A light blue background.

A mother and a father and their three children smiling at the camera.

Mirza Lilaj, Diellza Lilaj, Eliot Lilaj, and Julia Lilaj have been assigned storage numbers 2003-369380, 2003-369381, 2003-369382, 2003-369383. Only those numbers exist for identification.

A bunker. That’s probably the best description of the basement in Östermalm. During the years he’d been in charge of the witness protection program, they’d allowed him to build the very first American-style safe house. It ended up being the only one, when the funds were re-directed to other, trendier activities. A bunker furnished like a small hotel with kitchenette, beds, TV, and well-stocked bookshelves. He’d never imagined its first guest would be someone too young to have learned to ride a bike, a child with no family.

A SUMMARY OF OUR FINDINGS:

A. The bodies of Mirza Lilaj, Diellza Lilaj, Eliot Lilaj and Julia Lilaj, shortly before death occurred, received gunshot wounds on the head that correspond to entrance 1, entrance 2, entrance 3, entrance 4, entrance 5, entrance 6, entrance 7, entrance 8 on our diagram.

That’s why his carefully designed program didn’t at first work out as he’d planned. He’d imagined a place for adult witnesses where they would be hidden and guarded until giving testimony at a trial, after which they’d be escorted to a new town and given a new name, new social security number, new background.

B. These entrance wounds most likely occurred two days before the examination date.

He’d also developed procedures with the help of various bureaucratic agencies to produce new school transcripts and new work references and set up a cash allowance to be paid every fourteen days—never leave a trail, every transaction is seen by someone and information can be bought anytime, anywhere. These routines had to be urgently adjusted to create new birth records, issue certificates for swimming lessons, and credibly document attendance at a preschool.

C. The combined number of wounds strongly indicates homicide.

Ewert Grens closed the blue folder and pushed it to the side. Information that belonged to one living girl. He grabbed the next folder, a green one—which contained what happened to her afterward. After the crime. After ballistic wound paths and cold storage.

After their deaths.

He stood up, held the folder tightly while he paced back and forth across his office.

A five-year-old who was alive. Who survived. Because someone let her? Or because someone hid her? Or because she hid on her own? Did she curl up somewhere and listen as the only people she trusted were executed one by one, holding her breath without even knowing why. She must have understood that discovery meant death?

He’d asked her, but she had no capacity to tell him how or why.

And now, so many years later, he knew even less.