“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