“Wayne Jennings. Not Waylon,” corrected Hultin.
“Thanks. According to FASK, he was just Balls’s henchman. The truly important operations in Vietnam were carried out under the personal leadership of Balls. Again, according to FASK. They’re also convinced that Balls is K. Apparently he’s a general at this point. According to the serial killers’ cheerleaders, he stopped killing when he was transferred to Washington, D.C., and got Vietnam out of his blood, and he started up again when he retired. The reasoning itself seems pretty coherent, I think.”
“But it can hardly be your Balls who’s come here,” Hultin said. “He was traveling with a thirty-two-year-old’s passport.”
Chavez nodded with as much enthusiasm as his exhaustion would allow.
“Exactly. That gives us a little perspective on the FBI’s reasoning. The whole theory that the Kentucky Killer has come to Sweden actually rests on pretty flimsy grounds. It was a quick, smart conclusion under the circumstances, but it is based on something as trivial as Hassel not having a ticket on him. Then the speedy hypothesis became an axiom. We don’t even know when Hassel was murdered. Our literary critic could very well have had some whim at the airport, thought of something else he had to do, and decided to stay another night or two. Maybe he called to cancel his own ticket, then threw it away. Maybe he stuck around for a while and had a few drinks. On the way to the toilet he was attacked and murdered. Meanwhile a young criminal with a fake passport arrived at the airport, maybe on the run from angry bookies or something, and wanted to get the first international flight he could find a seat on. The plane to Stockholm was going to take off in about an hour, and he hopped on. In which case, the Kentucky Killer never left the country. Does that sound unreasonable?”
Hultin looked around the room. Since no one else seemed willing, he raised the objections himself. He did so honorably.
“Aside from the fact that there are a few too many coincidences, it seems pretty bizarre that Hassel would have gone to the airport only to change his mind once he was already there, not bother to check in an hour ahead of time as is required, wait for at least half an hour, and then call to cancel instead of just walking up to the ticket counter.”
“To my ears it sounds like classic alcoholic behavior,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “Maybe he arrived too late, wandered about aimlessly, realized he had missed the check-in deadline, thought that meant he’d missed the flight, and called the desk in order to avoid facing the contempt of the ground agent. Then he kept boozing at the airport and picked a fight with the wrong person. In which case, Jorge’s hypothesis would work better.”
“The problem,” Hultin said coldly, “is that the autopsy didn’t show any elevated alcohol levels in the blood. And no drugs. You would know that if you’d followed orders and read Larner’s report.”
“What happened to his luggage?” Nyberg asked, as if to confirm Hultin’s theory that he had read inadequately.
“It was recovered next to him,” Hultin said, “which bolsters the image of a cold-blooded murder. Not only did he silently carry Hassel into a closet in the middle of the rush of people at Newark; he also managed to get the luggage in.” He sighed. “Let’s try to apply some ice-cold logic here. The cancellation came seventeen minutes before departure. The employees obviously assumed that it was Hassel calling, and that he was calling from outside the airport. But if he was calling from outside to cancel, then why would he have gone to the airport? Because it’s clear that he did: for one thing, the crime scene investigation shows that the closet was indisputably the site of the murder; for another, it wouldn’t have been possible to carry a corpse in through a busy airport corridor. Okay? So two possibilities remain. One: that he himself called from the airport, which is ruled out by its own absurdity, because in that case he (a) would have made it to the plane-after all, Reynolds did, and he arrived five minutes later-or (b) changed his mind on a whim at the last minute, and then why call at all-if he was sober? Why not just turn around and take a taxi back to Manhattan? And two: that someone else called in his name-and if so, then this other person had a good reason to do so, and the best reason seems, at the moment, to be that he wanted to get on the flight to Stockholm at any price. Hayden’s intuitive hypothesis still seems to be a valid working hypothesis, if not yet an axiom.”
“Okay.” Chavez was acting as though he had sniffed some ammonia during his break in the round. “It wasn’t my hypothesis, anyway. Mine’s based on Balls. If our man is now a retired general, it shouldn’t be too big a problem for him to put down some false tracks; there would be lots of ambitious thirty-two-year-old officers at his disposal to use as less-than-scrupulous stand-ins. For some reason, Balls felt that now was the time to be rid of the FBI; maybe he thought Larner’s persistence was becoming irritating. So then, what is the safest way to render the FBI harmless? You leave the country. The FBI is not the CIA; the FBI’s domain is very distinct: within the borders of the United States. So if you carefully choose a country where the police have scanty resources, where the priorities are incomprehensible, where the directors are appointed with strange methods, and where the police are, to put it bluntly, likely to be bumbling, and you then murder a citizen of that country, steal his ticket home, and make sure that your stand-in is capable of suggesting that you have arrived in the country in question, then the FBI’s conclusion is that you have gotten away. Just like Paul and Kerstin, I am of the opinion that there might be a message in the somewhat curious sequence of events at the airport, but that it is directed at the FBI rather than at Sweden, and that the entire Swedish part of this case might well be faked. I have my doubts that he’s here. The stand-in came in, switched passports, and went back without leaving Arlanda, and waiting at home was a retired but far-from-powerless general who made sure the stand-in advanced a few steps in his career.”
The A-Unit looked listless, about to hit a wall. So many hypotheses had whizzed around during the past hour that the team needed fresh air. Viggo Norlander, the only one who had remained quiet, wearing a mental dunce cap after his own little sequence of airport events, got to summarize the whole thing: “In other words, we’re spinning our wheels.”
“That’s exactly right,” Hultin said good-naturedly.
9
The day went by.
Another day or two went by.
A few more days went by.
Nothing happened. The media blared no headline sirens. The A-Unit was allowed to work in undisturbed peace, which, in its own way, made their idleness even more frustrating. They quite simply had nothing to do, not even shoo off stubborn reporters, which at least would have brought a sort of bittersweet satisfaction.
All Swedish deaths that were reported to the police came trickling in-as did all the reports of Americans suspected of crimes. None of them seemed particularly promising as leads. If the Kentucky Killer hadn’t abruptly adapted to Swedish circumstances and started surreptitiously murdering dementia patients, which someone seemed to be up to at the moment in a nursing home in Sandviken, then he was lying low. If he wasn’t a twelve-year-old who had kicked a pregnant woman to the ground on the street so that her broken rib killed the fetus, if he hadn’t raped and murdered a sixty-two-year-old prostitute and put her into a portable luggage trunk, stuck a one-year-old into a freezer, killed himself with nose spray, mistaken sulfuric acid for moonshine, or attacked his neighbor with something as strange as a recently sharpened rake. Officially, Nyberg was the one who kept track of the odd deaths; unofficially, the A-Unit didn’t give a shit about them. Nyberg preferred to stick to the underworld, where he could terrorize old-guard small-time criminals in peace.