THE FLASHLIGHT ILLUMINATED ALL the CPUs that were lined up alongside the dusty fat monitors, printers, and keyboards. Lilja released the fabric that hung across the opening in the wall, which was several metres wide. This area had originally been intended to house an oil tank for the boiler, but the rise of district heating had rendered the oil tank obsolete, and these days the room was used as a graveyard for computers that couldn’t understand anything more than Basic and MS-DOS. There was no Elsa Hallin here, in any case.
Lilja had been so sure that Elsa was still somewhere in the library, but they had almost finished searching the entire basement, and neither she nor Klippan had found even the tiniest piece of evidence to bolster her theory. Maybe the killer had decided it was entirely too risky to keep Elsa in the library: it was a public building with thousands of visitors each day, after all. On the other hand, this perpetrator seemed capable of just about anything. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this uncertain and confused by a case.
And then it hit her.
*
LILJA AND KLIPPAN RUSHED past the lending desk.
“Are you done?” the librarian called after them.
“Almost,” Lilja said, hurrying into the main building with Klippan at her heels.
“Irene, can you tell me what you’re up to? We’ve already been here,” Klippan complained, all of his body language indicating that his blood-sugar levels had completely crashed.
Lilja didn’t care; she went up the stairs to the second floor and into the non-fiction section. She felt her heartbeat quicken. She really hoped she was right this time.
It looked just as she remembered: the door, barely visible to anyone who didn’t know about it, was in the middle of the shelf, surrounded by technical books for the nerdiest of technology freaks. She heard Klippan panting behind her.
She placed her hand on the cool handle, letting it rest there for a moment before she pushed it down. The door was unlocked, exactly as it had been back when she was a kid; it swung open silently, almost on its own.
The study room hadn’t changed a bit. The same green-striped curtains hung at the windows, and the same desk was positioned in the same spot it had been twenty years ago. The only thing missing was the copulating colleagues.
Instead, there was a lone woman in a chair. Her head was bent toward her chest, and her long, dark hair hid her face and large portions of her white blouse. They approached the woman, whose legs and arms were bound to the chair with straps. A shiny, dark pool of blood had spread under the chair in a one-metre radius.
Lilja walked up to the edge of the blood. She stopped, crouched down, and felt the coagulated surface with one finger, which caused rings to spread through and wrinkle the glossy surface. Klippan grabbed a broom that was leaning against the wall, and held it to the woman’s forehead so that he could carefully lift her head to reveal her face.
The woman in the chair was unquestionably Elsa Hallin, but that wasn’t what made Lilja initially avert her eyes. A deep incision had been made from the underside of her chin down to the top of her rib cage. Something was hanging out of the open wound and over the white blouse, which had turned red — something that looked like a bloody fillet of meat.
“That fucker cut out her tongue,” Klippan finally managed to say.
Lilja tried to make sense of it all, but she couldn’t gather her thoughts.
“A Colombian necktie,” Klippan continued. “This is the first time I’ve seen one in real life. Doesn’t this corroborate what the librarian said?”
“What did she say?”
“That Elsa had a sharp tongue.”
That’s right, Lilja thought. Elsa Hallin had a sharp tongue, and the killer had pulled it right out of her throat until it hung down over her chest like a fat, bloody tie. According to Klippan, Colombian neckties had been a common method of execution during the Colombian Civil War. Their main purpose was to scare those who’d discovered the victim into silence. The method involved making a vertical cut in the throat while the victim was still alive and pulling the tongue out so it hung down over the chest. Death could take up to an hour, depending on whether the victim died of blood loss or suffocation.
“So she might have been sitting here trying to call for help for a whole hour?”
Klippan shrugged. “It’s impossible to know exactly how long she was alive at this point, but it wouldn’t have mattered how much she screamed, no one would have heard her because her vocal cords were shredded.”
Lilja stood up. From now on, they would have to work according to the theory that the killer wouldn’t rest until the whole class was obliterated. Her phone rang. It was Tuvesson.
“We have another victim.”
“You mean Elsa Hallin?” Lilja said.
“No. Camilla Lindén. But, wait, did you find Hallin?”
Lilja felt her sense of balance vanish.