A few days and a few nights.

That’s how long this little girl has lived with the stench.

NOW

PART
1

Chapter 3

He’s never liked summer.

Something that chafed at his skin, something he’d fought year after year until finally he stopped fighting it at all. That’s the way it is. The heat. The quiet city. People walking around in shorts, laughing too loud.

Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens lay on the brown corduroy sofa, its stripes long since worn away, his head cradled on the low armrest, his back sunk into cushions that had been far too soft for a long time. While that gentle music, his Siw Malmkvist who sang sixties songs just for him, flowed out of an ancient speaker crammed into his bookshelf between overflowing binders and thick investigation reports. Both of his windows stood wide open, but despite the early hour it was already a stiflingly warm twenty-seven degrees inside and out. He’d stopped fighting when he realized he was not alone. He wasn’t the only one who was changed by June, July, and August. But they didn’t fight the season—they fought people. That terrible heat crept into them, hunted them, played havoc with their boundaries, and it wasn’t just in prison corridors that the number of riots increased as the heat became more oppressive; also outside those walls reality shrank as heat pushed down from above. And when heart rates increase, so does violence, so does murder. He’d been a detective for most of his life, and it had been a long time since he could take a break when the sidewalks lacked any snow.

A stubborn knocking at his office door.

They could keep on if they wanted to.

His neck was stiff and tender, his leg aching like usual. The oldest detective on this dusty corridor, second oldest on the entire force. And there it was, less than six months away, that giant black hole that scared him even more than his bed at home, an abyss a man falls into headlong and then never stops falling. The one thing he didn’t want to think about, and the only thing he could think about.

That goddamn knocking. They weren’t giving up.

More than forty years. My god. He’d been so young when he first set foot in this building, already convinced he belonged here. So young he could never imagine the end arriving. Not because you want it, but because a society you never wanted to be a part of has decided the ending for you.

“Ewert?”

Now it wasn’t enough to just knock. Now someone was shouting through the keyhole.

“I know you’re in there, Ewert. I’m coming in. No matter what you say.”