How the hell did it all fit together?
“How the hell does all this fit together?” said Kerstin Holm, her first words since the plane had taken off from Arlanda and set course for New York. She and Hjelm were apparently on the same wavelength.
“I don’t know,” said Paul Hjelm.
Then it was quiet.
The sun shone blindly, as though it belonged to no particular season, outside the trembling Plexiglas airplane windows; it could just as easily have been a winter sun as a summer one-but it was an autumn sun. They found themselves in a detached moment. It was a journey through time, the only possible kind. Time passed and no time passed. It was a place for contemplation.
He would have liked to have a whiskey and soda and listen to music and read a book. All of that would have to wait.
Should he use the time to develop hypotheses, then? No, those would have to wait. This was more a time to establish openness, a critical receptiveness, to all the information and impressions that would come streaming toward them in the new world. They would have to keep the questions coming without trying to answer them too quickly. For there were so many questions.
Why does he kill? Is it for the same reasons before and after his break? Why did he take a break for almost fifteen years? Is it really the same killer? Why does everyone feel there’s something wrong with the image of him as a classic serial killer? Why was Lars-Erik Hassel murdered at the airport? Why did the murderer go to Sweden? Why did he use a thirty-two-year-old’s passport if he is over fifty? How did he find Gallano’s cabin in Riala? Why did he change cars in Frihamnen? Was it because he wanted Gallano’s corpse to be traced via his car? After all, Lindberger’s corpse was easy to find, too. Does he, like most serial killers, want to display his art for an audience? Why did he murder Lindberger, an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? What was Lindberger doing in Frihamnen in the middle of the night? Where was he murdered? Is the failed break-in at the computer company LinkCoop’s warehouse connected to the case? Why did the killer shoot John Doe instead of torturing him? Who the hell is this John Doe, who can’t be found in any international registry? Are we asking the right questions?
The last question was perhaps the most important. Was there a link between all these questions, something you couldn’t see until you got up high enough and looked down at the darkness in the crystal-clear sunlight, and then it would be obvious?
Right now it didn’t feel like it.
But at least they were on their way.
22
A wasp had come into the room to die. How it had survived the storms of the past few days was a mystery. Perhaps, more dead than alive, it had managed to hide from the madness in some musty hole but hadn’t died there. Instead it had come out with its stinger drawn, ready to wound even in the last moments of its life. A doomed survivor with all its senses but the sixth gone: the sixth sense, that of a killer.
The wasp made a few wobbly rounds of the fluorescent tube light up on the ceiling, as unaffected by heat as it was by light. It buzzed suddenly; it was no longer the usual drone of a wasp but was duller, more aggressive. Then it rushed downward, a last kamikaze attack with its stinger raised. It came closer.
Chavez executed a mercy killing. A precise backhand using a yellowed issue of Expressen sent the body into the corner under the churning old dot-matrix printer; the stinger stuck straight up from the crumpled body. The body would almost certainly lie there until next year, when a light spring breeze would reveal it to be a collection of dust that stuck together only out of habit.
As he stared at the wasp, he had a lightninglike but wordless insight. For a split second he thought he saw the core of the case, crystal clear.
Then reality returned and concealed his clarity with a data list that was growing and curling up on itself, on the floor over the wasp. A shroud of everyday, routine work enveloped the detective’s stroke of genius.
The printer stopped printing. Chavez got up, tore off the list, tore at his hair, and observed his own future as though in an utterly trivial crystal ball. The list of dark blue Volvo station wagons with license numbers that started with B and that were registered in Sweden was long, surprisingly long. He was bored with this task before he’d even started.
He would start by crossing out all those Volvos that were older than fifteen and newer than five years old. After that he would concentrate on those in the Stockholm area. That would bring the cars down to a manageable number-sixty-eight.
Jorge Chavez threw the list down onto his desk and picked up a list he had made himself. There he wrote, as point number three, “The Volvo shit.” Point number one was “The cabin shit”: to return to the nightmarish cabin in Riala in full daylight to assist the industrious technicians, who, to their vociferous surprise, had not found a single strand of hair at the site of the murder and therefore were continuing their intensive search. Point number two was “The Hall shit”: to go to Hall and talk to Andreas Gallano’s fellow inmates and go through his belongings, which he had left behind after his escape a month ago.
Chavez, in other words, had drawn Gallano in the lottery, and as if that weren’t enough, the damn Volvo had been assigned to him, too. This was the work he’d inherited from Kerstin, and he couldn’t help harboring an envious grudge; he and Hjelm could damn sure have been of much greater use to the FBI. They were, after all, the ones for whom things had been moving along; first with Laban Hassel, then with Andreas Gallano.
He wondered, in his not-entirely-peaceful conscience, what he had done to earn the dunce cap. He hadn’t run over small children at Arlanda or groped chicks in the passport check. He hadn’t taken off for Tallinn on a purge à la Charles Bronson and ended up on the floorboards like a fallen version of the only begotten son. And yet here he sat with the worst crap job of all while that nobody Norlander was gathering up the few brain cells he had and destroying the next most stimulating job: taking on John Doe. That job demanded the right man-and Norlander was definitely not that man.
Chavez’s modest request for a change had brought him two things: an icily neutral look from Hultin and a list of two hundred dark blue Volvos.
He turned on the coffeemaker with the tip of his toe and watched the spout until the first drop hit his freshly ground Colombian beans. Then he gazed across the desk, where Hjelm was conspicuous by his absence.
The man with the golden helmet, Chavez thought maliciously. The fake Rembrandt. Perhaps the most admired of the master’s paintings, and it turned out to have been done by an anonymous pupil.
He missed him already.
Then he gave a deep sigh, artfully poured the coffee while the hot water was still bubbling, and dove into the Volvo inferno.
The future was not his.
23
The nontime had passed. The hours that didn’t exist no longer existed. They landed at Newark in a broiling-hot noonday sun that embraced the entire unending system of runways; from up in the sky, they had glittered in the sun like an inexperienced fly fisherman’s tangle of lines.
Paul and Kerstin hadn’t exchanged many words during the flight, not only because they had been contemplating the case; the disruptions in their relationship seemed to keep spreading-although neither of them thought much about it.
They were shepherded through passport control and had to wait more than half an hour for their luggage. After clearing customs, they finally entered the enormous arrivals hall, where a crowd of people were holding signs with the names of their unfamiliar arriving guests. After a few minutes, they realized that a sign in the hand of a tall suit-clad man, with the Lewis Carroll-inspired text “Yalm, Halm,” must be directed at them. The renowned comedy duo of Yalm & Halm politely greeted the gigantic man, whose name they made out as Jerry Schonbauer, and who shepherded them to a slightly calmer part of the arrivals hall.