” the reporter said, but she didn’t sound angry. Just watchful.

“I completely understand,” Dessie said. “I know what you’ve been through.”

“I read about the killings in Sweden,” Charlotta Bruckmoser said, sounding slightly less guarded.

“Well, here’s something you might not know,” Dessie said, and she told her story. About the photographs mimicking famous works of art, with a few exceptions; about the postcards of places where death and art mixed together, again with a few exceptions; about Jacob Kanon and his murdered daughter; about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, their alibis and Jacob’s conviction that, in spite of everything, they were the Postcard Killers.

The only thing she left out was the night in Jacob’s room in the hostel.

Two sharp beeping sounds told her that someone was trying to call her, but she ignored them.

Charlotta Bruckmoser was silent for a few moments after Dessie had finished speaking. “I haven’t read any of this in the papers,” she eventually said.

“No,” Dessie said, “and I doubt you could get confirmation of it from any official sources.”

“What about you, what do you think?” the reporter asked cautiously. “Are the Rudolphs guilty?”

Dessie took a moment to reply.

“I really don’t know anymore.”

Silence again.

“Why are you telling me this?” the Austrian woman asked.

Two more beeping sounds. Someone was keen to get hold of her.

“The pictures you received,” Dessie said. “I’d really like to see the pictures you received.”

“I’ll e-mail you the card and the letter and everything,” Charlotta Bruckmoser said.

Ten seconds later there was a ping from Dessie’s mailbox. The pictures were here!

There was blood all over the room, as if the victims had been crawling about while they bled to death. Two lamps had been broken. The bodies had fallen forward onto their sides and lay about a meter apart on the floor.

“Is there any Austrian work of art that looks like this?” Dessie asked. “Famous art?”

The reporter took her time replying.

“I don’t think so,” she said, “but I’m no expert.
Famous
art, though? I really don’t think so.”

Dessie clicked open the PDF of the envelope and looked at the address. It was written in the same block letters as the others. But on the back was something she hadn’t seen before: nine numbers, hastily written down.

“That number on the back,” Dessie said, “what does that mean?”

“It’s a phone number,” Charlotta Bruckmoser said. “I tried calling it. It’s for a pizzeria in Vienna. The police decided it had nothing to do with the case.”

At that moment Dessie’s inbox pinged again. She felt her stomach lurch.

It’s Jacob, ran the thought going through her head. He’s e-mailed me because he misses me.

It was from Gabriella.

Tried to call you. Another double murder in Oslo.

“I’ve got to go,” Dessie said and hung up on Charlotta Bruckmoser.

Chapter 108

Los Angeles, USA

UCLA WAS AS BIG as a decent-size town in California. More than thirty thousand students, some two hundred buildings, more than fifty thousand applicants to be freshmen every year.

Jacob had punched Charles E. Young Drive into the GPS, an address that was supposed to be in the university’s northern campus, where the School of the Arts and Architecture was based.