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Friends of the Animals was on the line, and several other animal rights groups would undoubtedly be calling him soon. The police spokesman, Lars Norrby, was away on vacation, so Knutas had to handle the reporters on his own. He wrote up a brief press release and said that for a change he was going to be unreachable for the next few hours.
    Back at the criminal investigation division after the morning excursion to Petesviken, Knutas bought a sandwich from the vending machine in the coffee room. There was no time for lunch. He had called in his closest colleagues for a meeting at one o’clock. Sohlman should be able to make it back from the investigation out at the crime scene to join them, thanks to the fact that there were now two crime techs in the police department.
    They gathered in the bright, open conference room, which had a big table in the middle. Police headquarters had recently been remodeled, and new furniture, in a simple Scandinavian design, had been purchased. Knutas had felt more comfortable with their old worn furniture made of pine. At least the view was still the same; the panoramic windows looked out on the Forum supermarket parking lot, the ring wall, and the sea.
    “The crime that has been committed is a particularly nasty one,” Knutas began, and he told them about what they had seen out at Petesviken. “The pasture and the surrounding area have been blocked off,” he went on. “There’s a highway that runs past the pasture, and that’s where we’re looking for traces of any vehicles. If the person or persons who did this took the horse’s head with them, they most likely had a car. The neighbors and other people who live in the area are being interviewed, so we’ll have to see what turns up during the course of the day.”
    “How was the horse killed?” asked Jacobsson.
    “Erik can tell us more about that.” Knutas turned to the crime tech.
    “Let’s take a look at some pictures of the horse,” said Sohlman . “I have to warn you, Karin, that some of them are very unpleasant.” He directed this comment to Jacobsson, not only because she was the most sensitive of his colleagues when it came to blood, but also because she had a great affection for animals.
    He clicked through the photos of the horribly abused body.
    “As you can see here, the head was severed from the neck, or rather, hacked and chopped off. A veterinarian, Åke Tornsjö, has already taken a look at the horse. He’s going to do a more thorough examination later, but he was able to tell us how he thinks it was done. According to him, the perpetrator—if it actually was the work of one individual—presumably first knocked the horse unconscious by giving him a strong blow to the forehead, most likely with a hammer, a sledgehammer, or an axe. When the horse lost consciousness, he used a large knife, like a butcher knife, to slice through the neck, and that’s what killed the animal—meaning, the loss of blood. To sever the head from the vertebrae, he had to smash them apart. We’ve found crushed pieces of bone, and I would guess that it was done by using an axe. Marks on the ground indicate that the horse was still alive after the first blow. He lay there, kicking in his death throes. The grass had been thrashed about, and the ground was churned up. The area around the neck is ragged and rough, which indicates that the perpetrator had to go at it for a while—he seems to have known perfectly well what to do, even if he lacked a more detailed knowledge of a horse’s anatomy.”
    “How nice. Then we can exclude all veterinarians,” muttered Wittberg.
    “There’s one thing that I can’t make sense of,” Sohlman went on, unperturbed. “When the carotid artery was severed, the horse should have lost an incredible amount of blood. We can see that blood did run out of the neck and body, but there’s only a small amount accumulated on the ground. Almost negligible. Even if the blood had seeped into the ground, there should still be more of it.”
    The others gave the tech a puzzled look.
    “How would you explain that?” said Jacobsson.
    “The only thing I can come up with is that the perpetrator must have collected the blood.”
    “Why would anybody want to do something like that?” objected Wittberg.
    “I have no idea.” Sohlman stroked his chin meditatively. “The owner last saw the horse at around eleven last night. The vet estimates that the animal had been dead for at least five or six hours