The Tenant
Page 8
Jeppe shook his head pensively. “If that’s the case, the murderer must have removed it, because the crime scene investigators didn’t find anything matching that description.”
“It could well be that some of his DNA is on that fabric,” Nyboe said. “He would have been quite bloody after the killing—you know that, right? With her blood, I mean. Interesting that he was able to flee through the city unseen, covered with blood spatter, on a hot summer night.”
The assistant pathologist washed off the body, weighed and measured it so that it was ready for the internal exam. The large, sharp autopsy knives, which might be mistaken for butcher knives in a professional kitchen, sat ready on the cart next to the table. Nyboe took a pair of metal mesh gloves from their hook on the wall, selected a heavy knife, and sliced Julie Stender’s body open from her throat to her pubic bone.
CHAPTER 11
“Egg salad or ham?” Anette asked, leaning out from between two students in line by the hospital’s quick-lunch cart to address Jeppe, who was waiting to the side.
“Just coffee, thanks.”
Anette sighed at her delicate partner. Her own stomach grumbled. Jeppe hardly ate anything these days and was starting to look like a waifish punk rocker with his bleached hair. She thought lovingly of her own chubby, healthy husband at home, who had promised to make steak béarnaise for dinner.
They had just emerged from the autopsy hall, and the foyer seemed to explode with noise after their many hours of quiet concentration. Nyboe had sawed open the rib cage and emptied the victim’s body of organs, weighed and measured them, and taken blood and tissue samples so the chemical pathologist could examine them for toxins, alcohol, and drugs. Then he had made an incision in the scalp and peeled it away from the skull to saw open the cranium and examine the brain and its damage by the left temple. The exam supported the previous conclusion: Julie Stender had died of a powerful blow to the head, likely caused by a man, who was probably right-handed. The time of death had occurred between 11:00 p.m. Tuesday and 2:00 a.m. Wednesday.
Anette and Jeppe sat down on a couple of lime-green barstools in the foyer to have a short break before heading back to police headquarters. Jeppe pulled out his notepad. Anette unwrapped her ham sandwich, took a big bite, and wiped a stray bit of mayonnaise off her chin with the back of her hand.
Jeppe watched her disapprovingly.
“Do you have any idea how many additives and preservatives are in that sandwich?” he asked. “If you left it sitting on the table for a year, it wouldn’t even mold, it’s so full of poison.”
“Fine by me,” Anette said, sipping contentedly from her plastic bottle of blindingly orange soda. She nodded impatiently at Jeppe’s notepad. “So? What’ve we got?”
Jeppe shook his head at her and returned to the notes. “Julie comes home from a concert on Tuesday evening. Perhaps she’s accompanied by her killer, if not, she lets him in shortly thereafter. Either way, she knows him well enough to invite him in late at night, even though she’s home alone. Who are the men in Julie’s life?”
“Her father—we need to check in on him today.” Anette spoke with a wad of ham sandwich in one cheek.
“I agree. Christian Stender knows something. But could a father slice up his child like that?”
“If he’s crazy enough.”
“Gee, thanks,” Jeppe replied acidly. “Always good to have a solid psychological profile.”
“You’re welcome!”
“Okay, then there’s Esther’s singing teacher, Kristoffer,” Jeppe said, pulling a packet of wet wipes from his pocket. “He and Julie had a relationship, he is emotionally invested, and he was at the crime scene. The question is whether he had time to do it. Nyboe believes the earliest she could have died is eleven p.m., and we have witnesses who spoke to Kristoffer at the Student Café at eleven thirty.”
Anette declined the wipe he offered and answered her ringing cell phone.
“Werner.”
“It’s Saidani. We have a problem. Are you still at the hospital?”
“We just wrapped up. We’re heading out in five minutes.”
“There’s been activity on Julie Stender’s Instagram page. Ten minutes ago, someone posted a close-up of Julie Stender’s dead face, of the knife-work pattern. Someone logged in as Julie. We’re already getting inundated by media inquiries.”
“Fuck!” Anette blurted out, her jaw dropping.
Jeppe raised his eyebrows at her.
“It appears to be from the night of the murder,” Saidani continued. “The picture is dark and grainy, and there’s blood.”
“Crap! Can’t you take it down?” Anette got up and signaled to Jeppe that they had to go.
“We’re trying,” Saidani said. “But every time we delete it, it shows up again a few minutes later. I’m trying to shut down her profile, but it’s not that easy, and I also need to make sure that we don’t lose any important information.”
They left the rest of their lunch behind and ran out to the car. When they got to HQ, the whole Homicide unit was on alert. Until now they had been focused on finding a murderer. With this turn of events they also had to field questions and tamp down the worst of the panic. The media had named him the Knife Monster. How creative.
Anette tossed her jacket on the desk and headed straight for Saidani’s office with Jeppe close on her heels. Their shoe soles stuck to the clingy linoleum flooring, making their footsteps sound like a symphony of agitated plungers.
Anette barged in without knocking. “Did you get it down?”
“Not yet,” Sara Saidani replied, not looking up from her screen. “We have access to the profile, but we can’t control it as long as someone else is also logged in as Julie. Hopefully we’ll hear back from Instagram soon. They’re only contactable by email, even for the police.”
Anette leaned in and looked at the dark photo. White skin stood out from the shadows and revealed the macabre work. Right next to the picture of the disfigured face there were images of a living, smiling Julie. Her young, cheerful eyes made the contrast unbearable.
“It has to be the murderer.” Saidani pointed to the screen. “Look at that rag rug! The picture was taken at the apartment on Klosterstræde, so unless someone took it after the murder, and before Gregers Hermansen found her—and I’m assuming that’s pretty much inconceivable—then it’s him.”
“Can’t you trace where the picture is coming from?”
“Not when it’s uploaded using a mobile server.” Saidani sounded frustrated. “We can’t trace that. I don’t understand why Instagram hasn’t closed the profile already. There’s been plenty of time.”
“But why post a picture of the victim to her own Instagram profile?” Jeppe interrupted. “What does he get out of that?”
“Who knows?” Saidani said with a shrug. “It’s a way of showing off your accomplishments.”
Anette rubbed her face with her hands. This case was getting worse and worse. She exchanged a look with Jeppe.
“Well, what do we do now, Jepsen?” Their options were extremely limited. At the moment she didn’t envy her partner his role as investigative lead.
Jeppe looked down at the floor and sighed.
“Let’s split up,” he said. “Call Clausen and find out if they’ve gotten any further with the technical investigations. I’ll handle questioning Caroline.”
“She and her mother are waiting in the break room,” Saidani said, looking up from her screen.
“Excellent.” Jeppe nodded to Anette. “I’ll finish up with Saidani. You go ahead and make the call.”
“All right, then. Have fun, you two!”
She marched out into the hallway with a quick little wink at Jeppe. If Saidani weren’t so horrifically boring to look at, Anette would have sworn Jeppe liked her. Fine by her, she just found it exasperating that Saidani was always so darned grumpy.
Anette poured herself a cup of hot chocolate and called Clausen, the crime scene investigator. He answered on
the first ring.
“Hello, Werner. What’s on your mind?” Clausen sounded drained as well.
“The murder weapon,” she said. “What’s the status?”
“Negative. Whatever she was hit on the head with, it’s no longer in the apartment. We’re working on the knife right now. I expect we’ll have something for you later today. Stop by when you have time.”
“Anything else?” She sipped the chocolate, burning the tip of her tongue.
“There are traces in the apartment of all the obvious people. The girls’ hair in the shower drain, Julie’s own saliva on a dirty coffee cup, and so on, but nothing with a clear connection to the killing. Come to think of it, there are strikingly few traces of the murderer when you consider how violent the attack must have been. No hair that doesn’t belong to one of the girls, no blood, no secretions, and not many prints so far. He was extremely careful. We did find a good footprint on a stack of papers in the living room and some footprints in the blood around the body. They’re very clear, so they might give us something.”
“What about fingerprints?” Anette asked.
“Bovin is working like crazy, but so far he hasn’t found anything obviously connected to the murder. No unfamiliar prints.”
“Tell me: Did our guy wear gloves?” Anette asked, and took another tentative sip of her hot chocolate.
“If you ask me, and I suppose that’s what you’re doing,” Clausen said, “he wore more than gloves. I think he must have been wearing a protective suit of some kind.”
* * *
CAROLINE BOUTRUP SAT holding her mother’s hand in Homicide’s break room. She was wrapped in a big wool cardigan, and a scarf covered the lower part of her face. Her dark brown hair was tousled and greasy, and her face was swollen from crying. Even so, she was one of the prettiest people Jeppe had ever seen—gorgeous, actually, like a movie star. Her mother, Jutta, was an older, more severe version of the same beauty but tidier, with her hair in an elegant pageboy cut and a suit jacket over her straight shoulders.
Jeppe shook hands with both and asked Caroline to accompany him to the interrogation room so they could speak privately. A handful of plainclothes officers standing by the coffee machine checked out the attractive young woman as she walked past.
She started to cry the instant he closed the door behind them. Heartrending sobs of despair followed by wiping tears and mucus on her sweater sleeves. He gently sat her down, pushed a box of tissues across the table, and let her finish crying before he began.
“Caroline, I know this is extremely difficult and that you’re very upset. But I need your help. There is a murderer on the loose, and we need to know everything about Julie in order to catch him before he escapes or, worse yet, attacks someone else.”
She wiped away more tears and sat up in her seat, trying to pull herself together.
“What do you want to know?” Her accent was rural Jutland.
“Can you think of who might have done this? Was there anyone who might have wanted to harm Julie?”
“No!” Caroline exclaimed with an unhappy shake of her head. “Julie was… an angel. Well, no, maybe not an angel—but, you know, a good person! She had the biggest heart.”
“What about men?” Jeppe asked. “Did she have a boyfriend?”
“Not one who lasted.” Caroline started twisting the fringe on her scarf into messy little braids. “Julie sort of collected snubbed boyfriends. She always wanted to be just friends, when she wasn’t into them anymore—”
“Could one of these spurned boyfriends have had reason to take revenge on her?” Jeppe asked.
Caroline started crying again. “Julie and I have known each other our whole lives. This is totally unreal.” She covered her face with her hands and sat like that for a moment. “But, no. Julie always dated sort of fluffy, vegetarian types of guys, the kind who couldn’t even kill a fly.”
Jeppe got up and brought Julie a glass of water from a pitcher in the corner of the room.
“Were you aware of Julie and Kristoffer’s relationship?”
“He was totally pestering her, that geek!” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Composed music for her and called in the middle of the night. Julie couldn’t deal with it. Daniel tried to hook her up with someone from the band instead.”
“Daniel, your boyfriend?” Jeppe asked.
“Yeah. I mean, we grew up together, all three of us, and we were in the same class…” Her voice broke slightly, but she cleared her throat and continued. “Daniel’s from a slightly fucked-up family, too, so he and Julie would have these red wine–fueled discussions about fathers and stepmothers.”
“Did Julie come from a ‘fucked-up’ family?”
The eyebrows again. Her whole face was saying, Duh.
“Her mother died of cancer when she was little,” she said. “And you’ve met her father, right?”
Jeppe hesitated. “Do you think Julie’s father loved her?”
“He fucking idolized her!” Caroline made a face as she continued. “But Julie hated it.”
Jeppe’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Reporters? Or maybe Mr. Stender had coerced someone into giving him Jeppe’s phone number—it would have to wait.
“What about Julie’s tattoo?” he continued. “What do you know about it?”
“I know she had it done at my friend Tipper’s tattoo place, in Nyhavn. I was the one who recommended him…” Caroline bowed her head for a moment, unable to continue.
“The stars on her wrist, do you know if they symbolized something specific?”
She bit her lip. “I don’t know. Julie had started having secrets, ever since she met this new guy about three weeks ago. The stars had something to do with him.”
“The Mysterious Mr. Mox?” Jeppe asked, the hairs on his shins standing up.
Her eyes widened in surprise.
“Yes, that’s what I called him because she wouldn’t tell me anything about him. Where do you know him from?”
“Tell me what you know about him.” Jeppe leaned forward.
“Well, he was just someone she’d met on the street. A guy she fell in love with kind of overnight, really. But she refused to say who he was. Said it would jinx the relationship. I never met him.”
“She must have told you something about him,” Jeppe pressed. “Anything at all. It’s important, Caroline.”
She drank some water and thought.
“Hmm. She did say he was a real man and that I would be proud of her for once.”
“Because he wasn’t a… fluffy vegetarian type of guy?” Jeppe asked with a slight smile.
Caroline put her face in her hands and sobbed.
CHAPTER 12
Jeppe stabbed a piece of dry chicken and half a lettuce leaf with his plastic fork and tried to get it into his mouth without spilling it on himself. He and Anette had brought some food over to the little garden outside the Glyptoteket museum to clear their minds in the sunshine. The pretty museum was right next to police headquarters and its garden a well-kept secret hideaway in the middle of the busy city center. They had to get away from the crummy mood back at headquarters, if even just for twenty minutes.
In the grass around them lay half-dressed Copenhageners enjoying one of the warmest days of the summer so far. One of the only warm days, actually.
Anette stood with one foot on the bench, inhaling cigarette smoke, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Falck just told me that he pushed Daniel Fussing hard during the questioning this morning, and that there are holes in the boys’ statements about the night of the murder. Sure enough, Daniel confirms that he spoke to Kristoffer immediately after the end of the concert at the Student Café, but two of the other band members and the bartender say that the concert ended much closer to midnight than Kristoffer claims. They played three extra numbers. If Kristoffer left by ten thirty, which is the last confirmed time anyone saw him at the Student Café, and didn’t get back until around midnight, he could have had time to do it.”
“He had a motive and he was there.” Anette bit down on her cigarette. “He was there. How often is the murderer a person the victim knows who just happens to be nearby at the time of death? Hmm, let me see… ah, yes: always!”
“Kristoffer doesn’t have the strength anyway. Have you seen how skinny he is?”
“You just have to be angry enough, Jeppe.”
He closed the plastic lid over the rest of his wilted salad and tossed the container in the closest trash can. If things kept going like this, he too wouldn’t have much strength left. The only good thing about a divorce is how delightfully slim the unhappiness makes you.
Anette sat down next to him. “Did Saidani manage to get the Instagram account closed?”
“Yes, but the damage has already been done. All the morning newspapers are running the picture.”
She studied her cigarette butt and apparently decided that there was still one more puff left in it. “Falck had just gotten Julie’s dad on the line when we left. And it was not going smoothly.”
“No, he’s an angry man. I mean, it’s understandable. By the way, I asked Falck and Saidani to run a background check on him.” Jeppe’s phone buzzed in his pocket; he lifted it out. It was his mother. He declined the call. “So, what do you think of the Mysterious Mr. Mox?”