Henrik chose not to listen. He pulled out his cell phone, flipped through pictures until he found one of Ida Eklund. Her eyes were big and blue. Her long blond hair lay in a tangled braid over one shoulder. She was smiling at the camera.

“Is this the girl who was with you?”

Pim squinted at Henrik’s phone.

“I don’t know,” she said in a barely audible whisper. She turned onto her side and pulled the blanket over her head.

“Look carefully,” Henrik said.

But Pim didn’t say any more. She had turned in on herself.

* * *

It was freezing cold outside when Henrik Levin, Mia Bolander and Jana Berzelius stepped out of the main entrance to Vrinnevi Hospital. Mia immediately hunched her shoulders in an attempt to get warm.

“Hey, where did you get Ida from?” Mia asked. “How would she be mixed up in this? Are you totally out of ideas, Henrik?”

“Wait, start from the beginning,” Jana said. “Who is Ida?”

“Yesterday, we found a young man murdered in his apartment.”

“Robin Stenberg? I heard about it from Per Åström.”

“Exactly. And we thought at first that Robin was alone, single, but apparently he had a relationship with a girl named Ida Eklund.”

“I’m freezing to death,” Mia said. “Do we have to stand out here for this?”

“And Ida is missing?” Jana said.

Henrik nodded.

“To make a long story short, Ida had told her parents that she was going to stay the night at her boyfriend’s house, which the parents didn’t like because they’d never met him. Ida chose to ignore her parents’ disapproval, and we assume that she slept at Robin’s the night before last. We haven’t yet confirmed it, but we’re proceeding from that assumption right now.”

“Hello?” Mia said, wrapping her arms around herself but getting no reaction from the others.

“So she might have been there when Robin Stenberg was murdered?” Jana said, feeling the hair on her arms stand up.

“Like I said, we don’t know anything for sure yet, but yes, it is entirely possible that Ida was in the apartment when Robin was murdered.”

Jana’s thoughts whirled around in her head. She didn’t meet Henrik’s or Mia’s eyes, held her pale face pointed toward the ground, on the snow.

“But why would Ida have been in the same place as Pim?” Mia said, shivering. “And how would she get there in the first place? Because of Robin Stenberg? Isn’t it a bit of a long shot to believe that a sixteen-year-old high school chick and a twenty-year-old vegetarian have anything to do with this drug case? Use your brain, Henrik.”