The Postcard Killers

    Then she went over to her desk in the crime section.

    “Has anything happened in Stockholm today? Anything at all?” she asked Forsberg, her dumpy, disheveled news editor, as she put her backpack on the desk and set her bicycle helmet down next to it.

    Forsberg looked up over his glasses for a fraction of a second, then went back to the newspaper in front of him.

    “Hugo Bergman has written a big piece. The People’s Party want a European FBI. And they’ve found another pair of young lovers murdered. In Berlin this time.”

    What sort of nonsense has Hugo Bergman come up with now? Dessie thought, sitting down at her desk. She took her laptop out of her backpack and logged into the paper’s network.

    “Anything you want me to do more work on, boss man?” she wondered out loud, clicking on the news about the double murder in Berlin.

    “Talk about sick bastards, these killers,” the news editor said. “What the hell’s wrong with people like that?”

    “Don’t ask me. I specialize in petty criminals,” Dessie said. “Not serial killers. Nothing big and important like that.”

    Forsberg stood up to get a cup of coffee from the machine. The victims in Berlin were Australians, Dessie read. Karen and William Cowley, both twenty-three and married for a couple of years. They’d come to Europe to get over the death of their infant son. Instead, they had run into the notorious murderers who were killing couples all over Europe. The postcard had been sent to a journalist at a local paper. The picture was of the site of Hitler’s bunker, and there had been a Shakespeare quote on the back.

    Dessie suddenly gasped. She felt almost like she was having a heart attack, or how she imagined that might feel.

To be or not to be…

    Her eyes were pinned to the recycling bin in front of her.

    “Forsberg,” she said, sounding considerably calmer than she felt. “I think they’ve arrived in Stockholm.”

Chapter 5

    “SO, DESSIE, YOU’VE NO IDEA why the postcard was sent to you in particular?”

    The police had taken over the conference room behind the sports desk. Police superintendent Mats Duvall sat on the other side of the table, looking at her through a pair of designer glasses.

    An old-fashioned tape recorder, the sort that actually used a cassette, was slowly winding on the table in front of her.

    “Not the faintest idea,” Dessie said. “I don’t get it at all. No.”

    The newsroom was cordoned off. A team of forensics officers had taken the postcard, photographed it, and sent it off for analysis. After that, they had laid siege to the mail room.

    Dessie didn’t understand what they were expecting to find there, but they had a whole arsenal of equipment with them.

    “Have you written any articles about this? Have you reported on any of the other murders around Europe?”

    She shook her head.

    The superintendent looked at her coolly.

    “Can I ask you to reply verbally so that your response gets picked up on the tape?”

    Dessie sat up in her chair and cleared her throat.

    “No,” she said, a little too loudly. “No, I’ve never written about these murders.”

    “Is there anything else you might have done to provoke them into contacting you specifically?”

    “My obvious charm and flexibility?” she suggested.

    Duvall tapped away at a small gadget that Dessie assumed was some sort of electronic notepad. His fingers were long and thin, the nails well manicured. He was dressed in a suit, a pink shirt, and a gray-on-blue striped tie.

    “Let’s move on to you: how long have you been working here at Aftonposten? ”

    Dessie clasped her hands in her lap.

    “Almost three years,” she said. “Part-time. I do research when I’m not here.”

    “Research? Can I ask what in?”

    “I’m a trained criminologist, specializing in property crime. And I’ve done the extension course in journalism at Stockholm University, so I’m a trained journalist as well. And right now I’m writing my doctoral thesis…

    Glad you asked?”

    She had let the sentence about her thesis trail off. Focusing on the social consequences of small-scale property break-ins, it had been placed on the back burner - to put it mildly. She hadn’t written a word of it in over two years.

    “Would you describe yourself as a high-profile or famous reporter?” the superintendent asked.

    Dessie let out a rather inappropriate laugh, partly through her mouth, partly her nose.

    “Hardly.” She recovered slightly. “I never write about the news. I come up with my own stories. For instance, I had an interview with Burglar Bengt in yesterday’s paper. He’s Sweden’s ‘most notorious’ burglar. Found guilty of breaking into three hundred eighteen properties, and that doesn’t include -”

    Superintendent Duvall interrupted her, leaning in closer across the table.

    “The usual scenario is that the people who sent the postcard carry on a correspondence with the journalist. You may get more mail from the killers.”

    “If you don’t catch them first,” she said.

    She met the policeman’s gaze. His eyes were calm, inscrutable behind his shiny glasses. She couldn’t tell if she liked or disliked him. Not that it mattered.