Death Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

long haul.
    “The marks were from a tripod,” Ringmar said. “It might have been for a video camera or a regular camera—or a pair of binoculars, for that matter—but it’s definitely a tripod.”
    “How the hell can they tell?” someone asked from the middle of the room.
    “Say that again?”
    “How can they be certain that it was a tripod?”
    “They aren’t certain, as we just pointed out,” Winter said. “But the lab is in the process of eliminating everything else.”
    “So the bastard recorded the whole thing.” The inspector looked around the room from his spot by the door.
    “That’s just speculation,” Winter said.
    “What we do know is that there are marks from a tripod base in the dried blood,” Ringmar said.
    “Can they tell when the marks were left there?” Bergenhem asked.
    “What?” Djanali asked.
    “Did he put a tripod there before or afterward?”
    “Excellent question,” Ringmar said, “and I just received the answer.”
    “Which is?”
    “They think someone put it there before the murder.”
    “In other words, the blood is from later on,” Bergenhem said.
    No one spoke.
    “So he was making a movie,” Djanali said. She stood up, then walked out of the room and through the corridor to the bathroom. She leaned over the sink for a long time. Where are all the guys? she wondered. Isn’t all this making anyone else sick to their stomach?

    Winter had a lot to tell Karin and Lasse Malmström, but at first he just sat there with his hands in theirs. Nothing in here has a life of its own any longer, he thought. The grief has taken over and the shadows have crawled out from their hiding places.
    “There’s nothing worse than outliving your own child,” Lasse said.
    Winter got up and crossed the hallway to the kitchen on the left. He hadn’t been there for years, though he had been a frequent guest at one time. The days fly by like wild horses across the plains, he thought, trying three cupboards before he found the jar of instant coffee. He filled the pot with water and plugged it into the socket by the sink. Carefully measuring the powder and milk into three cups, he poured the boiling water. He found a tray in a compartment designed for a pastry board and put the cups on it.
    All this is keeping you on edge, he thought, but it’s also making you more observant, which is probably good. Learning to sort things out and rearrange them will make you a better investigator. For whatever that’s worth.
    The sun trickled through the window over the counter and collided with the dim glow from the hallway, filling the kitchen with a light that revealed nothing and pointed nowhere. How will they find the strength to make it through the days ahead? he wondered.
    He took the coffee back to the living room and sat down in the armchair. Karin had opened one of the blinds. The sun painted a long ashen rectangle on the north wall.
    “So he had been gone for two days,” Winter started off.
    Lasse nodded.
    “Did he know where he’d be staying?”
    Karin and Lasse looked mutely at each other.
    “Did he reserve a room before he left?”
    “He didn’t want to,” Karin said.
    “Why is that?”
    “It wasn’t the first time he’s gone someplace on his own. He’s never been in London by himself before, but he’s been here and there.”
    Winter wasn’t surprised that she spoke of Per in the present tense. Her son was still with her, a phenomenon he had observed many times before.
    “He wanted to take things as they came,” she continued.
    The rectangle of light on the wall had moved, and Karin’s figure was now illuminated. Her head was bowed, lending dark shadows to her face. Something glittered in her right eye, a reflection from far away. She was wearing washed-out jeans and a thick knitted sweater—the first clothes that caught her eye when getting out of bed after a sleepless night, Winter guessed.
    “Teenagers don’t like to plan so much,” she added.
    “Did he say anything