The Glass Devil

Chapter 4

SVANTE MALM LOOKED AS if he hadn’t slept a wink during the last twenty-four hours. His usual happy, horse-like face was ashen with exhaustion, and even his freckles looked faded. He blinked and ran his fingers through his salt-and-pepper red hair several times. If it was in an attempt to give some shape to his nonexistent hairstyle, it was completely in vain: He looked even more like an over-aged punk.

We’re all starting to get older and more worn down, thought Irene. Lucky that we have Fredrik. She glanced at him. He sat upright and, as far as Irene was concerned, seemed almost brazenly alert. His thin light-blue cotton shirt matched his eyes, and he smelled nicely of body lotion and aftershave. Even though she might be newly showered after her morning jog, she never managed to achieve that bright-eyed and bushy-tailed look.

Svante Malm began to show signs of wanting to get started. He cleared his throat and said, “I’ve spoken with Åhlén. He’ll be here at any moment and will give an account of what has materialized out at the cottage. I’ll go through what we’ve found so far at the rectory. Professor Stridner was actually nice enough to come out last night to look at the bodies. She said that they had probably been dead less than twenty-four hours. It was cold in the bedroom, not more than seventeen degrees,* and that, of course, impacts the process. She promised to give these autopsies priority this morning.”

He stopped to take a gulp of coffee. Irene noticed that his hand shook slightly as he brought the mug up to his lips. Forensics was more understaffed than usual since this year’s flu season was still reaping victims. Two of them worked in the Forensics department of the Göteborg Police Department. There were no substitutes for those positions.

“The victims were shot at point-blank range with at least one shot each, right in the forehead. You don’t get a small, neat little hole when you shoot someone between the eyes with large-caliber ammunition. The back of the skull is torn away. They died immediately. No signs of a struggle. Based on the injuries, the rifle which was lying under the bed is probably the murder weapon. There were no fingerprints on the rifle. It had been wiped carefully. The murderer probably wore gloves.”

“How did he get in?” Superintendent Andersson interrupted.

“The door was open when Irene and Fredrik arrived at the crime scene, the key in the lock.”

Tommy whistled softly and said, “So the murderer had a key to the house.”

“That’s not certain,” Andersson replied. “Irene and I found a key to the cottage under a flower pot on the outside steps. Was there one like that on the steps to the rectory?”

Irene tried to remember but before she could answer, Fredrik beat her to it.

“There was a large white ceramic pot with pine needles or something like that on the outside stairs. The key may have been under it.”

The superintendent nodded and shrugged at the same time. No one could know for certain but the family may have been in the habit of putting an extra key under potted plants, the most common place for Swedish families to leave a spare key.

“There is no apprarent damage in the rest of the house. Which brings us to the computer. The lab did a quick test; the symbol on the monitor was written in human blood. We’ll know whose blood a little later. But when I tried to start up the computer, it was completely dead. It beeped when the power was turned on, but the monitor remained blank. We’ve brought it in to the station. Ljunggren is good with computers. Åhlén brought in the other computer, from the cottage. The last thing I did before I came up here just now was to try to boot it up. Exactly the same thing happened: It beeped but wouldn’t start up.”

Svante pulled out some Polaroid photos from an envelope and handed them to Tommy Persson. “Here are pictures of the symbol.”

The photos were divided quickly among the officers present. Irene felt uneasy when she saw the fivepointed star surrounded by the ring. Svante had written “the cottage” and “the rectory” in one of the top corners. From what Irene could make out, the symbols were almost identical.

“These stars are called pentagrams. A pentagram is a fivepointed star that can be drawn in one pass with five straight lines. One point faces up, two down, and two to the sides.”

Svante stood. He pulled down the white screen from the ceiling and turned on the overhead projector. He drew a fivepointed star in blue ink.

“This is a pentagram. Compare it with the pictures. Do you see any differences?”

“Yes. On the computer screens, they’re upside down,” Fredrik said quickly.

“Exactly. Now I’ll turn my picture as well.”

With a quick movement of his hand, Svante rotated the picture a hundred and eighty degrees.

“Do you see that the appearance of the star changes? Now it has two points going up and one down. Drawn this way, it becomes a magic symbol. I’ve come across it a few times in the past. And now I’ll fill in the two top points and the lower one.”

He quickly colored in the three points and the space in the middle of the pentagram with a red pen. The spectators saw a triangle with two points facing upward. Svante took a new gulp of coffee before he continued: “This is the Devil’s face, with two horns and the goatee.”

He paused to see the effect of his words. All the officers looked surprised, but Superintendent Andersson suddenly woke up. “What kind of crap is this? The Devil’s face!? Are you messing with us?” he asked angrily.

Svante attempted a smile. “No. As I said, I’ve come across this before, twice at church fires and once at a murder. The murder was never solved, but everything pointed to it being a Satanic sacrifice. I’m thinking of the Purple Murder. Do you remember?”

Everyone but Fredrik nodded. Svante looked at him and said, “You are too young: It was more than twenty years ago.

“We found the victim in an apartment. The neighbors called the police when they began smelling him in the summer heat. When we got there, it appeared to be a completely ordinary apartment. The hall, kitchen, and living room looked normal. But the bedroom was a house of horrors. The floor, walls, and ceiling were painted black. The window was covered with a thick black curtain. He had covered the walls with a lot of symbols. Different whips and masks were hanging in there too. There were candleholders everywhere, but all the candles were black and made of wax. A large ceramic basin, which he had filled with strange objects, had been placed in the middle of the room. There were pieces of bone, tufts of hair from humans and animals, a snakeskin, and I can’t remember what all. He was lying on top of the bed with his throat cut. The murder weapon was never found, but it must have been a 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 Kålltorp’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 Ringön. 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?”

“Norssjön’s summer church.”

“Norssjön! 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 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.