Mari Jungstedt - Unknown

"In general the opposition seems quite weak and ineffectual," he went on. "There haven't been any threats. Of course, there have been a number of protests, and the authorities have received letters and such, but nothing that seems particularly serious. It seems very unlikely that we're going to find any sort of motive there. Don't you agree?"

He looked at Jacobsson, who nodded.

"Have you gone through the letters of complaint sent to the authorities?"

"Not yet."

"Do that as soon as possible," Knutas urged them. "Is there anything of archaeological interest out at Hogklint?"

"Doesn't seem to be. The area has been partially excavated before. There doesn't seem to be any major find, although we still need to talk to more people."

Wittberg took a big gulp of Coke.

"I had an interesting conversation with Susanna Mellgren," said Jacobsson. "She called me this morning to tell me that the report about her husband's infidelities was true."

"Is that right?" said Knutas in surprise. "It was only yesterday that she denied the whole thing."

"I know, but now she claims that it's been going on for several years, with different women. On the other hand, she wasn't sure whether he'd been seeing Martina Flochten or not. She says that she can usually tell whenever he takes up with someone new. She claimed not to mind that he's unfaithful. To be honest, I had the impression that she stays in the marriage because it's the most practical thing to do at the moment, financially speaking. She's in the process of studying to be a massage therapist and wants to start her own business. I'm guessing that she's probably planning to divorce him as soon as she can stand on her own feet."

Knutas frowned. "We're going to have to talk to Mellgren about this again, since he said their marriage was so great," he muttered, making a note on a piece of paper.

Knutas then asked Larsvik to give them a report on how she viewed the perpetrator. She went to stand at the head of the table.

"First and foremost, I want to emphasize that these are preliminary thoughts; nothing can be confirmed for sure at such an early stage. Take what I say as a screening instrument, a working hypothesis, nothing more. Yet there is much to indicate that we're dealing with a perpetrator who is seriously mentally disturbed. He probably carried out these acts alone, which indicates that he possesses great physical strength. The perpetrator most likely had no personal relationship with Martina Flochten. I don't think that they even knew each other. The crime doesn't seem to have been directed at her. On the other hand, I think the way it was carried out indicates that he harbors a hatred toward other people and a contempt for women in particular. There is some sort of symbolism in this, although it's hard to say what it might mean after only one homicide. I think he wanted to humiliate his victim and inject as much powerlessness into the situation as possible. By doing that, he becomes the one with power, and that's something he enjoys. It's possible to imagine that as a child he was abused or in some other way mistreated by one or both of his parents. Now he wants revenge by placing his victim in the same position of powerlessness that he experienced as a child. It wouldn't surprise me if he has a complicated relationship with his mother."

"How the hell do we go looking for a bad mother-son relationship?" Kihlgard threw out his hands, almost knocking over Jacobsson's plastic coffee cup.

Agneta Larsvik smiled. "It might be a good thing to keep in the back of your mind during the interviews, for instance. In case anyone expresses scorn for women or has cut ties with his parents, especially his mother."

"You say that he wanted to put the victim in a position of powerlessness," said Jacobsson, "but why would he keep tormenting her after she was dead? At that point she would no longer be able to feel her powerlessness."

"Keep in mind that the important thing is the feelings of the murderer-it's not a matter of logical or rational thought processes. He's so engrossed in his own emotional state of possessing power, and he's enjoying it so much, that he can't think along logical lines. He reduces his victim to a thing, an object, something that helps him to enter into the state that he's trying to achieve. It's a way for him to ease his own anxiety, at least for the moment."

"Then what do you think about the ritualistic element-the fact that the murder was carried out like some sort of ceremony?" asked Wittberg.

"The one doesn't have to exclude the other. He could be a fanatic who devotes himself to some type of ritual voodoo arts as well."

"What does it mean that she was naked?" asked Knutas.

"Nudity makes us think that the murder has a sexual connotation, of course. Curiosity, perhaps. It might mean that he's sexually inexperienced. We might also ask ourselves what he did with her clothes, and whether there could be some type of fetishism involved."

"The same thing with the blood. What the hell does he want with the blood?"

"For him, collecting the spilled blood might be a way to hold on to the positive feelings the murder has given him. In the same way that a serial killer usually takes with him something belonging to the victim. A lock of hair, a piece of clothing, anything at all."

"A serial killer?" Jacobsson looked shocked.

"Yes, exactly." Larsvik had a serious expression on her face. "Of course it's important not to get locked into one idea, but I think we need to consider the possibility that this murderer may strike again."

The Antiquities Room, which was the historical section of the Gotland Regional Museum on Strandgatan in Visby, was deserted on this Sunday morning. The entrance hall seemed chilly in contrast to the heat outside on the street, and there wasn't a sound. His footsteps echoed across the stone floor. In the museum reception area, the girl sitting behind the glass window was deeply absorbed in her book. She didn't seem to hear him approach. He was forced to clear his throat twice before she finally looked up. He met her gaze behind the horn-rimmed glasses and paid for a ticket without uttering a word. For appearance's sake he strolled without interest through the rooms with the picture stones, the prehistoric graves, and the reconstructed Stone Age settlements. He seemed to be the only visitor. On a dazzling Sunday during summer vacation, people preferred to spend the day at the beach or in their summer houses rather than in a museum. The weather suited his purposes perfectly.

He climbed the stone stairway that would take him to what really interested him: the treasure chamber. Whenever he stepped inside he was seized by a feeling of melancholy. Here was only a fraction of all the riches that had been plucked from the Gotland soil since the excavations on the island had started in earnest during the 1960s-caches of silver, jewelry, and coins.

Per square mile, Gotland had produced a larger quantity of Viking Age treasures than anywhere else in the world. No fewer than seven hundred Viking Age silver hoards had been dug up. The most famous was known as the Spillings treasure, the world's largest silver cache from the Viking Age. It was dug up in Spillings in Othem parish on Gotland in 1999. The treasure weighed 148 pounds and contained, among other things: 14,300 coins, almost five hundred armlets, twenty-five rings, and loose silver.

Several of the coins in the Spillings treasure were sensational-in particular, the one called the Moses coin, minted in the Khazarian kingdom, which was eastern Europe's most powerful state during the eighth and ninth centuries. The Moses coin was the first archaeological artifact that tied Judaism to the Khazars, which made it unique in the world.

Sometimes he would spend long periods of time in here, lost in his own fantasies about the coin. It bore the Arabic inscription Musa rasul Allah — "Moses is God's messenger." Researchers had interpreted this to be of Jewish origin, alluding to the biblical Moses, who had led the Israelites out of Egypt and received the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai.