“Five pieces in a group show last spring. It was an old promise from back when he worked for me.”
“So you’ve stayed in touch even after he stopped working for you?”
“Sporadically.”
“How was he as an assistant?” Jeppe kept his tone casual, as if the question wasn’t important.
“The best I’ve had.” Kingo smiled at his own reflection in the windowpane. “I was sorry to let him go. I’m usually always the one to get tired of them first. But David didn’t disappoint.”
“If things were going well, why did he leave?”
Kingo sighed wearily. “Tell me, what don’t you just ask David these questions? Is he under suspicion for something?”
Jeppe didn’t respond.
“He works for you guys, why the hell am I spending my evening answering questions about him?” Kingo eyed Jeppe reprovingly, looking like a man who was unaccustomed to being coerced into anything at all. Jeppe still didn’t answer.
“It just couldn’t go on forever. He was never going to be an artist. Had to get himself a real job sooner or later.” Kingo tossed his hands vexedly against the roof of the car.
Anette cleared her throat and glanced at the intersection in front of them. If they were going to take the road over Langebro to the interrogation rooms at headquarters, now was the time. Jeppe shook his head, and Anette stayed to the right instead, driving toward Knippelsbro. Still headed for the Port of Tuborg. They didn’t have enough to detain him. Jeppe glanced at his watch again. Another fifteen minutes, if they were lucky.
“What’s he like, David Bovin?”
“What do you mean? Haven’t I just described him?”
“I mean, what’s he like as a person?”
Kingo made a face and answered moodily.
“Well, we’ve never been friends, you understand, so I can’t give you more than a hunch—”
“How long did he work for you?” Anette interrupted.
“One year, give or take a few months.”
“During which time you traveled together, worked, and attended shows,” Anette said, letting her skepticism show. “You must have had ample time to develop more than a hunch about him?”
“How well do you two know each other?”
The car fell quiet. Jeppe forced himself to maintain eye contact with Kingo. He knew a manipulator when he encountered one.
“Just answer the question!”
Kingo exhaled noisily. “David is a friendly, quiet, focused man with a rich internal life. He’s also a wounded soul. Frazzled, disillusioned, lonely. One of those people who has a hard time making life work after they’ve been to war. Bad childhood, inadequate education, damned good at being a soldier, but not very much else.”
Jeppe watched the square Kongens Nytorv float past the car window and disappear behind them.
“What do you know about his childhood?” Jeppe asked.
Again that glint of amusement, which vanished so quickly from his eyes that Jeppe wasn’t sure he’d really seen it.
“David grew up in a number of institutions and with foster families. It wasn’t a safe childhood.” He patted Anette on the shoulder. “Pick up the speed a little. I’m running late.”
She tightened her grip on the wheel, her knuckles glowing white.
“David was unlucky,” he continued. “I’m not entirely sure what went wrong, but he never found a good family. And like all orphans, he has a hole inside. Really that’s what motivates him, both as an artist and as a human being: the loneliness, the misty uncertainty that is his past. Plus an enormous resentment at having been given up. He wanted so fervently to find his biological mother. I helped him as best I could. It became sort of a small… project.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No.” Kingo looked Jeppe straight in the eyes and smiled. “Unfortunately, we never succeeded.”
CHAPTER 33
“Are you comfortable?”
Esther de Laurenti fought back tears. Her ankles and wrists were bound with zip ties that cut into her skin. Waves were lapping over her thighs and the soles of her feet had been cut up by sharp stones in the shallow water. Keeping her balance squatting at the water’s edge was almost impossible, but if she gave in and let the waves push her, she would hit the knife he held pointing right at her. The sun hung low in the sky, coloring everything warm and golden, but in her soaking clothes she was so cold her teeth were chattering.
“Good that you finally woke up. I’ve been bored. You slept fourteen hours, at least. But that’s okay; we had to get the helicopters out of the way.” He blinked both eyes hard, as if they itched behind his glasses. “I brought you here to show you my childhood home. Thought you should see it before the whole thing is over. I’ve seen yours, so I guess you ought to see mine. Or to be more precise, one of them. The Dandelion Twenty-Four-Hour Care Center, what do you think?” David Bovin straightened up in the chair he had placed on the beach, without moving the knife, soaring in the air in front of Esther’s face.
“They’re spending millions of kroner renovating it—new rooms, new kitchen, gym, and a nice yard with a trampoline. Back when I used to live here things were different. We slept in a dormitory. At the mercy of the big boys and of those teachers, who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.”
“Let me go,” Esther pleaded. “I don’t know who you are, but I promise you I don’t have anything to do with your childhood.”
“Oh, no? That’s very generously phrased, I reckon. But of course you can afford to be generous. Only child, right, the apple of your parents’ eyes? I wonder what such a nice house in the city is worth today?”
“You can have it if you just let me go. I beg you.” Esther was hit by a wave and toppled sideways into the water. Her head went under and she couldn’t make it back up to the surface with her arms bound behind her back and her legs numb. For a long moment she struggled, panicking at thought of her lungs filling with water. Then she felt his hand roughly grab the back of her neck and heave her up into a squatting position again.
“Believe me, it’s not easy for me, either. I’ve wished for something different my whole life, but it wasn’t up to me, was it?”
Esther coughed and tried to stand up. Her thigh muscles burned. A tilt of the knife got her back down again. “I can’t stay like this. It’s so painful.”
“Do you think I’m interested in hearing about your pain?” he asked. “Do you think I feel sorry for you? You gave me away! You sat there in your privileged existence and couldn’t cope with a child,” he sneered. “What do you think they do with the children no one wants? Do you even understand what you did? What it’s like to be passed from foster family to foster family until they give up and cram you into an institution with all the other kids that no one wants?”
“Stop. It wasn’t me—”
“Look at my arm. When I was nine, my so-called foster father tried to cut my hand off with a kitchen knife. It took six months before the state removed me from that family. No one ever believed me. Do you think anybody took an interest in me, in my well-being, in my happiness, in my drawings? Cry all you want, Mom. You have plenty to cry about.” He brought the knifepoint close to her nose.
“I’m… not… I’m not… your mother.” The cramps in Esther’s legs were so bad that she was gasping and crying from the pain. Snot ran down her chin and salt water stung her eyes.
So this was how she was going to die. Now.
“The choice isn’t yours anymore!” he screamed, spitting at her. “Look at me! I never had a mother, because you didn’t want me. But I managed anyway!”
A wave knocked her down again. This time she didn’t struggle. Maybe she could make herself so heavy that she would sink to the bottom. Then she could slide along the sea floor out into the open ocean and dissolve. Slosh and drift forever. Never be in pain again.
“All this is your own doing. You wrote the script, composed Julie’s murder, the carvings, the whole thing. You gave birth to me! Unintentionall
y perhaps, but out I came.”
His voice was right by her ear. She was hovering high in his strong arms now. The clouds swept in and out of her field of vision, making her lightheaded. She had accepted it. She closed her eyes.
His voice was soft, almost affectionate.
“When Julie opened the door, she was so happy to see me. But you should have seen her face when I got out the knife. I’ve never seen anyone so surprised. Except from a couple of minutes later when I started carving into her peachy skin. I took the liberty of making the carvings my own: my fingerprint on her cheek.”
Esther moaned loudly. He let go of her and she fell onto the sharp rocks, which dug into her flesh. No pain is greater than physical pain, didn’t Orwell write that? But it was a lie. Even with her body screaming in pain, it was the thought of Julie that hurt the most.
“And your friend Kristoffer. The son you never had. You want to know about the pain he was in? How scared he was before he died?”
“No!” Esther screamed with a force she didn’t know she had left. “No, no, no, no, no!”
He hovered over her, shading her from the sky.
“That idiot wanted to meet me, because he had recognized me and become suspicious. He had a keen eye. Then again, he was a tad naive. Do you still not recognize me? I took your fingerprints a couple of days ago, Mother dearest.”
He grabbed her by the hair and lifted her head up off the ground so they had eye contact.
“Not ringing any bells? Are you telling me that I’m FUCKING invisible to you?!”
He let go of her and she fell hard onto the rocks again. Something broke in her jaw.
“Hey, you want to hear something funny?” He straightened up, brought his leg back and kicked her in the ribs. “They just said on the radio that the killer has been apprehended. Isn’t that hysterically funny?”
He kicked her again
“And convenient. That means I can work in peace and quiet. You can be my final piece. My Night Watch, my Garden of Earthly Delights. What do you say? Isn’t that ironically poetic?”
He kicked her onto her back and leaned over her. The lower part of her face was paralyzed with pain, and a mixture of spit and blood was drooling from the corner of her mouth, dripping down into her throat. With a strength she didn’t know she had, she forced her lips into an o and sent a glob of spit at him. It hit him on the chin.
Esther closed her eyes against his angry roar.
CHAPTER 34
“There’s the Tuborg bottle,” Erik Kingo said, pointing at the four-story observation tower shaped like a giant beer bottle. “Thanks for the ride.”
He grabbed his stuffed unicorn and groped for the door handle, clearly not up for any more of this tediousness.
“One moment, we just have a couple more questions. Tell us about your affair with Julie Stender. We have a witness statement confirming that you had a sexual relationship.”
That stopped him.
“She was above the age of consent,” Kingo snapped. “And spare me the moralizing! I’m well aware that kind of relationship sends up red flags in the minds of women over forty.” Erik Kingo pointed indiscreetly at Anette.
“You don’t think that would have been a relevant piece of information to bring up a little sooner? You having a sexual relationship with the victim?” Jeppe couldn’t keep the contempt out of his voice.
“Oh, please! It was years ago, and it didn’t mean shit. Just fun and games. If I had to keep people apprised of all the women I’ve slept with, I would have time for nothing else.”
That pushed Anette over the edge.
“Women? Your lodge brother’s fifteen-year-old daughter! How old are you? Sixty?”
Kingo raised his eyebrows at Jeppe, miming I told you so.
“She’s far from the only teenager I’ve screwed,” he admitted. “I’ve also screwed whores and maids, black, yellow, and red. And if you ask me why, the answer is: Because I can.” He pointed to Anette again. “You obviously eat too much ice cream, but that’s your own concern.”
Jeppe put his hand on his partner’s arm to calm her.
“What did Christian Stender think about your sleeping with his daughter?”
Kingo rolled his eyes.
“It’s not like we fucking discussed it over breakfast. She would sometimes sneak downstairs to my bedroom when I spent the night, it probably only happened a handful of times. He never found out, and I would prefer to keep it that way. I wasn’t the only man she slept with, though, believe me!” Kingo chuckled as he thought back on Julie Stender’s sexual precociousness.
“Are you aware that she became pregnant during that period of time?”
“No.” He didn’t seem like he could care less.
“She was convinced you were the baby’s father,” Jeppe continued, though strictly speaking he only had this information from Daniel.
“That’s ridiculous!” Kingo held up a flat hand as if to stop the flow of nonsense once and for all. “If that were the case, I would have heard about it.”
Jeppe was dying to bring Kingo back to the station, but he knew there would be hell to pay if they did.
“How would you categorize your relationship with Christian Stender?”
“He’s one of my crocodile birds. All artists have them in one form or another—the successful ones anyway.”
“You’re going to have to expand on that a little.”
“He buys my art,” Kingo said, looking a little bored. “Helps me with connections in the private business world. In return, I throw starshine on his life by attending his parties and going hunting with him. It’s a basic tit for tat, profitable for both parties.”
“So you wouldn’t call him a close friend?”
“What’s friendship? We enrich each other’s lives. It’s mutually beneficial. How much more can you ask for?”
“Would it shock you if Christian Stender had anything to do with his own daughter’s death?” Jeppe asked, watching him somberly.
It was hard to see Kingo’s face in the dim light inside the car. He sat motionless. “Yes, of course that would shock me. Why do you ask me that?”
“I can’t go into that at the moment. But are you saying you would consider it unlikely for Christian Stender to have murdered his own daughter?”
“Yes, I would.” He gathered up his things and opened the car door. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late and my granddaughter has to go to bed soon. It goes without saying that I expect the details about my relationship with Julie Stender to remain confidential. Should they get out, I can assure you that I’ll deny everything and pull every conceivable string I can to get you both fired. Good night.”
Kingo got out of the car and slammed the door shut. They watched him walk toward the deserted neighborhood of luxury homes. His gait looked a little less cocksure than it had half an hour earlier.
“What is a crocodile bird? Did you get what he meant?” Anette rolled down her window and inhaled the summer air deep into her lungs.
“It’s a bird that lives off the decaying bits of food in a crocodile’s mouth. The crocodile gets his teeth cleaned, so he doesn’t eat the bird. As long as it does its job right, everyone’s happy.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
Jeppe clapped his hands together, hard.
“Then it turns into dinner.”
* * *
DARKNESS HAD SETTLED over the coast of Øresund. Thomas Larsen and Sara Saidani parked in front of a yellow brick bungalow and checked the number again, Bukkeballevej 14. That was it. The Dandelion 24-Hour Care Center shone golden light out of its large 1970s windows. An understated municipal sign, invisible until they stood at the front door, further confirmed it. Sara looked around. Everything exuded peace and a quiet idyll. She rang the bell and was a moment later asked to hold up her badge to the front-door intercom’s video camera. Apparently it was important to keep someone out. Or in.
A childcare worker opened the door. In his arms he held a crying
infant, whom he was trying to soothe with a blue pacifier. He was rocking the baby mechanically from side to side, as it lay close to his chest, screaming.
“This little guy’s got an inner-ear infection,” he explained. “What can I do for you?”
“Good evening. We’re here in connection with a kidnapping.” Saidani tried to speak normally, but practically ended up shouting at him to be heard over the crying.
“Let me just get my boss. She’s watching a movie with the big kids. Wait here!” The care worker disappeared, the baby’s cries fading with his every step. A moment later a woman came to the door.
“Hi, I’m Jeanette,” said the manager, a compact woman with a short pageboy and wary eyes. She shook their hands.
“We’re here looking for a missing person,” Saidani began. “It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with you, but we have a theory that a suspect may have ties to this orphanage. Could anyone have sneaked in and hidden inside the institution?”
“Here?” she asked, her skeptical look growing more intense. “That’s impossible. We’ve been in every nook and cranny of the building and out in the yard until just a few minutes ago when it started to get dark. There was dancing in the gym and hide-and-seek in the garden. Plus, we have a barbed-wire fence around the grounds and no secret corners to hide in. Why would anyone sneak in?”
“Do you have a soccer coach named David Bovin?” Saidani asked, ignoring the woman’s question.
She hesitated. “Yes, he’s one of the volunteers from the Children’s Aid Foundation. They run various activities for our kids, including dance and soccer. Physical activity is important, especially for the specific kind of kids we have here.”
“Does he have a key to the place?”
She scoffed.
“Even our permanent care workers don’t have keys. As I’m sure you can see, we maintain stringent safety precautions. Child placements are rarely popular with those involved. David comes every Thursday afternoon and coaches the kids in either the gym or the yard. But no, no key.”
“Is he good with the kids?”
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