They had traced the three girls' last hours in as much detail as they could. He was including Jeanette in this aspect of the investigation. There was another peculiarity. She was still alive, but what had happened to her that evening before the crime was hardest of all to work out. There were fewer witnesses. Several couldn't remember.

He'd spent ages poring over the map, trying to figure out if they'd followed the same route to the park, to the rock, the opening, the bushes. Maybe there was a common route, or something that amounted to the same thing. If you added up all the evidence from friends about where they'd been and what they'd done and what they were going to do that night, there was something like a route that Beatrice, Angelika, and Jeanette might have taken before they came up against the rapist. It started to the north of the city center, and everybody knew where it ended.

North of the city center. What had they been doing there? It must have been near the river, the old harbor, or around the opera house. Or on the other bank, perhaps? Winter had read the case notes backward and forward and over and over again, but hadn't found a place mentioned where they might all have started off on the same journey. Was it all a coincidence? He didn't know, but he would keep at it. He would force his way into the reality of the map, into the very spot.

He'd been looking for some connection between the cases, and here one was-extremely vague at the moment, but even so. What else was there for him to do?

Winter turned left. Angelika Hansson's father was at the door waiting for him, just like last time.

"Leave me on my own in here for a while," said Winter, and Lars-Olof Hansson closed the door on him. Winter started looking around Angelika's room. He needed to start from the beginning all over again. He opened the left-hand door of the wardrobe.

There was nothing in the wardrobe he hadn't seen before.

Nobody had moved the clothes since he and Bergenhem had been there on their first search and removed sweaters and pants, a job he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. He had an innate reluctance to touch dead people's clothes. He wasn't cut out to be a forensics officer. Those clothes would never be worn again. He'd seen it before: they'd lie there for years on their shelves and in their drawers, just as all the furniture would stay exactly where it had been, the papers would still be on the desk, the books on their shelves, the few ornaments would be untouched.

They were all concrete memories now, memories they didn't want in that house, but they didn't have the strength to obliterate them. Or the will. Or both, he thought, as he closed the wardrobe door.

What am I looking for? If he knew, he wouldn't be here, intruding on the despairing parents in the next room. If he knew, he would already have found it, taken it away to be examined under a brighter light.

A secret.

The thought had been in the back of his mind since he'd spoken to Jeanette's father that first time. There was a secret. Either the father or the daughter was hiding something. Maybe both of them. Something they hadn't said. It wasn't something he could point to like a physical piece of evidence, but it had to do with the crime committed on the daughter, the rape. He couldn't pin it down, not yet. But he could sense it. And Halders could sense it. He needed Halders. This was a case for Halders as well, a complicated case that required a sort of thinking that aimed straight for the target, without too many sidetracks.

And here he was now, in this room that would only ever allow in a mixture of half light and half darkness through the closed Venetian blinds.

He sat down at the desk and looked at a photo of Angelika on a jetty by the sea. A young black body and a smile as big as the horizon, and just as white.

These confounded photographs that took no account of the future. He had already stared at a thousand pictures similar to this one, like a clairvoyant predicting a tragedy that is going to happen. Everything in photographs like these acquires a significance different from what one sees on the surface, it seemed to him. When I look at this picture, it's as if I'm coming to that jetty from the future, with a death announcement.

Angelika's father had no secret of that kind. Winter could hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. Her father-an adoptive father, but her father even so-had been genuinely ignorant about his daughter's pregnancy and possible boyfriends.

But did Angelika have a secret? Who was it she had come up against in the night? Just like Beatrice she'd split off from her friends and been alone. Or had she met the man who'd made her pregnant some eight weeks earlier?

What had she done then? She had almost finished her twelve years of schooling and was on her way out into the big wide world. Did she bump into a rapist and murderer who lay in wait for his victims in the summer night? A coincidence. Bad luck, to put it mildly. Or was there a motive behind it? Was it a planned crime?

The location could have been carefully selected… in either case. By the madman. Or by the murderer who was waiting for somebody in particular, just for her.

But then this wasn't about Beatrice Wägner, or Jeanette Bielke. Or was it?

Maybe the three girls had something in common that had led to their attacks, maybe it wasn't just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had they done something that… linked them? Could that be it? For God's sake, I need to concentrate on this particular murder. It's possible to find common denominators in everything.

Winter sat with his head in his hands, thinking, then stood up and opened one of the desk drawers. He needed a cigarello, but controlled his craving. It had gotten stronger since he'd become a father. He had thought it would grow weaker, or maybe disappear altogether, but it had become worse. He was smoking more than ever. That meant it was time to stop. Angela's discreet hints had slowly developed into something else. Not nagging. Never that. But maybe… irritation. It wasn't just the doctor in her. It was healthy common sense. Healthy.

He stood up, walked through the house, and as soon as he was outside he lit a Corps.

When he came back he searched the room methodically. He spent some time studying the photograph again, her skin against the water. He opened the desk drawer and took out the eight bundles of photographs he'd just been through. He started once again, sorted them into small piles, resorted them. Angelika in various locations, mostly outdoors. Smiling, not smiling. He put the outdoor pictures together, the indoor ones together. Summer snapshots. Winter snapshots. The bright colors of autumn leaves. Angelika in a snowdrift, black, black, white, white. Angelika on a hillside in spring with wood anemones gleaming white. Angelika with her mother and father, on the same hillside: her parents so pale after the winter they looked almost ill.

There were no dates on the photos, but they all seemed to have been taken during the last year. It was a guess, but became more than that when he checked the dates on the envelopes. There were nearly three hundred pictures. It was like an open diary of her last year. Summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer again. Her last summer, or half summer, he thought, and turned to a series of photographs taken at her graduation party. Flowers, balloons, all the traditional things, a one-year-old Angelika enlarged eighteen times on a poster hanging above their heads.