“There was a bloodstain in my kitchen, Detective, when I came home after our last meeting. It wasn’t mentioned in any of the police reports.”

“Do yourself a favor and shut up.”

“And in the weapon’s case in my basement. I kept my gun there, a Radom, and it was pointing in the wrong direction because somebody used it. A bullet was missing. And that too wasn’t in any of your police reports, Grens.”

The bloodstain on the floor. The secret weapon’s case.

And maybe now Ewert Grens started to listen.

“And then there’s what Rasmus and Hugo like to call checkered pancakes. Something you apparently made for them, Grens, that I still haven’t really figured out. But who would know that outside my family?”

“Checkered pancakes?”

“Yes.”

His gaze.

The stranger stared at him and never looked away. Grens was starting to recognize it.

“You said that. Checkered pancakes.”

“Yes. I said that.”

Ewert Grens de-cocked his gun, lowered it.

And pulled out the other kitchen chair.

“Hoffmann?”

“The one and only.”

The stranger looked at the detective with those steady eyes and now slowly raised his hands from the table. The same movement he’d tried several times before—but now he completed it. With his right hand he began to wiggle two of the fingers on his left hand.

“You see, Grens?”

And both fingers came loose. One at a time.

“Medical-grade silicone and an individualized case design. As easy to coax them off as it is to get them on. Finger prostheses. The vacuum inside them holds them in place. Do you recognize me now? Missing two fingers?”

“Why . . . Why the disguise? And your voice—that’s not how you sound?”

Grens placed the gun between them on the kitchen table. Maybe to prove that he trusted his visitor. That they could trust each other.

“This?”

Piet Hoffmann pulled slightly at his puffy cheeks and just as puffy chin, ran a hand through his dyed hair, rolled the finger prostheses across the table until they clunked against the gun.

“Death threats. Somebody means business. And what’s worse—Zofia and Hugo and Rasmus and Luiza are in just as much danger.”

Grens picked up the finger prostheses. Felt them. Rolled them back over the table.

“Why come here—break in—to the home of someone you said you never wanted to see again?”

“I need your help, Grens.”

“Go to the police then. They’ll help you.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It works for everyone else. Regular people don’t sneak into police officers’ homes—they go to the police station and fill out paperwork.”

“First of all, which of your colleagues would even help an ex-con? That’s not how it works—and you know it. You harass us. Persecute us. You just want us locked away again.”

“Well then, you report that.”