by Sara Blaedel
Camilla had described the layout of the house. On the ground floor, along with the kitchen, bathroom, and living room, there were two guest bedrooms, which were rarely used and mostly for storage. Upstairs there was a second bathroom, three bedrooms, and a little attic room.
There was the sound again, and Louise stood still and listened until she realized it was the ceiling creaking as her colleagues walked around upstairs.
She put a hand on the dining table and stood there for a second to let her heart rate slow down. She didn’t know what she’d expected, and decided that most of all she was trying to avoid expecting anything.
She heard the others coming down the stairs, and Stig came over and opened the door of the woodstove, which was burning briskly. A big log was still going strong, even though it had obviously been in the stove for a while.
“Well, there’s just no telling,” Stig said after he shut it again. “They could be absolutely anywhere, but it must be somewhere they can get to on foot. What about neighbors? Are there any?”
Camilla had told them about the Jønssons, who had a farm on the other side of the band of pines, which ran through this stretch of woods like a belt.
“About a kilometer away, through the woods,” Louise said, but didn’t know if Camilla knew the way. She walked over to open the lock on the patio door and call to Camilla to have her show them in which direction the neighbors lived, when she saw Camilla suddenly jump up and start running toward the woods bordering on the backyard.
The lock jammed and wouldn’t budge, despite Louise hitting it. She watched Camilla disappear into the edge of the woods and started running through the kitchen. She had just gotten to the corner of the house and around into the back yard when the screams ripped through the silent forest.
Louise ran through the tall grass, past the table, past the fire pit, but stopped suddenly when Camilla came staggering back from the edge of the woods with her hands clenched together over her head in helplessness, tears streaming, shrieking.
Louise started running again when she saw Camilla collapse, her violent sobs filling Louise with fear.
Stig and their Swedish colleagues were right behind her as she went farther into the woods where a small, narrow path wound its way between the pine trees.
Henrik Holm was lying on his stomach with one arm over his head and the other out to the side. Killed from behind, shot once in the back of the head and twice in the back.
Louise gasped for air and doubled over as though she suddenly had a terrible stitch in her side. The others kept going past her and knelt down next to the body.
Louise didn’t need to go all the way to know that the pastor was dead. Liquidated. She was also experienced enough to know that he’d been shot at close range. He hadn’t had a chance to get away.
Camilla’s sobs sliced through her bones. Louise’s vision went black, and she didn’t have enough air to stand back up and walk back to her. Instead, she sank down even more and let herself fall onto the forest floor, where she sat with her back against a tree and ignored the sharp pine needles that pierced her knit sweater.
They felt for a pulse, looked at his face. The bullet exited where his mouth had been.
Louise looked away, peering into the darkness between the tree trunks as she heard the Swedish officers on their cell phones, both calling for backup.
61
IT WAS HIS EYES SHE SAW FIRST. HlS EYES FOUND HER THROUGH THE dense branches. There were several rows of trees between them. Still, she could see his face quite clearly.
Stig had stayed on the footpath, while the other two ran back to the house.
Louise was slowly crawling forward on her knees, squeezing her way between the trunks. When she got there, Jonas’s face was hidden in his hands and he was sitting perfectly still. Louise put an arm around him and pulled him to her. Squeezed him and felt his face against her shoulder. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t making a sound. She could hardly feel him breathing.
Tears streamed down her cheeks and landed on his hair, but otherwise she felt nothing. The sound of Camilla’s deep sobs didn’t penetrate this far into the woods, nor did the piercing tones of the first sirens. Not even Stig’s gentle voice, talking to her right before he grasped her elbow and started helping her out, while she was still holding the boy in her lap.
Jonas kept his head buried in against her shoulder until they were out on the path, where Stig lifted him up into his arms and carried him to the house with Louise walking right next to him.
As they reached Camilla in the grass, she slowly got up onto her knees and took the hand Louise held out to her. Together they walked up to the house, where first responders’ flashing lights made the place feel too crowded. The ambulance and police cars were parked in a long line down by the driveway. None of them had driven all the way up to the house, since the driveway had already been cordoned off.
Louise followed Stig into the living room and let Camilla collapse into the room’s only armchair in front of the woodstove, in which there was no longer a glow behind the soot-covered glass door. Louise sat down on the sofa, as Stig let Jonas slowly slip down next to her.
“Do you think it would be better if we put him to bed until we leave here?” her colleague asked, searching her face to see what she thought.
“Just let him lie here,” Louise said and swallowed a couple of times in quick succession when she saw how the boy curled up into a fetal position and hid his face in a cushion.
A weak shiver ran through him as she carefully placed a hand on his shoulder and then quickly pulled it back again; she couldn’t even fathom the misfortune this eleven-year-old boy had suffered, and now he may have just witnessed his father being gunned down as well.
The silence in the living room was oppressive.
Jonas was still curled up into a tight ball, breathing so quietly that occasionally Louise feared he’d stopped.
Camilla sat in the armchair staring straight ahead. She was pale and staring off into space. Every once in a while she reacted as an almost invisible shiver ran through her, and she mindlessly clasped her hands together hard, as if a sharp pain were jabbing through her.
Stig had gone out front and was talking to Willumsen by phone. From what she could hear, Louise was going to take Jonas and Camilla back to Denmark in the car after the Swedish police questioned them, knowing full well that the boy was definitely too much in shock to be able to tell them anything. Jakobsen would be waiting at National Hospital to receive them so Jonas could get emergency crisis counseling.
Darkness had fallen outside, and Louise counted about six or eight CSI techs from the Swedish crime lab working both in front of and behind the house. Three were leaning over the tire imprints in the driveway and preparing to take a plaster mold.
Louise held Jonas’s hand as they walked to the car. As expected, the boy hadn’t been able to tell the police anything about what had happened, so they decided to wait and have him try to talk to them when their own expert crisis psychologist could be present.
Louise noticed Stig standing and watching them as she carefully turned his car around on the narrow forest road and slowly started driving back through the darkness, avoiding the biggest of the potholes.
62
THE MURDER OF POPULAR PASTOR HENRIK HOLM FILLED THE newspaper front pages on Monday morning. Only a little bit of the story had leaked, but it was enough to leave people in shock at the brutality of his killing.
The investigative team was gathered in Willumsen’s office. No one had slept more than a couple of hours since Louise had arrived at National Hospital late Saturday night with Jonas and Camilla, who were both admitted to be treated for shock. Louise had sat with them until Sunday morning, going directly from the hospital to police HQ.
“Miloš Vituk pleaded guilty to the four killings,” Willumsen began, eyeing them with tired eyes, his face unshaven.
“Four?” Louise and Stig exclaimed simultaneously.
“Otto Birch died over
night,” Willumsen informed them sadly. After a moment of silence as that news sank in, he returned to the topic of Miloš Vituk. “We searched the cell phone we found on him when we arrested him and, sure enough, it had a different number than the ones we knew about. Igli is just compiling all the numbers. He’ll bring a list as soon as he’s done.”
He signaled he was changing subjects by taking a gulp of his coffee.
“Late last night, Lars spoke briefly with Otto Birch.”
Willumsen nodded to Louise’s partner to have him take over.
“He was very confused about what had happened. He went into the church and was swapping out the candles in the holders when two men came in. They asked for the pastor, and an instant later his legs exploded in pain. He collapsed onto the floor. One man walked right up to him and held a big revolver to his forehead, demanding to know where they had gone. So Otto told him about the house in Sweden and gave them the address. Then that man disappeared. We’re assuming this was Bosko, while the other one, who had stayed in the background, stepped forward and aimed at him.”
“Is there any evidence that Bosko was there?” Louise wanted to know. She had asked that same question many times since Sunday morning, but Willumsen had shaken his head each time.
“Miloš Vituk was brought before a judge yesterday at 2:00, and after confessing, was remanded for four weeks.”
“But he wasn’t the one behind the murders,” Toft said, without removing the plastic cigarette from his mouth. He’d been sitting with the Serb ever since his arrest Saturday afternoon, right up until they had escorted him down to see the judge for his preliminary hearing.
Willumsen shook his head.
“That’s not what we’re trying to prove here. Frandsen has had his CSI techs working all night, and he called twenty minutes ago to say that he is on his way over from Slotsherrensvej. But obviously he has to make it through morning rush-hour traffic before he’ll be here,” Willumsen added, pulling the printout of an e-mail out of the stack he had in front of him on the table.
“We received a report from the DNA lab. They confirmed that the same DNA was found on the girl murdered in Kødbyen and Kaj Antonsen. And,” he said, drawing it out a little, “the murdered prostitute in Prague. They sent the results to the international database and we have a match with Bosko. He’s been charged multiple times for violent assaults, but they’ve had to let him go each time because of a lack of evidence. We don’t have anything on Miloš Vituk. However, we ran the fingerprints the techs found in the big Volvo in Helsingør through our automated fingerprint ID system, but we didn’t get any hits. But Interpol did find a match when they ran it through their system. Helsingør also sent us prints from the surveillance footage from when the ferry disembarked in Helsingborg.”
He pushed two pictures out onto the table.
“Bosko!”
The Serb was walking purposefully down the hallway, making no attempt to hide his face. To the contrary, he was looking right up into the camera in one of the pictures. In the corner, the computer had printed that the passenger walked by at 3:07 P.M.
“He had a car waiting on the other side, and we were standing on Valdemarsgade at that time,” Louise calculated, looking over at Stig, who was clicking the pen he was holding in his hand. There was a half-empty cola on the table in front of him, even though it wasn’t even 9 A.M. yet. He might have slept even less than she had. He had stayed behind in Sweden so that he would be available to the Swedish police during the first few hectic days of the investigation. They had found the pastor’s computer and the letter he’d written to them but had not had a chance to send.
Everything matched what Camilla had repeated to their Swedish counterparts and again out at National Hospital. It had also been confirmed that Baby Girl was Tereza’s daughter. The baby was still at Skodsborg Orphanage, and Toft had brought the mother out there that same afternoon so she could sign the necessary paperwork, now that they had the mother’s permission for the baby to be put up for adoption.
“What about the father?” Louise asked, her eyes drifting over toward her partner.
“Bosko,” he said. “The first time she met him, he raped her in a little apartment in Malmö. After that, he forced her to work until a week before she gave birth. He sent her to Denmark the day before the birth, and she stayed in the apartment out at Enghave Square. Miloš Vituk was with her when she gave birth, and he was also the one who immediately took the baby and left it in the church.”
Louise sighed and then took a deep breath when Toft added that the little stillborn baby boy had been born in Malmö. The mother didn’t know what had happened to him after Bosko’s men had taken him.
Frandsen didn’t knock before he walked in and quickly greeted everyone around the table.
“Bosko was in the church,” he began without any introductions. “We also have evidence that he was at the crime scenes in Kødbyen and in the courtyard off Sønder Boulevard, but there are no traces of Miloš Vituk at these locations.”
Frandsen looked over at Willumsen, who just nodded.
“The three bullets that hit the sexton were not fired from the same weapon. The two bullets in his knees were fired from a pistol and match the casings from a Glock 9mm that our people found in the church, while the shot in the chest was fired from a revolver, which in all likelihood was identical to the Smith & Wesson you confiscated from Miloš Vituk when he was arrested. And,” he continued, glancing around, “the pistol is the same as the one that shot and killed Henrik Holm up in Sweden, which occurred while Miloš Vituk was in custody being questioned by you guys.”
He tossed his report onto the table in front of Willumsen and looked over toward the door when Igli knocked and stepped in.
The interpreter apologized and asked if he was interrupting.
Willumsen shook his head and waved him in.
“Miloš Vituk still insists that he was responsible for all three shots even though he can’t explain what happened to the other weapon,” Toft confirmed.
Igli stood against the wall, ready to distribute the copies he’d printed out of the numbers from Miloš’s “secret” phone. Once everyone had a copy, he cleared his throat.
“You’re not going to get Bosko,” he said softly and sounded sure. “Miloš Vituk will continue to claim that he was responsible for the whole thing and doesn’t know anything about Bosko. In return he will be well looked after for the rest of his life. That’s how it usually goes. I’m guessing that Bosko has already been back in Serbia for ages by now, and a man like him won’t be caught there.”
Louise was lost in her own thoughts when Lars tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the door, where Suhr had stuck his head in and waved for her to come out. She spotted Jakobsen behind him, looking all business with his silver-gray hair and a concerned cast to his eyes.
Out in the hallway, Suhr took her by the elbow and led her down to his office. The somber look in his eyes kept her from saying anything as he asked her to take a seat and pointed to a chair for the psychologist, who must have come straight over from National Hospital.
“We’re going to have to talk about Jonas,” Suhr began once he’d taken his own seat behind the desk. “There’s no reason to doubt the information the pastor gave us. According to the civilian registration database, there is no next of kin either in the pastor’s family or that of his deceased wife.”
Louise nodded. That matched what Camilla had said Henrik had told her about his wife’s death.
“That leaves Jonas Holm all alone. Without a family or any next of kin, we’re going to have to concede that it will be darn near impossible for us to track down any potential biological family members in Bosnia, since no one knows his parents’ identities.”
“I’ve talked to the boy a little.”
Jakobsen took over now, watching Louise with his clear, penetrating gaze.
“Jonas is still in a state of deep shock, but he did say that he was walking around at the edge of the w
oods gathering some kindling for the fire when his dad suddenly ran out of the house. Almost at the same time he heard a car door slam and the stranger came running along behind his dad. He crouched down and hid only a few meters from where his father was gunned down.”
Louise’s throat constricted.
“I sat with him a long time last night,” Jakobsen continued. “This is a tough period he’s going to have to make it through, and this trauma will be with him for a very long time. I tried to talk to him a little about the fact that—along with his input of course—we’re going to have to find him a new family that he can live with.”
“How is that going to happen?” Louise asked, leaning forward.
Jakobsen looked at her, a serious expression on his face.
“Normally the social welfare authorities would find a foster family for him or maybe even a family that wants to adopt him. In his case, of course, they will have to keep in mind that it might be best if they live nearby so Jonas can keep going to the same school and stay in touch with his friends.”
“Normally,” Louise repeated, watching Jakobsen. “What do you mean by normally?”
Jakobsen folded his hands together in his lap and leaned back a little in the chair.
“In some cases, the child expresses a desire to live somewhere in particular,” Jakobsen said slowly. “And Jonas Holm would very much like to live with you.”
Louise stood up and turned away as Suhr took over.
“Do you even know this boy?” her boss asked.
Her eyes wandered to the window, watching a bird fly past before heading farther up into the sky, where there was no limit to how far it could go.
Then she nodded.
“It’s a very big responsibility, and no one expects you to.…”
He hadn’t finished when Louise spun around and walked out of the office.
Once out the front door, she started walking down the street, heading away from HQ. Her thoughts were racing. Finally she sat down on a concrete wall and looked over at the main library and Iceland Quay across the water. She watched the bicycles zoom past and a few boats sail by. She concentrated, recalling that fortuneteller who had once very convincingly told her that when a woman has a child, it was because the child had chosen her to be its mother. Now Louise’s number seemed to have come up—chosen by a big, eleven-year-old boy.