INGVAR MOLANDER WAS SURE that he hadn’t been asleep. He thought he had been lying awake on the cot in the basement — so that he didn’t wake Gertrud — going over and over the events of the past few days in his mind. And yet he had just woken up to the sound of his phone ringing.
It was Lilja. He didn’t feel like answering. All he wanted to do was pretend that he hadn’t heard it, and keep sleeping. But that would be way too obvious: everyone at the station knew he was a light sleeper and that the tiniest sound would wake him, no matter how tired he was.
“Molander speaking.”
“Hi, it’s Irene. Did I wake you?”
“Let’s hope it’s important.”
“The fingerprints you found in the Peugeot are gone. Risk took them and he’s probably handed them over to the killer.”
Molander sat up. “What the hell are you talking about?” he managed, although he had heard her perfectly well.
“I’ll explain later. The important thing is that the prints are gone and we have to —”
“Hold on. Was he in the database?”
“No idea. I didn’t have time to check before they vanished.”
“But how the hell could they just vanish?!”
“Like I said, Risk took them, but it doesn’t matter right now. Priority number one is finding more prints as soon as we can.”
“How the fuck are you planning to do that?” Molander felt a bad mood rolling in like a German invasion, and he had no way of combatting it. Not only had he been woken from a slumber he dearly needed, but they had also managed to lose the prints that were supposed to identify the perpetrator: evidence that their Danish colleague had risked her job to allow him to obtain.
“I was thinking since he obviously got sloppy in the car, he was probably sloppy other times too, right?”
“Sure, or maybe not. Even if he was, there’s still a small but important question: Where?”
“At Glenn’s house.”
“What?”
“Glenn Granqvist. You know, the second victim.”
“Yes, of course I know who he is. But why...”
“Well, Glenn hit the back of his head on the shoe rack and started bleeding, didn’t he?”
She was right. His memory began to wake up from its cryo-sleep.
“You were the one who showed me that the perpetrator had used a rag to clean up the blood in the hallway, and that he’d even rinsed and wrung it out so it wouldn’t drip.”
“Right. So?”
“Don’t you think he took off his gloves to rinse it and wring it out?”
Lilja was right. The odds were good that he’d taken off the gloves and accidentally left a print or two in the closet. “Let’s head over right away.”