Postcard killers Read online

  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 swal owed 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 col ected – but at the same time extremely humble and likable.

  The Postcard Kil ers were the worst murderers ever seen on the European continent. She appreciated that the police had to investigate every lead, she real y did. The fact that she and her brother had coincidental y and innocently been drawn into it al 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 real y have carried out a brutal double murder and then gone to buy tickets to A Streetcar Named Desire?" she asked, her eyes fil ing with tears.

  "What do they think we are? A couple of cal ous 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 cel 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, closing 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 actual y come back at al. 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 bil boards, 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 Hol ywood and the dream factory and a glamorous life in the sun. For some people, anyway.

  Personal y, he could see only the crass advertisements, the elevated freeways, and the endless blocks of ugly single-story vil as.

  California wasn't exactly his bag of potato chips.

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

  He swung off right and drove on until he nearly fel 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 cel, feeling more alive than he had since Kimmy died.

  He hadn't showered since he left her, and he could stil make out the smel 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 Hol ywood Boulevard.

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

  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 intel igence. 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 fal 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 Jil 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 Thirtysecond and could do with your help. Today, if not sooner."

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

  "Wel," 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 al ergic."

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

  "I've got a whole lot to tel 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 usual y drink this late, but they had decided to do "crazy things" while they were traveling and "break al 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 stil…

  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 al 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 real y like Scandinavia. It's total y 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. 129 Anna blinked. What the hel were they doing? Flirting with each other?

  While she was standing here, right next to them?

  "Eric," she said, "I real y am tired. And we're going to Tivoli tomorrow…"

  Eric gave a shril laugh, as if she'd said something real y childish. The girl laughed along with him.

  "I think this feels like a magical evening," the girl said. "I'd real y 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. "Hel!" 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 real y 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 toast. He had drunk too much, and nothing could stop him when that happened. She'd known that before she married him. He pul ed 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 real y 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 real y twins?" Jacob asked, opening the bottle. The time difference was helping him feel a little high. He didn't mind.

  "Oh yeah, they real y 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 real y interesting thing happened when the twins were thirteen."

  Lyndon raised his bottle and drank, and Jacob could see his hand trembling. How il 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 tel 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."

  The ingenuity of the drug cartels knew no limits. Cocaine and Renaissance art?

  "What happened to the kids?"

  "Some relative looked after them. My contact thought it was a cousin of the mother's, but he didn't have a name."

  Jacob drank some more.

  "Sounds like they were pretty wel -off," Jacob said.

  "You're not wrong there," Lyndon said. "Their home was evidently some sort of manor house, slightly smal er than the Pentagon. It's empty these days, owned by some bankruptcy agency."

  "Is it far from here?"

  "Not real y. Just east of Santa Barbara. Why? You thinking of going there?"

  "Possibly. Did you get anything on the boyfriend, Wil iam Hamilton?"

  Lyndon snorted.

  "He was hardly in Rome last Christmas. He's never even had a passport.

  He's never been out of the States."

  Jacob groaned.

  "I've got an address in Westwood," Lyndon said, "but I don't know if it's current. The Rudolphs used to hang out around that area, too. Looks like they studied art at UCLA, started some sort of group cal ed the Society of Limitless Art…"

  Al of a sudden Jacob realized that he could no longer sit upright without a lot of concentration. He looked at his watch.

  She's just woken up, he thought. The boats are gliding to and from the quays of Gamla Stan beneath her living-room windows, the sun has been up for hours and she's sitting on her sofa watching the sails flap in the wind, drinking coffee and eating a flatbread rol…

  "Come on, I'l help you to the sofa," Lyndon Crebbs said. "You don't look so terrific yourself."

  Chapter 99

  Sunday, June 20

  Copenhagen, Denmark

  It was raining.

  Dessie was sitting at a table by the window of a packed cafe on Stroget, a long pedestrian street, watching people hurry past with umbrel as and raincoats. She was surrounded by families with young kids out for the weekend, the youngsters sleeping in buggies or sitting in kids' seats and gurgling while their mothers drank lattes and their dads had a Sunday beer.

  "Is this seat taken?"

  She looked up.

  A young father with tousled blond hair and a little girl in one arm had already taken hold of the chair opposite her.

  "Yes," she said quickly. "I'm waiting for someone. Sorry. He'l be here shortly."

  The father let go of the chair and gave her a sympathetic look. "Sure. No problem."

  She had been sitting at the table on her own for over an hour now. But she actual y was waiting for somebody.

  Nils Thorsen, a crime reporter on the Danish paper Extra-Avisen had been chosen as the Postcard Kil ers' Danish contact: a position he was as enthusiastic about as she had been in Sweden.

  During the past twenty-four hours, the two of them had gone through al the details, pictures, and evidence that Jacob had left behind when he disappeared.

  About an hour ago Thorsen had been cal ed back to the office: a letter had arrived in the afternoon mail, addressed to him. White, rectangular, capital letters.

  Dessie watched the father go back to the mother. He said something and nodded in her direction. The woman snickered, and they both laughed.

  She looked down at the table again and pretended she hadn't seen them.

  The fact was, she had a lot in common with Nils Thorsen. They had the same profession, the same interests, and even the same moral principles. He 132 wasn't bad-looking either. A bit thin on top, maybe…

  Why couldn't she feel the same way about him as she did about Jacob Kanon? God, she was starting to get loony, wasn't she? It was pretty pathetic, but it was out of her control now.

  Slowly she wound her hair up, fastening it with a bal point pen, and went back to looking at the postcard in front of her.

  Tivoli. The amusement park in the middle of Copenhagen. Posted while the Rudolphs were being held in Stockholm.

  She had to face facts here.

  However much she wanted to believe Jacob, his theory just didn't make sense.

  Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph weren't guilty.

  Not o
f sending this card, and not of sending the letter that Nils and the police here in Copenhagen had presumably opened by now.

  Why had she let herself believe it?

  People wil let themselves be convinced of anything, she supposed.

  Anything was better than a life without meaning. That was why religion existed, and footbal team fan clubs, and volunteer torturers in the service of dictators.

  As both a researcher and a journalist, she had regarded questioning everything as her guiding principle. Investigating. Thinking critical y. Not taking anything for granted.

  Al at once a longing burned her like a hot iron.

  Oh, Jacob, why aren't you here? How did you get into my head this way?

  How did you get into my heart?

  Chapter 100

  "Sorry, Dessie, so sorry," Nils Thorsen said, shaking the rain from his oilskin coat and sitting down opposite her. "That took ages, didn't it. I apologize."

  He ordered a fresh beer at once, sneaking a look to see how she was taking his absence.

  "Was it a Polaroid picture?" Dessie asked.

  The reporter wiped his glasses on his sweater and put a copy of a blurry photograph in front of her.

  The setting was unclear, and the focus al wrong. It was difficult to see what the picture was of, actual y.

  Dessie squinted and looked closely at the shot.

  It had been taken from a very low angle. She could make out the foot of a bed, but whatever was on top of it was unclear to her.

  "Have they found the location where this was taken?" she asked. 133 "It's only a matter of time," Nils said. "It has to be a hotel room. Look at the painting in the background. No one would have anything that ugly in their own home."

  "Are there… people on the bed?" Dessie asked.

  Nils Thorsen put his glasses back on. His hands were trembling. The man was clearly frightened, and she understood that better than anyone.

  "I don't know," he said.

  She held the picture up to her face, shifted it around in the light. Bedding, some items of clothing, a handbag, and – Suddenly a foot came into focus. Then another. And another.