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underwater for the requisite amount of time,” said Sohlman. “She had sand and sludge under her fingernails. Most likely it got there when he was holding her under. The bottom is swampy there, so her fingers would have sunk in a bit. That may have been how she lost the ring. It’s the kind with an opening in the band and has to be squeezed tight to fit.”
    A gloomy mood had settled over the room. Maybe they were all thinking about the same thing: the image of Martina, futilely fighting for her life in the reeds while her friends were partying only a few hundred yards away, having no idea what was happening.
    “It sounds premeditated,” said Kihlgård, “and ice cold. He must have counted on getting her alone so that he could carry out the deed. I mean, who goes around with a knife and a rope and things like that in his car for no reason?”
    “Maybe he’d been spying on her for a while,” Jacobsson tossed out. “We don’t know how long he may have been waiting for the right opportunity. Maybe it was just a lucky chance that it happened that night.”
    “Can we be sure that it was Martina he was out to get?” asked Kihlgård. “Who’s to say he wasn’t just after some random victim, anyone at all?”
    “That might also be the case,” Knutas admitted.
    “Another thing that strikes me is that this crime required time,” Kihlgård went on. “He must have needed at least a couple of hours to get everything done.”
    “Then there’s the ritualistic element. What does that tell us?” said Knutas. He turned to look at the forensic psychiatrist.
    “It’s much too early for me to make any sort of evaluation,” said Agneta Larsvik. “I want to see more pictures of the victim and study more of the facts. I also need to wait for the autopsy report. In addition, I’d like to see the crime scene before I say anything specific.”
    “But what’s your first reaction?” Knutas ventured.
    “What we see here,” she said with a glance at the photo of Martina, which filled the entire screen, “is an expression of extreme and improbable violence. It’s a very strange act, which makes me think of a solitary, gravely ill perpetrator with a strong hatred for women. Possibly inexperienced sexually. The knife wound in the abdomen may signify a curiosity about the female body in the same way that other perps insert objects into the vagina to examine it. The fact that the victim is naked might imply a sexual association, but as I said, at this stage it’s impossible to draw any definite conclusions.”
    “Do you think this is the perp’s first crime?” asked Jacobsson.
    “Probably not. I would guess it’s a young killer who has committed violent crimes before. This sort of macabre crime is not something a person would do his first time out.”
    “Why do you think he’s young?”
    “An individual who is sick enough to be capable of a crime of this nature wouldn’t be able to get along in society for very long. To put it simply, he wouldn’t get very old before he was caught. But keep in mind that these are only my initial thoughts.”
    Knutas was looking resolute. “Can you say anything about the modus operandi?”
    All eyes were fixed on Larsvik.
    “The fact that the perpetrator hung the body up in the tree may mean that he wants to be seen. By exposing his victim, he’s saying to us that he’s dangerous, almost like ‘Look what I can do!’ It may indicate that the murderer wants to tell us that we’d better stop him in time, before he does the same thing again.”

 
    Late that afternoon the preliminary autopsy report arrived by fax from the forensic medicine lab in Solna. In his mind Knutas sent the ME words of thanks; then he closed the door to his office and started leafing through the pages.
    It turned out that Martina had died from drowning after all. Her lungs were severely inflated; she had foam in her windpipe and seawater in her stomach. Traces of sperm were found in her vagina, but there were no injuries to indicate a sexual assault. The sperm sample had been sent to the Swedish Crime Laboratory in Linköping. The knife wound in her abdomen was deep; it had injured the aorta and intestines. Her blood alcohol level was .12, which meant that she was definitely intoxicated when the murder was committed.
    The discovery of the ring and the autopsy results indicated that the murder had occurred at Warfsholm—to be more precise, at the shoreline in front of the youth hostel, not far