by Inger Wolf
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Frost and Ashes is translated from Danish after Frost og Aske by Mark Kline [email protected].
Copyright © Inger Wolf, 2018
Copyright this edition © People’sPress, Copenhagen 2018
Cover: Juan Padron,
https://juanjjpadron.wixsite.com/juanpadron
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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ISBN-13: 978-87-7180-901-5
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People'sPress
Vester Farimagsgade 41, 1606 København V
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Afterword
About the Author
Books by the Author
Under The Black Sky - excerpt
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Grab your copy today!
Chapter One
Friday, January 5
Lieutenant Detective Daniel Trokic's black hair was wet with snow, and his bare cheeks stung from the cold. The hem of his leather coat was covered with clumps of ice. Large, heavy snowflakes landed on the swirling creek in front of him. He shivered while looking at the boy lying in a bed of branches directly above the water. Spotlights showed a thick layer of snow covering his body, though the wind had blown off a few patches to reveal his green down coat. Blue veins stuck out from his polar-white face, and a fishing line was wrapped several times around his thin neck. A faint smell of smoke rose from his singed hair and clothes and the countless small burn marks on his hands.
* * *
Trokic walked over to the red-and-white barrier tape. Captain Agersund had just arrived but was already holding a steaming hot cup of coffee from the techs' vehicle. They were about a half kilometer from Mårslet, a small town on Giber Creek. Fields spread out on all sides; a bare landscape marked only by small clumps of trees with naked branches sticking up in the air like giant brooms. Trokic peered down the creek, but it was too dark to see very far. They stood for a moment in silence and watched the techs and forensic pathologist work.
"It's an eight-year-old boy from Mårslet," Trokic finally said. "His name is Lukas. He's been missing since three-thirty yesterday; he was on his way home from his after-school club. A few teams have been searching for him since yesterday evening around six; a dog found him an hour ago. Kornelius and Taurup just left to inform the parents."
"Damn," Agersund mumbled. He shook his head as if that could erase the gruesome sight in front of them. "What's that around his neck?"
Trokic turned to face his boss. He licked a snowflake off his lips, and immediately it melted in his mouth. "Fishing line. Bach says he's been strangled."
"Looks like the killer might have tried to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. When he could've hidden him, or driven him away."
"Maybe. Whatever happened, nothing about this looks simple to me."
Trokic zipped up his black leather coat the last few centimeters to shut out the bitterly cold wind. After coming home from a quiet day at work, he’d opened a bottle of wine and begun skimming the paper when the call came. And now he was staring at a scene where everything looked too small in the spotlights. He noticed something blue, a knitted mitten hanging halfway out of the boy's coat pocket. And farther down, a white sneaker.
"When did it happen?" Agersund said.
"Bach says he's probably been here since yesterday. Rigor mortis, livor mortis, small signs from his skin of being in water. But he can't give us a precise time of death. The boy is as cold as everything else around here; body temperature can't tell us anything."
Torben Bach, the forensic pathologist, stood awkwardly halfway in the water beside the boy. Because of his experience, more often than not he was called in on homicide cases. His white coveralls blended in with the snowy surroundings. When he noticed Agersund, he raised his hand.
"We can't see what happened because of the snow," Trokic said. "It's making everything difficult; all the tracks are covered. And, of course, several of our vehicles got stuck; they haven't arrived yet."
The storm had moved in late that afternoon. The temperature had been dipping the past several days, and first, a blanket of large flakes fell peacefully before the wind began whipping small pellets of snow. That evening, a full-blown blizzard had hit and quickly paralyzed traffic as snow began drifting.
"Any local witnesses?" Agersund said.
"Not yet, nobody lives right around here. But there are several houses spread out along the road. We need to get some officers knocking on doors soon as possible."
"Goddamn horrible weather." Agersund was notoriously anti-winter. He nodded at a group of people speaking quietly and stomping their feet to keep warm. "The media’s on their toes today."
Trokic shrugged. "We don't have anything for them."
"I'd like to hold a press conference first thing tomorrow morning. Tell them that if they keep asking. If we’re lucky, they won't make up anything too crazy before then."
Fifteen months had gone by since they'd had any kind of unusual homicide. Back then a young woman had been found in Marselisborg Forest with her throat cut, a case that had the media chattering about various theories of ritual murder. But now they’d love to keep the media from stirrin
g things up. Trokic had only driven through Mårslet a few times. It was an idyllic, fairy-tale-like town close to Århus. Nothing bad ever happened there. Zero crime. Even thieves didn't bother to venture into the area, and the local constable hardly ever had to call them in on a case. In other words, the town was a model of virtue in the district. Which would make the font size of the headlines that much larger, he imagined.
"For God’s sake, Daniel, he looks like my boy at that age," Agersund mumbled. He tapped Trokic's shoulder with his short, rough index finger as if he were holding Trokic personally responsible. "Take care of this out here. We’re having a briefing, eight this evening."
He handed Trokic his coffee mug and trudged into the snowy darkness.
* * *
Trokic hesitated a moment before returning to the creek. The techs had removed most of the snow covering the boy and dumped it into a large green container. The snow would be melted and examined in the lab. The boy's chestnut-brown hair framed his stiffened face. A purple streak from a felt tip pen ran down his cheek, and his mouth was slightly open as if he were gasping to stay alive. A few gaps separated baby teeth from several permanent teeth. Trokic was relieved that someone had closed his eyes, which earlier had been staring blankly up at the sky. He glanced at the fishing line that had left deep, red cuts in several places on the boy's neck. Somebody had put some extra effort into it, he decided. Anger?
Bach walked up beside him. The pathologist's gray hair was tucked under his hood, and only a small part of his face was visible.
"Was he killed here?" Trokic said.
"Mmmm, well…" Bach looked reluctant to commit himself. "I think he was thrown in the creek closer to the village, the current carried him here, and he got tangled up in the branches. I doubt he floated very far. It doesn’t look like his down coat is waterproof, and if it had absorbed a lot of water, he'd probably have sunk to the bottom."
He gestured at the snow. "We've got to get him in; these conditions are hurting us. I've checked for tiny hemorrhages on his eyelids and face, mucous membranes, but it's really difficult to see in this light. It looks like he has scratches on his throat, too."
Trokic nodded and walked the final five steps over to the boy. Again, he smelled the terrible stink the cold couldn't stifle. The tops of the boy's hands were covered with horrible, reddish-yellow burn marks, and his small fingers were like flattened boils. As if he had reached for something and gotten burned. An avalanche of memories from a war-torn country flooded his thoughts. Thick, asphyxiating smoke. Burning buildings, screams, heat, and fire consuming everything. A destructive, definitive force.
The boy had fought against the fire. It had been part of the final moments of his life. But where? The fields and trees lay under an enormous white blanket, and there was nothing else nearby.
Chapter Two
Daniel Trokic threw his wet black leather coat on a hook, stuck a Rammstein CD in his small stereo on the table, and plopped down in his office chair. A few moments later, Morgenstern and a series of heavy metal riffs pulsated throughout the room; as always, the massive sound restored a sense of order to his thoughts.
He'd returned from Christmas vacation in Croatia two days earlier, and in a way, he was happy to be back home in Denmark. Or at least back in his hometown, even during the ugliest time of year. Brown and gray snow on the road, filthy buses, hungry screaming seagulls hunting for crumbs of pizza. Århus in January wasn't without its charms, though. The holiday season was over, for instance. All they needed to do was take down the garlands from the walking street and haul the Christmas tree away from the Town Hall Square, and things like the stress level on people's faces would be back to normal. Trokic had lived in the city almost his entire life, close to forty years, and he knew it better than anywhere else in the world. He preferred its everyday appearance. Evening traffic crept outside his window. He'd been lucky on his way home; several of the larger streets and expressways were still closed because of a car accident and no snowplow.
A message from Agersund lay on top a stack of papers on the table: "Read before briefing." The sheet underneath described a competition for making flødeboller–whipped egg whites covered with chocolate. Not a part of the required reading, he assumed, but someone must have thought it was important.
He tossed the paper aside and began reading the report from the first officer on the scene, reports from the search written by the town constable in an abbreviated, formal style of writing, and the first statements taken by officers. In one report, Lukas Mørk was eight years old, while in another he was eight and a half. Were the ages of kids that old still expressed in terms of half years? He'd been one hundred-thirty centimeters tall. Trokic held up a photo that showed a happy boy with chestnut hair and light green eyes. Thin, finely-shaped nose with a sprinkle of freckles. His smile was crooked and a bit mischievous. A school photo, he noticed when he glanced at the back side. He stared at it a second too long. The boy's eyes smiled too, and Trokic sensed the happiness of the moment. He attached the photo to his board with a magnet. The techs were still working where they'd found the boy, and he also lacked a postmortem report from Bach. He expected the autopsy would be delayed until the next morning.
* * *
The briefing room was quiet as the twenty or so officers from Department A at Århus Police Headquarters waited for Agersund to find a marker that worked. Many of their faces revealed a simmering anger and energy.
"To hell with it," Agersund mumbled as he tossed away a worthless marker. He straightened up. "We'll be staying with the same teams, and I hardly need to say we’ll be working evenings and weekends. Right now, there isn't a single parent in Mårslet, or Århus for that matter, who isn't nervous as hell."
He looked over his motley crew and scratched his nose. He was in his late 50s, the father of two teenagers. Since his divorce three years ago, his wardrobe had suffered, and today he’d apparently run out of any clothes that matched. His verdigris polo shirt had lost all shape, like something that at best had been dried on a radiator.
"Daniel Trokic will be in charge of the investigation. He will be given a copy of every report on a daily basis. Trokic, why don't you go over what we have at the moment."
Trokic slid off the table and stood beside his boss. He made eye contact with Detective Lisa Kornelius and nodded. He had special plans for her, and she wasn't going to be happy to hear them. At all.
"Lukas Mørk disappeared on his way home from the after-school club yesterday afternoon. He was in second grade, and every day he was at the club until about three-thirty, when one of the workers sent him home. It took him about fifteen minutes. According to his mother, he usually came right home, but once in a while he'd make a detour and be a bit late. Which is why she wasn't seriously worried until around four-thirty when she called the club and was told he'd been sent home at the usual time."
Trokic taped an enlarged map of Mårslet to the board. Someone behind him gulped down part of a soda – a can, judging from the short metallic screech – and half-muffled a belch.
"The green line is the route he normally took. As you can see, it's not all that long. From the school, he usually walked past the church, down Tandervej, then he turned off into the residential area where they live."
He pointed at the map. "According to the people working at the club, the boy was alone when he left yesterday. We know he reached the church; this afternoon, some of you spoke with three parents who saw him while they were picking up their kids. Right now, that’s about all we have. His mother told us she went looking for him. And his father drove around the neighborhood when he got home from work about five-thirty. His mother says she wondered if he'd crossed the street to buy candy at the supermarket. Presumably, he had twenty crowns his grandmother gave him the day before, and he'd done that a few times, but she says it wouldn't have delayed him very long. But anyway that's why it was one of the first places she looked. None of the checkout girls remembered him, though they'd been busy then."
"Don't they have surveillance cameras?" a young female officer asked. Anne Marie twirled a lock of red hair around her ear.
"They do, and I've assigned someone to get ahold of the recordings."
She frowned. "But what about Lukas, didn't he have a cell phone?"
"The parents say he didn't have one."
"How the hell can someone not have a cell phone?" a young officer in back mumbled.
"Maybe because he's only eight years old," someone suggested.
"Really, though," Anne Marie said. "Late afternoon, one of the busiest times of the day, surely people saw him."
"We don't know how far he got before the killer entered the picture," Trokic said. "So okay. Eight o'clock last night, the parents called the local constable, David Olesen. He judged the situation to be serious because of the boy’s age, and because it was dark and snowing hard. Also, the boy had broken his normal routine. Olesen immediately got ahold of several neighbors and volunteers and put together a search party. They combed the entire town but came up empty." Obviously, he thought.
