Grens didn’t say a word as he pushed Sven and Mariana aside, threw open the cell door, and rushed across the hallway toward the toilets. He pulled on the plastic gloves he always kept in the inner pocket of his jacket and knelt down with aching legs and hips in front of one toilet bowl at a time. But no matter how far he dug or how far he pushed his hand into the pipe, he met only water. The phone was gone. And with it the possibility of tracing where the call came from.

He was furious.

But he’d never let that smiling bastard see it.

He commanded Sven and Mariana to leave the cell and slammed the door without so much as a glance at the still-naked Zaravic, then hurried to the guards’ glass cage.

“Do you have a spare cell?”

“What?”

“A cell. Unoccupied.”

The young guard seemed to think he hadn’t heard right.

“An empty cell?”

“Yes?”

“What are you gonna do with that?”

“Is there one or not?”

The third cell on the opposite side of the hall from Zaravic was until just a few hours ago home to a suicidal junkie. It wasn’t particularly clean. But Grens didn’t notice that or the pungent odor as he ordered Sven and Mariana to come inside and close the door behind them.

“Which one of you?”

Sven and Mariana looked at their boss, then at each other.

“Which one what, Ewert?”

“Goddamnit—who! Who leaked the information about Hoffmann so fresh, so unique that it only could have come from one of very few I trust, someone close to me. Really. Fucking. Close. There’s no other explanation. And I’ve had enough!”

Ewert Grens used to hit things when he couldn’t keep this rage inside. Better than hitting people. The shiny rolling instrument carts at Forensic Medicine in Solna made a quivering ring that corresponded to the anxiety he sometimes felt in the presence of the dissected dead, and his own coffee table in his office made a dull thud when it hit his corduroy sofa. Here there were no tables. So he used the white walls, an almost silent sound that barely registered even though his knuckles turned the white paint red.

“Please, Ewert, please calm down.”

“Calm down, Hermansson? I’ve worked here for more than forty years! I’ll be retiring soon! But I have never—never—been used like this!”

He and Hoffmann shared that. They didn’t trust anyone. They talked about it, how now and then you have to choose to trust. But one thing that Grens realized was when a person chooses to trust, they also expose themselves to the risk of being betrayed.

“Answer me!”

And that was exactly what had happened.

“Which one!”