“You were right at the time, Superintendent. The man you once arrested and were forced to release—that was the man who ordered the murders of my family and who took over my father’s business. He moved back to Albania and a town called Shkodër, close to the border of Montenegro, but you probably know that already. I tracked him down there. I did what you did, interrogated him, but I was better—there were no rules to restrain me. And I remember every word he said. Listen, little girl, this is how you do it. If you wanna go on like this, you have to learn. You go in and shoot the kids first. Then you tell the person you want answers from that they can make a new family. And then, whether you get your answers or not, you shoot them afterward. I remember how he looked at me while I held a gun to his head, his eyes were so alive while he tried to provoke me. That’s what you do—you don’t shoot from the top, you shoot from the bottom up. Like we did to your family. He knew he was going to die. So he described their deaths to me in graphic detail. It was like if he was taking my family away from me again, do you understand, Superintendent Grens?”

She glanced out the window again. And the whole time she kept her gun pointed at him. She opened the blinds even farther, pulled them up completely, the summer night would soon turn to dawn, the darkness to timid light. Grens tried to meet her eyes, to reach her, share something with her, it’s harder to kill someone once they’ve done that.

“If I’d solved the case then. Found the evidence I was missing. We wouldn’t have to be here today. You wouldn’t be standing there with a loaded weapon pointed at me, you wouldn’t have had to avenge your family’s murders.”

“He wanted me to shoot him. Quickly. For the same reason my mother spit in his face—she’d already figured out what he told me long after, she was going to die, no matter what.”

“Zana, I . . .”

“You’re right. You didn’t catch him then. But I never would have found him unless you, Superintendent, had found him first.”

She leaned back, pushing her back against the window. Then she cocked the gun with a slow, obvious movement.

And suddenly Grens understood.

She was doing the same thing.

Right now.

She was trying to provoke her own death.

“No!”

He was just about to stand up, run toward her, stand between her and the window, but she put her index finger on the trigger and started to squeeze.

“Sit down if you want to survive!”

She meant it.

He was sure of it now.

“Zana—I know what you’re doing.”