James Patterson - Postcard killers

"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."

Sunday, June 20

Copenhagen, Denmark

It was raining.

Dessie was sitting at a table by the window of a packed cafe on Stroget, a long pedestrian street, watching people hurry past with umbrel as and raincoats. She was surrounded by families with young kids out for the weekend, the youngsters sleeping in buggies or sitting in kids' seats and gurgling while their mothers drank lattes and their dads had a Sunday beer.

"Is this seat taken?"

She looked up.

A young father with tousled blond hair and a little girl in one arm had already taken hold of the chair opposite her.

"Yes," she said quickly. "I'm waiting for someone. Sorry. He'l be here shortly."

The father let go of the chair and gave her a sympathetic look. "Sure. No problem."

She had been sitting at the table on her own for over an hour now. But she actual y was waiting for somebody.

Nils Thorsen, a crime reporter on the Danish paper Extra-Avisen had been chosen as the Postcard Kil ers' Danish contact: a position he was as enthusiastic about as she had been in Sweden.

During the past twenty-four hours, the two of them had gone through al the details, pictures, and evidence that Jacob had left behind when he disappeared.

About an hour ago Thorsen had been cal ed back to the office: a letter had arrived in the afternoon mail, addressed to him. White, rectangular, capital letters.

Dessie watched the father go back to the mother. He said something and nodded in her direction. The woman snickered, and they both laughed.

She looked down at the table again and pretended she hadn't seen them.

The fact was, she had a lot in common with Nils Thorsen. They had the same profession, the same interests, and even the same moral principles. He 132 wasn't bad-looking either. A bit thin on top, maybe…

Why couldn't she feel the same way about him as she did about Jacob Kanon? God, she was starting to get loony, wasn't she? It was pretty pathetic, but it was out of her control now.

Slowly she wound her hair up, fastening it with a bal point pen, and went back to looking at the postcard in front of her.

Tivoli. The amusement park in the middle of Copenhagen. Posted while the Rudolphs were being held in Stockholm.

She had to face facts here.

However much she wanted to believe Jacob, his theory just didn't make sense.

Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph weren't guilty.

Not of sending this card, and not of sending the letter that Nils and the police here in Copenhagen had presumably opened by now.

Why had she let herself believe it?

People wil let themselves be convinced of anything, she supposed.

Anything was better than a life without meaning. That was why religion existed, and footbal team fan clubs, and volunteer torturers in the service of dictators.

As both a researcher and a journalist, she had regarded questioning everything as her guiding principle. Investigating. Thinking critical y. Not taking anything for granted.

Al at once a longing burned her like a hot iron.

Oh, Jacob, why aren't you here? How did you get into my head this way?

How did you get into my heart?

"Sorry, Dessie, so sorry," Nils Thorsen said, shaking the rain from his oilskin coat and sitting down opposite her. "That took ages, didn't it. I apologize."

He ordered a fresh beer at once, sneaking a look to see how she was taking his absence.

"Was it a Polaroid picture?" Dessie asked.

The reporter wiped his glasses on his sweater and put a copy of a blurry photograph in front of her.

The setting was unclear, and the focus al wrong. It was difficult to see what the picture was of, actual y.

Dessie squinted and looked closely at the shot.

It had been taken from a very low angle. She could make out the foot of a bed, but whatever was on top of it was unclear to her.

"Have they found the location where this was taken?" she asked. 133 "It's only a matter of time," Nils said. "It has to be a hotel room. Look at the painting in the background. No one would have anything that ugly in their own home."

"Are there… people on the bed?" Dessie asked.

Nils Thorsen put his glasses back on. His hands were trembling. The man was clearly frightened, and she understood that better than anyone.

"I don't know," he said.

She held the picture up to her face, shifted it around in the light. Bedding, some items of clothing, a handbag, and – Suddenly a foot came into focus. Then another. And another.

Instinctively she thrust the picture away from her eyes.

There were people there, two of them.

The evidence seemed to suggest that they were no longer alive.

"Do you real y think that's an imitation of a work of art?" the Dane asked.

"Impossible to say," Dessie muttered.

She pushed the terrible picture away and began to run through Denmark's most famous works of art in her mind.