Waiting there was an equally well dressed but slightly less stiff and slightly less FBI-like black man in his fifties. As the enormous Schonbauer took his place in the hierarchy just behind him, the black man extended his hand with a genuinely welcoming smile. “Ray Larner, FBI. You must be officers Yalm and Halm from Stockholm.”
“Paul Hjelm,” said Yalm.
“Kerstin Holm,” said Halm.
“So he’s started again now?” said Larner with a regretful smile. “A pair of fresh eyes is probably what this case needs.”
“It’s basically a matter of adding our information to your vast archive of knowledge,” said Kerstin with gently ingratiating humility.
Larner nodded. “As you know, I’ve devoted a great deal of my professional life to this character, and yet I still don’t know what he’s up to. He is the most mysterious of all our serial killers. With most of them, you can come up with an approximate motive and psychological profile pretty quickly, but K deviates from almost all the usual norms. You will have seen my report, of course.”
They nodded. Larner called the Kentucky Killer “K,” as did the diehards in FASK, Fans of American Serial Killers, with whom Chavez had Internet contact. They shivered a joint shiver.
Jerry Schonbauer picked up their luggage, which hanging from his fists looked like toiletry bags. As they started walking, Larner asked them, “What do you say to the following schedule? We’ll drive you to the hotel so you can freshen up after your journey. Then we’ll have a late lunch at my favorite restaurant. And then we’ll start work. But first”-he nodded at Schonbauer, who was drifting with their bags toward an exit glimmering in the distance-“a little guided tour of Newark International Airport.”
Larner took them up the stairs to the check-in hall. They wandered for quite some time through an indoor landscape that never seemed to change; even the steady stream of travelers remained static.
Finally they stopped at a small door amid the sea of people. Larner pulled out a bunch of keys, slipped one in, and yanked it open. It was a janitor’s closet, large modeclass="underline" fluorescent lights on the low ceiling, clean, whitewashed floors, and shelves with meticulously arranged cleaning equipment-rags, brushes, buckets, towels. They made their way around the shelves to a more open area with a chair and a desk with a few old sandwiches on it. On the wall above was a tiny window through which one could see the giant bodies of arriving and departing planes sweeping past.
This was where Lars-Erik Hassel spent the last hour of his life.
And what an hour.
Hjelm and Holm looked around the closet. There wasn’t much to see. It was a clinical place in which to die a clinical death.
Larner pointed at the chair. “We’ve taken the original chair, of course. Aside from Mr. Hassel’s bodily fluids, there wasn’t a trace on it. There never is.”
“Never?” said Kerstin Holm.
“When we began, of course, there weren’t any real possibilities for DNA testing.” Larner shrugged. “But judging by the six murders in this new series, we probably weren’t missing anything. The closet is spotless. Like he’s superhuman. K.”
This last word was just a letter, but his tone took it to astronomical heights.
“Nine,” said Kerstin Holm.
Larner looked closely at her and nodded.
As they left the closet, Hjelm lingered for a few seconds in the open area. He wanted to be alone there. He sat in the chair and looked around. So sterile-such an American brand of sterile efficiency. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine just a tiny bit of the horrible, silent pain that these walls had encircled, tried to make some telepathic contact with Lars-Erik Hassel’s suffering.
It didn’t work.
It was there, but it was beyond words.
Agent Schonbauer drove with a practiced hand through chaotic traffic of abnormal dimensions. Larner sat next to him, talking to Hjelm and Holm in the backseat: about the late-summer heat in New York, about “community policing,” the city’s new and successful model for fighting crime, about the structure and strange priorities of the Swedish police system, about the autumn storm in Stockholm, and extremely superficially, about the FBI and the Kentucky Killer. Throughout Hjelm watched Larner, whose body language said something different than what the official, dark FBI costume projected. His controlled, cheerful relaxation and smooth, exact motions seemed to beg forgiveness for his getup. Hjelm amused himself by comparing expected and actual appearances. First and foremost, he had not expected Larner to be black; embedded in that assumption, of course, was a whole package of prejudices. But he hadn’t expected him to be so alert, either, after all the setbacks with K: the futile search twenty years ago; the pursuit of the apparently innocent Commando Cool leader Wayne Jennings, which had ended in Jennings’s death; the resultant lawsuit and Larner’s demotion; and then the reboot, when everything started up again. But Larner seemed detached, as if he were watching the spectacle with an indulgent smile. He seemed to possess the divine gift of being able to separate his professional and personal lives; he radiated, in some way, a happy home life.
They entered the gigantic Holland Tunnel, passed under the Hudson River, and came out on Canal Street, then turned left into SoHo. They drove up Eighth Avenue and arrived at a small hotel by the name of Skipper’s Inn near Chelsea Park. Because a free parking spot was as rare as a Swiftian utopia, they were dropped off on the sidewalk after being informed that Larner would return in an hour and a half. They climbed the stairs to the peculiarly long, narrow building that was crammed like a turn-of-the-century relic between two considerably glitzier Manhattan complexes of pearly glass.
They were given adjoining rooms, each with a window facing out onto West Twenty-fifth Street, and thus took up a quarter of the sixth floor of this lodging house, which actually succeeded in feigning resemblance to an English inn-or rather, several inns stacked on top of one another. Their rooms were small and cozy, with a rustic touch, if you could ignore the roar outside the nonfunctional, quadruple-paned windows. Although the air conditioning was spurting air at full force and was competing with the racket from the street, it wasn’t able to cool the room below body temperature.
Hjelm lay down on the bed, which rocked precariously. He had never been to the United States before, but there were two things he associated with the country: air conditioning and ice. Where was the ice? He got up and went over to the mini-bar. The top half of the small refrigerator was a freezer, and sure enough, it was filled with ice cubes. He took a few, returned to the bed, and let the ice cubes balance like horns on his forehead until they fell to his ears.
How he had longed for the sun in the Stockholm rain! Now he longed for the Stockholm rain. The grass is always greener, he thought, clichéd; his brain felt mushy.
In American films, New York was either sparkling with hysterical but happy Christmas snow, or it was boiling like a cauldron in the midsummer sun. Now he understood why. In mid-September, the happy Christmas snow was months away.
He made his way to the shabby but amicably shabby bathroom. There was a shower in a grungy little bathtub, and he made use of it, without preparing toiletries or a change of clothes-he just went straight in, satisfied that he’d remembered to take off what he was wearing. When he was finished, he didn’t dry off but went over to the sink and drank from it. After five gulps it struck him that perhaps he shouldn’t drink the water, and he spat and sputtered. The last thing he needed was to get a juicy case of travelers’ diarrhea.