The Tenant

by Katrine Engberg

  “A song?” Anette said, resisting the urge to slap him. “Sit back up. It’s hard to—”

  “ ‘Love Will Save You.’ It’s about the power of love to save. Or to kill,” interrupted Kristoffer, who seemed to think it was the most normal thing in the world to stand on Klosterstræde and sing toward a set of closed windows. Who was obviously not conscious of the fact that he was being questioned in a murder investigation.

  “I saw shadows moving behind the curtains,” he continued. “She wasn’t alone. I felt dumb, double-crossed.” Kristoffer lifted his head off the table, patted his chest pocket and then remembered the smoking ban. “Yeah, so, I left.”

  “What do you mean?” Anette straightened up in her chair. “Left? Where to?”

  “Down to the canal. I smoked a cigarette, maybe two. Then I went back.”

  “Back where? To Julie’s apartment?” The room fell quiet. Kristoffer’s gaze was back to the corner of the room, as if searching for something there. Anette counted to ten in her head.

  “Did you go back to Julie’s apartment?” she repeated.

  “No, I went back and listened to the rest of the concert.” Kristoffer spoke sluggishly, as if the topic didn’t matter to him at all.

  “When did you get back to the Student Café after your little excursion?”

  “No idea. But the band was still playing, so I can’t have been gone for more than half an hour.”

  “And then what?” Anette asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did you do after the concert? Oh, come on, damn it!” Anette’s patience was wearing thin.

  “Then I got drunk with my friends,” Kristoffer replied.

  Anette sighed loudly. “Can your friends confirm that?”

  “Yes. We all went out. Caroline’s boyfriend, Daniel, came, too.”

  “We’ll take their phone numbers.” Jeppe pushed a notepad across the table at him.

  Kristoffer’s face was as blank as a baby’s. Exasperation with his odd behavior washed through Anette’s body like a heat wave. When Kristoffer stifled a yawn and stretched, she lost it.

  “You do understand that she was murdered, don’t you?” she sneered. “Does that mean nothing to you? Because honestly you’re acting like you couldn’t care less!”

  Kristoffer smiled again. Unsettlingly. He placed his palms flat on the table and looked at the backs of his hands.

  “Couldn’t care less?” he echoed. “Because I’m not screaming and blubbering? Pounding my fists on the wall until they bleed? I’m not sad; I’m devastated. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  They left him to sit in the questioning room alone while they called his friends, who all confirmed, independently, that Kristoffer was there during the intermission and again right at the end of the concert. That meant that he could not have been gone for more than the forty-five minutes the second half of the concert lasted. Surely not long enough to seek out, mutilate, and murder Julie, change out of bloody clothes, get rid of the murder weapon, and go back, seemingly unaffected.

  “He is still freaking weird,” Anette said, rubbing her eyes and tilting her head to the side so that her neck cracked loudly.

  “There’s no way he had time to do it.” Jeppe gave her a tired smile.

  “Maybe they’re covering for him.”

  “We’ll collect a DNA sample and fingerprints and confirm the timing tomorrow with other witnesses from the bar. But why would they lie? We’re going to have to let him go, and you know it.”

  Anette kicked a trash can so it skidded across the floor with a metallic screech. For the last couple of hours she had started to believe they were going to solve the murder case of a decade in under twenty-four hours. Now it was back to the drawing board.

  * * *

  JEPPE’S HOUSE LAY dark and unapproachable behind the suburban street’s low trees. He took off his shoes without turning on the light in the entryway, an old habit from back when there was someone to wake up when he came home late. He made himself a cup of tea with boiling water from the instant hot water tap at the sink, a device that Therese had insisted on and that he had never gotten used to. It splattered, and he burned his fingers. The tea bag swelled up and floated on the surface of the cloudy water. He watched the murky water in distaste. Why couldn’t he even work up the guts to develop an honest alcohol problem?

  He left the tea in the kitchen and took his computer to bed, averting his eyes from the side where Therese used to sleep and heading straight for his own side. In her former nightstand was a copy of the Kama Sutra they had brought home from a weekend trip to Paris, back when they were still in love. Before the fertility treatments. Before Niels. Now the book lay in the drawer like a mockery of his faith in love and turned that whole side of the bedroom into a minefield.

  Jeppe stood for a moment, contemplating, then grabbed his comforter, turned around, and went back to the living room. There, he stacked two pillows against the backrest of the sofa, got comfortable, and opened his laptop.

  Kristoffer had been with Julie right before she was murdered and admitted both to having a relationship with her and to feeling angry and jealous. He had motive and opportunity, was at the scene of the crime at the right time, and therefore at the top of the suspects list. But Jeppe was inclined to believe his explanation. Maybe his unfiltered honesty was a devious way of deflecting suspicion, but if so, it was working. Jeppe had a hard time imagining him being violent. He could usually spot it in people’s eyes. Still, Kristoffer had felt rejected, and jealousy can make any man lose his mind. What song had he sung as he stood under Julie’s window?

  Jeppe checked his notes, opened his computer, and searched for “Love Will Save You.” By a band called Swans? That didn’t mean anything to him.

  The song was dark and gloomy, sung by a drawling, rusty man’s voice.

  “Love will save you from your misery, then tie you to the bloody post.”

  He did some more searching and found a debate about the song on a Swans fan page. The lyrics were being discussed by what appeared to be young male loners with too much time on their hands. Was the style more Goth/industrial or just Goth? Was the song more or less depressed and full of suffering than, for example, “Failure,” which must be another song by the band? Some thought the song expressed hope, others that it was the ultimate give-up. Suicide was mentioned quite a few times. Jeppe blinked sleepily and closed the computer. A line from the song followed him into the fitful night.

  “And love may save all you people, but it will never, never save… me.”

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 9

  CHAPTER 10

  The crunch of footsteps on gravel accompanied Jeppe’s heavy breathing in the damp morning air. In the sky over the park, pink clouds glowed against the morning blue like the wet dream of a Technicolor cinematographer. Jogging is a classic response to getting a divorce. Not just to exercise your way back into shape so you can be attractive to someone new but also as part of a therapeutic process. It reminded Jeppe of when he was little and would pinch himself hard on the arm to stop a scrape on the knee from hurting too much.

  He headed up the hill. “Ascot Gavotte” from My Fair Lady was throbbing in the back of his mind, but on top of that his thoughts flowed freely. What makes a person cut into another person? The impulse to hurt others dwells in us all; we understand it, even if we don’t act on it. But to cause pain the way Julie’s killer had done required an urge that he couldn’t comprehend. The only word he could find for it was evil.

  Jeppe paused to stretch on a little playground and then continued home. Sprinted along the train tracks so he could quickly put the dreary buildings of that stretch behind him. The house in Valby was right next to the tracks; otherwise he and Therese could never have afforded it. Noise abatement absorbed most of the racket. One got used to the rest. Jeppe had actually thought it quite amusing to see the trains rushing by from the upstairs bathroom. Therese, on the other hand, had done everything she could to hide t
he railroad, blinding windows and planting lilacs up against the sound barriers. The house was only a few yards from the tracks, but its back was turned to them like an indignant teenager. From the outside, the brick facade seemed inviting in the morning light, but the second Jeppe stepped in, the loneliness of the place slammed him.

  In the shower, as usual, he avoided touching his penis too much. He hadn’t had sex since December, hadn’t wanted to even once, and his cock seemed as if it had physically shriveled up. A side effect of the antidepressants he had taken the first few months maybe. During the five therapy sessions management had forced him—recommended was the official term—to have with one of the police psychologists, the word impotence had sloshed around amid others like anger, fear, and jealousy, but it hadn’t quite slipped out.

  He got dressed in his usual jeans and T-shirt, dismissed the idea of breakfast, and dropped his notepad in the pocket of his windbreaker. The autopsy was scheduled for 8:00 a.m. at the Pathology Department of the national hospital. If he left early enough, he could avoid the worst of the morning traffic.

  Jeppe parked his car right in front of the hospital’s Teilum Building, which ironically enough looked like an oversize gravestone amid pea gravel and evergreens. The lobby’s brown-tiled wall made sure to keep the mood inside depressed and dim as well. A frosted-glass door on the left led to the presentation room, which was used when the deceased could not be ID’ed in any other way. A sign read, NEXT OF KIN, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY in several languages. Jeppe smiled wryly. The risk of someone popping in unannounced was probably small.

  Anette brought a gust of fresh air with her when she jogged through the door a minute later. She was accompanied by the same police photographer who had been at the crime scene.

  “Good morning,” Jeppe said, nodding to both.

  “Good morning!” Anette replied with a jaunty wink. “Caroline Boutrup is back in Copenhagen hale and healthy. Her mother came over from Jutland to be with her. We’ll head directly to the station to meet with her once we’re done here.”

  “And Daniel, the boyfriend?” Jeppe asked.

  “Falck is on his way to see him now.” Anette applied pink lip gloss, smacked her lips, and drummed on the elevator button.

  The white-tiled autopsy room extended over five separate autopsy bays in a row, each equipped with a large stainless steel sink and a docking station to attach the autopsy tables. Bright fluorescent tube lights hung over each bay. The detectives went through the usual disinfection rituals and then put on smocks, shoe covers, and operating-room scrub caps. Walked past the rows of white rubber boots by the wall, down to the farthest bay, where the murder-case autopsies always took place. The tables were empty. Still, the usual strong smell hung in the room—not bad, just sweetish with a hint of disinfectant.

  Nyboe waited at the end of the room in a green lab coat and scrub cap. He was putting on latex gloves, talking calmly to the assistant who would help him during the autopsy.

  “Welcome,” he greeted them. “I hope you’re all well rested.”

  He nodded to the assistant, who left the room.

  “This won’t be a fun one, so fair warning,” he continued. “As you know, it was already clear at the crime scene that the victim incurred a number of stab wounds that had bled and were thus inflicted prior to death.” Nyboe made eye contact with each of them, one by one, as if to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.

  “The victim’s cranium was crushed at the left temple, without perforation of the skin. That is noteworthy, as the skin at the temple is taut and easy to break. We did a CT scan yesterday when the body came in. She has an impression fracture, which extends into the pia mater”—he paused to rephrase—“in other words, down to the soft, innermost meninges. That caused cerebrospinal fluid leakage and a massive intracranial hematoma, which is to say a large accumulation of blood in the brain. Of course, we’ll go through the whole kit and caboodle before we draw any conclusions, but everything suggests that the cause of death was a blow to the left temple with a blunt object. As always, I’ll let you know along the way if I encounter anything.”

  The assistant rolled in an autopsy table that held the body of Julie Stender, draped with a sterile sheet. Once the table was secured into the dock, the assistant carefully lifted the sheet and removed the sterile bags that had been placed over the victim’s hands. She was lying just the way Jeppe had seen her in the apartment the previous day. Partially dressed, and covered with dry blood and scabs, like a limp dummy that had been thrown out of a high-rise. A body that, up until a day ago, had been a living, thinking human being with dreams, emotions, and needs. Now it was nothing more than a pile of DNA.

  * * *

  THE AUTOPSY BEGAN with an external exam of the body. Nyboe, the assistant pathologist, and the photographer circled the table like vultures, intent on finding the best point of attack.

  Nyboe stopped occasionally and narrated into his Dictaphone what traces he found on her clothes. In places where the knife had cut through, dirt and secretions were labeled and described before Nyboe repeated the procedure under an ultraviolet light. He removed hair and small particles, placed them in little sterile bags, and numbered them. Clipped the fingernails and archived those the same way.

  The two pathologists carefully coaxed the clothing off the body so she lay naked in front of the five observers. The photographer took several pictures as Nyboe started meticulously investigating the external lesions with a magnifying glass and stainless steel tweezers, all the while droning into his Dictaphone. Wounds, hands, nails, ears, and scars. Cotton swabs were rubbed over her nipples, eyelids were raised, and eyeballs examined for hemorrhage.

  Every now and then Nyboe paused to share an observation.

  “The tattoo is quite recent. Two stars and some words on her right wrist; it is quite fresh and not yet done forming scabs—it’s been there only a couple of weeks at most.”

  “So she had it done in Copenhagen,” Jeppe said, addressing Anette. “Maybe Caroline knows something about it.”

  Nyboe pointed to Julie Stender’s arms.

  “There are between twenty-five and thirty surface scratches on both her arms, most only a few millimeters deep, some deeper. She must have held her arms up to protect herself against the knife. Here, by her sternum and clavicle, a few of the stab wounds went deeper. I can’t find any evidence on the skin of fixation—in other words, some sign that she was tied up. That corresponds with the numerous blood spatters around the apartment. In the front hall, the living room, the bathroom.”

  “What do you mean?” Jeppe interjected.

  “He chased her around,” Nyboe explained. “Several of the stab wounds went in from behind, so he also stabbed her while she was moving away from him. But none of them were lethal. He could easily have killed her with the knife, but instead he chose to hit her on the head with something heavy.”

  “Maybe he needed to speed things up?”

  “Yes, maybe. At the same time, he must have placed something over her temple before he struck her, because otherwise the skin would have broken from the powerful blow. Also there is no trace from a murder weapon on her skin.”

  “He tried to protect her face, because he wanted to use the skin for his carvings.” Jeppe shivered.

  “I will leave it up to you to decide on the murderer’s motives.” Nyboe said, lifting a tangled, bloody mass of hair away from Julie’s face and carefully pointing with a latex-clad finger. “These cuts were primarily made after she was dead, but if you look at this cut on her forehead, here, you can see that there was massive bleeding. I think he tried to make the carvings while she was alive but she fought back so hard he was forced to kill her to work in peace. Hence the blow to the temple.”

  There was silence in the autopsy room.

  “He,” Anette said, shifting uncomfortably. “Can we be sure that it was a he?”

  “It requires strength to restrain a living person while you cut them with a knife.”

 
; “But there was no sexual motive?” she insisted.

  “I leave the motives to you,” he repeated. “But, no, there was no penetration of either the vagina or the rectum, and no signs of semen on the body so far.”

  Nyboe bent down closer to the body and talked into his Dictaphone. “Surface scratches, maximum depth two millimeters, apparently made with the same knife. Narrow knife blade, under two millimeters thick, very sharp and probably no more than eight or nine centimeters long. This would fit extremely well with the folding knife that was found at the scene.” He paused and looked at the photographer. “Do we have enough close-ups of the face?”

  The photographer nodded but took a few more anyway.

  Nyboe continued, half into his Dictaphone, half to them, “Long unbroken lines, cut parallel in lengths around the right eye, across the skin between the nose and mouth and down around the chin, starting in a kind of spiral pattern on the right cheek. What do you think it looks like?”

  “A Maori tattoo?” Anette suggested. “They have lines on the face like these.”

  “Yes, that’s possible. I do think it’s most evocative of a paper cutting or something like that. Anyway, think of how difficult it is just to draw a circle freehand, and then imagine how hard it must have been to cut this in soft skin. It must have taken a half hour at least.”

  Anette and Jeppe exchanged looks over the table. In that case, Kristoffer could be ruled out, assuming of course that his alibi held. What internal compulsion could drive a killer to risk staying so long after the victim died? To cut a pattern?

  “Why didn’t anyone hear her screaming?” Jeppe asked of no one in particular.

  Nyboe eyed him intensely. He was not a fan of unsolicited questions during his autopsies.

  “I was just about to examine the oral cavity,” he said. He tipped the body’s head back quite far and forced the mouth open, flipped the magnifying glass on his headband down over his eye, and looked carefully for several minutes. “We have something here. On the inside of her right molars. It looks like a little thread. Approximately seven millimeters long and made of purple or pink material. We’ll send it to Forensics for analysis, but it may mean he stuffed something into her mouth so she couldn’t scream. Some kind of fabric, which, if so, would probably be rather bloody.”