Blomkvist blanched. “Good Lord,” he said.
“I can’t find any Bible quote that fits, but there are several passages that deal with a
fire offering and a sin offering, and in some places it’s recommended that the
sacrificial animal—most often a bull—be cut up in such a way that the head is
severed from the fat. Fire also reminds me of the first murder, of Rebecka here in
Hedestad.”
Towards evening when the mosquitoes began to swarm they cleared off the
garden table and moved to the kitchen to go on with their talk.
“The fact that you didn’t find an exact Bible quotation doesn’t mean much. It’s not a
matter of quotations. This is a grotesque parody of what is written in the Bible—it’s
more like associations to quotations pulled out of context.”
“I agree. It isn’t even logical. Take for example the quote that both have to be cut
off from their people if someone has sex with a girl who’s having her period. If
that’s interpreted literally, the killer should have committed suicide.”
“So where does all this lead?” Blomkvist wondered aloud.
“Your Harriet either had quite a strange hobby or else she must have known that
there was a connection between the murders.”
“Between 1949 and 1966, and maybe before and after as well. The idea that an
insanely sick sadistic serial killer was slaughtering women for at least seventeen
years without anyone seeing a connection sounds utterly unbelievable to me.”
Salander pushed back her chair and poured more coffee from the pot on the stove.
She lit a cigarette. Mikael cursed himself and stole another from her.
“No, it’s not so unbelievable,” she said, holding up one finger. “We have several
dozen unsolved murders of women in Sweden during the twentieth century. That
professor of criminology, Persson, said once on TV that serial killers are very rare in
Sweden, but that probably we have had some that were never caught.”
She held up another finger.