The Postcard Killers Read online

  “She sounds like an idiot to me.”

  “We were both young, both idiots.”

  Silence fell inside the car.

  A green VW Passat drove past.

  Jacob looked at his watch. 8:54.

  A blue Saab sped past them. They could hear the sound of rock and roll coming from the open windows. Two young males. Punk-style haircuts.

  Jacob looked at his watch. 8:55. He was conscious that he was doing it obsessively, but he couldn’t help it.

  Dessie’s phone rang. She listened in silence, said not a word, then turned to Jacob.

  “They’ve passed through Salmis and Vuono,” she said. “Two villages just outside this town. Still in the red Volvo. They’re almost here.”

  “Robert’s men, are they reliable?”

  Dessie nodded. “Very.”

  “I don’t want them involved at the border. I’ll take it from here.”

  She passed on the message and hung up.

  Chapter 134

  NINE O’CLOCK CAME AND WENT.

  No red Volvo. No Rudolphs.

  The road beyond the rotary was full of cars now, mostly trailers and trucks. Due to the hunt for the Postcard Killers, security at the border crossing had been stepped up and all vehicles were forced to go through the checkpoint, next to a small wooden building up on the left.

  Jacob looked at his watch again.

  Half past nine. Jesus. The time was crawling.

  Big tourist buses had started to arrive in the lot outside IKEA. They seemed to come from the whole of the Arctic region. Jacob saw license plates from Norway, Finland, and Russia. It was like IKEA was a county fair.

  Soon there was a line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot.

  “This is the Thursday before Midsummer’s Eve,” Dessie said. “It’s the high point of Sweden’s busiest shopping week. It’s even bigger than Christmas.”

  Jacob didn’t say anything.

  He realized he was grinding his teeth. He needed to stop that. Yes, as soon as they caught the Rudolphs.

  A line of shoppers was starting to form outside the entrance to the superstore. These country folks were clearly nuts.

  Jacob looked at the time.

  Three minutes before ten.

  He glanced up into the rearview mirror.

  Just a line of cars: blue, red, white, black, all full of crazy-ass Arctic shoppers.

  He pressed the palms of his hands to his forehead.

  The doors to the store opened.

  People flooded into the hangarlike building.

  Jacob felt like he was going to burst out of his skin.

  “What the hell is this?” he yelled suddenly. “Where have they gone?”

  Dessie didn’t answer.

  “They must have taken another road,” Jacob said. “They’re not coming through Haparanda. That criminal hooligan you call your cousin was wrong. Maybe he’s in league with them now. Maybe he’s fooled us into sitting here so they can get away. They could have bribed him.”

  “Jacob, calm down! You don’t know what you’re saying. Stop it.”

  Jacob turned the key, and the engine coughed into life.

  “What are you doing?” Dessie asked.

  “I can’t wait here any longer,” Jacob said. “I’m going completely fucking mad just sit—”

  “Hang on,” Dessie interrupted. “Just hang on. A red car—there’s a red car. I think it’s a Volvo.”

  Jacob looked in the rearview mirror again.

  It was a Volvo wagon, an old model, definitely red.

  There were two people inside.

  A young blond man and a dark-haired woman.

  The Rudolphs were here.

  Chapter 135

  THE VOLVO CREPT SLOWLY toward the big rotary with all the bushes and trees in the middle.

  Jacob pulled out into the traffic right behind them. His heart was thumping so hard that he could hardly hear anything going on around him.

  The pair in the Volvo stopped in the rotary. The line to the border crossing snaked forward ahead of them.

  “They’ve realized they can’t get through this way,” Dessie said. “Not in that car. So what do they do about it?”

  Jacob pulled handcuffs from the inside pocket of his jacket and stuffed them under his belt behind his back. Then he leaned forward and took the Glock out of its holster strapped to his ankle. Suddenly he was glad he hadn’t turned it over to the authorities as requested but had checked it in an airport locker while he traveled to and from Los Angeles. It looked like he’d need it now.

  He heard Dessie’s breath catch.

  “Jacob, what are you doing? You can’t use that gun here. You’ll go to jail.”

  Just then the red Volvo swerved out of the traffic line. The driver wrenched the car to the left and squeezed past a trailer and a small van with Cyrillic lettering scrawled along the side.

  Jacob found first gear and pushed his foot all the way to the floor. A moment later he was forced to brake sharply to avoid a truck that was halfway into the rotary.

  “Hell! We’re losing them!”

  “They’re going straight on,” Dessie cried, leaning her head out of the window. “Now they’re turning right! They’re in the IKEA parking lot!”

  Jacob drove too fast past the truck. He scraped the side of a Peugeot and forced his way into the lot as the driver of the Peugeot sat angrily on his horn behind them.

  The parking lot for IKEA was complete chaos. Cars and buses and trailers were all battling with huge shopping trolleys and children’s strollers and hundreds of people.

  Jacob stopped the car and looked around wildly.

  “Where the hell have they gone? We’ve lost them! They got away!”

  “I think they were heading for where the buses park,” Dessie said, pointing. “There. There! That’s Sylvia Rudolph, isn’t it?”

  The dark-haired woman opened the door and started to run. She was athletic, fast on her feet.

  “No!” Jacob cried, trying to drive after her. An entire family—grandma, mother, four kids, and a dog—blocked his way. Then the driver of the Peugeot suddenly appeared, banging furiously on the windshield. Jacob showed him the pistol, and the man backed away, hands up.

  “To hell with this!” Jacob said, throwing the door open and racing toward the buses.

  Chapter 136

  IT WAS THE RUDOLPHS, he was sure of that much. He recognized Malcolm’s relaxed movements and the woman’s thick head of dark hair.

  The killers were moving quickly through the parking lot, getting away. People who saw him running with his pistol drawn screamed and threw themselves out of his way. Someone yelled, “Madman!” at him. That was correct.

  Dessie was coming up behind him. She had her cell phone in one hand. She was keying in a number as she ran.

  The Rudolphs disappeared between two big buildings.

  Jacob raised the pistol as he approached the corner. He didn’t know what weapons the Rudolphs might have.

  No one was there.

  He rushed through the passageway and emerged from the far end.

  Four buses, with toilets and curtains, were parked there. Even if one of the vehicles was unlocked, they couldn’t hide for long, not here.

  With his Glock drawn he ran over to the first bus.

  No one.

  The second one.

  No one.

  The third…

  “Drop the gun!”

  The voice came from behind him, a woman’s voice, struggling to stay calm and collected.

  He spun around, aiming the Glock, ready to kill.

  Chapter 137

  SYLVIA RUDOLPH WAS HOLDING Dessie in front of her as a shield. She had a knife to her throat. It was a carving knife, maybe a butcher’s knife.

  Jacob’s head was spinning. For a moment he imagined it was Kimmy standing there with the knife to her throat. He couldn’t let her die.

  “Drop the gun,” Sylvia Rudolph said. “Put it on the ground—or
she dies. I have no problem with that.”

  Dessie’s face was deathly pale. Her cell phone was still in her hand.

  Malcolm Rudolph was standing some ten feet away, looking bewildered and lost.

  Jacob stood still, his weapon raised.

  All at once the situation was clear to him. Another part of the mystery had just been solved.

  It wasn’t the brother who was the killer.

  It was the sister, Sylvia. La señorita. The girl who found her parents dead in their beds, or who had killed them with her own hands. Why, though? For the sake of art?

  “Do as I say,” Sylvia said, “or I’ll cut her throat! She’ll die right here.”

  Her voice was becoming less controlled, but Jacob believed every word she said.

  He tightened his hold on the grip of the pistol. Instinctively he adopted the posture he had practiced so many times back home in New York.

  He closed an eye, focusing his aim, slowing his breathing as best he could.

  He studied Sylvia’s ice-cold expression next to Dessie’s terrified face. There she was, the woman who had killed his Kimmy, holding a knife to Dessie’s throat. Another knife but the same killer.

  Suddenly he felt his pulse relax.

  “Put the gun down!” Sylvia roared. “I’ll cut her throat! Put it down! You want her to die?”

  So much for all her talk of art and conceptual creation.

  When it came down to it, she just wanted to save herself. And maybe her crazy brother, her lover.

  He squeezed the trigger: a cautious click, then the explosion and recoil.

  Dessie dropped her cell and screamed. She screamed and screamed. Oh god, no, he’d missed!

  Dessie must have moved at the last second.

  What had he done?

  Chapter 138

  DESSIE WAS COVERED IN blood, and she was still screaming. But then Jacob realized it wasn’t her blood after all.

  It was Sylvia’s. It was pieces of Sylvia’s brain that were splattered across Dessie’s face and Windbreaker. It was Sylvia who sank to the ground, who dropped the knife, as Malcolm came running over to her.

  Dessie staggered away and leaned against one of the buses. Jacob rushed at Malcolm with his pistol raised.

  “Get on your knees, hands above your head!” he shouted at the top of his voice.

  He was screaming to make himself heard above the ringing in his own ears, but Malcolm seemed not to hear him. The man sank down beside his sister’s body and took her in his arms. With a wild howl, he rocked Sylvia back and forth, back and forth, completely deaf to the uproar around them.

  Jacob went up to him, weapon aimed at his chest.

  He fished out the handcuffs from under the belt of his trousers with one hand as he tried to make contact with the dazed man.

  “Malcolm Rudolph—the police are on their way. Put the body down. Get on your knees. Hands behind your head!”

  The howling subsided. Malcolm’s shoulders slumped. He laid his sister’s body gently on the asphalt.

  Jacob saw that he had hit her between the eyes, just above them in the forehead. The entry wound gaped red, and the woman’s eyes stared blindly at the sky. The back of her head had been blown away.

  “You killed her,” Malcolm said. His arms hung by his sides. His back was bent like an old man’s. “You killed my Sylvia.”

  “You and your sister killed my daughter,” Jacob said.

  He opened the handcuffs and leaned down to secure Malcolm Rudolph’s arms behind his back.

  From this angle, Sylvia’s dead eyes seemed to be watching him.

  He didn’t see the knife coming.

  In a fast move, the brother leapt up and stabbed the knife toward Jacob’s chest. Instinctively, Jacob shifted a few inches to the right.

  The blade cut through the outside and lining of his suede jacket, biting into skin and sinew and muscle. Then it tore veins and arteries and lung tissue.

  Jacob heard someone scream, a woman screaming.

  He felt warm blood pulsing out of his body and saw the world spin and turn sideways, as if he could fall right off it. A shot rang out, the echo ringing through his head.

  The killer in front of him sank to the ground with his hands over his stomach.

  Then someone was holding him, laying him on the ground, tearing his shirt away.

  It was Dessie, his Dessie. No, it was Kimmy, his Kimmy. Of course it was!

  “Kimmy,” Jacob whispered. “I knew you’d come back.”

  Epilogue

  Chapter 139

  Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, USA

  THE WIND CARRIED WITH it the smell of the sea and also exhaust fumes from Leif Ericson Drive. It made the leaves above his head rustle, the electrical wires sing.

  Jacob was sitting on the porch outside his small house, watching the boys from the neighborhood play baseball on the patch of grass on the other side of the street.

  The heat and extreme humidity had finally broken, leaving a hint of autumn behind it.

  The sun was no longer high in the sky, and the leafy trees threw deep shadows along the street.

  His lung had healed. The pain in his arm was almost gone. The wound had started to itch instead. Sometimes he thought that was worse.

  He looked down toward Shore Road.

  Still no taxi.

  He pulled at the shoulder sling in irritation.

  Next week he could take it off.

  They said he must have had a guardian angel.

  The little town on the Arctic Circle where his lung had been punctured and his arm almost sliced off had had no hospital, but there had been a local health center with an emergency room and a Hungarian doctor who specialized in microsurgery. The Hungarian had stitched his muscles and blood vessels together while they emptied the center’s supply of blood plasma into his body, and somehow he had survived.

  Malcolm Rudolph hadn’t been so lucky.

  Jacob’s wild shot had hit his liver. The killer bled to death in the helicopter ambulance. Good riddance to him, and his sister, too. Horrifying bastards.

  When Jacob woke up and remembered what had happened, he started to prepare himself to face the Swedish judicial system. He assumed that he would get away with the actual shots. After all, Gabriella had heard the whole sequence of events over Dessie’s phone. It was obvious that he had fired only in self-defense.

  On the other hand, he would have to explain his weapon, the one he’d purchased in Italy.

  The Europeans were very serious about the illegal possession of firearms.

  When Mats Duvall had visited him in the hospital, Jacob had been expecting to face charges.

  But the police superintendent had merely informed him that a preliminary investigation could not be carried out. All suspicions had been dropped through lack of evidence. That was what happened in cases like this, he had explained curtly.

  The Swedes weren’t quite as rigid as he had thought.

  But his gun was confiscated when he left the country.

  Jacob watched as the neighbor’s son got a clean hit on the other side of the street. The ball shot off like a missile toward Johnson’s Garage (which, naturally, was no longer Johnson’s, but belonged to a Polish family, whatever their name was). Jacob held his breath until the ball hit the brick wall, just inches from a window.

  Once upon a time he had played baseball on that same patch of grass. He had broken the windows of Johnson’s Garage on a couple of occasions. He still lived in the house where he’d grown up, where his father had grown up, where Kimmy had grown up.

  Maybe he could take off the wretched rag around his neck. What was the worst that could happen? His arm was hardly going to fall off, was it?

  A taxi came slowly along the street and stopped at the sidewalk below the porch.

  Jacob raised his good arm and waved. He even managed to smile.

  Chapter 140

  JACOB DIDN’T GET UP as Lyndon Crebbs got out of the backseat with his scruffy navy bag in tow.<
br />
  “So, here you sit, you one-armed bandit!” the FBI agent said.

  Jacob shifted to make room on the step for his old mentor. “How did the operation go?” he asked.

  Lyndon sighed as he sank beside him on the steps.

  “Well, I’ll never use my dick for anything but pissing from now on, but you have to be grateful. Small mercies.”

  They sat there next to each other. Good friends, the best kind. Through thin and thinner.

  The ball-playing boys on the other side of the street started arguing about something, and a halfhearted fight broke out before they drifted off home, one by one.

  “What happened up in Montecito?” Jacob asked.

  “They found the remains of a woman behind the Mansion,” Crebbs said. “She wasn’t buried very deep. Hadn’t been there long. Four or five years, according to the coroner.”

  “Any ID?”

  “Not yet, but it’s probably the missing girl, Sandra Schulman. Her throat was cut. More of Sylvia’s artwork, I’m sure.”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “What about the murder of the guardian?” Jacob asked. “And the parents?”

  Lyndon Crebbs shook his head.

  “Still open cases. My guess is that they’ll stay that way…. Do you want to know what I found out about Lucy?”

  Jacob looked over toward Johnson’s garage. It was Lucy Johnson’s childhood home.

  “Not right now.”

  Lyndon Crebbs glanced at Jacob.

  “How did it go with the girl from Stockholm? The one named after the princess?”

  “She’s going to finish her doctorate,” Jacob said. “As far as I can tell, it’s going pretty well.”

  “Isn’t that what I’ve always said? The smart ones are always best. Where did she end up, anyway?”

  Jacob felt his face crack into a grin.

  “There she is, down there,” he said, pointing with his healthy arm toward Narrows Avenue.

  The only thing Dessie had bought since she moved in was a seven-speed women’s bicycle with a shopping basket on the front. And now she was pedaling along Seventy-seventh Street with the basket full of leeks and other rabbit food.