Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [130]
“So why the hell did the district court decide to give her a free pass into society?” Faste asked.
“It should probably be viewed as a combination of things. She had a lawyer, an eloquent one, but it was also a manifestation of the current liberalization policies and cutbacks. It was a decision that I opposed when I was consulted by forensic medicine. But I had no say in the matter.”
“But surely that kind of prognosis must be pretty much guesswork, don’t you think?” Modig said. “You don’t actually know what’s been going on with her since she turned eighteen.”
“It’s more than a guess. It’s based on my professional experience.”
“Is she self-destructive?” Modig asked.
“You mean could I picture her committing suicide? No, I doubt that. She’s more of an egomaniacal psychopath. It’s all about her. Everyone else around her is unimportant.”
“You said that she might react with excessive force,” Faste said. “In other words, should we consider her to be dangerous?”
Dr. Teleborian looked at him for a long moment. Then he leaned forward and rubbed his forehead.
“You have no idea how difficult it is to say exactly how a person will react. I don’t want Lisbeth Salander to be harmed when you apprehend her … but yes, in her case I would try to make sure the arrest is carried out with the utmost circumspection. If she is armed, there would be a very real risk that she will use the weapon.”
∗Anna Lindh was one of Sweden’s most popular politicians, foreign minister under Prime Minister Goran Persson from 1998 to 2003. She was assassinated in 2003 in a stabbing attack. Her alleged murderer confessed and was sentenced to life in prison after a psychiatric evaluation. However, an appeals court overturned the sentence in 2004, and the defendant was transferred from prison to a closed psychiatric ward. Prosecutors reappealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden, which has since reinstated the life sentence.
CHAPTER 18
Tuesday, March 29–Wednesday, March 30
The three parallel investigations into the murders in Enskede churned on. Officer Bubble’s investigation enjoyed the advantages of authority. On the surface, the solution seemed to lie within reach; they had a suspect and a murder weapon that was linked to the suspect. They had an ironclad 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.
Hedström 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