Because when he finally stopped manically calling her, his own phone started to ring loudly, and he picked it up.

“Good. You changed your mind. If you’ll just give me her . . .”

“Grens?”

A man’s voice. It wasn’t Charlotte M. Andersen, changing her mind and calling him back.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Officer on duty here.”

“And?”

“Regerings Street 79. We were called there a half hour ago, and I thought you should know.”

“Yes?”

“A new corpse. Two bullet holes—forehead, temple.”

Ewert Grens jumped up quickly from his desk chair, but he didn’t head immediately for the elevator, he turned in the opposite direction, the phone still at his ear, and walked toward Mariana Hermansson’s office.

“Anything else?”

“The officers on the scene describe a male, well-built, approximately fifty years old, and one meter and eighty-five centimeters tall. Also noted: there is a gun in a shoulder holster. Also noted: a wallet in the inner pocket of his jacket. The shooter made no attempt to disguise that this was anything other than another execution. Even left the victim’s ID behind, untouched.”

“Wait.”

The plastic folder was where he’d put it an hour earlier, still on Hermansson’s transparent chair. Grens flipped through it looking for a document hidden somewhere in the middle of the stack.

“And the name? Let me guess.”

There. The picture of two of the four who were still alive. Had been alive when Hoffmann was talking about them last night on Grens’s balcony.

“. . . Dusko Zaravic? Or Ermir Shala?”

The two who, according to the notes that the police’s surveillance team had kept, were part of an unofficial network that included the recently murdered Pejović and Stojanović. Doing security and rough jobs for various weapons dealers.

“Ermir Sh . . . How did you know that, Grens?”

“Shala?”

“Yes. At least according to the driver’s license found in his wallet. How . . .”

The officer on duty was never able to finish his question because Grens had already hung up.

He had to make another call immediately.

Only one of the four was still alive.

Dusko Zaravic.

The one who Hoffmann had once informed against and sent to prison.

He might have been paid to carry out three executions on behalf of a new competitor in the arms trade. He might be the one who had an inside man on the police force—who had managed to buy off one of Grens’s colleagues and who was now threatening Hoffmann. In that case, there were also personal reasons for carrying out the threat because Zaravic would know that it was Hoffmann who prevented him from visiting his dying son. Piet Hoffmann who now had his own sons to lose.