Free The Fire Dance by Helene Tursten Page B

called to her daughter in the kitchen.
    “Lentil soup. I’ve made baked bananas for dessert,” Jenny informed her. “You can go ahead and pour yourself a glass of wine.”
    Jenny had been a vegan for a few years now. Lately, she’d developed an interest in cooking. Since Krister was a professional chef, he found inspiration in her vegan creations. He’d lost about twenty pounds, a very good thing, but Irene found that she couldn’t reconcile herself to vegan food. She begged them to limit the vegan meals to three times a week. On the other nights, Jenny had to fend for herself and often got by on leftovers from the previous night.
    Irene could hear the jangle of Jenny’s many thin silver bracelets as she stirred the soup.
    Recently, Jenny had been dyeing her hair raven black and wearing a lot of red and lime green. Many years had passed since Irene had argued with her daughter about her choice of clothes. Jenny was grown now and could wear whatever she wanted. Her old-fogey mamma had been forced to realize that her daughter’s role as a singer in a rock band with a punk edge demanded a certain look.
    “Pappa called. He’s running late. Someone got sick,” Jenny said from the kitchen. Irene sighed as she thought about her poor husband, who often had to stand in when one of the other cooks got sick. He’d been complaining of being too tired lately, which was certainly to be expected. Gladys’s was one of Göteborg’s most popular restaurants and even had a one-star rating in an international guidebook, so expectations from both the boss and the patrons were high.
    As soon as Sammie had enjoyed his fill of petting and tickling, Irene went into the living room to search through the bookshelves. She found the paperback by Max Franke. His name was in bigger letters than the title. As she pulled the book from the shelf, a few grains of sand fell to the floor—a greeting from the sunny beaches of Crete. On the back cover was the name of the publisher and there she found what she was looking for: Borgstens Förlag AB. She wrote down the name on a slip of paper and put it in her wallet.
    A LL THE GATHERED detectives sat as straight as candles in a candleholder as morning prayer was about to start. Even Superintendent Andersson sat quietly in his chair, waiting, because, as they found out that morning, Yvonne Stridner intended to grace them with her esteemed presence. Professor Stridner was practically a legend as the Head of Forensic Medicine in Göteborg and was known as one of the best pathologists in Europe. She herself would have insisted she was one of the best in the world.
    A few minutes after the clock showed it was time to start, they could hear the energetic click of Stridner’s high heels on the hallway floor. Professor Stridner appeared in the doorway and surveyed the auditorium before making her entrance. She walked to the podium, leaving a waft of expensive perfume in her wake. She shrugged off her fur coat and fluffed her bright red hair. As always, her clothes were modern and tailored. This autumn morning, she wore dark brown linen trousers and an emerald green angora sweater with an eye-catching brooch fastened to the collar. The brooch was a leopard whose glittering red eyes caught the light. Irene assumed that the red stones were real rubies.
    Yvonne Stridner spoke without further ado.
    “Since I was coming to meet with the chief of policeanyway, I thought I would inform you of the results of Sophie Malmborg’s autopsy to save us all time.”
    Stridner stared down the auditorium, and Superintendent Andersson shrank as her sharp blue-green eyes bored into his. Most people would have had the same reaction.
    Satisfied with the attention of her audience, Stridner continued.
    “Sophie was still alive when the fire began. Her nostrils and lungs are filled with soot. The soot particles reach as deep as the alveoli. In the lower lobes of the lung, the concentration of soot is fairly slight, which means