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cynicism inherent in this wait.
    “No,” Hultin answered. “The atrocities don’t include torn-out teeth or chopped-off fingertips.”
    “What do they include, then?” Nyberg asked.
    “Wait.” Chavez was staring down into his overflowing notebook. “We weren’t quite finished. Who
were
the identified victims? Does he concentrate on some particular social class?”
    Hultin once again swung his mental machete through the jungle of paper. While he searched, he said, “Many of your questions will be answered by the complete FBI report, which Special Agent Larner is going to fax over this afternoon, but okay, we might as well anticipate the events.…”
    Then he found what he was looking for.
    “The eight people identified in the first wave were relatively highly educated. He seems to have a weakness for academics. The six in the second wave were more varied. Maybe he’s gone and become a democrat.”
    “Get to sex sometime,” said Kerstin Holm abruptly.
    A moment of bewildered silence ensued among the male audience. Then Hultin understood: “A single woman in the first group, out of eighteen. Two out of six in the second.”
    “There are a few differences after all,” Holm summarized.
    “Like I said,” said Hultin, “perhaps he’s become a democrat when it comes to sex, too. Let’s wait and see what Larner has tosay about it. He’s followed the case from the very start. In the seventies, based on the MO, they narrowed it down to a group of, if not
suspects
, then at least
potential
perpetrators. It turned out to have certain similarities to a method of torture from, believe it or not, the Vietnam War. A specific and extremely unofficial American task force used it to get the Vietcong to talk without screaming. An utterly silent method of torture, tailor made for the jungle. Since the existence of the task force was officially denied and brushed off as just another Vietnam myth, it was extremely difficult for Larner to get names. He hinted that he was stepping on quite a few tender and highly placed toes, and likely he was making a fool of himself and destroying his chances for promotion to boot. But slowly and surely, he tracked down the task force, which went by the disagreeable code name ‘Commando Cool,’ and ferreted out the names of those involved. Above all, one person who could
almost
have been called a suspect crystallized: the group leader, a Wayne Jennings, from none other than Kentucky. There was never any proof, but Larner followed Jennings wherever he went. Then something unanticipated happened. Jennings got tired of the surveillance and tried to evade the FBI—and he got into a head-on car collision. Larner was there himself and saw him burn up.”
    “Did the murders continue after that?” Chavez asked.
    “Yes, unfortunately. There were two more in quick succession, and then they stopped. Larner was blamed for having hounded an innocent man to death. There was a trial. He survived it, sure, but he fell in the hierarchy. And it didn’t get any better for him when, after fifteen years of walking into a headwind, he realized that the killer had started up again. For just over a year now, Ray Larner has been back where he started with the elusive Kentucky Killer. I don’t envy him.”
    “You should,” said Söderstedt. “He isn’t Larner’s responsibilityanymore—he’s yours. He’s the one who’s free, not you.” Söderstedt paused, then continued maliciously: “You’re taking over from scratch after twenty years of intensive FBI investigations that had resources equivalent to the Swedish GDP.”
    Hultin observed him neutrally.
    “So what was so special about Commando Cool’s modus operandi?” Gunnar Nyberg tried. “How did that literary critic die?”
    Hultin turned to him with an expression that could have been interpreted as suppressed relief. “The point is that it’s two different things,” he said. “The serial killer makes use of what we can call a
personal