by Sara Blaedel
A few weeks after Henning’s brother was arrested, they had lunch at one of the colorful eighteenth-century restaurants on Franciscan Square, right off the pedestrian shopping district downtown. After coffee, they sat holding hands across the table, promising each other that their relationship would survive, despite the trauma they had shared in regard to the headline-grabbing online-dating case involving several brutal rapes.
“It’s settled. It will always be the two of us,” he said, and at the time that had filled her with relief. But then everything suddenly went to hell—ending with that e-mail he’d sent saying he had to focus on taking care of his brother.
As she sat staring at her screen, she would have given anything in the world to just let go of him and move on, but she couldn’t. He filled her thoughts, and she was close to exploding from the pain of longing to have him back in her life. He was the man who had finally shown her what it felt like to come home. He was the one: she had known it after their first week together.
Her hands were still trembling a bit as she opened the door to her editor’s office to announce that she was back.
Terkel Høyer was sitting behind his desk and didn’t look like he was going to be heading home anytime soon either.
“No word from Holbæk since they issued the missing-person report,” he said.
Camilla had been on the crime beat at Morgenavisen for several years and had gotten good at reading her boss. She could sense that he was all fired up about running something in the paper the next day.
“We’ve got to include every angle on the story. You’re going to have to get someone local to talk, otherwise we’ll just be rehashing what we did out in Slagelse the first few days after Ghazala Kahn was killed. There wasn’t any depth to our coverage, and people lost interest in the story.”
Camilla watched him for a moment. She didn’t actually think there was anything strange about readers’ avoiding the tragedy of an entire family joining forces to beat their daughter to death because she’d sullied their familial honor by marrying someone they didn’t want her to. Camilla really couldn’t blame readers for turning their backs on that one in disgust. At the same time, she understood what Terkel was saying. Over time, all the reporting on cases like these started to sound the same, so their coverage of this case would pack more of a punch if she could land an interview with members of the family. That probably wouldn’t be so easy to accomplish, but she could certainly take it on as a challenge.
“And then of course you’ll byline a report from Holbæk with local reactions and whatever else you can dig up.”
She nodded and got to work packing up her laptop and throwing a few things into a small bag so she could spend the following day in Holbæk.
“But we still don’t know if the girl is actually from there,” she pointed out.
He conceded her point but thought it wouldn’t hurt to stick to the plan all the same.
“I talked to Storm,” he explained. “The MTF already has a team in town. It’s probably not a bad idea to stick close to them. He agreed to give us an update on the case by phone later tonight, once they’ve gotten a little more information to put out. You stay here and write that tonight so we can run it in the next edition, and then drive out there tomorrow morning.”
Camilla nodded and thought about Storm, whom she had a great working relationship with. He didn’t have the same aloofness from the press that several of the other lead detectives had, which undeniably made it a little easier to enjoy friendly rather than irritable interactions with the police.
She went back to her office to pull out her calendar. Sometimes she was organized enough to jot down her family’s and friends’ plans. This was usually limited to her mother in Skanderborg, Markus’s dad, and Louise. She started by calling Tobias to find out if he could take their son a day earlier than planned. Normally this week he was supposed to pick Markus up from his independent boarding school on Friday and keep him until Monday morning, but if he didn’t have other plans he was usually more than happy to take Markus for an extra day.
She sent a text message and quickly got a reply that that plan was okay, and Tobias would come pick Markus up Thursday afternoon. So that was covered. Camilla pondered briefly calling Storm and asking if he had any more information besides what she already knew, but she decided to give him a couple more hours. She still had plenty of time until her deadline. Instead, she printed out the missing-person report to have it ready, and then she went down to grab a bite to eat.
Louise carried her weekend bag in to reception, and the woman at the counter handed her the room key along with a message that the others were already at the restaurant. She rushed up to her room with her bag, quickly scanning the large, airy room with yellow walls and gaudy curtains around the large windows. The décor included light-colored birch furniture, a large framed America’s Cup poster from 1987, and a painting of the crowns of some trees densely packed together under a blue sky. Next to the bathroom there was a small vanity.
She went into the bathroom and washed her hands, splashing a little cold water onto her face. Then she removed her hair band and shook out her long, dark curls before gathering them back into a ponytail again. That would have to suffice. Before heading to the restaurant, she sat down on the bed and dialed the two numbers that Dicta Møller had given her, but no one answered at either. Dicta’s friend’s cell phone went to voicemail, and her parents’ landline rang and rang until Louise hung up.
“Hi,” everyone said as she came in.
“I ordered something for you,” Søren said, “but you should tell them what you want to drink.”
There was no one in the restaurant besides them, and the waiter was busy talking through the swinging door that led off to the bar. She walked over to him and ordered a Coke before taking the empty seat her former partner had saved her.
“So you think it may be the girl’s classmate?” Storm asked as she sat down.
“Can’t rule it out. There are several similarities,” Louise replied, looking at him.
He was speaking from across the table four seats away from her, so she had to raise her voice.
“She said her friend is from Jordan, she has a beige jacket, and she wears white Kawasaki shoes. I think we have to take her information seriously and follow up on it.”
Storm nodded.
“How long has it been since she was heard from?” he asked.
“She wasn’t at school, and she missed a date with her friend this afternoon, so it’s only really been today,” Louise replied.
“None of those things are uncommon,” said Mik, who was sitting across from Storm. “What was her name—the girl you talked to?”
Louise hesitated until she realized he was asking because he thought he might know her. That’s how it was with small-town life, she reminded herself. People knew each other.
“Dicta Møller,” she answered, adding that the girl and her missing friend were in ninth grade at Højmark School.
Mik shook his head; apparently the name didn’t ring a bell. Holbæk wasn’t quite that small.
“Shouldn’t we focus on our food now? That way, we can throw ourselves back into our work afterward,” Storm suggested, apparently forgetting entirely that he had started the whole conversation.
The waitstaff started bringing in huge plates of Wiener schnitzel, with slices of veal as thick as phone books. The meat was served with pan-fried potatoes, peas, anchovies with lemon, and horseradish on the side. Gravy was set out in a little boat next to each place setting. Normally Louise would have lost all appetite when confronted with an enormous portion like this, but the last thing she had eaten was some oatmeal she’d dished up at seven that morning. So she tried to ignore the oversize portion, reminding herself there was no shame in not cleaning her plate.… She could just hear her grandmother: No shame in not cleaning your plate.… Nowadays, if anything, there was more shame associated with overeating. After dinner, several of the others ordered apple cake wit
h whipped cream, while she made do with coffee.
She could already tell what direction things would go if she was to be living and eating with a pack of hungry men like this for any period of time. Not that she was some kind of delicate lettuce eater, but she was going to have to keep an eye out. Otherwise she’d just end up having to run off the weight during her morning jogs.
“Let’s meet again in the command center for our briefing,” Storm said once everyone was almost done with their coffee. They split up and left the restaurant in small groups, chatting away.
Bengtsen was waiting for them by the time they got back. He had made a fresh pot of coffee, and had a baking sheet of chocolate cake on the table in front of him.
“It’s from Else,” he said, passing it around.
Louise tried to call the two numbers for the girl and her parents again, but since there was still no answer, she sat next to Bengtsen and was happy to take a piece of cake. She had regretted not ordering the apple cake almost immediately, even though she felt as if she were bursting at the seams.
“Is Else your wife?” she asked, slicing a corner off the cake and tipping it onto a piece of paper towel. She had decided to ignore the somewhat rigidly square grid Bengtsen had begun when he took the first piece.
He nodded, drawing the ends of his narrow lips up only just enough that Louise dared interpret it as a smile. But whether the smile was an expression of a lifelong devotion to his wife or whether it was because he was a little shy about having food made for him, she couldn’t say. She was quick to praise the cake as soon as she had gotten a bite into her mouth.
“How did it go out at the crime scene today?” she asked Dean, who was sitting on her other side and who had loosened his tie a bit. “Did anything turn up?”
“The Frogman Corps has been doing dives up and down the cove, but they haven’t found anything,” he replied, referring to the elite special forces unit of the Royal Danish Navy. He poured her a cup of coffee before saying that forensics had kept the girl’s beige jacket out at the scene so the dogs would have something to go by.
“Various things have been collected from the scene,” he continued, but he was interrupted by Storm, who asked him to speak up so everyone could hear.
Dean Vukić looked around and reiterated that the divers hadn’t found anything they could link to the girl or her murder and that the canine units weren’t finished yet.
“There are some tire prints we’ll research. And we have several footprints that we need to take casts of. And the CSI team has secured some evidence from the soil in the form of cigarette butts, chewing gum, mucus from globs of saliva that will be checked for DNA, and then we’ll see what we have,” he said.
Yes, we’ll see, Louise thought. But first they had to find out who the girl was.
“We haven’t located a purse, bag, or cell phone,” Dean finished after a pause.
Now it was Mik’s and her turn, and Mik updated everyone on the autopsy.
“We’re obviously ruling out an accident, given the concrete slab she had on her abdomen,” Storm stated when they finished.
“What about suicide?” Søren asked.
“In that case she would have had to jump into the water from a boat,” Skipper said, but he added that they had not come across any unmoored boats in their survey of the area.
“If she had been attacked at that location, there would have been prints in the dirt or on the bluffs near the water,” said Dean, who had spent the whole day working with the CSI team. “There were no signs of any struggle. And, again, some kind of boat was needed to get her so far out into the water.”
“There are some boats moored out at Hønsehalsen that the fishermen use,” Bengtsen interjected, who evidently had in-depth knowledge of the area.
“All those boats are accounted for,” Skipper said. “They’re all moored, so she couldn’t have used them herself, in any case. But we should take a closer look at them.”
“Most likely she was killed somewhere else and brought out to Hønsehalsen,” Dean added. “Otherwise, the dogs would have responded at the scene. We ran the dogs through the little marina with all the dinghies too, and they didn’t find anything.”
Everyone nodded and seemed to agree.
Storm sat sorting some scraps of paper as though they were playing cards.
“These are the tips that have come in response to the missing-person report so far,” he said, dropping them nonchalantly on the table. “Probably nothing of much interest. All of the girls are native Danes, but let me flip through them quickly,” he said, fishing out his glasses. “There’s a Lisette Andersen, age seventeen, from Kalundborg. Her mother called in. Her daughter has short blonde hair.”
“Didn’t it say that our girl has long dark hair and might be Arab?” Søren asked pessimistically, disqualifying Kalundborg.
“A Tove Mikkelsen called in about her daughter, age twenty, from Roskilde, but she pointed out that her daughter looks very young and could well pass for sixteen.”
“We get a couple hundred missing-person reports about teenage girls every year,” Ruth interrupted, looking at the men around the table. “Some of them make their way to Christiania,” Ruth continued, reminding them of the appeal of Copenhagen’s downtown hippie commune, “or they get settled into a co-op building or communal house somewhere and come home again once the exoticism of their adventure has faded and they miss hot baths and decent food. But there isn’t anything you can say when a mother is worried that something has happened to her daughter.”
“True enough, but there’s no reason to spend more time on that now,” Storm replied, instead asking Louise to tell Bengtsen about her conversation with the teenage girl. Bengtsen had not been at the dinner at the hotel restaurant, so he didn’t yet know anything about Dicta Møller’s visit.
She quickly updated him on the conversation and on the similarities that were of interest.
Bengtsen nodded several times as Louise spoke.
“Given so many things that match, we definitely need to get hold of Ms. Møller’s friend or her parents so we can figure out what’s going on,” he said. “We can’t proceed with the investigation until the body has been identified.”
“I’ve called her and her parents’ numbers a few times, but there isn’t any answer at either number,” said Louise.
Storm looked from Louise to Mik Rasmussen.
“You two drive out there right away. We’ve got to determine whether we’ve found the right girl. And then we’ll go from there.”
6
“THERE IS A LOT OF ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD,” Mik Rasmussen explained as they parked next to some townhouses at the end of a large block of apartments. The town-houses were made of yellow stone, and there were two apartments in each.
Samra and her family lived in the topmost unit. From down in the parking lot, Louise could make out a faint light in the one room facing the front of the building. Not much light, probably from just a single lamp in the room, she guessed, walking closer. The downstairs neighbors were clearly at home. That unit had lights on everywhere, and she could see a person through the window.
They walked up the stairs together and rang the bell. As they waited, Louise jotted down the name on the door: Ibrahim al-Abd. There was no woman’s name. After a few minutes and several rings they gave up and went down again.
“Let’s just go and talk to the downstairs neighbor,” Louise suggested, walking over and ringing the bell before her partner could object.
The door opened, almost before her finger had released the button.
No one said anything, but they were observed with curiosity by a woman with a crutch under one arm.
Louise introduced herself and asked if the woman knew if the upstairs neighbor had been home over the course of the evening.
The woman at the door took a small step back when she learned they were with the police, but at the same time a spark of curiosity gleamed in her eyes.
“Is a
nything wrong?” she asked.
Louise shook her head and said that she assumed not, but they had a question for the family upstairs.
“Have you seen their daughter at all today?” Mik asked over Louise’s shoulder.
The neighbor thought about it and shook her head.
“I don’t think I’ve seen any of them today at all. But you can just check if their car is parked in the lot. Maybe they all took the car somewhere together.”
Louise stepped aside so Mik could move in closer.
“What kind of car is it?” he asked.
“It’s a run-down red one.”
“What make?”
Louise was already sure this woman was clueless about makes and models, so they would have to take whatever she said with a grain of salt.
“A Honda,” the neighbor said, after a long pause.
Louise took a notepad from her pocket and wrote, “Red car, older-model Japanese. Check vehicle registration.”
“How many kids do they have upstairs?” she asked before they left.
“Four. Two older ones, and two little ones,” the woman said, explaining that the children were Aida, a girl who was four, and Jamal, a boy of about two. Louise and Mik said thank you and apologized for disturbing her. The neighbor stayed in the doorway watching them until they got back to their car.
Right as they were about to exit the lot, Louise yelled, “Stop!” There was a red car parked there matching the description. She jumped out and went over to an older-model red Peugeot 306. She wrote down the vehicle registration number and walked back over to her partner.
“Should we just try to go upstairs again and see if they’ll open the door?” she suggested, but she could tell that he really wanted to get going and thought they had already done enough.
“You can wait,” she said. “But it does look like their car is here.”
Mik stayed in the car with the engine running while Louise quickly ran back upstairs and pressed the bell. She stepped away and looked in through the window next to the front door. She could see the kitchen, and it was completely dark. There was a bedroom on the other side. Louise leaned over the railing and peered in. That was the window with the light on, but the room was empty and the door to the hallway closed. It was a girl’s room, she noted.