The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millennium #2)

Blomkvist blinked himself awake. Then he shook his head and made for the shower.

Paolo Roberto looked miserable lying there in his shorts on the hospital bed. Blomkvist had waited an hour to be allowed to see him. His nose was hidden beneath a bandage. His left eye was covered too and one eyebrow had surgical tape over five stitches. He had a bandage wrapped round his chest, and cuts and bruises all over his body. His right knee was in a brace.

Blomkvist offered him a coffee from the machine in the hall and inspected his face critically.

"You look like a car crash," he said. "Tell me what happened."

Paolo Roberto shook his head and met Blomkvist's gaze. "A fucking monster happened," he said.

He shook his head again and inspected his fists. His knuckles were so swollen that he could scarcely hold the cup. His right hand and wrist were in a splint. His girlfriend already had a lukewarm attitude towards boxing - now she was going to be furious.

"I'm a boxer," he said. "I mean, when I was active I wasn't afraid to step into the ring with anybody. I've taken a punch or two, but I know how to dish them out too. When I punch somebody they're supposed to sit down and hurt."

"But this one didn't do that."

Paolo Roberto shook his head for the third time. Then he told Blomkvist what had happened during the night.

"I hit him at least thirty times. Fourteen or fifteen times to the head. I hit him on the jaw four times. At first I was holding back a bit - I didn't want to kill him, just protect myself. But in the end I gave it everything I had. One of my punches should have broken his jaw. But that fucking monster just shook his head a little and kept on coming. That is not a normal human being, I swear to God."

"What did he look like?"

"He was built like a tank. I'm not exaggerating. He was over six foot six and weighed at least 300 pounds. All muscle and armour plating. A fucking giant who doesn't know what pain is."

"You've never seen him before?"

"Never. He had no idea how to box. I could feint and throw him off his guard and he didn't have a clue how to move to avoid being hit. He was out of it. But at the same time he tried to move like a boxer. He held his arms up the right way and he kept recovering to a starting stance. Maybe he'd trained in boxing but hadn't heard a word of what the trainer said. What saved my life - and the girl's - was that he moved so slowly. He would throw roundhouse swings that he telegraphed a month in advance, and I could duck or parry them. He got in two good punches on me - one to the face, and you see what that did, then one to the body, where he cracked a rib. But neither of them was full power. If he'd landed them properly he would have knocked my head off."

Paolo Roberto laughed, a bubbling sort of laugh.

"What's funny?"

"I won. That moron tried to kill me and I won. I actually decked him. But I had to use a fucking plank to get him down for the count."

He turned serious again. "If Miriam Wu hadn't kicked him in the balls at just the right moment, I don't want to think about how the hell it would have ended."

"Paolo - I'm really, really glad you won. Miriam is going to say the same thing when she wakes up. Have you heard how she's doing?"

"She looks about the same as I do. She has a concussion, several cracked ribs, a broken nose, and damage to her kidneys."

Blomkvist bent forward and put his hand on Paolo Roberto's good knee. "If you ever need me to do anything... " he said.

Paolo Roberto smiled. "Blomkvist - if you ever need a favour again... "

"Yes?"

"...  ask Sebastian Lujan to do it for you."

CHAPTER 26

Wednesday, April 6

Inspector Bublanski was in a dismal mood when he met Modig in the parking lot outside the hospital just before 7:00. Blomkvist had woken him up, and he in turn called Modig and woke her up. They met Blomkvist by the entrance and went with him to Paolo Roberto's room.

Bublanski could hardly grasp the bewildering details, but what was eventually clear was that Wu had been kidnapped and that the boxer had beaten up the kidnapper. Except that to judge by his face, it was far from obvious who had beaten up whom. As far as Bublanski was concerned, the night's events had lifted the investigation of Lisbeth Salander to a whole new level of complication. Nothing in this infernal case seemed to be normal.

How had Paolo Roberto even gotten involved in the affair?

"I'm a good friend of Lisbeth Salander's," he told them.

Bublanski and Modig looked at each other, surprised and sceptical.

"She sparred with me at the gym."

Bublanski fixed his gaze somewhere on the wall behind Paolo Roberto. Modig could not help laughing out loud. After a while they had written down all the details he could give them.

"I'd like to make a few points," Blomkvist said dryly.

They turned to him.

"First of all, Paolo's description of the man who drove away from the warehouse in the van matches the one I gave of the person who attacked Salander at the same spot on Lundagatan. A tall guy with a light brown ponytail and a beer belly. OK?"

Bublanski nodded.

"Second, the point of the kidnapping was to force Miriam Wu to reveal where Lisbeth Salander is hiding. So these two thugs have been looking for Salander since at least a week before the murders. Agreed?"

Modig murmured a "yes."

"Third, it looks less likely that Salander is the lone nutcase she has been portrayed as. And neither of these maniacs seems, on the face of it, to be a member of a lesbian Satanist gang."

Neither Bublanski nor Modig said a word.

"And finally, number four. I think this story has something to do with a man called Zala. Dag Svensson did a lot of work on him in his last two weeks. All the relevant information is in his computer. Dag linked him to the murder of a prostitute named Irina Petrova in Sodertalje. The autopsy recorded that she was very severely beaten. So severely that any one of three of the worst blows would have been fatal on its own. Her injuries sound very like the ones that Miriam Wu and Paolo Roberto have been subjected to. In both cases the instruments of this extraordinary violence could be the hands of a gigantic thug."

"And Bjurman?" Bublanski said. "Let's suppose that someone had a reason to silence Svensson. Who would have had a motive to murder Salander's guardian?"

"All the pieces of the puzzle aren't in place yet, but there's a connection between Bjurman and Zala. That's the only credible solution. Could you agree to start thinking along new lines? I think that these crimes have something to do with the sex trade. And Salander would sooner die than be involved in something like that. I told you she's a damned moralist."

"So what was her role? What was she doing at Svensson and Johansson's apartment?"

"I don't know. Witness? Opponent? Maybe she was there to warn Dag and Mia that their lives were in danger."

Bublanski set the wheels in motion. He called the Sodertalje police and gave them Paolo Roberto's directions to a dilapidated warehouse southwest of Lake Yngern. Then he called Holmberg - he lived in Flemingsberg and was closest of the team to Sodertalje - and asked him to join up with the Sodertalje police as soon as he possibly could to assist with the crime scene investigation.

Holmberg called back an hour later. He had arrived at the crime scene. The Sodertalje police had had no difficulty finding the warehouse. Along with two smaller storage sheds it had burned to the ground, and the fire department was there now, mopping up. There were two discarded gasoline cans in the yard.

Bublanski felt a sense of frustration approaching fury.

What the hell was going on? Who were these thugs? Who was this Salander person really? And why was it impossible to find her?

The situation did not improve when Ekstrom joined the fray at the 9:00 meeting. Bublanski told him about the morning's dramatic developments and proposed that the search be reprioritized in light of the mysterious events that had taken place, which cast doubt on the scenario that the team had been working on.

Paolo Roberto's story reinforced Blomkvist's account of the attack on Salander on Lundagatan. The hypothesis that all three murders were committed by one mentally ill woman no longer seemed valid. The suspicions regarding Salander could not altogether be discarded - they needed an explanation for her fingerprints being on the murder weapon - but it did mean that the investigation had to work on the possibility of a different killer. There was only one theory at present - Blomkvist's belief that the murders had to do with Svensson's imminent expose of the sex trade. Bublanski identified three significant points.

The prime task was to find and identify the abnormally large man and his associate with the ponytail who had kidnapped and assaulted Miriam Wu. The giant should be relatively easy to find.

Andersson reminded them that Salander also had an unusual appearance, and that after three weeks of searching, the police still had no idea where she was.

The second task was to add to the investigative team a group that would actively focus on the list of prostitutes' clients in Svensson's computer. There was a logistical problem associated with this. The team had Svensson's computer from Millennium and the Zip disks that held the backup of his missing laptop, but they contained several years' worth of collected research and thousands of pages. It would take time to catalogue and study them. The team needed reinforcements, and Bublanski detailed Modig to head that unit.

The third task was to focus on a person who went by the name of Zala. The team would enlist the assistance of the National Criminal Investigation Department, since they apparently had come across the name. He assigned that task to Faste.

Finally, Andersson was to coordinate the continued search for Salander.

Bublanski's report took six minutes, but it touched off an hour-long dispute. Faste was vociferous in his resistance to Bublanski's proposals, and he made no attempt to conceal this. His opinion was that the investigation, regardless of the new - peripheral, he called it - information, had to stay focused on Salander. The chain of evidence was so strong that it was unreasonable to divide the effort into different channels.

"This is all bullshit. We have a violence-prone nutcase who has grown worse and worse over the years. Do you actually believe that all the psychiatric reports and results from forensics are a joke? She's tied to the crime scene. We know she's a hooker, and there's a large sum of money unaccounted for in her bank account."

"I'm aware of all that."

"She's also a member of some sort of lesbian sex cult. And I'll be damned if that dyke Cilla Noren doesn't know more than she's letting on."

Bublanski raised his voice. "Faste. Stop it. You're totally obsessed with this gay angle. It's way past professional."

He at once regretted speaking out in front of the whole group. A private talk with Faste would have been more productive. Finally Ekstrom interrupted the raised voices to approve Bublanski's plan of action.

Bublanski glanced at Bohman and Hedstrom.

"As I understand it, we only have you for three more days, so let's make the best of the situation. Bohman, can you help Andersson track down Salander? Hedstrom, you'll stay with Modig."

Ekstrom raised his hand as they were about to break up.

"One last thing. We're keeping the part about Paolo Roberto under our hats. The media will go ballistic if one more celebrity springs to light in this investigation. So not a word about it outside this room."

After the meeting Modig took Bublanski aside.

"It was unprofessional of me to lose patience with Faste," Bublanski said.

"I know how it feels," she said with a smile. "I started on Svensson's computer last Monday."

"I know. How far did you get?"

"He had a dozen versions of the manuscript and a huge amount of research material, and I don't know yet what's important and what's safe to ignore. Just cataloguing it with meaningful names and looking through all the documents will take several days."

"What about Hedstrom?"

Modig hesitated. Then she turned and closed Bublanski's door.

"To tell you the truth...  I don't want to trash him, but he isn't much help."

Bublanski frowned. "Out with it."

"I don't know, he's obviously not a real policeman like Bohman. He talks a lot of drivel. He has about the same attitude towards Miriam Wu as Faste does, and he's totally uninterested in the assignment. And - although I can't put my finger on it - he has some kind of problem with Salander."

"How so?"

"I've got a feeling there's some bad blood between them."

Bublanski nodded slowly. "That's a shame. Bohman's OK, but I don't really like having outsiders involved in this investigation."

"So what shall we do?"

"You'll have to put up with him for the rest of the week. Armansky said they'll break it off if they don't get results. Keep digging and count on having to do the whole job yourself."

Modig was interrupted after only forty-five minutes. She was called to Ekstrom's office. Bublanski was with him. Both men were red in the face. Tony Scala, the freelance journalist, had just released a scoop with the news that Paolo Roberto had rescued the S&M dyke Miriam Wu from an unknown kidnapper. The article contained several details that could only be known to someone inside the investigation. It was written in such a way as to suggest that the police were considering filing charges against Paolo Roberto for assault.

Ekstrom had already received several phone calls from other papers that wanted news about the boxer's role. He was livid. He accused Modig of having leaked the story. Modig vigorously objected to the accusation, but in vain. Ekstrom wanted her off the investigation.