the text. Mia Johansson was good enough to be on the force, he told himself. One section of the bookshelf was only half full and seemed to contain material belonging to Svensson, mainly press clippings of his own articles and others on subjects that had interested him.
Holmberg spent a while going through the computer and found that it held almost five gigabytes, everything from software to letters and downloaded articles and PDF files. Certainly he was not going to be able to read through it in one evening. He added the computer and assorted CDs and a Zip drive with about thirty disks to the confiscated items.
Then he sat brooding for a while. The computer contained Johansson's work, as far as he could see. Svensson was a journalist, and a computer ought to be his most important tool, but he did not even get email on the desktop. So he must have had a computer somewhere else. Holmberg got up and went through the apartment, thinking. In the hall there was a black backpack with some notebooks that belonged to Svensson and an empty compartment for a computer. He could not find a laptop anywhere in the apartment. He took the keys and went down to the courtyard and searched Johansson's car and then the apartment's basement storage area. He found no computer there either.
The strange thing about the dog is that it did not bark, my dear Watson.
He made a note that at least one computer seemed to be missing.
Bublanski and Faste met Ekstrom in his office at 6:30 p.m., soon after they returned from Lundagatan. Andersson, after calling in, had been sent to Stockholm University to interview Johansson's tutor about her doctoral thesis. Holmberg was still in Enskede, and Modig was running the crime scene investigation at Odenplan. Ten hours had passed since Bublanski was appointed leader of the investigative team, and seven hours since the hunt for Salander had begun.
"And who is Miriam Wu?" Ekstrom said.
"We don't know much about her yet. She has no criminal record. It'll be Faste's task to start looking for her first thing tomorrow morning. But as far as we could see, there's no sign that Salander lives at Lundagatan. For one thing, all the clothes in the wardrobe were the wrong size for her."
"And they weren't your typical clothes, either," Faste said.
"Meaning what?" Ekstrom asked.
"Well, let's just say they weren't the type of clothes you'd buy for Mother's Day."
"We know nothing about the Wu woman at present," Bublanski said.
"How much do you have to know, for God's sake? She has a closet full of whore outfits."
"Whore outfits?" Ekstrom said.
"Black leather, patent leather, corsets, and fetishist whips and sex toys in a drawer. They didn't look like cheap stuff, either."
"Are you saying that Miriam Wu is a prostitute?"
"We know nothing about Froken Wu at this stage," Bublanski said a little more sharply.
"One of Salander's social welfare reports indicated a few years ago that she was involved in prostitution," Ekstrom said.
"And social welfare usually knows what they're talking about," Faste said.
"The social welfare report was not supported by any police reports," Bublanski said. "There was an incident in Tantolunden when she was sixteen or seventeen; she was in the company of a considerably older man. Later the same year she was arrested for being drunk in public. Again with a considerably older man."
"You mean that we shouldn't draw conclusions too hastily," Ekstrom said. "OK. But it strikes me that Johansson's thesis having been on trafficking and prostitution, there's a possibility that in her work she made contact with Salander and this Wu and in some way provoked them, and that this might somehow constitute a motive for murder."
"Johansson might have got in touch with Salander's guardian and started the whole merry-go-round," Faste said.
"That's possible," Bublanski said. "But the investigation will have to document that. The important thing for now is to find Salander. She's obviously no longer living on Lundagatan. That means we also have to find Wu and discover how she came to live in that apartment and what her relationship with Salander is."
"And how do we find Salander?"
"She's out there somewhere. The problem is that the only address she ever had was on Lundagatan. No change of address was filed."
"You're forgetting that she was also admitted to St.Stefan's and lived with various different foster families."
"I'm not forgetting." Bublanski checked his papers. "She had three separate foster families when she was fifteen. It didn't go well. From just before she turned sixteen