by Willow Rose
I made myself some tea and sat in my dad’s favorite chair. No TV, no kids, no anything. Just me and my hot cup of tea. I looked out in the dark and thought about Giovanni when the phone rang.
“That didn’t last long,” I murmured but then I saw that it was him.
“Just the person I was thinking of,” I said as I answered.
It didn’t take him much effort to convince me to leave my tea and come to his beach house. He said he wanted to see me. He missed me, and that was all I had to hear. I really needed someone to talk to right now. Someone who would listen and understand my frustration. And Giovanni was the best listener.
He smiled his bright smile when he opened the door and let me in. Always the gentleman, he took my jacket and poured me a glass of red wine.
“Only one,” I said. “I have to get back to the kids tonight so my dad won’t be alone with two.”
Giovanni looked surprised at me.
“Two kids? Did you have another one since we last saw each other?”
I laughed. It felt good. Then I told him the whole story about Sune and the murder they apparently thought he had committed.
Giovanni listened as always and looked serious while I spoke.
“So you don’t think he could have done it?” He said.
“There is no way!”
“Hmm …”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“It is just …”
“What?”
“Well the police arrested him. They must have something, some kind of evidence. You told me he’s already been in prison.”
“In juvenile prison. For hacking. Not for killing anyone or even hurting anyone.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Only about a week.”
He drank his wine and looked at me. I knew what he was saying, but couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to.
“Face it. You don’t know anything about the guy.”
“I just know he couldn’t do it.”
Now it was my turn to drink. I stared out the panoramic window. The ocean was calmer tonight but we could still hear the waves as they rolled in on the beach. I loved that sound.
“What about the other killings?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, all the victims have a connection. They all went to the same school together. They were friends.”
“So?”
“So, could Sune have killed all of them too?”
I thought it through. Was it really possible for Sune to have committed these killings? When I first met him it was at Didrik Rosenfeldt’s summer residence. The first murder had already taken place. Sune could have done it the night before. I had no way of knowing that.
The next one was Henrik Holch. Sune was with me when we heard about it. But the murder had been committed the night before and I wasn’t with him then. And the last one? The priest? Was it really possible that he could have driven to Roedvig Stevns an hour away, killed the priest, then come back to Karrebaeksminde and gone with me in the afternoon? It was possible. But not likely. Not to me. And what about Bjorn Clausen who was killed in 1987? Sune was hardly born at that time, so that was out of the question. But again it might have been a real suicide. I had no argument, no alibis to support his innocence. I just knew in my heart that he was innocent. “I just have a gut feeling about this guy, that’s all.” I finished my glass of red wine and got up.
“I need to go to the bathroom.” I was about to go upstairs when Giovanni grabbed my hand and pulled me near him. He put his arm around me and started kissing me on the neck. I felt a nice shiver all the way down my back. Then I felt his warm breath in my ear. His muscular body came closer to mine. His lips were arm and soft as they touched mine.
I stopped him. “I really have to go to the bathroom,” I said, laughing like a little girl.
He smiled and let me go.
“The one upstairs is clogged. Use the one in the back.”
The toilet in the back was right next to the studio where Giovanni made his sculptures. I had to go through the studio to get to the bathroom. I had never been in there before and I was quite curious to see it. So after my visit to the toilet, I found myself in the middle of a totally different world. This was where the magic was made.
I looked at one of the sculptures he was working on and tried to imagine what it would look like when it was done. And when did an artist like Giovanni even know when it was done? If it was anything like writing then you could always find something, some little thing that could have been better. I knew about that from the book I wrote about my trip to Iraq. It didn’t make me a millionaire, but it was fun to write something for once that wasn’t thrown away a few hours later and forgotten. It was something I had created, something my kid would have and read long after I was gone.
The sculpture in front of me seemed to be mocking me. The look in his eyes was strange and scary. I kept staring into his eyes for awhile and when I moved my head my eyes caught something. On a bench right beside the sculpture was a hammer and a chisel. I took it in my hand. It was heavy. I touched the pointy part at one end. It looked exactly like the welded spikes in the photo.
I put it down and looked around. At the other end of the studio I saw something else. I went there and my heart started pounding in my chest when I realized what it was.
It was a welding machine.
On a table I saw heavy leather gloves and a protective long-sleeve jacket to avoid exposure to the extreme heat and flames.
“The brightness of the welding area can lead to a condition called arc eye in which ultraviolet light causes the inflammation of the cornea and can burn the retinas of the eyes,” a voice said behind me.
I turned around. Giovanni had come into the studio. He took up a mask and put it on so it covered his face.
“Goggles and welding helmets with dark face plates prevent this exposure,” he continued while picking up another mask and putting it on. “And in recent years, new helmet models have been produced that feature a face plate that automatically darkens upon exposure to high amounts of UV light.”
He threw the mask on the table and took a step to the right and pulled out a curtain.
“To protect bystanders, I put up opaque welding curtains to surround the welding area. These curtains, made of a polyvinyl chloride plastic film, shield any spectators from exposure to the UV light from the electric arc.”
I nodded. “A lot of security is needed.” I took a few steps away from him.
Then I felt him grabbing me around the waist. He pulled me close. My heart beat faster.
“You are so beautiful, do you know that?” he asked.
I forced a smile. I tried to hear over my heart racing in my chest. I didn’t know what to think. And I had a hard time thinking at all. I really liked the guy, but the fact was I didn’t know anything about him.
Giovanni lifted me up and cleared a table behind us. He put me down on the table and leaned on me. I felt a hand under my skirt. He was breathing heavily when he aggressively removed my panties in one move.
“You bring out the beast in me!” he groaned in what felt like an explosive rage.
The sex in the studio was intense, to put it mildly. Giovanni was wild as an animal and revealed a side I hadn’t seen before in him. And in me. It was crazy, not like anything I had experienced. And I hate to admit it, but I liked it in a way. The thing is, I couldn’t really figure out if it was the sex itself or the tiny bit of fear of what he would do to me that made it so … scintillating. At one point he even grabbed my throat with both of his hands and I was afraid that he would strangle me. But then he let go.
Afterwards we tumbled into the living room and threw ourselves on the pillows on the floor in front of the fireplace where Giovanni lit the fire. We both groaned, breathing heavily. He poured us another glass of wine and I thought that after all that exercise I must have already burned o
ff the first one. So I took it and drank it. I felt lightheaded.
“So you never told me anything about yourself.” I looked down at him with his head in my lap.
He smiled. “Why is it that women always want to talk about stuff like that after sex?”
“I don’t know. Because we want to know who we just slept with? If we should regret it or do it again?”
He laughed and looked into the fire. But he didn’t answer me.
“So where are you from?”
“Like that is any secret to you.”
“I know you are originally from Milan, but why did you come to Denmark?”
“My father is Danish. I came here when I was fifteen. He got a job in Copenhagen. So we moved here.”
“So that’s where you got those blue eyes,” I said.
He nodded and sat up.
“So where did you go to school? You must have been in ninth grade back then.” I drank my wine, trying to pretend like the question wasn’t important. Trying to act casual.
Again he avoided answering. Instead he took the glass out of my hand and kissed me.
Then he whispered, “What’s with all the questions? What does it really matter where we come from and what we have been doing before we met? What is important right now is that we are together. Nothing else really matters when it comes to love.”
I smiled. He was so smooth.
“Did you go to boarding school?”
It was a reasonable question since a lot of children who came to Denmark from foreign countries and didn’t speak the language went to Herlufsholm boarding school where they had a special program for international kids.
Giovanni sighed and got up from the floor.
“Now I will get us something to eat. I made Ricotta e cioccolato. You know, like a chocolate pie.”
I went home with a strange feeling inside of me. I couldn’t escape the facts. Giovanni had a welding machine, not something everybody had. On top of that, he had spikes lying around. And he was about the same age as the victims. He could easily have been a student at the same school, something he apparently didn’t want to tell me.
Why all the secrecy if he had nothing to hide?
24
The next morning, I went to visit Sune after dropping off the kids at school. I had talked to Sara and asked her to get hold of the best lawyer money could buy.
Sune looked exhausted. His green Mohawk was flaccid, his eyes red, and his skin paler than the dingy white wall behind him. I felt so sorry for him. The police would only let me talk to him for a minute so I had to be brief. A police officer listened in from the corner of the small room.
I grabbed his hand.
“No touching,” the officer said.
I moved my hand. “Sorry,” I said to the officer.
I looked back at Sune. “How are you?” He sighed.
“That bad?”
“All this is just because I was in that stupid juvenile prison. Only because my friend didn’t think when he hacked into the files of PET. He was stupid and left traces. And that led them straight to me.”
“You hacked The Police Intelligence?” I couldn’t help myself. I was impressed with him. He had only been a teenager back then.
“Yes, first I did, and then I showed my friend how to do it. I never should have done that. It’s always easy to be smart in the afterthoughts, right?”
I nodded. I had tried that a lot of times in my life. Regretted decisions, trusting the wrong people.
“Is Stevnsfortet the prison you went to?”
“Yes.”
So that was his connection to the pastor.
“And it was still the same pastor, I’m guessing. But why would anyone think that you killed the pastor just because you were in there a long time ago?”
“Because I could have done it.”
I widened my eyes and didn’t know quite what to believe anymore.
“What are you saying?”
“I wanted that guy dead as much as any other who had ever been to that prison.”
I’d never seen this kind of anger in that gentle guy. It was very unusual.
“Why?”
He held his hand up and showed me the two missing fingers. “Because he did this,” he said.
“What? The pastor?” I could not believe what I was hearing.
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it. Why would a pastor do that to you?”
“That’s what he did to a lot of us.”
“Cut off your fingers?”
“Cut anything off that had to do with the crime we were in for.”
“So he took your fingers because you used them for hacking?”
“Yes, and he castrated those who were in for rape and so on.”
I leaned back in my chair, astonished that a thing like that could go on in a Danish prison without anyone knowing.
“But why wasn’t he stopped a long time ago?”
“No one dares to tell. The story goes about the one boy, who tried to tell, but no one believed him and the following night he got his tongue cut out. So he couldn’t talk anymore.”
“Wow. That is a horrible story. But who did the prison guards think it was then? I mean the evidence is pretty obvious.”
“They thought it was something going on among ourselves, the prisoners. Like personal, drug related or hierarchy stuff and they didn’t really care. They would just put us in the hospital and then back in the cell when we had been treated.”
“And he has been doing this for all these years to all the prisoners?”
“Well, it wasn’t all the prisoners he would do this to. Just a few of us who he thought needed more punishment, I guess. Those who did the same crime more than once or the ones who claimed themselves to be innocent. Those who wouldn’t repent.”
“Like you.”
“Like me.”
“But that doesn’t quite explain why they think you killed him. It could have been any one of the prisoners who wanted revenge.”
“Yeah, well, I threatened him. I was so mad back then that I said in front of everybody in the prison, including the warden, that I would hunt him down and put one of his crosses through his skull.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I kind of dug my own grave there.”
That really wasn’t good. Sune had an excellent motive and he had even told how he would do it.
“But I didn’t do it,” he said.
I looked at him and believed him.
“I don’t have it in me to kill someone. I just know I couldn’t do it. And now they are accusing me of having planned it all in the last couple of years. They even think that is why I moved down here.”
“What else are they saying?”
“That I came in after the Sunday morning service and killed the pastor in the confession chair in the prison church.”
“But don’t they keep records of who visits the prison?”
“Sure they do, but they think I either paid someone off to let me in or that I know the area so well I somehow knew a way to sneak inside.”
“That sounds like a weak theory.”
“That’s what they are trying to get me to tell them. How I got in. Apparently someone did visit the prison that morning. Under the name Bjorn Clausen.”
“You are kidding me. But he’s dead, right?”
“I know. But they think I might have used a false name. You know, it is a juvenile prison. That means they like to call it an institution. Most of the inmates are allowed to have visitors and their names are registered in the computers, but not checked or cleared. With a fake ID, anyone could get in under a false name.”
I opened my mouth and was about to ask another question when the officer interrupted us.
“Time is up,” he said.
Two officers came into the room and grabbed Sune by the arms.
“I will get you the best lawyer, I promise you that,” I said to him. “I’ll get you out of here in no time. You’ll see Tobias soon.
”
I looked him in the eyes just in time to see a little sparkle of hope in them, and then he left the room between the two officers.
On my way home I felt the anger rage inside of me. Didn’t they see the connection between the killings at all? It was so obvious to me, but it was like the police didn’t want to see it. Were they really that stupid and incompetent? I normally wouldn’t believe that about our police force, but this made me think that there was only one way out for Sune.
I had to catch the killer myself.
25
Back at the office Sara was talking on the phone. She tried her best to convince one lawyer after another they needed to help Sune. She guaranteed the bill would be paid and they were sure to win the case since he was not guilty.
But still she had no luck. They were all too busy or they didn’t care much for a small case like that and they certainly didn’t want to lose.
“What about just helping someone in need?” I heard her yell at one point and then slam the phone down.
My editor was in a better mood. He called me and said he loved my article on the boarding school connection and wanted to do more about the serial killer angle.
“And no one has complained?” I asked.
“About the article? Of course. There is always someone who complains.” He said. ”But that won’t stop us.”
I was beginning to love my new editor. Nothing seemed to put him down.
“So who was it? Rosenfeldt? The police?
”Ah well, if you must know, both of them.”
“And you’re not having second thoughts?”
“That someone this important is complaining just shows me that we are on to something really big and that’s what it’s all about. That’s why we hired you and pay you three times as much as the rest of our staff.”
I was proud. My new editor had a way of making me feel like I was the most important reporter on the newspaper. And he said any trouble that would head my way he would gladly take.
“What about Sune?” I asked.