to understand.
Instinctively she put her hand on his arm, which was tensed up and very strong.
“But what does this actually tell us?” Gabriella said. “That the killers are fucked in the head? We already knew that.”
Her tone was terse, almost dismissive. Dessie looked at her in surprise. She removed her hand from Jacob’s arm.
“It tells us more than that,” Jacob said, now a policeman again. “It tells us a lot of things. They’re showing off. They’re contemptuous. They’re demonstrating to us how they have power over life and death. Maybe that death is a form of art that they can use as they please.”
Dessie was surprised at the depth of the thought.
Gabriella’s intercom crackled.
“The video from the Museum of Modern Art is at the Bergsgatan reception desk now,” a voice said.
Jacob stood up.
“Ask for the recordings from all the museums,” he said. Gabriella’s head jerked.
“Do you realize how many recordings we’re talking about? Anyway, they won’t have them after such a long time.”
But Jacob had already left the room.
Chapter 51
THE RECORDINGS FROM THE SECURITY cameras at the Museum of Modern Art were of relatively good quality. Hopefully, they would be incriminating.
They were a bit grainy, and the colors were slightly flattened, but the people coming and going were clearly visible in the bright lighting. The recordings had no sound.
Jacob and Gabriella had barricaded themselves into a video suite deep in the basement of police headquarters, in the middle of piles of computer disks. The files weren’t in order or marked in any useful way, which meant they had to go through each of them in turn.
“Where to start with this very bad movie?” Gabriella said, a note of resignation in her voice.
Jacob flipped through the disks, thinking out loud.
“The murders took place on Saturday afternoon. So they must have visited the museum before that.”
“If they were ever actually there,” Gabriella said. “Don’t forget that part.”
Jacob chose to ignore her negative attitude.
“Saturday morning isn’t very likely,” he said. “They were probably busy doing other things then.”
“Like what?” Gabriella said.
He looked at her in mild despair.
“Buying champagne and smoking dope with the German couple they would then murder in cold blood.”
They divided the recordings between them and started their random viewing.
Chapter 52
JACOB WAS STUDYING A SCREEN where a group of schoolchildren were wandering aimlessly around the room containing Swedish art at 9:26 on Friday morning. He hit the fast-forward button, and the children suddenly started dashing about like mad things, jumping around the room like midget actors in an old silent movie.
“What do you think of Dessie?” Gabriella asked out of nowhere without turning away from her screen.
Jacob looked over at her in surprise.
She had also sped up her recording, and had reached Thursday 2:23.
“Pretty smart girl, for a journalist. Why? What do you think of Dessie?”
Gabriella got to the end of her recording and reached for a new disk from the pile. Friday 3:00 started with three old ladies who seemed more interested in one another than in the art around them.
Gabriella slowed down her recording to look more carefully at a group of Japanese visitors on a guided tour in front of Dardel’s painting.
“She’s got a lot of integrity, which makes her seem tougher than she is. It was probably a mistake to force her to write that letter,” Gabriella said. Jacob glanced over at Gabriella’s screen and watched her hit fast-forward again after the Japanese tourists disappeared.
“Stop! Look at that,” Jacob suddenly said.
At 3:27 a young couple came into the room and stood in front of
The woman had long hair, dark but not black. It was hard to judge the exact color because of the quality of the film.
Beside her was a tall, well-built man with fair hair. The man put his arm around the woman’s shoulders. She stroked his back and slipped her fingers under the waistband of his jeans.
Together they went right up to the painting, like they were inspecting it thoroughly.
“Do you think that could be them?” Gabriella wondered. Jacob didn’t answer.
The couple kept standing there, looking at the painting, speaking only occasionally to each other. They paid no attention to any of the other works in the room.
Gabriella moved the video forward frame by frame so they didn’t miss anything, not a single gesture.
Jacob wished he could hear what they were saying to each other. The young couple stood in front of the canvas for almost fifteen minutes. They had their arms around each other the whole time. Then they abruptly turned to leave the room. The woman kept her head lowered, but just as the man reached the doorway, he threw his hair back. Suddenly his handsome features were caught in razor-sharp precision by the security camera.
Gabriella caught her breath.
“It’s him!” she said. “That’s the guy from the police composite.”
Jacob leapt forward and paused the image. His voice was hoarse with excitement.
Chapter 53
DESSIE SPREAD HER NOTES AND research material out across Gabriella’s desk. She was starting to get excited about the possibility of solving these murders.
There was one aspect of the killers’ pattern that she’d noticed several times:
She leaned back in her chair, chewing the hell out of a ballpoint pen. If she ignored the murders and the brutal artistic associations, what was left of the Postcard Killers?
Well, a couple of petty thieves.
And how did people like that behave?
She didn’t need her research material in front of her to know the answer to that.
They were creatures of habit, just like everyone else, and maybe even more so.
Criminals who concentrated on break-ins, for instance, almost always started in the bedroom. That was
