The Treacherous Net by Helene Tursten Read Free Book Online Page B

Internet was the most likely route if someone wanted to hook up with teenage girls.
    “There was that guy in Malmö last year, remember. He was in his thirties, but online he pretended to be a twenty-five-year-old woman looking for young models. He talked them into everything from posing naked in front of a webcam to meeting up with him. They managed to prove fifty-six cases of rape. There were probably a lot more, but the girls weren’t prepared to come forward. They were all in their teens,” Fredrik went on.
    “There are plenty of similar cases where a man has conned a girl into meeting up and then raped her, but none of them has led to murder,” Tommy pointed out.
    “Not in Sweden. Overseas. There have been several in the US,” Hannu said.
    “How can these girls be so naïve? Don’t they realize they’re arranging to meet a complete stranger? As a parent you don’t have a clue what they get up to online!”
    Jonny spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture. Irene understood how he felt; his two girls were fourteen and twelve. His boys were slightly older.
    “So it seems most likely that contact was established online,” Superintendent Thylqvist stated. She turned to Fredrik. “Could you make sure that Alexandra’s and Moa’s computers are checked?”
    “I’ll speak to Jens.”
    Jens was their IT expert, and he was highly skilled. As he sauntered along the corridors in his low-slung jeans and woolen hat he looked like a skateboarder who had left his board somewhere and gotten lost, but in fact he was thirty years old and had just become a father. Little Zelda was named after a princess in a popular video game. But then Jens was a bit different, and Irene always thought of him as their “IT oddball.”
    “Thank you, Fredrik. Apart from that, I assume you’ve got your hands full with the gang murders. Jonny, Hannu and Irene—I’d like you to work on the two girls; Tommy, you’re on the mummy. Unfortunately, I have a meeting that will take all day.”
    Efva Thylqvist got to her feet, signaling that the briefing was over.
    They divided up the twenty-three names on Irene’s list among the three of them. Only two of the men had convictions for homicide. Others were guilty of violent rape, serious assault and extreme threatening behavior. Jonny and Hannu each took one of the men convicted of homicide.
    Irene spent the rest of the day working through her eight names. Three of them were still in jail and hadn’t been out on parole, so they could be crossed off right away. She was also able to eliminate another man who was in a state psychiatric institution. If he had done half of what was in his file, he was more than qualified for the role of serial killer on the hunt for young girls, so to be on the safe side Irene checked that he hadn’t been let out for any reason toward the end of April, and he hadn’t. His case worker made it clear that it would be a long time before he was even considered for parole.
    Of the remaining four, one was held in an open jail and was on day release. He was employed in a car repair workshop and was doing well, according to the governor. On April 30 he had worked half a day and had spent the evening in front of the TV with some of the other inmates. His alibi seemed legitimate.
    The last three names were trickier. She got a hold of the youngest, an eighteen-year-old, at his mother’s house in Tynnered. After a lengthy discussion, first with the mother and then with the boy himself, they arranged to meet the following day. He was adamant that he didn’t want to come down to the police station. “I get these traumatic flashbacks,” he insisted. Someone’s obviously had therapy , Irene thought. They agreed that she would come to his mother’s apartment at ten o’clock the following morning.
    Then she hit a wall. Neither of the remaining two men answered on the number that was given in their contact details. In one case she heard an automated message informing her that