Jacob fol owed her finger as it moved along the narrow, winding roads 164 leading up the oblong country.
"Your home territory," he said. "When wil they get to the border? How long?"
Dessie bit her lip.
"They'l have to stick to the speed limit – they can't risk getting stopped for speeding. And there's a lot of wildlife out on those roads. Elk, deer, maybe reindeer farther north…"
"Are there self-serve gas pumps where they can pay cash to refuel without being seen?"
"They're everywhere," Dessie said.
Jacob ran his hands through his hair.
"We've got to check al cars stolen in Stockholm this morning, and any that are stolen in the north of Sweden over the next few hours."
He put his index finger on the map and screwed his eyes shut. Postcard Kil ers, he thought, where the hel are you?
Chapter 123
The stolen mercedes WAS speeding over a bridge with glittering bright blue water on both sides.
Smal, wooded islands strewn with light gray rocks rose on the left and right.
"Do I turn off up here?" Mac asked, leaning in toward the windshield.
"What do you think?"
Sylvia looked down at the road atlas and started to feel sick. She always got carsick when she tried to read on a car trip.
"Left onto the two-seven-two," she said grouchily. "Somewhere on the other side of this lake."
She fixed her eyes on the horizon, the point where the road disappeared in the distance, just as her mother had taught her.
Mac slowed down.
"There's no need to be so miserable about it," he said. "This was your idea, after al. I'm doing the best I can."
She swal owed and glanced at him, leaning close and giving him a quick kiss on the ear.
"Sorry, darling," she cooed. "You're driving bril iantly."
She ran her hand lazily along the dashboard. There was no longer any 165 reason to hide their fingerprints or DNA. On the contrary, it was time to let the world know their message.
Soon they would be able to sit back and enjoy what they had achieved.
Mac braked, signaled, and turned off to the left. They drove past fields with sheep and cattle, past thick groves of trees.
"It's kind of beautiful in its own way, don't you think?" Sylvia said, putting the atlas away. She wasn't planning to look at it again. They were almost there now.
Mac didn't answer.
The landscape opened up around them as they drove through a smal town. To the left were a few houses, to the right a farm. They passed a row of what was once laborers' housing, a school, and an apartment block. Then they were out the other side. So much for civilization on this road trip.
They drove on in silence.
Mac was looking intently through the windshield.
"What do you think about that one?" he said, pointing to a farm on the edge of the forest.
Sylvia leaned forward to check the place out. "Could be. Maybe."
Mac slowed down, then stopped the car. "Yes or no?"
The farmyard seemed quiet and deserted. Al the windows and doors were shut. They could see an old Volvo behind a barn, a sedan that must have been the height of style in the early 1980s.
"This'l do," Sylvia said, taking a quick look behind her.
No cars in sight.
"Quickly, now," she said. "We need to be really careful from here on. No mistakes."
Chapter 124
Mac jumped out of the car. Sylvia took her seat belt off and slid over to the driver's seat.
With a certain amount of effort she put the car in gear. She wasn't used to driving cars with gears and a clutch. Then she sped off to the far side of the next bend.
There she stopped.
She wound down the window and listened over the sound of the engine.
The trees sighed; some sort of animal was bleating in the forest. The sound of a car rose and fel in the distance, but nothing came past. 166 She would have to wait here for a while.
Her eyes settled on some sort of construction in the trees. Planks, a ladder.
A tree house, or maybe a hunting post.
Suddenly she was fil ed with a feeling of intense hatred and disgust.
Imagine, there were people who lived the whole of their pointless lives in godforsaken places like this, working and drinking and fucking and building hunting posts without any awareness that there was anything else, that a higher level of human consciousness even existed. People out here abandoned their lives to meaningless banality, never bothering about bril iance, about aesthetics.
She tore her eyes from the hunting post and concentrated on the rearview mirror.
Mac was driving the red Volvo now. He didn't slow down as he passed her, just carried on at the same careful y precise speed: not too slow, but not too fast either.
She put the car in gear and fol owed at a safe distance. Careful. No mistakes.
Now they had to find a good spot to dump the car from Stockholm, somewhere it would be found relatively quickly, but not immediately.
She licked her thumb and pressed it against the wheel. A lovely print.
Suck on that, dear police!
It made her giddy to think of what they'd already achieved, and that was only the start.
The next part could be even more impressive, their next act. She and Mac were maturing as artists.
Chapter 125
The whole case was breaking open now – and quickly.
The kil ers from Athens lived in Thessaloniki. They weren't a couple, just two art student friends at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the largest university in Greece. They were arrested on the campus, given away by the electronic trail left on their computers.
They were both deeply religious, and both claimed that they were in direct contact with "the creating God, the unknowable ruler of al the universe." They admitted to what had happened in Athens, but denied it was murder. Their work was part of a global conceptual artwork intended to reveal humankind's divinity.
The murders in Salzburg were traced to a young British couple from London. They were enrol ed at a fashionable art col ege in the middle of London. They hadn't attended any classes for the past four months. 167 Their fingerprints and DNA were found at the scene of the crime, and the murder weapon was discovered under a loose floorboard in the couple's apartment.
They didn't comment on the accusations. They didn't respond to any of the authorities' questions, and they even refused to talk to their own lawyer. On their blogs they had written that every individual was responsible for creating their own morals and their own laws, and that everything else was an affront to the rights of the individual.
The kil ers in Copenhagen were arrested that evening, both the repeat offender whose details had been in the DNA register and his accomplice, a younger woman who was deeply remorseful once she was captured. The woman confessed at once, in floods of tears, and said that she had changed her mind and tried to stop the kil ings. Her change of heart had occurred when her col eague had raped the young American woman, which hadn't been part of the "artwork" design.
Dessie looked at Jacob and saw how his eyes registered everything that was reported about the murderers, how his jaw clenched every time new information was received.
The other police officers exhibited the sort of relief that comes after an arrest and a confession, but not Jacob. The others' shoulders relaxed, became less tense, and the way they walked seemed somehow freer, but Jacob's face remained carved from stone.
She knew why.
Kimmy's kil ers were stil out there somewhere, probably on their way to Finland.
Chapter 126
During the day, three cars had been stolen in the Stockholm region.
An almost-new Toyota from the suburb of Vikingshil. A Range Rover out in Hasselby garden suburb, at the end of the underground network. An old Mercedes from a parking garage beneath the Gal erian shopping center in the middle of the city.