A large, flat stone. Grens considered sitting on it, letting the sun warm his face, just forgetting this whole investigation for a while, people being executed and others who were at risk of it.

“Yes, I have my ways.”

He sat down. The stone was hard and had a surprisingly smooth surface, as if nature had sanded it down and placed it here for people who need to rest. He just had to make a few more calls. Like at the Tax Agency, he’d developed collaborations at all of the major telecommunications companies over the years.

“I need all the info you have. Send them to this phone.”

“I knew you could solve this, Grens. So I was prepared. It’s all on its way to you . . . now.”

Grens heard his phone ding just as Hoffmann said goodbye and hung up. He stayed there on that flat stone making a few bargains with his contacts at the phone companies, an exchange of favors, and arranged the cell phone tracking that would give Hoffmann, and therefore himself, a new and clearer direction. Then he and the cadets headed out, but only managed to make it another ten or twenty kilometers before Lucas, still in the passenger seat, couldn’t take it anymore.

“Superintendent?”

The young cadet wasn’t content this time to stare straight ahead while he chatted. He turned now until it almost felt like he was sitting between the two front seats staring straight at Grens.

“Yes?”

“I thought of something.”

“You don’t say.”

“You’re burning.”

“What?”

Lucas crept even closer. Though that hardly seemed possible.

“What we talked about on our way here. You know, which didn’t go so well. About your age and about my dad. Well . . . I mean, I had just no idea that after so many years a police officer could still care so much. I can see and hear how you’re just burning, and it makes me so happy. The thought that I might still be burning after a whole life as a police officer. But it also makes me . . . worried. I . . . I mean, surely, you know, right, that she could be dead? Superintendent? You know you have to prepare yourself for that?”

Grens never answered. Because he didn’t want to, and he couldn’t.

He knew deep inside exactly what the cadet was trying to tell him. Her adoptive family’s tearful worry was justified, and it was now his own. When he told them it would be fine, that was just a bad attempt to comfort them. Because the longer he searched for the girl named Hannah Ohlsson, who had disappeared without a trace, the clearer it seemed to him that she might very well be dead.

PART
4

Chapter 30

It’s been so long since I felt like this.

Never.

Never like this.

I’m sure of it.