Where Monsters Dwell (6 page)

“Why do you think he did that?” Felicia asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Does any of it make sense?” replied Laubach. “But I know what you mean. It seems unnecessary to take the head back upstairs. Maybe he did it to confuse us. I have no idea what the intent was. Maybe the killer was trying to tell us something.”

“You’ve been watching too much TV,” said Patterson.

“This might be one of those rare instances when reality is stranger than fiction,” said Laubach.

They stood in silence for a moment, mulling over what he had said. Then Patterson voiced what they were all thinking.

“Does this mean we’re looking at a serial killer?”

“Based on the crime scene alone, I would venture to say that the perpetrator has killed before,” Laubach said. “What do you think, Stone?”

She knew why he had asked. Last year she had taken part in a three-month-long course on serial killers, at the FBI in Washington, D.C.

“I’d say that you’re right, Laubach. Even just looking at the crime scene. But at the same time…”

“At the same time what?” asked Patterson. Felicia couldn’t help thinking that he often acted like an impatient little boy, even though he was older than she was, and more experienced. But she also knew that it was precisely this impatience that made him the talented investigator he was.

“At the same time I think we can say with certainty that he has never killed quite like this before,” Felicia replied.

“How can you tell?” asked Patterson.

“It’s too extreme, too conspicuous—almost theatrical, as if the killer wants to be noticed. If there had been other murders like this before, we would remember. We would have studied them. They would have been required curriculum. Flayed alive, tied up, and throat sliced? I haven’t read about anything like that.”

“There is Ed Gein, though,” Laubach pointed out.

“Of course, but we’re talking about the present,” she said. She knew about Ed Gein. The much too real grave robber and killer from the sleepy little town of Plainfield in the 1950s. He didn’t just flay his victims; he also skinned the bodies he stole from the local cemetery. But this was different. “There’s something about the location of this crime scene,” she went on. “The Edgar Allan Poe Museum. I have a feeling the choice was no accident. We don’t have a series of killings yet, but maybe it’s starting right here.”

“Could it be somebody who’s killed before, but who has gradually worked his way up to this stage?” Patterson asked.

“And what exactly would be the intermediate stages to a murder like this?” she replied dryly.

Laubach broke in. “What if the perpetrator has killed before in other countries: Mexico, Brazil, Russia? How much do we know about possible serial killers abroad?”

“Actually, the FBI has a surprisingly good overview, better than any other international agency. We discussed several foreign cases in the FBI course I took, including a possibly unsolved case in Europe, but nothing that was anything like this one. Still, there’s always a chance. But a foreigner here in Richmond? And why here at the museum?” Felicia once again recalled her friend’s wedding invitation and the words “burlesque” and “macabre.”

“I’d be surprised if Morris doesn’t ask us to cast a wider net, but I have a feeling that there’s a connection between the victim, or at least the victim’s workplace, and the perpetrator,” she said.

At that moment Patterson, Laubach, and Stone all received the same text message:

You’ve seen the crime scene. Laubach will put his team to work. Reynolds is coming back to talk to the staff. The rest of us will meet at the station in an hour. War council.

It was from Morris.

7

Trondheim, September 2010

When Vatten woke up
on Sunday, it was way past breakfast and the usual time for his Sunday walk. He drank his coffee and looked out the window. Then he put on a pair of worn but sturdy hiking boots and rain gear and went out. He walked all the way up to Kuhaugen Hill, sat down on a bench, and looked out over the town and the fjord. The drizzle landed like drops of dew on his face, and he hoped for a moment that the rain would clear his thoughts enough to remember more than just blurry glimpses of what had happened in the library the day before. Or that it would also wash away the unpleasant feeling that he had done something terribly stupid after drinking those two mugs of Spanish red wine. But the rain did nothing but make his face wet.

On the way back he took a detour, and unexpectedly ran into Siri Holm, the new librarian. She was walking in the vicinity of Kvilhaugen with a smug-looking Afghan hound. It was the dog who saw him first.

“Well, if it isn’t our security officer,” she said with a smile.

“Oh, hi. I almost didn’t see you. Lost in my own thoughts,” he said apologetically, with a strained smile. He looked at the dog, who was staring haughtily into space.

“Your dog?”

“No, I found her here and caught her with a leash I just so happened to have with me,” she said with a teasing laugh. “I’m sure she belongs to the local tribe of Afghan hounds.”

“Dumb question. I just didn’t picture you as a dog person.”

“I’m probably a lot of different things you can’t imagine.” She smiled and held his gaze so long that he blushed. “If you’re out for a Sunday walk, maybe you have time for a cup of tea at my place?”

He hesitated.

“Come on, I promise not to put the moves on you. Not right away, anyway.”

Siri Holm was fifteen years younger than Vatten. He didn’t know many women her age, but he didn’t think that young women had changed much since he was in his early twenties. He realized that she wasn’t just young. She was something altogether unique. If he took her at her word and was interpreting her signals correctly—the smile, the way she put her hand on his shoulder when they were talking—then he had to assume that she was flirting with him. Still, he wasn’t sure. It was more like she was coming on to the whole world.

“Have you got any coffee?” he asked.

She didn’t, but he followed her to her place anyway. She lived in a two-room apartment in a wooden building at the top of Rosenborg, with a view over the whole town and the fjord. She told him that she’d gotten the apartment from her father, who, according to her, had made a bit too much money a bit too easily.

Vatten knew how places could get messy. Several rooms in his house were filled with old books, magazines, newspapers, and other useless items he didn’t have the energy to clean up. But at least he had some kind of order; things were in boxes or stacked up. Siri Holm’s apartment, on the other hand, was utter chaos—he’d never seen a messier place. Apart from a bookcase along one wall of the living room, where the books stood in surprisingly neat rows, everything looked like it was out of place. There were clothes on the floor and dirty dishes everywhere: on the coffee table, on the rug, under the couch. There was a hodgepodge of antiques and stuffed animals scattered over the floor and piled on the tables. On one of the wide windowsills lay a trumpet, one of the few objects not covered with a layer of dust. In the middle of the room stood a mannequin wearing a tae kwon do outfit. Around its waist was an ominous black belt.

The dog ignored the mess completely, sauntering across the living-room floor without stepping on anything, and lay down with a lethargic expression on a pillow near the door to the kitchen. Vatten watched Siri through the doorway as she fixed the tea. She had to fish out the teapot from underneath a pile of mail and old newspapers.

“Welcome to my cabinet of curiosities,” she said when she entered the living room carrying two cups. She set them down on two bare spots on the coffee table that he hadn’t noticed at first. Then she cleared off some books and magazines from the couch and invited him to have a seat.

When he sat down a bit hesitantly on the sofa, she came and sat down right next to him, so close that he could feel her thigh against his own. It was firmer than his was.

“When I get my first paycheck I’m going to hire a cleaning service. I hate housework. It’s such a waste of time, don’t you think?”

“I thought you were a librarian,” he said laconically.

“I keep my thoughts organized, and my books,” she said, pointing at the bookcase. “All the rest are just things in the way.” She laughed. “I think I have to get myself a boyfriend who’s a neat freak. At least for long enough so he could set up a couple of big cabinets for me that I could put everything in.” Then she put her hand on his knee. “Maybe you’d like the job?”

“May I take a look at your books?” he asked, getting up and smoothing out his slacks.

“That’s not all you need to ask a lady to take a look at,” she said. “Go for it.”

The bookcase covered the whole wall across from the windows, and to Vatten’s great surprise, it contained only one genre.

“I see you like mysteries.”

“It’s more of a mania than a real fondness, I’m afraid.” She had left the couch and was standing next to him. “I collect solutions.”

“Solutions?”

“Yes. Look here.” She took out a book with no lettering on the spine. It was a thick, leather-bound diary, obviously expensive. When she opened it he saw that it was filled with short, handwritten entries. Each of them began with what was evidently the title of a mystery novel. Then there was a name—under the heading Murderer. After that was a page reference.

“Here I’ve written down the names of all the murderers in the novels I’ve read and on which page I figured it out. It’s one of my specialties. I once had a boyfriend who claimed that it was my biggest talent: figuring out the murderer in a mystery novel. But he didn’t know me very well. And now that I think of it, I never gave him a decent blow job.”

Vatten blushed.

“Agatha Christie is the easiest. Lots of people think she’s hard, but I think she’s easy,” Siri went on. “But every author has his own pattern. That’s why the first book you read by a new author is always the hardest. How does this author think? How does she construct her books? Figuring out the murderer in a book isn’t the same thing as doing it in reality. The biggest mistake people make is that they try to stick to the facts of the case, but that doesn’t matter at all. It’s about the narrative flow, the way the story is laid out, what function the various characters have in the story, things like that.”

“Interesting,” he said, and meant it. “Can you give me an example? I always get fooled.” The erection he had been trying to get rid of since he left the sofa was beginning to subside.

“The rule of thirds,” she said.

“The rule of thirds? And what’s that?”

“The murderer is usually most visible in the first third of the book. That’s when the author dares to show a glimpse of him or her. The rest of the book is spent trying to present that character as being unimportant, irrelevant, while other possible suspects are put forward instead.”

“And then the murderer is pulled out of the hat again at the end?”

“Exactly. But as usual, knowing a rule isn’t enough. There are a lot of other signs you have to look for and keep track of. It’s a matter of experience.” She smiled, clearly aware of the curious and somewhat absurd nature of such insight.

“You read Poe, I see.” Vatten took out a volume of collected works translated to Swedish from the bookcase and felt a rather alarming tingling in his body. This was the second time this weekend he had ended up talking about Poe with a woman, though he couldn’t remember how it had turned out the first time.

“Sure, but I don’t really like him. I don’t like any sort of fantastic literature: horror or fantasy or science fiction. I don’t see the point of it. It’s just too easy for the author when he can make up whatever he wants. It’s sort of the same with Poe as a mystery writer. The solution of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is just a gimmick. I mean, an ape as the murderer? You have to give the reader a chance. If you don’t, it’s not a crime novel, the way I see it.” She paused. “Have I disappointed you? You like Poe, don’t you? I can see it in your face. Not everything he wrote is bad. I like the one with the police officers who can’t find the letter.”

“‘The Purloined Letter,’” said Vatten.

“Yes, that’s the one.”

She leaned forward unexpectedly and kissed him on the cheek. She took the book he was holding and put it back on the shelf. He watched with fascination as she lined it up perfectly with the other books, so that it didn’t stick out or get pushed in too far. Then she took his hand and leaned toward him again. This time she kissed him on the lips.

“Something has happened in your life,” she said. “Either you’re grieving over something, or you have a great secret, or maybe both.”

Then she slipped her face down along his body, until she was squatting with her head even with his hips. She opened his fly and took him quickly into her mouth. His eyes swept over the spines of the books on the shelves, and then fled out the window on the other side of the room, out across the town and the fjord. At last he focused his gaze on the isle of Munkholmen covered by a drifting mist. When was the last time he was out there? It was before, when life was still normal. Back when he used to receive pleasures like this from his wife.

Then he came. He felt her swallow, and then she wiped her hand playfully across her mouth, and laughed.

“Oi, and here I promised not to come on to you.”

“I think I’d better be getting home,” said Vatten.

“Okay,” she said and went back to the sofa to sit down.

*   *   *

I never learn, Siri Holm thought after Vatten had left. But I’m sure that something good will come of this. The man is completely tied up in knots. He’ll relax more the next time we meet.

She went into the cramped bathroom, which was just as messy as the rest of her apartment, found her toothbrush, which had fallen on the floor, and brushed her teeth. Then she got out her trumpet and stood in the living room playing a tune from Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
.

The last thing she thought before her head was filled with music was this: She had heard all about what had happened to Vatten several years ago. But like everyone else, she wanted to know the answer to the question she had hinted at earlier. The solution to the puzzle that was Vatten. Was he in mourning, or was he harboring a secret that not even the police had managed to discover?