Karen Aagaard stuck her head inside the conference room halfway down the editorial corridor. There was no one there.

“He was still in his car when he called me, so perhaps he hasn’t arrived yet. Grab yourself a coffee, but stay on this floor. I’ll let you know when he gets here.”

On her way to the kitchenette, Heloise passed the pigeonholes. It was rare for her to receive actual mail these days. Today, however, a big pile of letters was waiting for her.

She carried the letters and a cup of instant coffee to the investigative section, swung both feet up on her desk, and opened the first envelope. It was a heavy thing, nine pages of densely written outrage about the use of child labor in India. The same theme recurred in letters two and three, while the fourth contained a small, yellow Post-it, bearing a single word:

Slut!

“Wow, that’s original,” she said, holding up the Post-it note to her colleague, Mogens Bøttger, who was sitting on the other side of the double desk.

He looked up from his notepad with an unimpressed raising of an eyebrow.

Heloise scrunched up the note along with the envelope and threw the paper ball toward the wastebasket at the far end of the room. It landed on the uneven herringbone parquet floor well clear of its target.

“Swish!” Bøttger said in mock admiration. “The NBA will surely be waiting to scoop you up if Mikkelsen kicks you out.”

“He won’t.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure, if I were you.”

“He won’t fire me,” Heloise stated.

She picked up the next envelope and started opening it.

“He fired the one with the warts,” Bøttger declared in a singsong voice, referring to a fellow reporter who had just been canned for having invented a source. The firing had echoed throughout the building and left chief editor Mikkelsen with a burst blood vessel in one eye. He had been incandescent with rage.

“She damn well deserved it,” Heloise said, “but my case is completely different. I acted in good faith. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t do things differently if I could turn back time—the bright light of hindsight and all that—but Mikkelsen and I, we …” Heloise shook her head dismissively. “He’s not gonna fire me.”

She unfolded the next letter and started reading. Bøttger went on talking, but the sound of his voice faded away as a cold, uncomfortable tingling spread inside her.

The letter was short.

It contained only a few sentences written in a neat hand, but the words made her mouth go dry and a cold, bubbly sensation fill her chest.

Bøttger’s voice cut through just as Heloise realized she had stopped breathing. “But you really shouldn’t let anyone tell you—”

“Mogens,” she interrupted him. “Didn’t you cover a story a few years ago about a lawyer who was murdered?”