“I didn’t say that we didn’t find a match for the fingerprints. I just said they weren’t a match with Anna Kiel.”

“Then who did they match?” Schäfer’s brow furrowed.

“A guy by the name of …”

Schäfer could hear clicking on a keyboard.

“Duvall.”

“Duvall?”

“Yes, a Martin Duvall.”

Schäfer leaned back in his chair. The name didn’t mean anything to him.

“What do we have on him?”

“A conviction for assault from last year. A thirty-day sentence.”

“All right,” Schäfer said. “I’ll look into that. Anything else?”

“Not right now.”

“Could you please send me an email with the test results as soon as possible?”

“I already have,” she replied.

Schäfer thanked her and concluded the call. He sat for a moment, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table while he thought. He could hear the water in the shower running, and when the citrusy scent of Connie’s shampoo reached his nostrils, he looked up at the clock again. He didn’t have to leave for work for another hour.

He got up and started walking down the hallway toward the bathroom.

The door opened on the second knock, no more than an inch or two, but enough that Heloise dared to give it an extra push.

She leaned into the hallway.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

Nothing.

She could see the yellow Nikes he had been wearing yesterday sitting next to the doormat.

“Ulrich?” Heloise took a step into the apartment. “You here?”

She had managed to sweet-talk his address out of the central switchboard at Ekspressen by playing the coworker card and especially by feeding them a shameless lie about a scoop of a story they were working on together: “It’s a tell-all story about the crown princess. I can’t reveal anything except that it’s going to make a lot of noise when it breaks. Ulrich and I have a meeting at his place with a source for the piece today, but I misplaced his address, so …”

She had felt her toes curl in shame and had been astonished at how easily they bought it. Now she couldn’t help but wonder if it had been as easy for Anna Kiel to sniff out her address.

She took a couple of steps farther into the apartment.

She could hear a humming sound somewhere and had started moving toward it when it suddenly occurred to her that she might be about to surprise Ulrich in a, um, private situation. A look of disgust crossed her face, and she shook the image out of her head. She walked farther into the apartment, making sure her footsteps were audible so as to draw attention to her presence, and repeated loudly, “Ulrich? Are you here? It’s me, Heloise!”

She peered into the living room.