The Midnight Witness

by Sara Blaedel

  “I don’t understand it,” Camilla said, ignoring Louise. “A man in his mid-forties doesn’t just fall down and die. At least not very often. Would you do me a big favor and ask around? Discreetly, of course. I promise not to do a thing without your permission. I’d just like to know what the hell happened.”

  “Okay. Privately, for you, and don’t open your big mouth about it at the paper. I really don’t know how much I can find out.” Louise glanced at her watch. The briefing would start in less than a half hour, and she had to pick up some of her papers. “Camilla, gotta run. I have to grab a taxi to get to work on time. But I’ll ask around. Okay, bye.”

  2

  Camilla sensed someone watching her when she hung up. In the second it took to whirl around in her chair, she flashed through what she’d told Louise, what the person behind her might have heard.

  “Hi, Terkel, I didn’t know you were standing there.” She tried to keep her voice light.

  “Did she know anything?” he asked, not even trying to hide his eavesdropping.

  She almost flared up at him, but then she noticed how gray and hollowed-out he looked. Suddenly she feared he was going to start sobbing.

  “No,” she said. “But she promised to see what she could find out. I just don’t know when; they’re working twenty-four seven on the case with the young girl found yesterday.”

  Høyer obviously wasn’t listening. He walked over to her desk and slumped down in the chair, as if someone had pulled the plug on him.

  Camilla went out for two cups of coffee. How should she tackle her boss falling apart in her office? She didn’t really know him all that well.

  She set the coffee down in front of him. “You use cream, sugar?”

  He shook his head.

  She sat down and looked at him expectantly, but he simply stared at the photos on her desk. “How old is he?” he said, pointing at the photo of Markus.

  “He’ll be six this summer.”

  He seemed lost in thought while gazing at her son. Finally, he said, “Frank’s the one who called and told me about you when he heard Laugesen was quitting. He said it was obvious from day one at Roskilde that you’d make a name for yourself.”

  Camilla didn’t know what to say.

  “How long did you two actually work together?” he said.

  “A few months.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “I wasn’t around him much. He focused on the biker stories. One time he asked me if I’d go with him to talk to an ex-biker who’d gone underground. The guy agreed to tell his story if we kept his name out of it.”

  “He always got so involved in whatever he was covering,” her managing editor said. He straightened his glasses. “One time the police offered him an anonymous address, but he wouldn’t take it. If someone had a bone to pick with him, they were welcome to stop by.”

  “It seemed to me he was always working,” Camilla said. “Did he even have a life?”

  “He got married three years ago. Helle was the first girlfriend he had that I know of, and I’ve known him since journalism school. Liam was born two years ago.”

  He reached for his coffee and then slumped back again. “We were going to get together this evening, but when I called to hear when, Helle answered. She was crying. Yesterday morning two police officers came by and told her Frank was dead. He’d been found early Sunday morning.”

  Camilla nodded and noticed a cuticle she was scratching had begun bleeding. She dabbed some spit on her index finger and wiped off the blood. “That’s damn strange, too. Louise says she’ll call when she’s had time to ask around. But surely they told his wife something?”

  “Not much. She went in yesterday evening to identify him, but that’s just a formality. He had his driver’s license and press card on him; they had his name and photo.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Høyer stood up to leave. Before he reached the door, she promised to let him know as soon as she heard from Louise.

  “I’ll keep checking with the dispatcher, too,” she said. “And with Department A.”

  He turned at the doorway. His expression had changed. “We also need to find out about that girl they found in Østre Anlæg yesterday evening. Did your friend know anything about that?”

  So much for Mr. Sensitive, she thought. “No, not really. But the officer said the Homicide chief is sending out a press release this afternoon.”

  After he left, she had the feeling he’d been standing in the doorway long enough to hear her talking to Louise about the girl’s brother.

  Louise Rick handed her debit card to the taxi driver and waited for a receipt to sign. The briefing started in ten minutes, and she still had to pick up her files.

  After signing the receipt, she crumpled it up and threw it in her bag along with her billfold. Then she jumped out of the taxi, hurried over to the broad entryway, and took the steps two at a time. She was winded by the time she tossed her bag and coat on the chair in her office.

  The files were on her desk. She forced herself to slow down; she didn’t want to show up at the conference room down the hallway all out of breath and stressed out. No one was going to get on her case for galloping in at the last second. Everybody had been hard at it since being called in yesterday, after the girl’s body was found.

  Louise ducked into the kitchen for a cup of coffee before sitting down at the oval table. She still felt cold.

  “Hi, Louise, how’d it go with the parents?” Henny Heilmann sat with her papers neatly piled in front of her, a bottle of water beside her.

  “It went fine, but it got late. It hasn’t soaked in for them yet. They were with their daughter and her boyfriend Saturday afternoon, and a day later she’s dead. I’m driving over again when I’m finished with the report, so they can sign it.”

  Heilmann nodded. Normally people associated with a case were questioned at Police Headquarters, but when the immediate family was involved, it wasn’t uncommon to go to them.

  Louise smiled. She’d quickly realized that her boss’s stony, insensitive front had nothing to do with her. She liked Heilmann, who was in her mid-fifties and had been detective chief inspector for several years. The way Louise understood it, she had no ambition of moving up the ladder, because she liked heading up Investigation Team 2. The police chiefs and detectives were very welcome to duke it out at the top.

  The briefing started at ten past twelve, even though one officer hadn’t shown up yet.

  Besides Louise, the members of the team were Thomas Toft, Michael Stig, and Søren Velin. Velin was Louise’s partner, but he’d been sent on leave for two and a half months. Lars Jørgensen, a new man at Homicide, had been filling in; he was the one missing. Together with Forensic Services and the Criminal Investigations Department at Station City, they would be investigating the murder of Karoline Wissinge. The head of Homicide, Hans Suhr, wasn’t at the morning briefing, either.

  “We’re starting one short,” Heilmann said, explaining that Willumsen had nabbed Jørgensen for a few days to work on a new homicide. No one said anything, but they were all annoyed. Detective Superintendent Willumsen headed up an investigation team when a vacation or leave of absence required it. And he always got what he wanted. When he needed an extra body, he took it, and when anyone else was lacking an investigator, he never gave one up. But no one called him on it.

  “All right, let’s go through what we have,” Heilmann said. She grabbed the top sheet of paper from the pile in front of her. “At four ten p.m. on Sunday, a dog walker discovered the body of a twenty-three-year-old woman under some bushes in Østre Anlæg. Initially we couldn’t identify her. She had no bag, no identification on her. She was taken to Forensic Medicine, and at that time a Martin Dahl reported his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend missing. The woman in the park matched the description he gave. Later, around nine p.m., he showed up and identified her as Karoline Wissinge.”

  Louise was having trouble concentrating on what her boss was s
aying. A monotonous clicking sound distracted her; as usual, it came from Michael Stig. He’d tipped his chair against the wall and stuck his feet up against the table. The ballpoint pen was hidden by his arms, which hung between his bent knees.

  “At present we know Karoline was in town with two friends Saturday evening,” Heilmann continued. “According to them she left the café they were in, a place called Baren, with a man…” She grabbed another sheet of paper. “Lasse Møller, around one. No one saw her after that.”

  “Michael. Would you please stop!” Louise snapped.

  Nonchalantly he tossed the pen on the desk without looking at her.

  She relaxed and focused on the case again. She was familiar with the basic facts, but she jotted down the times in her notebook.

  Heilmann looked at Michael Stig. “You spoke with Martin Dahl yesterday?”

  “Yeah.” He took his legs off the desk and scooted his chair forward. “He said he was home alone Saturday night. It’s in my report.”

  Dahl had gone to Karoline’s parents after Stig left, and Louise had met him there, but she’d formed almost no impression of him. He’d sat silently on the sofa, lost in his own world, while she was occupied with Karoline’s parents.

  “Fine.” Heilmann checked something off on her list. “CID is helping us knock on doors in the neighborhood; I’m organizing that with them. Wissinge and Dahl lived in the Potato Rows; they had the ground floor of a house on Skovgårdsgade. It runs into Lundsgade, which is the street that leads to the park where she was found. We’re looking for witnesses in the area from Silver Square to her home and then over to the park.”

  Heilmann looked over at Toft. “What did the pathologist have to say?”

  Toft thumbed through a pile of yellow documents with the Department A logo in the corner and pulled out a sheet. “Flemming was the one out there last night.”

  Flemming Larsen was Louise’s favorite forensic pathologist. He was professional and easy to get along with.

  “He wouldn’t give a precise time of death. It was cold Saturday night, the body temperature was screwing up his calculation, but hypostasis was evident where she was lying, and there was full rigor mortis. She’d been dead between twelve and twenty-four hours.”

  “He’s got to pin it down better than that!” Stig said.

  Toft laid a hand on his partner’s shoulder. “I twisted his arm; finally he said between nine p.m. and seven the next morning.”

  “And we know she was alive after midnight,” Louise said.

  Toft nodded and turned back to his papers. “He was sure about his conclusions at the crime scene, though. The marks on her throat were obvious, and her eyes were visibly bloodshot.”

  “Was she raped?” Louise asked.

  “Right now, it doesn’t look like it, but of course they’ll check that during the autopsy. By the way, Flemming said to tell you hi and thanks again.”

  Louise smiled; the shift in mood was a bit absurd but welcome.

  Last Friday they’d been out bowling with several forensic technicians and pathologists, along with a few CID officers. They’d been talking about going out together since last summer, because though they knew each other superficially, there was never enough time to sit down for a really good talk. Louise didn’t feel like she had to socialize with her colleagues, and she didn’t want to ruin their professional relationships, but it had been fun. They actually got along together without blood being involved.

  Louise told about her night with Karoline’s parents. “They’re in their mid-fifties, really nice people. They said that Karoline and her boyfriend had been living together for a year. She’d just finished nursing school and had a temporary job on the neurosurgery ward at the National Hospital. They also said they lost their son last year. Karoline’s younger brother, Mikkel, died in a traffic accident.”

  Heilmann nodded. “Of course, it’s tough for them to handle another loss, so soon after the first one. Has anyone suggested they talk with a crisis counselor, with Jakobsen? It might be good for them.” She made a note of that. “I want you to stick with the parents, and we’ll have to bring the boyfriend in for questioning. Can you take care of him, too?”

  Before Louise could answer, Heilmann said, “I can try to find a partner for you until Søren comes back, if you want.”

  Louise shook her head. “That’s okay, I can deal with the parents and the boyfriend myself.”

  “Great. Toft, Stig, I want you to focus on Lasse Møller, the guy who left Baren with Karoline, and her friends she was with that night.”

  The briefing broke up, but Louise stayed in her chair.

  Heilmann gathered her papers until Toft and Stig left, then she asked what was wrong.

  “What happened behind the Royal Hotel?”

  “The dead man, you mean. They thought it was natural causes, but they found out it was a homicide at the autopsy this morning. Someone stuck a small knife blade under his skull.”

  “I knew Frank Sørensen. He was a crime reporter.”

  Heilmann nodded.

  “How in hell didn’t they see it was a homicide?” Louise said.

  “Initially there was nothing to see. He had stumblebum trauma and he stank of alcohol. Which is why they didn’t call us in at first.”

  Louise sighed. Stumblebum trauma. The label given to heavy drinkers who fell.

  “He had scrapes and scratches here and there, bruises from falling, a cut on the back of his head,” Heilmann said. “The doctor they called in concluded he was an alcoholic who had too much to drink, and he put that down as cause of death. He assumed that Frank Sørensen had staggered around and maybe knocked into a few of the posts holding up the bike shed.”

  “So, the doctor didn’t call us in?” Louise was incredulous.

  “No, he just sent the body to be autopsied. That’s what they do in deaths like that.”

  Louise’s hackles rose. What the hell did that doctor think he was doing? Just because a man looked a bit scruffy and stank of booze didn’t necessarily mean he’d drunk himself to death.

  Heilmann broke into her thoughts. “There’s a team of techs over there now, going over the area. But it’s been twenty-four hours since he was found; there’s probably not a lot left.”

  They sat quietly for a few moments. “It looked like a heart attack,” she said. “He was lying there with a bike key in his hand. The key fit the bike he fell over.”

  Louise knew she was filling her in on how Frank was found, not making excuses for the doctor. She shivered and felt the cold creep under her skin.

  “His wife immediately claimed he’d been killed; she refused to accept that alcohol caused his death.”

  She could already imagine Camilla’s reaction. She felt sorry for her, but she probably should call Willumsen; it was his case. She needed to find out if it was okay to tell her friend about this murder.

  Louise rounded up her things and returned to her office. She wanted to try to catch Peter before writing her report about the parents last night. They hadn’t seen much of each other lately. Not that that was so unusual. They’d been a couple for five years, but only within the past two years had they talked about living together so they could at least sleep in the same bed. So far it had all been talk.

  She pulled her phone out of her bag. It was still on silent mode, and she switched it back to ring before texting Peter to call her when he had time.

  She turned on her computer, but before she typed in the password, her phone rang.

  “Louise Rick.”

  “Hi, hon, good to hear you’re still alive. How are you?”

  The sound of Peter’s dark voice warmed her. She missed him. Peter was the European product manager for a large pharmaceutical company, and there were periods he was out of the country half the time. Sometimes even more than half.

  “I didn’t make it home until early this morning.” She filled him in on Karoline Wissinge and her conversation with the parents. “Did you get anything done?” />
  He laughed for a second. “That would be an exaggeration. I had the pleasure of Thora’s company last evening. You remember her, the Finn we had dinner with? She insisted I take her to a buffet with all her Finnish friends.”

  In her mind Louise saw the stout lady with the infectious sense of humor. “Is it Wednesday you’re coming back?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be home late in the afternoon. You want me to shop for dinner?”

  “I don’t know how things are looking here. The investigation’s just started; there’s going to be quite a bit of overtime until we find the killer.”

  She sensed that she needed to talk about it. “There’s another homicide. One of Camilla’s former colleagues was killed. I haven’t told her he was murdered yet.”

  Pause. “We can invite Camilla and Markus over on Wednesday,” he said. “I’ll fix dinner, and if you don’t make it home, I’ll save some for you.”

  “Great idea. Her mother is coming to town that day, but she’s taking some New Agey course with her spiritual friends, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

  Peter had never tried to come between Louise and Camilla, and he was wild about Markus. Camilla and the father, Tobias, had split up several years ago, and now the boy was with him every other weekend. Camilla’s mother lived by herself in Skanderborg, and Camilla’s father wasn’t someone she could just call when she needed help with picking Markus up at day care, so Peter had stepped in to help several times.

  “I’d better call her,” Louise said.

  “Tell her hi. I’ll call you later tonight.”

  She sat for a moment holding the phone after Peter hung up.

  Louise punched in Willumsen’s number while the computer started up.

  “Detective Willumsen.” As usual, he sounded gruff.

  “Hi, Willumsen, it’s Rick.”