Hunter. Ларс Кеплер

she isn’t easy to live with. She has a fiery temper and a tendency to overreact in certain situations.

      She goes back downstairs to the bullet-riddled body in the kitchen.

      The glare from the lights reflects off the ridged aluminium floor. It feels like she’s standing on a silver bridge above a scene of bloodstained chaos.

      Saga spends a long time looking at the dead man’s upturned palms, the yellow callus beneath his wedding ring, the sweat-stains under the arms of his shirt.

      The team around her are working quickly and silently. They’re filming and cataloguing everything on an iPad using three-dimensional coordinates. Strands of hair and fabric are taped to transparent film, while tissue and skull-fragments are placed in test-tubes which are then immediately chilled.

      Saga walks over to the patio door and examines the circular hole in the three layers of glass.

      The alarm didn’t go off until the chair was thrown at the window, when the acoustic detectors and magnetic contacts reacted.

      So the chair wasn’t thrown by the killer.

      Saga thinks back to the look of terror on the woman’s face, her wounded wrists, the smell of urine.

      Was she being held captive here?

      Two men are covering the floor with large expanses of chilled foil, pressing it down using a wide rubber roller.

      One IT specialist wraps the hard-drive from the security-camera controller in bubble-wrap, then puts it in a cool-box.

      Janus is stressed. His jaw is clenched, and his freckled brow almost white and beaded with sweat.

      ‘OK … what do you think?’ he asks, coming over to stand beside Saga.

      ‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘The first shot to his abdomen was fired from a distance, and from a slightly strange angle.’

      Blood has been oozing from the Foreign Minister’s stomach onto the floor.

      A bullet leaves a ring of dirt around its entrance hole. There are two circles of powder dust on the man’s shirt.

      The first two shots were from a distance, then there were two at extremely close range.

      Saga bends over the body and looks at the entrance wounds in the eye-sockets, noting that there is none of the usual cratering around the openings.

      ‘He used a silencer,’ she whispers.

      The killer must have used the kind of silencer that also muffles the flare, because there is no evidence of the percussive gases igniting. Otherwise the gas would have forced its way under the skin and left an obvious depression around the wound.

      She straightens up and steps aside to make room for a forensics officer, who spreads a sheet of plastic over the dead man’s face. He presses it against the bullet-holes in an effort to gather particles from the ring of dirt, then marks the centre of the entrance holes on the plastic with a marker.

      ‘He was rolled onto his stomach after his death, then over onto his back again,’ Saga says.

      ‘What for?’ the forensics officer asks. ‘Why would—’

      ‘Shut up,’ Janus interrupts.

      ‘I want to see his back,’ Saga says.

      ‘Do what she says.’

      They all feel like time is starting to run out. They anxiously fasten bags around the Foreign Minister’s hands, and lay out a body-bag beside him. They lift him up carefully and lay him down on his stomach in the bag. Saga looks at the wide exit wounds in his back and the messy void at the back of his head.

      She stares at the floor where he was lying and sees the bullet-holes from the two final shots, then realises why the body had been rolled aside.

      ‘The gunman took the bullets with him.’

      ‘No one does that,’ Janus mutters.

      ‘He used a semiautomatic pistol with a silencer … Four shots fired, two of which were clearly lethal,’ she says.

      A heavyset man is going around the dark-toned furniture in the living room, spraying luminol over the fabric as another forensics officer puts an armchair back into place over the depressions in the rug.

      ‘Get ready to pack up, everyone,’ Janus shouts, clapping his hands. ‘We’re cleaning the house in ten minutes, and the glazier and painter will be here within an hour.’

      The heavyset man removes the forensic team’s floor-tiles behind them as they leave. As soon as they exit the door a team enters the house to clean it.

      The killer not only took the spent cartridges with him, but also dug the bullets out of the floor and walls while the alarm was howling and the police were on their way. Not even the very best hit men do that.

      They’re dealing with a perfectly executed murder, yet he left a witness. He could hardly have failed to notice someone watching him at the crime scene.

      ‘I’ll go and talk to the witness,’ Saga says. The woman must be involved somehow.

      ‘You know we’ve already got our experts there,’ Janus says.

      ‘I need to ask my own questions,’ Saga replies, and sets off towards her motorbike.

       9

      The bomb-shelter beneath Katarinaberget in Stockholm was the biggest nuclear shelter in the world when it was built at the start of the Cold War. Today the whole place, other than the section that used to house the backup generators and ventilation units, is used as a parking garage.

      The machine house is a separate building, blasted into the bedrock alongside the actual shelter.

      These days it is used by the Security Police.

      It’s the site of the secret prison known as the Spinnhuset. The most highly classified interrogations take place deep in the bowels of the old ice pools.

      It’s still early in the morning when Saga passes the Slussen junction on her motorcycle. Her sweaty leather bodysuit feels cold against her breasts. She drives in through the arched entrance next to the petrol station, and heads down into the garage. The shift in acoustics amplifies the sound of the engine.

      Rubbish has gathered beneath the peeling yellow railings, and loose cables hang from the loudspeakers.

      The panels covering the wide groove in the floor rumble beneath the tyres as Saga passes the shelter’s immense sliding doors, designed to protect against a pressure wave.

      As she heads down the concrete ramp, her mind ponders the unsolved riddle.

      Why would the woman activate the security alarm and then stay at the crime scene if she was involved in the murder?

      Why would the killer leave a witness if she wasn’t involved in the murder?

      The Security Police see her as a security risk whether she was involved or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

      Saga brakes carefully as she circles deeper and deeper inside the parking garage.

      The woman’s identity has been verified. Her name is Sofia Stefansson, and she appears to work part-time as a prostitute, though that hasn’t been confirmed.

      So far they’re relying on what she said, and the very limited documentation they’ve found in her flat.

      Saga can’t rule out the possibility that Sofia has been recruited by a terrorist organisation.

      Maybe she was the bait; maybe she filmed what happened in bed in order to blackmail the Foreign Minister?

      But in that case, why was he killed?

      Saga