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this man before. It was the childish face of the civilian from Jørstadmoen. In the pocket of the coat draped over the back of the chair the man found the silencer. As if Holt had planned it all himself.
    All right, Holt thought. So I guess I wasn’t meant to survive. What was it he’d said to Waldhorst? “Don’t we all have a little daughter?” Holt tried fleetingly to remember his own little daughter’s smell, but he couldn’t do it. He started crying again despite himself. He didn’t want the man leaning over him to think that he, Captain Kaj Holt, was afraid of taking a bullet to the head.
    If he hadn’t been so drunk, so overwhelmed by sleep, so sad, then . . . he didn’t know . . . then he would have used his bare hands to kill the man hovering over him.
    The man had a faint smile on his lips. It may have been that smile that made Holt get up as though he’d never had a drop of alcohol in his life.
    “If I’m going to die, I’ll die by my own hand,” he whispered. The childish face must have been surprised at that, because he seemed caught off guard when Holt slugged him in the kidneys with his left hand. He doubled over silently and then took a step back, tipping over the chair next to the wall. Holt waited just a second, a single second too long. The floor seemed sloped, the wall was slanted, the ceiling was caving in—wasn’t it? That fucking guy would be pissing blood for the rest of the summer, and Holt laughed at the thought. I’m laughing, you hear me, baby face?
    A second too long, he realized when it was already too late.
    Baby Face’s head-butt must have punctured a lung. His sternum felt like it gave way, but no sound came out of Holt’s mouth. When he lay back down on the bed, it was like he’d never gotten up.
    Holt closed his eyes and thought, It’s going to be like coming home.

CHAPTER 6
    Early Saturday Morning, May 17, 2003
    Nordmarka
    Oslo, Norway
     
    A heavy fog had settled over the forest in the last half hour, clinging to the black spruce trees like dust. An owl screeched somewhere over Tommy Bergmann’s head as he stood looking at the white vapor rising up from the piss drenching the cold moss. He buttoned up his fly and listened to the silence all around him. For a moment there wasn’t a sound; everyone—including the newly arrived officers from the Kripo crime-scene team, Georg Abrahamsen, and the two uniformed cops from the Majorstua police station who had arrived late that night—had fallen silent.
    A crackle from the uniforms’ portable radio broke the silence. For a moment Bergmann caught himself missing the camaraderie and cooperation of life on patrol. As investigators, they worked as a team, but deep down they all knew it was every man for himself.
    They hadn’t made much progress in the past few hours, and none of them were even close to being able to answer the question they were all asking themselves: Who was Gustav? The only thing they knew for sure was that the first skeleton they had uncovered was a woman who had been married or at least engaged to this Gustav. One of the Kripo guys thought he could tell at a glance that there were definitely more bodies in the grave. Bergmann didn’t go for that sort of overconfidence, but if that were the case, it might give them a better idea what had become of Gustav.
    He went back down the path and studied the scene before him. The white tent was now up. It was illuminated by one battery-powered light on the outside and three on the inside. The two uniforms stood outside, each with a headlamp. The glaring beams cut through the treetops like air defense searchlights before they turned their heads, and then the light swept over the tree trunks. Bergmann was blinded for a few seconds. When his sight returned, he noticed a pair of deer eyes deep in the forest. Caught in the headlamp’s light beam, the animal froze as if petrified.
    “Tommy!” Abrahamsen’s voice cut through the night. The eyes in the forest