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victims.
    Gunnar Ambjörnsson had returned to Gotland.

 
    The murder of the Visby Social Democratic politician was the lead story all over Sweden on that Thursday. At the press conference the police held in the afternoon, reporters from the Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish press were also present. Given the large number of witnesses this time, it was impossible even to try to keep secret the macabre circumstances surrounding the murder. The air was buzzing with speculations about sects, ritual killers, and occultism, and the police were bombarded with questions about the way in which the previous murders had been committed. They had to admit that there were certain similarities, but they declined to be specific.
    Knutas felt drained after the press conference, which was the longest one he had ever attended—and it was going to get worse.
    During the afternoon, word had leaked out that Gunnar Ambjörnsson had received a horse’s head stuck on a pole. Then the news that Staffan Mellgren had been subjected to the same thing before he was killed spread like a wave through the media services in Sweden. Journalists from all the national media organizations caught the first available plane to Gotland.
    After the press conference Knutas and the other members of the investigative team became unavailable—except for the much put-upon Lars Norrby, that is. In his position as police spokesperson, he had to take them on all by himself. The police realized that the intensive media attention was going to make it even harder to catch the killer.
    The investigative team, along with the NCP, began the huge task of interviewing demonstrators who were opposed to the construction project, groups interested in the Æsir religion with ties to Gotland, Ambjörnsson’s political colleagues, and anyone else who in any conceivable way might have something to do with the case.
    Knutas sensed that the perpetrator was somewhere close by, partly because the places where the victims and horses’ heads had been found testified to a good knowledge of the local area. He didn’t think that someone from the mainland would have chosen the sites that had been used.
    The police had completely given up any thought that the murderer might be a woman. Dragging Gunnar Ambjörnsson’s body up the hill at Högklint and then managing to hoist it up into a tree required a physical strength that far exceeded a normal woman’s ability. If their assumption that the perpetrator was a Gotlander was right, it meant that he would have had to leave the island for Stockholm late Saturday night or early Sunday morning in order to meet Ambjörnsson when he arrived on his connecting flight from Paris. Somehow they must have met in Stockholm, maybe even out at the airport. There were no indications that the meeting had been planned earlier, since Ambjörnsson arrived from Paris at 12:45 P.M. , and the plane he had booked to Visby was supposed to leave an hour later. He would barely have had time to get his luggage, go through customs, and head over to the domestic terminal to check in.
    Someone had gone to Stockholm and most likely met Ambjörnsson when he disembarked from the plane. Would he have gone voluntarily with a stranger when he knew that he had been threatened? Hardly. So it had to be someone that he knew and trusted. This person had persuaded him to leave the airport instead of flying home. Why would he do that?
    Later Ambjörnsson had returned to Gotland, either dead or alive. They didn’t yet know whether he was killed on the mainland and then transported to the island, or whether he had lost his life on Gotland. From what he could tell, Erik Sohlman thought that Ambjörnsson had been dead for at least several days. The ME was on his way by plane, so it wouldn’t be long before they knew more.
    The police had contacted Ambjörnsson’s relatives in Stockholm, but none of them had spoken to him in a long time. His girlfriend in Stånga was beside herself with grief, and she had no idea where he had gone after he got off the plane at Arlanda airport. He hadn’t been in touch with her since he returned to Sweden.
    After the ME had examined the body at the scene, it would be taken to the forensic medicine lab in Solna for autopsy. Knutas already had some idea what the autopsy report would contain. All indications were that Ambjörnsson had met the same fate as the previous victims. Knutas had now received confirmation from many different angles that the