Summary Early-retired, terminal Treasury archivist Walter Poelmans is found shot through the head after a call to the precinct suggesting his own dead. The childless recluse widower seems a perfect suicide candidate, but the strange phrasing puzzles the detectives, who look for former colleagues and soon suspect some cover-up causing coordinated leaving of his section. His former nurse Chantal De Pauw is suspected of cuing a series of robberies in the area, jewelry is found hidden is presumed cahoot Bennie De Roeck's home, but neither can be tied to the murder, and she's the next victim. Poelmans's former supervisor Rene Bertels is now in a home, demented too badly to clarify, but key to a stolen fortune of Nazi death camps loot in a Swiss bank.

• Crime