Such a pleasure.
He bent a bit farther forward, and his hand slid along the stem until it reached the waterline. He caught something in his hand. The incredibly stubborn rain meant that he couldn’t really see what it was. Sticky. Like seaweed.
Seaweed? But he had cleaned the stem of seaweed as recently as this morning.
He got a good grip on the bunch of seaweed and lifted it upward.
And stared into a pair of open eyes.
He immediately let go of the body and screamed.
As the body splashed back down into the water, he noticed two small red holes in the pale white neck.
Vampires in Lidingö?
17
Viggo Norlander was back on his dunce task, but he hadn’t realized until now that it had nothing to do with dunces. Quite the opposite: it was important work, and he had been placed there because of his competence.
He had arrived at his spot in the pathology department before the new corpse did, which he considered to be of merit. This time, unfortunately, he wasn’t alone.
He didn’t really understand how it had happened, but several of the unpleasant morning’s visitors were already present.
The Johnsson couple were there, the ones who dreamed of finding their son-in-law in the morgue at Karolinska instead of in his Bahraini harem. The old rapids-shooter Egil Högberg, accompanied by a new aide, was there, ceaselessly repeating “My son, my son.” And Justine Lindberger, the young civil servant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was there, intensely missing her missing husband. Norlander did his best to cool down the heated atmosphere.
By the time old Sigvard Strandell peeked out of the loathsome cold chamber and gave Norlander a quick nod, the latter had already decided to prioritize Justine Lindberger.
She appeared to have collected herself after the morning’s breakdown, but Norlander made sure that there were still medical personnel on site.
He led her carefully into the cold chamber. As had not been the case with the unidentified corpse from Frihamnen, the new body had not yet been placed in a cooler box; it was lying on a gurney in the middle of the room, covered by a genuine county council sheet. Strandell was there to make sure that no damage was done to his future working material. It was he who pulled the sheet aside for Justine Lindberger.
This corpse was a man almost as young as the previous, unidentified one. The dark hair gave a ghostly contrast against the whitish-blue face, slightly swollen from its stay in the water-and it had two small holes in the neck.
Justine Lindberger squeaked, nodded, and ran out into the hallway. The staff outside were ready, caught her up, and gave her an injection. Before it took effect, Norlander had time to ask the unnecessary question: “Do you recognize the dead man?”
“It’s my husband,” said Justine Lindberger faintly. “Eric Lindberger.”
And then a gradually developing mist brought her long, horrible day to a merciful end.
18
Supreme Central Command finally lost its quotation marks. The decisive indication was that the whiteboard had been set up behind Hultin’s desk. It was time for brainstorming. The markers lying there seemed to be simmering with impatience.
The case had let out a giant blob of ketchup. First came nothing, then nothing-and then everything. So far perhaps only a little of America’s favorite condiment garnished the Swedish bread. Perhaps the sandwich would soon be covered in sticky red sludge.
In any case, the Kentucky Killer had begun. Two definite victims had, in the course of a few hours, been added to the probable one. Things had been set in motion, possibly in escalating motion.
It was after nine o’clock at night. Everyone was there. No one even thought of complaining about the unreasonable working hours.
Jan-Olov Hultin was rummaging through his papers, then found what he was looking for, stood, grabbed a marker, and got the meeting going.
“So,” he said evenly, drawing squares and arrows on the whiteboard, “at eight-ten on the third of September, the Kentucky Killer arrived in Stockholm under the name Edwin Reynolds after having murdered the literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel at Newark International Airport outside New York during the night. After his arrival, it seems he promptly went to Riala in Roslagen; the degree of decomposition of drug dealer Andreas Gallano’s body suggests that he was murdered just over a week ago, which matches up quite well with the Kentucky Killer’s arrival in Sweden. Andreas Gallano had escaped from Hall and apparently taken shelter in a cabin that, by way of various fronts, belongs to a tax evader named Robert Arkaius, who had once been Gallano’s mother’s lover. What happened in the cabin we don’t know, other than that the Kentucky Killer put Gallano to death with the method he is in the habit of using. There is reason to believe that he then lived there for over a week with an increasingly stinking corpse in the cellar. That he almost immediately made his way to such a perfect hiding place indicates previous contact with Gallano or his drug syndicate. This must be verified.
“Then what happened? Here it gets complicated. Gallano’s beige Saab is discovered near the site of a double murder. Of course, it may have been there for a long time, for completely unrelated reasons, but for the time being, all signs indicate that, the night before last, on the twelfth of September, the Kentucky Killer took Gallano’s car to Frihamnen. There with his usual pincers he murdered two more people: an as-yet-unidentified man, whom we’ll call John Doe as the Americans do, with four shots to the heart; and a thirty-three-year-old civil servant with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eric Lindberger. Just as Hjelm and Chavez were finding Gallano, Lindberger’s corpse was discovered at a Lidingö boat club by the retired executive Johannes Hertzwall. Eric Lindberger has the same vampire bite on his neck as Gallano and Hassel did. An examination by Strandell has shown that he died at about the same time as John Doe; that is, less than twenty-four hours ago, and the boat club is situated a reasonable distance from Frihamnen. So it is extremely likely that Eric Lindberger is the corpse that was seen being shoved into a decade-old dark blue Volvo station wagon with a license number that starts with B by a man with a balaclava at two-thirty in the morning.”
Hultin paused. His students were like lit lightbulbs, in front of the horribly growing diagram on the whiteboard.
“May I suggest a scenario?” he continued. “The Kentucky Killer goes to Frihamnen to commit a pair of seemingly well-planned murders. He travels there in Gallano’s car, but has another one waiting.
“He commits his crimes in some deserted cellar, wraps the victims in blankets, and starts to load them into the second car. Then he’s surprised by a gang of attorneys who are lost, brandishing bandy sticks and bottles of vodka. That means that he has time to load only one of the bodies-Lindberger. He leaves behind the other, our unidentified twenty-five-year-old John Doe. Convinced that his car has been reported to the police, he thinks he has to get out of there quickly and hurries to Lidingö, where he dumps the victim rather carelessly and scrams.”
“In this scenario,” said Gunnar Nyberg, “you’re assuming that the break-in at LinkCoop’s warehouse doesn’t have anything to do with the murders.”
“I can’t get a failed break-in at a warehouse to fit. Does anyone here have an opinion?… No? No, I think it’s an irrelevant event. One thought, of course, is that the break-in failed because the burglars happened to witness a considerably worse crime and got out of there.”
“Or maybe this,” said Kerstin Holm thoughtfully. “You’re probably right that it was a well-planned crime, but only for Lindberger. Sure enough, the poor guy had a visit from the pincers in the neck. But if the Kentucky Killer shot someone in the heart, too, then that’s the first time he’s broken the pattern. It could be that our John Doe is the burglar, and that he happened to see the murderer as he was dragging his victim, and was discovered and shot. I would bet the Lindberger murder was planned, but the John Doe murder wasn’t.”