The Postcard Killers

    Jacob shivered slightly and realized how cold and wet he was. His hands were filthy. There was no shower in his room in the youth hostel where he was staying, and he hadn’t bothered trying to find the shared bathroom. The building depressed him. It was an old prison, and his room was a cell from the 1840s, which he was sharing with a Finnish poet. He and the poet had squeezed onto the lower bunk of the bed and drunk their way through the vodka, aquavit, and brдnnvin, and afterward the poet had gone into the city to dance the tango somewhere.

    Jacob had spent the night throwing up into the wastepaper basket and feeling miserable. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the whole of the country to drown his thoughts about Kimmy and her murder.

    He beat on his forehead with his fists.

    Now that he was so close to the bastards, his own failings were overtaking him.

    He got gingerly to his feet and set off toward the glass cubicle again. The soles of his shoes had dried and had a better grip on the floorboards. The glass box was empty now. The guard had gone off somewhere. Shit. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the glass with his hands, he tried to see into the newsroom. As far as he could tell, there was no one about. What sort of fucked-up place was this? Wasn’t this supposed to be a newspaper?

    He walked back to the security post and buzzed the alarm. No response, no one anywhere.

    He put his finger on the buzzer and held it there. The guard finally approached, holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other.

    “Hello!” Jacob called. “Can you please call Dessie Larsson and tell herI’m here?”

    The guard glanced at him, then turned his back and started talking to someone out of sight.

    Jacob banged the glass wall with the palm of his hand.

    “Hello!” he yelled. “Come on! It’s a matter of life and death!”

    “You’re too late,” said a voice behind him.

    He spun around to see the journalist standing in the stairwell behind him. Her face was white, her green eyes tired. There were dark rings around them.

    “The picture arrived this morning,” she said. “The forensics team already took it away.”

    He stepped toward her and opened his mouth, but he couldn’t get a single question out.

    “A man and a woman,” Dessie Larsson said. “Their throats were cut.”

Chapter 18

    DESSIE OPENED THE DOOR TO the newsroom with her card and code.

    “I’m not going to offer you anything to drink,” she said over her shoulder.

    “If you’d turned up yesterday, you might have gotten a cup of coffee, but you lost your chance. This way…”

    She headed off to the right through the office, aiming for the crime desk.

    “I’m not here for coffee,” Jacob Kanon said behind her. “Have the bodies been found?”

    He was in a bad mood and stank like hell. Nice guy.

    “Not yet,” said Dessie. “Give us a little time, will you. Murder is a bit less common here than in New York. Suicide is our specialty.”

    She sat down behind her desk and pointed to the wobbly metal chair in front.

    “When was the letter posted?” he asked.

    “Yesterday afternoon, at the central Stockholm post office. We don’t usually get mail on a Sunday, but the police ordered an extra delivery.”

    He sat down on the chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

    “Did you see the picture?” he asked. “What did it show? Were there any particular characteristics? Anything that could identify the crime scene?”

    Dessie looked carefully at the man in front of her. He looked even worse in daylight than he had in the gloom of the stairwell. His hair was a mess and his clothes were dirty. But his blue eyes were burning with an intensity that brought his whole face alive. She liked something about him - maybe the intensity. Probably that.

    “Just a Polaroid picture, nothing else.”

    She looked away as she passed him a copy of the picture. Jacob Kanon took it with both hands and stared at the bodies.

    Dessie was trying to look calm and unaffected. Violence didn’t usually bother her, but this was different.

    The victims were so young, their deaths so cold and calculated, so inhuman.

    “Scandinavian setting,” the policeman stated. “Pale furniture, pale background, blond people. Did they take the envelope away?”

    Dessie swallowed.

    “Forensics? Of course they did.”

    “Have you got a copy?”

    Dessie handed him a photocopy of the ordinary oblong envelope. The address was written in neat capital letters across the front.

DESSIE LARSSON

AFTONPOSTEN

115 10 STOCKHOLM

    She looked uncomfortably at her own name.

    “They won’t find anything on it,” Jacob Kanon said. “These killers leave no fingerprints, and they don’t lick the stamps. Was there anything on the back?”

    She shook her head.

    He held up the picture of the bodies.

    “Can I have a copy of this?”

    “I’ll print a new one for you,” Dessie said, clicking the command through her computer and pointing at a printer some distance away. “I’m going to get a coffee,” she said, getting up. “Do you want one?”