Ewert Grens didn’t need to answer. They both knew that this man with no family of his own to protect or mourn or live with would do anything for two boys who sometimes popped up at the police station, and sometimes called him their pretend grandpa. That only a year ago he’d been lying on a floor ready to die, with a murderer’s tool aimed at his heart, because that was the only way to protect those boys, the only way for them to survive.

“I found this in an unused conference room at the police station. I asked them to transport it over—I think it will do more good here right now.”

Grens pushed the butter and the bread aside and lifted the whiteboard onto the kitchen table, leaning it against the wall.

“Yesterday we established an informal and provisional headquarters—in my kitchen. Turned my apartment into a new police station with just two employees. For an investigation that cannot be handled from inside the real police station because it happens to be full of police and this concerns the police. Or—one police officer who sold out, and who’s as dangerous as a loaded weapon.”

He also moved his own coffee cup, after taking a drink first. And when there wasn’t enough room for the magnets and the markers, the butter ended up on the only empty chair.

“I had a coffee with a forensic technician this afternoon. Someone I trade a favor with now and then. And he has . . . well, how should I put this, offered assistance to our new headquarters on a freelance basis.”

Grens’s jacket was hanging over the back of the empty chair. From the inside pocket he pulled out a bundle of papers. He attached the first one with a magnet to the center of the whiteboard and wrote fingerprints beneath it.

“This is from the forensic engineer’s computer. An image of a fingertip. The red circles denote characteristics that can be used for identification. We need eight or ten or preferably twelve to use as comparison with the other fingerprints in our database. He found four here. That was all. You see? Four red circles on these threatening letters that were sent to you, and only two on the hand grenade you gave me—the one put into your mailbox.”

Piet Hoffmann wasn’t surprised. Organizations big enough to be making millions on trading in illegal weapons, in some cases even hundreds of millions, didn’t go around dropping off threats or hand grenades without wearing gloves.

“Then there’s this.”

A new sheet of paper was stuck onto the board to the right of the other one, and Grens wrote weapon below it. Long lines of text in such a tiny font size that Hoffmann couldn’t even read them from his place at the table.