Postcard killers

"No cats for me, Kimmy's al ergic."

Lyndon Crebbs suddenly became very serious and looked much more like himself, which meant even more suspicious.

"I've got a whole lot to tel you," he said.

Chapter 97

Copenhagen, Denmark

It was really still night, but the sun was already up.

The pretty American girl named A

She looked up at Eric and moved closer to him. Sometimes it felt like she could never get close enough.

The hip club was throbbing with music, but it was almost possible to talk in the upstairs bar. Not that anything sensible ever got said at this time of day, not in bars like this one.

"One more, then, eh?"

The guy who had bought their drinks was panting against her neck again.

He was cute, but stil…

She pressed herself against Eric, away from the other man.

"No, thanks," she said. "I've had enough."

"Go on," Eric whispered in her ear. "Just one more. We're al having fun."

A

The other guy ordered her another margarita.

A

"Whereabouts in the States are you from?" the guy asked as he handed her the drink. The salt around the rim rained down on her fingers.

"Tucson, Arizona," Eric said. He was always so polite to everyone.

"Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass…," the guy's pretty girlfriend sang, waving her glass.

"There's nothing but desert there, am I correct?"

"Not quite," Eric said.

A

"I want to go back to the hotel now," she said. "Please, Eric."

"Have you been traveling long?" the girl asked, sucking on the straw in her empty glass.

"Two and a half weeks," Eric said. "We real y like Scandinavia. It's total y awesome!"

"Yeah, isn't it?" the girl said.

She moved closer to Eric and kicked off one of her sandals. A

"You know what they say about men with big feet?" she said, looking up at Eric from behind her hair.

Eric smiled in that way that made his eyes twinkle. 129 A

While she was standing here, right next to them?

"Eric," she said, "I real y am tired. And we're going to Tivoli tomorrow…"

Eric gave a shril laugh, as if she'd said something real y childish. The girl laughed along with him.

"I think this feels like a magical evening," the girl said. "I'd real y like a souvenir of tonight, wouldn't you, A

She draped herself against her boyfriend and kissed him softly on the lips.

The guy buying the margaritas gave a slightly forced laugh.

"This could get expensive," he said. It was almost as if he was reading a script.

"There can't be any shops open at this time of day," Eric said.

The guy stiffened. "Hel!" he said. "You're right! So let's get a bottle of champagne!"

He signaled to the bartender again.

The girl tilted her head and smiled at Eric.

"I'd real y like to drink it with the two of you," she said, "in your hotel room."

A

"Come on," he whispered right in her ear, his breath hitting her eardrum.

"We wanted to meet new people on our trip, didn't we? These two are great."

A

Eric was quite right.

She real y had to stop being such a deadhead. They should go back to the hotel and party.

Chapter 98

Lyndon put two more bottles of beer on the table. Jacob grabbed one of them.

"I didn't think my sources would have much to say about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, but I was wrong," he said, sitting down heavily at the table.

"Are they real y twins?" Jacob asked, opening the bottle. The time difference was helping him feel a little high. He didn't mind.

"Oh yeah, they real y are. Born fifteen minutes apart. Why do you ask that?"

Jacob thought back to the video from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, how the couple had held on to each other, her hand sneaking inside the waistband of his trousers.

"Don't know," he said, taking a deep swig of beer.

"The real y interesting thing happened when the twins were thirteen."

Lyndon raised his bottle and drank, and Jacob could see his hand trembling. How il was he exactly? He looked bad, which upset Jacob. He didn't have a lot of friends like Lyndon.

"Their parents, Helen and Simon Rudolph, were murdered in their bed eleven years ago."

Jacob blinked.

"Don't tel me," he said. "Let me guess. They were naked and their throats had been cut?"

The FBI agent chuckled. "Precisely. The bedroom evidently looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood everywhere."

"Who did it?"

Lyndon Crebbs shook his head.

"The case was never solved. The father was an art dealer. There was talk that he was transporting more than just Renaissance paintings in the containers he shipped between South America and the U.S., but nothing was ever proved."

The ingenuity of the drug cartels knew no limits. Cocaine and Renaissance art?

"What happened to the kids?"

"Some relative looked after them. My contact thought it was a cousin of the mother's, but he didn't have a name."

Jacob drank some more.

"Sounds like they were pretty wel -off," Jacob said.

"You're not wrong there," Lyndon said. "Their home was evidently some sort of manor house, slightly smal er than the Pentagon. It's empty these days, owned by some bankruptcy agency."

"Is it far from here?"

"Not real y. Just east of Santa Barbara. Why? You thinking of going there?"

"Possibly. Did you get anything on the boyfriend, Wil iam Hamilton?"

Lyndon snorted.

"He was hardly in Rome last Christmas. He's never even had a passport.

He's never been out of the States."

Jacob groaned.

"I've got an address in Westwood," Lyndon said, "but I don't know if it's current. The Rudolphs used to hang out around that area, too. Looks like they studied art at UCLA, started some sort of group cal ed the Society of Limitless Art…"

Al of a sudden Jacob realized that he could no longer sit upright without a lot of concentration. He looked at his watch.

She's just woken up, he thought. The boats are gliding to and from the quays of Gamla Stan beneath her living-room windows, the sun has been up for hours and she's sitting on her sofa watching the sails flap in the wind, drinking coffee and eating a flatbread rol…

"Come on, I'l help you to the sofa," Lyndon Crebbs said. "You don't look so terrific yourself."