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

and he was reminded of an earlier case. That it could in any way be connected with the Kentucky Killer was absurd, of course, but he left the door ajar, knowing from experience that as time went on, it was often through unclosed doors that the solution came creeping.
    By six o’clock the A-Unit had had time to round out the day with one last meeting. Norlander was missing—perhaps he had grown tired of scrubbing the toilets—but otherwise everyone was there. No one had anything new to contribute. Hultin had pieced together a whole lot about the Kentucky Killer that he would take home to go through. Nyberg had wasted his time in vain in the underworld, of course—no one there knew anything. Chavez said he would get back to them with possible news from the Internet world early tomorrow morning. Söderstedt had found tons of potential Americans in hotels and hostels, on Finland ferries and domestic flights; he activated a whole armada of foot soldiers around Sweden, all of whom drew a blank. Kerstin Holm’s afternoon had been the most interesting, possibly because she
didn’t
come up with anything.
    No one in the large flight crew could place the name Edwin Reynolds, and no one was struck by even the most minuscule whiff of retrospective suspicion. Perhaps one could triviallyconclude that he simply didn’t stand out. An everyman, like so many serial killers. One might suppose that a man who, hardly an hour earlier, had carried out a bestial, tortuous murder would stand out in some way, perhaps not with large, wild eyes, bloody clothes, and a dripping ice pick, but at least with something. The staff had no such recollections. But even that fact, after all, contained a certain amount of information.
    Hjelm had compressed his rather voluminous afternoon harvest into a synopsis that he was quite pleased with: “There are differing opinions on Lars-Erik Hassel’s abilities.”
    At Skärholmen, Hjelm drifted out of the musical haze, opened his eyes, and looked over at the next seat. The woman’s icy glare was still boring into him, as though he were the Antichrist. He allowed himself to not give a damn about her, fixed his eyes ahead, and was just about to close them when he saw Cilla on the opposite seat.
    “Who’s watching the children?” slipped out of him. He bit his tongue far too late and cried out in pain.
    Cilla gave him a measured look. “Hi yourself,” she said.
    “Sorry.” He leaned forward and gave her a kiss. “I was somewhere else.”
    She pointed at her ears with a scrunched expression.
    He yanked out his earphones.
    “You’re yelling,” she said.
    “Sorry,” he said again, feeling like a social wreck.
    “The children are sixteen and fourteen, as you may recall. They watch themselves.”
    He shook his head and laughed. “I bit my tongue.”
    “Far too late,” she said.
    The ice was broken, by one of the little moments when they read each other’s minds and overlooked each other’s shortcomings; when the positive aspects of habit triumphed over the negative ones.
    “Hi,” he started over, placing his hand on hers.
    “Hi yourself.”
    “Where have you been?”
    “I bought a shower curtain at IKEA. The old one was moldy. Haven’t you seen those black spots?”
    “I thought you had been throwing
snus
around.”
    She smiled. She used to laugh at his stupid jokes, but now she smiled. He didn’t really know what that meant. That he wasn’t as funny anymore, or that she was worried that her teeth were stained brown from coffee?
    Or was that what they called maturity?
    He still thought she was beautiful: her blond hair in its slightly disheveled page boy; the years that had gathered the right way, around her eyes instead of her waist; her gift for dressing sexily. And then her penetrating looks, too seldom in use these days.
    He loved to be seen through; this was an insight he’d had late in life, but that’s how it was. To be seen through is to be seen a second time, and that didn’t