One of the few cases he’d been forced to abandon, even though he was sure he’d found the murderer.

A piece of shit he’d picked up and thrown into a prison cell at Kronoberg. He kept him there for seventy-two hours, as long as he could legally. And that guilty piece of shit alternated between laughing scornfully or lying or staring down at the floor or hissing no comment during his interrogation, while Grens and his colleagues turned over every investigatory stone they could find. In the end, they lost the race against the ticking clock. A guilty fucking piece of shit, feared by everyone, who called himself King Zoltan. When his three days were up he laughed even harder at their lack of witnesses and technical evidence. The moment he was released he headed straight for the airport, took a flight out of the country, and never came back again.

The little girl, whose name Grens forgot, had seen the killer. He was sure of it. A witness in shock who one day just might understand what she had witnessed. The forensic technicians had found traces of hair and urine in one of the wardrobes at the apartment—traces that matched her DNA. That’s where she hid. Pissing herself. And from that angle, with the wardrobe door open just a crack, she would have had a good overview of at least two of the murders.

Ewert Grens went over to the window.

He leaned out.

And screamed in fury.

He knew what this meant.

Someone had taken those documents out of the guarded archive, read through the first folder of the preliminary investigation, and realized that there was a witness, then read the second folder and found out what happened to the little girl after she left the safe house and Grens. Someone knew what she looked like, what her new name was, which new town she ended up in, what new family she was placed with. Someone had taken the documents and replaced them with blank paper so nobody else would ever know. And now they could complete their murder of an entire family and erase all of their tracks.

Grens screamed again, straight into the heat of the courtyard.

The life of that now-grown girl was in danger.

In fact she might already be dead.

PART
2

Chapter 9