For he was becoming more and more certain that if father and son confronted each other in Sweden, the father would be victorious. He would kill his son for a second time.
They took the helicopter back to Louisville and caught a flight back to New York. The whole foray had only taken a few hours. It was afternoon at JFK, a long, hot afternoon. They took a taxi back to FBI headquarters, where they found Jerry Schonbauer sitting with his legs dangling, leafing through a pile of papers as though nothing had happened.
But it had.
“Good timing,” said Schonbauer. “I’ve just received a preliminary crime-scene report, including a preliminary reconstruction of the burned letter. That’s the only thing of interest. The rest of the investigation didn’t turn up anything-the apartment was completely clean. Here are your copies of the letter.”
It had been possible to make out the date: April 6, 1983. Almost a year after Wayne Jennings faked his death. It was a letter he wouldn’t have needed to write nor, presumably, been able to write. That he had done it anyway revealed a trace of humanity that Hjelm didn’t really want to see.
“When did his wife kill herself?” he asked.
“The summer of 1983,” said Larner. “Apparently it took a few months for her to understand the extent of the whole thing.”
The envelope had been among the burned remains. The Stockholm postmark had been clear. The address was that of the farm; apparently Wayne Jennings had been relatively certain that the FBI wasn’t reading his widow’s mail a year after his death.
What could be reconstructed read as follows (with the technicians’ comments in brackets):
Dear Mary Beth. As you can see, I’m not dead. I hope one day to be able to expla [break, burned] see you in another life. Maybe in a few years it will be p [break, burned] have been absolutely necessary. We were forced to give me this dis [break, burned] pe that you can live with this knowledge and [break, burned] ucky Killer is me and yet it’s no [break, burned] now go by the name [break, cut out] ty that Lamar is better off without me, I wasn’t always [break, burned] lutely must burn this letter immedia [break, burned]. Always, your W.
“Lamar didn’t want to give us the name.” Larner put down the letter. “Maybe he did want to give us the rest-it depends on how seriously we should take this half-failed incineration. But he didn’t want to give us the name-he cut it out before he set fire to the letter.”
“A loving husband,” said Holm.
“What does it actually say here?” said Hjelm. “ ‘The Kentucky Killer is me and yet it’s not’-is that how we should interpret it? And: ‘We were forced to give me this-disguise’? ‘We’?”
“That could mean Jennings was a professional killer, employed by someone else,” said Larner pensively. “Suppose, in the late seventies, it was suddenly necessary to get a great number of people to talk-engineers, researchers, journalists-and a whole cadre of unidentified people, probably foreigners. They called in their torture experts, who may have been on ice since the Vietnam War. They had to disguise the whole thing as the actions of a madman. The serial killer was born. And the consequences were plentiful.”
It hung in the air. No one said it. Finally Hjelm cleared his throat. “CIA?”
“We’ll have to attend to that bit.” Larner sighed. “It won’t be easy.”
Kerstin and Paul looked at each other. Maybe the good old KGB theory hadn’t been so far off target after all. Maybe it was top-level politics. But it was the victims who were KGB. Maybe.
“If I were you,” said Larner, “I’d look closely at Sweden’s immigration register for 1983. The last victim died in the beginning of November 1982. The letter was written from Stockholm in April 1983. Maybe you’ll find him listed among the immigrants during that interval.”
An FBI man looked in. “Ray, Mrs. Stewart has come up with a picture.”
They stood in unison and followed him. Now they would find out what Lamar Jennings looked like.
Chief inspector Jan-Olov Hultin looked skeptical. “ ‘Get out of here’?” he said. “ ‘Beat it’?”
“That’s what he said,” said Viggo Norlander.
He was lying in a hospital bed at Karolinska, dressed in a bizarre county council hospital gown. He had a large compress on the wound in his neck and still felt a bit groggy.
“So in other words, he spoke Swedish?” Hultin ventured pedagogically, bending down toward the once-again-defeated hero.
“Yes,” Norlander said sleepily.
“You don’t remember anything else?”
“He was dressed all in black. A balaclava. His hand didn’t shake so much as a fraction of an inch when he sighted me with the pistol. He must have missed on purpose when he fired. Then he took off in a pretty large car, maybe a Jeep, maybe brown.”
“This is an insane serial killer with many lives on his conscience. And he’s shot people before. Why didn’t he kill you?”
“Thanks for your support at this difficult time,” Norlander said, and conked out.
Hultin got up and went over to the other bed in the hospital room.
In it was yet another once-again-defeated hero. Both of his bundles of muscle had been flattened by the same man; that didn’t feel so great.
Gunnar Nyberg’s bandage was more extensive. His nasal bones were cracked in three places; he found it incredible that such small bones could be cracked in so many places. But his soul hurt much worse. He knew that no matter how hard he tried, he would never get that horrible image of Benny Lundberg out of his mind. He would probably die with it before his eyes.
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
Hultin sat in the visitor’s chair with a little groan. “Viggo? He’s recovering.”
“Not Viggo. Benny Lundberg.”
“Aha. Well, the latest news isn’t good. He’s alive, and he’ll survive. But his vocal cords are seriously injured, and the nerve paths in his neck are one big mess. He’s on a respirator. Worst of all, he’s in a state of extreme shock. The perpetrator literally terrified him out of his wits. He pushed him over the line of sanity, and the question is whether there’s any way back.”
Hultin placed an incongruous bunch of grapes on Nyberg’s table. “Your clear-headedness saved his life,” he said. “You should know that. If you’d tried to pull out the pincers, he almost certainly would have died right away. That neck doctor you got there struggled for over an hour. He had to operate at the scene. It was good that it was you and not Viggo who went in; I guess I can say that now that he’s out.”
Hultin looked into Nyberg’s eyes. Something had changed. “Are you okay, by the way?” he said quietly.
“No, I’m not okay,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “I’m furious. I’m going to put a stop to this guy if it’s the last thing I do.”
Hultin was of two minds about that. Certainly, it was excellent that Nyberg was coming out of his recent apathy toward work and his longing for retirement; but a furious Nyberg was like a runaway steam engine.
“Come back as soon as you can,” Hultin said. “We need you.”
“I’d be back already if it weren’t for this damn concussion.”
“That’s something we’ve got plenty of right now,” Hultin said neutrally.
They had been mistaken, thought Nyberg. It wasn’t two cases of pneumonia that had sailed through the air to find their rightful owners, it was two concussions.
“If we hadn’t stopped to eat, we could have saved him,” he said bitterly.
Hultin looked at him for a moment, then said goodbye, and stepped into the corridor. Before he stepped out into the evening’s downpour, he opened an umbrella with police logos, which kept the deluge in check until he reached his turbo Volvo, the only privilege of his rank that he accepted.