The Postcard Killers

“The Mona Lisa,” she said, putting a copy of da Vinci’s masterpiece alongside the photograph.

    Jacob clumsily grabbed the pictures, crumpling them slightly. The mysteriously smiling woman on the painting was holding her right hand over her left and resting both on her stomach.

    “Christ,” he said finally, “you’re right. That’s what they’ve been doing.”

    “Karen and Billy Cowley,” Dessie said.

    She put down the picture of the couple murdered in Berlin, showing them in profile, the side with their uninjured eye looking toward the camera. Beside it she laid a printout of an Egyptian statue.

    “The bust of Nefertiti, probably the most imitated work of art from Ancient Egypt. It’s in the Neues Museum in Berlin. The killers saw it there, I guarantee you.”

    Gabriella leaned forward. Her face was flushed, two red marks glowing on her cheeks. Dessie glanced at her. They had been there, too, to the Neues Museum, on their first trip away together.

    Jacob picked up the picture and studied it intently.

    “What do you mean?” he asked Dessie. “What do their gouged-out left eyes have to do with it?”

    “The bust of Nefertiti is missing its left eye,” Gabriella said. “Everyone knows that.”

Chapter 50

    DESSIE WASN’T PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN art. Hell, she hadn’t recognized the connection to The Dying Dandy. Not at first. But she was fairly knowledgeable about the theory, something she had picked up during her marriage to Christer, probably as a means of self-preservation. She hadn’t wanted to come across as an ignorant country girl from Norrland at the various openings. She hadn’t exactly felt any real emotion or joy from art, however. Gabriella, on the other hand, had a genuine love of art. She’d gotten on very well with Christer, better than Dessie had actually.

    “Amsterdam,” Dessie said, picking out a copy of the next painting.

    “Vincent van Gogh. Heard of him?”

    Jacob looked at her with indulgence.

    “I’m an American,” he said, “not a barbarian.”

    “One of his self-portraits,” she said. “It usually belongs in London, but this spring it was on loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He actually cut off his left ear, but the killers clearly didn’t know that, because they cut off-”

    “The right ears of their Amsterdam victims,” Jacob said breathlessly.

    “Hell. What are they up to?”

    A silence fell. Jacob drummed his fingers on the table, something he did when he was deep in thought.

    Gabriella looked through the pictures of the bodies and compared them to other works of art that Dessie had printed out.

    “Florence is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus?”

    “The Uffizi,” Dessie confirmed.

    “What about Athens, then? What’s Athens meant to be?”

    “I don’t know that one. But Madrid has to be The Naked Maja by Goya -

    from the Prado. What do you think, Jacob?”

    But Jacob wasn’t listening now. He had gone very pale. He was staring vacantly out at the greenery in Kronoberg Park.

    “Who was Kimmy?” he asked. “Which work of art is she? What were they imitating?”

    Dessie felt her palms sweating. She looked through the printouts and held them out to him.

    “The Sistine Chapel,” she said softly. “The Creation of Adam is a detail from the ceiling fresco. You know, Michelangelo…”

    She held the larger picture, with God lying in front of a human brain and stretching out his hand to Adam, and then a close-up of God’s finger almost touching Adam’s hand.

    Jacob turned to look at Dessie. His eyes were an even brighter blue, radiating a sorrow she couldn’t begin to understand.

This is Kimmy’s dad, she thought . Not Jacob the policeman, just Jacob thedad.

    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.