“What happened with the roadblocks?” asked Gunnar Nyberg.
“The only thing we accomplished was a few hours of complete traffic chaos on the E4. The Arlanda traffic in every direction is quite simply too dense. In addition, it took a hell of a long time to set up the roadblocks. Only a true amateur would have been caught. We’re trying to identify all the taxi and bus drivers who were working around Arlanda at the time in question, but as you know, deregulation has made the taxi traffic in Stockholm unmanageable, so we’ll probably have to admit defeat on that point. Anything else?”
“Not a question, really,” said Kerstin Holm. “Just some information. According to the data register, our man was number eighteen to pass through my passport control. I’ve tried to get my impressions in order, and I’ve talked to the immigration officer, but neither of us has any memory of him at all. Maybe something will come up eventually.”
Hultin nodded and continued mysteriously. “To be on the safe side, I’ve made sure that all deaths reported to the police in the country, from now on, are reported directly to us, and the same goes for all suspected crimes against Americans in Sweden. If there’s the least suspicion of foul play, our brains must unanimously think: Could this have anything to do with our serial killer? This is our case now, even in an official sense, and it’s our only one, and the whole unit is part of it, and it is top-top secret, and no one around you must even catch a whiff of the words bestial-American-serial-killer-loose-in-Sweden. Wherever you are, think: Could the serial killer have anything to do with this bus being late? Might he have any connection at all to this bike accident or to that man’s incredibly spastic movements or to your better half’s increasingly loud snores? In other words, full focus.”
They understood.
“I have kept in rather intensive contact with the authorities in the United States,” Hultin continued. “Special Agent Ray Larner with the FBI has supplied us with a detailed account of last night’s events and a brief profile of the perpetrator. Concerning the results at Arlanda, more information will be streaming in during the next few days. Here is the broad outline as it stands right now.
“The Swedish literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel was tortured to death just before midnight Swedish time in a janitor’s closet at the Newark airport outside New York. It was a few hours before he was found. He had no ticket on him, but a flight to Arlanda that same night was found to be written down in his agenda. In other words, it was likely that the killer had taken his ticket, but a person can’t check in if the name on the ticket doesn’t match the name on the passport, so they took a chance and checked with SAS to see if Hassel’s ticket had been canceled. Why steal the ticket otherwise? His wallet and agenda and everything else were still there, after all. And they got lucky-they got hold of a ticket agent who remembered a late cancellation by phone, which was quickly followed by a late booking. But of course this all happened at night New York time, and in order to find the name of the person who booked last, they needed a data expert who could go into the computer and get exact booking times. They finally managed to tear someone matching that description from the arms of his sweetheart, and he dug up the name, after which it was delivered to us. Eleven minutes too late.”
Hultin paused and let the A-Unit’s slightly overloaded brains absorb this information.
“This caused us to face certain problems. The likely scenario is that the killer murdered Hassel, called in his name to cancel his ticket, then called again and booked the recently canceled spot in his own fake name. What does this tell us?”
Since everyone realized that the question was rhetorical, no one was interested in answering it. Hultin complicated the laws of rhetoric by answering it himself, with another question: “The basic issue is, of course: Why Sweden? What kind of evil thing have we done for this to happen to us? Let us assume the following. A notorious serial killer finds himself in an airport. His intention is to flee the country, hence the fake passport. Maybe he can feel the FBI breathing down his neck. But in his excitement, his desire to kill is acutely intensified. He waits in a suitable place until a suitable victim comes close. He does his deed, finds the ticket, and gets it into his head that it’s a suitable place to flee to; the plane is leaving soon, after all. But when he calls to book his seat, it turns out the plane is full. He knows, however, that one seat is definitely free. He takes a peek at the ticket, finds the difficult-to-pronounce name Lars-Erik Hassel along with a booking number, and calls to cancel, at which point a spot is vacant. What is wrong with this picture?”
“Spot the difference,” said Hjelm. No one laughed.
“It is actually almost possible to find several,” Chavez said with an unintentional but hardly career-boosting dig at Hultin, who didn’t blink. “The most important part of your scenario, Jan-Olov, is the coincidence. If he truly didn’t get the idea to travel to Sweden until after the murder, one might ask if he would really go to that much trouble to get to such an arbitrarily chosen country. The traffic to and from Newark is nonstop, after all. Why not just as well fly to Düsseldorf five minutes later or Cagliari eight minutes later?”
“Cagliari?” said Nyberg.
“It’s on Sardinia,” Hjelm said helpfully.
“It was just an example,” Chavez said impatiently. “The point is, Sweden doesn’t seem to have been chosen randomly at all. It feels a little extra unpleasant.”
“And then one might ask,” Kerstin Holm added, “if he would really risk first going up to the counter and getting a no, then calling in Hassel’s name, and then returning to the counter a few minutes later and asking the same question, only to get a yes this time. A man who has been eluding the FBI for twenty years would hardly take such a risk of attracting attention and being directly linked to a corpse that could be discovered at any moment.”
Hultin seemed a bit thrilled by two such keen objections to his scenario and countered his opponents: “On the other hand, there is an obvious moment of risk in what he actually did. If they had gotten hold of a data expert eleven minutes earlier, we would have had him. It was far from an idiot-proof plan.”
“I still think the evidence points to Sweden being his goal when he set out for the airport,” Chavez persisted. “But when he arrives, it turns out the flight is fully booked. Then his plan takes shape. Why not combine work and pleasure? Somehow he locates a solo traveler to Arlanda, murders him in his usual, pleasurable way, and takes his place, even though this involves a definite but limited risk. The risk of discovery, on the other hand, is an important ingredient in a serial killer’s enjoyment.”
“Then what does that suggest?” Hultin asked pedagogically.
“That his desire to come here to Sweden was so strong that it caused him to take a risk that he probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise. And in that case, he has a very definite goal here.”
“Ice-cold calculation combined with impulsiveness and a craving for pleasure. Something to sink our teeth into…”
“There’s nothing to indicate Sweden in his profile?” Arto Söderstedt wondered with exemplary precision.
“Not according to the FBI.” Hultin paged through the file. “Leaving the United States at all doesn’t really fit with his profile. His history is as follows.
“It all started twenty years ago in Kentucky, where victims who had been killed in the same awful manner began to show up. The wave then spread all over the Midwest. It blew up in the media, and soon the notorious killer was going by the name the Kentucky Killer. Within today’s deeply alarming serial killer cult, he’s a legend, one of the original characters, and he’s thought to have inspired many budding practitioners. He committed a series of eighteen murders in four years, then stopped abruptly for a decade and a half. Just over a year ago a new series began with exactly the same MO, this time in the northeastern United States. Hassel was his sixth victim in this latest series, his twenty-fourth overall. His twenty-fourth known victim, I should probably add.”