The Postcard Killers Read online

  Dessie heard herself gasp.

  Chapter 35

  TWO YOUNG PEOPLE LAY DEAD as if broken on the floor of a hotel room.

  Their throats had been cut with the same brutality as in the murders on Dalarö. The wounds gaped dark red, the floor was drowning in blood.

  Dessie’s mouth went dry again and her pulse was racing in a terrifying way.

  “The blood’s still bright, fresh,” Dessie said. “They were alive just a few minutes before.”

  “Yes, that’s correct,” said Jacob, “they’d just died.”

  She forced her breathing to stay calm, regular. It wasn’t really helping.

  Jacob put another picture in front of her.

  “Karen and Billy Cowley,” he said. “Look at them, Dessie. What do you see?”

  The young Australian couple who had come to Europe to get over the death of their young son hadn’t just had their throats cut. They were sitting upright, side by side, their heads leaning back against what must have been the head of a bed. Their left eyeballs had been stabbed, blood and fluid running like red mascara from the sockets.

  “The couple in Amsterdam had their right ears cut off,” Jacob said, putting a third picture in front of her. “Their names were Lindsay and Jeffrey Holborn.”

  She looked at the pictures, forcing herself to see beyond the blood and violence.

  “They’re telling us something,” Jacob said angrily. “The killers are talking through these pictures. I’m sure of it. Look at this one, from Florence.”

  A double bed: a young woman on the left, a young man on the right. The picture was taken from above, which meant the photographer must have been standing on the bed, right between the dead bodies.

  “What do you see?” Jacob asked.

  The man and woman were lying in the same position, their bent legs parallel a little to the left, their right hands on their ribcages and their left ones over their genitals.

  “They couldn’t have been lying like this when they died,” she said.

  Jacob nodded.

  “I know,” he said, “but why?”

  Dessie picked up the picture from Paris. The two victims were sitting with their hands on their stomachs.

  “They look like they’ve just eaten too much,” Dessie said.

  They were posing. The corpses were posing. They were saying something, or at least representing something. What was it? If the cops figured that out, they just might catch them.

  She looked at Jacob.

  “Let me see the one I was sent,” she said.

  He gave her the picture from Dalarö. She took it and could still feel the smell of the hot living room.

  The woman, Claudia, was sitting upright against the back of the sofa. In her lap was a cushion that had probably been white to start with. She was leaning over the man, Rolf, who was lying on the cushion in her lap.

  The man was lying in a strange position. One knee was drawn up, and his fingers were spread out above his heart. In his right hand he was holding something that looked like a sign—or a spatula.

  “It’s definitely been arranged,” she said.

  “Does it mean anything to you?”

  Dessie looked at the picture for a long time.

  “I recognize something,” she said. “I just don’t know where from. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Concentrate,” Jacob said.

  She stared at the picture until the focus started to blur.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s not coming.”

  He looked at her with his very blue eyes for several long seconds.

  Then he gathered the pictures together and without another word left her sitting at the café table.

  Chapter 36

  JACOB GOT OFF THE BUS outside the central police headquarters on Kungsholmen in the middle of Stockholm.

  On his first night in Stockholm he had walked around the huge complex that housed the central Swedish police authority ten times or more, feeling like a nut, not caring in the least.

  Various different sections had been added over the course of the past century, giving the building an extremely schizophrenic appearance. The eastern section looked like some Disney castle, the southern bit was functional concrete, the northern section was a concrete monstrosity, and the western piece was inherited from the same Soviet era as the suburb he and Dessie had passed on the way to the crime scene on Dalarö.

  The unconventional-looking building hadn’t made the people inside particularly flexible—he knew that much already. The investigating team refused to take his calls. The receptionist kept putting him through to an automated message box that acted as the telephone tip-off line.

  Enough was enough, though.

  Now he was going to get inside, no matter what the cost to his reputation.

  He clenched his fists and steeled himself for the upcoming confrontation.

  The entrance was in the old, communist part of the complex. He walked into the lobby and got a sense of déjà vu. Like the Aftonposten lobby, it had a stone floor, pale wood, and a glass cubicle.

  He hoped the similarities would end there and cleared his throat as he laid his police badge on the desk.

  “Jacob Kanon, NYPD,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “I’m here to see Superintendent Mats Duvall. It’s about the murders on Dalarö.”

  The overweight woman on the other side of the desk looked impressed at the sight of his police badge.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “He should be,” Jacob replied, entirely truthfully.

  “I’ll just call him,” the plump woman said, picking up the phone.

  “No need,” Jacob said. “I’ll find him myself. He’s on the fifth floor, isn’t he?”

  He had studied the building from outside and counted seven floors in the office section.

  “Fourth floor,” the woman said, putting the receiver down as she clicked open the inner door.

  He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and exited into a narrow corridor with a low ceiling and humming strip lighting. He took several steps before knocking on a random door. He stuck his head into a small office and said, “Hello, excuse me, but Duvall, can you tell me where he is?”

  A woman with a ponytail and glasses looked up in surprise.

  “He’s in a meeting about Dalarö at the moment,” she said. “Conference Room C, I think.”

  “Thanks,” Jacob said and turned back. He had already passed Conference Room C.

  He retraced his steps, slipped into the room, and closed the door behind him.

  There were ten people inside, the core of the investigating team: Mats Duvall, Gabriella Oscarsson, a woman in her fifties in a suit, two fairly young women, and five men of varying ages. There were thermoses of coffee and refreshments on the table.

  Coffee cups stopped in midair, hands stiffened, and ten pairs of eyes stared at him.

  “Your investigation is about to go seriously wrong,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting right down at the table with them.

  Chapter 37

  THERE WAS A DEATHLY SILENCE in the room.

  He had managed to get their attention, though. Now he had about ten seconds before he would be thrown out.

  “You’ve probably worked out that the victims’ passports and wallets are missing,” he said. “Jewelry, cameras, and other valuables are gone. Their bank accounts have been emptied, their credit cards taken right to the limit with cash withdrawals. When you go through their credit-card transactions, you’ll discover at least one large purchase before the cash withdrawals take over.”

  He paused. No one moved.

  “What you’re looking for is a very attractive couple around twenty-five years old,” he went on. “Maybe even younger. A man and a woman, English speaking. They’re well off, probably white, posing as normal tourists.”

  Mats Duvall cleared his throat. Then he spoke in nearly perfect English.

  “I should explain to my colleagues that this man is
a homicide detective from the New York police. His name is Jacob Kanon, and he has been tracking all the investigations since New Year’s. He has personal reasons—”

  “My daughter, Kimberly, was one of the victims in Rome,” Jacob said.

  He looked around the group. Their shock at his appearance had started to turn to anger in a few of the faces. One of the older men, a bald man in a suit and vest, seemed particularly irritated.

  “This is Sweden,” the bald man said now. “The Swedish police are responsible for official business here. We don’t need any lessons in investigative technique, not from the FBI, nor from any other New York cowboys.”

  “Cross-border cooperation is absolutely vital if these killers are going to be stopped,” Jacob said. “All we’ve got to go on is their pattern, and we need coordination for that to become clear.”

  “That isn’t necessarily true,” the bald man said. “What we need is a decent, honest investigation, and we’re very good at that here in Sweden.”

  Jacob stood up so abruptly that his chair toppled over behind him.

  “I’m not here to take part in some pissing contest,” he said in a gruff voice. “And New York doesn’t have cowboys, by the way!”

  The bald man in the vest also stood up. His forehead was sweating and his eyes were narrow and small.

  “Evert, let him speak.”

  The woman in the suit had said this. Her voice was low and calm. She stood up and walked over to Jacob.

  “Sara Höglund,” she said, holding out her hand to him. “Head of the National Crime Investigation Department. You’ll have to excuse Prosecutor Ridderwall, he’s an extremely dedicated judicial investigator.”

  The prosecutor sat down and ran his hand angrily over his scalp.

  The woman in the suit looked Jacob carefully up and down.

  “Detective Kanon from New York City,” she said. “What district?”

  “Thirty-second,” Jacob replied.

  Her eyes lit up in recognition.

  “Harlem,” she said.

  He nodded. The police chief knew her NYPD.

  She turned to Mats Duvall.

  “We need all the help we can get on this case,” she said. “Formalize Mr. Kanon’s status with Interpol. These bastards have to be stopped.”

  Jacob clenched his fists in triumph.

  He was on board, and his intuition had been correct—something was going to break here in Stockholm. He hoped it wasn’t him.

  Chapter 38

  WASHINGTON CONFIRMED JACOB’S STATUS AND Berlin verified that he had been linked to them in their investigation into the German case, and a couple of phone calls later, he was formally accepted as part of the group, albeit on strictly limited terms.

  “You’ve got no mandate to make your own decisions on police business,” Mats Duvall clarified. “You can’t be armed, so I must ask you to hand over your sidearm. And you have to be accompanied at all times by a Swedish colleague.”

  Jacob looked at him steadily.

  “I haven’t got my sidearm with me. You’ll get it, though,” he said. “Who am I going to be working with?”

  Mats Duvall looked at everyone.

  “Gabriella, you’ve been on the case from the start?”

  Gabriella Oscarsson tightened her lips until they formed a harsh line.

  “Good,” the superintendent said, distributing sheaves of photocopies around the table.

  The atmosphere in the room was tense and uncomfortable. Serious run-throughs of an entire case like this almost always contained elements of hierarchical squabbling, and Jacob realized that his actions hadn’t made things easier.

  Mats Duvall cleared his throat and continued going through the victims’ credit-card transactions. He spoke in English for Jacob’s benefit. None of the others objected, but they couldn’t have liked it.

  The last purchase had been made in the NK department store around lunchtime on Saturday. Claudia Schmidt had been shopping at the perfume counter, and Rolf Hetger in the jewelry department.

  After that, there was a gap of a few hours before the cash withdrawals began.

  Jacob studied the printout. It was in Swedish, but the times and amounts were clear enough. And it was the same damn pattern as in the other cities.

  In fewer than six hours, the killers had managed to trick their victims out of their bank cards, drug them, kill them, steal their possessions and rental car, drive off in the vehicle, and start emptying their bank accounts.

  “The Germans died between the perfume counter and the cash withdrawals,” he clarified.

  Prosecutor Ridderwall leaned forward across the table.

  “The preliminary autopsy results haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact time of death,” he said. “Are we really going to sit here and guess?”

  Jacob put the papers down and looked at the fat little man, at his aggrieved expression and small, hostile eyes. He needed to set some firm boundaries with these people from the beginning.

  “Are we going to run through the investigation,” he said, “or are the two of us going to go outside and fight in the yard? I like to fight, by the way. Golden Gloves in Brooklyn.”

  Gabriella gave an audible sigh and muttered something that sounded like “Good god.”

  The prosecutor didn’t reply and remained seated. So Jacob picked up the papers again.

  Rolf Hetger had spent 22,590 kronor in the jewelry department—almost $3,000.

  “What did he buy?” Sara Höglund asked.

  “We’ve got people at NK right now,” the superintendent said. “We’ll know soon.”

  They moved on to the next sheet and went through the cash withdrawals. The addresses meant nothing to Jacob.

  “Where are these cash machines?”

  “In the city center.”

  Jacob nodded. Thus far the killers were following the pattern exactly. That was good news, he believed.

  “Some of the machines have camera surveillance,” Gabriella Oscarsson said. “We’ve requested the recordings for the times in question.”

  “What did the cameras in the other cities show?” Mats Duvall asked.

  Jacob fished out a notebook from his sports bag. He replied without opening the book; he knew the answer by heart.

  “A tall man with brown hair, a cap, and sunglasses. He’s wearing a dark, medium-length coat, and light shoes.”

  “Every time?” the superintendent asked.

  “Every time,” Jacob said.

  They went through the valuables that, according to the victims’ families, had probably been stolen from Dalarö.

  “The make of camera? What karat ring?” Jacob asked.

  “The parents are going to go through old receipts,” Gabriella said, irritated. “They’ve just lost their kids. Surely some level of sympathy…”

  Jacob looked at her and felt his jaw clench.

  Silence fell on the room. Finally Sara Höglund took over.

  “How do we proceed from here? Suggestions?”

  Jacob swiveled in his chair for a few seconds before replying.

  “We have to break their pattern somehow,” he said. “We have to provoke them to start making mistakes.”

  Sara Höglund raised her eyebrows. “How do we do that?”

  “By using the communication channel they’ve already opened,” Jacob said.

  Ten pairs of eyes looked skeptically at him.

  “The postcard to the paper Aftonposten,” he said. “The killers obviously want to communicate—and now we’re going to give them a reply.”

  Gabriella Oscarsson lifted her eyes to the ceiling. Mats Duvall nodded in encouragement.

  “Go on.”

  Jacob looked at each and every one of the people at the table before answering.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Get Dessie Larsson to write an open letter to the killers and have it published in tomorrow’s paper. Have her offer to interview them.”

  Evert Ridderwall snorted indignantly.
“Why on earth would the killers respond to something like that?”

  Jacob looked steadily at him.

  “Because we’re going to offer them a hell of a lot of money,” he said.

  Chapter 39

  SYLVIA SIGNALED THE WAITER OVER with a well-manicured hand and a small, delicate wave. She was playing rich girl again today.

  “We’d like to look at the wine list again,” she said, then giggled and leaned against the shoulder of the beautiful Dutch woman sitting next to her. “It feels so naughty, doesn’t it, drinking wine at lunchtime?”

  The Dutch woman cackled and nodded. “Very good wine, too.”

  They were sitting in Bistro Berns, a high-class French restaurant with a rather vaudevillian atmosphere, situated by the Berzelii Park in the middle of town.

  Sylvia and the Dutch woman had eaten chèvre chaud with a beetroot and walnut salad, and the men had each had boeuf bourguignon, and now they were ready for another bottle of red, the good stuff.

  “I think the financial crisis will lead to the sort of clear-out that the capital markets really need today,” the Dutchman said, looking important.

  He was terribly keen to impress Mac, and Mac was playing along and pretending to be interested in his every pronouncement. Mac kept getting better with each new couple they met.

  “That’s the positive scenario,” Mac said. “On the other hand, maybe we ought to learn from history. Financial worries at the turn of the last century didn’t break until after the First World War.”

  “God, you’re both soooooooo boring,” Sylvia groaned, waving the waiter over again. “Well, I’m going to have a sinfully rich dessert. Anyone joining me?”

  The Dutch woman ordered a crème brûlée, and the men asked for coffee.

  “Have you heard what happened here?” Sylvia asked, pouring more wine into their glasses. “Two tourists were murdered on some island.”

  The Dutch woman’s brown eyes opened wide. She was absolutely gorgeous, this one.

  “Is that true?” she said in horror. “Was it in the papers?”

  Sylvia shrugged.

  “I can’t understand what the papers say. It was a girl in the hotel who told us. Isn’t that right, Mac, that two tourists were murdered on an island near here?”