Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [154]
“I wonder how carefully the police searched the parsonage. In the photographs it looks like it was a big wooden house, and there must have been plenty of places to hide a body for a while.”
“That’s true, but there’s nothing in the material to indicate that he would have any connection to the serial murders or to Harriet’s disappearance.”
“Actually, there is,” Salander said, with a wry smile. “First of all he was a pastor, and pastors more than anyone else have a special relationship to the Bible. Second, he was the last person known to have seen and talked with Harriet.”
“But he went down to the scene of the accident and stayed there for several hours. He’s in lots of the pictures, especially during the time when Harriet must have vanished.”
“All right, I can’t crack his alibi. But I was actually thinking about something else. This story is about a sadistic killer of women.”
“So?”
“I was…I had a little time to myself this spring and read quite a bit about sadists in a rather different context. One of the things I read was an FBI manual. It claimed that a striking portion of convicted serial killers came from dysfunctional homes and tortured animals in their childhood. Some of the convicted American serial killers were also arrested for arson. Tortured animals and arson crop up in several of Harriet’s murder cases, but what I was really thinking about was the fact that the parsonage burned down in the late seventies.”
“It’s a long shot,” Blomkvist said.
Lisbeth nodded. “Agreed. But I find nothing in the police report about the cause of the fire, and it would be very interesting to know if there were other unexplained fires hereabouts in the sixties. It would also be worth checking to see if there were any cases of animal abuse or mutilation in the area back then.”
When Salander went to bed on her seventh night in Hedeby, she was mildly irritated with Blomkvist. For almost a week she had spent practically every waking minute with him. Normally seven minutes of another person’s company was enough to give her a headache, so she set things up to live as a recluse. She was perfectly content as long as people left her in peace. Unfortunately society was not very smart or understanding; she had to protect herself from social authorities, child welfare authorities, guardianship authorities, tax authorities, police, curators, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers, and bouncers, who (apart from the guys watching the door at Kvarnen, who by this time knew who she was) would never let her into the bar even though she was twenty-five. There was a whole army of people who seemed not to have anything better to do than to try to disrupt her life, and, if they were given the opportunity, to correct the way she had chosen to live it.
It did no good to cry, she had learned that early on. She had also learned that every time she tried to make someone aware of something in her life, the situation just got worse. Consequently it was up to her to solve her problems by herself, using whatever methods she deemed necessary. Something that Advokat Bjurman had found out the hard way.
Blomkvist had the same tiresome habit as everyone else, poking around in her life and asking questions. On the other hand, he did not react at all like most other men she had met.
When she ignored his questions he simply shrugged and left her in peace. Astounding.
Her immediate move, when she got hold of his iBook that first morning, had naturally been to transfer all the information to her own computer. That way it was OK if he dumped her from the case; she would still have access to the material.
She had expected a furious outburst when he appeared for his breakfast. Instead he had looked almost resigned, muttered something sarcastic, and gone off to the shower. Then he began discussing what she had read. A strange guy. She might even be deluded into thinking that he trusted her.
That he knew about her propensities as a hacker was serious. Salander was aware that the legal description of the kind of hacking