They read. The small print was difficult to interpret. Both Hjelm and Holm felt an instinctive aversion to putting their signatures on such ambiguous papers, but diplomacy reaped yet another victory-they signed.
“Excellent,” said Larner. “Where were we? Commando Cool. Eight members, no Balls. The team leader was the very young Wayne Jennings, who was already a veteran when they netted him-twenty-five years old and with six years of war behind him and God knows how many dead. All the best and most formative years of his life spent in the service of death. Twenty-seven when the war ended, thirty when K began to be active. Returned after the war to his dead father’s farm in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of the Cumberland Plateau, if that means anything to you. Didn’t do much farming, just lived on his veteran’s pension. He was without a doubt the most likely suspect; according to statements, he was very skilled at handling the pincers. The third body was found just thirteen miles from his home.
“As for the others in Commando Cool, three died in the final stages of the war. Besides Jennings, there were four left; you’ll find their names in the complete material, which you’ll have access to. One came from Kentucky, Greg Androwski, a childhood friend of Jennings’s, but he fell apart and died a junkie in 1986. He was alive during K’s four years in the Midwest, but he was pretty worn down and quite unlikely to be a killer. Completely destroyed by Vietnam.
“Three left. One came to New York, Steve Harrigan, who became a stockbroker and was one of the wizards of Wall Street during the 1980s. Another went to Maine: Tony Robin Garreth, who makes his living taking tourists on fishing tours. Both were pretty safeguarded against suspicions. The last one, Chris Anderson, moved to Kansas City and sold used cars.”
“Swedish background?” said Kerstin.
Larner smiled faintly. “Four generations back. His great-great-grandfather came from someplace called Kalmar, if you’ve heard of that. But Anderson was actually number two on our list, Jennings’s second-in-command, just as icy, just as destroyed by the war. But his alibis were a tiny bit better than Jennings’s. And Jennings was nastier-that was my main argument, just based on a feeling, that is. I managed to push the whole thing pretty far.”
“How sure were you, really, about Jennings?”
Larner leaned back in his chair with his hands on the back of his neck. He deliberated for a moment. “Completely,” he said. “One hundred percent.” He fished a thick folder out of an old-fashioned file cabinet that stood next to the whiteboard.
Jerry Schonbauer peeked into the room. “It’s ready,” he said.
“Five minutes.” Larner tossed the folder to Holm, who opened it. A small bundle of photographs unfolded like a fan. The first one was a portrait. Jennings in his thirties, a young, fresh-looking man with light blond hair and a broad smile. But he also had a steely blue coolness in his eyes, which sharply divided the picture into two parts. Kerstin held her hand over the upper part of his face and saw a happily smiling young person; but when she moved her hand to the lower part, she saw the icy gaze of a man who was hard as nails.
“That’s it,” Larner said almost enthusiastically. “That’s exactly it. When we first visited him, he was pretty amiable, really pleasant-the lower half. As we persisted, we saw more and more of the upper half.”
They looked through the rest of the photographs. A teenage Jennings in uniform, Jennings slightly older in a circle of identical field uniforms, Jennings with a big tuna fish, Jennings pointing a Tommy gun at the camera with a fake attack face, Jennings at a dance with a beautiful southern woman with two first names, Jennings with a small child on his lap, Jennings making out with a Vietnamese prostitute-and then Jennings roaring with laughter as he presses a pistol to the temple of a grimacing, naked, kneeling Vietnamese man who is pissing himself in a deep hole in the ground. Holm lifted it up toward Larner.
“Yes, that,” he said. “It’s like it makes you forget the others. It’s a fucking awful picture. I would get a lot of money if I sold it to Time magazine. I don’t understand how he could keep it. We found all of these pictures when we raided his house after he died.”
“What happened when he died,” Holm said, “exactly?”
“Well,” Larner began, “at the end we had him under surveillance twenty-four hours a day-”
“For how long?” she interrupted.
“It had been going on for a month when he died.”
“Were any murders committed during that time?”
“The bodies were usually found in a state of decay that made them hard to date. But all sixteen that preceded his death had been found by then. It was one reason I was so persistent, even though every imaginable authority was against me: the longer we watched twenty-four hours a day and no new victims were found, the more likely it was that he was the murderer. May I continue now?”
“Of course,” said Holm, ashamed. “Sorry.”
“I tried to be there in the car as often as possible, and I was there that day, the third of July 1982. It was broiling hot, almost unbearable. Jennings came rushing out of the house and yelled at us; he’d been doing that for the last few days. He seemed at the end of his rope. Then he rushed over to his car and tore off. We followed him north along a county road for maybe ten miles, at a crazy speed. After a while, a bit ahead on the road, past a long curve, an incredible cloud of smoke rose up. When we got there, we saw that Jennings had crashed head-on into a truck. Both vehicles were ablaze. I got as close as I could and saw him moving a little in the car, burned up.”
“So you didn’t see the collision itself?” said Holm.
Larner smiled again, the same smile of understanding and indulgence that had become characteristic of their relationship. Hjelm felt a bit like an outsider.
“I know why you’re persisting in this, Halm,” said Larner. “No. We were a few hundred yards back, and there was a curve in the road. And no, I didn’t see his face as he burned up. Did he fake the accident and flee the scene? No. For one thing, there was nowhere for him to go, just flat, deserted earth all around, and no other vehicle was in the vicinity; and for another-and this is crucial-the teeth from the body in the car were his. I had to spend a great deal of time convincing myself that he actually died in that car.
“But he did. Don’t believe anything else. Don’t do what I did and get stuck on Jennings. It destroyed any chance of moving forward on this case. I can’t even come up with a sensible hypothesis anymore. K remains a mystery. He must have been sitting somewhere, laughing out loud, while I harassed a tired, unemployed war veteran and drove him to his death. Then, just to show me how wrong I’d been, he killed two people within six months; both of them died long after Jennings did. And then vanished into thin air.”
Larner closed his eyes.
“I thought I was done with him,” he said slowly. “I kept working on the case, going through every little detail with a fine-toothed comb for several years after the eighteenth and final murder. More than a decade went by. I started working on other things, chasing racists in the South, taking on drug traffickers in Vegas, but he hung over me the whole time. And then that bastard started again. He’d moved to New York. He was mocking me.”
“And you’re dead certain that it’s him?”
Larner touched his nose, tired. “For security reasons, we make sure that only a very tiny number of agents know the crucial details of each case. For K, it was me and a man by the name of Camerun. Don Camerun died of cancer in 1986. Not even Jerry Schonbauer knows this particular detail-I’m the only one in the bureau who does-it’s about the pincers. It’s the same pincers, and they’re inserted in the same, exact, exceedingly complicated way. Because it’s your case now, you two will also be given access to the description; I strongly recommend that no one else learns about it.”