The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

  "Your very last editorial. Write it whenever you like. It almost certainly won't be published before the trial, whenever that might be."

  "I'm not sure that's such a good idea. What do you think it should be about?"

  "Morality," Blomkvist said. "And the story of why one of our colleagues was murdered because the government didn't do its job fifteen years ago."

  Berger knew exactly what kind of editorial he wanted. She had been at the helm when Svensson was murdered, after all. She suddenly felt in a much better mood.

  "OK," she said. "My last editorial."

  CHAPTER 4

  Saturday, April 9-Sunday, April 10

  By 1:00 on Saturday afternoon, Prosecutor Fransson in Sodertalje had finished her deliberations. The burial ground in the woods in Nykvarn was a miserable mess, and the violent crimes division had racked up a huge amount of overtime since Wednesday, when Paolo Roberto had fought his boxing match with Niedermann in the warehouse there. They were dealing with at least three homicides, the bodies found buried on the property, along with the kidnapping and assault of Salander's friend Miriam Wu, and arson to top it all off.

  The incident in Stallarholmen was connected with the discoveries at Nykvarn, and was actually the purview of the Strangnas police district in Sodermanland county. Carl-Magnus Lundin of the Svavelsjo Motorcycle Club was a key player in the whole thing, but he was in the hospital in Sodertalje with one foot in a cast and his jaw wired shut. Accordingly, all of these crimes came under county police jurisdiction, which meant that Stockholm would have the last word.

  On Friday the court hearing was held. Lundin was formally charged in connection with Nykvarn. It had eventually been established that the warehouse was owned by the Medimport Company, which in turn was owned by a fifty-two-year-old cousin of Lundin who lived in Puerto Banus, Spain. She had no criminal record.

  Fransson closed the folder that held all the preliminary investigation papers. There would need to be another hundred pages of detailed work before they were ready to go to trial. But right now she had to make decisions on several matters. She looked up at her police colleagues.

  "We have enough evidence to charge Lundin with participating in the kidnapping of Miriam Wu. Paolo Roberto has identified him as the man who drove the van. I'm also going to charge him with probable involvement in arson. We'll wait to charge him with the murders of the three individuals we dug up on the property, at least until each of them has been identified."

  The officers nodded. That was what they had been expecting.

  "What'll we do about Sonny Nieminen?"

  Fransson leafed through to the section on Nieminen in the papers on her desk.

  "This is a man with an impressive criminal history. Robbery, possession of illegal weapons, assault, manslaughter, and drug crime. He was arrested with Lundin at Stallarholmen. I'm convinced that he's involved, but we don't have the evidence to persuade a court."

  "He says he's never been to the Nykvarn warehouse and that he just happened to be out with Lundin on a motorcycle ride," said the detective responsible for Stallarholmen on behalf of the Sodertalje police. "He claims he had no idea what Lundin was up to in Stallarholmen."

  Fransson wondered whether she could somehow arrange to hand the entire business over to Prosecutor Ekstrom in Stockholm.

  "Nieminen refuses to say anything about what happened," the detective went on, "but he vehemently denies being involved in any crime."

  "You'd think he and Lundin were the victims themselves," Fransson said, drumming her fingertips in annoyance. "Lisbeth Salander," she added, her voice scored with scepticism. "We're talking about a girl who looks as if she's barely entered puberty and who's less than five feet tall. She doesn't look strong enough to take on either Nieminen or Lundin, let alone both of them."

  "Unless she was armed. A pistol would compensate for her physique."

  "But that doesn't quite fit with our reconstruction of what happened."

  "No. She used Mace and kicked Lundin in the balls and face with such aggression that she crushed one of his testicles and then broke his jaw. The shot in Lundin's foot must have happened after she kicked him. But I can't swallow the scenario that says she was the one who was armed."

  "The lab has identified the weapon used on Lundin. It's a Polish P-83 Wanad using Makarov ammo. It was found in Gosseberga outside Goteborg, and it has Salander's prints on it. We can pretty much assume that she took the pistol with her to Gosseberga."

  "Sure. But the serial number shows that the pistol was stolen four years ago in the robbery of a gun shop in Orebro. The thieves were eventually caught, but they had ditched the gun. It was a local thug with a drug problem who hung out around Svavelsjo MC. I'd much rather place the pistol with either Lundin or Nieminen."

  "It could be as simple as Lundin carrying the pistol and Salander disarming him. Then a shot was fired accidentally that hit him in the foot. I mean, it can't have been her intention to kill him, since he's still alive."

  "Or else she shot him in the foot out of sheer sadism. Who knows? But how did she deal with Nieminen? He has no visible injuries."

  "He does have one, or rather two: small burn marks on his chest."

  "What sort of burns?"

  "I'm guessing a Taser."

  "So Salander was supposedly armed with a Taser, a Mace canister, and a pistol. How much would all that stuff weigh? No, I'm quite sure that either Lundin or Nieminen was carrying the gun, and she took it from him. We're not going to be sure how Lundin got himself shot until one of the parties involved starts talking."

  "All right."

  "As things now stand, Lundin has been charged for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But we don't have a damned thing on Nieminen. I'm thinking of turning him loose this afternoon."

  Nieminen was in a vile mood when he left the cells at Sodertalje police station. His mouth was dry, so his first stop was a corner shop, where he bought a Pepsi. He guzzled it down on the spot. He bought a pack of Lucky Strikes and a tin of Goteborgs Rape snuff. He flipped open his mobile and checked the battery, then dialled the number of Hans-Ake Waltari, thirty-three years old and number three in Svavelsjo MC's hierarchy. It rang four times before Waltari picked up.

  "Nieminen. I'm out."

  "Congrats."

  "Where are you?"

  "Nykoping."

  "What the fuck are you doing in Nykoping?"

  "We decided to lay low when you and Magge were busted--until we knew the lay of the land."

  "So now you know the lay of the land. Where is everybody?"

  Waltari told him where the other five members of Svavelsjo MC were located. The news neither pleased Nieminen nor made him any calmer.

  "So who the fuck is minding the store while all of you hide away like a bunch of pussies?"

  "That's not fair. You and Magge take off on some fucking job we don't know shit about, and all of a sudden you're mixed up in a shoot-out with that fucking slut the cops are after, Magge gets shot, and you're busted. Then they start digging up bodies at our warehouse in Nykvarn."

  "So?"

  "So? So we were starting to wonder if maybe you and Magge were hiding something from the rest of us."

  "And what the fuck would that be? We're the ones who took the job for the sake of the club."

  "Well, no-one ever told me that the warehouse was doubling as a woodland cemetery. Who were those stiffs?"

  Nieminen had a vicious retort on the tip of his tongue, but he stopped himself. Waltari might be an idiot, but this was no time to start an argument. The important thing right now was to consolidate their forces. After stonewalling his way through five police interrogations, it was not a good idea to start boasting that he actually knew something on a mobile less than 200 yards from a police station.

  "Forget the bodies," he said. "I don't know anything about that. But Magge is in deep shit. He's going to be in the slammer for a while, and while he's gone, I'm running the club."

  "OK. What happens now?" Walt
ari said.

  "Who's keeping an eye on the property?"

  "Benny stayed at the clubhouse to hold the fort. They searched the place the day you were arrested. They didn't find anything."

  "Benny Karlsson?" Nieminen yelled. "Benny K.'s hardly dry behind the ears."

  "Take it easy. He's with that blond fucker you and Magge always hang out with."

  Sonny froze. He glanced around and walked away from the door of the corner shop.

  "What did you say?" he asked in a low voice.

  "That blond monster you and Magge hang out with. He showed up and needed a place to hide."

  "Goddamnit, Waltari! They're looking for him all over the fucking country!"

  "Yeah . . . that's why he needed somewhere to hide. What were we supposed to do? He's your and Magge's pal."

  Nieminen shut his eyes for ten full seconds. Niedermann had brought Svavelsjo MC a lot of jobs and good money for several years. But he was absolutely not a friend. He was a dangerous bastard and a psychopath--a psychopath that the police were looking for with a vengeance. Nieminen did not trust Niedermann for one second. The best thing would be if he turned up with a bullet in his head. Then the manhunt would at least ease up a bit.

  "So what did you do with him?"

  "Benny's taking care of him. He took him out to Viktor's."

  Viktor Goransson was the club's treasurer and financial expert, who lived just outside Jarna. He was trained in accounting and had begun his career as financial adviser to a Yugoslav who owned a string of bars, until the whole gang ended up in the slammer for fraud. He had met Lundin at Kumla prison in the early nineties. He was the only member of Svavelsjo MC who normally wore a jacket and tie.

  "Waltari, get in your car and meet me in Sodertalje. I'll be outside the train station in forty-five minutes."

  "All right. But what's the rush?"

  "I have to get a handle on the situation. Do you want me to take the bus?"

  Waltari sneaked a look at Nieminen, sitting quiet as a mouse as they drove out to Svavelsjo. Unlike Lundin, Nieminen was never very easy to deal with. He had the face of a model and looked weak, but he had a short fuse and was a dangerous fucker, especially when he had been drinking. Just then he was sober, but Waltari felt uneasy about having Nieminen as their leader in the future. Lundin had somehow always managed to keep Nieminen in line. He wondered how things would unfold now with Lundin out of the way.

  At the clubhouse, Benny was nowhere to be seen. Nieminen called him twice on his mobile but got no answer.

  They drove to Nieminen's place, about half a mile farther down the road. The police had carried out a search, but they had evidently found nothing of value to the Nykvarn investigation. Which was why Nieminen had been released.

  He took a shower and changed his clothes while Waltari waited patiently in the kitchen. Then they walked about 150 yards into the woods behind Nieminen's property and scraped away the thin layer of soil that concealed a chest containing six handguns, including an AK5, a stack of ammunition, and around four pounds of explosives. This was Nieminen's arms cache. Two of the guns were Polish P-83 Wanads. They came from the same batch as the weapon that Salander had taken from him at Stallarholmen.

  Nieminen drove away all thoughts of Salander. It was an unpleasant subject. In the cell at Sodertalje police station he had played the scene over and over in his head: how he and Lundin had arrived at Advokat Bjurman's summer house and found Salander apparently just leaving.

  Events had been rapid and unpredictable. He had ridden over there with Lundin to burn the damned summer cabin down. On the instructions of that goddamned blond fucker. And then they had stumbled upon that bitch Salander--all alone, five feet tall, thin as a stick. Nieminen wondered how much she actually weighed. And then everything had gone to hell, exploded in a brief orgy of violence neither of them was prepared for.

  Objectively, he could describe the chain of events. Salander had a canister of Mace, which she sprayed in Lundin's face. Lundin should have been ready, but he wasn't. She kicked him twice, and you don't need a lot of muscle to fracture a jaw. She took him by surprise. That could be explained.

  But then she took him too, Sonny Nieminen, a man who could make well-trained men cower. She moved so fast. He hadn't been able to pull his gun. She had taken him out easily, as if brushing off a mosquito. It was humiliating. She had a Taser. She had . . .

  He could not remember a thing when he came to. Lundin had been shot in the foot and then the police showed up. After some palaver over jurisdiction between Strangnas and Sodertalje, he wound up in the cells in Sodertalje. Plus she had stolen Magge's Harley.

  She had cut the badge out of his leather jacket--the very symbol that made people step aside in the line at the bar, that gave him a status that was beyond most people's wildest dreams. She had humiliated him.

  Nieminen was boiling over. He had kept his mouth shut through the entire series of police interrogations. He would never be able to tell anyone what had happened in Stallarholmen. Until that moment, Salander had meant nothing to him. She was a little side project that Lundin was messing around with . . . again commissioned by that fucking Niedermann. Now he hated her with a fury that astonished him. Usually he was cool and analytical, but he knew that at some time in the future he would have to pay her back and erase the shame. But first he had to get a grip on the chaos that Svavelsjo MC had landed in because of Salander and Niedermann.

  Nieminen took the two remaining Polish guns, loaded them, and handed one to Waltari.

  "Do we have a plan?"

  "We're going to drive over and have a talk with Niedermann. He isn't one of us, and he doesn't have a criminal record. I don't know how he's going to react if they catch him, but if he talks he could send us all to the slammer. We'd be sent down so fast it'd make your head spin."

  "You mean we should . . ."

  Nieminen had already decided that Niedermann had to be gotten rid of, but he knew that it would be a bad idea to frighten off Waltari before they were in place.

  "I don't know. We'll see what he has in mind. If he's planning to get out of the country as fast as hell then we could help him on his way. But as long as he risks being busted, he's a threat to us."

  The lights were off at Goransson's place when Nieminen and Waltari drove up in the twilight. That was not a good sign. They sat in the car and waited.

  "Maybe they're out," Waltari said.

  "Right. They went to the bar with Niedermann," Nieminen said, opening the car door.

  The front door was unlocked. Nieminen switched on an overhead light. They went from room to room. The house was well kept and neat, which was probably because of her, whatever-her-name-was, the woman Goransson lived with.

  They found Goransson and his girlfriend in the basement, stuffed in a laundry room.

  Nieminen bent down and looked at the bodies. He reached out a finger to touch the woman whose name he could not remember. She was ice-cold and stiff. That meant they had been dead maybe twenty-four hours.

  Nieminen did not need the help of a pathologist to work out how they had died. Her neck had been broken when her head was turned 180 degrees. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and had no other injuries that Nieminen could see.

  Goransson, on the other hand, wore only his underpants. He had been beaten, had blood and bruises all over his body. His arms were bent in impossible directions, like twisted tree limbs. The battering he had been subjected to could only be defined as torture. He had been killed, as far as Nieminen could judge, by a single blow to the neck. His larynx was rammed deep into his throat.

  Nieminen went up the stairs and out the front door. Waltari followed him. Nieminen walked the fifty yards to the barn. He flipped the latch and opened the door.

  He found a dark blue 1991 Renault.

  "What kind of car does Goransson have?" Nieminen said.

  "He drove a Saab."

  Nieminen nodded. He fished some keys out of his jacket pocket and opened a door at the fa
r end of the barn. One quick look around told him that they were too late. The heavy weapons cabinet stood wide open.

  Nieminen grimaced. "About 800,000 kronor," he said.

  "What?"

  "Svavelsjo MC had about 800,000 kronor stashed in this cabinet. It was our treasury."

  Only three people knew where Svavelsjo MC kept the cash that was waiting to be invested and laundered: Goransson, Lundin, and Nieminen. Niedermann was on the run. He needed cash. He knew that Goransson was the one who handled the money.

  Nieminen shut the door and walked slowly away from the barn. His mind was spinning as he tried to digest the catastrophe. Part of Svavelsjo MC's assets were in the form of bonds that he could access, and some of their investments could be reconstructed with Lundin's help. But a large number of them had been listed only in Goransson's head, unless he had given clear instructions to Lundin. Which Nieminen doubted--Lundin had never been good with finances. Nieminen estimated that Svavelsjo MC had lost upwards of 60 percent of its assets with Goransson's death. It was a devastating blow. Above all, they needed the cash to take care of day-to-day expenses.

  "What do we do now?" Waltari said.

  "We'll go and tip off the police about what happened here."

  "Tip off the police?"

  "Yes, damn it. My prints are all over the house. I want Goransson and his bitch to be found as soon as possible, so that forensics can work out that they died while I was still locked up."

  "I get it."

  "Good. Go and find Benny. I want to talk to him. If he's still alive, that is. And then we'll track down Niedermann. We'll need every contact we have in the clubs all over Scandinavia to keep their eyes peeled. I want that bastard's head on a platter. He's probably riding around in Goransson's Saab. Find out the registration number."

  When Salander woke up it was 2:00 on Saturday afternoon and a doctor was poking at her.

  "Good morning," he said. "My name is Benny Svantesson. I'm a doctor. Are you in pain?"

  "Yes," Salander said.

  "I'll make sure you get some painkillers in a minute. But first I'd like to examine you."

  He squeezed and poked her lacerated body. Salander was extremely aggravated by the time he had finished, but she held back; she was exhausted and decided it would be better to keep quiet than to tarnish her stay at Sahlgrenska with a fight.