The Postcard Killers (9 page)

She swallowed, couldn’t believe her ears.

“I’m here today only because the police told me to be here,” she said. “I’m supposed to be off Monday and Tuesday. I’m not claiming any kind of copyright on these murders, but if —”

She was interrupted by a shout and then a loud commotion in the lobby. It sounded like something breaking, something large and solid.

Forsberg stood up.

“What the hell is that?”

A furious male voice could be heard through the office walls. The words weren’t clear, but they didn’t need to be.

“Wait here,” Dessie said and ran toward the door as fast as she could.

Chapter 33

JACOB KANON WAS STANDING AND yelling inarticulately at the enclosed glass cubicle where Albert, the security guard, had taken cover. Dessie fumbled with the door and rushed out into the lobby.

“You’re calling her right now!”
the American detective was screaming.
“You’re going to pick up the phone now and tell her I’m here, you fucking —”

“What are you doing?” she asked breathlessly, grabbing him by the shoulder.

Jacob Kanon spun around and stared at her. He fell silent in the middle of a word that sounded suspiciously like
motherfucker,
then breathed out.

“Have you heard from the police today?” he asked “What are they saying?
Tell me
.”

Dessie looked over her shoulder into the newsroom, then took a firm grip of the man’s arm and pulled him toward the outside door.

“Your credibility is already pretty low,” she said, pushing him into the revolving door. “You won’t make it any better by standing here shouting at poor Albert. And whatever did you
break?
”

They emerged into the sunshine.

“A wooden bench,” the American said sullenly. “It hit one of the radiators.”

She gave him a skeptical look, then burst out laughing.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

Chapter 34

SHE FELT HIM LOOKING STRANGELY at her as they walked off in the direction of Fridhemsplan.

They went into an empty taxi drivers’ café a few hundred meters from the newspaper office.

“I’m serious,” the policeman said as they sat down in a corner with their coffee. “The Swedish police are way too rigid in their thinking. They’ll never catch the killers if they carry on like this. They’re acting like amateurs. Trust me on this.”

Dessie stirred her coffee, the spoon clinking noisily against the china.

If anyone was being rigid, it was she. Her behavior in the newsroom just now wasn’t exactly smart. She had to stop being so blunt, and finally, dumb.

“I can’t help you,” she said. “I’m not even working on the killings for the paper. There are other people assigned to the story.”

Jacob Kanon leaned across the table, his eyes sparkling brilliantly again.

“Can’t you try to get back on the story?”

Dessie looked at the American. His interest in the case was beyond dispute. Unlike her he was dedicated, he had a burning passion, he had a purpose to what he was doing.

What did she have to lose by writing a few commonplace articles about murder? Doing some normal interviews like any good reporter.

“Maybe I could interview you about Kimmy,” she said thoughtfully.

That wasn’t actually a bad idea. A father in mourning speaking out, his grief for a much-loved daughter…

She reached for her pen and notepad.

“Tell me what Kimmy was like as a girl. How you reacted when you found out she was —”

Jacob Kanon smashed his fist on the table so hard the cups jumped. Dessie dropped her pen with a start.

The waitress behind the counter glanced quickly in their direction, then looked away again. Whatever this was, she didn’t need any of it.

“I’m not giving any interviews about Kimmy,” Jacob said.

Dessie sat in silence for several moments before she spoke.

“I just meant as a way of —”

“I’m a homicide detective,” he interrupted. “I talk to people, I attempt to solve crimes, but I don’t do interviews. Not about anything.”

“I don’t want to ask you in your capacity as a policeman, but as a father.”

He looked at her with his strange, piercing eyes. Then he grabbed his sports bag. He pulled out a bundle of papers and slapped a photocopy on the table between them.

“This is Kimmy,”
he said.

Dessie heard herself gasp.

Chapter 35

TWO YOUNG PEOPLE LAY DEAD as if broken on the floor of a hotel room.

Their throats had been cut with the same brutality as in the murders on Dalarö. The wounds gaped dark red, the floor was drowning in blood.

Dessie’s mouth went dry again and her pulse was racing in a terrifying way.

“The blood’s still bright, fresh,” Dessie said. “They were alive just a few minutes before.”

“Yes, that’s correct,” said Jacob, “they’d just died.”

She forced her breathing to stay calm, regular. It wasn’t really helping.

Jacob put another picture in front of her.

“Karen and Billy Cowley,” he said. “Look at them, Dessie. What do you see?”

The young Australian couple who had come to Europe to get over the death of their young son hadn’t just had their throats cut. They were sitting upright, side by side, their heads leaning back against what must have been the head of a bed. Their left eyeballs had been stabbed, blood and fluid running like red mascara from the sockets.

“The couple in Amsterdam had their right ears cut off,” Jacob said, putting a third picture in front of her. “Their names were Lindsay and Jeffrey Holborn.”

She looked at the pictures, forcing herself to see beyond the blood and violence.

“They’re telling us something,” Jacob said angrily. “The killers are talking through these pictures. I’m sure of it. Look at this one, from Florence.”

A double bed: a young woman on the left, a young man on the right. The picture was taken from above, which meant the photographer must have been standing on the bed, right between the dead bodies.

“What do you see?” Jacob asked.

The man and woman were lying in the same position, their bent legs parallel a little to the left, their right hands on their ribcages and their left ones over their genitals.

“They couldn’t have been lying like this when they died,” she said.

Jacob nodded.

“I know,” he said, “but why?”

Dessie picked up the picture from Paris. The two victims were sitting with their hands on their stomachs.

“They look like they’ve just eaten too much,” Dessie said.

They were posing.
The corpses were posing
. They were saying something, or at least representing something. What was it? If the cops figured that out, they just might catch them.

She looked at Jacob.

“Let me see the one I was sent,” she said.

He gave her the picture from Dalarö. She took it and could still feel the smell of the hot living room.

The woman, Claudia, was sitting upright against the back of the sofa. In her lap was a cushion that had probably been white to start with. She was leaning over the man, Rolf, who was lying on the cushion in her lap.

The man was lying in a strange position. One knee was drawn up, and his fingers were spread out above his heart. In his right hand he was holding something that looked like a sign — or a spatula.

“It’s definitely been arranged,” she said.

“Does it mean anything to you?”

Dessie looked at the picture for a long time.

“I recognize something,” she said. “I just don’t know where from. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Concentrate,” Jacob said.

She stared at the picture until the focus started to blur.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not coming.”

He looked at her with his very blue eyes for several long seconds.

Then he gathered the pictures together and without another word left her sitting at the café table.

Chapter 36

JACOB GOT OFF THE BUS outside the central police headquarters on Kungsholmen in the middle of Stockholm.

On his first night in Stockholm he had walked around the huge complex that housed the central Swedish police authority ten times or more, feeling like a nut, not caring in the least.

Various different sections had been added over the course of the past century, giving the building an extremely schizophrenic appearance. The eastern section looked like some Disney castle, the southern bit was functional concrete, the northern section was a concrete monstrosity, and the western piece was inherited from the same Soviet era as the suburb he and Dessie had passed on the way to the crime scene on Dalarö.

The unconventional-looking building hadn’t made the people inside particularly flexible — he knew that much already. The investigating team refused to take his calls. The receptionist kept putting him through to an automated message box that acted as the telephone tip-off line.

Enough was enough, though.

Now he was going to get inside, no matter what the cost to his reputation.

He clenched his fists and steeled himself for the upcoming confrontation.

The entrance was in the old, communist part of the complex. He walked into the lobby and got a sense of déjà vu. Like the
Aftonposten
lobby, it had a stone floor, pale wood, and a glass cubicle.

He hoped the similarities would end there and cleared his throat as he laid his police badge on the desk.

“Jacob Kanon, NYPD,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “I’m here to see Superintendent Mats Duvall. It’s about the murders on Dalarö.”

The overweight woman on the other side of the desk looked impressed at the sight of his police badge.

“Is he expecting you?”

“He should be,” Jacob replied, entirely truthfully.

“I’ll just call him,” the plump woman said, picking up the phone.

“No need,” Jacob said. “I’ll find him myself. He’s on the fifth floor, isn’t he?”

He had studied the building from outside and counted seven floors in the office section.

“Fourth floor,” the woman said, putting the receiver down as she clicked open the inner door.

He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and exited into a narrow corridor with a low ceiling and humming strip lighting. He took several steps before knocking on a random door. He stuck his head into a small office and said, “Hello, excuse me, but Duvall, can you tell me where he is?”

A woman with a ponytail and glasses looked up in surprise.

“He’s in a meeting about Dalarö at the moment,” she said. “Conference Room C, I think.”

“Thanks,” Jacob said and turned back. He had already passed Conference Room C.

He retraced his steps, slipped into the room, and closed the door behind him.

There were ten people inside, the core of the investigating team: Mats Duvall, Gabriella Oscarsson, a woman in her fifties in a suit, two fairly young women, and five men of varying ages. There were thermoses of coffee and refreshments on the table.

Coffee cups stopped in midair, hands stiffened, and ten pairs of eyes stared at him.

“Your investigation is about to go seriously wrong,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting right down at the table with them.

Chapter 37

THERE WAS A DEATHLY SILENCE in the room.

He had managed to get their attention, though. Now he had about ten seconds before he would be thrown out.

“You’ve probably worked out that the victims’ passports and wallets are missing,” he said. “Jewelry, cameras, and other valuables are gone. Their bank accounts have been emptied, their credit cards taken right to the limit with cash withdrawals. When you go through their credit-card transactions, you’ll discover at least one large purchase before the cash withdrawals take over.”

He paused. No one moved.

“What you’re looking for is a very attractive couple around twenty-five years old,” he went on. “Maybe even younger. A man and a woman, English speaking. They’re well off, probably white, posing as normal tourists.”

Mats Duvall cleared his throat. Then he spoke in nearly perfect English.

“I should explain to my colleagues that this man is a homicide detective from the New York police. His name is Jacob Kanon, and he has been tracking all the investigations since New Year’s. He has personal reasons —”

“My daughter, Kimberly, was one of the victims in Rome,” Jacob said.

He looked around the group. Their shock at his appearance had started to turn to anger in a few of the faces. One of the older men, a bald man in a suit and vest, seemed particularly irritated.

“This is Sweden,” the bald man said now. “The Swedish police are responsible for official business here. We don’t need any lessons in investigative technique, not from the FBI, nor from any other New York cowboys.”

“Cross-border cooperation is absolutely vital if these killers are going to be stopped,” Jacob said. “All we’ve got to go on is their pattern, and we need coordination for that to become clear.”

“That isn’t necessarily true,” the bald man said. “What we need is a decent, honest investigation, and we’re very good at that here in Sweden.”

Jacob stood up so abruptly that his chair toppled over behind him.

“I’m not here to take part in some pissing contest,” he said in a gruff voice. “And New York doesn’t have cowboys, by the way!”

The bald man in the vest also stood up. His forehead was sweating and his eyes were narrow and small.

“Evert, let him speak.”

The woman in the suit had said this. Her voice was low and calm. She stood up and walked over to Jacob.

“Sara Höglund,” she said, holding out her hand to him. “Head of the National Crime Investigation Department. You’ll have to excuse Prosecutor Ridderwall, he’s an extremely dedicated judicial investigator.”

The prosecutor sat down and ran his hand angrily over his scalp.

The woman in the suit looked Jacob carefully up and down.