Bad Blood: A Crime Novel by Arne Dahl

her husky alto. Hjelm compared it to his own office, where Chavez surfed the Internet full time and where the conversation these days mostly seemed to involve soccer. He felt short of breath. He needed a little John Coltrane. And maybe he would be brave enough to return to Kafka, even though the worth of literature had been drastically devalued during the last few days.
    But most of all he needed to tell Kerstin something.
    He wondered what it was.
    “Can’t you give me a summary instead?” she said.
    He looked at her. She didn’t turn away. Neither of them understood the other’s look.
    “Three things,” he said professionally. “One: pay a visit to the twenty-three-year-old literature-student son, Laban Hassel. Two: find out more about the colleague Elisabeth Biskopsnäsa, the one who called the hospital and tattled. Three: check whether those threatening e-mails are still on the computer, either at home or at the newspaper office.”
    “Have you been to Hassel’s home at all?”
    “I swung by. No obvious KGB signs fluttering around like vampires. A tasteful, large Kungsholm apartment with a few bachelor touches. And exercise equipment. Do you want to take a peek?”
    She shook her head. “There’s something I have to check on. Try to get Jorge out into the sunlight.”
    He nodded, hesitated at the door for a second, and cast a quick glance at the tape player. Then he left it with her.
    She regarded it for a while. She looked at the closed door, then back at the tape player.
    She fast-forwarded to a point in between the passages that Hjelm had so frantically toggled. Paul had asked the ex-wife:
    “Who is your new husband?”
    “Surely that has nothing to do with this.”
    “I just want to know what you’ve got instead of Hassel. What you looked for instead. The differences. It might tell me a few things about him.”
    “I live with a man who works in the travel industry. We do well together. He works hard but leaves work at work and devotes his time to me when we’re home.We have a normal life together. Was that the answer you were looking for?”
    “I think so.”
    Kerstin Holm looked at the closed door.
    For a long time.
    Hjelm did get Chavez out into the sunlight. At a moment when his desk mate complained about increasing bum sweat, he jumped at the opportunity, and the two former Power Murder heroes left police headquarters to the hands of more permanently accomplished medalists like Waldemar Mörner. They hadn’t been able to find out exactly what had happened with the complaint from the news reporter, who had received, quote, “massive lip injuries” when Mörner shoved the microphone into his mouth. Presumably the complaint had been considerably easier to digest.
    Out on the street, yet another sparklingly clear late-summer afternoon offered up its free services. Autumn had arrived in Arlanda, but it was delaying its appearance in Stockholm. The somewhat tired symbolism could hardly escape anyone.
    Chavez could still comfortably wear his old linen jacket, which needed washing more than its camouflaging gray color cared to admit. He stretched his compact Latin body intensely as they walked along Kungsholmsgatan and crossed Scheelegatan.
    “The Internet,” he said dreamily. “Endless possibilities. And endless amounts of shit.”
    “Like life,” Hjelm said philosophically.
    They turned onto Pipersgatan, trudged up the hill, and started up the steep steps toward Kungsklippan, where the rows of houses tried to eclipse one another’s views of Stockholm. Some stared out over City Hall and police headquarters—theywere hardly the most attractive ones—while others cast covetous glances past Kungholms Church to Norr Mälarstrand and Riddarfjärden; still others peered a bit disdainfully out over the muddle of the city and beyond, to upper Östermalm. Lars-Erik Hassel’s son from his first marriage lived in one of these last.
    They rang the doorbell. After a while a young man with a thin goatee,