Dark September

by Inger Wolf

They'd been working together for seven years, starting when Trokic had started at Homicide. He would have liked to describe their relationship as collegial, characterized by mutual respect and cordiality. But the fact was that the captain reminded him of the ants that invaded his kitchen every summer: they got into everything that smelled of sugar, and they were impossible to get rid of.

  "He's with her parents. A doctor and a psychologist took care of him. We were really worried; he was completely apathetic when they carried him out of the apartment."

  Agersund's short gray hair stood straight up as if at attention. Before long, he would be darting around like a lizard on a stone wall. "Damn tough for him. I've already taken the first call from the press. Probably listening in on a police scanner. He started yapping about the rapist from the Botanical Gardens. Damn, I was hoping this wouldn't get out; the media will be on it like flies on shit."

  This wasn't a new problem. Sometimes the press beat them to the crime scene. Many reporters called in several times a day to hear what was going on, and it was the dispatcher's job to handle it. They had ways to limit the media's access to their communication. By encrypting sensitive information when possible, for example. Or by using cell phones. But it didn't always work, and public knowledge of a case in its early stages often did serious harm. Not only to the investigation but also to the persons involved. Agersund knew how to handle the press. Every day during a major case, he fed the reporters a tasty morsel they could turn into a headline, which essentially was what they were after. That kept them off the backs of the police.

  Trokic looked over at the big whiteboard on the wall, at the photo of the naked young woman and the flowers. There were photos of the woman from every angle, showing her tangled hair, her pleasant-featured but lifeless face, the open wound on her neck. Trokic had also put up a map of the forest and made his own sketch of the chaotic crime scene he would be spending a lot of time analyzing. Crime scenes like this were a rare sight, simply because such cases were rare.

  He scratched his cheek. "They say the dogs tracked a scent down to the rest area, too. The killer might have arrived in a car."

  "That could be anybody," Agersund said.

  Trokic absentmindedly ran a hand through his black hair as pieces of the puzzle whirled around in his head. Too few pieces, he realized, to know what the picture would be in the end. He drummed his fingers on the desk. He had to get out of there. Get going.

  Detective Taurup stood in the doorway. His boyish body seemed even thinner in his blue windbreaker. Like Trokic, he hadn't shaved that morning, though in Trokic's case it made little difference, as his five o'clock shadow always showed up early.

  "What's going on?" Trokic said. "Do we have a report from the first responding officers?"

  "Yup. Leif Korning, the guy who found her, has been cleared. His alibi checked out."

  "That's what I figured. The guy's half blind, I hear. He couldn't possibly be involved."

  "Hey, are you okay, Daniel? You look a little rough around—"

  "I'm fine." Trokic ignored the “rough around” bit. He still had a headache.

  "I want that murder weapon and the cell phone," Agersund said. "And her clothes. We might have to take a closer look at that pond, get some divers down in there. However, part of the forest is a preserve. Before you know it, we'll be fighting the forest manager, the regional bureaucracy, and an army of biologists."

  He stood up to leave. "Daniel, don't turn this into a one-man show. Keep me posted."

  Trokic waited patiently for the usual spiel about not taking things into his own hands, about his responsibility as a leader. Once in a while, Agersund threatened him with a transfer. He shrugged it off nowadays, sensing it was just for show; his boss had resigned himself to Trokic's way of doing things.

  He fingered the two marbles he always carried in his pocket and glanced at Agersund. "I usually do."

  Lisa Kornelius shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. Her colleagues respected her, even though her odd clothing, purple hair, and height led them to make silly comments sometimes. She'd spent three years in the Copenhagen Police IT division, and she'd been loaned out to the Århus Police twice: on a local hacker case two years ago, then later for a seminar on computer forensics. Agersund had been so impressed that he'd talked her into transferring to Århus. Now she assisted whenever computer technology was involved, no matter which department.

  As far as Trokic knew, she lived alone in an apartment in the center of town, with no boyfriend and no kids. She was in her early thirties, though at times, the look in her eyes made her seem twenty years older. He had enormous respect for her work, and he had no problems with her, as long as she stayed behind her desk. He didn't understand why she'd been assigned to this homicide. In his opinion, everyone should keep to what they do best, and if that was working with computers, they shouldn't be out in the field, where trusting your partner to have your back in an emergency was essential. He simply couldn't see her taking part in a police operation or as an analytical interrogation leader. But for some reason, Agersund had decided to throw her a bone. And Trokic would have to make the best of it.

  Lisa seemed a bit distracted as she flipped the pages of her notebook back and forth, trying to familiarize herself with the details of the case. Clearly, she didn't want to show she was affected by the situation, but her eyes darted a few moments as she glanced at the photographs on the whiteboard. How many homicide victims had she seen in her career? Probably none. He wondered if she could handle watching the autopsy.

  "You've been in Copenhagen? Was it a good trip?"

  She nodded without saying a word, her eyes glued to her notes.

  Trokic poured another cup of coffee and offered it to her. She spilled a few drops on her lime-green sweater on the hand-off.

  "When will we hear from forensics and the techs?" Lisa said.

  She wanted to show she knew what was going on, Trokic thought. "We'll get the reports from our people early tomorrow morning, the others hopefully sometime this week. Jasper will be coordinating the questionings."

  Finally, she looked up at him. "What do you think happened here, why was she killed?"

  He mirrored the cool look from her green eyes. Verdigris, like the copper roofs of old churches. "I think it's personal. Very personal." The telephone rang as he stood up. Bach.

  "We're on our way," Trokic said.

  "It's the plant," the pathologist said. "Your tech just arrived. He called a botanist in immediately." He paused a moment. "This is going to be interesting."

  Chapter Seven

  "It's one of the most poisonous plants in Denmark," Bach said, as he slipped the sheet off the corpse. "Hemlock. It can be lethal. It's not very common. Normally, it would be dead by now, if the summer hadn't lasted so long. But that's not the strangest part."

  Trokic breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell. Instantly, he'd felt nauseous when they stepped into the autopsy room of the Department of Forensic Medicine. He would never get used to the place. Every time he came here, the smell brought forth images of things he wanted to forget.

  There were seven of them in the room: the pathologist, Torben Bach, an assistant pathologist, an orderly, Lisa Kornelius, Trokic, Agersund, and the tech, Kurt Tønnies. It was Tønnies' job to photograph the procedure from start to finish and to take care of all the technical evidence, such as clothes, jewelry, etc.

  "The bouquet scattered over her has been dried. When I first saw the plants, I thought they'd just wilted, but they're dry as a bone. Not one single drop of moisture left in them. In other words, they weren't picked recently."

  "Dried?" the tech said. "What does that mean?"

  Bach smiled. "When you find out, I hope you'll tell me." He measured the throat wound and made a note of it.

  "If they weren't picked in the immediate area like we thought, that would indicate planning," Agersund mumbled. "Not a spur-of-the-moment rape that got out of hand."

  The sight of the young wo
man was no less frightening, now that she'd been brought in from the forest. The gaping wound on her throat was black. Trokic noticed that Lisa held herself and shook a bit, and he kept an eye on her in case she got physically ill. She seemed to be holding up okay in that department, though.

  "The murder weapon is probably a small, sharp knife with a narrow blade," Bach said. "You can see it from the cut, right there. Anyway, you're looking for a very fine instrument."

  He slid his finger along the wound. "It's a very clean cut that severed nerves and veins…deep, very deep in fact. All the way to the spinal column. The person is right-handed. And a good deal of physical force was used. Or it could be rage."

  They watched for over an hour, with Bach commenting along the way. At first, there was no new information, nothing they hadn't known from the postmortem done where they'd found her body. The time of death was Saturday evening, probably between seven and ten. The cause of death was the incision in her throat and the subsequent enormous loss of blood. There was no sign of sexual assault besides the semen. Anna Kiehl was twenty-seven years old, five feet seven, with medium-blonde hair cut in a page. Normal build. Trokic noticed that her navel had been pierced and that she had several birthmarks. Her skin was now an unnatural color, and her inner organs had been removed.

  "So, she didn't put up a fight?" Trokic asked.

  Bach stood quietly for a few moments, ignoring the question. Finally, he said, "She was pregnant."

  "How far along?" Lisa asked, even more horrified now as she gazed down at the body.

  "Hmmm…I need a measurement. My guess is ten weeks. Right now, I would say the fetus looks normal."

  "Daniel!" Agersund thundered. "Boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, lovers, any men interested in her?"

  Trokic shook his head. "We don't know of anyone yet. Obviously, it's our top priority now."

  Bach's orderly took the fetus away. DNA tests would be performed to possibly determine the identity of the father. Trokic was relieved when it was gone.

  "Hemlock," Bach said. "Bit of an odd statement from our killer."

  "What do you mean?" Lisa asked.

  "If I remember correctly, hemlock causes cramps, vomiting, abdominal pain, and a whole number of other very unpleasant symptoms. Even a small dose can cause respiratory paralysis and death. But it was used here only for decoration."

  "They made Socrates drink hemlock tea after he was convicted of not believing in the state gods," Tønnies said. "They said he perverted young people. Could there be a connection?"

  "Interesting," Agersund said. "It can't be a coincidence. I don't want a single bit of this leaked to the media, is that understood?"

  "When can we expect a report?" Trokic said, sweating now. It was difficult for him to concentrate. And the dead woman already smelled, a sweet, heavy odor.

  "When I get the results of all the tests," Bach said. "Would you mark these?" He handed Trokic two glass tubes and a permanent marker to give him something to do, distract him from his thoughts. A diplomatic move.

  Bach took off his gloves, turned to the sink, and washed his hands thoroughly and systematically.

  Several of the others looked at each other for some answer. The unspoken question hung in the air above the young woman's body.

  "We're going to nail the bastard," Agersund said.

  Chapter Eight

  "Human hair, you say," Agersund said skeptically. "Stuck in a necklace that's obviously been laying there a long time. It could be anybody's. We have three hundred thousand candidates from the city alone, not counting the surrounding area."

  "You think so?" Trokic said. "I don't agree. The pond is quite a distance away from the trail; it's not the most logical place to be walking around. We've got to have it examined."

  Lisa glanced at the whiteboard in the briefing room. Her boss had already sketched out what they knew at present. Several colleagues sat glued to their chairs, concentrating on what was going on.

  "Yeah, yeah, okay, take care of it," Agersund said, ready to move on. "Until we have the techs' reports, we're going to focus on mapping out the movements of the victim. I want to know everything about this young lady. When we're done, I want to know who she saw, what she did, what she ate, all her habits, good and bad. I want to know her better than I know myself."

  "That shouldn't be too hard," Jasper mumbled from somewhere back in the room.

  As usual, Agersund ignored the insult and brought out a large map of the city and all the suburbs and forested areas. He hung it over the whiteboard. A stippled square in the southeast corner outlined where they'd found Anna Kiehl.

  "We're looking for witnesses within this area." He drew an invisible circle in the air around the map and then pulled up his gray pants, which looked as if they might fall off any minute.

  "We're going to question everyone who could have been in the forest in the time frame of the murder. Dog walkers, mountain bikers, runners, riders, tourists, residents of the area. I want all the reports on my desk, with a copy for Trokic."

  Trokic spoke up. "We've got to assume we're dealing with an extremely disturbed person. We're checking all the lunatics not locked up, also everyone who could have had some problem with the victim."

  "What about the MO?" one of the older officers asked.

  "We haven't seen anything quite like this before, so it's probably not someone we know."

  Agersund cleared his throat and sat down on the table. "We don't have a motive. It doesn't look like she put up a fight, which could mean she'd gone there voluntarily with the killer. Who then would be somebody she knew. But let's not eliminate anything. Nobody, I mean nobody talks to anyone who even looks like they might be media. If anyone leaks anything, this person will be fed into a shredder and squeezed into a ball smaller than my asshole.”

  "Is anyone from MCI coming?" Jasper said.

  On difficult cases, they often were assisted by the Mobile Crime Investigation Unit, a division of the national police with special expertise and experience.

  "We're not getting much help," Agersund said. "They're working on that case with the headless corpse that showed up in Copenhagen a month ago. But they thought they might be able to spare someone they just hired."

  "Fantastic," Jasper said, acting as if he was about to clap. "We're so very grateful."

  "It's better than nothing," Agersund mumbled.

  Lisa looked at her boss and smiled. Despite his clumsy behavior and tacky appearance, she was sure he was an excellent leader. Once in a while, when he showed up in wrinkled, seedy shirts and trudged through the building, she nearly felt sorry for him. He'd been divorced for four years; his wife just couldn't take it anymore, was what she'd heard. The irregular work hours, all the talk about autopsies and other Department A activities during dinner. One day when he got home from a late shift, she'd tossed half of the house into a duvet cover and announced that their marriage was over. They had joint custody of their two teenage boys. So much for the gossip. Lisa appreciated him for several reasons: he'd made her feel welcome and treated her with the greatest respect, he'd made sure everyone working with child pornography had access to a psychologist, and he always had time for them. Even when he had way too much on his plate. He was popular on the force and with the public, and she was proud to call him her boss.

  Agersund's phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket and spoke shortly to someone. He hung up and looked at everyone. "The techs have just started going through Anna Kiehl's apartment. Trokic, Lisa—take care of that.”

  Chapter Nine

  The air was cold and crisp when they arrived and stepped out into the darkness. Their evening would be spent combing through Kiehl's apartment. Twenty-four hours earlier, Lisa had been on her way to another meeting. She smiled at the thought of her trip to Copenhagen. The man she'd met. Maybe she shouldn't have gotten involved with him so quickly, but she felt the chemistry had been right, and he had been incredibly attractive and gallant. And what else should she do with her fading youth? Sh
e'd met him on a dating site on the internet, and they'd written back and forth for two months, dozens of emails. She felt they'd become close. He was only a few years older, and he didn't reject the idea of having children or of moving to Jutland, two important things to her. Now she was in wait-for-a-call mode, and she was, in fact, grateful for something else to think about.

  The techs had found a slip of paper under Kiehl's bathroom scale. The only small piece of the puzzle that for now piqued their curiosity. In her short career with the city's police department, Lisa had participated in searches for computers containing things you wouldn't show your worst enemy. Usually, though, those searches had taken place at the end of an investigation. This was something new for her. A beginning.

  On one side of the paper stood a name: Procticon. A British pharmaceutical company, Jasper had said. On the other side: "C+I." It might have nothing to do with the case, but it couldn't be ignored. Writing the name of a pharmaceutical firm on a slip of paper and sticking it under a scale was odd. It must have been dropped on the floor and blown underneath by a gust of wind.

  Lisa was responsible for the dead woman's computer, an older model that she disconnected and carried out to the techs' light blue van.

  When she returned, she said, "Not a bad place to live for a student."

  "According to her mother, all she lacked was her thesis," Trokic said. "Which is why she was only studying part-time. She freelanced, wrote for several magazines, and taught the younger anthropology students at the university. Over in that folder on the desk is a lecture on genetic anthropology; she was going to give it tomorrow."

  Newspapers and magazines were piled up in a rack on the wall. National Geographic, Norwegian Anthropology Magazine, Peoples of the World. The techs had ordered Trokic and Lisa to keep their hands in their pockets until the apartment had been gone over for fingerprints. They'd already gathered up everything to be examined. Calendars, personal papers, contents of desk drawers.