Erik Wilson weaved back and forth for a moment, and for a moment he almost seemed like he might lose his balance.

“Which one of the binders?”

“Paula’s.”

The head of the homicide unit didn’t have to search for very long before he realized that all the notes he’d taken during his years of secret meetings were gone. And leaving the door to the safe wide open, he stumbled back to his desk and sank down in his chair.

“Paula. Piet Hoffmann. How many violent criminals, would you guess, Wilson, did we lock up thanks to his reports? How many drug seizures were made based on his info? How many murders and shootings did we solve because he risked life every day? And it was your goddamn responsibility to keep the truth hidden in that fucking safe!”

Grens looked at his boss. Who just sat there, empty.

“What do you think is gonna happen when those papers get out on the streets? Or—are they already? What do you think, Wilson, that he . . .”

“I know exactly what this means!”

Ewert Grens smiled. His boss no longer seemed empty.

“And they’ve also sold you out.”

“What the hell . . .”

“Because as you said. No one can break in here. And if that’s so, then I’m sitting across from a dirty cop.”

“You know how devoted I was to my infiltrators! You know I built the whole goddamn program from scratch and guarded it like it was my own goddamn child! I created the rules that protected them! I took risks for them every single day! And you know how close I am to the Hoffmann family and all that I’ve done for them! You know that!”

Grens stared at the man screaming at him, who seemed to be disgusted with him. And he liked that man. Not the screaming or disgust, but he knew that the message was genuine. He knew Erik Wilson well enough to know that. A man that Grens had once considered an enemy. But that had changed. Or did Grens change? Slowly, Grens had begun to respect this man, ever since he left his job as a handler and started a new, much more difficult one—being Grens’s boss. It was the way he let his staff follow their own lead when it was needed, and how he used his authority to rein them when it was not. A decent man with decent morals. So what Grens was seeing right now was what he’d hoped.

“You’re right—I don’t think it was you, Wilson. But I think you might have made a mistake.”

“Such as?”

“Well . . . are you still single?”

“Excuse me?”