ERNE MIKSON CLENCHES his arm harder against his ribs, but the unstapled stack of papers is already sliding toward the floor. They cascade uncontrollably and skate across the laminate floor into even greater disarray.
“Kurat! Fuck!” Erne curses loudly, and if the situation weren’t so chaotic, he would probably smile at his bilingual outburst. He lowers himself to his knees and sweeps up the papers. His lungs feel like they’re collapsing every time he leans forward; the blood rushes to his head faster than it used to. All sensation disappears from his fingertips.
“Wait. Let me give you a hand,” Mikael says, taking a few brisk steps down the corridor. He has just stepped out of the men’s room.
“No!” Erne says, thrusting Mikael aside. “Stop, Micke.”
“OK, OK.” Mikael steps back, hands on his hips.
Erne gathers up his papers, taps them into a disordered, unruly sheaf, and jams it under his arm.
“Is something wrong?” Mikael asks after giving Erne a moment to catch his breath.
“Yes. Have Nina and Rasse come to the conference room. Now.”
“Do you have a fever?”
Mikael points at the thermometer lying on the floor where Erne was crouching a moment ago.
Erne feels a cold wave wash through him. “No, goddamn it, I don’t. I just forgot it in my pocket. . . .”
“OK,” Mikael says, and walks off.
“YUSUF CALLED A minute ago,” Erne says as Rasmus pulls the door shut. “We have the fifth body. An old man in Kulosaari, tied to an armchair and stoned to death. Only a few hundred meters from the Koponens’ house.”
Mikael’s brow furrows in sympathy. “Who is he?”
“Albert von Bunsdorf.”
“Doesn’t tell us anything. Sounds like an aristocrat or something.”
“Exactly,” Erne sighs, then concentrates on corralling his renegade papers into a stack on the table. Mikael, Nina, and Rasmus are standing next to him, too agitated to sit down.
“What else do we know about the victim?” Nina asks.
“Seventy-year-old widower. Respected physician. Retired, specialized in psychiatry. A link to the case not only through the MO but also through devil statues in the yard.”
“Let me see,” Mikael says as Erne flips through his papers.
Erne finds a printout of a few shots of the stone statue snapped with a flash. He hands the printout to the trio to peruse.
“Baphomet,” Rasmus says softly.
“What?”
“Just as I suspected. Jessica said the figure she saw on the ice raised a hand into the air. But it wasn’t clenched in a fist; it was positioned like the hand in this statue. Jessica couldn’t see it, because the figure was so far away—”
“Wait, wait, wait. . . . Slow down a little, Rasse. Sebamed?” Mikael says brusquely.
“Baphomet. An ancient divine being of sorts. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t really have anything to do with Satan worship. With heresy, absolutely, so one could assume von Bunsdorf was punished for worshipping it.”
A deep silence falls over the room.
“There were two statues. One in the front yard and one in the backyard. Situated so they were facing the house,” Erne says.
A restless murmur wells up at the corner of the table.
“The murderers brought them—,” Nina begins.
“Yusuf thinks that, based on the tracks, the statues must have been there for at least a few days. Maybe they were erected before the snowstorm two days ago.”
“How long has he been dead?”
“We’ll know the exact time of death soon. But the body’s state of absolute rigor mortis would indicate the victim was killed between nine and twenty-four hours ago.”
“So the statues could have easily been brought—”
A guttural squawk emerges from Rasmus’ throat, silencing Mikael. Everyone turns to look. The shoulders of Rasmus’ black sweater are covered in dandruff.
“Darn it, didn’t any of you hear me?” he says, rubbing his temples.
Erne glances at Nina, who smiles involuntarily. For the first time in his career as an investigator, this placid man is demonstrating signs of having a will of his own. An actual pulse.
“Please go ahead, Rasse,” Erne says conciliatorily, and all eyes turn back to Rasmus. “Be so kind as to enlighten us.”
“You’re entertaining a dangerous flaw in your thinking. Don’t you understand? The murderers didn’t bring those Baphomet statues to von Bunsdorf’s yard. Just the opposite. In all likelihood, those statues are the reason he died.”
“Sit down, all of you.” Erne nods at Rasmus. “Go on.”
“A goat’s head has traditionally symbolized fertility. New life. Baphomet, with his human body and goat head, is a fertility god of sorts. Do you get what I’m driving at?”
“You’re saying von Bunsdorf died because he worshipped a pagan god?”
“That would explain an inquisitor’s anger. For instance, in fourteenth-century France, Templars were imprisoned because the king at the time believed they were worshippers of Baphomet. They were tortured, and many confessed under duress.”
“So the Templars worshipped Satan?”
“No. Like I said, Baphomet didn’t originally have anything to do with Satan worship. But the pentagram associated with Baphomet was extracted from that context in the nineteen sixties, and a goat’s head was drawn inside. This is how the Satanist symbol came about. And note, Satanism is a different thing than Satan worship.”
Mikael chuckles. “How?” It doesn’t take him long to notice that he’s the only one laughing.
“As its name indicates, Satan worship entails a belief in an evil force, Satan. In Satanism, on the other hand, Satan symbolizes the animal side of humanity, the natural desire for sex and other hedonistic pleasures the Church has tried to root out for centuries. It’s more like Satanists are giving the finger to the Christian concept of morality instead of actually believing in the existence of Satan.”
A burst of laughter incongruent with the moment echoes from the corridor as a group of police officers walks past. Once the noise dies down, Mikael asks: “OK. So you mean a Swede-Finn psychiatrist was a dyed-in-the-wool Satanist and died for it?”
Rasse buries his face in his hands and sighs as if to indicate that the level of the questions has dropped to a new low. “Not a Satanist but an adherent of Baphomet. For some reason or other, the perpetrators considered both Maria Koponen and Lea Blomqvist witches. They’ve raised themselves to the status of some sort of inquisitors who have the authority to punish heretics. That’s why von Bunsdorf suffered the same fate.”
“There’s something illogical about that though,” Nina says, studying her neatly filed fingernails. “We’ve been assuming the murderers believe in the occult. Now Rasse is talking about them as if they are Inquisitors, who, at least in the Middle Ages, wanted to kill those accused of occult activities. So which is it?”
“Good point, Nina,” Erne says, stifling a yawn in his fist.
“How does von Bunsdorf’s murder take place in the book?” Mikael asks when no one seems to have an answer to Nina’s question.
“The victim is stoned to death, like von Bunsdorf. In other ways the scenario is totally different,” Rasmus says.
“If, in the perpetrators’ view, von Bunsdorf deserved to die due to his presumed Satanism, where does that leave Maria Koponen and Lea Blomqvist? Were they Satanists too? Or were the women labeled as witches simply on the basis of their looks?” Nina asks.
Rasmus looks frustrated; it seems as if his explanations have fallen on deaf ears. “Interesting question. That’s the assumption we’ve been working off of so far. That the only thing the women have in common is their appearance.”
“And shitty luck,” Mikael adds.
“But what if there’s some worldview or philosophy underpinning all this? Something Maria and Lea had in common when they were alive . . . that could help us move forward?” Nina says.
“We’ve spoken with the Koponens’ closest friends, and nothing of the sort came up.”
Nina cracks her knuckles. “Maybe they weren’t asked the right questions.”
“Maybe not.” Erne sighs so deeply that his lungs empty to the last gasp. “Do any of you see it?”
“What do you mean?”
Erne looks straight ahead impassively. “Lea Blomqvist was a neuropsychologist studying aggression. Albert von Bunsdorf was a retired psychiatrist. And Maria Koponen worked as a product development manager at a drug manufacturer making antipsychotics.”
Mikael scratches his neck. “Now that you put it that way—”
“The connection is clear but not very specific. At most we can talk about a pattern in which the victims are linked by work with the human psyche.”
“Exactly. Tantalizing but still pretty broad. In reality, their jobs were totally different. The victims’ workplaces didn’t have anything to do with each other. University of Helsinki, Neurofarm Inc., and von Bunsdorf’s one-man practice, which he ran from nineteen sixty-eight to two thousand nine.”
“So not the same clients, enemies . . . anything.”
“Neurofarm’s clients were large drug companies. Whereas—”
“Goddamn it,” Erne snaps, a stressed-out squeak escaping his lips. He shoots a sharp glance at Nina. “In the case of von Bunsdorf, let’s approach it as if it were a one-off murder. What is your first thought, Nina?”
“The perpetrator is a former patient.”
“Exactly. Get us a list of all of his patients. And come up with some ideas about what the link between these people could be. Did Albert von Bunsdorf specialize in a certain psychiatric problem, for instance?”
“Will do.”
“And last of all: now that we’ve talked to everyone who lives on the Koponens’ street, I want a summary of the output. A list of residents and any potential links to the Koponens.”
“I can do that,” Mikael says.
“I admire your initiative. Now I need to talk to Jessica. And then fart up a press release on this latest murder.” Erne pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “So you get back to work, you bunch of charlatans.”