James Patterson - Postcard killers

Mac jumped out of the car. Sylvia took her seat belt off and slid over to the driver's seat.

With a certain amount of effort she put the car in gear. She wasn't used to driving cars with gears and a clutch. Then she sped off to the far side of the next bend.

There she stopped.

She wound down the window and listened over the sound of the engine.

The trees sighed; some sort of animal was bleating in the forest. The sound of a car rose and fel in the distance, but nothing came past. 166 She would have to wait here for a while.

Her eyes settled on some sort of construction in the trees. Planks, a ladder.

A tree house, or maybe a hunting post.

Suddenly she was fil ed with a feeling of intense hatred and disgust.

Imagine, there were people who lived the whole of their pointless lives in godforsaken places like this, working and drinking and fucking and building hunting posts without any awareness that there was anything else, that a higher level of human consciousness even existed. People out here abandoned their lives to meaningless banality, never bothering about bril iance, about aesthetics.

She tore her eyes from the hunting post and concentrated on the rearview mirror.

Mac was driving the red Volvo now. He didn't slow down as he passed her, just carried on at the same careful y precise speed: not too slow, but not too fast either.

She put the car in gear and fol owed at a safe distance. Careful. No mistakes.

Now they had to find a good spot to dump the car from Stockholm, somewhere it would be found relatively quickly, but not immediately.

She licked her thumb and pressed it against the wheel. A lovely print.

Suck on that, dear police!

It made her giddy to think of what they'd already achieved, and that was only the start.

The next part could be even more impressive, their next act. She and Mac were maturing as artists.

The whole case was breaking open now – and quickly.

The kil ers from Athens lived in Thessaloniki. They weren't a couple, just two art student friends at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the largest university in Greece. They were arrested on the campus, given away by the electronic trail left on their computers.

They were both deeply religious, and both claimed that they were in direct contact with "the creating God, the unknowable ruler of al the universe." They admitted to what had happened in Athens, but denied it was murder. Their work was part of a global conceptual artwork intended to reveal humankind's divinity.

The murders in Salzburg were traced to a young British couple from London. They were enrol ed at a fashionable art col ege in the middle of London. They hadn't attended any classes for the past four months. 167 Their fingerprints and DNA were found at the scene of the crime, and the murder weapon was discovered under a loose floorboard in the couple's apartment.

They didn't comment on the accusations. They didn't respond to any of the authorities' questions, and they even refused to talk to their own lawyer. On their blogs they had written that every individual was responsible for creating their own morals and their own laws, and that everything else was an affront to the rights of the individual.

The kil ers in Copenhagen were arrested that evening, both the repeat offender whose details had been in the DNA register and his accomplice, a younger woman who was deeply remorseful once she was captured. The woman confessed at once, in floods of tears, and said that she had changed her mind and tried to stop the kil ings. Her change of heart had occurred when her col eague had raped the young American woman, which hadn't been part of the "artwork" design.

Dessie looked at Jacob and saw how his eyes registered everything that was reported about the murderers, how his jaw clenched every time new information was received.

The other police officers exhibited the sort of relief that comes after an arrest and a confession, but not Jacob. The others' shoulders relaxed, became less tense, and the way they walked seemed somehow freer, but Jacob's face remained carved from stone.

She knew why.

Kimmy's kil ers were stil out there somewhere, probably on their way to Finland.

During the day, three cars had been stolen in the Stockholm region.

An almost-new Toyota from the suburb of Vikingshil. A Range Rover out in Hasselby garden suburb, at the end of the underground network. An old Mercedes from a parking garage beneath the Gal erian shopping center in the middle of the city.

"The Merc makes sense, right?" Jacob said. "They wouldn't take the underground al the way out to the suburbs just to get a car."

He picked up the map again.

"So now they're driving north. That's how Dessie and I figure it," he said.

"They might even have changed cars by now. I would have. They're traveling on minor roads and heading for Haparanda. They're sticking close to the speed limit. So they should get there early tomorrow morning, at the latest."

Mats Duval looked skeptical. "That's just speculation," he said. "There's nothing to prove that they'd choose that particular route, or even that mode of 168 transport. We don't know anything for certain."

Dessie watched Jacob stand up. He was making an effort not to attack anything, or anyone.

"You've got to reinforce the border crossings in the north," he said.

"What's the name of that river right on the border? The Torne River?"

"We can't al ocate manpower simply on the strength of guesswork," Mats Duval said, closing up his electronic gadget, a sign that the conversation was over.

At that, Jacob stormed out of the room, closely fol owed by Dessie.

"Jacob…," she began, taking hold of his arm. "Stop. Look at me."

He spun around, standing right next to her.

"The Swedish police are never going to catch them," he said in a low voice. "I can't let them get away again. I can't do that!"

Dessie looked into his eyes.

"No," she said. "You can't."

"When's the next flight to Haparanda?" Jacob asked.

She took out her cel and cal ed the twenty-four-hour travel desk at Aftonposten.

The closest airport was in Lulea, and the last flight that evening was an SAS plane, leaving Arlanda at 9:10.

She looked at her watch.

It was nine o'clock exactly.

The airport was forty-five kilometers away.

The first plane the next morning was a Norwegian Air Shuttle, due to leave at 6:55.

"We can be in Lulea at 8:20," Dessie said. "Then we have to rent a car and drive up to the border. It's another hundred and thirty kilometers away."

Jacob stared at her.

"Do you know any police up there? Or some customs officer who can keep an eye on things until we get there?"

"No," she said, "but I can cal Robert. He lives in Kalix. It's a forty-fiveminute drive from the border."

"Robert?"

She smiled, a smile that was almost a grimace.

"My criminal cousin. The big one who protected me when I was a kid.

And even now."

Jacob ran his fingers through his hair and paced quickly around the coffee machine.

"How long would it take to drive up there?" he asked. "If we leave now."

She looked at her watch again.

"If we go for it, and the road isn't ful of trailers and lumber trucks, we'l be there by six."

He slapped the wal with his hand, nearly putting a hole in it. 169 "That's not good enough," he said.

"If Robert keeps an eye on things, they won't get through," she said. "A blue Mercedes, registration TKG two-nine-seven, wasn't it?"

He looked at her, fire in his eyes.

"Have you got access to a car?"

"No," she said, "but I've got a bicycle."