“What happened with this Commando Cool character who moved to New York?” Holm persisted. “The stockbroker?”
Larner laughed. “Apparently all of my old thoughts are floating in the air and you’re catching them, Halm.”
“Kerstin,” she said.
“Okay, Charstin. You’re absolutely right, Steve Harrigan isn’t mentioned in the report I sent you. But I’ve checked up on him. He’s in the complete material that you’ll get to look at. Harrigan is a billionaire, always on the go. He’s been abroad during each and every one of the six murders in the second round. And he is definitely not in Sweden now. So now that considerably more than five minutes have passed, let’s join Jerry in the showroom and watch a movie.”
He led them through the corridors and into an auditorium that, sure enough, resembled an actual movie theater. The giant man was sitting on a table up front, below the screen, dangling his feet. His pant legs were pulled up a bit, exposing a pair of extremely hairy calves above the regulation black socks. When he saw them, he hopped down and showed them to seats in the front.
“Jerry had just come in from the Kentucky office, when the second round started,” Larner said, wiggling into one of the sleep-inducing chairs. “He’s a damn good agent. Took Roger Penny alone, if you’ve heard of him. Go ahead, Jerry. I’m gonna take a nap. It’s awful at first, but you’ll get used to it.”
The lights went down with a dimmer function; it really did feel like a movie theater.
The special effects did, too. Unfortunately, they were not Hollywood brand.
“Michael Spender.” Schonbauer’s bass accompanied a picture of a man whose only whole body part was his head, under which two conspicuous red dots shone from his neck like lanterns. His head was canted backward, white and swollen. He was naked. The look in the dead eyes had retained the same horrible pain as Andreas Gallano’s. The nails on his hands and feet had been ripped away, the skin had been cut from his trunk in narrow stripes, and his penis had been split down the middle from glans to base and lay open, two bloody rags, one on each side of his groin.
Their nausea was abrupt and mutual. They very nearly had to run from the room.
“Spender was the first victim,” Schonbauer continued expressionlessly, “a computer engineer at Macintosh in Louisville. Found by a berry-picker in the woods in northwestern Kentucky about two weeks after his death. Went missing from his workplace after lunch on September fourth, 1978. Was discovered on the afternoon of the nineteenth, sixty miles from his hometown. Worked on the development of the first big Apple computer.”
The next victim was unidentified, a large man with Slavic features. The picture was a bit more stomach-friendly. He was dressed, but his fingers and genitals were disfigured.
“Looks a bit Russian,” Hjelm said, thinking of the absurd KGB theory.
“Without a doubt,” said Schonbauer. “As soon as it was possible, we sent the fingerprints to the Russian police, but it didn’t result in anything. We don’t have any information at all, except that he was found in southern Kentucky about two months after Spender. In an old outhouse near a deserted farm. He had been dead for over a week.”
The next picture showed another unidentified victim. A thin, fit white man in his sixties, naked, disfigured in the same way as Spender. The picture was gruesome. It was dusk, there was a dim light above the treetops, and the only thing that gleamed was the body, sitting straight up on a rock in the woods. Rigor mortis. The arms were sticking straight out from the body, as though they had been lifted by an inner, irresistible force; the bones were sticking straight out of the hands, like nails that had been driven out from the inside. The eyes stared, openly accusing.
Hjelm didn’t get used to it; on the contrary, he felt even closer to throwing up.
They rolled on, a terrible cavalcade of the remains of suffering. It was beyond the limits of human comprehension. The very quantity made the crimes even more gruesome. Slowly but surely, the extent of the case became clear to them-the incredible accumulation of human suffering. Holm cried out twice, silently; Hjelm felt her shoulder lightly nudging his. He cried out once too, but more loudly.
“Do you want me to stop?” Schonbauer asked calmly. “I couldn’t make it all the way through till my third try. I’m pretty used to it now.”
Larner was snoring audibly next to them.
“No, keep going,” said Hjelm, trying to convince himself that he had recovered.
“We have so many of them,” Schonbauer said in a subdued voice. “So incredibly many serial killers, and no one can really understand a single one of them. Least of all themselves.”
In the end their defense mechanisms kicked in, and although they never started snoring, they slowly became indifferent. Like a horrible conclusion, Lars-Erik Hassel woke them up. He was sitting on his chair with shredded fingers, sprawling in all directions; his genitals were a swamp of half-floating remnants. Through the small window in the background, they could see part of a large aircraft.
His head was craned back; he stared at them upside-down, his pain mixed with disgust, his suffering with paradoxical relief.
Maybe, Hjelm thought, he was relieved that it wasn’t Laban.
The lights came up again. Schonbauer returned to the table and sat with his legs dangling once again like a teenage girl’s. Larner awoke in mid-snore with a start and snuffled loudly. Hjelm rolled his shoulders. Holm was sitting stock-still. No one looked at anyone else for some time.
Larner stood, yawned, and stretched until his compact body creaked. “And now, do you two have some dessert for this party?”
Kerstin handed over the Swedish folders wordlessly.
Larner opened them, skimmed through the pictures, and gave them to Schonbauer, who would soon add them to the series of images. Then he got up to leave.
Kerstin and Paul thanked Schonbauer, who gave a curt nod, and they all followed Larner out. Walking through the corridors, they came to a door without a name on it. Larner opened it. They stepped into an empty room.
“Your workroom,” he said with a gesture. “I hope you can work together.”
The office looked exactly like Larner’s, minus all the signs of life. The question was how much of their own they could offer. The desk had been pulled out from the wall and furnished with two chairs, one on each side. Two computers rubbed shoulders on the desk next to a telephone and a short call list. Larner picked it up.
“My number”-he pointed-“Jerry’s number, my pager, Jerry’s pager. You can always get hold of us. Below are names of the files in question, descriptions of them, personal passwords, and guest passes with codes so you can get in, but only in here. Locked doors are doors that you don’t have admittance to. You have no reason to leave this corridor, nor any possibility of doing so. Bathrooms, women’s and men’s, are a few doors down. There are a couple of cafeterias-I recommend La Traviata two floors down. Any questions?”
No questions. Or an endless number, depending on how you looked at it. None were asked, in any case.
“It’s six p.m. now,” Larner continued. “If you like, you can work for a few hours. I stay till about six. Unfortunately I’m busy tonight, otherwise we could eat dinner together. Jerry has offered to eat with you and show you around town, if you’d like. You can let him know.
“So all that’s left is to wish you good luck. You don’t need to worry about getting into the wrong things on the computers-they’re customized for you, and everything confidential is elsewhere. Contact me or Jerry if problems or questions come up. ’Bye.”
He disappeared. They were alone.
Holm rubbed her eyes. “I don’t actually know if I can handle this,” she said. “It’s midnight Swedish time. Shall we accept Swedish time and go back to the inn?”