The Golden Calf by Helene Tursten Page A

couldn’t reach him on Tuesday, she began to worry. She called a number of people, and finally she reached his father, who went out on Wednesday and found them both. There are no signs of a break-in at the crime scene. As I said, the bodies are two meters apart. We believe that Rothstaahl was shot first. The other guy was trying to run out the door between the kitchen and the bedroom when he was shot in the back of the head.”
    “Have you found the bullets?” asked Irene.
    “No. There were no exit holes, so they’re probably still in the bodies. Fired from a girly gun.” Jonny grinned.
    Irene studied the photograph of the two men. Jonny’s last comment raised the hair on the back of her neck. Could it be possible?
    “How many shots did each man receive?” she asked quickly.
    “Don’t you have your own case to work on? Why do you always interrupt—”
    “—because our case is connected to yours,” Irene said.
    “Your case? How?”
    “Just tell me how many shots were fired.”
    “Two. Two apiece, that is,” Jonny said sullenly.
    “Irene’s right,” Tommy said. “It does resemble the Askim murder.”
    “Stop right there!” said Andersson. “What makes you think the murders in Askim and Långedrag are related?”
    Irene hesitated. It was mostly a gut feeling. Before she could figure out how to put it into words, Tommy spoke.
    “Here’s how they are alike. There’s no sign of a break-in. All three men were shot at point-blank range with a small-caliber weapon. The murders happened within a twenty-hour time period, and neither of the two men we identified was ever involved in a crime. Both took place in areas of Göteborg that otherwise have low rates for murder and violent crimes.”
    “So who’s the third guy? Do we have any reports of missing persons that might match the body?” asked Birgitta.
    Jonny shook his head. “No one who looks like him has been reported missing. We turned him over and took his photo before he was taken to the morgue.”
    Jonny clicked for the next slide. The man in this photo was younger than the other one. He was blond with fairly long hair. Despite having been dead for some time, one could tell that he’d been rather good looking.
    Kajsa Berggren leapt out of her chair. She didn’t run out of the room this time, but pointed at the picture and waved her arms around excitedly. “I know him! I know who he is!” she yelled.
    “Who?” asked Andersson, confused by her excitement.
    “That guy is Philip Bergman!”
    “Who?” the superintendent asked again. Andersson did not like Kajsa’s strange outbursts. Usually she was so quiet and well mannered that he forgot she existed. And then, all of a sudden, she’d have an outburst and do something erratic.
    “Kajsa’s right,” Tommy said. “That really is Philip Bergman. Bergman-Kaegler. And that brings us back to Sanna.”
    This was too much for old Andersson. He slammed his palm on the table and roared so loudly that his voice echoed through the room, “What the hell is behind all this?”
    Irene could sympathize with her boss. There was something familiar about that combination of names: Bergman-Kaegler. Unlike her boss, she decided to wait and see how this would play out.
    Kajsa Birgersdotter made a valiant attempt to explain. “Sanna Kaegler and I are the same age. Maybe that’s why I follow her in the news.… Philip Bergman and Sanna Kaegler were old friends who started an IT company together. It became one of the largest in the industry. They all got really rich! The tabloids always wrote tons about them and their fancy apartments in London and New York and how successful their company was. And then the tech bubble burst, and their company went bust. And then that guy Bonetti went missing, too.”
    Andersson groaned loudly, but Irene was all ears. She and Tommy had been involved peripherally in the search for Thomas Bonetti.
    Witnesses had seen Thomas Bonetti in his Storebro Royal Cruiser 420 leave from