Read Sun Storm for Free Online Page B

wounds. He was clean, stitched up and sluiced down, pale under the fluorescent lights. It bothered Anna-Maria to see his slender body lying naked on the cold steel table. She had kept her fleecy jacket on.
    Lars Pohjanen pulled on a green surgical gown, shoved his feet into his worn old clogs, which bore only vestiges of the white they had once been, and slipped on his thin, supple rubber gloves.
    “How are the kids?” he asked.
    “Jenny and Petter are fine. Marcus is suffering from a broken heart and is mostly just lying on his bed with his headphones on, developing tinnitus.”
    “Poor kid,” said Pohjanen with genuine sympathy, and turned to Viktor Strandgård.
    Anna-Maria wondered whether he meant Marcus or Viktor Strandgård.
    “Do you mind?” she asked, and took her tape recorder out of her pocket. “So the others can listen later.”
    Pohjanen shrugged his shoulders in agreement. Anna-Maria switched on the tape recorder.
    “Chronologically,” he said. “First a blow to the back of the head with a blunt instrument. You and I are not really in a position to try and turn him over, but you can see it on here.”
    He took out a computer slide and clipped it on to the X-ray light box. Anna-Maria looked at the images in silence, thinking of the black-and-white ultrasound pictures of her baby.
    “You can see the split in the skull here. And the subdural bleed. Just here.”
    The doctor’s finger traced a dark area on the pictures.
    “It might have been possible to save his life if he had suffered only the blow to the head, but probably not,” he said.
    “Your murderer is most likely right-handed,” continued Pohjanen. “Then, after the blow to his head, he receives these two stab wounds to the stomach and the chest.”
    He pointed to two of the wounds on Viktor Strandgård’s body.
    “It’s impossible to speculate about the height of the perpetrator from the blow to the back of the head, and unfortunately there are no clues from the stab wounds either. They were delivered from above, so it’s my guess that Viktor Strandgård was on his knees when he received those wounds. Either that, or the perpetrator is immensely tall, like an American basketball player. But I would presume that Strandgård suffered the blow to his head first. Bang.”
    The doctor smacked his own bald head to illustrate the blow.
    “The blow makes him fall to his knees—there are no grazes or hematomas on the knees, but the carpet was quite soft—and then the killer stabs him twice. That’s why the angle of entry is sloping from above. So it’s difficult to say anything about his height.”
    “So he died from the blow and the two stab wounds?” asked Anna-Maria.
    “Yes,” continued Pohjanen, suppressing a cough. “This stab wound through the wall of the rib cage splits the seventh rib bone on the left-hand side, opens the pericardium—”
    “The peri—?”
    “The heart sac, the right ventricle, the heart chamber. This causes a bleed into the heart and the right lung. With the second blow the knife cut through the liver and caused a bleed into the abdominal cavity and the peritoneum.”
    “Did he die immediately?”
    Pohjanen shrugged his shoulders.
    “What about the rest of his injuries?” asked Anna-Maria.
    “He sustained those after death. All this damage to the torso and belly with a sharp object. These blows came from directly in front and were delivered after the moment of death. I would guess that Viktor Strandgård was lying on his back at the time. There’s also this long gash which opened up the stomach.”
    He pointed at the long reddish blue wound in the stomach, which was now held together with rough stitches.
    “And the eyes?” asked Anna-Maria, gazing at the gaping holes in Viktor Strandgård’s face.
    “Look at this,” said Pohjanen, slotting in another X-ray plate. “Just here! Can you see this splinter that’s come away from the cranium right inside the eye socket? And here! I hardly noticed it