Erik Wilson crumpled up the wet napkin, dropped it onto Grens’s plate, which was scraped clean by now.

“First an apartment break-in where nothing is stolen that pulls you into the past. And then a few days later a dead man in a stairwell executed in a familiar way. It might be a coincidence. That happens. But I’m a police officer, so I don’t really believe in coincidences—do you, Ewert?”

Chapter 17

He was lying on his back. As if relaxing. That was the impression he gave at first. Not dead—but rest with a different ending, an awakening. Maybe it was his mouth. The smile. People who smile seem alive. But as Ewert Grens got closer, the impression changed. The dead man wasn’t smiling. He was terrified. Or at least he had been at the moment of his death.

He had known it was the end.

Stretched out on the concrete floor of a stairwell with light switches that sat too high and that were hard to push in. Life can cease in darkness, too.

Grens sank down next to the body, his damned knee cracked and wobbled and his hip protested, but the pain was almost a relief. It meant life. Most of the dead man’s face, whatever wasn’t taken up by that terrified smile, was broken and bloody, and the detective superintendent’s eyes were drawn to the bullet holes on the right side of the forehead and under the left temple. And he knew—this was no coincidence. Suddenly he was seventeen years younger in a third-floor apartment with a hopping girl, counting her dead family members. He didn’t just move back in time—he was thrown there, slung. Those two entrance holes were no coincidence. They were copies of what he saw back then. When the medical examiner measured the distance between the nose and the entrance hole, the cheek and entrance hole, the hairline and entrance hole, he would find—Grens was convinced—the proportions to be exact.

The same shooter. Same signature.

And this was—once again—Ewert Grens’s investigation. Years later it continued with a somewhat slower and less agile, but also older, wiser, and more experienced detective superintendent. Once again Grens became lead investigator on site, responsible for the crime scene, making the decisions. But this time there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d miss a four-by-four-centimeter hole beneath a hardwood floor.

“His identity, Ewert.”