The Postcard Killers Read online

  He looked at his watch again, hesitating. Then he took a step toward her and gave her a clumsy hug. The duffel bag was in the way and she got no contact with his body. How very fitting, she thought. The perfect ending for them.

  “See you,” he said, turning around and walking quickly toward the express train to Arlanda.

  She watched him go until he was swallowed up by the mass of people and disappeared in the crowd.

  “See you.”

  Chapter 93

  CNN, SKY NEWS, AND BBC World were all broadcasting live from the Hall of Mirrors in the Grand Hôtel. The overblown decor with its gold pillars, mirrored doors, and crystal chandeliers made Dessie think of Versailles or some other wedding-cake château. Journalists and photographers and cameramen and radio reporters were all pushing and shoving to get the best places.

  It was so crowded that the television people were standing shoulder to shoulder as they spoke to the cameras.

  Usually she did all she could to avoid press conferences.

  There was something humiliating in all the pushing and shoving to get close, packed in with other reporters and turned into a babbling crowd.

  The hierarchy was ridiculously strict as well.

  The television people always got to sit at the front. The bigger and noisier the channel, the closer their reporter got to the center of the action.

  Then came the radio reporters with their antennas, the news agencies, the national press, and then the specialist and local press. Researchers and editorial staff like her were let in only if there was room.

  Today she decided to behave like Jacob, storming through everybody like an express train, quickly showing her press pass at the door and forcing her way into the back of the room, not taking no for an answer, not caring what anybody thought of her.

  The room could hold five hundred, but the hotel management had limited the number to three hundred because of all the equipment needed for live television broadcasts.

  She leaned back against the wall, craning her neck to see. What an absurd circus.

  At the front of the room was a small, important-looking podium with metal steps on both sides.

  The jungle of microphones shouted out the fact that this was where the siblings were going to proclaim their innocence to all the world.

  The level of sound in the room was rising steadily, like the tension in a stadium during the World Cup final.

  Dessie closed her eyes.

  She felt almost completely paralyzed inside. Events in the room were reaching her through a thick, toughened, glasslike material. It felt like that, anyway.

  How could everything have gone so wrong? And so quickly.

  Her cell rang and she only noticed it because she was holding it in her hand.

  It was Forsberg.

  “How does it look? Did you manage to get inside? How close are you?”

  “I thought this whole spectacle was going out live on seventeen channels,” Dessie said. “Can’t you see for yourself?”

  “They’re just showing a forest of microphones. I can’t tell anything. Have you seen Alexander Andersson?”

  “I don’t think we’re in quite the same place,” Dessie said. “I’m standing right at the back.”

  Forsberg took a deep breath.

  “Is it true that you interviewed them?” he said. “While they were being held?”

  She kept her eyes fixed on the podium. Something was happening in the front.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. They’re coming in now!”

  The Hall of Mirrors exploded in a storm of flashbulbs and spotlights. From a door on the left Malcolm Rudolph walked into the room. He was wearing a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck and a pair of fashionably torn jeans.

  His sister, Sylvia, was walking behind him, her billowing chestnut brown hair glittering in the flashing lights. She was dressed entirely in white.

  “Shit,” Forsberg said in her ear. “She’s beautiful! How does she look in person?”

  “I’ll call you later,” Dessie said, ending the call.

  After Sylvia came a tall, thin woman whom Dessie recognized as Andrea Friederichs, their lawyer—their copyright lawyer.

  The central characters stopped in front of the jungle of microphones and stood there for three long minutes so that they could be photographed properly.

  Then the lawyer leaned forward and said in the queen’s English: “If we could get started with this press conference…”

  Chapter 94

  THE RUDOLPHS’ MESSAGE TO the world was crystal clear: a miscarriage of justice had narrowly been avoided today.

  This was repeated time after time during the forty-five-minute live broadcast.

  The emcee for the performance was Andrea Friederichs, and Dessie had to admit that she performed her duties with aplomb.

  She said that thanks to the civic-minded courage of Prosecutor Evert Ridderwall, these innocent young people had been spared yet another day of stressful interrogation, and another night in a Swedish prison cell.

  Obviously, the Rudolph siblings had nothing to do with the Postcard Killers.

  The very idea was preposterous.

  The lawyer systematically went through all the points that proved they were innocent. She reeled them off from memory, no notes:

  They were in Madrid when the killings took place in Athens.

  They were in the south of Spain at the time of the Salzburg murders.

  They were buying theater tickets when the murders in Berlin were carried out.

  The Dutch couple, Nienke van Mourik and Peter Visser, were clearly still alive when the Rudolphs left their hotel room.

  The Swedish police had arrested and held them because they were looking at art.

  “I have never seen such an extreme case of high-handed policing,” Andrea Friederichs said.

  Dessie looked around the room, noting her colleagues’ sympathetic demeanors. They clearly shared the lawyer’s righteous indignation.

  Maybe she was wrong?

  Had she let herself be misled by Jacob, a man who clearly wasn’t able to be objective in this case? How could he be? He had lost a daughter.

  Were the Rudolphs innocent?

  She swallowed nervously and was forced to consider the possibility.

  Then it was the siblings’ turn to speak for themselves. Malcolm went first.

  He was in tears again as he described his sorrow when he was told of the deaths of their Dutch friends. The photographers’ flashes reached a crescendo as he hugged himself around the chest and the tears ran down his handsome face.

  Sylvia was more collected—but at the same time extremely humble and likable.

  The Postcard Killers were the worst murderers ever seen on the European continent. She appreciated that the police had to investigate every lead, she really did. The fact that she and her brother had coincidentally and innocently been drawn into it all was a great shame. She at least was grateful that the Swedish judicial system more or less worked, and that two innocent suspects were no longer being held, even though there were some reactionary police officers who were happy to ignore such things as motives and evidence.

  “Would we really have carried out a brutal double murder and then gone to buy tickets to A Streetcar Named Desire?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears.

  “What do they think we are? A couple of callous monsters? No. We came to Europe on vacation. To see museums. To visit your great cities. Is that a crime?”

  A cascade of flashes exploded everywhere in the room. There was even some applause.

  Dessie pushed her way to the door, took out her cell phone, and rang Forsberg.

  “What a show!” the news editor exclaimed. “We’re the lead on CNN!”

  She noted his empathy toward the Rudolphs.

  “I’m going away for a few days,” Dessie said. “Just so you know.”

  “What do you mean, ‘away’? Where to?”

  “Copenhagen,” Dessie said, closi
ng her phone.

  Chapter 95

  Saturday, June 19

  Los Angeles, USA

  THE LANDING GEAR HIT the ground with a thud at LAX, Los Angeles International Airport.

  Jacob was back on American soil for the first time in six months.

  This wasn’t how he had imagined his return, if he had actually come back at all. But he’d had to come back. This was where the Rudolphs had lived and created their scheme.

  The air outside the terminal building was thick with exhaust fumes. He stood for a moment looking at his surroundings from the parking lot outside the rental-car office. It was such a familiar scene: the sea of private cars spreading out around him, the advertising billboards, the voices, the sound of traffic in the streets.

  The U.S. was just as he remembered it, just a bit more… unsubtle.

  He rented a Chrysler with GPS. He didn’t know his way around L.A. and had no desire to learn right now, not on this trip.

  Programming Citrus Avenue into the wretched machine turned out to be tougher than finding the address on a map, so he gave up and drove north along Sepulveda Boulevard in heavy city traffic. God, the traffic. It was even worse than in New York.

  He would never come to grips with Los Angeles, he was thinking to himself.

  A sort of romantic shimmer lay over the whole city. Here was Hollywood and the dream factory and a glamorous life in the sun. For some people, anyway.

  Personally, he could see only the crass advertisements, the elevated freeways, and the endless blocks of ugly single-story villas.

  California wasn’t exactly his bag of potato chips.

  He ignored the freeways and followed Sepulveda for miles, until he reached Santa Monica Boulevard.

  He swung off right and drove on until he nearly fell asleep at a streetlight. He’d been warned that jet lag from Scandinavia was no joke. It sure wasn’t. The time difference was nine hours. Here it was only seven in the evening, but after six months in Europe, his body thought it was four in the morning.

  Exactly one day before, he had been lying in a narrow bunk in an old prison cell, feeling more alive than he had since Kimmy died.

  He hadn’t showered since he left her, and he could still make out the smell of fruit from her body on his…

  He pushed the confusing thought aside and parked the car near a loading bay on Beverly Drive.

  Two quick coffees and a parking ticket later, he was more or less ready to go on.

  Number 1338 Citrus Avenue was a fairly rundown two-story rental with a flat roof and a walkway, just a few blocks from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Lyndon Crebbs opened the door before Jacob had time to even ring the bell.

  Chapter 96

  “YOU OLD BASTARD!” THE FBI agent said with feeling, hugging him. “Come in, for god’s sake!”

  Jacob stepped into a sparsely furnished room with a deep-pile beige carpet that had seen better decades.

  His mentor had aged. His hair was white and his suntanned face was covered in a network of wrinkles. But his eyes were the same, dark brown and crackling with intelligence. And suspicion.

  “God, Lyndon, you look like an old man.”

  The FBI agent laughed hard and closed the door behind him.

  “Prostate trouble, Jacob. The cancer’s eating me up, slowly but surely.”

  Jacob let his duffel bag fall to the floor and sank down on a chair at Lyndon’s round dining-room table. “So—what have you heard? Anything?”

  “I got a message from Jill in New York,” Lyndon said, taking out two Budweisers. “They’re wondering when you’re going to stop running round Europe chasing murderers. They say they’ve got enough of those in the Thirty-second and could do with your help. Today, if not sooner.”

  Jacob laughed so loud and long that the noise almost shocked him.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m certainly not planning to settle in this dump of a city.”

  Lyndon smiled.

  “You know what they say: L.A. isn’t a cat that jumps into your lap and licks your face. But with a little time and patience, it just might.”

  And Jacob replied the same way he had for the past twenty years whenever pets were mentioned.

  “No cats for me, Kimmy’s allergic.”

  Lyndon Crebbs suddenly became very serious and looked much more like himself, which meant even more suspicious.

  “I’ve got a whole lot to tell you,” he said.

  Chapter 97

  Copenhagen, Denmark

  IT WAS REALLY STILL night, but the sun was already up.

  The pretty American girl named Anna took a careful sip from the last of her margarita. She didn’t usually drink this late, but they had decided to do “crazy things” while they were traveling and “break all the rules.”

  She looked up at Eric and moved closer to him. Sometimes it felt like she could never get close enough.

  The hip club was throbbing with music, but it was almost possible to talk in the upstairs bar. Not that anything sensible ever got said at this time of day, not in bars like this one.

  “One more, then, eh?”

  The guy who had bought their drinks was panting against her neck again. He was cute, but still…

  She pressed herself against Eric, away from the other man.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

  “Go on,” Eric whispered in her ear. “Just one more. We’re all having fun.”

  Anna gulped and said, “Okay, then. To fun!”

  The other guy ordered her another margarita.

  Anna looked at her watch. It was late.

  “Whereabouts in the States are you from?” the guy asked as he handed her the drink. The salt around the rim rained down on her fingers.

  “Tucson, Arizona,” Eric said. He was always so polite to everyone.

  “ ‘Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass… ,’ ” the guy’s pretty girlfriend sang, waving her glass.

  “There’s nothing but desert there, am I correct?”

  “Not quite,” Eric said.

  Anna tugged at his shirtsleeve, even though she knew he didn’t like it when she did that.

  “I want to go back to the hotel now,” she said. “Please, Eric.”

  “Have you been traveling long?” the girl asked, sucking on the straw in her empty glass.

  “Two and a half weeks,” Eric said. “We really like Scandinavia. It’s totally awesome!”

  “Yeah, isn’t it?” the girl said.

  She moved closer to Eric and kicked off one of her sandals. Anna watched her toes climb up Eric’s sneaker.

  “You know what they say about men with big feet?” she said, looking up at Eric from behind her hair.

  Eric smiled in that way that made his eyes twinkle.

  Anna blinked. What the hell were they doing? Flirting with each other? While she was standing here, right next to them?

  “Eric,” she said, “I really am tired. And we’re going to Tivoli tomorrow…”

  Eric gave a shrill laugh, as if she’d said something really childish. The girl laughed along with him.

  “I think this feels like a magical evening,” the girl said. “I’d really like a souvenir of tonight, wouldn’t you, Anna?”

  She draped herself against her boyfriend and kissed him softly on the lips.

  The guy buying the margaritas gave a slightly forced laugh.

  “This could get expensive,” he said. It was almost as if he was reading a script.

  “There can’t be any shops open at this time of day,” Eric said.

  The guy stiffened. “Hell!” he said. “You’re right! So let’s get a bottle of champagne!”

  He signaled to the bartender again.

  The girl tilted her head and smiled at Eric.

  “I’d really like to drink it with the two of you,” she said, “in your hotel room.”

  Anna felt herself tense up, but Eric raised his glass in a t
oast. He had drunk too much, and nothing could stop him when that happened. She’d known that before she married him. He pulled her tight to him.

  “Come on,” he whispered right in her ear, his breath hitting her eardrum. “We wanted to meet new people on our trip, didn’t we? These two are great.”

  Anna felt like she wanted to cry.

  Eric was quite right.

  She really had to stop being such a deadhead. They should go back to the hotel and party.

  Chapter 98

  LYNDON PUT TWO MORE bottles of beer on the table. Jacob grabbed one of them.

  “I didn’t think my sources would have much to say about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, but I was wrong,” he said, sitting down heavily at the table.

  “Are they really twins?” Jacob asked, opening the bottle. The time difference was helping him feel a little high. He didn’t mind.

  “Oh yeah, they really are. Born fifteen minutes apart. Why do you ask that?”

  Jacob thought back to the video from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, how the couple had held on to each other, her hand sneaking inside the waistband of his trousers.

  “Don’t know,” he said, taking a deep swig of beer.

  “The really interesting thing happened when the twins were thirteen.”

  Lyndon raised his bottle and drank, and Jacob could see his hand trembling. How ill was he exactly? He looked bad, which upset Jacob. He didn’t have a lot of friends like Lyndon.

  “Their parents, Helen and Simon Rudolph, were murdered in their bed eleven years ago.”

  Jacob blinked.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Let me guess. They were naked and their throats had been cut?”

  The FBI agent chuckled. “Precisely. The bedroom evidently looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood everywhere.”

  “Who did it?”

  Lyndon Crebbs shook his head.

  “The case was never solved. The father was an art dealer. There was talk that he was transporting more than just Renaissance paintings in the containers he shipped between South America and the U.S., but nothing was ever proved.”