The Butterfly House

by Katrine Engberg

  “Let’s all consider how a psychiatric treatment home could potentially lead to such nasty murders. And keep your eyes and ears open! Two murders in two days—there’s definitely a risk that he’ll strike again. Let’s make sure we manage to stop him. Or her.”

  Jeppe’s phone rang on his desktop. Larsen leaned over and looked indiscreetly at the screen.

  “It’s your mom,” he announced. “You want me to answer?”

  “I can handle that on my own, thanks.” Jeppe swallowed his annoyance. “We’ll leave in ten minutes.”

  While his colleagues filed out of the office, Jeppe declined the call and chucked his phone back on the desk. Anette would have known how to give Larsen a funny, biting comeback and put him in his place. Maybe it’s your mom, Larsen, calling to thank Jeppe for last night. Something like that.

  Jeppe shook his head. He was going to have to up his game.

  CHAPTER 8

  “If we just lift our arms, then I can—”

  Nurse Trine Bremen tried to get the elderly patient to cooperate, but he wasn’t listening, just looking around the room, confusion in his watery, aged eyes. He had just been admitted with chest pain and ventricular tachycardia and had obviously received some kind of sedative from one of her colleagues. Either that or he had dementia.

  She looked in his chart at the end of the bed. He hadn’t been given anything other than aspirin yet.

  “Hi, Gregers! Are you awake?” Trine patted his hand and tried to establish eye contact. “Listen, there’s no indication that you’ve had a heart attack. You can relax. We’re going to keep you here for a couple of days and run some tests on your coronary arteries so we can find out what’s causing your chest pain.”

  The patient slowly focused on her.

  “Hi there,” she said. “I’m Trine. Would you like a drink of water?”

  He nodded and carefully drank from the plastic cup she handed him. Then he pointed to his heart and cleared his throat.

  “I had angioplasty… uh, I can’t remember when.”

  “A year ago. It says so in your chart. Don’t worry, we know all about it. Everything’s under control. How are you feeling now? Still in pain?”

  With difficulty, he propped himself up on his elbows.

  “Maybe it’s a little better now…?” he said. “I’m still thirsty.”

  Trine poured some more water into his plastic cup and watched as he drank again. He moved as if in slow motion and still seemed confused.

  “I need to ask you some questions, Gregers. Are you ready for that?”

  He nodded reluctantly.

  “The feeling came on all of a sudden, is that right? Can you describe what happened? Dizziness, chest pain?”

  He nodded again, looking insecure.

  “My chest felt tight. And then I was gone.”

  “You were gone?” Trine asked, as she wrote angina pectoris.

  He waved his hand irritably, as if he himself didn’t quite know what he meant.

  “Have you felt that way before?”

  “Not many times,” he said, shrugging his shoulders evasively. “Maybe once or twice.”

  That, Trine knew, probably meant he had been having trouble for a long time. Many patients, especially men, refuse to accept that they’re sick.

  “Do you smoke?”

  Again he made an irritated hand gesture.

  “Gave it up years ago,” Gregers said. “Say, can a guy get a cup of coffee in here?”

  “You need to fast, Gregers. No coffee today.” She patted his hand. “And now, could you please help me out. I need to put this IV in your hand.”

  “Uh,” he said, eyeing her skeptically. “Says who?”

  Trine counted to ten in her head. She and Klaus had fought again yesterday, yelling at each other until the kids woke up and started crying. It had started with a stupid misunderstanding and then escalated from there, the way it usually did. Something about who did the most housework, about the kids’ field trip, and how disappointed they both were in each other. Sometimes maintaining a normal, bearable everyday life for their little family seemed like an insurmountable task. Now she felt worn out, her feet swelling in her support hose, and her ability to deal with cranky old men gone.

  “We’re going to inject contrast fluid into your arteries so we can do something called a myocardial scintigraphy, just as soon as we can get you in. So you need to be fasting. That’s why you need this IV.”

  “I want to talk to a doctor! Someone in charge.” He stared straight ahead, as if she weren’t worthy of his attention.

  Trine felt a knot of pent-up frustration building in her belly. That old familiar wall in front of her, holding her back every time she dared to feel good enough, pretty enough, popular, and successful. The unlucky cards she had obviously drawn at birth. With a resolute motion, she took her patient’s hand and started swabbing it with alcohol.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, pulling his hand back. “I want to talk to one of your supervisors!”

  “They’ll tell you the same thing I just have: You need an IV so that we can give you medicine and painkillers.” She grabbed his frail fingers in a firm grip and brought the needle close to the thin skin on the back of his hand.

  He howled in affected pain.

  “What the hell kind of way is that to treat people? I’m going to complain!”

  “I haven’t even touched you yet.” Trine saw the needle shaking between her fingers and gulped, suddenly on the verge of tears. “It’s your own fault if I hurt you with this needle. You need to lie still.”

  “I don’t take orders from you!”

  Right as he slapped her hand away, the alarm went off. Not the nurse call button, which normally just meant a full bed pan, but the actual code alarm. That alarm always meant an emergency.

  Trine dropped the IV and ran toward the sound. The alarm set off a stress response in her and surely in her coworkers as well. That’s what it was designed to do: trigger immediate action. She felt an irrational spark of elation. After all, her expertise could mean the difference between life and death.

  She ran as fast as she could down the white and gray hallway, past open doors, chairs, and beds. By the time she reached room seventeen, breathing hard, the endorphins were coursing through her body, making her feel high.

  A small group was already gathered around the bed closest to the door, in which a frail woman suffering from a postoperative infection was lying. She’d had a pacemaker replaced, if Trine remembered correctly. Dr. Buch was resuscitating the patient along with an attendant and two of her nursing coworkers: Pia doing the external ventilation and Rebekka preparing the defibrillator paddles. A volley of orders flew back and forth.

  “What’s the rhythm?”

  “No pulse, V-fib!”

  “Stand clear. Check breathing and pulse!”

  “Continue CPR!”

  They worked together as one, a well-oiled machine, a coveted little club. Trine stepped up to the bed.

  “Should I get the adrenaline ready?” she asked.

  The doctor glanced fleetingly at her. She was young, not much older than Trine.

  “Thanks, Trine, but we’ve got it.”

  The rejection stung. But only half as much as the very brief look Pia and Rebekka exchanged over the bed. She wasn’t welcome.

  Trine turned around and left the room without saying a word, put the voices and the hectic energy behind her and returned to the calm of the hallway. She wouldn’t give them the pleasure of seeing her cry.

  * * *

  “IT CAN’T BE here, can it?”

  Jeppe pulled over to the side, peering out the windshield. An idyllic pond lay glassy and dark between weeping willows and beech trees, whose branches stretched up into the low-hanging clouds. Their leaves had only just started to turn, fluctuating from a bottle green to bright yellow and then dark red.

  Out Thomas Larsen’s passenger-side window, the old buildings of Brede Works, the cradle of Dani
sh industry, were glowing white, and under them chuckled the water of the Mølleåen. Once upon a time the millstream had supplied energy for both copper production and a clothing factories. Nowadays it was all just a museum and there was no one around, no traffic, no noise from stamping presses or assembly lines.

  Jeppe remembered his mother dragging him out here to a special exhibit on China back when his cultural upbringing was at the top of her priority list. Back when they spent every weekend at the Louisiana Museum or the National Museum or attending plays, reading or watching art films in the original language. Poor Mom, his becoming a policeman must be the biggest disappointment of her life.

  “The GPS says farther out, toward the Open Air Museum. Go straight ahead and then up the hill to the right.” Larsen pointed through the fogged-up windshield. “Over there somewhere.”

  They crossed the creek toward the tall trees. As the road brought them up the hill, it started raining again.

  “It should be on the right.”

  Jeppe stopped the car in front of a white stucco house with a glossy black tile roof behind a beech hedge and an electronic wrought iron gate. A discreet sign under the doorbell next to the gate confirmed that they had arrived at the Forest’s Edge Youth Center. They got out and let the sound of the slamming car doors echo in the silence among the trees. Apart from the melancholy dripping from the branches, there wasn’t a sound. It was both soothing and eerie.

  The door opened before they had a chance to ring the bell, revealing a woman in her sixties standing in the doorway. She had short hair and glasses, was average height, and wore practical casual wear in faded summery colors. In one hand she held a lit cigarette.

  “Come in! The gate closes automatically.” Her voice and the gray skin on her face indicated that the cigarette in her hand was far from her first. Rita Wilkins looked like a woman who had worked hard and lived hard.

  “We’re celebrating a birthday today, so there’s leftover coffee and cake in the kitchen. Let’s go sit in there.”

  Rita Wilkins took a final, greedy puff on her cigarette and then put it out against the sole of her shoe in a practiced motion, before holding her hand out to them, her distracted eyes not making eye contact. She guided them through a front hall, so full of raincoats, backpacks, and shoes they almost couldn’t see the walls and into a big open kitchen with a flowered tablecloth on the table, children’s drawings on the cabinets, and stacks of dirty plates in the sink from the birthday breakfast. The kitchen looked like a normal family kitchen, just on a larger scale.

  “The coffee is still hot, I bet. Just help yourselves!”

  She pointed to an insulated carafe surrounded by multicolor mugs on the long table, then went to the sink and started rinsing plates and putting them in the dishwasher. She was in constant motion, almost gruff, not worrying about making noise or chipping the dishes.

  They sat down, and Larsen poured them both coffee while Jeppe took out his notepad.

  “As Detective Larsen explained on the phone, we’re here to talk about the two murders that have taken place in Copenhagen in the last two days. One commonality between the victims is that they both worked in your old Butterfly House treatment facility…” Jeppe paused to give her an opportunity to respond, but she just nodded and returned to washing the dishes. “Could you tell us a little about that place?”

  “Well, basically Butterfly House was a residential program,” she explained without turning around, “that offered specialized rehab for children and teenagers suffering from psychiatric disorders or social challenges: schizophrenia, anxiety, eating disorders, and so on. Serious cases, but ones that still didn’t qualify for full institutional care. My husband at the time, Robert, and I opened the home five years ago with a small, dynamic group of employees. We had room for up to six patients.”

  “But the facility closed two years ago. Why was that?”

  She turned off the water and dug around in the cupboard under the sink, took out a scouring pad, and straightened back up.

  “There’s a time and a place for everything. The kids were growing up. When they turn eighteen, they enter the adult system.…”

  “But couldn’t you have taken in new residents?” Jeppe put his pen to the paper but didn’t write anything.

  She shrugged her shoulders and turned the tap on again.

  “Were there problems among the staff?” Jeppe asked.

  “No, none of that. The staff was a great team, a real community. The core group of us worked together closely, and it was a prerequisite that we could cooperate smoothly.”

  And yet the facility had closed after only three years.

  “So, the home functioned well?”

  She hesitated for a moment with her back turned.

  “When you’re dealing with mental illness, there are always challenges. It can be tough work. But, yes, Butterfly House was a good place.”

  A hint of sadness had crept into her voice, which Jeppe couldn’t quite decode.

  “You had a number of nurses working.…”

  “We had three, one full-time and two temps. Tanja Kruse worked full-time, and…” She shook her head tiredly. “I haven’t been able to think of the names of the other two yet, or Alex’s last name. The old contracts are up in one of the boxes in the attic; I just haven’t had time to go through them.”

  “What about the young patients? Where did they go when Butterfly closed?”

  “They were scattered to the winds and dispersed in the system.” She had frozen at the sink, her voice distant. “We all were.”

  “Is it possible that one of the kids”—Jeppe searched for the right words—“could have a reason to take revenge against former staff members?”

  She didn’t respond to that.

  Jeppe exchanged a glance with Larsen and was just about to ask again when Rita Wilkins dumped cutlery off a plate, straight into the sink, and then seemed to freeze again, her hands under the running water. To his surprise, Jeppe noticed that she was crying.

  “I’m sorry that we need to be so blunt.…”

  “I understand,” she said, holding her hand up to stop him. “Of course you do. It’s all just a little… much, all of this.”

  She turned off the water, dried her hands on her pants, and came over to the table, for the first time looking Jeppe in the eye.

  “You’re asking what happened to our patients.” She took a deep breath and then exhaled heavily, sat down on the edge of a chair, and put her hands on the table, palms down, as if she didn’t trust them to stay still if she didn’t watch them. “Have you heard about Pernille?”

  “No.”

  “Pernille Ramsgaard was one of the four kids who lived at Butterfly House. She had a serious eating disorder and was in really bad shape at times.” Rita Wilkins broke off the eye contact and turned her hands palms up so she could inspect them while she talked.

  “A little over two years ago, Pernille committed suicide. She was only seventeen. It’s so sad when they lose hope that things can get better.” Rita Wilkins grabbed a mug and passed it to Larsen, who immediately got up from his chair and poured her some coffee. When the mug was half full, she yanked it toward herself so that he had to jerk the carafe back upright to avoid spilling on the tablecloth.

  “But unfortunately it happens. We had done everything we could for Pernille, but in the end she didn’t want to keep going. Tragic, really tragic…”

  “Is that why you closed Butterfly House?”

  “Her parents blamed us for her death,” she said, looking up.

  “Us?” Jeppe held his pen at the ready, over the still blank page of his notepad.

  “Robert and me, the whole staff.” She drank a little coffee, set down the cup, and placed her hands flat on the table again. “They thought we had failed, that we were responsible for Pernille’s death. Their grief and anger were understandable.…”

  “Do you believe they were justified in feeling that way?”

  She shrugged and said, �
�They sued us. That didn’t get them anywhere. But it cost us the place. The committee dropped our grant, just like that. The cost per patient is one hundred and fifty thousand kroner a month for round-the-clock care. I mean, there was nowhere else for us to get that money.”

  Her chin crumpled.

  Jeppe hesitated. The woman before him was clearly upset. Why, then, did he still get the sense that she was carefully picking and choosing what she did and didn’t tell them?

  “Did Bettina Holte and Nicola Ambrosio have a special connection with Pernille, more so than the others?”

  “No, not really.” Rita got up abruptly, walked back to the sink, and continued tossing the cutlery into the dishwasher with the rest of the dirty dishes.

  “The only person Pernille was more attached to than the rest of us was her caseworker.”

  Jeppe flipped back through his notes and asked, “Kim Sejersen, the social worker?”

  “Yes, but really we all participated in the treatment as one big family.” She closed the door of the dishwasher and turned the knob until it started humming.

  “Ramsgaard, you said? Pernille Ramsgaard?”

  “Her father’s name is Bo, her mother, Lisbeth. They still contact me regularly. I have their address and phone numbers if you want to talk to them.”

  Rita walked over to a chest of drawers, opened one, and pulled out an address book. Jeppe watched her write on a slip of paper and gestured to Larsen that he should take it.

  “Call them and ask if we can stop by!”

  While Larsen called, Jeppe checked his own phone. Monica Kirkskov, the scientist at the Medical Museion, had texted that she had more information and would like to meet. And his mother had called twice. What was with all this sudden attention? Jeppe put the phone back in his pocket and stood up.

  “Thank you for your time. Call us when you find the names of the old employees or if you happen to think of anything else we should know. And please look after yourself. There’s a killer on the loose, so don’t go around on your own for the next few days.”

  Rita was already on her feet. They followed her to the open front door, where she immediately lit another cigarette. Smoke billowed out into the moist forest air between the beech trees. A few yards from the door, Jeppe turned around.