“But nothing I could connect to the break-in. Nothing that would explain why a person breaks into an inner city apartment in the middle of the day, walks around inside—and chooses to leave without taking anything with them.”

“May I open the door to my office again, Officer Hermansson? Would that be okay with you? Maybe someone else has a window open and we can get a little draft flowing in here. It’s already twenty-seven degrees. And it’s supposed to hit thirty-two!”

“I was about to log out of the system. Put the case aside again, deprioritize down to one of this county’s fifty-six thousand open cases. And in a few months, I’d recommend Wilson close it.”

Ewert Grens was fanning himself with the envelope now, his eyes closed, trying to herd some air onto his damp forehead—she ripped it out of his hand and pulled out a document, put it down on the rickety coffee table, and pointed impatiently to the first three lines.

“Then I saw this. An annotation at the very bottom of the file. A red flag warning that there’s an older case filed away in the restricted archive, available only in paper form. A seventeen-year-old investigation at the same address, same floor, and according to the apartment number, even the same apartment. The kind of investigation you do—when people die in this city.”

He was listening now. But still didn’t know what she was talking about.

“The note. The red flag.”

In the case of any report regarding Dala Street 74, regardless of the classification of the crime, please contact Detective Inspector Ewert Grens immediately.

“You wrote that, Ewert. Signed it.”

The document lay on the table between them, her fingers still tapping on the lines she wanted him to look at.

Until he finally did.

“Seventeen years ago?”

“Yes.”

“Murder?”

“Yes. Or . . . rather, four murders. A mother. A father. A daughter. A son.”

Chapter 4

Strange.

How memory works. How it’s not there at all until it is, until it comes back and hits you at full force, pushing everything else aside, demanding space.

All the space.

Because he did remember.

Ewert Grens leaned out through the open window into the inner courtyard of the Kronoberg Police Station, where his colleagues sat on park benches, some in the sun with their noses and cheeks red, others lying in the shade of some small tree, drinking coffee from brown plastic mugs.

That suffocating anxiety.

Maybe it was the heat squeezing his body, making him restless. Maybe it was the sweat dripping down his tired back.

Maybe it was a little girl hopping on one foot with food on her face, her little feet kicking up the most horrific stench at the most horrific crime scene he’d ever seen—the rooms that enclosed her dead family.

Chapter 5