The Postcard Killers Read online

  “Is it Jacob?”

  Unable to stop herself any longer, Dessie started to cry.

  “Sorry,” she sniffled into the phone. “Sorry, I…”

  “You fell for him hard, didn’t you?”

  Gabriella sounded neither angry nor disappointed, but more like a good friend now.

  Dessie took a deep breath.

  “I suppose so,” she said.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Things don’t always work out as you hope,” Gabriella said, so quietly that her words were almost inaudible.

  “I know,” Dessie whispered. “Sorry.”

  Gabriella laughed.

  “That took its time,” she said.

  “I know,” Dessie repeated.

  Silence again.

  “What’s happening today?” Dessie asked, to break the silence more than anything else.

  “The Rudolphs have announced that they’re checking out of the Grand at lunchtime. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.”

  Dessie bit her lip. “Do you really think they’re innocent?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing to link them to the murders,” Gabriella said. “No forensic evidence, no witnesses, no confessions, no murder weapons…”

  “So who did it? Sell me on a new explanation,” Dessie said. “Who are the real Postcard Killers, then?”

  Before Gabriella could answer, the doorbell rang.

  What the—?

  Who could it be now? A reporter who still hadn’t given up?

  She had no peephole and no safety chain.

  “Hang on a moment while I get the door,” Dessie said, going out to the hall and unlocking the door.

  She opened it cautiously, then suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

  “I’ll call you later,” she said into the phone and hung up on Gabriella.

  Chapter 116

  JACOB WAS ALMOST AS crumpled-looking and unshaven as he had been the first time he stood outside Dessie’s door.

  She took a great leap into his arms, holding him tight, tight, tight, as though she never meant to let go, kissing him hard and letting her hands roam inside his checkered flannel shirt.

  “Dessie,” Jacob whispered into her hair. “We’re standing in the stairwell and you’re not wearing any clothes.”

  Her towel had fallen to the floor. She kicked it into the apartment and pulled him into the front hallway. The dirty duffel bag ended up under the telephone table, his jeans by the door, his shirt and T-shirt by the radiator.

  They made it as far as the door to the living room before they collapsed to the floor. She fell into his bright blue eyes and felt him pushing inside her. The world spun and she closed her eyes, straining her head back against the wooden floor when she came.

  “Jeezuz,” Jacob said. “I guess that means you’re happy to see me!”

  “Just you wait,” she said, nipping his earlobe with her teeth.

  They stumbled into the bedroom. Dessie pushed him onto the bed and began to explore every inch of his body. She used her fingers, hair, and tongue, tasting and licking and caressing.

  “Oh, god!” he panted. “What are you doing to me?”

  “I’m just happy to see you,” Dessie said. “What are you doing to me?”

  Then she sat astride him.

  She moved gently above him, deep and intense, forcing him to calm down, slow down. It gave her a chance to catch up, and when she felt the rush coming, she let go completely. He seemed to lose several seconds when he came, but she forced him to continue for another minute or so until she came as well.

  Then she fell into his arms and passed out.

  Chapter 117

  DESSIE OPENED HER EYES and looked deep into his bright blue ones. They crackled with a warmth that left her breathless. And more confused than ever.

  “You’re here,” she whispered. “It wasn’t a dream. I’m so glad. I’m happy.”

  He laughed. His teeth were white, a bit crooked. His hair was sweaty, sticking out in every direction. He sank back down on the bed and pulled her to him.

  “Why did you come back?” she asked.

  He kissed her and then grew suddenly serious.

  “Several reasons,” he said. “You were the most important one.”

  She hit him playfully on the shoulder with her fist.

  “Liar,” she said.

  “How did you make out in Denmark and Norway?” he asked.

  She told him about the grotesque murders in the hotel in Copenhagen, about the mutilation of the bodies and the fact that the woman had probably been raped. They had found bruises and scratches on the inside of her thighs, and the semen in her vagina wasn’t her husband’s. It didn’t seem to her like the Rudolphs’ work.

  She went on to tell him about the motor home death scene at the campsite outside Oslo, how neither the bodies nor the letters had been discovered because the reporter had been on vacation, and how the bodies had been arranged to look like Munch’s The Scream.

  “How did you get on in America?” she asked.

  He gave her a summary of his investigations, telling her that the Rudolphs came from an extremely privileged background. That Sylvia had found their parents murdered when she was thirteen years old. That their guardian, Jonathan Blython, had embezzled their inheritance and been found dead with his throat cut. That Mac’s girlfriend Sandra Schulman—whom Sylvia was jealous of—had disappeared after a visit to the Rudolphs’ home. That the twins had set up an experimental art group, the Society of Limitless Art, and been expelled from UCLA because of a public act of incest.

  “A public act of incest?” Dessie said.

  “They called the work Taboo. The two of them made love in an exhibition hall.”

  “They really are mad,” Dessie said, pulling him to her once more.

  Chapter 118

  AFTERWARD, THEY SAT IN bed and ate an improvised lunch. Jacob was finishing one of her microwaved vegetarian lasagnas.

  Dessie had taken her laptop back to bed and was reading Aftonposten’s report of the deal that the lawyer, Andrea Friederichs, had negotiated for the rights to Sylvia and Malcolm’s story.

  “An advance of three and a half million dollars,” she read, “plus royalties and even more money for the subsidiary sale of the book rights. And get this—the lawyer has decided not to charge for her services. She only represented them because it was the right thing to do, she says.”

  “Are they still at the Grand?”

  She clicked further on the site and looked at her watch.

  “According to Alexander Andersson’s blog, they checked out half an hour ago. They left through the back door to avoid the media scrum outside the main entrance.”

  Jacob threw off the covers, leapt out of bed, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Dessie looked after him in surprise.

  “There’s nothing that links them to the murders,” she called into the kitchen. “Jacob? They’re free to come and go as they like.”

  She heard the kettle boil.

  The next minute he was standing in the doorway with a mug of coffee in each hand. His face was as dark as a thundercloud.

  “It was them,” he said. “I know it was. We can’t let them go free.”

  “But there’s still no evidence,” Dessie said glumly. “We can’t prove a damn thing.”

  He handed her a mug.

  “Their gear must be somewhere. The eyedrops, the outfit he was wearing when he emptied those accounts, the things they’ve stolen and not managed to get rid of. And the murder weapon…”

  “Exactly,” Dessie said. “That could be in any rubbish bin, and do you know why? Because I told them in that bloody letter that they were about to get caught. I gave them time to clean up.”

  Jacob stopped beside the bed and looked at her.

  “There was nothing wrong with that letter. You were doing the right thing when you wrote it. You were very brave.”

  “Was I?” Dessie said. “What did it actuall
y achieve? Apart from warning the Rudolphs and making a fool of me in front of every proper journalist in Sweden.”

  He walked angrily across the bedroom floor, turned, and came back.

  “They didn’t throw their stuff away,” he said, “not all of it, anyway. Most serial killers keep trophies. They would have chosen a hiding place as soon as they got to Stockholm. It’s entirely possible that it’s all still there. I think that it’s even likely.”

  He stopped midstride.

  “The little key!” he said.

  Dessie blinked.

  “What?”

  He reached across Dessie and her computer to grab her cell phone from the bedside table.

  “What’s going on?”

  “At the bottom of page three of the official report, there’s something about a key. My FBI friend noticed it. I can’t help hoping it belongs to some left-luggage locker in Stockholm.”

  Chapter 119

  GABRIELLA SIGHED HEAVILY INTO the phone.

  “Of course we looked at the key,” she said. “There was nothing to indicate that it actually belonged to the Rudolphs.”

  Jacob realized he was grinding his teeth again. This could be the second big error by the police in Stockholm. “What do you base that on?”

  “It was in the toilet cistern in the hotel room. It could have been there for weeks. Who knows for how long?”

  Jacob had to stop himself from slamming the phone against the bedroom wall. You didn’t have to be an expert to know that water cisterns were a favorite hiding place for lots of people, and especially criminals in a new city. Christ!

  “The key belongs to them!” he said. “It fits a locker, a postal box, or some other form of lockable space. And I hope that’s where you’ll find all the evidence. Please get on it immediately.”

  “The Rudolphs have been ruled out of the investigation,” Gabriella said curtly, then hung up.

  Dessie took her cell phone away from him before he smashed it against the head of the bed.

  Jacob collapsed onto the bed, all his energy gone, his patience, too. He’d flown across the Atlantic twice within a week, and by now his body clock had practically lost track of what century it was.

  “What was the name of that art group at UCLA?” Dessie asked, pulling the laptop over.

  He had shut his eyes and was massaging his own neck. “The Society of Limitless Art,” he muttered.

  What could he do to persuade the police to open the investigation again? Or even to act like real cops?

  He couldn’t just let the Rudolphs disappear.

  “Here’s something,” Dessie said. “Look at this! You don’t even have to move. Just open your eyes.”

  She turned the laptop to face him.

  Welcome to the Society of Limitless Art

  You are visitor no. 4824

  “The address is www.sola.nu,” she said. “That’s a domain registered on Niue, an island in the South Pacific. They let anyone register any sort of address in just a couple of minutes.”

  Jacob took a look at the screen.

  “They set this up when they were at UCLA,” he said.

  Dessie tried clicking on the first tab, Introduction.

  “And here we have the background of conceptual art,” she said. “Marcel Duchamp tried to exhibit a urinal in New York in nineteen seventeen. He was refused.”

  “I wonder why,” Jacob said.

  “Look here,” Dessie said.

  Jacob sighed and sat up.

  The gallery included a long sequence of strange photographs that he would hardly have associated with art: motorways, trash, an unhappy cow, and a few shaky home movies of—what a surprise!—motorways, trash, and presumably the same unhappy cow. It was hard to tell for certain.

  “This is ridiculous,” Jacob said. “I feel like that cow, though. Does that make me a work of art?”

  “Their ridiculous art project got them thrown out of school,” Dessie said. “This sort of thing matters to them.”

  Jacob stood up now, looking for his jeans.

  He found them out in the hall. He stopped there, trousers in one hand, and stared back into Dessie’s living room.

  So this was where it all ended, in an apartment halfway to the North Pole. He’d done his best, but it wasn’t enough. Kimmy’s killers were going to walk free. Could he live with that? Who cared? What was the alternative?

  “Hey!” Dessie called. “Look here!”

  “What?”

  He went back toward the bed.

  “Sections of the site are locked. It’s a puzzle to be solved. We need a password.”

  Chapter 120

  A BOX HAD APPEARED against a gray background, with the message Log in!

  Dessie typed “sola” for Society of Limitless Art in the box and pressed Enter. The screen flickered.

  Sorry—wrong password.

  “I didn’t think it would be that easy,” she said.

  Suddenly an idea came into Jacob’s head. There was a key with no lock in the report. Here was a lock but no key.

  “We could be onto something here,” he said. “Try ‘Rudolph.’ Maybe it is that easy.”

  Sorry—wrong password.

  Jacob stared at Dessie. He remembered the last conversation he’d had with Lyndon Crebbs: What if there are other killers? What if the Rudolphs have inspired copycats?

  He heard his own reply echo in his head: If there are more killers, they have to be working together.

  “If the Rudolphs have got an accomplice,” Jacob said slowly, “then they need some way of contacting him, them, whoever it is. Could they be using this site to communicate with one another?”

  Dessie tried a hundred other possibilities. Again and again:

  Sorry—wrong password.

  “We’re lucky the site is still letting us try new ones. Most sites will block you after three tries,” Dessie said.

  “Where are the postcards?” Jacob asked.

  Dessie reached for her knapsack on the floor beside the bed. She tipped out the copies, letting them fan across the bed.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Let’s try all the words on the cards,” Jacob said. “What’s this one here?”

  He picked up a photograph he hadn’t seen before. It was of two dead or seriously wounded people in a room that showed clear evidence of a struggle.

  “That’s the picture from Salzburg,” she said. “I spoke to the reporter. She mailed it to me.”

  Dessie tried word after word: “Rome,” “Paris,” “Madrid,” “Athens.”

  Sorry—wrong password.

  “What are these numbers?” Jacob asked, pointing at the back of the Salzburg envelope.

  “The phone number of a pizzeria in Vienna. The reporter already checked it. Nothing to do with the case,” Dessie said.

  Next she went through all the sites on the postcards: “Tivoli,” “Coliseum,” Las Ventas.”

  Jacob picked out the pictures from Copenhagen and Oslo.

  Oslo was done by the Rudolphs.

  Copenhagen was the copycat.

  “What if they’ve got a password that isn’t a word but something else?” he said.

  Dessie looked at him intently.

  “When would you need that information?” Jacob asked. “When are you most in need of instructions? The moment you’re about to carry out your task, wouldn’t you say?”

  Dessie stared at him. “I don’t know, I’ve never been a murderer. I’ve been tempted a couple of times.”

  “Where would you write the password you need to get your instructions for the kills? On the nearest thing available maybe?”

  He picked up the copy of the back of the envelope from Salzburg.

  “The Rudolphs had an alibi for the murders in Austria,” he said. “So that must have been carried out by their accomplice. Try these numbers.”

  Dessie picked up the laptop again and carefully typed in the nine numbers.

  She pressed Enter.

&nb
sp; The screen flickered.

  A new image appeared.

  “Holy fucking Christ,” Dessie said.

  Chapter 121

  THE INVESTIGATING TEAM HAD gathered in Mats Duvall’s office. Their faces were pale and drawn.

  “Do we have any idea where the hell the Rudolphs have gone?” Jacob asked, sitting down opposite Sara Höglund.

  The head of the unit shook her head. She looked to be in utter despair. As she ought to be.

  “They were let out the back door of the Grand Hôtel this morning. No one’s seen them since then.”

  “And the key? The key that no one on the team paid much attention to?”

  “We know it belongs to a left-luggage locker.”

  Jacob slammed his fist on the table so hard that the coffee cups jumped.

  “We’ve put out a national alert and informed Interpol,” Mats Duvall added quickly. “Arlanda, Skavsta, Landvetter, Västerås, Sturup, and every other airport with international connections is on increased alert. The Öresund Bridge to Denmark is blocked and every vehicle is being searched. The ports have been informed. The border posts are on the alert. Surveillance of all highways and European routes has been intensified. They won’t get out of Sweden.”

  Jacob stood up.

  “For fuck’s sake, they’ve just gotten hold of three and a half million dollars! They can buy their own plane!”

  “The whole amount is in an account in the Cayman Islands,” Gabriella said, reading from a document in front of her. “The transfer has been confirmed by the bank they used here in Stockholm.”

  Jacob was close to upending the table and all the useless paperwork on it.

  “So they haven’t got much cash at the moment,” Dessie said, just to be clear.

  Jacob leaned back in his chair, pressing the palms of his hands to his forehead.

  Dessie had already given him the hopeless details. The Rudolphs were free and had vanished, in a country with fewer inhabitants than New York and an area almost as big as Texas. There were thousands of miles of unguarded borders with both Norway and Finland, and just as much coastline. A couple of hours in a fast boat would get them to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Denmark, or Germany.