“And one more thing, Ewert: if you want me to make this mysterious arrest, while you drive down to Söderköping for an interrogation you won’t discuss with me, then you’re going to have to take care of the cadets today. Lucas and Amelia will have to go with you, if I’m going after Zaravic. Okay?”

As Grens hung up the phone and headed toward the cadets’ closet office, he realized that each step was accompanied by a new uneasiness. And he couldn’t quite pinpoint where it came from or how to get rid of it. Other than that he was sure that someone in this police station had sold out to criminal arms dealers by putting highly classified documents into their hands. And that two of the people he’d come to trust and actually like around here, Erik Wilson and Mariana Hermansson, might have something to do with it.

Chapter 25

The enormous garage built deep beneath the Kronoberg Police Station always remained the same temperature—warm and comfortable when winter storms settled in over the capital, and pleasantly cool in the midst of heat waves like this one. Ewert Grens opened his car doors and the two cadets jumped in simultaneously—the one named Lucas, who had shoulders the width of Grens’s waist, sat down beside him in the passenger seat, and the one named Amelia, who had short dark hair and intelligent eyes, plopped down in the back. The garage door automatically slid aside, and they headed up a steep incline toward the morning sounds of Kungsholmen, up to a lowered bar that a guard opened for them. The exit toward Essinge route and the E4 highway south came next. He started driving faster, heading into their two-hour trip to Söderköping—two hundred kilometers closer to a little girl.

“DB.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what you said, Superintendent. The first time we met. DB. Dead Body.”

Lucas had a high, nasal voice, and an accent that sounded like it came from western Sweden.

“That’s what you used to call murdered people. Like when you were our age.”

“Yes. That’s what I said.”

“And I thought—how many? How many dead people do you . . . I mean, if you keep track until your age. I mean, now.”

“Your age?”

“Yes. Do you keep track?”

“Yes. I keep track.”

“And?”

“As of two days ago, three hundred and nine. Yesterday, three hundred and eleven. This morning three hundred and twelve.”

The cadet fell silent. As if he lost his train of thought.

“Oh, that was . . . very precise. You do keep track. Three hundred . . . But did you say this morning?”

“Mmm. Another one, identical. Like the one where we met each other.”

“Identical? So why are we sitting here? Why aren’t we already there?”

“Because today, this is more important. This trip.”

“Why?”