He can see that little head trying to escape, see the first shot penetrate her forehead, tear a hole in her temple.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.

And now the gun turns to him.

And its cold, hard muzzle tears the skin of his face until drops of blood start to fall.

The finger on the trigger starts to pull.

He woke up. In a cold sweat. His heart pounding in his chest. Until he looked at the familiar ceiling. And the walls that were protecting him. He got up from his corduroy sofa, still in his office at the police station. The first step always meant stabbing pain in his stiff leg and his neck and lower back.

Ewert Grens wasn’t sure what exactly it was—but something was different.

He limped over to his window and looked out over the police station’s deserted courtyard.

And then he heard them again. The shots. Someone shooting and someone running.

Just like in the dream.

And he realized what had changed. It was easier to breathe. The gnawing, sticky heat had been replaced by heavy gray clouds, and now those clouds had burst with a helluva rainstorm, which beat violently against his window and metal windowsill, clattering, bang bang, bang bang. That’s what he heard. The shots. That’s why he woke up.

The detective superintendent smiled at his own confusion—thoughts born from his own mind—and listened to the rain until the window was just a blur. All the buildings outside, the core of Swedish police operations, were hazy, now lacked any sharp lines. He opened the window and cupped his hands, brought rainwater to his face, and the stuffiness inside drifted away. He ran his wet hands through his hair and looked at his reflection in the top pane of the half-open window, saw those thin, straggling strands slicked back by rain.

A Stockholm night. Which would soon turn into a Stockholm dawn.

Sometime after two he’d finally lain down to get some rest. Apparently he’d fallen asleep. Now he returned to his desk and one of the two folders that he’d checked out of the guarded archive. He flipped through the case file and the autopsy reports of a nearly twenty-year-old investigation without noticing anything he hadn’t seen before.

Nothing.

He found no more now than he did back then.

He had instructed Nils Krantz—the forensic technician who was one of the few who’d been a police officer as long as Grens himself—to comb every centimeter of the apartment on Dala Street 74. Fingerprints, fibers, DNA. Nothing. He’d analyzed every visit to the guarded archive in recent months. Nothing. He’d even ordered an examination of the blank paper left inside the folder, not just dusting for fingerprints—but finding manufacturers, distribution chains, retailers. Nothing.