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Hultin paged through the file. “Leaving the United States at all doesn’t really fit with his profile. His history is as follows.
    “It all started twenty years ago in Kentucky, where victims who had been killed in the same awful manner began to show up. The wave then spread all over the Midwest. It blew up in the media, and soon the notorious killer was going by the name the Kentucky Killer. Within today’s deeply alarming serial killer cult, he’s a legend, one of the original characters, and he’s thought to have inspired many budding practitioners. He committed a series of eighteen murders in four years, then stopped abruptly for a decade and a half. Just over a year ago a new series began with exactly the same MO, this time in the northeastern United States. Hassel was his sixth victim in this latest series, his twenty-fourth overall. His twenty-fourth
known
victim, I should probably add.”
    “A break of almost fifteen years,” Kerstin Holm mused aloud. “Is it really the same person and not a—what’s it called?”
    “A copycat,” said Hjelm, using the English word.
    Hultin shook his head. “The FBI has ruled that out. There are details of the MO that have never been made public and that only a few authorities at the bureau know of. Either he’s hidden his victims well for fifteen years, or else he quit and maybe settled down, before his craving for blood got the best of him once again. That’s the FBI’s scenario, anyway. That was why thebulletin went out for a white middle-aged man. Probability says that he was just under twenty-five when he began, so he’s just under forty-five now.”
    “And ‘white’ is also based on probability, I assume?” said the chalk-white Söderstedt.
    “Almost all serial killers are white men,” said Kerstin Holm. “A much-debated phenomenon. Maybe it’s some sort of hereditary compensation for the many hundreds of years of world domination that they are about to lose.”
    “Haphazard fascism” came flying out of Hjelm.
    The A-Unit considered this expression for a few long seconds. Even Hultin looked contemplative.
    “What kinds of victims were they, in fact?” Chavez asked at last.
    Hultin’s resumed page turning caused Hjelm to ponder the advantages of the Internet and encrypted e-mail, something that wasn’t too common yet. That was Jorge and Kerstin’s domain. They were also the ones who looked most irritated when information was slow in coming.
    “Let’s see,” said Hultin after a long pause.
    Chavez groaned quietly, which brought him a look that could mean yet another stain on his work record.
    “There’s a lot of diversity in the victims,” their wise leader said at last. “Twenty-four people of diverse backgrounds. Five foreign citizens, including Hassel. Primarily white middle-aged men, to be sure, which an alert officer who’s familiar with feminism could easily interpret as implied self-contempt.”
    “If it weren’t for the fact that he wasn’t middle-aged at all when he began murdering,” Kerstin Holm countered promptly.
    The icy chill in Hultin’s long look could have been fatal. “Quite a few of them remain unidentified,” he finally continued. “Even though the list of missing persons in the United States is a book as thick as the Bible, the number still seems disproportionately large—ten out of twenty-four.”
    “Is
that
something that’s changed?” Söderstedt asked alertly.
    Yet another look from Hultin. Then he paged frenetically and got a hit. “All six victims in the second round have been identified. That means that ten of eighteen in the first round remain unidentified. A majority. Maybe some sort of conclusion can be drawn from that. However, I’m not ready to do that right now.”
    “Could it be the case that the MO itself has made identification difficult?” asked Hjelm.
    Clearly their minds were sharp. Many of them had been waiting a long time for this very moment. To a person, they ignored the degree of