Noren began rocking her upper body back and forth and let her hands glide up in front of her.
"I can feel that she's close... Wait a minute, I'll check my telepathic powers."
"Cut it out."
"I've already told you I haven't heard from her for almost two years. I have no idea where she is. So now, if there isn't anything else... "
Modig hooked up Svensson's computer and spent the evening cataloguing the contents of his hard drive and the disks. She sat there until 11:00 reading his book.
She came to two realizations. First, that Svensson was a brilliant writer who described the business of the sex trade with compelling objectivity. She wished he could have lectured at the police academy - his knowledge would have been a valuable addition to the curriculum. Faste, for example, could have benefited from Svensson's insights.
The second realization was that Blomkvist's theory about Svensson's research providing a motive for murder was completely valid. Svensson's planned exposure of prostitutes' clients would have done more than merely hurt a number of men. It was a brutal revelation. Some of the prominent players, several of whom had handed down verdicts in sex-crime trials or participated in the public debate, would be annihilated.
The problem was that even if a john who risked being exposed had decided to murder Svensson, there was, as yet, no prospect of such a link to Nils Bjurman. He did not feature in Svensson's material, and that fact not only diminished the strength of Blomkvist's argument but also reinforced the likelihood of Salander's being the only possible suspect.
Even if a motive for the murders of Svensson and Johansson was still unclear, Salander had been at the crime scene and her fingerprints were on the murder weapon.
The weapon was also directly linked to the murder of Bjurman. There was a personal connection and a possible motive - the decoration on Bjurman's abdomen raised the possibility of some form of sexual assault or a sadomasochistic relationship between the two. It was impossible to imagine Bjurman having voluntarily submitted to such a bizarre and painful tattoo. Either he had found pleasure in the humiliation or Salander - if she was the one who had done the tattooing - had first made him powerless. How it had actually happened was not something Modig wanted to speculate about.
On the other hand, Teleborian had confirmed that Salander's violence was directed at people whom she regarded as a threat or who had offended her.
He had seemed genuinely protective, as if he did not want his former patient to come to any harm. All the same, the investigation had been based largely on his analysis of her - as a sociopath on the border of psychosis.
But Blomkvist's theory was attractive.
She chewed her lower lip as she tried to visualize some alternative scenario to Salander the killer, working alone. Finally she wrote a line in her notebook.
Two completely separate motives? Two murderers? One murder weapon?
She had a fleeting thought that she could not quite pin down, but it was something she intended to ask Bublanski at the morning meeting. She could not explain why she suddenly felt so uncomfortable with the theory of Salander as a killer working alone.
Then she called it a night, resolutely shut down her computer, and locked the disks in her desk drawer. She put on her jacket, turned off the desk lamp, and was just about to lock the door to her office when she heard a sound further down the corridor. She frowned. She had thought she was alone in the department. She walked down the corridor to Faste's office. His door was ajar and she heard him talking on the phone.
"It undeniably links things together," she heard him say.
She stood undecided for a moment before she took a deep breath and knocked on the doorjamb. Faste looked up in surprise. She waved.
"Modig is still in the building," Faste said into the phone. He listened and nodded without releasing her from his gaze. "OK, I'll tell her." He hung up. "Bubble," he said in explanation. "What do you want?"
"What is it that links things together?" she asked.
He gave her a searching look. "Were you eavesdropping?"
"No, but your door was open and I heard you say that just as I knocked."
Faste shrugged. "I called Bubble to tell him that the NFL have finally come up with something useful."
"What's that?"
"Svensson had a mobile with a Comviq cash card. They've produced a list of calls which confirms the conversation