by Inger Wolf
But Annie stared at a point behind her without a sign of recognition. Her cold eyes looked as if she were already peering into the hereafter. And she'd almost stopped blinking, too.
Sidsel shivered. The body heat built up from her walk was gone, and the air was bitterly cold. How long could she stand it out here in only a thin sweater? Now she felt tears running down her cheeks, and her scarf fell onto Annie's face. She was scared. Frustrated–where was that ambulance? She'd emphasized how serious the situation was, how badly Annie needed a doctor. Plus, she was exposed here in the yard–what if whoever had done this came back? Maybe he'd only left for a few moments to get something. It was deserted out here.
* * *
Five minutes later, a gray Toyota pulled up, and an unusually tall man with gray hair jumped out and trotted over. She'd never seen him before.
"David Olesen, I'm the constable out here. Lieutenant Detective Daniel Trokic contacted me; he's on his way."
He leaned over Annie and checked her pulse. "This doesn't look good. Damn. There's nothing we can do before the ambulance comes."
A few moments later, Trokic pulled in. Sidsel clenched her teeth to keep from bursting into tears, but when he put his arm around her shoulder, she couldn't help it.
"Is there anything at all I can do to help?" she finally managed to say.
"You can go inside and make us a big pot of coffee. It's going to be a long night."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Tuesday, January 9
Trokic crossed the street and viciously kicked a snowdrift. Earlier, he'd called and asked where the hell the ICU ambulance was, and he'd been told that the 'processing time' for that fringe area was between twenty minutes and a half hour, depending on traffic and weather conditions. Which meant they hadn't had a decent chance of keeping the seriously-injured woman alive. She’d been pronounced dead at 0:43 a.m. when they couldn’t find her pulse.
In addition, several people had tramped around in the snow to check her and finally take her inside the warm house, away from the thick smoke that made breathing difficult and worsened her shock. Valuable evidence, including prints of shoe soles in the snow, might have been ruined, and the whole area was likely contaminated with DNA.
The ambulance had driven off with the woman's body, and the firemen had extinguished the fire in the shed. Or what was left of the shed; it had nearly been gone when they arrived. They'd finally sealed off the area with barrier tape, and two techs, Kurt and Jan, had taken over.
Sidsel was back in the house next door. She’d assured Trokic she was okay with being alone, but she hadn’t looked okay. The police would be at Annie's house the next several hours, and with all the police cars parked out front, she would be safe. But he’d seen her eyes glazed over with fright, and he wished she would go back to her own place in Århus. He felt he should keep an eye on things. At the very least check to see if she'd remembered to lock her door.
Three Rammstein numbers on his car's CD player later, he felt clear-headed enough to join his colleagues at the kitchen table for a cup of coffee and a few cookies they'd confiscated. He skirted the taped-off area to avoid contaminating the scene more than it already was.
"Is there anything pointing to arson? An arson-homicide?"
Kurt sat, rubbing his puffy eyes. "Too early to say." He sounded like an old doctor calmly explaining an illness to a patient. But Trokic knew the two techs spoke a great deal about a case when they were by themselves. In their own masculine way, that probably revealed more than an entire army of psychologists ever could.
"A hell of a painful way to end your days. What do you think could have happened?"
"Here's my theory," Kurt said. "Somehow, for some reason, she was out in the shed and got locked inside while it was burning. The padlock on what's left of the door is locked. But she got out. It looks like she broke through the door at the door frame. The fire helped, I'm sure."
"She put up a good fight," Trokic said.
"That she did. We're taking casts of several shoe prints, but I'm afraid most of them are ruined, or they're ours. All the stomping around out there…Anyway, if we don't find anything, my theory is probably going to stay just that. A theory." He gestured in irritation out at the yard.
"I've got a new camera," Jan said proudly.
"Really!" Trokic said. "Are you saying Agersund the great Polaroid fan coughed up the money for a real camera? You expect us to believe that?"
"Here’s the evidence." He lifted the camera up in the air.
Trokic nodded. "We're going to bring some fire investigators in; we need to nail down the source of the fire, and this time Copenhagen can’t say no. They’ll be happy for your photos."
Jan peered over at Trokic for a moment. "Where's the woman who found the victim? Her with the coffee and all that long fine hair?"
"I sent her home. She's the neighbor, at least for the time being. She's housesitting."
Jan fastened an external blitz to the camera. "Maybe you ought to get your foot in the door there, Daniel. Wouldn't be at all out of line to offer a little extra nighttime police protection. We'll hold the fort down here; it won't take you too awful long."
Both the techs laughed. Heavy snowflakes began falling outside again.
Trokic snorted. "Very funny. Just do your job, okay? It’s starting to snow again; you two wise-asses better get busy before Mother Nature ruins everything for you."
Chapter Forty
Jacob drove. Trokic had slept only two hours, and he felt he was on the verge of some sort of mental collapse. The purr of the police car over the snowy streets made him even drowsier. He'd finally been on his way to bed early that morning, with images of Annie Wolters' charred body still haunting him, when Pjuske threw up her dry food three places on the sofa. A protest against not being served the vet's gourmet-priced pellets, maybe? Whatever the reason, it had taken him a half hour to clean the sofa. Later, he slept uneasily, dreaming of burning houses and ash-gray rabbits. He’d woken in a sweat.
They finally pulled up to a rundown wooden house, green with white windows, on the outskirts of Mårslet. It looked like an allotment shack, in stark contrast to the other houses in the neighborhood. From the misshapen bushes and the walkway's crooked tiles, Trokic guessed that the snow-covered yard was a total mess. The resident's name had been written with a permanent marker on the red, rusty mailbox; frozen advertisements stuck out of its flap. The place nearly looked abandoned.
"Light blue old wreck of a Ford in the driveway," Jacob said as they trudged up the walkway. "A promising start. But it doesn't exactly look like anyone's home, does it?"
He nodded at the yellowed curtains behind the windows.
"We're a little bit early, too." Trokic knocked on the door. It sounded hollow, echoey, like distant thunder. Surely, that was loud enough to be heard. But he pounded on the door again and yelled, "Open up, it's the police.”
The door opened a crack, revealing a pale yellowish, wrinkled face with eyes like cement, chin marked by trails of drool. The man realized he was looking at two policemen, and reluctantly he opened the door. Two fingers with longish crooked nails tapped nervously on the nicked-up edge of the door.
Trokic's expectations sank at the sight of the man in front of them. The records claimed that Gabriel Jensen was in his early 60s, but he might just as well have been eighty. He was nearly bald, and he was hunched over and clinging to a royal-blue walker.
"Police." Trokic showed him his badge. "May we ask you a few questions?"
"About what?"
"It concerns the homicide of an eight-year-old boy, Lukas Mørk, which maybe you've heard about?"
"Heard about it! How could you not hear about it, all day on the TV news? Field day for reporters, ain't it. Christ. I didn't kill him; I can tell you that damn much."
He nodded down at his walker and nudged a crumb of something from his lip into his mouth. While munching on his new acquisition, he stared at the two policemen.
"If y
ou don't mind, we'd like to talk to you anyway," Jacob said. "We know it's a little early, but this won't take long."
Jensen sighed demonstratively and grimaced. "All right, okay, but I got to have my morning beer. Otherwise, I'll start shaking. Get in here and shut the door; it's cold as hell out there."
He opened the door wide, turned his walker around, and headed inside. When the supply of fresh, crisp air was cut off behind them, the overpowering stink of trash and sweat met them head-on. Trokic guessed that cleaning and personal hygiene weren't high on Jensen’s priority list.
* * *
Jensen led them through a dark hallway and out into a small kitchen with pink tiles and walls. Plates stood in lopsided stacks, with various types of dried food sandwiched between them. Beer cans both foreign and domestic dotted the skyline of towers of pizza and cornflakes boxes leaning against the wall. A long row of plastic bags full of trash stood shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Several of the bags had leaked liquids that left stains in an assortment of colors and sizes. The stench wafting up from the bags was unbelievable. Farthest to the right on the counter, Trokic noticed a cage with an apathetic yellow parakeet that periodically rammed its beak against the cage bars.
"I'm thinking I don't have to share this with you two." Jensen laughed as he pulled out a brown can of Elephant beer out of the refrigerator. "Sorry I don't have anything else to offer you."
Jacob looked happy to hear that. "The district doesn't send anyone to help you clean?"
"I don't let them bitches set foot in this house. They stick their goddamn noses into everything; they got all these ideas. But I don't get out so much anymore after I got good and drunk and broke this hip. It didn't grow back together right; it’s hard to get around. My brother comes over and does the grocery shopping for me once a week. Sometimes, he takes the trash out too."
He stared at the plastic bags on the floor as if he couldn't figure out how they got there. "Looks like I'm up to six bags, so he'll be here tomorrow. You hear that, Pipmads? Chow time again!" He grinned knowingly at the bird.
"So, what brings you here, anyway?"
"We got a tip," Trokic said. Which was true.
"A tip? You sure as hell didn't get it from anybody who's seen me lately. Je-sus Chrr-rist! Don't surprise me though. Once a con, always a con."
Trokic got straight to the point. "We know you did time for indecent exposure several years ago. But that's not why we're here. We’ve also heard you have an insect collection. Beetles."
"So? That's illegal nowadays? You want to see it?"
"In a while. It just seems odd to us that the dead boy, Lukas, was very interested in exactly the same thing, insects, especially ladybugs. Which technically is a type of beetle. There aren't all that many people here in Denmark who collect them."
"I wouldn't know about that."
"We're also interested in hearing what you can tell us about Eigil Riise. You do remember him?"
Jensen's grayish eyes turned dark as he took a drink of beer. He wiped his mouth and burped quietly. "Yeah. I remember Eigil." He stared blankly up at the ceiling. "And so what? I didn't drown him either; the boy took his own life."
"You reported his parents. You said they were behind it. What in the world made you say that?"
He laughed and shrugged. "I thought they deserved it."
"Could you maybe explain that a little better?" Trokic was getting annoyed, but Jensen just kept on laughing.
"I'm telling you, I didn't do none of it, you stupid pinhead. You deaf or what?"
Trokic ignored the insult. He'd been called worse before. "Not long after he died, you went to sea, and you've been a sailor most of your life, is that right?"
"The town didn't like me. I figured I'd better give them a break."
"But you knew Eigil?"
"If you absolutely got to know, yeah, I knew him pretty good. I liked the kid."
"Liked him?"
"I know what you two are thinking. But it wasn't like that. He came by and mowed my yard once in a while; I paid him a little bit. Sometimes we'd watch some sports thing on TV."
"But what does that have to do with his parents?"
"They killed him."
"They drowned him?"
"No, he handled that himself. They just drove him to it, is all."
Suddenly, he looked as if he'd said too much. "Oh, what the hell. What business is it of yours now, anyway? I've said all I'm going to say." He looked back and forth between them. "Want to see my beetles?"
* * *
"You think he's lying?" Jacob said on the way back to Århus.
"No."
Trokic skipped past Joe Satriani's "Crush of Love" on the CD player. An instrumental masterpiece, provocative, an incredible ocean of sound that cemented Satriani's place among the guitar gods. He used to be wild about it before the lawyer. They’d been in bed, listening to the music. And like so many times before, she had traced the veins along his arm as if she were studying a map. Then she'd said that if he didn't soon find a way to open up, he’d turn into a very lonesome man. He hoped that someday he'd be able to listen to the number again. After all, it was some of the best music the guitar genius had ever made.
"So, you trust this guy? I think he's lying out his ass."
"It’s hard to tell someone’s lying when there isn't a lot at stake. But there is here. Anyway, what good does it do him to lie to us right now?"
Jacob shrugged. "I just don't think we can trust what he says."
"No, but I don’t see him involved in the murder, with that walker he’s pushing around. I think this time the coincidence is just that, a coincidence."
"A dead end, then." Jacob ran his hand through his messy hair. "But now that we're talking about old cases, maybe you can tell me what it is you know about Sinka? Did she come back?"
Trokic changed lanes and turned on to the coast road. Jacob could read him like an open book. "No. But since you asked straight out, there's something I'd better tell you."
Chapter Forty-One
The years seemed to pass across Jacob's face as the memories slowly returned. Trokic saw in his eyes the war, the devastated villages. But also, a young couple in love.
"I don't know what the hell to think," he said after Trokic had told him about meeting Ivan. "And you buy me coffee before telling me all this? I need something stronger."
He waved the waitress over and ordered two Irish coffees. They were in Buddy Holly, a bar close to the police station. It was packed, though the mood was a bit dull from the heat inside and the steady stream of drinks. It had stopped snowing, and people were beginning to get out in the slick streets again. Trokic took a sip of coffee and mulled over what to say.
He'd met Jacob during the war when he was out on an errand for St. Patrick's in Petrinja. Jacob thought it was interesting to meet someone with a mixed ethnic background, and later, since he was in Zagreb anyway–shortly before Serbia had begun bombing the city–they met for a beer. In a burst of Croatian hospitality, Trokic invited him to meet his family–his cousin and her husband, who lived several kilometers outside the capital. That's where Jacob met Trokic's younger cousin, Sinka, who already had been turning men's heads with her lithe figure and beautiful eyes. In spite of the nearly impossible situation, or perhaps because of it, the two fell head over heels in love. They began talking about marriage.
But then Sinka had disappeared. Now Trokic wondered: was Jacob reacting so strongly because he missed his first love so much? Trokic tried to recall feeling a similar way, but he'd simply never experienced anything quite like their love. He’d always had some sort of emotional barrier as if his emotions were small creatures that refused to grow up. Sometimes it seemed like he’d reached a standstill inside. As if he were waiting to feel something unknown to him.
"Beograd is no small town, you know," he finally said. "It's not like you can stroll around with a sign on your back, hoping to run into somebody who knows her. If it even was her."
"But
she's Croatian. People would notice her."
"Maybe several years ago. Now, I don't know."
"It is her." Jacob set his Irish coffee down so hard that whipped cream sloshed over the edge. "I think we should contact some of our Serbian colleagues down there and talk to them."
Trokic shook his head. "You think the police will want to help? You think they give a damn about something like this? When it could lead to some crime on the Serbian side? I just can't see it. They might say, yeah, sure, we'll look into it. And then destroy everything they have on the case."
Once again, Trokic felt a stab of pain at the thought that he might be right. And immediately it was back to us versus them. Even he, who had grown up in a distant country, had been forced by nationalism to be against them. The Serbs. It had started as an impersonal dislike fostered by propaganda and stories from distant fronts. But one day, it hit his own family. When he tried now and then to explain to other Danes how it could happen, all the hate and bloodshed and war between neighbors, they couldn’t understand. But they should be able to, Trokic thought. Nationalism was on the rise in Denmark, spreading like wildfire as hate intensified uncritically against "the others." The massive shadow of generalization that made it impossible to see a neighbor as a unique human being.
Jacob sounded hopeful, though. "I don't know about that. Times are different, with new leaders and all."
Trokic leaned back in his chair and looked thoughtfully at his colleague. "But Beograd, though. She would have blown Serbia up, the whole country, if she'd had a big enough bomb."
He could still see Sinka's face at his father's funeral, just after the war started. To him, she'd only been a big kid. He shivered at the thought. She was sensitive and passionate, and time had taught him that those qualities could get even the best people in trouble. Anyway, war could do practically anything to people. Like what happened to Milan, the family friend who now was serving a life sentence for murdering civilians while he was a commanding officer.