The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  Before hanging up, he told her to look into the case again; he wanted her and Olle to systematically go over the witness statements, to find who had been in contact with the hospice nurses and the service itself. And he would try to get into contact with Eik.

  “I’ve ordered another round,” Camilla said, when a half-frozen Louise returned to the table.

  “Stephanie is Eik’s daughter.” Louise warmed her hands between her thighs and shivered. Drops of condensation drew stripes on the beer glass in front of her. “Damn it! If only he’d said something.”

  She summarized what Rønholt had said. “What kind of a woman was she anyway, this Sofie?” she mumbled. “If only he’d never met her!”

  “That’s not how I see her.” Camilla’s tone of voice caused Louise to look up. “She seems like a strong woman to me, and brave. She fought for what she believed in, and she paid the price. She deserves respect for that. You can’t see all this objectively, you’re too involved.”

  “That may be, but she didn’t tell her daughter who her father really was. It’s damn hard for me to respect that!” That came out more forcefully than she’d intended.

  “Maybe she had her reasons,” Camilla pointed out. “It’s clear to me she wanted a new life after what happened to her mother. And when she and Eik broke up, she didn’t know she was pregnant. Should that stop her from following her plans?”

  “She went underground and let him initiate an enormous time-consuming search for her. She’d been missing for years!”

  Camilla didn’t respond to that. “How much time goes by before someone receives an inheritance?”

  Louise shrugged. “I guess it depends on how complicated the estate is, after someone dies. If there are stocks or bonds, back taxes, unknown heirs, and things like that, things that require extra time. But it has to be settled within two years.”

  “If I understood the pastor in Jutland correctly, Sofie inherited quite a bit of money from her parents. Do you know how much?”

  Louise shook her head.

  “I think it was her plan all along to go underground,” Camilla said. “Most likely she’d received an advance on the inheritance before she left. Imagine her traveling around while waiting for the rest of the inheritance.”

  Louise shrugged again. “But then why would she start a new life? How tempting is it to live in a small English town, married to a dull optician who doesn’t get along with her daughter, when she has enough money to do so much else?”

  Camilla slumped down in her chair and drank her beer. Louise had always been fascinated by how her friend could drink a humongous glass of beer as elegantly as if she were sitting at an exclusive New York bar, nipping at a dry martini.

  Louise looked out the window at the darkness, the glistening wet asphalt of Smallegade. It was all starting to make sense. It seemed very likely that Sofie had traveled after leaving the pastor. And that she had arranged for her inheritance to be transferred to a Swiss bank account, because she’d already decided to leave Denmark. That fit well with her opening the account back when she met Eik.

  Louise wrote a note in her cell phone notepad, to check where and when the inheritance had been paid out.

  “So you think she volunteered at the suicide clinic after getting her money?” Louise said.

  Camilla nodded. “And she spent the next few years as a volunteer for the organization.” She nodded again.

  “But why there?” Louise took a few very inelegant slurps of beer.

  “I think she felt very strongly about it,” Camilla said. “She felt the issue was vitally important. After experiencing how badly it went when her mother tried to kill herself. Sofie supported the right to choose when to die.”

  Louise nodded thoughtfully. Something that had happened at the suicide clinic in Zurich might have caught up to her now. At any rate, it should be looked at in connection with finding the actual killer.

  Oh God! she thought, when the realization suddenly hit her.

  “What?” Camilla said, annoyed now at Louise’s silence, her look of distraction.

  But Louise’s thoughts were so far away that she barely heard her friend. Sofie returned to Zurich after disappearing from the boat. Partly because her money was there, but also to work at the suicide clinic, so she could learn how to assist with a suicide, learn all the practical details involved. What if the home hospice nurses were more than just that? What if they were helping people here in Denmark to die? In comfortable surroundings, in their own homes! All of it managed by Sofie Parker from her office in England. They needed to contact the home hospice nurse service again. Her thoughts were swirling as she stood up to pay.

  22

  At seven thirty the next morning, Louise drove down a January-dark residential street in Hvidovre. She had tried to call the organization several times from home, but all she’d gotten was an answering machine. Before going into Police Headquarters, she drove out to see Margit Østergaard, the woman who had given her the number.

  She crept slowly down the street, trying to spot the house number. Finally she parked in front of a small, white, single-story house.

  A light shone from inside, though the outside of the house was dark. She got out of her car, straddled the dirty snow piled up against the curb, and walked up to the house.

  The sidewalk had been shoveled, and several bird balls hung from trees in the front yard. Louise rang the front doorbell and stared at a wreath with small red berries hanging from a thin nail.

  She waited a few moments before ringing again and leaning over to look in the kitchen window. A television appeared to be on in a room behind the kitchen. Maybe the living room, she thought. She rang one more time, this time holding the button down. Maybe Margit Østergaard was in the shower. No one answered.

  She called again and once more got the answering machine. She stepped down and walked around the house on a narrow tiled path hugging the wall. Through one of the three windows in back, she noticed the television was still on in the living room. Louise approached the window, then immediately jumped back a step.

  A standing lamp glowed beside an armchair. A plate of food had been set on the coffee table. In the middle of the room the home hospice nurse lay facedown on the floor, the back of her head shot off.

  Shit shit shit! Louise caught herself wishing that Eik or even Olle were there. She pushed the handle of the terrace door with her elbow. Locked. Now she noticed the bullet hole in the big window, like a spiderweb, the threads sparkling in the light, the midpoint dark, dead. It didn’t look like much, compared to the extensive damage the woman had suffered from the shot.

  Louise’s heart pounded; quickly she glanced around before calling 112, the police emergency number. On autopilot now, she gave the address and name of the victim. Described what she saw and knew: single woman, middle-aged, no obvious signs of break-in, no sign of a struggle in the living room—presumably the perpetrator hadn’t been in the house. Then she described the bullet hole in the window and the trauma of the victim visible from where she stood.

  After the call, she looked around, her senses alert as her breath hung in the light from the living room. The sky was turning brighter, though it looked like it might be one of those days without a real daytime. Clouds hung heavy in the sky, shrouding everything in a dark gray haze. Temperatures had risen in the night, a thaw had begun; it would be difficult to find clear tracks, unfortunately. Maybe it would be a different story when the techs arrived with their equipment and began fine-combing the small pathway and the flower bed under the window.

  She hurried back to her car and sat down to wait. Thoughts ran through her head, all the questions she would have asked the nurse. Now it was too late. She sank down in the car seat and pulled the hood of her winter coat up around her head. She wished someone were with her.

  * * *

  Louise had expected the female head of Homicide of the Western District Police to show up with her team, which is why she was very surprised when Thomas Toft
knocked on the side window of her car. She jerked up and hurriedly pulled her hood down. It had been a long time since she’d seen her old colleague from Homicide. She wondered if he had been transferred to the Glostrup police without her knowing.

  “Hi,” she said, after she stepped out of the car. She was about to shake his hand when she noticed her former partner, Lars Jørgensen, and Detective Michael Stig, standing over by a white Ford. “What in the world are all of you doing here? The last time I checked, Hvidovre was in the Western District.”

  Toft nodded. “When Emergency heard it might be a rifle, they contacted us. It’s the third shooting of this kind within the past two months, not counting gang shootings.”

  Louise was startled. “What?”

  Her old colleague nodded again. “The first homicide was our case, and when ballistics showed the same rifle was used in the second homicide, they gave us that one, too.”

  “And you think Margit Østergaard could be a third victim?” Louise looked over at the house.

  “We can’t know that yet,” Toft replied quickly. “But we still haven’t established a motive for the first two homicides; we haven’t even connected the two victims. So we asked to be called in on any report that could be related to the two homicides.”

  Louise nodded thoughtfully. “You might be interested in a shooting in England.” She greeted Michael Stig when he walked over to them.

  He had been an investigator at Homicide while Louise worked there, and it had been his knife-sharp elbows that had spurred Louise to accept Rønholt’s offer to head up a small new unit in the Search Department. Possibly it had been a step down the career ladder, but it had sounded awfully attractive when she’d heard that Stig had been promoted and would be her new boss following her old boss Willumsen’s death.

  Good that she left, she thought, seeing him standing there with his meticulously knotted tie and his arrogant attitude, which had thoroughly pissed her off when they had worked together. And things probably wouldn’t have been better when it turned out that Hans Suhr was retiring and Stig would be heading up the Personal Crimes Department, still known as Homicide. Success wasn’t treating him particularly well, apparently; he was thinner and ragged at the edges. It gets lonely at the top, also in the police corps.

  “What’s this about England?” he asked, ignoring Toft, who wanted to know how Louise was doing. “You’re saying the shooting of a middle-aged woman in Hvidovre has international connections?”

  Louise straightened up and smiled at him, refusing to be provoked. “I didn’t say that. But as I was about to say, there could be a connection. The woman inside the house with the back of her head blown off has a connection to a Danish woman shot in England some weeks ago. The two homicides resemble each other, too.”

  The head of Homicide approached them from the tech’s car.

  “And this case resembles our first two cases,” Toft told Stig, as Louise walked over to meet Suhr.

  He smiled at her. “What are you doing here? Are you transferring back to us and no one told me?”

  “I’m the one who called the homicide in.” Louise explained that she had met Margit Østergaard the day before and had driven out for more information. “She’s involved in a case I’m working on.”

  They stepped back onto the sidewalk when the forensic pathologist drove by. Traffic on the street was heating up, with people on their way to work, children heading for school, but many curious onlookers were standing on the sidewalk and watching from doorways. Uniformed police had set up barrier tape, technicians were at work inside the house and in the backyard. Several police officers were already taking witness statements, both from onlookers and from people in the surrounding houses.

  “What’s this case you’re working on?” Suhr asked, as they walked away from the crowd.

  Louise told him about Sofie Parker while considering whether to tell him about her suspicion she’d driven out to Hvidovre to confirm. “Both women were associated with a home hospice nurse service, and dying people they cared for have donated money to an account in Switzerland. Completely voluntarily. And the account was managed by Sofie Parker. That’s why we’re interested in other people who have been involved in the nurse service, because we see a motive among relatives who might not like so much money being given away.”

  “Interesting,” Suhr mumbled. He seemed to clutch the straw she’d handed him that finally might connect the victims.

  “There’s no question the two women were linked through the nurse service. It’s less certain they knew each other personally.” Louise decided to confide in him. “Besides all this, I suspect that the nurses not only sat with the terminally ill, but also played a part in providing them with a dignified death in their homes. That’s only my suspicion, of course; we haven’t confirmed it yet. We’re about to do another round of questioning. That’s why I came here to talk to Margit.”

  “How long has your department been working on the case?”

  “Since the murder of Sofie Parker.”

  “But why did they contact you when they discovered the woman was Danish?” Suhr sounded confused.

  Louise began to explain about Eik Nordstrøm, how he had reported Sofie missing, and that the department still had the case, since it had never been closed. “It’s a long story.”

  “Sounds like you’ve made good progress in that part of the investigation. It’ll be interesting to see if the first homicides are also linked to the nurse service. What would you say to joining us on a temporary investigative team on this case? Of course I’d have to clear it with Rønholt.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.” Louise watched Michael Stig cross the street. “I’m happy at the Search Department, and anyway we can help each other on this.”

  “If you suspect this has something to do with the killing in England, that makes four homicides in two months. And who says it ends here. We need to get organized to stop this.”

  Louise clenched her teeth as she weighed the pros and cons of joining Suhr’s team. First and foremost she would be in the middle of an investigation quite possibly focused on hunting down a serial killer. Working again alongside Toft and Lars Jørgensen was also appealing. Suhr too. But—and it was a big but—Michael Stig headed up the team. He would be absolutely unbearable to work with if she barged in and stole some of his thunder. And he would gloat if it turned out to be a coincidence that Sofie Parker and Margit Østergaard were both involved in the home hospice nurse service. He would make her out to be an idiot.

  “Call Rønholt,” she said.

  This case was too serious for her to let Michael Stig stand in the way. Also, she realized it gave her the opportunity to withdraw from Eik’s case. Even though she almost had forgiven him. He had chosen to distance himself from her, and she had to respect that.

  “The new team will be meeting in my office after lunch,” Suhr said, apparently confident that Rønholt wouldn’t object to his stealing one of his people. And he probably won’t, Louise thought, as she walked to her car.

  * * *

  It was like déjà vu as Louise logged on to the computer in her old office and sat down across from Lars Jørgensen. Her former partner’s bulletin board was up to date with photos of his Bolivian twins; they had grown from a pair of charming, mischievous terrorists to a pair of healthy adolescents. Louise hadn’t seen them for a year, and they looked twice as tall now.

  Toft sat at the end of the desk. An e-cigarette stuck up out of his checkered shirt pocket. He had been one of Headquarters’ hard-core smokers, but a total smoking ban had chased all the nicotine addicts down to the street every time they had to have a smoke.

  “How will it be when you move out to Teglholmen?” Louise asked. “Will there be smoking balconies or cabinets?”

  Toft peered at her over his glasses. “When’s the last time you heard of anyone taking smokers into account when they plan new offices?”

  She smiled. “Poor you, having to go down to the wharf.”


  As yet, no one knew what it would be like when Copenhagen Police moved into the new building by the Fisketorvet mall, but there had been talk. The Personal Crimes Department was one of the departments slated to move. Louise had expected her old colleagues would be sad about leaving Police Headquarters, but it sounded as if they were looking forward to it. She understood them; no one denied the old historic building needed a thorough renovation.

  Michael Stig walked in carrying a cup of coffee. Louise offered to find him a chair, but he said he wasn’t staying long.

  “We were just about to check where we are on the first cases,” Toft told his young boss, who sat on the bookshelf just inside the door. He’d set his coffee down, and now he was drumming his pen against his thigh.

  Louise started by telling what she knew about the murder of Sofie Parker. “Shot through the kitchen window. No witnesses other than the daughter, who is missing. No motive.”

  She sketched out the family’s situation, the daughter, the husband, and the past history in Denmark.

  “How long had Sofie Parker been missing?” Toft asked.

  “Since disappearing in 1996 and up until recently.” She told them about the email Eik had received. She added that the Swiss bank account was the only thing linking Sofie Parker with Denmark.

  Michael Stig nodded as she spoke, as if he had heard it all before. “And the child’s father is the Danish man the English police arrested for murder.”

  Louise was surprised. He’d wasted no time in getting up to date.

  “Eik Nordstrøm,” he continued, “is the man you share an office and an apartment with.” He looked over at Toft and Lars Jørgensen. “I told Suhr it’s a bad idea for Rick to work with us on this case.”

  Louise detested him, but she fought to keep her head down, and her feelings under control. “We don’t live together, but it’s true that we were in a relationship. And I’m not involved in his case.”

  “No?” Stig asked.

  “The English police are working on it.” She stood up to face him eye to eye. “The case on my desk is still the case the Search Department opened after the disappearance of Sofie Bygmann. I’ve been asked to find out what she did from the time she disappeared from the boat until she showed up in England. That’s what I’m involved in. And we did find out, in fact.”