Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  16

  LOUISE GAVE CAMILLA A QUICK HUG, AND WHEN THEY GOT UP TO Louise’s office, she grabbed the thermos on the desk and went to the kitchen to fill it up.

  “You look a little ragged around the edges,” Louise commented when she returned.

  Camilla nodded and smiled.

  “Not that you look all that chipper yourself,” Camilla retorted. “But you’re right. I had a couple of beers last night. Mmm, or maybe seven … which is actually why I’m here.”

  Louise sat down, full of curiosity, and watched as Camilla pulled a few sheets of paper out of her purse.

  “I ran into a man who was practically a witness to the murder in Kødbyen. He knew the murdered woman a little and saw her walk onto Skelbækgade right before she received a call on her cell phone. When she was done with the conversation, she went through the gate next to the Hospitality College, and immediately after that, a dark Audi A4 pulled up and a man got out and followed her in.”

  Lars Jørgensen had been sitting at his desk talking on his phone when they entered the office. Now he hung up and listened. He knew Camilla well and had worked with her several times on cases she had covered.

  “A moment later, the man came back out again and jumped into the car, which sped off.”

  Camilla took off her jacket.

  “Is this a witness we can talk to?” Lars asked from his desk, which faced Louise’s.

  Camilla shook her head.

  “No. You have to use me for this witness statement.”

  Louise had suspected as much when Camilla had started telling the story.

  “Before you continue, I just want to see if we can’t get the rest of the group in here. I know that Mikkelsen is here today talking with Toft and Stig. We IDed the woman yesterday and they’re informing the Czech police so they can locate her family and make sure they’re notified,” Louise said. Then she turned to Lars and asked, “Will you find Willumsen and the rest and ask them to come in here?”

  Camilla stood up when everyone walked in a few moments later.

  Louise introduced her to Mikkelsen. Camilla already knew everyone else.

  “What’s so important?” Willumsen asked brusquely when he showed up in the doorway and looked around at his investigative team. His eyes came to rest on Camilla and he took another step forward.

  “God, are we here because of some reporter?”

  Camilla stood up again and only now did Louise notice the hair in her friend’s ponytail seemed unwashed and she was barely wearing any makeup, which was quite unusual for Camilla. But you had to know her well to see that she must have hurried out the door faster than she usually did. Not that Louise was one to talk, because she looked the same way after a night with only a couple hours of sleep and countless cups of coffee with whiskey and whipped cream. But it was more normal for her; she didn’t always manage to do that conscientious a job with her makeup or tame her wild, dark hair.

  “No, it’s only a humble journalist here to provide law enforcement with some important information,” Camilla responded, flashing Willumsen her sweetest smile.

  Louise leaned back a little with her coffee mug in her hands, ceding control to the others.

  Willumsen nodded a couple of times, looking around for a place to sit down. Stig was standing in the doorway with his pen in his hand and only grudgingly did he give his place to Suhr when his superior asked him to make a little room.

  Camilla repeated what she had already told Louise and Lars.

  “That sounds like the two Albanians,” said Mikkelsen, who had his leather jacket over his shoulder and his glasses up on top of his head. “And Arian drives a new Audi A4.”

  “Arian is also the name Pavlína knows him by,” Louise added, saying that before Pavlína had IDed Iveta in the morgue, she told them Iveta had a mother back home she was sending money to. “But she didn’t say anything about a child.”

  Camilla shrugged and said that she could only pass on what Kaj had told her.

  “We must be able to trace the call she received,” Lars suggested and was countered by Suhr, who shook his head.

  “She didn’t have a cell phone on her when CSI went over the body.”

  “Then it must have been removed,” Lars concluded, and no one disagreed.

  “Can we use this for anything?” Willumsen wanted to know.

  “Of course, damn it,” Mikkelsen exclaimed. “You can’t expect to get much more than this.” He turned to Camilla. “But are you sure your source isn’t someone we could talk to? He can remain anonymous and we can do the questioning off the books so he won’t risk being called in later as a witness.”

  Willumsen was about to protest but was interrupted by Toft, who reminded them that the source’s statements meshed well with Pavlína’s.

  “So now there’s an extra reason for us to keep a sharp eye on those two Albanians.”

  Willumsen stood there for a moment with his arms crossed, nodding thoughtfully, but as he was about to leave the office Camilla stopped him with her hand.

  “In exchange for this, you have to promise me you’ll hold off telling any other reporters about what my source said until tomorrow, unless I call and tell you otherwise this afternoon,” she said, looking at Willumsen. His skepticism softened more when Suhr sent him a just-say-yes look.

  “All right, we’ll leave it at that. We really appreciate your going to the trouble to come to us with your information so we don’t have to read it in the paper tomorrow,” he said, sounding satisfied, before turning his attention to the others.

  “Locate that Audi so we can put a tail on it,” he ordered to no one in particular.

  “And install a tracker once it’s found.” That was for Toft. “Spend today and tomorrow tracking down any witness statements to support Ms. Lind’s anonymous source, and find out who those Albanians are and what they do. Once we have an idea about that, you can go to the railway station and see whether the girls really do meet there daily to settle their accounts with their pimps.”

  Then he gave Camilla a nod and left the office while Homicide Chief Suhr took the time to thank her properly.

  Stig lingered after the others left.

  “Funny, I thought for a second I had seen you down on Sønder Boulevard last night,” he said, his eyes running down Camilla’s Malene Birger designer dress and high-heeled shoes. “But it must’ve just been someone who looked like you, because this lady was sitting on a bench drinking beer with an old alcoholic.”

  Camilla smiled at him, saying that sounded pleasant enough, but she’d taken her son to his break-dancing class.

  Louise knew that was a lie. Markus had had break-dancing Monday—and that had been his last class. And then Louise recalled the same woman Lars was talking about. She wouldn’t be surprised if Stig had seen correctly. Louise walked her friend back to the main entrance and when Camilla said she was going home to bed, Louise gave her a hug.

  “I’m going to do the same just as soon as I can,” Louise said, waving after her.

  17

  CAMILLA WAS IN HER JOGGING CLOTHES ON HER WAY OUT THE DOOR Saturday morning when her phone rang. For a second, she considered ignoring it. She and Louise had a brunch date, and she was determined to get her run in beforehand.

  Her story had filled the entire front page and two pages inside the paper the day before. The intern’s last assignment before he went back to school was to put together a fact box on prostitutes murdered in the last few years in Vesterbro and also in the rest of the country. There were also several brutal killings in Ringsted and Ålborg. Not that they seemed connected; it was mostly just evidence of the ferocious violence that these marginalized women were subjected to, an angle Camilla was perfectly satisfied with.

  “I’m going to have to cancel,” Louise said after Camilla walked back into the living room and picked up after all. “There’s been another murder.”

  Camilla could hear people talking in the background and a car driving by.

  �
�Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m standing down on Sønder Boulevard. The victim is in the courtyard in one of the buildings off the street.”

  “Is it a prostitute?” Camilla wanted to know, already fearing a recurrence.

  “No.” The answer seemed calming, in a way. “It’s one of the drunks,” Louise continued. “Mikkelsen IDed him before I got on the scene. It was pretty savage, not something you want the families seeing who have a view into the courtyard.”

  Camilla sank down on her sofa’s armrest. “Is it Kaj?” she asked softly, feeling an iron fist clench in her stomach.

  “How the hell do you know him?” Louise asked, surprised.

  “I just know him,” Camilla responded tersely. “I’m coming down there.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise. They won’t let you see him either.”

  “God damn it! I don’t want to see him, either. But don’t you get it? He was the one who told me about Iveta and the Audi. How the hell did they find out it was him?”

  Camilla’s voice broke as the iron fist grew bigger and was now so large that she had a hard time getting up. Suddenly she started shivering as the room seemed to contract around the sofa.

  “Ah,” Louise said. “Well, then you’d better come. We’ve cordoned off the courtyard and our cars are parked out front, so it ought to be easy for you to find us.”

  Camilla saw the investigators from far away, as well as the ring of curious bystanders gathered on the sidewalk. As she moved closer, she could hear people guessing what had happened. She recognized a couple of people from the pub and the guy from the grocery shop on the corner.

  Louise was standing by one of the blue vans, talking to Niels Frandsen, the head of the Forensics Department. The barrier tape was strung across the entrance to the courtyard.

  “He’s still in there,” Louise said after Camilla parked her bicycle and greeted Frandsen, “so we’ll stay out here.”

  An ambulance with tinted windows came around the corner, and Louise took Camilla by the elbow and pulled her to the side a bit.

  “Flemming just finished examining the site and doing the preliminary postmortem exam,” she said. “They’re getting ready to move the body.”

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything this bad,” Frandsen admitted when he heard that Camilla knew the deceased. “We speculate that he was knocked down here in the archway before being pulled into the courtyard.”

  The ambulance stopped and Frandsen walked over and undid the police tape so it could drive in.

  He followed it over to talk to a couple of his people. Their faces were strained, and they were talking together quietly as they passed by. Behind them came Suhr, followed by Willumsen.

  Camilla confirmed that Kaj had been the source for her story and vigorously shook her head when asked who could have known that.

  “What happened to him?” she whispered to Louise once they were alone. She noticed her heart racing while the rest of her body felt completely stiff.

  She could tell that Louise didn’t know how to respond.

  Just then the pathologist ducked under the police tape and Camilla took her eyes off the gurney, which had just been pulled out of the ambulance.

  “It’s nasty,” Flemming confirmed with a grim look. “Not something I’ve seen before.”

  “What happened to him?” Camilla repeated, now with a shrill desperation in her voice that she couldn’t suppress.

  Flemming and Louise exchanged a quick glance.

  “The killers stretched out his four limbs and tied each between four benches, and then they gave him a variation on the Colombian necktie,” Flemming said, watching her.

  “And what’s that?” Camilla asked, uncomprehending.

  “The Colombian necktie is something the mafia does to people who rat to the police,” Louise explained and took hold of Camilla as she began to sway.

  “Normally what you see is the throat slit ear to ear and the tongue pulled through the gash. But in this case, his throat was cut vertically and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth with a knife inserted through the incision.”

  “So this variant could be called a Balkan necktie,” Camilla said sadly, thinking about the two Albanians and leaning against the wall for support.

  Louise had just suggested Camilla go back home when Suhr emerged from the courtyard, putting his arm around Camilla’s shoulder when he reached her.

  “I would really like to have you take a look at his face before the ambulance takes him away,” the homicide chief requested. “We need to know for sure that we’re talking about the same man who was your source.”

  Camilla nodded mutely and followed him under the police tape.

  “Everything here will make sense if it is him,” Willumsen said once they were in the courtyard.

  Make sense, Camilla thought, spotting the body of the former chef ahead of her. Now the iron fist was so enormous it pushed its way up into her throat and obstructed her breathing. She could inhale only in brief gasps.

  “We’ll show you only the top of his face,” Suhr said reassuringly when Camilla’s footsteps started to stiffen in reluctance.

  There were a fair number of people in the courtyard. The first person Camilla recognized was Mikkelsen, who was sitting slumped over on a bench, his face ashen, and his eyes staring vacantly at the asphalt under the green tarp that had been stretched out as a shelter to keep people in the building above from seeing the body. The CSI techs had made a white outline underneath the tarp to show where the body was found, although Kaj was on a gurney now, the ropes with which he had been bound to the benches dangling off the sides. The four benches had been pulled from the courtyard’s two seating areas and arranged like the vanes of a windmill, jutting outward from the spot where the body was left. His arms and legs had been fully stretched out at right angles from his torso, so he looked like a capital H on its side.

  Camilla forced herself to look at Kaj’s body on the gurney. It had been zipped inside a white body bag. The homicide chief now cautiously pulled the zipper down a few inches.

  She recognized Kaj just from his hair and the deep wrinkles on his face, and she cried as she nodded in confirmation. Suhr didn’t unzip the body bag any farther than the mouth so Camilla couldn’t see the deep incisions that ran from the Adam’s apple, where the knife had entered, down to his chest, where it had been stopped by the breastbone. The homicide chief held her by the elbow, supporting her when she turned and started to walk away.

  “I suggest that we drive over to HQ and have a chat,” he said as they started to make their way back out to the sidewalk.

  Camilla heard the rear doors of the ambulance close, and she leaned against the wall as it pulled away, heading toward National Hospital where the morgue was.

  Flemming squeezed her arm as he walked by, and Louise said they were ready to go.

  Toft, Mikkelsen, and Stig stayed behind with Willumsen while Lars and Louise went with Suhr and Camilla.

  “I just don’t get it. How could it end like that?” Camilla asked as Louise opened the back door of the car and helped her in. “No one could have known he was the one who told me what happened.”

  Camilla leaned her head against Louise’s shoulder and kept her eyes closed for the short drive in to Police Headquarters. Camilla was reliving glimpses of the afternoon and evening she had spent with Kaj, and thinking about her article as well. She’d gone through it several times—including after she was sure she was totally sober again. But there was nothing in it, nothing that could identify him in any way. She didn’t get it.

  But she had no doubt that it was her fault he had been murdered so viciously and left in plain view in his own courtyard. Humiliated and chastised.

  18

  THEY WERE SITTING IN LOUISE AND LARS’S OFFICE. SUHR HAD brought in an extra chair, and Camilla had downed two cups of black coffee before she suddenly leaped up, racing down the hall to the bathroom with her hand over her mouth.
>
  A copy of the paper with her article was sitting out when she came back, and they agreed that nothing in the story could have identified Kaj Antonsen as her source.

  “The only thing I can see right off the bat that might have helped someone figure it out is the picture of you in your byline,” Louise said, pointing to the small photo of Camilla that appeared next to her name under the title of the article.

  Suhr reached for the paper as Louise pointed this out.

  “If someone recognized you after seeing you with Kaj the day before the article ran, then they could have guessed your source,” Louise explained, watching Camilla struggle with more nausea as she realized that she’d so carefully obscured anything that would point to Kaj while ignoring the possibility that her own identity might give him away.

  Suhr nodded.

  “It’s certainly possible that it could have happened that way,” he agreed after he asked where she and Kaj had talked and who might have seen them together.

  “Everyone,” Camilla replied honestly. “Obviously I had no idea it would turn into a story like this. I was only there to get a sense of the neighborhood. I’m not really that familiar with Istedgade and that area. I also didn’t know how visible the prostitutes were in the street scene. I was interested in the case of the murdered prostitute, but then I met Kaj and we got to talking, had a few beers together, and lost track of time.”

  Louise wrote as Camilla talked.

  “Afterward, we went over to the bar, Café Høker, and we were there for a few hours while he filled me in on how a proper poires Belle-Hélène should be made—without whipped cream, of course,” she added, unable to hold back the tears.

  There was a knock on the office door. Toft apologized and stepped in along with a tech.