Mårtensson said. "I sent the gun and bullet fragments to NFL by messenger direct from the crime scene. Better for them to take care of it than for me to start handling the weapon."
"That's good. I haven't had time to go to the crime scene yet, but the two of you have been there. What are your thoughts?"
Nyberg deferred to her older colleague to speak for them both.
"First of all, we think it was a lone gunman. Second, it was an execution, pure and simple. I get a feeling that someone had very good reason to kill Svensson and Johansson, and he did his job with precision."
"What do you base that on?" Faste said.
"The apartment was neat and tidy. It bore none of the hallmarks of a robbery or assault or anything like that. And only two shots were fired. Both hit their intended targets in the head. So it's someone who knows how to handle a gun."
"Makes sense to me."
"If we look at the sketch of the apartment... from what we could reconstruct, we think that the man, Svensson, was shot at close range - possibly point-blank. There are burn marks around the entry wound. We're guessing that he was shot first. He was thrown against the dining table. The gunman could have stood in the hall or just inside the doorway to the living room.
"According to witnesses, people who live on the same staircase, the shots were fired within a few seconds of each other. Mia Johansson was shot from a greater distance. She was probably standing in the entrance to the bedroom and tried to turn away. The bullet hit her below the left ear and exited just above the right eye. The impact threw her into the bedroom, where she was found. She hit the foot of the bed and slid to the floor."
"A single shot fired by someone used to handling guns," Faste said.
"More than that: there were no footprints to indicate that the killer went into the bedroom to check that she was dead. He knew he had hit his mark and he left the apartment. So, two shots, two bodies, and then out. We'll have to wait for forensics, but I'm guessing that the killer used hunting ammunition. Death would have been instantaneous. There were ghastly wounds in both victims."
The team considered this summary in silence. It was a debate that none of them needed to be reminded of. There are two types of ammunition: hard, full-metal-jacketed bullets that go straight through the body and cause comparatively modest damage, and soft ammunition that expands in the body on impact and does enormous damage. There is a vast difference between hitting a person with a bullet that's nine millimetres in diameter and a bullet that expands to a couple of centimetres or more in diameter. The latter type is called hunting ammunition, and its objective is to cause massive bleeding. It is considered more humane when hunting moose, since the aim is to put down the prey as quickly and painlessly as possible. But hunting ammunition is forbidden for use in war by international law, because a soldier hit by an expanding bullet almost always dies, no matter where the point of entry.
In its wisdom, however, the Swedish police had introduced hollow-body hunting ammunition to the police arsenal two years earlier. Exactly why was unclear, but it was quite clear that if, for example, the demonstrator Hannes Westberg, who was hit in the stomach during the World Trade Organization riots in Goteborg in 2001, had been shot with hunting ammo, he would not have survived.
"So the purpose, unquestionably, was to kill," Andersson said.
He was speaking of the murders in Enskede, but he was also voicing his opinion in the silent debate going on around the table.
Nyberg and Mårtensson agreed.
"Then we have this improbable time frame," Bublanski said.
"Exactly. Immediately after the fatal shots were fired, the killer leaves the apartment, goes down the stairs, drops the weapon, and vanishes into the night. Shortly thereafter - it can only have been a matter of seconds - Blomkvist and his sister drive up and park outside. One possibility is that the killer left through the basement. There's a side entrance he could have used - into the back courtyard and across a lawn to the street that runs parallel. But he would have had to have a key to the basement door."
"Is there any sign at all that the killer left that way?"
"No."
"So, no description to