The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  “Let’s hear it.” He nodded at her.

  Having to justify taking part in the investigation annoyed Louise, when Suhr was the one who had headhunted her. “She went to Switzerland to work at a suicide clinic.” She explained about the home hospice nurse service and the donations, which they presumed that Sofie Parker had managed.

  “I believe the nurse service is actually an organization providing assisted suicide,” she said. “I would have spoken to Margit Østergaard about it, but obviously I arrived too late. And the motive for the killings could be that someone feels they’ve been cheated out of an inheritance. Some of the donations to the organization are big.”

  “And this organization was supposedly led by the woman shot in England.” Stig sounded doubtful. He asked what she had on the homicide in Nailsea.

  “It’s all in here.” She slid the file onto the desk.

  Stig opened the file, leafed forward to the description of the murder weapon, and read for a few moments before looking up at Louise. “This makes it look like we have a perpetrator.” He fanned the air with the file. “I’ll have our technicians compare this rifle with what we’ve already examined. It’ll be interesting to hear Eik Nordstrøm’s explanation.”

  Now she was irritated. “Like everyone else, he’s innocent until proven guilty!”

  “But he can’t be ruled out, either.” He gave her a condescending look, as if she were the one he was looking to take down.

  Louise bit her tongue.

  Stig stood up and turned to Lars Jørgensen. “Call me when you’re caught up on what we’ve got. But send me a few emails along the way, so I’ll know where you’re at.” He left with her file tucked underneath his arm.

  Louise caught the look her former partner gave Toft. “What?”

  Jørgensen shook his head slightly. “It doesn’t exactly save us time, emailing him about everything said after he leaves. It would be a lot easier for all of us if he just stayed and listened.”

  “You mean you sit there and email him, every time something is said he might want to hear? That he would have heard if he’d been here?” Louise couldn’t believe it.

  Jørgensen looked over at Toft, who shrugged. “You have to choose your battles.”

  * * *

  “Helle Frederiksen, forty-five, lived in Tårnby,” Toft said, as he began going through the Danish homicide cases. “Shot in the head and killed on November 19. The shot was fired through the living room window from just under eight meters. The weapon was a hunting rifle, the perpetrator must have been out on the street. No footprints found in the hedge or on the lawn. No unaccounted fingerprints in the house. A boyfriend lives in Oslo; he came down to visit when their days off matched up. We corroborated his alibi, he was at work. A sister has a key to the house, her prints are of course inside, too. She was home with her husband and children, working at her computer.”

  “All we have is what the techs found,” Jørgensen said. “She was a healthcare aide, well-liked. Outgoing, worked out in the local fitness center, ran twice a week with a few coworkers. During the winter she taught cooking at an evening school.” He threw up his arms.

  “Are her parents alive?” Louise asked, thinking of Sofie.

  Jørgensen nodded. “They live in Tårnby, too, not far from her. Her sister lives close by in Kastrup.”

  “Healthcare aide,” Louise said, “that’s a perfect fit. She might have joined the nurse service.”

  “We need to ask her sister if she knows anything about that,” Toft said. “I’ll handle it. I was out there a few times right after it happened.”

  “Who’s the second victim?” Louise asked.

  “Niels Boe, a master carpenter from Lynge. Lived alone on a farm on the outskirts of town. Shot in his living room with a hunting rifle, and according to ballistics it was the one used in Tårnby. The homicide in Lynge took place five weeks ago.”

  Louise was surprised. “I can’t recall hearing about any connection between the two homicides.”

  Toft shook his head. “You didn’t hear about it. When we found out it was the same murder weapon, we shut the lid on the Lynge case. We questioned family and friends. Spoke with the two workers employed by the victim, went through all his business connections. Nothing pointed to a motive or any link to Helle Frederiksen. Just as nothing in the investigation of her murder pointed to any connection to the carpenter.”

  “But,” Jørgensen said, “we don’t believe they were chosen randomly by some crazy killer. That’s why we showed up so soon when we heard about the homicide this morning.”

  Louise leaned her elbows on the desk and folded her hands under her chin. “Two things. We need to look for some link to the home hospice nurse service. If we find one, we’d better find the others associated with the service, damn quick. I’m beginning to think someone out there is picking them off one by one.”

  Jørgensen nodded, but Toft seemed more skeptical. “It still could be coincidental that the two women in England and Hvidovre knew about the service. We’re not even sure they knew each other.”

  “That’s true.” Louise was about to say more, when the door opened and Stig stuck his head inside. “They’ve just extended the custody period in England. The suspect doesn’t have an alibi for the homicide. Find everything you can on Eik Nordstrøm.”

  Louise jumped up. “What the hell! He’s not the one we’re looking for.”

  Suhr showed up in the doorway.

  She couldn’t believe her ears. “You can’t be serious. We’re supposed to spend time and resources checking one of our colleagues, while the perpetrator goes about his business? For Chrissake, Eik is in jail in Bristol, he can’t have shot a woman in Hvidovre this morning; use your head!”

  “Point taken!” Jørgensen said.

  “But we still don’t know if she was shot with the same weapon, and until we do we’re going to ignore that case and focus on what we do know.” Stig was short of breath. “And what we do know is, the hunting rifle used to kill Helle Frederiksen and Niels Boe was used in another homicide, the one Eik Nordstrøm is being held for. That’s a fact, and that’s what we’re going to investigate.”

  Louise ignored Stig and looked at Suhr. “How quick can Ballistics finish if we light a fire under them?”

  The Homicide chief nodded. “They’re working on it.”

  Stig drummed his fingers against the door frame, impatient to leave. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “Do you have a moment?” Louise asked Suhr, after Stig had left. He nodded, and she followed him out into the hall.

  “If this is how it’s going to be,” she said, angry now, “I’m going back to the Search Department to find out if Helle Frederiksen and Niels Boe had any ties to the nurse service. Maybe everyone here thinks it’s a shot in the dark, but show me one other thing that links these cases together!”

  Suhr lifted his hand. “Easy now.”

  “It’s totally okay that you investigate other angles,” she said, ignoring his admonition. “But I’m out if we don’t work fast to uncover any connection between the victims and the nurse service. And if there is, priority number one must be to find out how many people are at risk of having their heads blown off in their living rooms.”

  Her eyes pleaded with him. “We have to identify them, to stop this from happening again. We need to work together to find them quickly, everyone with some work-related link to the service, and how many nurses are involved. Are there others on the business side, doctors involved in providing the lethal medicine? Undertakers? We have to identify the people in danger of being killed.”

  Suhr nodded. Finally her heart slowed, and her voice was calm now. “Or else we work separately. In which case Olle and I will focus on talking to all the relatives of those who made deposits, and we’ll contact the home hospice nurse service, too.”

  Suhr nodded again and waited to be sure she was finished. “I agree. We have to follow up on your lead.”

  “Of course we h
ave to consider other motives,” Louise quickly added. “But I’m already involved in this case, and that’s what I’m going to concentrate on. So it’s your decision if it’s with you or my own department.”

  Once more he nodded, and he stuck his hands in his pockets. “We’ll do it here. Right now I have twenty men working on the homicide in Hvidovre. I’m putting Stig in charge of them, even though he has a lot on his plate. So you, Jørgensen, and Toft will follow your lead. I can’t spare any more officers, you three will be on your own.”

  “Fine.” Three was better than one, and she understood that Margit’s murder required every body he could scrape up. Now the three of them could go to work and find the motive.

  The Homicide chief walked back to the office and held the door open for her. “You three dig in and try to find what links the victims, based on the information Rick has brought in,” he told the two others. “We have a briefing this evening at six, and of course again early tomorrow morning. We have to locate the perpetrator—now.”

  He turned back to Louise. “I’m assigning two people to work with the English police. We have to keep abreast of what they come up with over there.”

  She nodded. Of course, they had to cooperate with England, she knew that. Just not in Michael Stig’s biased fashion.

  23

  The first person Louise called was Winnie Moesgaard in Karlslunde. She waited an unusually long time before the woman answered. The elegant elderly lady’s thin, feeble voice nearly broke.

  “My husband passed away this weekend,” she said. “The undertaker just stopped by.”

  “You have my deepest condolences,” Louise said. “I’m so very sorry to bother you at such a sad time, but unfortunately it’s very important.”

  “What’s it about?” Louise could barely hear her.

  “Last week,” Louise began, searching for the right words, “I met Margit Østergaard, the woman who sat with your husband.”

  “Yes.” She sounded hesitant.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but this morning she was found murdered. I’m well aware that you have a lot on your mind right now.”

  The woman gasped.

  “She was shot in her home sometime between midnight and seven a.m., so I would be very appreciative if I could ask a few questions, if you can handle it.”

  Silence. For a moment she was afraid that Mrs. Moesgaard had hung up. Finally Louise said, “Would you prefer that I come out to you, so we can sit down and talk about it?”

  “Heavens no! I just can’t understand how this could happen. It makes me so terribly sad. Margit was such a fine and warm person.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t know much, and that’s partly what I’d like to talk to you about.” Louise decided it wasn’t a good time to ask if her husband had received help in dying. It was best to stick with what was most important right now.

  “When you and your husband used the home hospice nurse service, did you meet any other nurses besides Margit?”

  It sounded as if Mrs. Moesgaard blew her nose and cleared her throat while covering her phone. Finally she said, “I very much liked Margit. So after the first time she was here, I asked the service to send her regularly. That’s one of the things the nurse service offers. Once in a while another nurse spelled her, of course. They all have jobs and families.”

  “So there have been others?”

  “Yes, once another nurse took the night watch. But I didn’t speak much with her.”

  “Do you remember her name?” Louise was ready to write the name down.

  “Hmmm. Just a moment.”

  Louise heard her footsteps, and in a moment she was back on the phone. “It was Esther, but I didn’t write her last name down.”

  “Do you know anything about her? Where she lived, where she worked when she wasn’t a home hospice nurse?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about her, but she was also very nice. We didn’t speak very much, I didn’t learn much about her as I did with Margit. It meant so much to me when we sat with my husband, talking about this and that. It took my mind off things.”

  “Of course.” Louise felt sorry for the charming lady. She was all alone now.

  “But can’t the nurse service provide you with her name? Surely they know it.”

  “Yes, they must. Do you have a number we can call?”

  “I have it somewhere here…”

  A few moments later, she was back. Slowly she read a telephone number.

  “Thank you so much for all your help.” Louise felt she’d made a bit of progress when she realized it was a landline number, not the one to the emergency hotline.

  * * *

  Toft had also just finished talking to someone, and he reported that Helle Frederiksen’s sister didn’t know of any home hospice nurse service, but she knew her sister took evening and night shifts once in a while.

  “The sister didn’t think any extra money was coming in, but she didn’t want to ask Frederiksen if she was doing something else those evenings.”

  Louise called the landline number Winnie Moesgaard had given her. No one answered. She looked the number up on her computer and was informed that it was an unlisted number. She called down to the tech boys and asked them to run it through the system.

  “Bingo!” Jørgensen said, as soon as he hung his phone up. “The carpenter’s daughter says her father had been sitting with terminally ill people once a week since her mother’s death. The daughter thought it was creepy, and she asked him if he could volunteer to visit the elderly. But apparently it was important to her father to sit with the dying.”

  He had their attention now. “But she didn’t know anything about it, she moved away from home a year ago, and in fact it sounded like she didn’t care if he sat with dying people or went to soccer matches. She was just happy he stayed active and was around people after her mother died.”

  Louise felt her scalp tingling. “Jesus! They are being taken out one by one.”

  “But how many are there?” Toft asked.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But we have to find out, fast.”

  Suhr had walked in and was leaning against the door frame, listening without saying a word.

  “We have to focus one hundred percent on identifying the others,” Toft said, looking at Louise.

  She nodded. “I’ll talk to the people I’ve already contacted, to get names and hopefully addresses. You two get on the list of the other relatives of donors to the Swiss account. Let’s not mention that we suspect someone helped the deceased person in their families to die, they might not even know what went on. And we can’t risk them clamming up on us.”

  The phone in front of her rang. It was Nis, the tech who had traced the unlisted number. “Margit Østergaard,” he said. Before he could give her the address, she cut him off.

  “Thanks, I was out there this morning, I know the address. Damn it!”

  Jørgensen looked at her in anticipation. “It was Margit’s private number that Mrs. Moesgaard wrote down,” she said. They were back at square one.

  Before she could say more, Toft stood up. “I’m going out there to search the house. If there’s any lists of names or anything else with names on it, I’ll find it. She had to have been in contact with some of the others.”

  Louise smiled at him. Typical Toft. He was thorough as he could be, and stubborn; you could rely on him to do the grunt work.

  On the other side of the desk, Jørgensen was already calling the next on the list. Louise listened to him explain and ask for the names of the home hospice nurses who had sat with the dying relative.

  Louise thought about Eik for a moment. Imagined him going to England to find the daughter he’d never met. Now the daughter was missing, and he was in jail. Somebody should tell him that the man who shot Sofie was back in Denmark. She couldn’t be sure, but she felt certain that Eik had gone to England to find Steph, that he was afraid the perpetrator might be after her.

  She texted Rønhol
t and asked him to tell Eik about the homicide in Hvidovre, if he got permission to talk to him.

  “Niels,” Jørgensen said, after he had hung up. “The son didn’t remember the last name, but he’d thought it was a bit inappropriate for a man to sit with his mother while she was dying. But his mother brushed him off, told him she felt safe with Niels at her side.”

  “Surely there’s more than the few we have now?” Louise said.

  Her former partner shrugged. “Honest, I thought the home hospice nurse service was a thing of the past. And I have no idea how many of them there might be. How do people even find out about it?”

  “There has to be a doctor involved! They get the medicine somewhere. Like, if it’s morphine, that’s not something most people can get their hands on. And how do they make sure they can prove it’s an assisted suicide, not murder, if they get caught?”

  She thought again about Else Corneliussen, who had helped Sofie’s mother to die. She’d asked Olle to find her, but as yet he’d made no headway.

  “If it’s true that they help people die, like you’re saying,” Jørgensen said, “at the very least they risk being charged with euthanasia. I just don’t understand how they dare do this. Dying people have to make it crystal clear they want to die, otherwise it’s murder.”

  Louise thought about Melvin. If he had ended up as a vegetable, or as someone who just laid there looking at life without being a part of it, could she have convinced herself to help him? “Probably they do it because they think it’s wrong that people suffering from a fatal illness, people in great pain, have to leave the country and pay a fortune for an assisted suicide. And also it’s about the right to die with dignity. I’m certain they’ve all experienced something that made them willing to run the risk, just like Sofie Parker.”