Bad Blood: A Crime Novel by Arne Dahl Read Free Book Online Page A

a microscopic possibility that this was all coincidental, that the Kentucky Killer had been at Newark Airport not to flee the country but only to look for a new victim; that poor Lars-Erik Hassel had canceled his trip all on his own and had thrown his ticket away; and that just after that, a completely unrelated man with a fake passport had popped up with a last-minute booking. The combination of all these things, however, verged on the unbelievable. There was no real doubt that the Kentucky Killer had come to Sweden. The only question was why.
    FBI agent Ray Larner’s more exhaustive report had come in. According to the timetable, the plane had taken off from Newark at 18:20 local time. At 17:03 a man who called himself Lars-Erik Hassel had called and canceled his ticket, and at 17:08 an Edwin Reynolds had managed to get the extra ticket; thus he had waited five risky minutes so he wouldn’t attract attention.Around midnight a janitor had made the macabre discovery in a cleaning closet—just under two hours before the plane would land in Sweden. A few minutes later an Officer Hayden had appeared from the airport’s local police station; he recognized the two small holes on the victim’s neck and contacted FBI headquarters in Manhattan, which in turn contacted the Kentucky Killer specialist Ray Larner and got confirmation that it was a hallmark of the famous serial killer. After examining Hassel’s belongings, Hayden had been smart enough to conclude that the murderer had in all likelihood taken a seat on the victim’s flight to Stockholm-Arlanda. After a while he received verbal confirmation from the night staff at the SAS ticket counter that a ticket had been canceled too late to have been rebooked, at which point the tired ground hostess also remembered that there had been a late booking. She could access only the passenger manifesto, however, and not the specific data of
when
each person had booked. While the FBI frantically searched for someone who had access to that data, Hayden had contacted the National Criminal Police in Stockholm and ended up with Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin via the head of the NCP. At that point, it was 07:09 in Sweden. Hayden swiftly faxed over all the material he had, and this turned into a portion of the pile of papers Hultin had brought along to the quick meeting before the helicopter ride to Arlanda.
    Nothing in FBI agent Ray Larner’s newly arrived, scrupulous report indicated any departure from what had been said earlier; nor did it indicate any imaginable ties to Sweden. Thus there was nothing they could really do, other than wait for the first victim, and that was unbearable.
    Therefore they devoted themselves to mental preparation for the intensive burst of activity that lay ahead. They spent the rest of the afternoon on small tasks that not only gave them the illusion of meaningful work, the sensation of
doing
something,but also involved
individual
activity. Each of them seemed to need to digest the state of things on their own.
    Hultin continued to collect and organize the material from the FBI. Holm returned to Arlanda to see if any of the staff had been struck by a flashback or a flash of genius, anything at all. The cabin crew of flight SK 904 would, they had heard, also be there, and she prepared herself for her specialty: conversations, interviews, interrogations. Nyberg returned to his usual routine: he set off for the underworld of Stockholm to sound out the situation there. Söderstedt shut himself up in his office and called all the places that he could in any way imagine might be sheltering this Reynolds, who was surely no longer called Reynolds. Chavez threw himself into the world of the Internet; what he thought he could find there was a mystery to the uninitiated. Hultin set Norlander to the task of scrubbing all the toilets in the police station with an electric toothbrush, which was viewed as a technical achievement within the noble art of punishment.
    And Hjelm