Lucas was proud. Wanted to tell. Be praised. And when Lucas was done, Grens did something quite rare, he praised him. Both of them. Because he realized he’d made a wise decision to let them pass their time with his local colleagues—they’d managed to access information he himself wouldn’t have.

First, in the documents from the closed investigation into the boy’s death: there’d been no witnesses to the event itself, the same story the adoptive parents had given him, but several partygoers described how a fourteen-year-old girl named Hannah Ohlsson was seen being harassed by the boy who died. Her boyfriend. Harassment that during that evening on at least two occasions resulted in loud arguments. Grens wondered if the adoptive parents deliberately left those details out, the boyfriend and harassment, or if maybe they never knew.

Then out of the other inadequately prepared documents from another discontinued investigation, the one into the girl’s disappearance: they had found another trace of her path after leaving. At least initially. Which led to a café in Malmö. Where she’d worked under the table for a couple of months after leaving her parents’ home. Until one day she disappeared from there too. The phone call from Albania became the last known contact she’d made.

New information on two fronts that left his mind lingering in a house with no photos, while his body was kept moving at one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. That is until his phone rang in his inner pocket, and he searched for it while the car weaved somewhat worryingly.

“Yes?”

“Hoffmann here.”

Ewert Grens pressed the phone closer to his ear. A voice that under no circumstances should be allowed to leak out. Even in a car surrounded by cadets who’d never heard of a Piet Hoffmann. Their informal collaboration, based out of the detective superintendent’s own apartment, should only be revealed if it became absolutely necessary.

“I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

Grens slowed down five kilometers later and exited the freeway, then drove under it, over to the same rest stop as earlier that day. He left the car and wandered around among the tables and benches and trash cans, while calling Hoffmann back.

“Grens here again.”

“I need your help tracking a call.”

“From your own phone? Or the recipient’s?”

“Neither of the phones are mine. But I want his—because it’s a he, I heard him—I want his position, the man who received the call.”

A family sat down at a table at the far end of the rest area. Coffee thermos and juice packs and sandwiches wrapped in foil. Grens nodded to them and turned toward the thick spruce forest while he spoke.

“It’s hard to get telephone companies to cooperate when it comes to regular crimes. Even official ones. This—well, it won’t be easy.”

“I’m sure you have your ways.”