Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (32 page)

“Who lives there now?”

“I seem to recall that it went round and round in the media for so long that it became unsellable. After his wife died, it was left to rot. It’s deserted.”

“There’s something about a closet that Lamar apparently
wants to tell us. A shadow in the closet at night, a door that’s gotten caught on ‘the arm of a jacket,’ then the stairs. Might there have been another cellar, a secret one? The very origin of the entire story of the Kentucky Killer?”

Larner thought it over, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Bill, how long is the letter going to take? Okay. I’m going to Kentucky. Jerry will hold down the fort here.”

He hung up and looked at them urgently. “Well, are you coming?”

They flew to Louisville, Kentucky, in a flash. At the airport, an FBI helicopter was waiting to carry them eastward. A tall mountain range towered up in the distance.

“Cumberland Plateau,” Larner said, pointing.

The helicopter landed at the edge of a tobacco field, and Larner and three bundles of muscle from the FBI, along with the two Swedes, jogged through the field and out onto the country road along. A grove of tall, unidentifiable deciduous trees lent shadow to a decaying farm a ways out on the wilderness land; there wasn’t a neighbor for miles.

Seen at a closer distance, the farmhouse looked haunted. Fifteen years had left their mark. Houses always seem to do their best when inhabited—otherwise they wither. Wayne Jennings’s farm had withered. It didn’t look as if it had felt very well from the start, but by now it had reached a state of complete abandonment. The front door was crooked and warped, and it took the efforts of the collective FBI muscle mass to tear it open, which was the same as tearing it apart.

They entered the hall. The house hadn’t been airtight. Everything was covered in a thin layer of sand. Each step was followed by a small, rising puff of sand. They passed the kitchen; dishes were laid out under the layer of sand, as though time had stopped in the middle of a regular day. They passed the stairway that led down to the small cellar; Hjelm cast a glance
down the steps. Three beer bottles stood on a small table. The sand had glued itself along their edges; they were like three pillars of salt in a salt desert. They entered a room with a bed. A few disintegrating posters were still clinging to the wall: Batman, a baseball team. A book lay open on the desk: Mary Poppins. On the pillow sat a threadbare teddy bear, covered with sand. Kerstin lifted it up; one leg remained on the bed. She blew it off and studied it. Her heart seemed about to break.

They went from Lamar’s room to his parents’; it was farthest off toward the wide-open spaces, which stretched on, flat, toward Cumberland Plateau. Larner pointed at the double bed; in the place of one pillow there was a large hole; down was still floating in the sandy air.

“This is where Lamar found his mother one hot summer morning,” he said quietly. “A shotgun. Her head was almost completely blown off.”

They went back out into the hallway and through the next door entered a guest room, which had its own entrance from the terrace.

“It has to be here,” Larner said.

He went over to the closet and opened the door. The assembled FBI forces stepped in with sturdy tools and instruments of measurement. They pulled a microphone along the wall. “Here,” said one of the FBI men. “There’s empty space behind here.”

“See if you can find the mechanism.” Larner moved back. They kept looking; he sat down on the bed, where the Swedes were already sitting.

“You can probably put that down now,” he said.

Holm stared down at the teddy bear that was sitting in her lap. She placed it on the bed. Sand had run out of the hole at the leg until it was just a fake shell of skin. She held up the scrap.

“The things we do to our children,” was all she said.

“I warned you,” said Larner.

It took time, almost fifteen minutes of intense, scientific searching. But finally they found a complicated mechanism, behind a piece of iron that had been screwed into place. Apparently Wayne Jennings hadn’t wanted anyone to make their way down there after his so-called death. But his son evidently had—and had retrieved his pincers.

A thick iron door slid open inside the closet; Hjelm even thought he could see the jacket arm that had gotten stuck one night and kept the door from closing again as it should. He walked over to the door to the guest room and crouched down, simulating the view a ten-year-old would have. Lamar had stood here; from here he had seen the shadow glide into the closet, and then he had followed. The thick metal door hadn’t closed properly.

Larner went into the closet and pulled open the door; the mechanism was a bit rusty and creaked in a way it surely hadn’t twenty years earlier. He turned on a powerful flashlight and disappeared. They followed him.

The narrow stone staircase had an iron handrail. Sand crunched under their feet as they made their way down the staircase, which was surprisingly long. Finally they came to a massive, rusty iron door. Larner opened it and shone his powerful flashlight around.

It was a shabby cellar, cramped, almost absurdly small, a concrete cube far belowground in the wilderness. In the middle a large iron chair was welded to more iron in the floor; leather bands hung slack from the armrests and chair legs. There was also a solid workbench, like a carpenter’s bench. That was all. Larner pulled out the drawers under the bench. They were empty. He sat in the iron chair as the little concrete cube filled with people; the last FBI man didn’t even fit and had to stand on the stairs.

“These walls have seen a lot,” said Larner.

For a second Hjelm thought he had made contact with all the suffering that the walls guarded: a hot and simultaneously ice-cold wind went through him. But it was beyond words.

Larner stood and clapped his hands. “Well, we’ll do a complete crime-scene investigation, but there’s no doubt that this is where most of the Kentucky Killer’s victims met their long-awaited deaths.”

They went back upstairs—claustrophobia wasn’t far off.

What had happened when ten-year-old Lamar had stepped into the torture chamber? How had Wayne reacted? Had he beaten him unconscious? Threatened him? Did he try to comfort him? The only person to ask was Wayne Jennings himself, and Hjelm promised himself and the world that he would ask him.

For he was becoming more and more certain that if father and son confronted each other in Sweden, the father would be victorious. He would kill his son for a second time.

They took the helicopter back to Louisville and caught a flight back to New York. The whole foray had only taken a few hours. It was afternoon at JFK, a long, hot afternoon. They took a taxi back to FBI headquarters, where they found Jerry Schonbauer sitting with his legs dangling, leafing through a pile of papers as though nothing had happened.

But it had.

“Good timing,” said Schonbauer. “I’ve just received a preliminary crime-scene report, including a preliminary reconstruction of the burned letter. That’s the only thing of interest. The rest of the investigation didn’t turn up anything—the apartment was completely clean. Here are your copies of the letter.”

It had been possible to make out the date: April 6, 1983. Almost a year after Wayne Jennings faked his death. It was a letter he wouldn’t have needed to write nor, presumably, been
able
to write. That he had done it anyway revealed a trace of humanity that Hjelm didn’t really want to see.

“When did his wife kill herself?” he asked.

“The summer of 1983,” said Larner. “Apparently it took a few months for her to understand the extent of the whole thing.”

The envelope had been among the burned remains. The Stockholm postmark had been clear. The address was that of the farm; apparently Wayne Jennings had been relatively certain that the FBI wasn’t reading his widow’s mail a year after his death.

What could be reconstructed read as follows (with the technicians’ comments in brackets):

“Lamar didn’t want to give us the name.” Larner put down the letter. “Maybe he did want to give us the rest—it depends on how seriously we should take this half-failed incineration. But he didn’t want to give us the name—he cut it out before he set fire to the letter.”

“A loving husband,” said Holm.

“What does it actually say here?” said Hjelm. “ ‘The Kentucky Killer is me and yet it’s not’—is that how we should interpret it? And: ‘We were forced to give me this—disguise’? ‘We’?”

“That could mean Jennings was a professional killer, employed by someone else,” said Larner pensively. “Suppose, in the late seventies, it was suddenly necessary to get a great number of people to talk—engineers, researchers, journalists—and a whole cadre of unidentified people, probably foreigners. They called in their torture experts, who may have been on ice since the Vietnam War. They had to disguise the whole thing as the actions of a madman. The serial killer was born. And the consequences were plentiful.”

It hung in the air. No one said it. Finally Hjelm cleared his throat. “CIA?”

“We’ll have to attend to that bit.” Larner sighed. “It won’t be easy.”

Kerstin and Paul looked at each other. Maybe the good old KGB theory hadn’t been so far off target after all. Maybe it
was
top-level politics. But it was the
victims
who were KGB. Maybe.

“If I were you,” said Larner, “I’d look closely at Sweden’s immigration register for 1983. The last victim died in the beginning of November 1982. The letter was written from Stockholm in April 1983. Maybe you’ll find him listed among the immigrants during that interval.”

An FBI man looked in. “Ray, Mrs. Stewart has come up with a picture.”

They stood in unison and followed him. Now they would find out what Lamar Jennings looked like.

Chief inspector Jan-Olov Hultin looked skeptical. “ ‘Get out of here’?” he said. “ ‘Beat it’?”

“That’s what he said,” said Viggo Norlander.

He was lying in a hospital bed at Karolinska, dressed in a bizarre county council hospital gown. He had a large compress on the wound in his neck and still felt a bit groggy.

“So in other words, he spoke Swedish?” Hultin ventured pedagogically, bending down toward the once-again-defeated hero.

“Yes,” Norlander said sleepily.

“You don’t remember anything else?”

“He was dressed all in black. A balaclava. His hand didn’t shake so much as a fraction of an inch when he sighted me with the pistol. He must have missed on purpose when he fired. Then he took off in a pretty large car, maybe a Jeep, maybe brown.”

“This is an insane serial killer with many lives on his conscience. And he’s shot people before. Why didn’t he kill you?”

“Thanks for your support at this difficult time,” Norlander said, and conked out.

Hultin got up and went over to the other bed in the hospital room.

In it was yet another once-again-defeated hero. Both of his bundles of muscle had been flattened by the same man; that didn’t feel so great.

Gunnar Nyberg’s bandage was more extensive. His nasal bones were cracked in three places; he found it incredible that such small bones could be cracked in so many places. But his soul hurt much worse. He knew that no matter how hard he tried, he would never get that horrible image of Benny Lundberg out of his mind. He would probably die with it before his eyes.

“How’s he doing?” he asked.

Hultin sat in the visitor’s chair with a little groan. “Viggo? He’s recovering.”

“Not Viggo. Benny Lundberg.”

“Aha. Well, the latest news isn’t good. He’s alive, and he’ll survive. But his vocal cords are seriously injured, and the nerve paths in his neck are one big mess. He’s on a respirator. Worst of all, he’s in a state of extreme shock. The perpetrator literally terrified
him out of his wits. He pushed him over the line of sanity, and the question is whether there’s any way back.”

Hultin placed an incongruous bunch of grapes on Nyberg’s table. “Your clear-headedness saved his life,” he said. “You should know that. If you’d tried to pull out the pincers, he almost certainly would have died right away. That neck doctor you got there struggled for over an hour. He had to operate at the scene. It was good that it was you and not Viggo who went in; I guess I can say that now that he’s out.”

Hultin looked into Nyberg’s eyes. Something had changed. “Are you okay, by the way?” he said quietly.

“No, I’m not okay,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “I’m furious. I’m going to put a stop to this guy if it’s the last thing I do.”

Hultin was of two minds about that. Certainly, it was excellent that Nyberg was coming out of his recent apathy toward work and his longing for retirement; but a furious Nyberg was like a runaway steam engine.

“Come back as soon as you can,” Hultin said. “We need you.”

“I’d be back already if it weren’t for this damn concussion.”

“That’s something we’ve got plenty of right now,” Hultin said neutrally.

They had been mistaken, thought Nyberg. It wasn’t two cases of pneumonia that had sailed through the air to find their rightful owners, it was two concussions.

“If we hadn’t stopped to eat, we could have saved him,” he said bitterly.

Hultin looked at him for a moment, then said goodbye, and stepped into the corridor. Before he stepped out into the evening’s downpour, he opened an umbrella with police logos, which kept the deluge in check until he reached his turbo Volvo, the only privilege of his rank that he accepted.

He drove through the pitch-black city, up St. Eriksgatan, then Fleminggatan and Polhemsgatan, but at this moment he was
an unfit driver. Mixing facts with intuitions as he was, he was a grave danger in traffic; fortunately, though, the nighttime traffic was nonexistent. Why Benny Lundberg? What had the security guard seen or done that night? After all, Hultin had been there and talked to him that same night, and everything had seemed normal. And yet there must have been something strange about that break-in. Immediately afterward Lundberg had taken vacation time and was later discovered half-murdered by the Kentucky Killer, who had spoken Swedish, flattened two solid, professional policemen, and refrained from killing Norlander even though he’d had him in his sights. If they hadn’t had the background information on the killer, Hultin would have immediately thought: inside job, a criminal cop.