Branko Stojanović was just five months older, had grown up in Danilovgrad just a couple of dozen miles northwest of Dejan Pejović’s home in Podgorica. They served their first sentences at the same time in the same prison in Pozarevac, immigrated to Sweden the same week, and received citizenship the same month. Stojanović’s name also stood next to Pejović’s in an interrogation in the red-flagged investigation—as one of his many informal and violent collaborators.

Their lives echoed each other as closely as any two possibly could.

And yet there was no way they could have known they’d end up naked and side by side in forensic medicine, autopsied on the very same morning.

Ewert Grens shifted the piles back to the table, got out of his sofa, and gently stretched his arms and stiff back while heading out into the hallway. Dark. Silent. The whole department had transformed in the late hour, other than the coffee machine. It roared just like always, stubborn and unrhythmic, like the heart of a newly operated upon person that was getting to know its pacemaker. One last cup of coffee then he’d head home. Not to sleep, he did that much better here at the station, but now and then even the hardest-working detective needs to change his clothes, water his plants, and check his mail.

A warm and windless summer night. Pleasant to walk through. It would take him twenty-five minutes to go by foot from the station to his empty apartment on Svea Road. Once, long ago, they would have covered this ground in fifteen minutes—Anni holding his hand tight as he adjusted his pace so he could always stay close to her. He took the same path no matter the season. Kungsholms Street, Scheele Street, and then as he crossed over Barnhus Bridge and the train tracks, he started, as he so often did, to sing. An elderly couple holding hands turned in surprise, a cyclist rang his bell at the man singing too loud and off-key. Always something from the sixties, tonight it was “Lucky Lips” and perhaps there was even a dance step or two, like the ones he’d once seen Cliff Richard take. He sang, and he remembered different times, all those days that made up his life as a police officer. Half a year left. And then what? How would he ever find that rush again, find meaning, when he’d never bothered to look for it anywhere else? He let his worries swirl away with the chorus and the dance steps, and his collar was getting a little damp by the time he turned onto Observatorie Street. Just a few hundred meters later he caught sight of his darkened kitchen windows.