The Postcard Killers Read online

  Silence fell around the table.

  Gabriella Oscarsson was concentrating on a bundle of papers, Mats Duvall was fiddling with his BlackBerry. Evert Ridderwall, the hotshot prosecutor, was staring blankly out the window.

  Jacob clenched his fists at the sight of the fat little man.

  He was the one who had let the bastards out in the first place.

  “What does the analysis of the website tell us?” Dessie eventually asked.

  Sara Höglund leaned forward.

  “Your first assumption turned out to be correct,” she said. “The Rudolphs have set themselves up as masters of their own universe. Their project aims to integrate life, death, and art, to find the ultimate form of expression. The Society of Limitless Art is their own university. As far as we can make out, they’ve got about thirty-five followers around the world. There could be more. Other art students who share their worldview and admire their ambitions.”

  Dessie looked down at her hands. “Three other couples have taken the ‘exam’ that the Rudolphs provide. Hard to believe, isn’t it? So many crazies out there.”

  The pages of the website contained detailed instructions

  on how to pass the exam, or “graduate,” as the Rudolphs called it, in the special project of the Society of Limitless Art. By causing death in a particularly artistic way, humankind could become a creating divinity, and thus immortal.

  The procedure of “the Work” was described in detail, from the dialogue to be spoken when the victims were seduced, to how the champagne, eyedrops, and knife were to be used. All the postcards and Polaroid pictures had been uploaded as JPEG files onto the site. Links and PDFs of the media coverage in each of the countries were also cataloged. It seemed that the press clippings were an important part of the artwork.

  “But none of the so-called graduates have actually passed the exam,” Jacob said, aware of how hoarse his voice sounded. “The amateurs always messed up the murders somehow. Sometimes there was no symbolism in their choice of postcard. Or they didn’t manage to imitate famous works of art with their Polaroids.”

  No one responded; they just listened to the American now.

  “It isn’t easy to kill, no matter how motivated or focused you are,” Jacob said in a low voice. “The others have all panicked and lost their grip on the situation.”

  “Athens, Salzburg, and Copenhagen were probably carried out by different members of the group,” Sara Höglund confirmed. “The police in each country are tracing the IP addresses of computers that accessed the site. We’ll have located them by this evening.”

  Mats Duvall stood up, holding his electronic gadget. “The perpetrator in Copenhagen has just been identified,” he said. “He’s a repeat sex offender. His DNA was on file.”

  “He’s a member,” Dessie said softly. “His user ID is Batman.”

  “How do you know that?” Gabriella asked.

  “He graduated on Sunday,” she said. “They had a ceremony on line.”

  Chapter 122

  THE MEETING BROKE UP and the members of the investigating team went back to their respective rooms. Everyone was excited about the new leads but also shocked about the Rudolphs being on the loose.

  Jacob and Dessie ended up sitting beside the coffee machine in the unofficial staff room on the fourth floor. On the table in front of them was a map of northern Europe.

  “They never go back to where a murder was committed,” Jacob said. “They keep moving on to new places, new countries.”

  Dessie ran her hand over the map.

  “So we can probably discount Denmark, Norway, and Germany,” she said.

  “They know things are heating up,” Jacob said. “They’ll want to lie low for a while now. So they’ll avoid any transport that involves passenger lists. They won’t pay with credit cards or anything that means they have to provide ID. So where the hell are they going, and how?”

  Dessie put both hands over the Stockholm district on the map.

  “They’re pretty much broke,” she said, “and they’re on the run.”

  “So?” Jacob said.

  “They’ll steal a car,” Dessie said. “If you’re right, they’re heading for Finland.”

  Jacob looked at the map, his finger landing on the Baltic Sea.

  “Why not a boat? It’s only a couple of inches to the Baltic states.”

  “In this country we guard our leisure craft like they were gold reserves. It’s much easier to steal a car. Then they’ll have to get up to Haparanda.”

  She indicated a point on the map where the two countries met. “That’s over a thousand kilometers from here.”

  “So they’re behaving like petty criminals again,” Jacob said.

  “There are no motorways north of Uppsala. The E-four isn’t bad, but there are speed cameras the whole way. They’ll have to drive up inland, past Ockelbo, Bollnäs, Ljusdal, Ånge…”

  Jacob followed her finger as it moved along the narrow, winding roads leading up the oblong country.

  “Your home territory,” he said. “When will they get to the border? How long?”

  Dessie bit her lip.

  “They’ll have to stick to the speed limit—they can’t risk getting stopped for speeding. And there’s a lot of wildlife out on those roads. Elk, deer, maybe reindeer farther north…”

  “Are there self-serve gas pumps where they can pay cash to refuel without being seen?”

  “They’re everywhere,” Dessie said.

  Jacob ran his hands through his hair.

  “We’ve got to check all cars stolen in Stockholm this morning, and any that are stolen in the north of Sweden over the next few hours.”

  He put his index finger on the map and screwed his eyes shut. Postcard Killers, he thought, where the hell are you?

  Chapter 123

  THE STOLEN MERCEDES WAS speeding over a bridge with glittering bright blue water on both sides.

  Small, wooded islands strewn with light gray rocks rose on the left and right.

  “Do I turn off up here?” Mac asked, leaning in toward the windshield. “What do you think?”

  Sylvia looked down at the road atlas and started to feel sick. She always got carsick when she tried to read on a car trip.

  “Left onto the two-seven-two,” she said grouchily. “Somewhere on the other side of this lake.”

  She fixed her eyes on the horizon, the point where the road disappeared in the distance, just as her mother had taught her.

  Mac slowed down.

  “There’s no need to be so miserable about it,” he said. “This was your idea, after all. I’m doing the best I can.”

  She swallowed and glanced at him, leaning close and giving him a quick kiss on the ear.

  “Sorry, darling,” she cooed. “You’re driving brilliantly.”

  She ran her hand lazily along the dashboard. There was no longer any reason to hide their fingerprints or DNA. On the contrary, it was time to let the world know their message.

  Soon they would be able to sit back and enjoy what they had achieved.

  Mac braked, signaled, and turned off to the left. They drove past fields with sheep and cattle, past thick groves of trees.

  “It’s kind of beautiful in its own way, don’t you think?” Sylvia said, putting the atlas away. She wasn’t planning to look at it again. They were almost there now.

  Mac didn’t answer.

  The landscape opened up around them as they drove through a small town. To the left were a few houses, to the right a farm. They passed a row of what was once laborers’ housing, a school, and an apartment block. Then they were out the other side. So much for civilization on this road trip.

  They drove on in silence.

  Mac was looking intently through the windshield.

  “What do you think about that one?” he said, pointing to a farm on the edge of the forest.

  Sylvia leaned forward to check the place out. “Could be. Maybe.”

  Mac slowed down, then stopped t
he car. “Yes or no?”

  The farmyard seemed quiet and deserted. All the windows and doors were shut. They could see an old Volvo behind a barn, a sedan that must have been the height of style in the early 1980s.

  “This’ll do,” Sylvia said, taking a quick look behind her.

  No cars in sight.

  “Quickly, now,” she said. “We need to be really careful from here on. No mistakes.”

  Chapter 124

  MAC JUMPED OUT OF the car. Sylvia took her seat belt off and slid over to the driver’s seat.

  With a certain amount of effort she put the car in gear. She wasn’t used to driving cars with gears and a clutch. Then she sped off to the far side of the next bend.

  There she stopped.

  She wound down the window and listened over the sound of the engine. The trees sighed; some sort of animal was bleating in the forest. The sound of a car rose and fell in the distance, but nothing came past.

  She would have to wait here for a while.

  Her eyes settled on some sort of construction in the trees. Planks, a ladder. A tree house, or maybe a hunting post.

  Suddenly she was filled with a feeling of intense hatred and disgust.

  Imagine, there were people who lived the whole of their pointless lives in godforsaken places like this, working and drinking and fucking and building hunting posts without any awareness that there was anything else, that a higher level of human consciousness even existed. People out here abandoned their lives to meaningless banality, never bothering about brilliance, about aesthetics.

  She tore her eyes from the hunting post and concentrated on the rearview mirror.

  Mac was driving the red Volvo now. He didn’t slow down as he passed her, just carried on at the same carefully precise speed: not too slow, but not too fast either.

  She put the car in gear and followed at a safe distance. Careful. No mistakes.

  Now they had to find a good spot to dump the car from Stockholm, somewhere it would be found relatively quickly, but not immediately.

  She licked her thumb and pressed it against the wheel. A lovely print.

  Suck on that, dear police!

  It made her giddy to think of what they’d already achieved, and that was only the start.

  The next part could be even more impressive, their next act. She and Mac were maturing as artists.

  Chapter 125

  THE WHOLE CASE WAS breaking open now—and quickly.

  The killers from Athens lived in Thessaloniki. They weren’t a couple, just two art student friends at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the largest university in Greece. They were arrested on the campus, given away by the electronic trail left on their computers.

  They were both deeply religious, and both claimed that they were in direct contact with “the creating God, the unknowable ruler of all the universe.” They admitted to what had happened in Athens, but denied it was murder. Their work was part of a global conceptual artwork intended to reveal humankind’s divinity.

  The murders in Salzburg were traced to a young British couple from London. They were enrolled at a fashionable art college in the middle of London. They hadn’t attended any classes for the past four months.

  Their fingerprints and DNA were found at the scene of the crime, and the murder weapon was discovered under a loose floorboard in the couple’s apartment.

  They didn’t comment on the accusations. They didn’t respond to any of the authorities’ questions, and they even refused to talk to their own lawyer. On their blogs they had written that every individual was responsible for creating their own morals and their own laws, and that everything else was an affront to the rights of the individual.

  The killers in Copenhagen were arrested that evening, both the repeat offender whose details had been in the DNA register and his accomplice, a younger woman who was deeply remorseful once she was captured. The woman confessed at once, in floods of tears, and said that she had changed her mind and tried to stop the killings. Her change of heart had occurred when her colleague had raped the young American woman, which hadn’t been part of the “artwork” design.

  Dessie looked at Jacob and saw how his eyes registered everything that was reported about the murderers, how his jaw clenched every time new information was received.

  The other police officers exhibited the sort of relief that comes after an arrest and a confession, but not Jacob. The others’ shoulders relaxed, became less tense, and the way they walked seemed somehow freer, but Jacob’s face remained carved from stone.

  She knew why.

  Kimmy’s killers were still out there somewhere, probably on their way to Finland.

  Chapter 126

  DURING THE DAY, THREE cars had been stolen in the Stockholm region.

  An almost-new Toyota from the suburb of Vikingshill. A Range Rover out in Hässelby garden suburb, at the end of the underground network. An old Mercedes from a parking garage beneath the Gallerian shopping center in the middle of the city.

  “The Merc makes sense, right?” Jacob said. “They wouldn’t take the underground all the way out to the suburbs just to get a car.”

  He picked up the map again.

  “So now they’re driving north. That’s how Dessie and I figure it,” he said. “They might even have changed cars by now. I would have. They’re traveling on minor roads and heading for Haparanda. They’re sticking close to the speed limit. So they should get there early tomorrow morning, at the latest.”

  Mats Duvall looked skeptical. “That’s just speculation,” he said. “There’s nothing to prove that they’d choose that particular route, or even that mode of transport. We don’t know anything for certain.”

  Dessie watched Jacob stand up. He was making an effort not to attack anything, or anyone.

  “You’ve got to reinforce the border crossings in the north,” he said. “What’s the name of that river right on the border? The Torne River?”

  “We can’t allocate manpower simply on the strength of guesswork,” Mats Duvall said, closing up his electronic gadget, a sign that the conversation was over.

  At that, Jacob stormed out of the room, closely followed by Dessie.

  “Jacob…,” she began, taking hold of his arm. “Stop. Look at me.”

  He spun around, standing right next to her.

  “The Swedish police are never going to catch them,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t let them get away again. I can’t do that!”

  Dessie looked into his eyes.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

  “When’s the next flight to Haparanda?” Jacob asked.

  She took out her cell and called the twenty-four-hour travel desk at Aftonposten.

  The closest airport was in Luleå, and the last flight that evening was an SAS plane, leaving Arlanda at 9:10.

  She looked at her watch.

  It was nine o’clock exactly.

  The airport was forty-five kilometers away.

  The first plane the next morning was a Norwegian Air Shuttle, due to leave at 6:55.

  “We can be in Luleå at 8:20,” Dessie said. “Then we have to rent a car and drive up to the border. It’s another hundred and thirty kilometers away.”

  Jacob stared at her.

  “Do you know any police up there? Or some customs officer who can keep an eye on things until we get there?”

  “No,” she said, “but I can call Robert. He lives in Kalix. It’s a forty-five-minute drive from the border.”

  “Robert?”

  She smiled, a smile that was almost a grimace.

  “My criminal cousin. The big one who protected me when I was a kid. And even now.”

  Jacob ran his fingers through his hair and paced quickly around the coffee machine.

  “How long would it take to drive up there?” he asked. “If we leave now.”

  She looked at her watch again.

  “If we go for it, and the road isn’t full of trailers and lumber trucks, we’ll be th
ere by six.”

  He slapped the wall with his hand, nearly putting a hole in it.

  “That’s not good enough,” he said.

  “If Robert keeps an eye on things, they won’t get through,” she said. “A blue Mercedes, registration TKG two-nine-seven, wasn’t it?”

  He looked at her, fire in his eyes.

  “Have you got access to a car?”

  “No,” she said, “but I’ve got a bicycle.”

  She waved her American Express card.

  “We’ll rent one, you idiot.”

  Chapter 127

  Thursday, June 24

  Norrland, Sweden

  IT WAS PAST ONE o’clock in the morning when Dessie sailed past the town of Utansjö. She had driven almost five hundred kilometers and needed to get petrol, drink coffee, and go to the bathroom. Not in that order actually.

  She glanced at Jacob in the reclined seat next to her as he slept the comatose sleep of the jet-lagged. The diesel would last until they got to the twenty-four-hour truck stop in Docksta, but she had a much better idea.

  It would mean a slight detour, but it might be worth the trouble.

  She reached the turning to Lunde, hesitated just for a second, and then headed left along Route 90.

  The car’s rhythm changed and the very poor road surface made Jacob stir.

  “What the hell… ?” he said, confused, as he sat up straight. “Are we there?”

  He looked around, astonished, at the early dawn light. Mist was lying in thin veils on the water, black fir trees reached up to the heavens, several deer fled across the fields.

  “We’re exactly halfway to Haparanda,” Dessie said. “Those are reindeer, by the way.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “This whole midnight sun thing is pretty fucked up,” he said, shaking his watch. “And the reindeer, too. Where’s Santa?”

  Dessie slowed the car and pointed ahead.

  “See that?” she said. “Wästerlunds Bakery. I lost my virginity in the parking lot around the back.”