The Forgotten Girls

by Sara Blaedel

IF WE’RE LOOKING for the same guy, then I’ve got something you ought to see,” Mik said. He explained that he had just returned from the archive in Roskilde, where he had gone to pick up some old cases.

  She had called him up to tell him about the latest development, and she could tell that he was walking while they talked. He seemed absentminded, even when she shared the news about the DNA match between the child care provider and Lise Andersen.

  “Twenty years ago there were several aggravated assaults in those woods. Two of the women were raped and killed. After the press release that we sent out this morning warning women against walking alone in the woods, we were contacted by a retired schoolteacher from Hvalsø, who told us that one of her graduates was the perpetrator’s first victim.”

  Louise stared straight ahead. She found it difficult to imagine the same perpetrator being in the area all the way back then. She had no recollection of those cases, but then it was around that same time that she was engrossed in the aftershocks of her own catastrophe and had her hands full just trying to keep her life together.

  “They never caught the perpetrator,” he added.

  “But then what about all the years in between?” Louise objected. “If this guy was behind a series of attacks, do you think he just took a break only to pick back up where he left off?” she said.

  It made no sense, she thought as she heard a door opening. She assumed that Mik had arrived back at his office.

  “Obviously we need to investigate whether he might be behind other crimes in the intervening years,” he conceded. “But if that’s the case then it definitely wasn’t a series of attacks like the ones that took place back then.”

  “No, of course not,” Louise mumbled. Then the police districts would clearly have been aware that the cases were linked.

  “His DNA was collected in connection with the old assaults but they never found the person behind the DNA profile,” he told her. “That was also before DNA was recognized as evidence so they may not have even been able to convict him even if he had been identified—there is no other evidence.”

  “And it was before the profiles started to get entered in the system automatically,” Louise said while still searching her memory. Surely she had heard about it, she thought, but she’d probably just repressed the story along with everything else.

  “Right now, the forensic geneticists are working on finding out whether the old cases can be linked to the murder of the child care provider. We’ll get the results later today.”

  “Would it be possible for me to read the case files?” Louise asked. If they were able to link them to the child care provider, they would also be linked to Lisemette.

  “You’re welcome to it,” Mik answered. “But you have to come up here. I can’t send them to you because we’re going to need them ourselves.”

  “Of course,” she quickly cut in. “I’ll head out as soon as I get a bite to eat.”

  Louise suddenly noticed that she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten since they sat outside in the community garden the night before. Now hunger was gnawing at her along with adrenaline, which was well on its way to firing up every fiber of her body.

  “CAN’T WE JUST pick up a sandwich on the way?” Eik suggested as they walked down the hall together shortly after. “And today I’m driving.”

  She followed him without objection to a beat-up Jeep Cherokee—black, like the clothes that Eik always wore. The car reeked of smoke; empty soda bottles littered the floor. Louise got her cell phone from her bag, and while Eik rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette she called her parents to check on Jonas.

  “Do you want to stay in Lerbjerg or should I ask if Melvin will be home later today?” she asked. She told him that she was on her way to Holbæk but could probably stop by on the way back.

  Louise looked questioningly at Eik to confirm that he would be okay with taking a detour on their way home. He nodded briefly and emitted some deep grunts as he tapped the wheel to the beat of a Nick Cave song playing from the car stereo.

  “I’d rather stay here,” Jonas sniffled and stifled a yawn.

  “I’ll call you tonight then,” she promised. “Feel better.”

  LOUISE PUT A bag on Mik’s desk with a chicken-and-bacon sandwich and a Schweppes Ginger Ale.

  “You’ve got a good memory.” He smiled and took a gulp before showing them to an office down the hall where the case files were stacked up.

  The first case occurred in the month of May. According to the old summary, Diana Sørensen had just gotten out of school to study for her finals when she was attacked in the woods. The girl explained that she was getting off her bike to walk up a hill when a man grabbed hold of her.

  “He came out from behind a tree as if he had been waiting for me,” the girl had said.

  There weren’t that many people coming through the woods, Louise thought, so it seemed illogical that he would have actually stood there waiting for the schoolgirl to pass by. More likely he’d followed her without her noticing. The girl had broken her right collarbone and her shoulder was dislocated from the fall, she read, inferring that the man must have yanked on her hard when he knocked her off her bike.

  Diana Sørensen had been unable to describe her assailant. The police report noted that the victim was presumably unconscious during part of the incident, and it was added in parenthesis that she had been a virgin at the time of the attack.

  Aside from the sounds, the man had been quiet during that part of the rape, the young girl recalled, and she never saw him as anything but just a large shadow.

  “It looked as if the sun had disappeared; suddenly everything was just dark,” she had explained. Once the perpetrator had thrown her to the ground facedown, he had ripped off her tight jeans.

  “He breathed in such a strange way,” she had described, and the officer had asked her to explain what it was about the rapist’s breathing that frightened her.

  “He sounded like an animal,” the report said, and Diana Sørensen had elaborated on her statement by explaining that his breathing always seemed to have the same pulse: “Like a fan or a horse wheezing.”

  “The young girl describes the perpetrator as a monster, a cross between man and beast,” Louise said, looking over at Eik, who was intently chewing on a match while reading. “But she couldn’t say what he looked like.”

  He didn’t seem to be listening at all, she thought. He had a deep wrinkle across his forehead, and his index finger followed the lines as he worked his way through one of the other old reports. Louise shook her head with irritation and picked up the next case.

  Two weeks later, a twenty-two-year-old woman had been raped and killed in the same part of the woods. There were clear indications that she had fought vehemently. The killer’s DNA had been scraped out from under her fingernails. According to the forensic report, the young woman had scratched and kicked in her attempt to defend herself until the perpetrator broke her neck, and only then did he consummate the rape.

  “Listen to this,” Eik interrupted her, spitting out his match into the wastebasket. “If this is the same perpetrator that we’re looking for, this says something about his defect of character.”

  Louise reluctantly took her eyes off the report on the rapist’s first casualty.

  “Gitte Jensen was walking her dog in the woods and had taken it off the leash even though dogs must be kept on leash. At one point it started barking like crazy and ran off between the trees. She tried calling the dog and was about to go look for him when she heard some strange sounds and twigs snapping on the forest floor. By then the dog had gone quiet, and she ran like hell all the way home, thinking about that rapist that everyone was talking about.”

  He fell silent for a second as he read on.

  “What about the dog?” Louise asked.

  “They found it,” he replied. “Or rather, what was left of it.” He bent over the report and read out: “ ‘It is presumed that the dog was lifted by its hind legs and hurled around.�
� ”

  Eik grimaced and put a new match in his mouth, disgust written on his haggard face.

  “You read it.” He pushed the report toward her.

  Louise pulled it closer while stealing a glance at Eik, whose quiet distress was striking.

  The dog’s skull was crushed and all of his vertebrae were broken, she read. The police had found bits of fur in the bark of the surrounding trees. Cerebral matter and blood were splattered across a sizable area, and based on that information Louise envisaged that the dog had been hurled around with terrific force.

  “How the hell can anyone even swing around a chap like that?” Eik asked after collecting himself a little.

  Louise shrugged. The dog was a male weighing upward of ninety pounds. “I guess you can if you’re strong enough,” she said.

  “But it probably tried to bite.”

  She thought of her dad, who once yanked a large fox out of the chicken coop. He had avoided getting bitten because he held it by its tail and swung it around so it couldn’t reach him.

  They sat in silence until Louise slid the report back across the table.

  “It attacked him,” she said.

  Eik nodded. “And then he destroyed it.”

  She felt a tight knot in her stomach. If the twins had been in some sort of contact with this perpetrator, then what had they been subjected to?

  “They never caught him,” Louise mumbled as she began to lay out the cases on the desk. Diana Sørensen had managed to get herself home after the assault. The doctors subsequently thought that she had probably been lying in the woods for a while before regaining consciousness, and maybe the rapist thought she was dead when he left her. At the back of the file was a map on which the schoolgirl had circled the place where the attack happened.

  Louise found Avnsø and turned the map to orient herself.

  “The rape happened just on the other side of the large Troll’s Oak,” she said, looking at Eik. “That’s only a few hundred yards from the Deep, which is where Mik believes that the runner was attacked.”

  She took the map from the next case file. In late summer another woman had been raped and killed not far from there.

  “All of the old attacks happened in the same part of the woods,” he said, pointing to the place where the dog had been found.

  “But nobody lives around there,” Louise said with frustration.

  “The perpetrator must have thorough knowledge of the woods,” Eik said, looking at her. “He knows the forest paths well enough that he’s able to take a shortcut to get ahead of his victims once he spots them. Who knows the woods like that?”

  He lit a cigarette and walked over to the open window. Louise was about to protest but instead she shrugged and tried to ignore it.

  “Lots of people know the woods. Riders, orienteers, forest workers, scouts,” she answered. She personally knew every way through there; she had ridden down all the small roads and knew exactly where to cut through the trees to get somewhere as quickly as possible.

  Once Eik had finished smoking and closed the window, they laid out all the cases by date.

  “The first one happened in May,” he summed up. “The last one was in August. And all of them in the early hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings, as far as I can tell.”

  Louise nodded. “Was there any specific pattern?” she asked. “Or some sort of regularity? Let’s have a look.” She started writing down the dates on a notepad.

  “It was a month between the first one and the second.” Eik leaned forward to read the next cases. “But then there were two just one week apart.”

  “What about the two women who went missing?” Louise suddenly remembered. “That was that same summer.”

  The year after she’d left town. She had seen the missing person reports back when they were trying to identify Lise Andersen.

  “Lotte Svendsen was one of them, and it was just after the Whitsun celebration.”

  Louise walked over to the computer and ran a search on the year. “There it is. May eighteen. That was the weekend before Diana Sørensen was raped. So maybe she wasn’t his first victim after all?”

  “What about the other one?” Eik asked. “When did she go missing?”

  “I don’t remember the date but we’ve got them both in the system back at the department.”

  There was a quick knock at the door, then Mik walked in.

  “We’ve gotten a positive result back from Forensics,” he said and asked them to gather up the case files and follow him to his office. “The old DNA profiles match our case. It was the same perpetrator in the woods back then.”

  24

  WHERE ARE YOU?” Camilla asked when Louise finally answered her cell phone. She had been calling pretty much every ten minutes for the past hour even though she had figured out that Louise must have set her phone to silent mode. Anger was still pumping through her body, and her throat was sore from yelling. She couldn’t even remember everything she had said. Could she have called off the wedding?

  “Can I stay with you for a little while?”

  She had packed a large weekend bag and already slammed the door behind herself.

  Markus had come home from school in the middle of their fight and when she turned her back to Frederik to go upstairs and pack, she had popped into her son’s room and told him to get some clothes together along with his schoolbooks for the rest of the week.

  But he wasn’t about to go anywhere. He wanted to stay with Frederik until she came around, and Camilla didn’t have the strength to argue with him as well.

  So now she had walked out on both of them and wondered if she’d just written herself out of the chapter that was supposed to be the beginning.

  “It’s only for a few days, until I can find something else,” she said, adding that she had to give the couple who was subletting her apartment thirty days’ notice.

  “Of course,” said Louise, and suddenly Camilla couldn’t cope with the thought of starting over one more time. Her life was a succession of restarts. When she met Tobias and got pregnant, she had thought that it was going to be forever but it seemed like only a second later that she was left alone with an eighteen-month-old boy. Every attempt at starting a relationship since had capsized.

  “We only just left Holbæk to head back to the department so it’ll be a little while before I get home,” she heard Louise say while she blew her nose.

  “No need to rush. I’ve still got my key,” she said and promised to take care of dinner.

  LOUISE ASSUMED IT was Camilla calling again as she was about to put her cell phone back in her bag. But this time it was Lisemette’s father on the other end of the line.

  “We buried Lise today,” he told her. “The funeral was beautiful, and of course the weather couldn’t have been nicer.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Louise said warmly. She hoped he’d make his peace, and was glad he’d at least gotten lovely weather for the somber event. She’d noticed that the warm May sun had inspired people to put on shorts and T-shirts. After a long winter, they couldn’t wait to shed the heavy layers.

  “Now she’s resting next to her mother, and the minister gave a nice sermon even though the two of them never knew each other. Well, my wife and the kids didn’t know her, either…”

  “I’m glad it went well,” Louise said.

  “But now my wife and I were just sitting here talking about Mette,” he said. “She would get very anxious if she felt insecure and scared. I can’t help wondering if she’s just left to her own devices now, sitting out there somewhere feeling miserable and scared. So I wanted to check if maybe there’s any news?”

  Louise leaned her head back against the soft headrest of the car while she weighed her answer.

  “No,” she answered honestly. “We don’t have anything yet. Right now we’re working on finding out where your daughters have been staying all these years.”

  “I’ve also been wondering if maybe we could find someone who remembers somethin
g from back then,” he continued, “but I don’t recall the supervisor’s name, only that it was a man.”

  “As soon as we have even the slightest clue to go on, I promise you’ll be the very first to know.”

  “You think she’s alive?” he asked, his voice hopeful, and Louise slumped down a little. She thought about the crushed dog and the old homicide cases and couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the beast they were hunting in the woods.

  “If she’s alive, we’ll find her,” she said grandly, refraining from letting on what she personally believed.

  He thanked her so profusely that Louise felt filled with shame at the thought that she might have promised more than she could deliver.

  CAMILLA HAD PUT out hummus, ham, sausage, and cheese on the table. It looked like she had cleared out an entire delicatessen, Louise thought.

  “The bread’s in the oven,” Camilla said and sank onto a kitchen chair, taking a large gulp of her wine.

  Louise patted Dina and went to pour the dog’s food in her bowl before taking a seat across from her friend.

  She had a headache, and the Tylenol she’d taken before biking home hadn’t kicked in yet. She accepted the glass of wine that her friend handed her and thought that it might be more effective to wash away the thoughts of Klaus and the beast still on the loose.

  “I think it’s over,” Camilla said, putting her glass down. “I’m not so sure that Frederik is the kind of guy who lets you just slam the door in his face.”

  “You did that?” Louise asked before getting up to find a bread basket when the timer for the bread went off.

  “I just got so angry, I couldn’t help it. I was minding my own business, having a sandwich in the kitchen. Suddenly he’s standing in the doorway, with that look on his face.”

  She grimaced and picked her glass back up before giving Louise an indignant look. “Do you know what he said to me?”

  Louise shook her head dutifully.

  “That I’d have to face the fact that it takes a bit of manners to be among the model citizens of Roskilde.”

  Louise was making herself a plate, but put her fork down and started laughing.