vegetarian lasagnas.
Dessie had taken her laptop back to bed and was reading
“An advance of three and a half million dollars,” she read, “plus royalties and even more money for the subsidiary sale of the book rights. And get this -
the lawyer has decided not to charge for her services. She only represented them because it was the right thing to do, she says.”
“Are they still at the Grand?”
She clicked further on the site and looked at her watch.
“According to Alexander Andersson’s blog, they checked out half an hour ago. They left through the back door to avoid the media scrum outside the main entrance.”
Jacob threw off the covers, leapt out of bed, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Dessie looked after him in surprise.
“There’s nothing that links them to the murders,” she called into the kitchen. “Jacob? They’re free to come and go as they like.”
She heard the kettle boil.
The next minute he was standing in the doorway with a mug of coffee in each hand. His face was as dark as a thundercloud.
“It was them,” he said. “I know it was. We can’t let them go free.”
“But there’s still no evidence,” Dessie said glumly. “We can’t prove a damn thing.”
He handed her a mug.
“Their gear must be somewhere. The eyedrops, the outfit he was wearing when he emptied those accounts, the things they’ve stolen and not managed to get rid of. And the murder weapon…”
“Exactly,” Dessie said. “That could be in any rubbish bin, and do you know why? Because I told them in that bloody letter that they were about to get caught. I gave them time to clean up.”
Jacob stopped beside the bed and looked at her.
“There was nothing wrong with that letter. You were doing the right thing when you wrote it. You were very brave.”
“Was I?” Dessie said. “What did it actually achieve? Apart from warning the Rudolphs and making a fool of me in front of every proper journalist in Sweden.”
He walked angrily across the bedroom floor, turned, and came back.
“They didn’t throw their stuff away,” he said, “not all of it, anyway. Most serial killers keep trophies. They would have chosen a hiding place as soon as they got to Stockholm. It’s entirely possible that it’s all still there. I think that it’s even likely.”
He stopped midstride.
“The little key!” he said.
Dessie blinked.
“What?”
He reached across Dessie and her computer to grab her cell phone from the bedside table.
“What’s going on?”
“At the bottom of page three of the official report, there’s something about a key. My FBI friend noticed it. I can’t help hoping it belongs to some left-luggage locker in Stockholm.”
Chapter 119
GABRIELLA SIGHED HEAVILY INTO the phone.
“Of course we looked at the key,” she said. “There was nothing to indicate that it actually belonged to the Rudolphs.”
Jacob realized he was grinding his teeth again. This could be the
“It was in the toilet cistern in the hotel room. It could have been there for weeks. Who knows for how long?”
Jacob had to stop himself from slamming the phone against the bedroom wall. You didn’t have to be an expert to know that water cisterns were a favorite hiding place for lots of people, and especially criminals in a new city. Christ!
“The key belongs to them!” he said. “It fits a locker, a postal box, or some other form of lockable space. And I hope that’s where you’ll find all the evidence. Please get on it immediately.”
“The Rudolphs have been ruled out of the investigation,” Gabriella said curtly, then hung up.
Dessie took her cell phone away from him before he smashed it against the head of the bed.
Jacob collapsed onto the bed, all his energy gone, his patience, too. He’d flown across the Atlantic twice within a week, and by now his body clock had practically lost track of what century it was.
“What was the name of that art group at UCLA?” Dessie asked, pulling the laptop over.
He had shut his eyes and was massaging his own neck. “The Society of Limitless Art,” he muttered.
What could he do to persuade the police to open the investigation again?
Or even to act like real cops?
He couldn’t just let the Rudolphs disappear.
“Here’s something,” Dessie said. “Look at this! You don’t even have to move. Just open your eyes.”
She turned the laptop to face him.
Welcome to the Society of Limitless Art
You are visitor no. 4824
“The address is www.sola.nu,” she said. “That’s a domain registered on Niue, an island in the South Pacific. They let anyone register any sort of address in just a couple of minutes.”
Jacob took a look at the screen.
“They set this up when they were at UCLA,” he said.
Dessie tried clicking on the first tab, Introduction.
“And here we have the background of conceptual art,” she said. “Marcel Duchamp tried to exhibit a urinal in New York in nineteen seventeen. He was refused.”
“I wonder why,” Jacob said.
“Look here,” Dessie said.
Jacob sighed and sat up.
The gallery included a long sequence of strange photographs that he would hardly have associated with art: motorways, trash, an unhappy cow, and a few shaky home movies of - what a surprise! - motorways, trash, and presumably the same unhappy cow. It was hard to tell for certain.
“This is ridiculous,” Jacob said. “I feel like that cow, though. Does that make me a work of art?”
“Their ridiculous art project got them thrown out of school,” Dessie said.
“This sort of thing matters to them.”
Jacob stood up now, looking for his jeans.
He found them out in the hall. He stopped there, trousers in one hand, and stared back into Dessie’s living room.
So this was where it all ended, in an apartment halfway to the North Pole. He’d done his best, but it wasn’t enough. Kimmy’s killers were going to walk free. Could he live with that? Who cared? What was the alternative?
“Hey!” Dessie called. “Look here!”
“What?”
He went back toward the bed.
“Sections of the site are locked. It’s a puzzle to be solved. We need a password.”
