The Postcard Killers Read online

  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 well-off,” Jacob said.

  “You’re not wrong there,” Lyndon said. “Their home was evidently some sort of manor house, slightly smaller than the Pentagon. It’s empty these days, owned by some bankruptcy agency.”

  “Is it far from here?”

  “Not really. Just east of Santa Barbara. Why? You thinking of going there?”

  “Possibly. Did you get anything on the boyfriend, William 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 called the Society of Limitless Art…”

  All 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 roll…

  “Come on, I’ll 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 café on Strøget, a long pedestrian street, watching people hurry past with umbrellas 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’ll 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 actually was waiting for somebody.

  Nils Thorsen, a crime reporter on the Danish paper Extra-Avisen had been chosen as the Postcard Killers’ 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 all the details, pictures, and evidence that Jacob had left behind when he disappeared.

  About an hour ago Thorsen had been called 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 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 ballpoint 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 of 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 will let themselves be convinced of anything, she supposed. Anything was better than a life without meaning. That was why religion existed, and football 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 critically. Not taking anything for granted.

  All 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 all wrong. It was difficult to see what the picture was of, actually.

  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.

  “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.

  Instinctively she thrust the picture away from her eyes.

  There were people there, two of them.

  The evidence seemed to suggest that they were no longer alive.

  “Do you really think that’s an imitation of a work of art?” the Dane asked.

  “Impossible to say,” Dessie muttered.

  She pushed the terrible picture away and began to run through Denmark’s most famous works of art in her mind.

  The Little Mermaid, the statue in Copenhagen’s harbor, was obviously the best known. But there were the artists of the Skagen School, the cubist Vilhelm Lundstrøm, and plenty more.

  She pushed the stray hairs away from her brow. A lot of the other photographs had been very easy to trace back to various artworks, usually well-known ones.

  This wasn’t one of them, was it? Something had changed.

  “I don’t think it was the same photographer,” she said to Nils Thorsen. “So who took this picture?”

  Chapter 101

  Los Angeles, USA

  “HEY, SLEEPYHEAD, YOU STILL alive?”

  Jacob slowly opened his eyes without the faintest idea of where he was. He examined the clues.

  A ceiling with a large damp stain.

  The rattle of an exhausted air-conditioning unit.

  A sharp smell of coffee, a smell he hadn’t woken up to for the past six months.

  “Ah, there you are. It lives. It snores. I’ve got some more information for you.”

  Jacob sat up on Lyndon Crebbs’s lumpy living-room sofa. It had been insignificantly more comfortable than the recliner on the fli
ght across the Atlantic.

  The FBI agent held out a mug of steaming coffee.

  “I’ve got the name of the guardian who took care of the Rudolph kids after their parents died,” he said. “Jonathan Blython, a cousin of the mother’s, also a resident of Santa Barbara.”

  Jacob took the mug, had a sip, and immediately scalded himself.

  “Excellent job,” he said. “Do you think he’d appreciate an informal visit?”

  “Hardly,” Lyndon said. “He’s been dead three years.”

  Jacob snapped awake.

  “A sudden and violent death?”

  Lyndon nodded.

  “He was found with his throat cut. Parking lot over on Vista del Mar Street. He’d been with a prostitute. It was written off as a violent mugging. No arrest.”

  “Three years ago, you say?”

  “The twins had just turned twenty-one. They were living here in L.A. No one connected them to the murder. Why would they?”

  Jacob drank the bitter liquid and fumbled for his trousers. They’d slid beneath the sofa. Suddenly he remembered his night with Dessie. He put it out of his mind.

  “I think I’m going to head out to Montecito,” he said, pulling his jeans on. “How far is it?”

  “A hundred miles or so, a bit less. You’ll be there in two hours if you miss rush hour. But—”

  Lyndon Crebbs placed a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  “First you’re going to take a shower,” he said.

  Chapter 102

  Copenhagen, Denmark

  THE CRIME SCENE WAS A hotel close to the Central Station.

  The hotel looked like it had been built in the 1930s. It was three stories and pretty basic, not to say shabby. It fit the pattern for the killers—before the Grand Hôtel murders, anyway.

  Dessie and Nils Thorsen arrived at the same time as one of the officers from the forensics team.

  “We’ll help you carry your equipment up,” Thorsen said to them. This was met with wide eyes but no word of protest. Dessie was impressed with Thorsen’s sly move.

  They were waved past the cordon by the uniforms whose job it was to keep the press and public away.

  The murders had been committed in a double room on the top floor.

  There were no security cameras in the corridors, Dessie noted. The killers’ old pattern.

  Two of the forensics officer’s colleagues had already started examining the room. It was harshly lit by various lamps, and Dessie could tell from the smell that the bodies were still there. Several detectives were walking around the room with notepads or cameras in their hands.

  Dessie came to a halt just outside the door. She stood on tiptoe to see past one of the plainclothes officers, and when he leaned over, she got a clear view of the bed.

  She gasped, couldn’t help herself. The scene was beyond horrifying.

  The man’s genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth.

  The woman’s stomach had been cut open and her guts laid out between her legs. She had an empty champagne bottle rammed down her throat.

  Dessie turned away and grabbed at the wall for support.

  “What is it?” Nils Thorsen asked.

  “See for yourself,” she said, stepping aside to let him through. “Although I advise against it.”

  Thorsen gulped for air and let out a noise that sounded like he was retching. He staggered back along the corridor.

  Dessie moved to the door. She vividly recalled the scene in the house on Dalarö.

  The similarities were striking.

  Two dead bodies, a man and a woman, their throats cut.

  But there were differences, too.

  She hadn’t thought it possible, but this scene was even more revolting. It was rougher and more graphic.

  “What nationality are they?” someone from the forensics team asked.

  “American,” the senior detective said. “From Tucson, Arizona. Anna and Eric Heller, newlyweds. Here on their honeymoon.”

  Dessie’s desire to throw up grew stronger. Her mind was working very fast. The similarities were undeniable, but there was also something different about this scene.

  Nothing suggested that the bodies had been arranged in a particular way. The couple lay splayed on the bed without any apparent attention to their position, as if they had been thrown there, or had even just fallen asleep that way.

  This was no Little Mermaid. Nothing from the Skagen school either. No famous art.

  She took out her mobile and called Gabriella.

  The detective grunted in answer.

  “Are Sylvia and Malcolm still at the Grand Hôtel?” Dessie asked.

  “They haven’t left their suite.”

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “The entire hotel is besieged by the press. The Rudolphs can’t move without the whole world knowing about it. Andrea Friederichs is busy selling the rights to the whole circus to the highest bidder. You know, ‘Based on a true story…’ ”

  Dessie closed her eyes. She massaged her forehead with one hand. “You’ve heard about Copenhagen?” she said.

  “Grisly from what I’ve heard,” Gabriella said.

  “This is different,” Dessie said. “Even more disgusting. I don’t think it was the same killers. This was someone different.”

  There were a few moments of silence from the other end.

  “Or else it was never actually the Rudolphs,” Gabriella said.

  Dessie couldn’t think of a response.

  “You have to consider that Jacob might be wrong,” Gabriella said. “Everything we find is pointing to the fact that Sylvia and Malcolm are innocent.”

  Yes, she was perfectly aware of that.

  “They might just have been incredibly unlucky,” Gabriella went on. “They might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or else someone really is trying to set them up.”

  Dessie moved to one side to let the ambulance crew through with their stretchers.

  “Or else they’re guilty,” Dessie said, “and now someone else is mimicking their murders in almost the same way, just not as well thought through.”

  “And this ‘someone else,’ ” Gabriella said. “Who might that be?”

  Chapter 103

  Montecito, USA

  THE DIRECTIONS JACOB HAD been given led him to a huge gate at the end of a paved private road.

  A tarnished bronze sign revealed that this was THE MANSION, with a very definite capital M.

  No false modesty here.

  Jacob sat in his car for a moment studying the surroundings.

  While he had been cruising the streets of Montecito, he realized that this whole area was a playground for the wealthy and famous. Many of the houses were showy mansions built in a faux Mediterranean-style, with ornate gates and colorful bougainvillea.

  This one was different, though.

  The walls were several feet high, unwelcoming, granite gray. They stretched as far as he could see up toward the hills. They protected the house and grounds so well that he had no idea what might be on the other side.

  The Mansion, my ass. More like the Fortress. To protect what secrets?

  He got out of the car and went up to the phone to the left of the gate.

  “Sí?” a crackling voice said.

  So it wasn’t entirely uninhabited.

  “Hola,” Jacob said. “Speak English?” He had many good qualities, but a talent for languages wasn’t one of them.

  “Sí. Yes.”

  “Jacob Kanon, NYPD. New York City police. I’d like to ask a few questions about the Rudolph family. It’s important that I speak to someone.”

  “Can you hold your ID up to the camera beside the phone?”

  Opening his wallet, Jacob pulled out his badge and held it up to the camera.

  “Come in!” the crackling voice said, and the tall gates started to glide apart.

  A small Tudor-style gatekeeper’s lodge was situated some fifty yards in on the left. The door opened and a
n elderly man limped out onto the drive.

  Jacob stopped the car again and climbed out.

  “You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting,” the man said, holding his hand out and saying that he was Carlos Rodríguez.

  “What for?” Jacob said, surprised.

  The man hastily crossed himself. “The killing of Mr. Simon and Mrs. Helen has been unsolved for too long! It is like a heavy weight I carry.”

  “So you knew the Rudolphs?” Jacob asked.

  “Knew?” Carlos Rodríguez exclaimed. “I’ve been the gardener here for more than thirty years. I was here the night it happened. I called the police.”

  Chapter 104

  CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ AND HIS wife, Carmela, had lived in the small gatekeeper’s lodge at the Mansion ever since he returned from the Vietnam War in the spring of 1975. Both of their children had grown up there.

  “Children are the future,” Rodríguez said. “Do you have children?”

  “No,” Jacob said, putting his ID back in his wallet. “But I’m interested in the Rudolphs’ children. What happened to them after the murder?”

  The gardener sucked his teeth.

  “The twins were looked after by Señor Blython,” he said. “He took them down to Los Angeles, to the big house he bought in Beverly Hills.”

  The man moved closer to Jacob and lowered his voice, as if someone might overhear him.

  “Señorita and Junior didn’t really want to move,” he said. “They wanted to stay in their house here, but it was up to Señor Blython to decide. He was their legal guardian, after all.”

  “Who owns this place these days?” Jacob asked.

  He remembered that Lyndon said it had been in the hands of a bankruptcy agency.

  Rodríguez’s face darkened.

  “The children inherited it, along with everything else: paintings, jewelry, stock shares, and small businesses. Señor Blython was charged with managing these assets until the children were twenty-one. But when that day came, the money was gone.”

  Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Their guardian defrauded them?”

  “He took every last penny. The house was sold at an executive auction. The company that bought it was going to turn it into a conference center. But they went bankrupt in the financial crisis.”