On the second floor he passed a line of lab technicians in white coats who were studying tissue samples under microscopes. He nodded to the ones he knew before crossing the walkway at the end of the floor and pushing open the door into the autopsy room.

The air felt cold and the smell wasn’t overwhelming today. Most of the tables were empty, and the morning’s cadavers were down in the morgue drawers in the basement, but the slightest hint of death lingered in your clothes and hair after you’d been in there, sometimes as a clear mineral odor of rust, other times like the nauseating stench of overripe apples. Both of those could be washed away with soap and water, but on bad days you reeked, as if you had been stirring in a sun-warmed barrel of week-old fish, and then it took more than a shower to get rid of the stench of decay.

Schäfer passed the first of the autopsy room’s five open bays, which were each equipped with a big stainless-steel sink and a docking station, and joined the team working in the rearmost and largest of the bays.

“Hello, boys and girls,” he said, and took a couple of steps closer to the autopsy table with his hands in his pockets.

“Ah, there you are,” the department chair and medical examiner John Oppermann said affably, scratching his moustache with his shoulder as he held his rubber-glove-covered hands out in front of him. “We’re just getting started.”

Schäfer and Opperman weren’t what one would call friends, because they didn’t socialize outside of work. But they felt a great deal of sympathy for each other. Their jobs had brought them to disaster-stricken parts of the world and war-torn regions far from the relatively safe duck pond of Scandinavia. They’d had shared experiences, which for better or worse—mostly worse—had brought them together.

In 2000, they had both been in Kosovo with the UN to do practical autopsy and identification work immediately after NATO kicked out the Serbs. What they found waiting for them down there were Milosevic’s mass graves—a sight that still sometimes haunted the insides of Schäfer’s eyelids late at night.

Schäfer regarded the body of Ulrich Andersson on the autopsy table as a forensics tech started cutting his clothing off and placing the items into separate plastic bags. His face was bluish and swollen, and his tongue, which was sticking out of his mouth, looked unnaturally large. There were dark livor mortis blotches on his feet, lower legs, hands, and underarms, whereas the rest of his body was pale.