Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

hardly think we should count on anything from those sources, but of course we will keep looking. One plus is that the media doesn’t know anything, even though the TV cameras showed up quickly at Arlanda. I imagine you’ll see the results tonight. Our most esteemed boss Mörner appeared and gave a statement, which guarantees some sort of quality TV, at least. Questions, anyone?”
    “What happened with the roadblocks?” asked Gunnar Nyberg.
    “The only thing we accomplished was a few hours of complete traffic chaos on the E4. The Arlanda traffic in every direction is quite simply too dense. In addition, it took a hell of a long time to set up the roadblocks. Only a true amateur would have been caught. We’re trying to identify all the taxi and bus drivers who were working around Arlanda at the time in question, but as you know, deregulation has made the taxi traffic in Stockholm unmanageable, so we’ll probably have to admit defeat on that point. Anything else?”
    “Not a question, really,” said Kerstin Holm. “Just some information. According to the data register, our man was number eighteen to pass through my passport control. I’ve tried to get my impressions in order, and I’ve talked to the immigration officer, but neither of us has any memory of him at all. Maybe something will come up eventually.”
    Hultin nodded and continued mysteriously. “To be on thesafe side, I’ve made sure that
all deaths reported to the police
in the country, from now on, are reported
directly
to us, and the same goes for all suspected crimes against
Americans
in Sweden. If there’s the least suspicion of
foul play
, our brains must unanimously think: Could
this
have anything to do with our serial killer? This is
our
case now, even in an
official
sense, and it’s our
only one
, and the
whole
unit is part of it, and it is
top-top secret
, and no one around you must even catch a whiff of the words
bestial-American-serial-killer-loose-in-Sweden
. Wherever you are, think: Could the serial killer have anything to do with this bus being late? Might he have any connection at all to this bike accident or to that man’s incredibly spastic movements or to your better half’s increasingly loud snores? In other words, full focus.”
    They understood.
    “I have kept in rather intensive contact with the authorities in the United States,” Hultin continued. “Special Agent Ray Larner with the FBI has supplied us with a detailed account of last night’s events and a brief profile of the perpetrator. Concerning the results at Arlanda, more information will be streaming in during the next few days. Here is the broad outline as it stands right now.
    “The Swedish literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel was tortured to death just before midnight Swedish time in a janitor’s closet at the Newark airport outside New York. It was a few hours before he was found. He had no ticket on him, but a flight to Arlanda that same night was found to be written down in his agenda. In other words, it was likely that the killer had taken his ticket, but a person can’t check in if the name on the ticket doesn’t match the name on the passport, so they took a chance and checked with SAS to see if Hassel’s ticket had been canceled. Why steal the ticket otherwise? His wallet and agenda and everything else were still there, after all. And they got lucky—they got hold of a ticket agent who remembered a late cancellation by phone,which was quickly followed by a late booking. But of course this all happened at night New York time, and in order to find the name of the person who booked last, they needed a data expert who could go into the computer and get exact booking times. They finally managed to tear someone matching that description from the arms of his sweetheart, and he dug up the name, after which it was delivered to us. Eleven minutes too late.”
    Hultin paused and let the A-Unit’s slightly overloaded brains absorb this information.
    “This caused us