Free The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund

he’s taken a lot of beatings, but the anaesthetic would have kept him going. Eventually, after hours of suffering, the drugs would have paralysed his heart and lungs. A slow and horribly painful death. Poor kid …’
    Jeanette was feeling dizzy.
    ‘But why?’ she asked, in the vain hope that Ivo had some sort of reasonable explanation.
    ‘If you’ll permit me to speculate …?’
    ‘By all means.’
    ‘The first thing that came to mind were organised dogfights. You know, two prize dogs fighting until one of them is killed. The sort of thing that sometimes goes on in the suburbs.’
    ‘That sounds like a hell of a long shot,’ Jeanette said instinctively, repulsed by the macabre thought. But she wasn’t entirely sure that it was. Over the years she had learned not to dismiss even the most unlikely ideas. On many occasions, once the truth was revealed it turned out to be far stranger than any fiction. She thought of the German cannibal who had used the Internet to find a man who was prepared to let himself be eaten.
    ‘Well, I’m just speculating,’ Ivo Andrić went on. ‘Another idea might sound more plausible.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘That he’s been beaten beyond recognition by someone who didn’t stop even though the boy was dying. Someone who dosed him up with drugs and then carried on with the abuse.’
    Jeanette felt a memory flicker.
    ‘Do you remember that ice-hockey player in Västerås, the one who was stabbed about a hundred times?’
    ‘No, I can’t say that I do. Maybe it was before I came to Sweden.’
    ‘Yes, it was a while back now. Mid-nineties. It was a skinhead off his head on Rohypnol. The hockey player was openly homosexual, and you know what neo-Nazis think of gays. The skinhead carried on stabbing the dead body way beyond the point when his arm should have cramped up.’
    ‘Yes, that’s more or less what I’m suggesting. A merciless lunatic full of hate and, well … Rohypnol or anabolic steroids, maybe?’
    Jeanette hung up. She was feeling hungry and looked at the time. She decided to give herself a long lunch down in the police headquarters canteen. She’d grab the booth at the far end of the room so she had a chance of being left in peace. The restaurant would be full of people soon, and she wanted to be alone.
     
    Before she sat down with her tray she snatched up a discarded copy of one of the evening papers. Almost at once she realised that the paper’s source in the police department was someone close to her, seeing as the article was based on facts that only someone intimately connected to the case could know. Since she was sure it wasn’t Hurtig, that only left Åhlund or Schwarz.
    ‘So you’re down here already?’
    Jeanette looked up from the paper.
    Hurtig was standing beside her, grinning.
    ‘Is it OK if I join you?’ He nodded to the empty seat opposite her.
    ‘Are you back already?’ Jeanette gestured to him to sit down.
    ‘Yes, we got finished an hour or so ago. Danderyd. Some rich bastard in construction with a hard drive full of child porn. Bloody awful.’ Hurtig walked round the table, put his tray down, then sat. ‘The wife went to pieces, and their fourteen-year-old daughter just stood and stared as we arrested him.’
    ‘Otherwise?’ she asked.
    ‘Mum called this morning,’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘Dad’s not well, he’s in the hospital up in Gällivare.’
    Jeanette put her knife and fork down and stared at him. ‘Is it serious?’
    Hurtig shook his head. ‘More like unbelievable. Looks like he got his right hand caught in the circular saw, but Mum said they can probably save most of his fingers. She managed to find them and put them in a bag of ice cubes.’
    ‘Damn.’
    ‘But she couldn’t find his thumb.’ Hurtig grinned. ‘The cat probably got it. It’s OK, the right hand would be the best one for this to happen to for Dad. He likes carving and playing the fiddle, and for both of those his left hand is more