"All of a sudden an abyss opened as Mikael's brain made an intuitive leap.  He remembered the fire victim in Hedestad..." (Larsson 348)

After months of research into the Vanger family and the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, Mikael gets one of his first major pieces of evidence into this mystery.  After a comment made by his daughter, Pernilla, about how the names and numbers from Harriet's journal where depressing Mikael realized she knew what the numbers stood for.  Knowing his daughter was religious, Mikael took the numbers and searched through Harriet's old bible and discovered that the numbers were sections from Leviticus that referred to brutal punishments for various offenses.  Here he realizes that the passage linked to a young woman who had been killed in 1949 described almost perfectly how she had been killed.  With this revelation, Mikael would now begin to see a larger picture that would lead to a dark and gruesome history from these once empty names and numbers.