During their conversation, Palmgren mentions a visit he received from a former secretary from St Stefan's, where she was committed as a child, who gave him Salander's medical files which led him to believe she was involved in something called the Registry.

Suspicious, Salander forces the Warden to let her use his computer, and learns the Registry is a secret project that places exceptional children in specific environments to test the effects on their growth.

Unable to do anything from prison, Salander asks journalist Mikael Blomkvist to investigate in her stead, pointing him to wealthy businessman Leo Mannheimer, whose name was in a Registry file she found.

Steinberg panics and contacts his associate Rakel Greitz who, despite dying from stomach cancer, enters Palmgren's house pretending to be a nurse, poisons him and takes the file.

Blomkvist arrives too late to save him, but in his dying breaths Palmgren tells him to find Hilda von Kanterborg, a former Registry agent whose initials were in the file.

Having grown up on a farm with an abusive adopted father, Dan found a passion for music and eventually fled to America, where he lived as a jazz musician.

After she is released, Salander, aided by Blomkvist's sister Annika, looks into Faria's history: she had been treated as a slave and object by her religious older brothers Bashir and Ahmed, who planned on selling her into marriage with a rich man.

After recovering from a wound sustained in her escape, Salander confronts and subdues Greitz and Benjamin, deciding to spare the former so she can suffer the shame of her reputation being ruined as she is arrested.

The people, Steinberg included, involved are sent to prison and, though preempted by a stock market crash, Millennium publishes Leo and Dan's story.