“Morning,” he said in a surly voice.

Heloise and Aagaard looked at him and exchanged glances. A white, crumpled shirt was hanging over his trousers’ waistline, and his hair was strangely flat and upended on one side of his head. Normally he was the epitome of good grooming, bordering on the nauseating, but today he looked like someone who would rather not be noticed. Quite a challenge for someone almost seven feet tall.

“I’m sorry I’m late, but I had to drop off Fernanda at day care, and she threw a tantrum when I said good-bye. It’s easier to get a comment on the record from a tax evader than it is to get a one-year-old to stop howling. Or to go to sleep when it’s her bedtime, for that matter. I don’t know how people who live with their children full-time do it.” He looked resentfully at both of them and flopped down on the chair next to Aagaard.

Mogens Bøttger’s daughter was the result of a summer fling with a forty-one-year-old fitness instructor. After two dinner dates she was pregnant, and he was screwed. Consequently, he was now a single parent three days every two weeks, and his relationship with the child’s mother was strained, to say the least.

“Don’t look at me,” Heloise said. “I’ve yet to discover the joys of parenthood.”

“Right, anyway, that’s why I’m late, and why I look like the living dead.” Bøttger distributed the coffee cups between them. “So, what’s up? What did I miss?”

“I got another one,” Heloise said.

“Another what?”

“A letter.”

Bøttger noticed the letters on the table and reached out his hand. “May I?”

“Yes, it’s that one,” Heloise said, pointing to the most recent.

He pinched the corners of the letter carefully and read out loud:

Dear Heloise

Mine is 4, yours is 13.

If I say Amorphophallus titanium, you will reply Lupinus.

My middle name starts with an ‘E’—how about yours?

I know so much about you.

You know a lot less about me.

But we are connected through him, I understand that now.

Do you see?

Do you see it now?

While I am denied your presence, Heloise, give me at least through your words some sweet semblance of yourself.

Anna Kiel

“Holy shit,” Bøttger said, looking up at the other two. His eyebrows had shot right up to his already receding hairline. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t know her?”

“One hundred percent,” Heloise insisted. “I have no idea why she’s chosen me. ‘Connected’—us? It makes no sense. But she knows me, or at least she knows some personal things about me.” Heloise pointed to the letter sent to her home. “Thirteen is my lucky number, so I presume that hers is four, and Lupinus is the Latin term for lupine—my favorite flower. How the hell does she know that?”