“Once the victim is silenced, you can then heap on the conventional methods, best directed at fingernails and genitals, where small, quiet motions incur the most pain. And then you just release the grip around the vocal cords a tiny bit so that something like a whisper can slip out. The victim can reveal his secret, quietly, quietly. For this purpose, Commando Cool developed related pincers, based on the same principles as the vocal cord pincers, but these other ones were aimed at the central ganglia in the neck, which are tugged and pulled a little bit from the inside, at which point an appalling pain radiates up into the head and down through the body. The two holes in the neck with their associated internal injuries have been discovered on all twenty-four victims of the Kentucky Killer, and there have also been distinctive torture wounds on their genitals and fingers.
“Larner has been a bit secretive about what distinguishes the workings of our friend from those of the commando task force, but obviously it has to do with the design of the two micropincers. It’s as though something like an industrial development process was used to make the pincers even more perfect for their atrocious purpose.”
Hultin looked down at his lectern.
“I want you to restrain yourselves for a second now, so you can absorb all this,” he said gravely. “Lars-Erik Hassel died one of the most horrific deaths a person can die. I would like you to think carefully about what we’re up against. It doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever had to deal with in our whole lives. There’s not an ounce of similarity to our good old Power Murderer. It isn’t really possible to imagine such ice-cold indifference to other people’s lives and such twisted pleasure at their suffering. This is a seriously damaged person of the sort that the American system seems to produce on an assembly line, and that they would have been welcome to refrain from exporting. But now he’s here. And the only thing we can really do is to wait for him to start. It could be a long time; it could be tomorrow. But it will happen, and we have to be prepared.”
Hultin stood to go to the restroom. He had held it for a surprisingly long time for someone who was incontinent. As he left, he said to the dispersing group, “As soon as I receive Ray Larner’s material, you’ll get copies. The outcome of this case hinges on you all studying it diligently.” He nodded at them and hurried toward his private, special door.
Jorge Chavez interrupted his departure: “How old is Edwin Reynolds, according to the passport?”
Hultin made a stiff face, dug through his pile of papers with his legs in a need-to-pee stance, and brought out a copy of the photographed passport page. “Thirty-two this year.”
Chavez nodded. “Of course the passport was fake,” he said, “but why choose to play fifteen years younger than he must, in all likelihood, be?”
“An element of risk, maybe,” said Hultin against his better judgment, and rushed off with papers floating through the air.
Chavez and Hjelm looked at each other.
Hjelm shrugged. “Well, he could have bought or stolen a ready-made fake passport.”
“Possibly,” said Chavez.
But no one could really shake the feeling that something was wrong. Utterly wrong.
6
There really wasn’t anything they could do.
Naturally, there was a microscopic possibility that this was all coincidental, that the Kentucky Killer had been at Newark Airport not to flee the country but only to look for a new victim; that poor Lars-Erik Hassel had canceled his trip all on his own and had thrown his ticket away; and that just after that, a completely unrelated man with a fake passport had popped up with a last-minute booking. The combination of all these things, however, verged on the unbelievable. There was no real doubt that the Kentucky Killer had come to Sweden. The only question was why.
FBI agent Ray Larner’s more exhaustive report had come in. According to the timetable, the plane had taken off from Newark at 18:20 local time. At 17:03 a man who called himself Lars-Erik Hassel had called and canceled his ticket, and at 17:08 an Edwin Reynolds had managed to get the extra ticket; thus he had waited five risky minutes so he wouldn’t attract attention. Around midnight a janitor had made the macabre discovery in a cleaning closet-just under two hours before the plane would land in Sweden. A few minutes later an Officer Hayden had appeared from the airport’s local police station; he recognized the two small holes on the victim’s neck and contacted FBI headquarters in Manhattan, which in turn contacted the Kentucky Killer specialist Ray Larner and got confirmation that it was a hallmark of the famous serial killer. After examining Hassel’s belongings, Hayden had been smart enough to conclude that the murderer had in all likelihood taken a seat on the victim’s flight to Stockholm-Arlanda. After a while he received verbal confirmation from the night staff at the SAS ticket counter that a ticket had been canceled too late to have been rebooked, at which point the tired ground hostess also remembered that there had been a late booking. She could access only the passenger manifesto, however, and not the specific data of when each person had booked. While the FBI frantically searched for someone who had access to that data, Hayden had contacted the National Criminal Police in Stockholm and ended up with Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin via the head of the NCP. At that point, it was 07:09 in Sweden. Hayden swiftly faxed over all the material he had, and this turned into a portion of the pile of papers Hultin had brought along to the quick meeting before the helicopter ride to Arlanda.
Nothing in FBI agent Ray Larner’s newly arrived, scrupulous report indicated any departure from what had been said earlier; nor did it indicate any imaginable ties to Sweden. Thus there was nothing they could really do, other than wait for the first victim, and that was unbearable.
Therefore they devoted themselves to mental preparation for the intensive burst of activity that lay ahead. They spent the rest of the afternoon on small tasks that not only gave them the illusion of meaningful work, the sensation of doing something, but also involved individual activity. Each of them seemed to need to digest the state of things on their own.
Hultin continued to collect and organize the material from the FBI. Holm returned to Arlanda to see if any of the staff had been struck by a flashback or a flash of genius, anything at all. The cabin crew of flight SK 904 would, they had heard, also be there, and she prepared herself for her specialty: conversations, interviews, interrogations. Nyberg returned to his usual routine: he set off for the underworld of Stockholm to sound out the situation there. Söderstedt shut himself up in his office and called all the places that he could in any way imagine might be sheltering this Reynolds, who was surely no longer called Reynolds. Chavez threw himself into the world of the Internet; what he thought he could find there was a mystery to the uninitiated. Hultin set Norlander to the task of scrubbing all the toilets in the police station with an electric toothbrush, which was viewed as a technical achievement within the noble art of punishment.
And Hjelm set out on his own assignment. Just as small as the likelihood that the Kentucky Killer had remained in the United States was the likelihood that the literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel’s past had anything to do with the case. Nevertheless Hjelm set off for the large newspaper office that had been Hassel’s workplace.
He allowed himself to walk there-a little habit that the relative idleness of the past year had permitted him to develop. He walked down to Norr Mälarstrand by way of Kungsholmstorg. The rainy weather from Arlanda, he couldn’t help thinking, was biding its time, waiting in the wings, getting ready to sweep the city in autumn. But for now the sun was still shining, if more weakly with every day that went by. On the other side of Riddarfjärden, an enormous cat stretched out and purred contentedly in the white rays of late-summer sunshine: the head-Mariaberget-lapped Lake Mälaren’s waters with the tongue that was Söderleden, while its body-Skinnarviksberget-twisted greedily and stretched down toward its elegant back legs, Långholmen, where the tail, formed by Västerbro, pointed the way to Marieberg and the newspaper complex.