Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (13 page)

Laban seemed to disappear into himself again, but they didn’t let him go completely. “What happened a month ago?” Hjelm asked. “Why did you suddenly start firing off more e-mails?”

Laban slowly raised his eyes; it seemed like an enormous, purely physical effort. His gaze fastened on Hjelm.

“That was when I got close to Ingela. She told me about Conny, about his birth, that he had never even wanted to see him.”

“ ‘Got close to’? How close?”

“I decided to murder him for real.”

Hjelm and Chavez held perfectly still. Hjelm tried to formulate the right question, which ended up being “You started piling on threatening e-mails with the intent of murdering him?”

“Yes.”

“And in the last one, you let him know that you knew about his New York plans and that you were going to kill him in a way that would make it impossible for him to scream out his pain? Do you know how he died?”

“He was murdered.”

“But the details?”

“No.”

“He was tortured to death, and his vocal cords were cut so that no one could hear him scream. When did you go to New York?”

“I haven’t—”

“When? Were you there waiting for him, or did you arrive just as the plane was about to take off?”

“I—”

“How did you learn about the Kentucky Killer’s MO?”

“Where did you get the Edwin Reynolds passport?”

“How did you sneak past the police at Arlanda?”

Laban Hassel gaped into the crossfire.

Hjelm leaned forward and said emphatically, “Where were you on the night of the second and third of September?”

“In hell,” Laban Hassel said almost inaudibly.

“Then you must have run into your father there,” said Chavez. “I don’t think any living person could come closer to hell than he was right then.”

In the dramaturgy of investigative techniques, Laban should, at this point, either have broken down or clammed up. What happened was something in between. His lips hardly moving, he said to the table flatly, “I can’t understand it. I had almost made up my mind to take that step, and then he died. Then
someone else murdered him. It was completely crazy. Or rather completely logical. Divine justice. A desire so strong that it materialized. It couldn’t be a coincidence; it had to be fate, a fate as grotesque as life itself. A message from above. And only now, now that nothing can be taken back, do I realize that I never would have killed him. And that I didn’t even want to. On the contrary, I only wanted to punish him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to get him to show some tiny trace of remorse.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Hjelm repeated, “Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”

“I was in Skärmarbrink,” Laban whispered, “at Ingela and Conny’s place.”

And Chavez repeated: “What happened a month ago? How close to Ingela did you get?”

“Very close,” said Laban calmly. “Too close. It’s not enough that I slept with my brother’s mother, not enough that she slept with the son of her son’s detested father, and that these insights slugged us hard in the face. We were also confronted with something we had in common, something horrible with the same root cause, and that was what caused me to make my decision. That was what made me send more and more letters. By then it was mutual.”

“And what was it that you had in common?”

Laban Hassel bent his neck way back and stared up at the ceiling. As his little goatee bobbed, he said, “We had both been sterilized.”

Hjelm looked at Chavez.

Chavez looked at Hjelm.

“Why?” they said in unison.

Laban got up, walked to the window, and opened it.

Dusk had fallen. Rain clouds swept across the city, borrowing
a bit of street light now and then. A gust of autumn blew through Laban’s hair and into the musty room.

“Bad blood always comes back around,” said Laban Hassel.

It’s time.

He’s on his way.

Now it will begin.

He moves silently through the empty cottage. The bag is resting over his shoulder. It rattles slightly in the dark.

He stops at the window next to the front door. He hears a weak, drawn-out, hollow cry as the autumn winds whine through the round hole next to the lock.

He raises his eyes from the hole in the pane of glass and takes in the night’s autumn storm, which heaves great sheets of rain across the pitch-black landscape. When he steps out onto the porch and the rain whips his cheeks, it is another wind he feels.

It is dry, dry as a desert. It sweeps down from Cumberland Plateau and whistles through the ice-cold house.

Through the night, he sees the shadow in the closet as a darker darkness. He follows it.

He wanders through the rain. It doesn’t exist. All that exists is a target. A darker darkness.

He gets into the beige Saab and drives away. The roads are more like paths. He carefully avoids the floodlike rivulets and balances on the banks of the river until the first lights of civilization color the bands of rain, and he discovers the stairs behind the secret door that catches the arm of a jacket. He takes the
first step, and the next. The lights disappear; the dusty-sweet scent comes, the same one that is thick in the car that is just turning out onto the big road. Occasional headlights sweep by. The illuminated facades of buildings take shape around him. There are nuances to the darkness now: he can not only
feel
the ice-cold, damp handrail; he can
see
it too, see it as a hazy band hurtling down toward the abyss in an endless, snakelike copycat of the stairs, which crunch with sand; and the skyscraper towers, strangely alone, at the entrance to the city. He sees it, a bit to the right, and drives along the street with the green swath in the middle. He doesn’t know its name, just knows the street, knows the number of steps, the exact number of steps down to the light-framed door that he can almost see now, a tiny glimmer at the very bottom. He knows exactly where each correct movement ought to happen, and then he turns around the stadium with the old clock tower, and he’s very close. Forest again; he is balancing at the edge of civilization: complexes of buildings on one side, forest on the other, a nocturnal jungle that he drags himself through until the contours of the door are visible. Like an icon frame around a darkness that’s brighter than any light, the light shoots out from behind the door. A halo that shows him the way.

He enters to the right. Dimly lit contours of ships give faint illumination to the rows of empty offices and warehouses. Otherwise, nothing.

He stops the car in an empty parking lot and walks with even, distinct steps down to the water. The rain is flung from side to side; it can’t get to him. Now he can tell it’s a door; the light is coming from inside it. Not a sound can be heard. A few steps left. Something makes a clinking sound behind him. The key clinks softly in the lock. He turns it, pulls open the heavy door, closes it behind him, and opens the bag. He places a hand towel on the floor just inside the door and stands there dripping.
Then he changes shoes, puts the wet towel and the wet shoes back in the bag, takes out a flashlight, and climbs down the stairs, the back point of a solitary cone of light. He stops in front of the door with the glittering halo swarming around it. He stands there. He can’t breathe.

He lets his flashlight sweep through the cellar. Nothing has changed. The junk in one corner, the collection of carefully stacked boxes in the other, and the empty surface a bit farther away; the always well-scrubbed cement floor with the drain and the heavy cast-iron chair. He pushes his way behind the farthest row of boxes, sits down with his back against the cold stone wall, turns off his flashlight, and waits.

He loses contact with time. Minutes pass—or seconds, or hours. His eyes adjust to the darkness. The image of the humid cellar develops slowly. The door appears clearly, above the stairs, about ten yards away. His eyes do not leave it.

Time passes. Everything is quiet. He waits.

Then a key is pushed into the lock. Two men step in, one older and one younger. He can’t make out their features. They converse quietly but intensely in a foreign language as they walk down the stairs.

Suddenly something happens. It goes so quickly. The older man presses something against the throat of the younger one. He immediately loses consciousness. The older man drags him over to the heavy cast-iron chair, takes a number of leather straps out of a case, and binds the man’s legs, arms, and body. Then he bends down to the case again.

That is when he opens the door and everything is revealed. The light streams out. He steps into the Millennium.

The older man lifts a large syringe out of the case and, with an experienced hand, guides it into the unconscious man’s throat from the side. He adjusts a few small knobs on the upper part of the mechanism.

He gives a start behind his boxes; he is close to knocking them over.

Then the older man lines up a series of surgical instruments on the cement floor, in careful order. Farthest to the right is another large syringelike gadget.

Finally he pats the unconscious man on the cheeks, harder and harder until he starts to shake. His head is stabilized. Intense jerks course through the restrained body, but the chair remains completely still. There is not a sound to be heard.

The older man says a few toneless words and bends down toward the second syringe. When he leans to the side to inject it in exactly the right spot, a faint light comes in from an unknown source and illuminates his face. For one second, it is completely clear.

That is when he truly gives a start. A box falls.

The older man stands stock still. He places the syringe on the floor and starts to move. He’s approaching fast.

It’s time, he thinks, and steps out of his hiding place.

The minibus imitated the gliding flight of a bat through the rainy night. Its night vision was turned on; its perception of space was perfect.

Although maybe bats don’t glide.

And was it really night vision they had?

He wished he hadn’t had that last whiskey.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Damn, Matte broke down up there.”

“Fuck, isn’t that the leaning tower? Did you drive us to Spain, you bastard?”

“Italy! Italy! I long for Italy, the lovely beaches of Italy …”

“Shut up!”

“It’s the gas tower—the only thing that’s leaning is your head.”

“The leaning brain of Skarpnäck.”

“The leaning minibus of Frihamnen. What curve-taking skills!”

“Where the fuck are you going? Matte!”

He looked over his shoulder.

It was an awful mess back there. It would take the whole morning to clean up after them. The bottles were mixed up with their bandy sticks, and the hazy figures seemed to be throwing themselves on top of each other in a sad, homoerotic cluster of snakes.

“Gärdet,” he said. “You live there, Steffe. As you may recall.”

“But you drove
around
all of fucking Gärdet! We shouldn’t have let you drive.”

“Says the man who blew the driving test six times.”

“Come on, try to go the right way. I know you’re from Nynäshamn, but you must have been to Stockholm once or twice.”

“Or heard of it.”

“The king lives there. Maybe that’ll help.”

“Does he really live in the palace? Or is it Drottningholm? Trick question.”

“What the hell? Are you going to send him fan mail?”

“ ‘Dear King, can you send a lock of Victoria’s pubic hair to a pining bachelor with roots in the working class of Säffle?’ ”

“Take a right. A right, you moron!”

“Dumbass!”

He got tired of it all and turned left out of pure spite. A general bellow spread through the minibus.

“Psycho!”

“Dipshit!”

“Idiot!”

The minibus glided on along a little dark road that split into four; he randomly chose one of them, and it seemed like the bus might be stopped at any second by a sudden iron fence and a severe, macho Latino border guard with a cigar in the corner of his mouth.

That didn’t happen. Instead, he could see a Volvo station wagon fifty yards away. Exhaust was rising from its tailpipe. The car was blocking the road.

He braked until they were almost standing still. They were thirty yards from the car when he saw a man next to it. He was in full motion. His head was covered by a balaclava. He shoved something into the back of the car, threw himself around the side, and roared away with shrieking tires. When the smoke settled, Matte noticed something lying on the ground. A large package with alarming contours.

Three of the guys who were somewhat sober leaned forward, above him.

“What the fuck was that?”

“A burglary?”

“Fucking hell! What have you gotten us into, Matte? Let’s split.”

He let the bus slowly glide up to the blanket-wrapped package. The headlights made the rain come alive. It whipped at the blanket.

He stopped the bus and went out into the storm. They followed him. He bent down and started to unwrap the blanket.

A face stared up at him. Chalk-white, with surprising facial features under the ruptured eyes. The rain beat against the eyeballs. The eyelids made no effort to avoid the drops.

They recoiled and stared silently at the white face that stuck out of the dripping blanket, shining through the night.

“Shit!” someone whispered.

“Let’s split,” someone else whispered.

“We can’t just leave him,” he said.

Someone grabbed the lapels of his jacket and brought his face close. “Yes. We can. Do you hear me, Matte? This has nothing to do with us.”

“You’ve been drinking,” someone else said soberly. “Think of the consequences.”

They went back to the minibus. The mood was different now.

He remained standing there for a moment, observing the corpse with reluctant fascination. It was the first time Matte had seen a dead person.

He returned to the driver’s seat. The bus was dripping with rain that would eat its way into the upholstery and make it mold. But that was the farthest thing from his mind as he turned the key in the ignition.