The Postcard Killers Read online

  “What did Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph say about what happened?”

  The man’s gaze wavered.

  “They couldn’t stay on at UCLA. There was no money, not even for the fees. So they had to get jobs. But they managed,” he said. “They’re very resourceful.”

  Jacob’s jaw tightened. If the old man only knew.

  “When did you last see them?” he asked.

  Carlos Rodríguez didn’t need to think about the answer. “The weekend before the house was sold at auction,” he said. “They came to collect a few mementos, photo albums and things like that.”

  “They were both here?”

  “And Sandra,” the gardener said. “Sandra Schulman, Sylvia’s best friend. They only stayed a few hours on that last visit, and then they left, in the middle of the night…”

  “And then Señor Blython was murdered,” Jacob said.

  Carlos Rodríguez snorted.

  “If you hang around with putas in Los Angeles…,” he said.

  Jacob nodded and let the subject drop. The gardener had told him more than he had expected.

  “The main building,” he said, “is it still here?”

  Carlos Rodríguez’s face broke into a smile again.

  “Pero claro que sí! I’m not formally employed anymore, of course. I get a little from the bank. Mostly we live on my pension. But I look after the Mansion.”

  “Could you show me around?” Jacob asked.

  “Sí, claro! Of course I can.”

  Chapter 105

  LYNDON WAS RIGHT.

  The house was enormous, and it looked like something from a horror film set in the English countryside. Señor Rodríguez may have done his best to keep the building in good condition, but his lame old body had no chance against the wind, the damp, the weeds, and the ivy. One window frame had slipped its hinge and was squeaking in the wind.

  This was where it all began, wasn’t it? The murders—the mystery of the Rudolphs.

  “The electricity has been cut off in the main house,” the gardener said apologetically as he unlocked the oak door.

  Jacob’s footsteps echoed in the grand stone hallway. Doors stood half open, leading into high-ceilinged rooms and down long, dark corridors.

  He took a quick look into the various rooms where Sylvia and Malcolm had once lived.

  The whole building seemed to have been emptied of its contents. Jacob noticed a single curtain in a library that was empty of books.

  “The master bedroom is on the second floor. Follow me.”

  A magnificent curved staircase led up to the more private parts of the mansion.

  Pale rectangles on the walls revealed where paintings had once hung. A battered rococo sofa, its stuffing hanging out, stood alone and dusty on the first landing.

  “Straight ahead,” Carlos Rodríguez said.

  The bed was still there, an ornate four-poster without curtains or bedclothes. Otherwise the room was empty.

  “So this was where it happened?” Jacob said.

  The gardener nodded.

  “And you were here that night?”

  He nodded again.

  “What did you see? Tell me anything you remember. Please. It’s important.”

  The man swallowed.

  “Terrible things,” he said. “Blood all over this room. Mr. and Mrs. were lying dead in that bed. They must have been asleep when it happened.”

  “Did you see their injuries close up?”

  The man ran his index finger like a knife across his throat.

  “Deep cuts,” he said. “Almost through to the bone at the back of the neck.”

  He gave an involuntary shudder as Jacob watched him closely.

  “How did you come to be here, in your employers’ room in the middle of the night? I don’t understand.”

  The man took a deep breath, then spoke.

  “I was asleep with my family when Señorita rang. I hurried here straightaway.”

  “It wasn’t you who found them?”

  “No, no. It was little Sylvia.”

  Chapter 106

  Monday, June 21

  Copenhagen, Denmark

  THERE WAS STILL A pattern here. It had just changed slightly.

  Dessie kept thinking she could see it clearly, just for a few seconds. Then it would slide out of her reach again.

  She was sitting on the unmade bed in her hotel room with all the pictures and postcards around her, all of Jacob’s crumpled copies. She picked them up, even though she had seen them a hundred times, maybe more. All the buildings and people and details were already imprinted in her memory.

  The postcard from Amsterdam of the plain building on Prinsengracht 267: the house where Anne Frank was hidden during the war, where she wrote her famous diary.

  Then Rome and Madrid: the Coliseum and Las Ventas, gladiatorial combat and bullfights. Arenas for theater based on killing.

  The Paris card was of La Conciergerie, the legendary antechamber of the guillotine.

  Berlin was a view of the bunker built by Hitler, the most famous failed artist in history.

  Stockholm showed the main square, Stortorget, the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath.

  But she couldn’t make three of the cards fit the pattern of the others.

  The Tivoli pleasure gardens in Copenhagen.

  The Olympic stadium from the Athens games of 2004.

  And that anonymous shopping street in Salzburg.

  What did they have to do with death?

  Dessie let the pictures fall to the bed again.

  Was she imagining this pattern?

  Was it foolish to try to give any sort of order to the way these sick bastards thought?

  She stood up and went over to the window. The rain had given way to mist and fog. Cars and bicycles were crossing Kongens Nytorv below her.

  Why was she really bothering? Jacob had left her. The newspaper hadn’t been in touch for days now. No one missed her.

  To be or not to be.

  As if you could choose to live or die.

  Could you? And in that case, what sort of life would it be?

  She knew she could do just as she liked, continue digging around in this story or go home: get involved or let go. Quite regardless of what other people thought, and what they thought about her, what did she actually want to do now?

  She turned around and looked at the mess on the bed.

  Jacob hadn’t managed to contact the Austrian reporter. He had never gotten hold of a copy of the picture of the bodies in Salzburg either.

  She walked toward her mobile phone, then picked it up and held it to her chest for a few seconds before dialing International Directory Inquiries.

  A minute later the phone rang at the reception desk of the Kronen Zeitung.

  “Ich suche Charlotta Bruckmoser, bitte,” Dessie said.

  Chapter 107

  THERE WERE SEVERAL CLICKS on the line, then the Austrian reporter was there.

  Dessie introduced herself as a fellow reporter from Stockholm.

  “Before I start, I want to apologize for phoning and disturbing you,” she said in her rusty schoolgirl German.

  “I was the one who received the postcard and picture in Sweden,” she explained. “I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

  “I haven’t got anything to say,” the reporter said, but she didn’t sound angry. Just watchful.

  “I completely understand,” Dessie said. “I know what you’ve been through.”

  “I read about the killings in Sweden,” Charlotta Bruckmoser said, sounding slightly less guarded.

  “Well, here’s something you might not know,” Dessie said, and she told her story. About the photographs mimicking famous works of art, with a few exceptions; about the postcards of places where death and art mixed together, again with a few exceptions; about Jacob Kanon and his murdered daughter; about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, their alibis and Jacob’s conviction that, in spite of everything, they were the Postcard K
illers.

  The only thing she left out was the night in Jacob’s room in the hostel.

  Two sharp beeping sounds told her that someone was trying to call her, but she ignored them.

  Charlotta Bruckmoser was silent for a few moments after Dessie had finished speaking. “I haven’t read any of this in the papers,” she eventually said.

  “No,” Dessie said, “and I doubt you could get confirmation of it from any official sources.”

  “What about you, what do you think?” the reporter asked cautiously. “Are the Rudolphs guilty?”

  Dessie took a moment to reply.

  “I really don’t know anymore.”

  Silence again.

  “Why are you telling me this?” the Austrian woman asked.

  Two more beeping sounds. Someone was keen to get hold of her.

  “The pictures you received,” Dessie said. “I’d really like to see the pictures you received.”

  “I’ll e-mail you the card and the letter and everything,” Charlotta Bruckmoser said.

  Ten seconds later there was a ping from Dessie’s mailbox. The pictures were here!

  There was blood all over the room, as if the victims had been crawling about while they bled to death. Two lamps had been broken. The bodies had fallen forward onto their sides and lay about a meter apart on the floor.

  “Is there any Austrian work of art that looks like this?” Dessie asked. “Famous art?”

  The reporter took her time replying.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, “but I’m no expert. Famous art, though? I really don’t think so.”

  Dessie clicked open the PDF of the envelope and looked at the address. It was written in the same block letters as the others. But on the back was something she hadn’t seen before: nine numbers, hastily written down.

  “That number on the back,” Dessie said, “what does that mean?”

  “It’s a phone number,” Charlotta Bruckmoser said. “I tried calling it. It’s for a pizzeria in Vienna. The police decided it had nothing to do with the case.”

  At that moment Dessie’s inbox pinged again. She felt her stomach lurch.

  It’s Jacob, ran the thought going through her head. He’s e-mailed me because he misses me.

  It was from Gabriella.

  Tried to call you. Another double murder in Oslo.

  “I’ve got to go,” Dessie said and hung up on Charlotta Bruckmoser.

  Chapter 108

  Los Angeles, USA

  UCLA WAS AS BIG as a decent-size town in California. More than thirty thousand students, some two hundred buildings, more than fifty thousand applicants to be freshmen every year.

  Jacob had punched Charles E. Young Drive into the GPS, an address that was supposed to be in the university’s northern campus, where the School of the Arts and Architecture was based.

  His contact, Nicky Everett, was waiting for him outside room 140, on the first floor of the building. The young man was wearing chinos, a golfing shirt, boat shoes, and frameless glasses. Jacob had never met anyone studying for a PhD in conceptual art, but he’d been expecting something more bearded and absentminded.

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me,” Jacob said.

  “I believe in art that communicates,” Nicky Everett said seriously, looking at him through the sparkling clean lenses.

  “Er….,” Jacob said, “you knew Malcolm and Sylvia Rudolph?”

  “I wouldn’t use the past tense,” Everett said. “Even if we no longer have a physical relationship, there are other forms of contact, correct?”

  Jacob nodded. Okay.

  “Could we sit down outside perhaps?” he said, gesturing toward some benches just outside the main entrance.

  They went out and sat in the shade of a few spindly trees.

  “If I’ve understood this right, you studied here at the same time as the Rudolph twins—until they left—correct?”

  “Absolutely,” Everett said. “Sylvia and Mac were leaders in their field.”

  “Which was?”

  “Let me quote Sol LeWitt: ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.’ ”

  Jacob made an effort to understand, and also to keep his emotions in check. “So an event, or a series of events, can be a work of art?” he asked.

  “Of course. Both Mac and Sylvia were determined to take their work to its ultimate limits.”

  Jacob remembered Dessie’s stories of the art student who faked a psychotic attack for her examination piece, and the guy who smashed up a car on the subway and called his artwork Territorial Pissing. He described these cases to Everett.

  “Could the Rudolphs ever do anything like that?”

  Nicky Everett pressed his glasses firmly onto his nose. “The Rudolphs were more meticulous in their expression. That all sounds rather superficial. ‘Territorial Pissing’?”

  Jacob ran his fingers through his hair. “So,” he said, “explain it to me: how can that be art? I want to hear this and understand it as best I can.”

  The student looked at him with complete indifference in his face.

  “You think a work of art should be hung on a wall and sold on the commercial market?”

  Jacob realized the futility of going any further down this road and changed the subject. “They started an art group, the Society of Limitless Art…”

  “It was more of a web project. I don’t think anything ever came of it.”

  “What was their social life like otherwise? Family, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends.”

  Nicky Everett seemed not to understand, as though the very idea that he might possess such insignificant facts was completely ridiculous.

  “Do you know if they were upset when their guardian died here in L.A.?”

  “Their what?”

  Jacob gave up.

  “Okay, I think we’re good,” he said, standing up. “It’s a shame the Rudolphs couldn’t afford to stay on here. Imagine all the incredible art they could have created…”

  He turned to go back to his car.

  Nicky Everett had also stood up, and for the first time, a genuine expression showed on his face. “ ‘Couldn’t afford to stay on here’? Sylvia and Mac were exceptional talents. They both had scholarships. There was no problem with fees.”

  Jacob stopped short.

  “No problem? So why did they leave, then?”

  Everett blinked a few times, a sure sign that he was agitated.

  “They created the work Taboo and were expelled. They showed up the bourgeois limitations and the hypocrisy of our society, and of this institution, of course.”

  Jacob stared at the student.

  “What did they do? What was Taboo? What was it that got them expelled?”

  Nicky Everett’s mouth curved into a smile.

  “They committed an act that was entirely relevant within the frame of their art. They had intercourse in a case in the exhibition hall.”

  Chapter 109

  JACOB SAT IN THE car with the GPS switched off and his duffel bag beside him on the passenger seat. The more he found out about the Rudolphs’ background, the weirder they became. Taboo went way beyond Territorial Pissing.

  If he started with this latest piece of information, the signals he had picked up on from the recording at the Museum of Modern Art had been correct. The siblings had an erotic relationship. It was possible that people had different preferences within the world of conceptual art, but in Jacob’s reality, you didn’t have intercourse with your twin in public, not unless you had a whole toolbox full of loose screws.

  The long trail of slashed throats they had left behind them couldn’t be a coincidence either. The question was, What came first, the chicken or the egg?

  Had Sylvia discovered her murdered parents and been traumatized for life? Was she trying to get over the experience by repeating it, again and again, in the form of macabre works of art? Or was she the one who had killed
her mother and father at the age of thirteen? Was that even physically possible? Would she have had the strength to do it? The neck was tough. It was full of muscles, sinews, and ligaments. But above all, why would she have killed her parents?

  He took it for granted that the twins had murdered the guardian who had embezzled the whole of their inheritance.

  And who was Sandra Schulman, the friend mentioned by the gardener? He would have to track her down, too. And the boyfriend, William Hamilton.

  For some reason he suddenly saw Dessie Larsson before him, her long hair and graceful profile, her slender fingers, her vigilant green eyes.

  Had the mob of journalists finally given up waiting outside Dessie’s door? Had she gone back to her old routine?

  Was she thinking of him? Was she all right?

  Irritated, he shrugged off the thought. He had more work to do in L.A.

  Chapter 110

  WILLIAM HAMILTON, OR BILLY as his friends called him, opened the door with his long, dirty blond hair standing on end and wearing nothing but a pink bath towel.

  “What?” he said abruptly, blinking in the dim light from the stairwell. “What now?”

  “Police,” Jacob Kanon said, holding up his badge, obscuring the NYPD. “Can I come in? Of course I can.”

  “Shit,” Billy said, frowning, but letting the door swing open.

  Jacob took that as a yes and stepped into the apartment.

  It wasn’t bad, the apartment. It was on Barrington Avenue, just a few miles from Westwood Village and the UCLA campus. It was at the top of the building, with a large terrace overlooking the pool and a garden.

  There was a fashionable kitchen/bar and an open gas fire.

  “What the hell’s the matter this time? What do you people want now?”

  Billy sank into a white corner sofa facing the artificial fire. The towel slid open, revealing well-muscled, suntanned thighs.

  “Honey, who is it?” a woman’s voice called from one of the bedrooms.

  “Mind your own business,” he muttered under his breath.

  “I’m here about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph,” Jacob said, sitting down on the sofa without being asked. Billy let out a low groan.