Bad Blood: A Crime Novel by Arne Dahl

been thinking about,” said the other church singer, Kerstin Holm. She was dressed in black as always, with a little black leather skirt of the type that Hjelm couldn’t help reacting to. It suddenly threw him back in time to just over a year ago. Yesterday’s homey feeling seemed to have opened the forbidden doors, and he found himself wondering how she really felt, who the new man in her life was, and what she thought of him now, afterward. Their relationship had been intense but unreal. Did she hate him? Sometimes he imagined so. Had he left her? Or was she the one who had left him? Everything was still shrouded in mist.
Misterioso
, he thought.
    He was abruptly brought back to reality by her words. “Serial killing is about being seen,” she said thoughtfully. Her contributions always resonated in a slightly different way. A womanly way, maybe. “The victims are meant to see their tormentor and therefore their murderer. A person doesn’t commit serial murders and then hide the victims. That would be something else.What are things like on that front? Has our man ever
hidden
a victim?”
    Hultin flipped through pages again. “It doesn’t seem like it, based on a quick look, but if you think it’s important, you should investigate further.”
    “I think pretty much all of us have had a vague sense that something is a bit wrong. Not a lot, but a little. He is bestially bloodthirsty but takes a fifteen-year break. He brings a fake passport to the airport but hasn’t booked a seat. He murders Hassel in the middle of the evening rush at one of the largest airports in the world without leaving a trace, but he doesn’t hide the body. He has all the attributes of a classic serial killer, but at the same time there’s a bit of a clinical hit-man professionalism to him. Does he really want to be seen? Or was he
telling
us where he was going? Can we also find a clue as to
why
he came here? We’ve discussed it before, but the combination seems not only dangerous but also wrong. Somehow.”
    It was that
somehow
, if anything, that everyone could get on board with.
    “Does it have something to do with Hassel personally, after all?” Hjelm dared to ask. “I’ve looked at his Maoist writings from the seventies, and they’re no trifling matter.” He picked at his bandaged eyebrow. “Let’s toy with the thought that the Kentucky Killer is KGB and that the wave of American murders is the result of Soviet imports. Hence the many unidentified victims. Did Hassel have some sort of information from the good old seventies that he couldn’t be allowed to divulge? Was he just one in a series of security risks or traitors or double agents? Maybe we could check unofficially with Larner to see if that idea has come up before.”
    “In any case,” Kerstin Holm replied eagerly, “that could explain the long break. He—or maybe a whole cadre—was quite simply called home sometime shortly after Brezhnev’s death in the early eighties. The KGB decreased its activity then; that fitsquite nicely. Then fifteen years later discontent spreads in Russia, the Communists make headway, agents are taken out of the deep freeze, and our friend is sent back to the United States to start afresh.”
    “He’s finished with the American list and switches over to the Swedish one,” Hjelm took up the baton of their appealing relay. “He weighs the risks with professional precision: ‘How can I get the message to the intended victims that I’m coming, without getting caught myself?’ Because it obviously is a matter of
being seen
, but in a different way than we first thought; this is a matter of being seen by those who are to be punished. He’s on a crusade; his goal is to strike fear in the hearts of all traitors. They must be informed that the state isn’t dead, that it’s never possible to flee the Soviet state; that it’s in good health as a state within a state.”
    “On the other hand,” Holm added, “he’s aware that