Postcard killers

Instead, he picked up the picture of the couple from Paris.

Emily and Clive Spencer, just married, propped up next to each other against a pale-colored headboard in a Montparnasse hotel room. They were both naked. The streams of blood that covered their torsos had gathered in congealed little pools around their genitals.

Why?

Chapter 3

Jacob reached for the wedding photograph he had asked Emily's mother to send him.

Emily was only twenty-one years old. Clive had just turned twenty-six.

They were a stu

Maybe a touch overweight, but that suited his status as a stockbroker in the London markets.

Emily looked like a fairy-tale princess, her hair in big ringlets framing her head. Slim and fragile, she looked quite enchanting in her ivory dress. Her eyes shone at the camera.

They had met at a mutual friend's New Year's party in Notting Hil, in one of those narrow trendy houses where the film with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts had been shot.

Emily's mother hadn't been able to stop crying when Jacob talked to her on the phone.

He could neither comfort nor help her. He wasn't even formal y involved in the case, after al. As an American police officer, he had to be careful not to get involved in the work done by the authorities in other countries.

That could have diplomatic consequences and, even worse, could lead to his expulsion from the country.

A wave of despondency washed over Jacob with a force that took his breath away and made the mug of wine in his hand shake.

He quickly emptied it of its contents and went and poured some more.

Pathetic, he knew.

He sat down at the desk once again, his back to al the photographs and postcards so that he didn't have to look at them.

Maybe he should go and shower. Head down to the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor in the hope that there was some hot water left. Did he even have any soap? Christ, had he even used soap since he arrived in Berlin?

He drank some more wine.

When the bottle was empty, he picked up the pictures of the dead couple from Rome. He placed them in front of him on the desk and put his 9mil imeter Glock 26 beside them, just as he always did.

The kil ers had sent two pictures of the murder in Rome: one image of the two naked victims and a close-up of two of their hands.

The woman's left and the man's right.

He picked up the picture of the hands and traced the shape of the woman's graceful hand with his finger, smiling as it reached the birthmark at the base of her thumb.

She played the piano, was an expert on Franz Liszt.

He breathed out deeply, let go of the picture, and picked up his gun.

He ran the palm of his hand over the dul plastic of the grip and put the muzzle in his mouth. It tasted of powder and metal.

He closed his eyes and the room slid gently to the left, the result of far too much Riesling.

No, Jacob thought. Not yet. I'm not done here yet.

Chapter 4

Friday, June 11

Stockholm, Sweden

The postcard lay next to a harmless invitation to a boules tournament – the newsroom against a rival newsroom – and another invitation to a wine-tasting evening with the culture crowd.

Dessie Larsson groaned out loud and tossed the cards for the pointless social events into the recycling bin. If people paid more attention to their work instead of playing with bal s and scratching one another's back, maybe this newspaper would have a future.

She was about to get rid of the postcard the same way but stopped and picked it up.

Who sent postcards these days, anyway?

She looked at the card.

The picture on the front was of Stortorget, the main square in Stockholm's Old Town. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. People were eating ice cream on the benches, and the fountain in the middle was purling with water.

Two cars, a Saab and a Volvo, stood parked in front of the entrance to the Stock Exchange Building.

Dessie turned the card over.

What sort of insane crap was this?

She turned the card over and looked at the picture once more, as if it might give her a clue to the cryptic words on the back.

Ice cream was licked, water purled. Neither the Volvo nor the Saab had moved.

People need to get a life, she thought as she tossed the card into the recycling bin.

Then she went over to her desk in the crime section.

"Has anything happened in Stockholm today? Anything at al?" she asked Forsberg, her dumpy, disheveled news editor, as she put her backpack on the desk and set her bicycle helmet down next to it.

Forsberg looked up over his glasses for a fraction of a second, then went back to the newspaper in front of him.

"Hugo Bergman has written a big piece. The People's Party want a European FBI. And they've found another pair of young lovers murdered. In Berlin this time."

What sort of nonsense has Hugo Bergman come up with now? Dessie thought, sitting down at her desk. She took her laptop out of her backpack and logged into the paper's network.

"Anything you want me to do more work on, boss man?" she wondered out loud, clicking on the news about the double murder in Berlin.

"Talk about sick bastards, these kil ers," the news editor said. "What the hel 's wrong with people like that?"

"Don't ask me. I specialize in petty criminals," Dessie said. "Not serial kil ers. Nothing big and important like that."

Forsberg stood up to get a cup of coffee from the machine.

The victims in Berlin were Australians, Dessie read. Karen and Wil iam Cowley, both twenty-three and married for a couple of years. They'd come to Europe to get over the death of their infant son. Instead, they had run into the notorious murderers who were kil ing couples al over Europe.

The postcard had been sent to a journalist at a local paper. The picture was of the site of Hitler's bunker, and there had been a Shakespeare quote on the back.

Dessie suddenly gasped. She felt almost like she was having a heart attack, or how she imagined that might feel.

To be or not to be…

Her eyes were pi

"Forsberg," she said, sounding considerably calmer than she felt. "I think 11 they've arrived in Stockholm."

Chapter 5

"So, Dessie, you've no idea why the postcard was sent to you in particular?"

The police had taken over the conference room behind the sports desk.

Police superintendent Mats Duval sat on the other side of the table, looking at her through a pair of designer glasses.

An old-fashioned tape recorder, the sort that actual y used a cassette, was slowly winding on the table in front of her.

"Not the faintest idea," Dessie said. "I don't get it at al. No."

The newsroom was cordoned off. A team of forensics officers had taken the postcard, photographed it, and sent it off for analysis. After that, they had laid siege to the mail room.

Dessie didn't understand what they were expecting to find there, but they had a whole arsenal of equipment with them.

"Have you written any articles about this? Have you reported on any of the other murders around Europe?"

She shook her head.

The superintendent looked at her cool y.

"Can I ask you to reply verbal y so that your response gets picked up on the tape?"