Free My Soul to Take: A Novel of Iceland by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir Page B

an Internet connection. What about you? What do you do?"
    "I'm a lawyer," Thora said, nodding eagerly as if he might not believe her. God, she was pathetic sometimes, she thought.
    "Oh, right," said Teitur. "Hey, why don't I show you around the place? I know it like the back of my hand after a week here."
    Thora smiled at him. She doubted whether he could have become a local expert in the space of a week. Especially on just one leg. "Who knows? We'll see."
    "I'm free and easy." Teitur grinned. "Just give me a shout."
    Thora thanked him and said goodbye. That would be something else, strolling around the locality with an attractive man instead of crouching in a dusty basement looking at old photographs. Even if he couldn't m ove very quickly . . . Oh, well.
    Most of the internal organs from the deceased were lying in steel trays. The brain was in one, the lungs in a larger one, the liver in a third, and so on. After working fifteen years as a police detective this gruesome buffet had long since cea sed to bother Thorolfur, but he did have to think back several years to recall a body in worse condition. His eyes drifted over to the hollowed-out body of the unidentified woman who was found dead on the beach on Snafellsnes. She was lying serenely on the autopsy table, her facial features beyond recognition due to extensive injuries and what the doctor had said appeared to be postmortem animal predation. Thorolfur felt saddened. He hoped the woman had either died quickly or lost consciousness before the end. If not, finding her murderer would become even more pressing as a sadistic bastard capable of such torture could not be incarcerated quickly enough.
    The doctor in charge of the autopsy walked over to the sink, slipping off his gloves. "So. The woman was brutally raped, but the cause of death was repeated blows to the front of the head. The facial features are unrecognizable as a result of this and of postmortem mutilation by animals, presumably scavengers. It cannot be determined whether the woman was conscious for the duration of the rape, but there are no visible injuries on the body to suggest that she resisted. Thus it seems likely that she had already sustained some cranial injury before the rape began, but was dead when it finished. The deceased may even be assumed to have been beaten during the act."
    "Lovely," muttered Thorolfur.
    "Quite. Anyway, semen, presumably from the assailant, was present in the vagina, and an analysis of that together with the hairs collected by combing her pubic area may identify the assailant. This seems the only likely method of identification. In fact, the exceptional volume of semen gives grounds for investigating the possibility of more than one assailant." He addressed his words to Thorolfur without ever looking the police detective in the eyes. They had worked together before so Thorolfur knew the man and did not take this as a slight. He had often wondered if the unsociable doctor had become this way from dealing with unresponsive corpses for all of his working life. "And the pins will be carefully described in the autopsy report. It's not every day that a body is found with such objects in the soles of the feet. I have a suspicion that the murderer attached some significance to that act. The most immediate inference is that he is seriously deranged or sadistic. At least, I can think of no logical explanation for this." He pointed to ten bloodstained pins that he had extracted from the soles of the woman's feet and placed in a transparent plastic jar.
    He took off his gore-spattered surgical gown and ran his fingers through his hair. "I'll send everything off for immediate analysis. I know you need the findings quickly."
    "Yeah." Thorolfur thanked the man and left. Snaefellsnes was a two-hour drive away and his men were waiting. They had a murderer to catch.
    Thora stared at the stack of boxes in the poorly lit basement . Light shone feebly from a bare bulb in the middle of the room