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as soon as possible. She didn’t think there were more than ten at most.
    While he waited, Johan made coffee. He was puzzled by the nonchalance displayed by the police regarding the thefts. He happened to think it was terrible that cultural treasures were being offered on a lucrative market and disappearing—not just from the island of Gotland but from Sweden as a whole.
    He rushed over to the fax machine when it started whirring. There were only seven reports. One had to do with the most recent burglary at the Antiquities Room. The rest concerned similar thefts from the antiquities warehouse and from various excavations.
    One report caught his interest. A necklace had disappeared from the excavation at Fröjel. The police report was dated Tuesday, June 29. The stolen item was an amber necklace with silver settings. It had been found in the earth on the previous day by the person who filed the report. She had put the necklace in a bag that was placed inside a box in one of the carts that stood lined up a short distance away from the excavation site. That was where the archaeologists stored their finds along with a computer and various tools and implements. When the person who filed the report went to look at her discovery the next day, it was gone. No one could explain how it had happened. The cart had been locked up for the night, and the lock was undamaged.
    The person filing the report was named Katja Rönngren. Johan thought he recognized the name and began searching through his notes. He found the list of people who had participated in the same excavation course as Martina. Sure enough, there was the name.
    Katja Rönngren was one of the students who had left the course after Martina’s death.
    She lived in Göteborg. Johan tried different information services until he tracked down her phone number. He called her up at once. He introduced himself and explained what he wanted to know.
    “This is Katja’s mother,” the woman said. “Katja’s not here.”
    “This is very important. How can I get hold of her?”
    “Katja’s on Gotland.”
    “But she left the course several weeks ago, didn’t she?”
    “She was only home for a couple of days. Then she went back to try to finish it after all.”
    “Have you heard from her since then?”
    “Several times. She said that she couldn’t stay at the youth hostel because it was booked up. So she’s staying with some friends in Visby. You can call her on her cell. Do you want the number?”

 
    They had checked the passenger lists from Destination Gotland without result. Ambjörnsson had apparently not changed his mind and taken the boat instead of the domestic flight.
    A large number of people had been questioned, but it had given them no leads. Knutas’s colleagues from the NCP were extremely capable, but they hadn’t come up with anything new, either. And Agneta Larsvik had been forced to take on another case back in Stockholm.
    After the eight o’clock meeting, Knutas decided to leave police headquarters and follow in the footsteps of the murderer on his own. He told the switchboard that he’d be gone for several hours. Then he got into his old Benz and chugged off. The weather kept changing. It had rained during the night, and clouds were gathering in the sky in dark, threatening clusters as he drove south along the coast road. Right before Klintehamn he turned off at Warfsholm and parked outside the hotel. The place was deserted. The tourists had no doubt gone into Visby since the weather was bad.
    He went up to the hotel porch and sat down at the same table where Martina and her friends had sat just over a month earlier. A chill wind was blowing, and it had started to drizzle. The water was gray, and from the harbor he could hear the machines roaring. It was far from the vacation paradise that he had encountered when he was last here with Karin Jacobsson. He stood up and looked toward the path that led to the youth hostel. That was where young Martina Flochten had presumably met her killer. Why in that particular spot?
    He strolled along the pathway, heading in the same direction that Martina had taken, and then stopped in the middle, where the willows on either side formed a tunnel. They sheltered him from both the wind and the rain. Somewhere along here she had been attacked. Then the perpetrator must have dragged her across the parking lot to the lawn with the juniper bushes and finally down to the water where her ring was found. Knutas