“Ewert, the on-duty officer received a call from a tenant in an apartment building on Oden Street near Vasa Park. Early this morning, a middle-aged woman thought she heard ‘two loud bangs’ from the apartment above hers. When she got out of bed a few hours later, she decided to go upstairs and knock on her neighbor’s door and discovered it was open. So she went inside. And in the hall there was a man stretched out on his back with two big holes in his head, one a little to the right on his forehead and one just below his left temple.”

Chapter 18

Dejan Pejović’s unkempt hair, thin mustache, and liver spots that formed a face within the face were now more than that. Born in Podgorica at a time when the Montenegrin city was still in Yugoslavia. Convicted twice in his homeland—manslaughter and assault, served time in Pozarevac, Serbia’s largest and toughest prison. Immigrated to Sweden twenty-two years ago, became a Swedish citizen eight years later. A search of the police records using his social security number yielded fifty-nine hits under the key term KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED, then another twenty-four hits listed as a suspect connected to organized crime, but only one single conviction—a few months with an ankle monitor for a minor assault charge: Pejović had spit on the shoe of a police officer. The numbers of investigations and prosecutions, however, were plentiful: charges of third-degree murder and manslaughter and attempted murder and assault and battery, always in connection to notorious arms dealers, and which ended up with a lack of evidence or witnesses who refused to cooperate or who quite simply disappeared.

Ewert Grens stretched out on his uncomfortably comfortable corduroy sofa, grabbed a new stack of papers from his wobbly coffee table, and added them to the pile already lying on his stomach. He, along with Sven, Mariana, and the young cadets, had gotten to know the dead man fairly well throughout the day—but they still had no clue about a perpetrator. No witnesses. No shoe or fingerprints. No traces of a struggle, no blood or fibers on the victim’s skin and clothing, no scrap of skin beneath the victim’s nails.

Two executions.

The murderer had made sure they knew that’s exactly what they were.

Just a few hours and kilometers between them.

The first in a stairwell on Brännkyrka Street 56. The second—Grens stretched for another pile, and sure, he could fit that on his stomach, too—in an apartment at Oden Street 88. That’s where they were called to next. Branko Stojanović. That was—had been his name. Another man lying motionless on his back. Stretched over a herringbone floor in a penthouse apartment. Jacketed bullets, half lead and half titanium, just like seventeen years ago, just like an hour ago. The two men had led similar lives as well.