“Presumably he has no idea how close you are to catching him at Arlanda. All he has is carry-on luggage-he just goes right through, gets in a taxi, stops somewhere on the way and buys some food, and goes straight to the cabin. Your drug dealer happens to be there, but by now Lamar Jennings is a practiced killer. He gets in easily and murders the drug dealer; the sight now and then of the body in the cellar is enough to keep the images at bay as he searches for his father and plans the best way to deal with him. What happens next is your business.”
No one had any objections. That was surely how it happened.
In the meantime, Hjelm’s thoughts had gone in a slightly different direction. “Was there a cellar on Wayne Jennings’s farm?”
Larner looked at him. He had expected to be able to catch his breath after his account, but now he had to make a sharp turnaround. “There was a small cellar, yes. But it was a sort of rec room, a cozy room with a fireplace, and we checked it several times. It wasn’t the scene of the murder.”
“Who lives there now?”
“I seem to recall that it went round and round in the media for so long that it became unsellable. After his wife died, it was left to rot. It’s deserted.”
“There’s something about a closet that Lamar apparently wants to tell us. A shadow in the closet at night, a door that’s gotten caught on ‘the arm of a jacket,’ then the stairs. Might there have been another cellar, a secret one? The very origin of the entire story of the Kentucky Killer?”
Larner thought it over, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Bill, how long is the letter going to take? Okay. I’m going to Kentucky. Jerry will hold down the fort here.”
He hung up and looked at them urgently. “Well, are you coming?”
They flew to Louisville, Kentucky, in a flash. At the airport, an FBI helicopter was waiting to carry them eastward. A tall mountain range towered up in the distance.
“Cumberland Plateau,” Larner said, pointing.
The helicopter landed at the edge of a tobacco field, and Larner and three bundles of muscle from the FBI, along with the two Swedes, jogged through the field and out onto the country road along. A grove of tall, unidentifiable deciduous trees lent shadow to a decaying farm a ways out on the wilderness land; there wasn’t a neighbor for miles.
Seen at a closer distance, the farmhouse looked haunted. Fifteen years had left their mark. Houses always seem to do their best when inhabited-otherwise they wither. Wayne Jennings’s farm had withered. It didn’t look as if it had felt very well from the start, but by now it had reached a state of complete abandonment. The front door was crooked and warped, and it took the efforts of the collective FBI muscle mass to tear it open, which was the same as tearing it apart.
They entered the hall. The house hadn’t been airtight. Everything was covered in a thin layer of sand. Each step was followed by a small, rising puff of sand. They passed the kitchen; dishes were laid out under the layer of sand, as though time had stopped in the middle of a regular day. They passed the stairway that led down to the small cellar; Hjelm cast a glance down the steps. Three beer bottles stood on a small table. The sand had glued itself along their edges; they were like three pillars of salt in a salt desert. They entered a room with a bed. A few disintegrating posters were still clinging to the walclass="underline" Batman, a baseball team. A book lay open on the desk: Mary Poppins. On the pillow sat a threadbare teddy bear, covered with sand. Kerstin lifted it up; one leg remained on the bed. She blew it off and studied it. Her heart seemed about to break.
They went from Lamar’s room to his parents’; it was farthest off toward the wide-open spaces, which stretched on, flat, toward Cumberland Plateau. Larner pointed at the double bed; in the place of one pillow there was a large hole; down was still floating in the sandy air.
“This is where Lamar found his mother one hot summer morning,” he said quietly. “A shotgun. Her head was almost completely blown off.”
They went back out into the hallway and through the next door entered a guest room, which had its own entrance from the terrace.
“It has to be here,” Larner said.
He went over to the closet and opened the door. The assembled FBI forces stepped in with sturdy tools and instruments of measurement. They pulled a microphone along the wall. “Here,” said one of the FBI men. “There’s empty space behind here.”
“See if you can find the mechanism.” Larner moved back. They kept looking; he sat down on the bed, where the Swedes were already sitting.
“You can probably put that down now,” he said.
Holm stared down at the teddy bear that was sitting in her lap. She placed it on the bed. Sand had run out of the hole at the leg until it was just a fake shell of skin. She held up the scrap.
“The things we do to our children,” was all she said.
“I warned you,” said Larner.
It took time, almost fifteen minutes of intense, scientific searching. But finally they found a complicated mechanism, behind a piece of iron that had been screwed into place. Apparently Wayne Jennings hadn’t wanted anyone to make their way down there after his so-called death. But his son evidently had-and had retrieved his pincers.
A thick iron door slid open inside the closet; Hjelm even thought he could see the jacket arm that had gotten stuck one night and kept the door from closing again as it should. He walked over to the door to the guest room and crouched down, simulating the view a ten-year-old would have. Lamar had stood here; from here he had seen the shadow glide into the closet, and then he had followed. The thick metal door hadn’t closed properly.
Larner went into the closet and pulled open the door; the mechanism was a bit rusty and creaked in a way it surely hadn’t twenty years earlier. He turned on a powerful flashlight and disappeared. They followed him.
The narrow stone staircase had an iron handrail. Sand crunched under their feet as they made their way down the staircase, which was surprisingly long. Finally they came to a massive, rusty iron door. Larner opened it and shone his powerful flashlight around.
It was a shabby cellar, cramped, almost absurdly small, a concrete cube far belowground in the wilderness. In the middle a large iron chair was welded to more iron in the floor; leather bands hung slack from the armrests and chair legs. There was also a solid workbench, like a carpenter’s bench. That was all. Larner pulled out the drawers under the bench. They were empty. He sat in the iron chair as the little concrete cube filled with people; the last FBI man didn’t even fit and had to stand on the stairs.
“These walls have seen a lot,” said Larner.
For a second Hjelm thought he had made contact with all the suffering that the walls guarded: a hot and simultaneously ice-cold wind went through him. But it was beyond words.
Larner stood and clapped his hands. “Well, we’ll do a complete crime-scene investigation, but there’s no doubt that this is where most of the Kentucky Killer’s victims met their long-awaited deaths.”
They went back upstairs-claustrophobia wasn’t far off.
What had happened when ten-year-old Lamar had stepped into the torture chamber? How had Wayne reacted? Had he beaten him unconscious? Threatened him? Did he try to comfort him? The only person to ask was Wayne Jennings himself, and Hjelm promised himself and the world that he would ask him.