Laban Hassel gave a crooked smile. “Eloquent, isn’t it?”
“Did you kill him?” Hjelm asked.
Laban raised his eyes, stared intensely into Hjelm’s, and said, “That is a very, very good question.”
“Is there a very, very good answer?”
But Laban said no more. He just looked fixedly at the table and kept his mouth shut.
Hjelm tried again. “What happened in January?”
Absolute silence.
Another attempt: “We know that you registered at the university three years ago but didn’t complete a single course. Perhaps you were able to cheat your way into student loans for a while. But for the next two years-what did you live on then?”
“CSU,” said Laban Hassel. “Cash Support for Unemployment, I think it means. Then it ran out.”
“In January this year,” said Hjelm.
Hassel looked at him. “Do you know how demeaning it is to apply for welfare? Do you know what it’s like to be openly distrusted and then meticulously investigated? Do you know what it feels like when they find out that your father is too well known and well-to-do for you to qualify for welfare? It’s not enough that he’s been hanging over me like a repressive shadow all my life-now because of him, I can’t even get money to survive.”
“That added to your hatred.”
“The first threat was spontaneous. I just vented on the computer. Then I realized that I could send my outburst as an e-mail. Then it became an idée fixe.”
“Why did you threaten your half-brother Conny?”
The look on Laban Hassel’s face could not be described as anything other than self-loathing. “That’s the only thing I regret.”
“Cut the throat of a six-year-old and fuck the severed throat?”
“Please stop. I wasn’t threatening the boy, only my father.”
“Have you met Conny?”
“I see him now and then. We’re friends. His mother, Ingela, seems to like me. We’re almost the same age. Do you know when I saw her for the first time?”
“No.”
“I was probably about fourteen, fifteen. I was out walking with my mom along Hamngatan. And as if it weren’t bad enough to be out walking with your mom at that age, we caught sight of my father on the other side of the street. With Ingela. He saw us, but far from being embarrassed by the seventeen-year-old at his side, he started crudely making out with her in the middle of the street. Mom and I got a private show.”
“Was that before the divorce?”
“Yes. Sure, all our relationships were hellish at home, but from the outside we still looked like a family. That day ripped the veil from the illusion.”
“Hellish in what way?”
“People seem to think that it’s much worse for children if the parents argue rather than shutting up and pretending to be friends. But that’s the worst kind of hypocrisy, because children can always see through it. Our house was dominated by an icy silence. Hell isn’t warm, it’s cold. Absolute zero. I went frostbitten through the polar landscape of my childhood. And besides that, he could go missing at any time: soccer matches he promised to come to but never showed up at, always the same thing. And then he’d come home only to freeze the whole fucking apartment.”
“You have literary talent,” said Hjelm, “I can hear that. Why waste it on hate letters to your dad?”
“I think it was an exorcism,” Laban said thoughtfully. “I had to get that bastard out of my blood. That cold bastard. But I might as well have chosen not to send that shit to him.”
“It could have been a novel.”
Laban looked into Hjelm’s eyes and blinked intensely. Perhaps some sort of connection was forming between them.
“Maybe,” he said. “On the other hand, I wanted to see how he’d react. I wanted to see if I could notice anything in him when we met. Maybe I also had some sort of vain hope that he would confide in his son. If he had hinted that he was being threatened even once, I would have stopped right away, I’m sure of that. But nothing. He showed no trace. He spouted the same old, tired jargon every time we met. I don’t even think he ever considered that the evil that the letters accused him of committing had to do with his role as a father.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Chavez from over by the window. “Do you know what the password on his computer was?”
Laban Hassel looked over his shoulder.
“Laban,” said Chavez. “L-A-B-A-N.”
“Why do you think Elisabeth Berntsson called you?” Hjelm asked. “She was prepared to take the blame herself in order to keep you out of it. Why do you think she suspected you?”
“Why do you think your father saved all your e-mails in a folder called ‘hate’?” Chavez asked. “Every single file we looked at had been accessed at least ten times.”
“You were waiting for him to take the first step,” said Hjelm. “And he was waiting for you to.”
Laban seemed to disappear into himself again, but they didn’t let him go completely. “What happened a month ago?” Hjelm asked. “Why did you suddenly start firing off more e-mails?”
Laban slowly raised his eyes; it seemed like an enormous, purely physical effort. His gaze fastened on Hjelm.
“That was when I got close to Ingela. She told me about Conny, about his birth, that he had never even wanted to see him.”
“ ‘Got close to’? How close?”
“I decided to murder him for real.”
Hjelm and Chavez held perfectly still. Hjelm tried to formulate the right question, which ended up being “You started piling on threatening e-mails with the intent of murdering him?”
“Yes.”
“And in the last one, you let him know that you knew about his New York plans and that you were going to kill him in a way that would make it impossible for him to scream out his pain? Do you know how he died?”
“He was murdered.”
“But the details?”
“No.”
“He was tortured to death, and his vocal cords were cut so that no one could hear him scream. When did you go to New York?”
“I haven’t-”
“When? Were you there waiting for him, or did you arrive just as the plane was about to take off?”
“I-”
“How did you learn about the Kentucky Killer’s MO?”
“Where did you get the Edwin Reynolds passport?”
“How did you sneak past the police at Arlanda?”
Laban Hassel gaped into the crossfire.
Hjelm leaned forward and said emphatically, “Where were you on the night of the second and third of September?”
“In hell,” Laban Hassel said almost inaudibly.
“Then you must have run into your father there,” said Chavez. “I don’t think any living person could come closer to hell than he was right then.”
In the dramaturgy of investigative techniques, Laban should, at this point, either have broken down or clammed up. What happened was something in between. His lips hardly moving, he said to the table flatly, “I can’t understand it. I had almost made up my mind to take that step, and then he died. Then someone else murdered him. It was completely crazy. Or rather completely logical. Divine justice. A desire so strong that it materialized. It couldn’t be a coincidence; it had to be fate, a fate as grotesque as life itself. A message from above. And only now, now that nothing can be taken back, do I realize that I never would have killed him. And that I didn’t even want to. On the contrary, I only wanted to punish him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to get him to show some tiny trace of remorse.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Then Hjelm repeated, “Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”
“I was in Skärmarbrink,” Laban whispered, “at Ingela and Conny’s place.”
And Chavez repeated: “What happened a month ago? How close to Ingela did you get?”
“Very close,” said Laban calmly. “Too close. It’s not enough that I slept with my brother’s mother, not enough that she slept with the son of her son’s detested father, and that these insights slugged us hard in the face. We were also confronted with something we had in common, something horrible with the same root cause, and that was what caused me to make my decision. That was what made me send more and more letters. By then it was mutual.”