would be helpful if my colleagues could hear what you just told me.”
“Can’t you repeat it?”
“No. I’m going to forget half of it, and I can’t answer the questions that I think we will have. We have no experience with this type of murderer. But you know a great deal.”
“Well, since it’s an extraordinary case, I’ll be there tomorrow at eight o’clock.”
Irene thanked her, rose, and started for the door. She was stopped by Stridner’s voice. “I will have the drawing of the tattoo with me tomorrow. It’s supposed to be finished today.”
AT EXACTLY eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, Professor Stridner started her case review. All the officers in Superintendent Andersson’s investigation team were present, as was the superintendent himself. The fact that Stridner had come in person to brief them showed how seriously she was taking this case. They listened to the medical examiner with increasing concern. The portrait of the murderer was becoming clearer but none of them could see who the individual in Stridner’s terrifying picture might be.
When she asked for questions, Birgitta raised her hand.
“Why has the murderer cut away the breasts in circular form? Just as if they were female breasts?”
“Ellipses. This probably has to do with the sexual ambivalence of the murderer. We don’t know exactly how he thinks during the dismemberment process, just that he finds an outlet for his strong inner feelings and fantasies. Objectively, what one sees with the victims is that the violation always affects the breasts, rectum, and genitalia. Always.”
“Why?”
“It has to do with power. The power to efface the sex. Complete power to annihilate the victim’s humanness.”
“Damn!” Andersson said.
Irene asked, “What is known about the victims? Is a particular type of person selected?”
“Women are often the victims, but there are exceptions. Yesterday, I told you about the brothers in the USA who had murdered and dismembered more than thirty young men and buried them on their ranch. When the men were identified, it turned out that most of them were homosexual prostitutes. Even among females the victims tend to be prostitutes. This isn’t because the necrosadistic murderer is drawn to prostitutes. The killer isn’t attracted to any one type. He wants a dead body. The easiest thing is to pay a prostitute and take her, or him, to a secluded place. There the murderer can carry out his real intentions: kill and dismember.”
Fredrik Stridh raised his hand. “How common is this type of murderer?”
“Very rare. We’ve only had a handful of cases in Sweden during the twentieth century. Murder-mutilation as a phenomenon is more common. During the last thirty years we have had about ten. But these were dismemberments where the body needed to be disposed of. They weren’t defiled in the same brutal way. For reasons of practicality, the extremities and the head were cut off so that the pieces could be stowed in sacks or suitcases, quite simply as a means of getting rid of the body and hindering identification.”
“So practical . . . I feel ill,” Birgitta mumbled to Irene.
Irene nodded in agreement.
Andersson looked meditative, but Stridner was the one who broke the silence. “Tomorrow I’m going to London for a large medical examiners’ conference. I could ask around about similar cases among my colleagues.”
“That . . . that would be great,” Andersson stammered.
Stridner opened her elegant briefcase and took out a large envelope. “The picture of the tattoo.”
She held it out to Andersson.
“Thank you very much,” he remembered to say after a while.
But it was too late. The clicking of Stridner’s heels could already be heard disappearing down the corridor.
THE DRAGON’Sred mouth was wide open and long razor-sharp teeth coiled around the end of its own tail. The eyes glowed like sparkling emeralds. The claws were wide open and ready to drag the intestines out of anyone who came too close. The entirety of the powerful and agile body was covered by red, blue, and green armored scales. The dragon curled itself in a protective circle around the mysterious character.
An upside-down y, Stridner had said. Or maybe it was more like an upside-down fork with two cross strokes over the stem, one exactly at the split in the fork and the other at the middle. The investigation team was in agreement that it was probably a Chinese character. Just to be sure, Hannu had been directed to contact Göteborg University in order to try and find someone who was skilled in Chinese characters or to consult the Chinese embassy.