It didn’t work. He burst into laughter.
“Look at that funny bird,” he said unconvincingly, pointing out the window.
“I’m glad I can be of service,” she said sulkily, pushing the glasses up toward her forehead.
They had been to visit the young computer expert Bernhard Andrews, who hacked his way into every branch of the Internet on the hunt for Lamar Jennings. Maybe he would find a photo. But as expected, he was nowhere. Not one single tiny directory could produce anything at all on Jennings; he had kept himself out of the monitoring systems of society for twenty-five years. The only thing that turned up was his birth certificate. It seemed that he hadn’t existed since his birth.
Mrs. Wilma Stewart had failed miserably to create a portrait of Lamar Jennings. As the image took shape on the computer screen, the old woman had shaken her head time after time. “Thicker lips… Thinner lips, I said, young man… Listen here. I said thicker lips.”
The heat claimed another victim. She nodded off in front of the computer and promised to come back later and try again.
Finally the crime techs dropped off the first of the materials they had finished processing from Lamar Jennings’s apartment. They had attempted to reconstruct the pages of Lamar Jennings’s diary from the remains they had found and made four copies. Each of the four took one and began reading. Schonbauer sat on Larner’s desk, dangling his legs, clad in a ridiculous net undershirt that had been revealed after the shirt catastrophe. Larner sat in his chair with his legs on the desk beside Schonbauer. Yalm & Halm sat in visitors’ chairs at a respectable distance from each other.
The fragments were incoherent, like key words out of a life story. Apparently Larner had been right in saying that Lamar Jennings had left just enough to indicate the depths of his pain. Each fragment bore a small amount of information.
“don’t know why i’m writing, pleading? am i trying to stop myself before i have time”
“a grave in the great perfection of futility”
“the old neighbor woman wanted to have me for tea, said no, thanks, would have vomited on her, gotten permission to”
“they are so small, they don’t want to understand how”
“stronger and stronger. Why do they get stronger and st”
“in the middle of the night, shadow in the closet, it’s stuck, invisible hinges”
“reduced to nothing, less than zero, there is a life under zero”
“in passing, the glow of a cigarette, can already hear the sizzle, can already smell the stench, but i can never predict the pain, only”
“April 19. What power they have now, can’t resist any longer”
“grandma dead. Okay. A package came. Just crap, except for a letter. Going to read it soon. The handwriting is worrying.”
“earth a grave, people maggots, where is the corpse? is it the dead god we eat up?”
“stairs out of nothing in nothing, like a dream. Comes in flashes now, like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal”
“just go there, say i’m sick, try to get help”
“if the images can become a story”
“July 27. Who am i trying to kid? There is only one help. The Aztecs killed in order to live. Human sacrifices. I”
“follow the shadow, the arm of a jacket has gotten caught, a door, stairs”
“theletterislyingthereimwaitingicantitwontwork”
“Grandma dead. Try again. Grandma dead. Okay.”
“The light behind the door like the frame of an icon, a darker darkness, have to get out, have to plead”
“the stairs straight down, can’t follow, only flashes”
“the cellar the cellar the cellar”
“sick SOB at the bar, Arkaius, fucking name, bragging bragging bragging, tons of houses all over the world, suck him off, dead as a doornail, need the address now, reward”
“open the letter, read, i knew it, it was impossible for him to be”
“open the door, into the light. Chaos, have to get out, have to”
“glow of a cigarette, our little secret, our little hell”
“why us in the middle of all this perfection, the tiniest mollusk is more adapted to life on earth, can’t feel pain”
As they read, they sneaked glances at each other.
When they were all finished, Larner said, “This is why it didn’t all fit together. This is a classic serial killer of the more intellectual sort, incredibly wounded, very intelligent. It couldn’t be reconciled with the early coldness. I ought to have realized. On July twenty-seventh we have a date. On July twenty-seventh, 1997, the prostitute Sally Browne was murdered in Manhattan. That was Lamar Jennings’s first murder. It starts there: ‘The Aztecs killed in order to live.’ Any other thoughts?”
“Arkaius,” said Kerstin Holm. “Robert Arkaius is a Swedish tax exile. He owns the cabin where Lamar committed his first murder in Sweden. Apparently he got the address in exchange for sexual favors. Arkaius couldn’t return to Sweden anyway. Of course, he didn’t know that his former lover’s son, Andreas Gallano, had holed up there after he’d escaped from prison.”
Larner nodded mutely.
Schonbauer said, “That must have been after he opened that letter and found out that his father was in Sweden, when he had already started the murders. He goes out and looks for Swedes in sketchy bars in order to get his hands on a good place to stay in Stockholm. Sex doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, other than that. The trauma seems to have occurred before puberty.”
“Our reconstruction of his profile,” said Larner, “is quite close to the one you’ve already done, Yalm. As a child, he is abused by his father-that’s probably the glowing cigarettes we see. Sure enough, the culmination comes when he goes down some stairs and opens that door and sees his professional murderer of a father at work. After that, he is never the same again. Then comes blow after blow. His father dies, his mother commits suicide after a few years, possibly because of that letter that reaches her in some unknown way and ends up in an untouched box at his grandmother’s house. When his grandmother dies, the letter ends up in the hands of the now-twenty-four-year-old son in New York, where he-as the apartment indicates-lives half-outcast from society. It confirms what he’s suspected all along: his father is alive. His tormentor still exists; he hovers over him and possesses him.
“His repressed images of the past start to return, moving in a certain direction, ‘like it travels inside me, like i’m being driven toward a goal.’ Finally the images drive him down to that door. He opens it and is confronted with the most repressed image of all, his father above a victim who’s foaming at the mouth, with the micropincers in his neck. He has to get rid of it, and that can only happen with homeopathic magic: like pleads to like. He has the pincers; now he can use them. The image in his memory is exact; he knows exactly what to do. As soon as the images appear, he must go out and kill. It calms him: ‘if the images can become a story.’ The murders make the lightninglike, hardhitting pictures into a more easily handled story.
“But as you said, Yalm, at the same time it’s about preparing himself for the big, decisive murder. He has to get rid of his father, he must die by his own methods, the very ones that haunt him. He’s finally gotten hold of the address of a safe house in the Stockholm area-it’s time. Apparently the letter has revealed that his father is in Stockholm, and even more important, it’s revealed what he calls himself-otherwise the whole project is hopeless. The techs have to be finished with the burned letter soon. If we’re lucky, the name will be there.
“Anyway, he gets a fake passport under the name Edwin Reynolds and goes to Newark Airport. Annoyingly, the next flight to Stockholm is fully booked. It’s not really a catastrophe, but somehow he happens to stumble upon Lars-Erik Hassel. Maybe the images came to him again in the airport; maybe he decides to kill two birds with one stone: getting his hands on a ticket, and simultaneously getting rid of the images and having a peaceful flight; avoiding six hours of inferno might be worth the relatively minor risks. Hassel somehow reveals himself as a traveler to Stockholm who hasn’t yet checked in, which means his seat can be made available. Jennings gets Hassel and his luggage into the janitor’s closet and does his deed; maybe he uses sex as a temptation again. Then he snatches Hassel’s ticket, calls and cancels in his name, books himself the seat with Reynolds’s name, and has a nice, calm flight.