“Oh, is that all?” The woman smiled encouragingly. “Well then, it’s hardly a matter of life and death.”

Uh, yeah, Schäfer thought. That’s exactly what it is.

Heloise clicked on the Uber app on her phone, but nothing happened. She checked her network coverage. It was pretty much nonexistent where she was. She looked down the road, first in one direction, then the other. There were cars driving by and a few people who passed her, walking quickly down the monotonous stretch of road. But there were no taxis to be seen.

She started walking in the direction of traffic, away from the prison, back toward downtown, as she held her phone out in front of her in hopes of finding better cell coverage. She felt drained, completely sapped of energy. It felt like her heart had been transformed into a liquid substance that was flowing around inside her, like an indefinable, reddish puddle, a weightless fluid in a spaceship.

She had just seen her father for the last time ever, and now she felt …

Nothing!

She kept her eye on the bars at the top left corner of her phone as she walked. Hypnotized by the screen, she walked right into someone who stepped out from a bus stop just as she passed the gray concrete structure.

“Sorry,” Heloise said mechanically without looking up.

She walked on in a sort of trance, raising her phone higher, searching for some invisible network cables, as if a couple of inches this way or that would make any difference.

“Heloise?”

She turned around toward the voice. She squinted and stared at the woman behind her as she contemplated whether she ought to stand still or run away.

Anna Kiel didn’t look directly at Heloise.

Instead she took a couple of steps closer to her and then stopped by an overfilled poster pillar a few feet away.

“Heloise?” she repeated, as she appeared to study a poster advertising a theater.

She looked different than in the pictures Heloise had seen. Her long blond hair had been replaced with a nut-brown, boyish hairstyle. She looked pale and thin, almost emaciated, and she was shorter than Heloise had imagined. Shorter than the five foot six that had been listed in the police description of her. She almost looked like a little girl. Heloise had a hard time imagining that the woman in front of her had murdered a tall, burly man, that she could have overpowered someone with Christoffer Mossing’s build.

Heloise nodded. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Follow me, but not too closely,” Anna Kiel said, and started walking.

Heloise followed her, staying ten to twenty yards behind her. They walked for about fifteen minutes, down streets with little, dilapidated houses on either side, across a footbridge over a road with heavy traffic, and continued past ghetto-like apartment blocks where tiny balconies were crammed full of trash, withered plants, and satellite dishes.