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She had not been in a bar since she came back and - just her luck - she had to run into hi Blomkvist It was the first ti?" Mi Or rather, Mimmi went on with her story about a dyke she had met on a trip to London a few years back She had been visiting an art gallery and the situation had gotten funnier and funnier as Mimmi tried to pick her up Salander nodded now and then, but as usual ed much, she decided He looked absurdly well-approachable and relaxed, but with a grave expression He was listening to what his co now and then It seemed to be a serious discussion

Salander looked at Blomkvist’s friend A er than Blo intently She had no idea who he was

All of a sudden a whole group came up to Bloot a pat on the cheek frohed at Blohed too

Salander scowled

"You’re not listening to what I’," Mimmi said

"Of course I aive up Should we go home and fuck instead?"

"In a bit," Salander said

She moved a little closer to Mimmi and put a hand on her hip

Mi you on the mouth"

"Don’t do it"

"Are you afraid people will think you’re a dyke?"

"I don’t want to attract attention right now"

"Let’s go ho to wait Twenty ot a call on his lasses and stood up siuy over there is Mikael Blomkvist He was more famous than a rock star after the Wennerstrom affair"

"You don’t say"

"Did you miss all that? It was about the time when you left the country"

"I’ve heard it mentioned"

Salander waited for another five minutes before she looked at Mimmi

"You wanted to kiss me on the "

Salander stood on tiptoe and pulled Mi, deep kiss When they separated there was applause

"You’re nuts, you know that?" Miet ho She pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and sniffed She thought about taking a shower but decided the hell with it, and instead left her clothes on the floor and went to bed She slept till 4:00 in the afternoon, then got up and went down to Soderhallarna ht about Blo herself in the same room as him She had been annoyed at his presence, but she also discovered that it no longer hurt to see him He had been transformed to a little blip on the horizon, a minor perturbation factor in her existence There orse disturbances in life

But she wished she had had the guts to go up to his She wasn’t sure which

Anyway, she was curious about what he was up to She ran a few errands in the afternoon and came home around 7:00 pm She booted up her PowerBook and started Asphyxia 13 The icon MikBlom/laptop was still on the server in Holland She double-clicked and opened a copy of Blomkvist’s hard drive It was her first visit to his computer since she had left Sweden more than a year before She noticed with satisfaction that he still had not upgraded to the latest MacOS, which would havewould have been terrarade would not interfere with it

The voluabytes since her previous visit A large part of the increase was due to PDF files and Quark documents The documents did not take up es were compressed Since he had returned as publisher he had apparently archived every issue of Millennium

She sorted the files on the hard disk by date with the oldest at the top and noticed that Bloreat deal of time over the past few months on a folder named, apparently a book project Then she opened Bloh the address list in his correspondence

One address ot an ee and read a few concise lines about a board e ended with the inforer had booked the saested the infored and downloaded Blomkvist’stitle The Leeches and the subtitle Society’s Support for the Prostitution Industry She also found a copy of a thesis entitled "From Russia with Love" written by a woman named Mia Johansson

She disconnected and went into the kitchen to put on so rooarette case and lit a Marlboro Light The rest of the evening she spent reading

By 9:00 she had finished Johansson’s thesis She bit her lower lip

By 10:30 she had finished Svensson’s book Millenniuain

At 11:30 she was reading the last of Blomkvist’s emails when she suddenly sat up and opened her eyes wide

She felt a cold shiver go down her spine

It was a e from Svensson to Blomkvist

In an aside Svensson mentioned that he had soster naet a chapter all to hied that there was not much time till the deadline Blomkvist hadn’t answered the email

Zala

Salander sat motionless until the screen saver went on

Svensson put aside his notebook and scratched his head He gazed at the single word at the top of the page in his notebook Four letters

Zala

He spent three s around the naot a cup of coffee froo ho late at the Millenniu

He had all the material under control, but for the first tiht have missed an important detail

Zala

Until that point he had been iet the book published, but noished he had ht about the autopsy report that Inspector Gulbrandsen had let him read Irina P’s body had been found in Sodertalje canal She had devastating injuries to her face and chest The cause of death was a broken neck, but two of her other injuries had been judged fatal Six ribs had been broken and her left lung punctured She had a ruptured spleen The injuries were hard to interpret The pathologist had offered the suggestion that a wooden club wrapped in cloth had been the weapon used Why a killer would wrap a murder weapon in cloth could not be explained, but the scale of the injuries was not characteristic of an ordinary assault

The murder remained unsolved, and Gulbrandsen had said that the prospect of their solving the case was slender

The name Zala had coathered over the last two years, but always on the periphery, always eerily elusive Nobody kneho he was and nobody could provide proof that he even existed So used as a threat, a terrifying warning to those who did not toe the line He had spent a whole week hunting forquestions of police, journalists, and several recently developed sources with contacts in the sex trade<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>