“Who is it?” she asked. “Is it one of the girls? That can’t be right. No one dies in my building.”
She realized what she must sound like—childish and out of control. The floor gave way beneath her, and she clung to the armrest to keep from falling.
The detective reached out and grabbed her arm.
“I think that coffee might just be a good idea, don’t you, Mrs. de Laurenti?”
CHAPTER 2
The thin handle of the dainty porcelain cup disappeared between Jeppe Kørner’s fingertips. Esther de Laurenti had put on a bathrobe and made coffee, and he and Anette were sitting on the cleared-off furniture waiting for her to rejoin them. The living room was full of color, knickknacks, and clutter. Jeppe felt ill at ease amid this feminine chaos. It reminded him of his mother’s apartment, where intellect and spirit were abundant but comfort pretty much completely absent. The walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with books of all shapes and sizes. Faded leather spines, paperbacks, and brightly colored coffee-table books with food and flowers on their covers. Wooden figures and dusty bibelots from all over the world dotted every available space on the shelves and walls, and densely written redlined papers were stacked on every horizontal surface.
Sounds from the first news crews on site carried up from the street as they set up in front of the building’s ocher facade. The press couldn’t listen to the encrypted police radio anymore, so they monitored persistent sirens and updates on social media instead. It never took long before someone tweeted, texted, or tagged a police response, and the journalists usually arrived at crime scenes just minutes after the first emergency responders. Perky, well-rested newscasters were already speaking somberly into cameras that panned between their faces and the throng of white-clad crime scene technicians.
Esther de Laurenti cleared her throat tentatively.
“I own the property and live here myself on the top floor. I rent the ground floor to businesses, the second and third floors are residential. Gregers has lived here since he got divorced twenty years ago. The retail space on the street level changes tenants every couple of years—as you can see, it’s currently a café run by a couple of nice young men…”
Her words flowed calmly, but her darting eyes revealed a person in distress.
“Caroline Boutrup has lived on the first floor for a year and a half. I know her parents from the old days, before they moved west, to Jutland. We had a sort of arts club together back then.”
She spoke with clear diction, which contrasted the curse words that sometimes peppered her otherwise elegant language. Part theater actress, part sailor.
“Julie Stender moved in this spring. The two are old friends—know each other from school. Nice girls to have living here,” Esther continued, her eyes fixing on a blue fluted vase. “Which one of them is it?”
“No identification has been made yet,” Jeppe answered gently. “Unfortunately, it’s also too early to say anything about the cause of death.”
Esther de Laurenti looked away. Her pale skin was without makeup, and the many fine wrinkles around her eyes and on her neck intensified the defeat on her face. Anette had squatted down to scratch one of the pugs’ golden bellies. The dog grunted contentedly.
“Has anything unusual happened in the building lately?” Jeppe asked. “New people coming to the girls’ apartment, a commotion on the street, arguments?”
“Oh, imagine hearing that question in real life!” Esther said, still looking away. “I feel like I’m in a book.”
The pug got tired of Anette’s petting. His claws clicked on the wooden floor as he headed to his bed.
“We’re not flitting in and out of each other’s homes every five minutes,” Esther finally explained. “Julie and Caroline are young women with busy lives. There’s often loud music and nighttime goings-on in their place, but I guess the same could be said for my place, too. Poor Gregers, to think that he can put up with us. It’s good he’s a bit hard of hearing.”
Esther’s voice dwindled, and she seemed lost in thought. Jeppe let her think in peace while he mentally swore at Anette’s restless drumming on the doorframe.
“Caroline has a boyfriend, what the hell is his name… Daniel! Daniel Fussing, nice young guy, also moved here from the Herning area in Jutland. But I haven’t seen him around in a while. I suppose Julie is… single.” She tasted the word as if its surface were rough and felt strange in her mouth.
Jeppe noted the names on his pad. A car alarm went off down on the street, and Anette sighed audibly from the doorway. There was a good reason why he preferred to do the questioning when they worked together—Anette wasn’t known for her tact.
“Caroline has been on a canoeing trip with a girlfriend of hers in Sweden since last week,” Esther continued. “I don’t think she’s back in Copenhagen yet. I last saw Julie the day before yesterday. She stopped by Monday night to borrow a light bulb. Seemed like her usual self, smiling and happy. Oh no, I just can’t believe we’re having this conversation!”
Jeppe nodded. Shock usually induced a sense of unreality.
“Couldn’t the victim be some friend of theirs?” she asked, with a desperate note in her voice.
He shrugged apologetically. “Unfortunately, we don’t know enough yet. Do you have the girls’ phone numbers?”
“They’re on a slip of paper on the fridge. You can just take it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. de Laurenti, that will be helpful.” Jeppe stood, signaling that the visit was over. Anette was already grabbing the slip of paper from its place under a pug-shaped refrigerator magnet. Jeppe heard something drop followed by Anette’s irritated groaning as she leaned down to retrieve the magnet. Christ, what was with this woman’s obsession with pugs?
“We’re going to need to speak to you again,” he said, edging his way around the overloaded glass coffee table to avoid knocking papers and cups to the floor. “Could we meet with you later this afternoon?”
“I should visit Gregers at the hospital, but other than that I don’t have any plans. I’m an author… well, I’m trying to become one, so I work from home.” Esther de Laurenti put her hand over a gold locket hanging from her neck, as if it gave her protection.
“We’ll send a fingerprint technician up to dust for any prints in both the front and back stairwell. He’ll also collect your fingerprints when he’s here, if that’s all right? For elimination.”
She nodded from the sofa, looking miserable.
When Jeppe realized she wasn’t going to see them out, he backed into the front hall, where Anette was already waiting with one hand on the door handle. They said goodbye to the small woman on the sofa, Jeppe with a pang of inadequacy. Esther de Laurenti looked like someone who could use a hug.
* * *
“OH LORD, SAVE me from spinsters and their knickknacks!” Anette complained once they were on the landing and out of earshot. There was something about Esther de Laurenti that bugged her. Maybe it was the suspicion that she herself would end up living this way—alone with her dogs and way too much stuff—if it weren’t for Svend. Dear Svend, her wonderful husband of twenty years, who seemed to love her just the way she was and never grow tired of her.
“Would it be less annoying for you if she didn’t have knickknacks, or what?” Jeppe asked, pulling the door shut behind them.
“Yes! No question! The least a person can do—I mean, once you’ve made the decision to live alone and be eccentric—is to fucking clean up your place.” Anette smiled wryly to take the sting out of her words. “It was on the second floor, wasn’t it?”
They made their way down the old, creaking stairs. Jeppe pulled a package of antiseptic wet wipes out of his pocket and passed them tentatively to her. One of his many irritating quirks was an antipathy to dogs, which Anette, as a keen dog person, found hard to accept. Communing with animals on a daily basis meant everything to her and she had done so since she was a little girl. Back then she would ride her bike from her childhood
home in the suburbs, south of Copenhagen, out to a nearby farm, where she was allowed to pet the cows, cats, and rabbits in cages. Anette viewed it as a serious character flaw that anyone might choose not to have a pet.
She raised her eyebrows at Jeppe and then shook her head resignedly. He held the wipes out to her again.
“Are you aware how many parasites can be found in dog fur?” Jeppe asked. “Not to mention all the bacteria, mites, and the fact that man’s best friend licks its rear end several times an hour.”
“You do realize your fear of bacteria borders on the pathological, don’t you?” she asked, stopping abruptly to face her colleague.
“We’re on our way into a crime scene,” he replied. “Just take one!”
He pulled out a wipe and passed it to her. Anette took it and proceeded down the stairs with a sigh.
“You’re nuts, Jeppe Kørner, you know that, right? And it’s called a butt, even on dogs.”
She wiped her hands and stuck the crumpled cloth into her pocket, shaking her head. With her bacteria-free fingers, she lifted the crime scene tape and opened the door to the first-floor apartment with a “Well, ladies? Where are we?”
“Hey, Werner, did you bring doughnuts?” someone called cheerfully from inside the apartment.
Anette tugged on the blue shoe covers and latex gloves. The crime scene was her domain: one of the few places she never felt clumsy. She tossed Jeppe a set of booties and walked in.
Just inside the front door it began. Bloodstains covered the walls and the floor, labeled with white arrows on small black stickers indicating the direction of the spatter. In a doorway a police officer was taking close-ups of a pile of bloody clothes. Anette inhaled the hot smell of fresh slaughter and tried to breathe through her mouth. Above her right eye, a vein started throbbing overtime. It was only like this the first few minutes; then she got used to it.
A canine officer passed her on his way out, leading his German shepherd to the stairs. She resisted the impulse to pet the dog, knowing the interruption wouldn’t be welcome. The canine unit was apparently done in the apartment and would now start searching the courtyard and street for a human scent that could potentially lead them to a murderer.
The front door opened straight into what seemed to be a multipurpose room. There was a heavy wooden dining table with folding chairs around it, a sofa, an old-fashioned steamer trunk serving as a coffee table, and a corner desk holding an open laptop. Despite the warm summer morning, the three windows facing onto Klosterstræde were hermetically sealed. The stench of blood was oppressive and thick.
A dactyloscopy technician—as the fingerprint experts insisted on being called—was on his knees in his white-paper getup, brushing the smooth paneling on the walls.
“Any hits?” Anette asked, nodding toward the brush.
The dactyloscopy technician scooted back on his knees along the wall without answering. He was one of the civilian fingerprint experts; Anette didn’t know him that well. They didn’t normally dispatch civilians on murder cases, but since so many people were away on summer vacation, the rules were probably different this time of year.
“Well, how about it, man?” she said, raising her voice. “Finding anything?”
He finally looked up, visibly irritated at the interruption.
“Prints on bottles and glasses, a few papers, and the laptop keyboard. Several good ones around the body. But this place hasn’t been cleaned in a long time, so they could be old.”
He bent over the paneling again, carefully pressing what looked like a clear sticker against the wood and then lifting the print onto a small transparent disc. He worked at an unbelievably slow pace—it was practically meditative.
Anette tore herself away and continued into the living room. Squatting next to a worn rag rug was Clausen, crime scene investigator par excellence, spraying clear fluid onto the fabric. A handful of unmistakable, almost-purple blood-spatter marks appeared, and he started collecting samples with a cotton swab, each of which he painstakingly placed into its own brown paper bag.
Clausen was a small, nimble man in his late fifties who, for almost ten years, had headed the National Criminal Technology Center, NCTC for short. He had served on the team investigating the Blekinge Street Gang, collected evidence of Kosovo’s mass graves, and helped in Thailand after the tsunami. Despite his underwhelming appearance, Clausen was on his fourth marriage with a rumored divinely beautiful violinist for the Royal Danish Orchestra. And once you saw him in action, you understood how he could attract such a woman. He tackled the monstrosity of his job by confronting it with indefatigably high spirits, his face normally lit up in a network of animated smile lines. Today, however, he was not smiling.
“Hi, Werner, good to see you,” Clausen said. “Be really careful you don’t touch anything. The apartment is full of blood, and we’re far from done collecting evidence. At least there’s no doubt the discovery site and crime scene are identical in this case.” Clausen snipped a tuft of the rug with a box cutter and placed the bloodied fibers into yet another brown bag. “Cataloging all of this is going to be quite a production once we get back. It’s going to take several days. We already have more than sixty exhibits from the blood spatter alone.”
“Fuck!” Anette said, hearing how loud she sounded in the oppressive atmosphere of the apartment. She cleared her throat and spoke more quietly. “Do we have a murder weapon?”
“Maybe,” Clausen replied. “We’re not sure yet what killed her. But a knife was used, and we have a good hunch which one. She was stabbed with a sharp, narrow blade, which appears to fit nicely with this guy here.” Clausen got up and carefully lifted a shiny, opened folding knife out of a bag to show Anette.
“Has it been wiped off?” she asked. “It looks very clean.”
“Yes, the perpetrator wiped it thoroughly, maybe even washed it. But there has been blood on it. Let me show you.” Clausen pulled a little strip of paper from a sterile bag in his well-organized toolbox and rubbed a yellow cotton swab over the knife blade. The cotton swab immediately turned green. “It’s reacting to red blood cells,” he explained.
“Then why isn’t that our murder weapon?” Anette asked, leaning forward to take a closer look at the knife.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But the pathologists are asking us to be on the lookout for a heavy blunt object as well. We haven’t found anything like that in the apartment, though. Not yet at least.”
“Speaking of evidence,” she said, “we told the upstairs neighbor that you’d be sending a guy up to take her fingerprints later.”
“Good. Bovin can do that.”
“He’s civilian, right?” Anette looked askance at the figure still crawling along the paneling.
“If you have any complaints, you should call the finance ministry and request better staffing,” Clausen snapped, pulling off his latex gloves to wipe sweat from his forehead with an embroidered handkerchief. “Until then, maybe you should focus on your own work and let the rest of us do ours.” He straightened his back so his eyes were at the height of Anette’s chin.
“No harm meant, Clausen,” she said, holding up her hands.
He nodded mercifully and got back down on his knees to return to his cotton swabs. Anette walked farther into the apartment. How incredibly irritable everybody was today! It must be the heat.
* * *
FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST NYBOE held court in the kitchen. Jeppe nodded to him and received a grim face in return. The dead girl lay with her head pressed up against the wall, abandoned like a piece of lost property on yet another multicolored rag rug. She was wearing cutoff jeans, a white lace bra, and sneakers. Her long hair lay in sticky tentacles, like a child’s drawing of the sun around her head.
Momentarily stifled, Jeppe leaned against the wall, peered at the floor, and pretended to be pensive. Stood for a moment and breathed until the onset of nausea passed and his heart rate came down. Tried not to listen to the rhythm of his racing pulse, tried not to fea
r the anxiety.
Ten years in Homicide had long since taught him to handle mutilated bodies without being sick, but he was never fully relaxed at a crime scene. Maybe it had to do with the sensitivity that emerges in us with age. The awareness that death is a fundamental fact of life. Or maybe it was just the cocktail of pills he had taken in the car on his way, to take the edge off his back pain. The doctors had long since ruled out a slipped disc, more than insinuating that his pain was psychosomatic, but what did they know?
He let go of the wall and approached the body. The second we die, we become someone’s job. In some ways a crime scene is reminiscent of a theater production. A web of silent agreements that, taken altogether, makes up a whole. On cue. Jeppe had a secret, shameful affinity for the dynamics of the crime scene and its intimate rhythms. But this one was different. Worse. Who was she, the young woman who was being dabbed up and put into bags? Why had she, specifically, been robbed of a career, marriage, children?
He thought uncomfortably of the family he would have to inform once they had identified her. The fear that would fill their eyes when he introduced himself, the hope that came right after—an uncle, we can certainly spare an uncle. And then, when it turned out it was someone far too close to them: tears, screaming—or worse yet, silent acceptance. He had never gotten used to that part of the job.
Jeppe squatted down beside the forensic pathologist.
“Hey, Nyboe. What’ve we got?”
Nyboe was a distinguished, modern gentleman. Like most medical professionals, he presumed everyone understood what he was talking about, leaving the layperson in the dark in just a few sentences. He was the chief medical examiner and highly respected, but Jeppe didn’t especially like him. The feeling seemed mutual.
“This is pretty bad,” Nyboe said, for once not snootily. “The victim is a woman in her early twenties. She has been subjected to serious violence and received multiple deep stab wounds. There are lesions on her head from blunt-force trauma with a heavy object. Her tympanic temperature was eighty-two point four degrees, and rigor mortis was well underway when I arrived scarcely an hour ago. The death thus likely occurred sometime between ten o’clock last night and four this morning. But as you know, I can’t say anything with certainty yet. No immediate signs of sexual assault. The lacerations on her hands and arms suggest she defended herself, but there were also some… well… cuts inflicted before death.”
The Tenant Page 2