hunting knife with a large blade. Extremely sharp. The murderer had drawn a pentagram on his stomach.”
“Why was it called the Purple Murder?” Fredrik wondered.
“The man was only wearing a purple cloak. Underneath, he was naked.”
“Why was it purple? Did the color mean something in particular?” Irene asked.
“Black, white, and red are the colors used during black masses. Sometimes they may have a little silver as well. When they use red, it’s a purplish red. Also, the ring around the pentagram symbolizes a snake which is biting its own tail. Exactly what the significance of that is, I don’t know.”
“Hadn’t the neighbors heard anything?” Irene asked.
When the Purple Murder happened, she had been an alternate in the field and had been driving a police car in Angered. All she’d known about that murder was what she had read in the papers.
“Nothing. But the murder occurred during vacation time, when most people were out of town. And this fellow was pretty odd and kept to himself. He rarely said anything to his neighbors, but he didn’t bother anyone either. Not until he started smelling.”
“So you mean we’re going to be chasing Satanists?. . who murder pastors? But why did they murder the son? He was a teacher, not a pastor. And why Mrs. Schyttelius?” Jonny asked.
Svante gestured tiredly. “I’m not saying that the murderer is a Satanist. I’m saying that the symbol on the computer screens is supposed to be magical and is common in occult and Satanic contexts.” He pointed his finger at the blue star with the three red-colored points that was projected on the screen and continued. “I’ve also seen it painted on church doors, churches burned down by Satanists. In one case, we caught the perpetrators. When Kalltorp’s old church burned down, two guys and two girls had set the fire. They said they were confirmed Satanists and had done it in the Devil’s honor. The existence of an older leader surfaced during the investigation; he was the one who had ordered the fire set. We never got our hands on him. The kids didn’t know his real name or what he looked like.”
“They must have seen what he looked like,” Jonny objected.
“No. He always had a silver mask over his face when they met him. They had a ‘church,’ as they called it, an old storage facility out on Ringon. A perfect remote location. The congregation consisted of about ten youths, and these four were given the honor of an assignment to burn down the church in question. Neither we nor his ‘congregation’ saw any trace of the leader after the fire. It was as if he vanished from the face of the earth. The kids were taken care of by Social Services, and this specific congregation dissolved. But a new one may have been founded; maybe the leader came back and started over again. What do we know?”
“Was the pentagram written in blood?” Tommy Persson wondered.
“Yes. The kids had killed a cat and drawn the symbol before they started the fire. They had used hamster blood at the other church fire.”
“Which was the other church where you saw the pentagram?”
“Norssjon’s summer church.”
“Norssjon! That’s where Schyttelius’s summer cottage is located!” Irene exclaimed.
Svante Malm nodded. “Exactly. But the church was on the other side of the lake and burned down almost two years ago. It was a small wooden church that was only used during the summer since there wasn’t any heating or electricity in it.”
“So it couldn’t have been an electrical fire,” the superintendent concluded.
“No. A witness who was out that summer night rowing on the lake heard voices from the church around midnight. He thought it sounded like chanting. A little while later, he saw flames shooting up from the building and supposedly he saw shapes moving around the fire. According to him, they were dancing. The witness was in his seventies and had heart problems, so he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything about the fire. Instead, he hurried home and called the fire department. But by the time they got there, the building had practically burned to the ground. Strangely enough, the door had survived, and I saw an upside-down pentagram for the second time.”
“Drawn on it with hamster blood,” the superintendent added.
“Yes. Animal sacrifices are common during their rituals. There’s one additional item at the crime scene in the rectory that has Satanic connections: A crucifix is hanging upside-down in the Schytteliuses’ bedroom. Satanists often use upside-down crosses during their black masses. The crucifix may well have hung in the bedroom before the murders, but the killer took the opportunity to turn it around.”
Irene tried to pull together the items of information they had just received. It wasn’t yet possible to combine them into a pattern. She raised her hand and posed her question when Svante nodded at her: “Do you think it’s plausible that someone would shoot his victims as part of a Satanic rite?”
Svante shook his head. “No. Rituals using knives are important elements in such murders. Swords are not uncommon. Nor is poison. There are usually different symbols painted or carved on the victims. They’re marked to show that they belong to the devil. Satanists have a strong belief in the power of blood. They drink blood and sacrifice blood. Of course it was bloody at the crime scene yesterday, but nothing points to these deaths being the result of the performance of a Satanic ritual.”
“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 Ahlen, stuck his bald head into the room. He lumbered over to where Svante sat. Irene knew that Ahlen 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 Ahlen 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 Norssjon. 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 Hemkop, 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.”
