by Sara Blaedel
“I’ll call as soon as I can get away,” she promised, giving him a kiss on the cheek and another on his forehead before he writhed out of her grasp. Shouting “Sure, fine,” he disappeared up the stairs.
Camilla turned to face Pastor Holm and smiled. “Well, it looks like they’ve moved on,” she said, and, thanking him for the coffee, she left.
4
“YOU WON’T FIND A SINGLE PERSON ON THE STREET AT THIS HOUR of the day who might have seen anything,” Mikkelsen informed Louise and Lars when they arrived at the local precinct. A clerk had showed them to Mikkelsen’s office, which had a window overlooking Halmtorvet, Copenhagen’s old Haymarket Square, which was now somewhat gentrified and lined with cafés and restaurants. The gray-haired detective with his small horn-rimmed glasses crossed his arms and glanced outside before telling them he’d already spoken with a few individuals last night who usually knew a thing or two about events in the area.
“Were they able to tell you anything?” Louise asked. She wondered whether Mikkelsen had even been home to sleep, having immediately noticed the utilitarian daybed pushed up against one wall of his office when she came in. Currently it was covered with piles of papers and folders, but underneath was a cotton blanket with a floral pattern.
He shook his head but shrugged at the same time, as if to say that it wasn’t always easy to know how much weight to place on their statements.
“I showed the picture around,” he said, pointing to the photograph taken the night before of the woman’s face from the chin up. “Several people said they’d seen her, but they claimed not to know who she was. Or who she works for.”
“And you’re positive she’s a prostitute?” Lars asked.
Mikkelsen reclined in his high-backed office chair, pausing for a moment with his hands clasped over his round belly.
“We’ll never get that fact confirmed a hundred percent,” he said, fixing his gaze on the wall behind them. “But I think we can proceed based on that theory.”
“A colleague claimed he could tell by looking at her teeth that she was from Eastern Europe. Does that sound right?” Louise asked, noticing at once how Mikkelsen’s face tensed up and his expression darkened.
He leaned forward again, placed his hands on the desk, and said, “It’s always nice to have colleagues who are smart enough to observe everything in a single glance, and who are ready to lump all the girls together. But it’s not that simple. We’re not dealing with brand-name goods here. We can’t just assume that if they look a certain way, they must come from a specific region. These are human beings we’re talking about, not some cultivar of a flower that you can look up.”
His tone was acerbic. This was obviously a pet peeve of his that came up a lot.
“So what’s your best guess?” Louise asked.
“She could very well be from Eastern Europe,” Mikkelsen admitted, but then he smiled. “I’m not basing that just on her appearance. That’s based on what happened to her and where she was found. Plus, I’d be more likely to know her a little if she were one of the Danish prostitutes. And lately I’ve also been getting the impression that things have been getting difficult in Eastern Europe for these girls, so more and more of them have been showing up in Denmark. Some of them work for pimps, others work for themselves, but ultimately they all have to pay to use the street.”
“Use the street?” Louise interrupted with a puzzled look. “What exactly does that mean?”
“Some of the nastier pimps think they’re in charge of the street, and they make the girls pay between 300 and 500 kroner a day for permission to use it.”
“How the hell can they do that? If anyone ‘owns’ Istedgade, surely it’s not a bunch of foreign pimps,” Lars exclaimed indignantly.
“Do the women get anything in return after they pay?” Louise asked, staring at a large city map, hanging next to Mikkelsen’s desk, that showed the Vesterbro District. There were also some photos on the wall, of Istedgade and its side streets from an era when the shop fronts looked completely different, Louise guessed from the fifties. In one of the pictures, a police officer was riding a bicycle, and another showed three men holding bottles of beer, raising them at the photographer in a toast. All of the photos were black and white.
Mikkelsen shrugged. “Sure, they promise them protection,” he said with a nod as he scratched his unshaven cheeks.
Louise understood this to imply that the prostitutes couldn’t really count on this protection.
“They believe it because they have no other choice. They’re told that the pimps are in cahoots with the police, and that they have to pay if they don’t want to be thrown out of the country.”
“But don’t the girls find the truth when they talk to each other?” Louise asked.
Mikkelsen shook his head and pushed his black-framed glasses up onto his forehead. There was something retro about their styling, but she was sure that he hadn’t chosen them for fashion but because he’d actually owned them since the sixties.
“Keep in mind that many of the girls who end up here don’t necessarily have the world’s best education. Where they come from, bribes aren’t uncommon to get the authorities to leave you alone. At the same time, these girls aren’t used to having much of a say about anything. So when someone who talks louder than they do, so to speak, explains that these are the rules, they fall in line accordingly.”
“So who’s controlling the girls this way?” Louise asked next.
“The crime bosses. The ones who work with the Nigerian prostitutes, the Roma gypsies, and the ones from Eastern Europe. There are girls walking around out there …” He tilted his head toward the window. “… who have no idea how many months there are in a year, or how many hours in a day. Those kinds of girls aren’t going to rebel against someone who gives them an order. They do whatever they’re told.
“They’re here for only one reason, and that’s to make money,” Mikkelsen continued. “Either for themselves or for the crime bosses who force them into prostitution. But whether they’re here of their own free will or they’ve been forced into it, most of them dream of being able to put a little aside or to send money home to their families. When there’s a middleman involved, there’s not much money left over, so sometimes a few of them try to go it on their own.”
“Do you think that’s what happened?” asked Louise, leaning forward a bit.
“It’s possible,” Mikkelsen said, nodding.
Louise sat in silence for a moment, lost in her own thoughts, trying to put together a scenario that would explain the killing.
“Well, should we head out and see if anyone has shown up who might recognize the woman?” Lars suggested, interrupting her thoughts.
Mikkelsen stood up. “Let’s do that,” he said. “But just think of it as getting some exercise, because I don’t think our odds are all that good. If this is what I think, the girl didn’t want to follow orders. So the only motive for the murder is to send a signal or a warning to the other girls, to show them what happens if they don’t obey and do what they’re told. And those guys do their job so thoroughly that there won’t be any evidence for us to find, not even if we roll out our entire technical arsenal.”
Mikkelsen put on a black leather jacket, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his desk drawer and stuffed it in his inside pocket.
“And if anyone happens to be unlucky enough to have seen something, you can bet they’re not going to feel like picking the perpetrators out of a lineup,” he added.
“But it is still possible that the victim was Danish and that the perp was a john, don’t you think?” Lars asked as they made their way downstairs.
“I doubt it.” Mikkelsen’s voice was quite firm. “If so, there would have been some indication of emotion. Not the kind of emotion that makes married people kill each other, but the more ambiguous kind that can pop up suddenly between a man and a prostitute: feelings of domination, rage, or possessiveness. We see it all the time when we pick up hookers
who’ve been beaten. But there was no emotion in this case. She was slaughtered like an animal.”
Out on Halmtorvet, Louise squinted in the bright sunlight. They started walking down Sønder Boulevard. There were fewer cars now that the street had been closed to through traffic, but there weren’t many pedestrians or bikers out either. Louise spotted a young drug addict leaning against the door in an entryway. The woman’s purse had slipped out of her grasp and was lying on the sidewalk. Louise guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She was wearing stylish clothes: tight jeans and a short, light-colored leather jacket. Her short brown hair was disheveled, and at the moment she seemed to be going through hell. Violent spasms racked her body. She leaned her head against the rough bricks of the building and clung to the door, her fingers trying to locate one of the doorbells. Convulsions shook her body again, and she doubled over, gasping for air.
Mikkelsen went over to her and cautiously placed his hand on her shoulder. “What is it, Sanne? What’s wrong?” he asked.
The woman didn’t turn to look at him, instead raising her arm and trying to push him away.
Mikkelsen pressed one of the doorbells and a moment later the door buzzed. He gallantly held it open for her as she staggered unsteadily toward the stairwell, fumbling along the wall with one hand. Then she disappeared from Louise’s view. Mikkelsen had picked up her bag and hung the strap over the woman’s shoulder before pulling the door closed.
Rejoining his colleagues, Mikkelsen made no comment about the incident and just kept walking.
“It’s always deserted around here in the early afternoon. But in an hour or two the johns will start heading home from work, and then the girls will show up,” he told them as he waved to a couple of middle-aged men sitting on a bench, each holding a beer. Louise fell in behind Jørgensen as a group of schoolkids passed them, taking up most of the sidewalk as they made their way toward DGI-Byen, the enormous conference center complex that included a gym, spa, and restaurant.
Mikkelsen was headed for Skelbækgade, which felt different to Louise in the daytime. There had been much more life on the street the night before than there was now.
“Let’s just go over and ask Nesip what sorts of rumors are going around,” Mikkelsen said, sounding like a local. He motioned for them to follow as he went down four steps into a basement grocery store, calling out: “Hello! Is the little shrimp working today?”
Louise saw a young immigrant boy behind the counter give him a high-five over the candy bins and the neat stacks of morning newspapers.
“He’s in back,” the boy said in the thick, local neighborhood accent.
Mikkelsen led the way through the shop, and Louise noticed the boy following them with his eyes, curious. Apparently he wasn’t concerned about a group of police officers tromping through the place.
In the back room the tea was sweet and the music was so loud that Louise had a hard time following the conversation when Mikkelsen sat down next to a small man who was apparently the shop owner. It seemed as if Mikkelsen was a friend, and Louise and Lars were merely along for the ride.
Mikkelsen placed the photo of the dead woman on the table, and Louise didn’t need to hear what they were saying to see that Nesip didn’t know her. She leaned forward to listen as Mikkelsen tried to ferret out what people in the neighborhood had been saying, and whether there was anything the police hadn’t caught wind of yet. At one point, the Turkish man had a highly emotional outburst, his voice rising in passion and temporarily drowning out the Middle Eastern music as he expressed his great sorrow that the harsh reality of street life had claimed yet another soul.
Mikkelsen glanced over at them and winked as he paused in his questioning until the shopkeeper had calmed down a bit.
Ten minutes later they were back on the street again. They hadn’t learned anything new, and the sweet tea had left a cloying sweetness in their mouths.
“So he didn’t know her name, but apparently he had seen her walk by a few times lately, although he couldn’t say whether it was a week ago or a month ago.”
They started walking back toward Halmtorvet. When Louise looked across the street, she grabbed Lars’s arm—she had seen the same drunk who had been sitting on the steps outside the Høker Café when the body was found.
“Isn’t that the guy?” she asked, pointing at the opposite sidewalk.
“It sure is, and it looks like he’s finally on his feet,” her partner said. He told Mikkelsen that the man was one of the first witnesses he’d talked to. “But the guy was so far gone, he hadn’t even noticed anything was happening.”
“Oh, that’s Kai,” Mikkelsen said. “He lost his grip on reality years ago. He does better when he keeps to his own world. He drinks a liter or more a day, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Sometimes he even makes his sofa available if someone needs a place to stay.”
The man was walking in their direction on the sidewalk on the other side of the street and stopped to lean against the wall of a building as he rummaged through his pants pocket. He finally pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and with great difficulty he removed one from the pack and then found his lighter.
Louise watched him as he started staggering forward again.
“He was sitting right across from the place where the body was lying. He must have seen her,” she said. Then she asked Mikkelsen if he’d consider having a word with the man. “Maybe he’d be more willing to recall something if you were the one asking.”
Mikkelsen stopped abruptly and glanced over at Kai, but then he started walking again.
“Okay, I’ll do it, but not here. I’d rather catch him at home. Kai would catch hell if word gets out he might have seen something. People consider a guy like him worthless, and the people we’re dealing with wouldn’t blink at shutting him up for good.”
Kai was almost directly across from them now. He crossed the street, heading for the basement grocery store. When he got close, he recognized Mikkelsen and raised his hand in greeting.
“Ça va, monsieur?” Mikkelsen asked, going over to shake his hand.
“Très bien, mon ami. Très bien,” Kai slurred, a smile passing over his ravaged face. He let go of the officer’s hand, pointed down at the store, and then raised his hand to his mouth as if he were tipping a bottle to his lips.
Mikkelsen smiled and gave him a slap on the back before Kai headed down the basement steps.
“He’s okay. He was the chef at the Plaza Hotel until his wife dumped him, and then his son was killed in a car accident … or maybe it happened the other way around. In any case, his whole world fell apart, and he said goodbye to his old life,” Mikkelsen explained. “Let’s take a stroll over to Istedgade. I want to show the photo to the folks at Club Intim. If this woman worked here in the neighborhood, she probably used their booths. Although I doubt the guys over there will feel particularly motivated to share, either.”
Rounding the corner onto Istedgade, Louise smelled the spicy aroma of grilling shawarma, and her stomach instantly contracted with hunger. She found a piece of chewing gum in her pocket, hoping that it would tide her over until she could get back to the office and the box of crackers in her desk drawer.
A group of men stood in front of the homeless shelter in the spring sunshine, clutching their beer bottles and chatting. A big dog had stretched out lazily in the middle of the sidewalk so that people had to walk in a circle around him. The street scene was a motley mixture, with everyone from bums to schoolchildren to the parents of toddlers who didn’t bat an eye at the sex shops while maneuvering their strollers home around the African prostitutes.
Club Intim was three steps below street level. The officers edged their way single-file past racks of porn DVDs in the crammed shop.
Louise could tell that the guy behind the counter recognized Mikkelsen, and it took him only a quick glance at Lars and her to know that they weren’t new customers. On the contrary, they were the sort of people he wanted out of the shop as quickly as possible.
; Club Intim promoted itself as Denmark’s leading porn theater, with four separate screens and signs advertising topless service and draft beer for 30 kroner. But only a certain clientele knew about the business transacted in the numerous private booths where prostitutes serviced their customers. The prostitutes paid 90 kroner per visit to rent a booth, and according to Mikkelsen, they could turn over three or four customers an hour.
Louise and her partner hung back as Mikkelsen stepped over to the counter to show the guy the photo of the murdered woman found on Skelbækgade. Louise perused the DVD titles. Bare breasts and spread legs—the packaging was basically the same on all of them.
Two men in their early twenties came out of the back room, which Louise later learned was a bar. Topless and bottomless, as Mikkelsen described it. She stepped aside to let the men pass. They gave her a knowing smile, and she made sure she had a response ready if they tried to proposition her. But just then a middle-aged man in a work jacket and white mason’s cap came barging out of the other corridor where the theaters and sex booths were. He was clearly in a hurry, and on his way to the door he happened to bump into one of the younger guys, pushing him into a rack. A couple of DVDs fell to the floor. Without even pausing, the man rushed up the three steps to the street, but before he got any farther, the young guys were on him. A punch slammed the middle-aged man into the shop’s front window with a loud bang.
Louise was up the stairs by the time he had taken the second blow, and she grabbed hold of the assailant. With a quick twist she had his arm pinned behind his back and her police badge out before Lars had even reached the entrance.
“All right, that’s enough,” she said, nodding at the older man to let him know he could go. She was just about to ask the young guys for their names when a loud scream came through the open door. Lars quickly turned back, and Louise let go of the guy’s arm to follow Lars as he ran back into the shop and down the corridor with the booths, toward the screams. Mikkelsen had remained inside while his colleagues dealt with the young guys, but now he followed them into the hall.