Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read Free

holster and was wholeheartedly present. He and Chavez half-ran toward the room that had once gone by the name “Supreme Central Command” and that—he thought hopefully—might do so once again. On their way through the hall, a door flew open in Chavez’s face, and Viggo Norlander hurtled out. Though he hadonce been the group’s dependable rule follower, since the Power Murders Norlander had become their bad boy; he had replaced his old, worn-out bureaucrat suits with trendy polo shirts and leather jackets, and his slight midlife flab was upgraded to a genuine six-pack.
    The rest of the group was already assembled when Norlander and Hjelm tumbled in. Chavez arrived just behind them with a handkerchief to his nose. Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin surveyed him skeptically from the desk at the front of the unexceptional little room; he was sitting there like an owl, or rather like a bored junior high school teacher who’d been forgotten by the pension board. His diminutive glasses were perched in their proper place, like a small, natural growth, on his giant nose. No newly kindled passion shone in his eyes, though something may have smoldered in their corners. He cleared his throat.
    All the members of the select group were actually there; all of them had, as usual, flex-timed in early so they could go home early, and none had been loaned out to some strange posting elsewhere as punishment. Gunnar Nyberg, Arto Söderstedt, and Kerstin Holm were already sitting up front. Nyberg and Söderstedt were of the same generation as Norlander, which meant they were a few years older than Hjelm and many years older than Chavez; Holm was somewhere between the latter two. She was the only woman in the group; a short, dark-complected Gothenburger, she was the third cog in the trio of brains, along with Hjelm and Chavez.
    On the other hand, she had something very important in common with the group’s purest bundle of energy, her office mate Gunnar Nyberg: both sang in a choir and weren’t ashamed to be caught singing
a cappella
numbers in their office. Nyberg had a colorful past as a brutal, steroid-using body builder, but nowadays he was a timid middle-aged man, a sloppily clad mountainof meat with a lovely singing voice who could still break out his old moves if necessary. During the investigation of the Power Murders, having already taken a bullet in his throat, he had tackled an accelerating car and put it out of action. Söderstedt, for his part, was one of the strangest group members, a Finland-Swedish, chalk-white former top lawyer whose conscience had caught up to him; he always worked apart from the others, following his own paths off the beaten track.
    Norlander, Chavez, and Hjelm took places in the row behind the trio. Then Hultin began in his customarily neutral voice, “A Swedish citizen has been murdered in the United States. But not just
anyone
, not just
anywhere
, and not
by
just anyone. A relatively well-known Swedish literary critic was killed a few hours ago at Newark International Airport, outside New York. He was sadistically tortured by a serial killer whose activity goes back several decades. Up to this point, it has nothing to do with us.”
    Apparently there was time for one of Hultin’s dramatic pauses, because what followed was that very thing.
    “Our dilemma,” he continued, “is that this robust serial killer of a robust international character is on his way here.”
    Another moment of silence, a bit more loaded.
    “The information from the FBI indicates that the killer took the literary critic’s seat on the flight. At this very moment he is on flight SK 904, which will land at Arlanda in just under an hour, at 08:10. All together the plane is carrying 163 passengers, and the police in New York have chosen
not
to inform the crew of the situation. At present we are in a state of uncertainty as to the identity of the perpetrator, which isn’t so strange when you consider that he’s been