connection to one victim and a possible connection via Blomkvist to the other two victims. For Bublanski it was now basically a matter of finding Salander and putting her in a cell in Kronoberg prison.
Armansky's investigation was formally subordinate to the police investigation, and he had his own agenda. His objective was somehow to watch out for Salander's interests - to discover the truth, preferably a truth in the form of a persuasively mitigating circumstance.
Millennium's investigation was the difficult one. The magazine lacked the resources of the police, obviously, and of Armansky's organization. Unlike the police, however, Blomkvist was not primarily interested in establishing a reasonable scenario for why Salander might have gone down to Enskede and murdered two of his friends. He had decided over the Easter weekend that he simply did not believe the story. If Salander was in some way involved in the murders, there had to be entirely different grounds from those the police were suggesting - someone else may have held the gun or something had happened that was beyond her control.
Hedstrom said nothing during the taxi journey from Slussen to Kungsholmen. He was in a daze from out of the blue ending up in a real police investigation. He glanced at Bohman, who was reading Armansky's presentation again.
Then all at once he smiled to himself. The assignment had given him an unexpected opportunity to realize an ambition that neither Armansky nor Bohman knew anything about. He was going to have a chance to get back at Salander. He hoped that he would be able to help catch her. He hoped above all that she would be sentenced to life in prison.
It was well known that Salander was not a popular person at Milton Security. Most of the staff who had ever had anything to do with her thought she was a pain. But no-one had any idea how profoundly Hedstrom loathed her.
Life had been unfair to Hedstrom. He was good-looking, he was young, and he was clever too. But he was forever denied the possibility of becoming what he had always wanted to be - a policeman. His Achilles heel was a microscopic hole in his pericardium that caused a heart murmur and meant that the wall of one chamber was compromised. He had had an operation and the problem was fixed, but having a heart condition meant that he was once and for all deprived of a place on the police force. He was relegated to second-class.
When he was given the chance to work for Milton Security he accepted, but without the slightest enthusiasm. Milton was a dump for has-beens-police officers who were too old and couldn't cut it anymore. He too had been turned down by the police - but in his case through no fault of his own.
When he started at Milton one of his first assignments had been to work with the operations unit on a personal protection analysis for a famous female singer. She had been frightened by an over-enthusiastic admirer, who also happened to be a mental patient on the run. The singer lived alone in a villa in Sodertorn, and Milton had installed surveillance equipment and alarms and provided an on-site bodyguard.
Over a two-week period Hedstrom had regularly visited the villa in Sodertorn along with other Milton employees. He thought the singer was a snobbish and standoffish old bitch. She gave him only a bewildered look when he turned on the charm, but she ought to have been grateful that any fan remembered her at all.
He hated the way Milton's staff sprang to do her bidding. But of course he didn't say a word about how he felt.
One afternoon, the singer and two of the Milton staff were by her pool while he was in the house taking photographs of windows and doors that might need reinforcing. He had gone from room to room, and when he came to her bedroom he could not resist the temptation to open her desk. He found a dozen photograph albums from when she was a big star in the seventies and eighties and had toured the world. He also found a box with some very private pictures of the singer. The pictures were relatively innocent, but with a little imagination they might be viewed as "erotic studies." God, what a stupid cow she was. He stole five of the most risque images, which had obviously been taken by some lover.
He photographed the images there and then and put the originals