“Except for the pentagrams and the cross,” said Tommy.
“Exactly.”
Svante hid a yawn with his hand. A tap at the door was followed by its opening. Svante’s colleague, Bosse Åhlén, stuck his bald head into the room. He lumbered over to where Svante sat. Irene knew that Åhlén was a few years younger than herself but his early hair loss and chubbiness made him look much older. Otherwise, the most notable thing about Bosse Åhlén was that he had seven kids, the youngest only a few months old. Maybe that was the main reason he looked tired, but the night’s work had left its mark as well.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He wiped his glasses on his not-so-clean lab coat. When he had returned them to their place on his round potato nose, he started speaking. “Report from the cottage at Norssjön. The victim was shot at close range with a large-caliber weapon. One round in the chest near the heart, and one through the head. He had his jacket and shoes on when he was found. These and his other clothes were in order. A plastic bag from Hemköp, a bag with gym clothes, and a lunch box were lying next to him. Everything points to the victim having been shot just as he stepped through the front door. It opens outward and he fell inward, so the murderer didn’t need to move the body in order to close the door. There are no signs of a struggle. No weapon was found in or around the crime scene. We’re going to make a thorough search of the property today.”
“Has Ljunggren looked at the computer?” Svante Malm asked.
“Yes. It’s completely dead, not functional. According to Ljunggren, someone formatted the hard drive using the Pentagon method.”
“The ‘Pentagon method’? Explain!” Andersson commanded.
“You can burn, crush with a sledgehammer, or pick apart a computer to try to destroy information on its hard drive. It’s useless, according to Ljunggren. It’s always possible to piece together at least a part of the contents again.”
“Who the hell is able to do that?” Andersson asked.
“A few really skilled hackers. Ljunggren says that there’s a company in Norway which is expert at it. Of course, it costs a lot of money, but in some cases it’s worth it. Usually, computers get sent there after a fire.
“So, basically, it’s very difficult to get rid of information stored on hard drives. According to the Pentagon, which obviously has top-secret material on its computers, there’s only one surefire way: You run a formatting program which actually writes random ones and zeros to the entire drive, replacing the information that was previously there. And you run it several times, just to be sure. That makes it impossible to reconstruct the files. Ordinarily, when you erase or even format a disk, the actual information, the non-random ones and zeros, is still there; what the erasing or formatting does is simply to destroy the ‘map’ to where all the information is located on the disk but it’s still theoretically possible to retrieve that information if you know what you’re doing.”
“And where does one get their hands on such a formatting program?” Tommy asked.
“You can buy them in computer stores. You can probably download them from the Internet as well. Anyone who has this software can replace everything on the hard drive with ones and zeros, which again totally destroys all the information that was there; and then just reinstall the system software so the computer will function, but with an otherwise empty hard drive.”
“How long does it take to erase an entire hard drive?”
“According to Ljunggren, about one to two hours on average, depending on its capacity.”
Tommy wrinkled his brow in concentration. Suddenly he brightened up and asked eagerly, “Did you find any kind of disk or CD containing formatting software at the cottage?”
“No.”
Tommy turned toward Svante Malm. “Did you find such a disk at the rectory?”
The technician shook his head.
“So the murderer must have stayed with his victims for an hour or two, running the formatting program.”
“Or maybe he had time to run it before the murders. Jacob Schyttelius was shot when he came home in the evening. The murderer could have gotten into the house during the day, and then he would have had plenty of time,” Fredrik Stridh objected.
“And he may have downloaded the program directly from the Internet rather than carrying it around with him,” Åhlén put in.
“So all we know is that the murderer effectively destroyed the computers at both crime scenes,” Irene thought out loud.
“And marked them with the Devil’s face,” Tommy added.
“The Devil’s. .!” Andersson exclaimed, irritated. “That is just a dead end. A pastor wouldn’t have anything to do with Satanists!”
“Don’t say that. The summer church at Norssjön was burned down by Satanists. And Schyttelius had a house by the lake,” said Irene.
“Do you mean that Schyttelius himself was a Satanist and burned down that church?” Jonny Blom asked.
“Of course not. I just think it’s strange that the church was located in the vicinity of the Schyttelius family, and that the symbol which had been painted on the church doors was also on the computer monitors.”
“Except that it was written in hamster blood, not human blood,” the superintendent muttered.
“The question is whether there is any relationship. According to Svante, pentagrams are commonly drawn during different rituals. It’s possible that the person who drew the pentagrams on the computer screens didn’t know about the symbol on the church door,” Irene continued thinking out loud.
“I say it’s a dead end! To hell with the computers and the bloody symbols and that crap, and concentrate on the murders!” Andersson exclaimed.
Irene became worried when she saw how red his face was. She knew how much he hated not having even the smallest definite lead to start with. Here, everything was just a guess. In certain complicated cases like the Schyttelius murders, there were no obvious leads or motives and it gave the investigators the feeling that the murderer was playing games with them. Irene wasn’t sure that that was the case with this investigation. Maybe the murderer was trying to say something? But that was contradicted by the fact that the murderer had silenced the only witnesses who could have provided any clues: the computers.
Andersson took a deep breath in order to regain his composure and get his blood pressure under control. “It’s been settled with the police in Borås that we will undertake the investigation of the murders. Most of the parish lies within our jurisdiction, not to mention that it’s a large complicated case. Irene, Tommy, and Fredrik will drive out to Kullahult and question the church personnel and the neighbors. Jonny and Hannu will speak with the people who live in the vicinity of the cottage. It will go faster out at the cottage, and when you are done you can join the others at Kullahult. Canvassing the neighborhood has apparently not given rise to anything concrete yet, but you’ll have to speak with the officers who have been making inquiries.
“We’ll meet here at the station around five o’clock. Personally, I’m going to speak with the press in an hour. After that, I’m going to contact Georg. . the principal at the school where Jacob Schyttelius worked. Then it would probably be a good idea to pull out the reports from the Purple Murder and the fire at the church by Norssjön. And I’m going to try and get ahold of Yvonne Stridner.”
A heavy sigh escaped him with the last sentence. The others nodded in understanding. Professor Yvonne Stridner, the head of Pathology, was not easy to deal with.
Chapter 5
THE SLUSHY SNOW FROM the day before had transformed itself into an annoying freezing drizzle. The temperature during the night had risen to seven degrees above zero, Celsius, but it was premature to start feeling giddy about spring warmth. Veils of rainy haze obscured Landvetter Lake and erased the division between air and water. Everything was obscured by a single wet gray mist.