by Sara Blaedel
Michael Stig loudly derided them as ‘all those annoying tips’. Toft shushed him, taking him to task and saying he ought to welcome all leads. There was no telling which one might break the case.
Louise smiled as Toft talked his partner down in a calm voice. They had already started following up on the potentially interesting calls.
One had come in from a woman in her mid-thirties who for the last six months had been keeping a secret of the nightmare she’d experienced following what she had thought was a successful dinner date at her home.
As recently as March, another woman had had what she described as a ‘nasty’ experience. But she wasn’t sure it could be called rape since she’d ‘asked for it’.
Even Lieutenant Suhr was shaken by how unsure the women were about where the boundary between rape and consensual sex was and what people were apparently willing to subject their bodies to. He sat in Heilmann’s office, reading through the reports that were written up as the tips came in.
‘If it hurts and you ask the man to stop and he keeps going anyway, then people have to realise that that shifts it from something consensual to assault,’ Suhr growled, infuriated, arranging the pages he’d read into a neat stack.
‘It’s just not that simple,’ Heilmann said without looking up.
Obviously Suhr was aware of that. It was just so obvious, when you sat there looking at a whole stack of calls, that these women should have reported the incidents. The definition of rape had changed since online dating came onto the scene. They saw more instances of cases where a couple had agreed to meet and to have sex. They just didn’t agree on when to stop and how rough it would be. Proving that an assault had occurred could be difficult in cases like that.
They also received loads of messages about men who looked nothing like the suspect they had described. Blond, jet-black hair, short, fat, foreign, not foreign, older, younger. One of the junior detectives who had been tasked with answering the phone had to sort through all of them. He knew where to draw the lines and who to include or discard.
‘I want to see the messages Bjergholdt sent,’ Louise said, stepping into the doorway to Suhr’s office on Wednesday afternoon. Suhr and Heilmann were sitting there quietly discussing which tips they should follow up on. ‘Maybe I can figure out what it is about them he responds to. There must be something or other that triggers him to target these particular women.’
She had already made copies of the profiles of women Bjergholdt had contacted, and there was a pattern. They were reserved. Not a word about sex or decadent or expensive habits. They just wanted a couple of candles on the table, to spend time alone with someone, and to feel safe. These women preferred cinemas to bars, family togetherness and leisure activities to a career.
Suhr waved for her to come in.
‘I need to figure out what turns him on,’ Louise explained. She needed more time and was glad she didn’t need to fight for it. Suhr had already decided that she should continue her search while the detectives worked on the leads and talked to persons of interest.
‘Toft has all the correspondence between him and the two victims. You can copy the whole stack,’ Suhr said, returning his attention to the papers in front of him.
The DNA results had come back from the pathology lab earlier that day. They showed that the semen in the condom and the pubic hair found on the floor of Christina Lerche’s apartment both matched the samples collected from Susanne’s back. Based on the suspect’s signature, or M.O., as Heilmann usually called it, they had already assumed they were dealing with the same man, but now they had concrete evidence. There was no doubt that this was an important step forward and a big relief for Suhr. In addition, another match showed that the man who called himself ‘Kim Jensen’, claiming to be from Hørsholm, who had raped and beaten Karin Hvenegaard two years earlier, was in fact the same person as Bjergholdt.
Three victims.
Louise was inclined to agree with Suhr that there were bound to be more. Maybe as soon as Stig got back from taking the statement of a woman whose description of an assault last year was strikingly similar to Karin’s.
*
Louise sat down heavily when she got back to her office. Fatigue washed over her. The sheer quantity of online profiles made the task seem insurmountable, and she still didn’t understand what kinds of things made people respond to a certain profile. Maybe there were special rules that she just hadn’t figured out yet as a newbie to the world of online dating. She picked up the phone and called Camilla.
‘Hey, could I read your articles on online dating?’ she asked. ‘That series you did, and anything else you’ve got in your archives.’
Camilla sounded busy and touchy. It didn’t sound like she was planning to set down what she was working on to comply with Louise’s request.
‘If it can wait until I get back in a couple of hours, I’ll put together a bundle for you,’ Camilla offered, intentionally packing up her things as audibly as possible as they talked.
Camilla had catapulted through the ranks on Morgenavisen’s crime beat in the last year. She had free rein to do what she wanted as long as Terkel Høyer, her editor, could count on as many front-page stories from her as possible. It had been a long time since Camilla had had to call around to the various police stations to find out what was on their blotters for the day. It had also been a long time since she had been sent to a pre-trial hearing; if she ever went to one now, it was to cover a story she had pitched herself. Otherwise, those sorts of mundane assignments now fell to the intern or to Ole Kvist, a colleague who had been with the paper a lot longer than Camilla.
‘I’m on my way out to do an interview for a piece I’m writing tonight. So I’ll be here if you stop by later,’ Camilla said. ‘I probably won’t have time to chat, but I can have the articles ready for you.’
It wasn’t hard for Louise to figure out that Camilla must be referring to the interview with Susanne. Printing her story while the investigation was still in full swing would obviously be a scoop. But Louise didn’t comment on that.
The earliest she could pick up the material would be around six or seven, but she could head straight home from there and read it that evening. Maybe that would help her learn some of the unwritten rules of the online scene that she was ignorant of. Not that Susanne was an experienced online dater, but maybe she had stumbled onto something because she had been so totally raw and honest about what she was looking for.
Louise had already read a couple of the emails Bjergholdt and Susanne had written to each other, but then she set them aside again, deciding to wait until she had read Camilla’s articles. Now she was back searching for dark-haired men, and she found herself lingering a number of times on profiles that captured her interest. Not because they struck her as anything Bjergholdt might be lurking behind, but because Louise found the self-portrayals intriguing on a purely personal level.
Before leaving, she warned Heilmann that Morgenavisen was going to be publishing an interview with Susanne the next morning. Louise was just shutting down the laptop she had been issued for her searches when Suhr walked in.
‘Hey, do you think you can get Camilla Lind to reprint the information about the suspect we’re looking for, along with the interview?’ he asked. ‘It’d be good to keep that fresh in people’s minds.’
‘I don’t think I’m going to be talking to her,’ Louise said. Why doesn’t he fucking pick up the phone and call her himself? she thought.
He muttered something she didn’t catch before he turned around and disappeared.
She enjoyed her bike ride up to Rosenborg Castle Gardens, just catching sight of the Renaissance verdigris spires over the wide-crowned trees, then turning north onto Kronprinsessegade, where Morgenavisen’s offices occupied a beautifully restored two-hundred-year-old neoclassical building. She parked her bike and headed up the stairs to the third floor, where the crime desk was located. Camilla was there, concentrating on writing, when Louise walked in.
; Camilla looked up from her screen, but seemed in another world.
‘Do you have time for a cup of coffee?’ Louise asked.
Her friend shook her head and said, ‘My deadline is in an hour and I still need to get it okayed.’ Camilla nodded at what she’d written.
Louise was glad that Susanne had remembered to ask to read through the piece before it was published – if she indeed was the one Camilla had interviewed. Louise briefly contemplated mentioning that Suhr wanted her to reprint the description of the suspect, but decided to drop it.
‘All right. Let’s get together another time,’ Louise said, taking the plastic binder containing the articles Camilla had printed out for her. Camilla had changed since Henning had entered the picture. She no longer had the same need to spend time chilling out with her friends, or maybe Louise just noticed it more since she was living alone now.
‘Henning and his brother are stopping by tonight. You’re welcome to come over. Markus will be there too,’ Camilla said, explaining that his babysitter had picked him up from school.
That babysitter was God’s gift to the single mother. She had known Markus since he was in kindergarten and jumped at the chance whenever Camilla couldn’t pick him up from his after-school club.
‘No, thanks, but that’s sweet of you,’ Louise replied. She just wasn’t up to it, but it was sweet of Camilla, and she really did want to meet Henning – just not tonight. They gave each other a quick kiss on the cheek. Louise walked back down to her bicycle and rode south along The Lakes separating central Copenhagen from Frederiksberg, turning onto Gammel Kongevej.
*
She wasn’t much the wiser by the time she finished reading Camilla’s articles about the dating culture later that evening, but it had occurred to her that the online dating scene could be divided into two groups: people who set up a profile exclusively to find a partner or companion, and people for whom this became a lifestyle. Susanne, Christina Lerche and Karin Hvenegaard belonged to the former group, whereas Bjergholdt was in the latter. She still couldn’t decide if it was meeting strange women that drove him, or the knowledge that he could hide his true identity – or if he entirely lacked those kinds of psychological motivations and was just using the internet as a supply source for his fetish. Either way, he was icy and calculating from the start and exploited the anonymity the internet provided. Or maybe he had started out with more genuine intentions and discovered how much freedom he had later. There was no way to know, she concluded, as she tried to piece together a pattern in her mind.
On the other hand, she had no doubt that the internet and that type of online contact had now become a part of his life. He travelled in those circles. That was proved to her when he showed up at the mixer. Those two young women had known him. She still hadn’t heard back from Stine Mogensen, actually, so she must not have found him yet.
Louise tried to picture him. What the fuck kind of person was he? Chivalrous, courteous, polite, she wrote on a piece of paper. Orders multiple-course dinners and calvados with his after-dinner coffee. Invites people to the quaint old wharf at Nyhavn, goes to hip dating mixers. He’s urbane, she concluded. He’s familiar with Copenhagen and knows his way around here. He walks his dates back to the metro, and shows up at Susanne’s apartment.
Something dawned on her as she was reading Camilla’s articles. It didn’t matter so much where you met online, but rather that you had a life in the virtual world at all. You met new people over the internet, formed new connections. People went online to play Yahtzee. Camilla had written about a woman who spent eight hours a day playing Yahtzee online with people she had never met in real life. Her best friends were people she knew from the site. As the virtual dice tumbled across the screen, they would write back and forth to each other, and that obviously allowed them to form close, intimate bonds.
When she had first read about that woman, Louise had a hard time taking her seriously. She was about forty, was apparently quite normal-seeming and extroverted, and didn’t have the least bit of trouble getting to know other people, either at work or in her free time. In the article, she discussed the world that had opened up to her when she started surfing the ’net. She talked mostly about her Yahtzee friends, calling those friendships both deeper and far more intimate than the ones she had with her friends who she hung out with in the real world. She made a big deal about saying that she had never felt a need to meet these online friends face to face. What they shared belonged in the Yahtzee universe, and it was better not to mix that with her everyday life. But that didn’t mean that it was less important to her. She had made sure to emphasise that at the end of the article.
Louise understood exactly what Camilla meant when she compared the woman’s two lives to people who had a vacation home somewhere remote but spent their everyday lives in the city. Those two lifestyles didn’t necessarily have to merge, either. Maybe the appeal was just that, switching back and forth between wellies and stilettos, as Camilla had poetically put it. All the same, it struck Louise that living in the cyberworld to that degree could outcompete living in the real world. Scary, especially since Louise mostly used the internet only to google things, check the weather, or email. With a sigh, she gathered the articles together into a pile and got ready for bed.
24
The Susanne Hansson article filled most of the front page the next morning, and Camilla’s interview continued on a second page. Louise folded up the paper after a cursory skim. She also noted the box in the lower right corner with a photo of Suhr and a reprint of the description of the suspect, which had already appeared on Tuesday: CONTACT THE POLICE, the heading read, and people did. Men and women both. In droves.
Louise shook her head in dismay at the men who called in claiming that they were the man the paper was warning people about. They started tracing those calls, but nothing had come of that so far.
And then there were countless messages from women who had been attacked by a man whose description or M.O. matched Bjergholdt’s.
On the other hand, the flood of new, relevant tips had restored Suhr’s optimism. ‘We have at least twice as many leads now,’ he said with satisfaction when the group gathered that morning to see where they stood.
They all agreed Bjergholdt was the person who had murdered Christina Lerche and raped Susanne Hansson and Karin Hvenegaard. They were also pretty sure he was behind two of the rapes they had received calls about, but that would be hard to prove. They showed the victims the stills of him from the CCTV footage and the victims confirmed that it looked like the same man, but that alone wasn’t strong enough evidence to prevent a good defence lawyer from picking apart the police charges even before the prosecution had a chance to present its case. Not that they were close to bringing anyone in at this stage anyway.
When Louise returned from the briefing, she sat down in front of her computer, her mind wandering. Her stomach felt empty, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t had breakfast. She hadn’t felt hungry, and by the time she finally did, she had a cigarette and a cup of coffee instead. Before, she would have got by on mineral water and apples, but that wasn’t enough any more. Peter called and asked if they could get together for a cup of coffee over the weekend so they could work out how to divvy up their joint savings account and the possessions they had purchased together.
Suddenly the weekend seemed daunting. She caught herself wishing that something would happen so she could bury herself in her work and the time would fly by. After a lot of cajoling, she had agreed to go out with Flemming Friday night. They had spoken only once since he had been over, and she didn’t want to spend a whole evening talking about her failed relationship. On the other hand, she didn’t have any other plans, and it would do her good to get out.
She felt another wave of nausea after she ate a slightly stale piece of bread with butter she found in the kitchenette. She only just made it to the bathroom in time to crouch over the toilet bowl. Once back in her office, she found the number and called her doct
or. A nagging suspicion had been creeping into her consciousness the last couple of days. At first she had tried to ignore it, but it continued to push its way to the front of her mind.
‘He doesn’t have any openings tomorrow,’ the secretary at her doctor’s office said emphatically, ‘and Monday the urgent cases from over the weekend will be coming in, so unless it’s an emergency, the first available appointment is Tuesday.’
Louise grudgingly conceded that it was not an emergency and made the appointment.
The next day, Louise forced herself to go along when Lars came in and said it was time for lunch and that he had to go to the cafeteria because he had forgotten his lunch on the kitchen counter at home. There was a throng of people and a heavy odour of food. Again Louise’s stomach lurched. She considered stopping by the pharmacy on the way home so she could buy a test and find out for sure, but the idea was so awful that she just couldn’t face knowing. God, what an awful accident that would be, she thought, following Lars to the end of the cafeteria line.
She stared dully at the fruit basket sitting next to the cash register and looked at the floor as the guys ahead of her filled their plates with steaming helpings of pork meatballs in curry sauce. She took a piece of rye bread and a banana and was ready to head back down to the office.
‘Come on,’ her partner said, nodding toward the long cafeteria table.
Louise reluctantly followed. She really just wanted to go back to the office and eat there so she could keep working. She had just briefed the lieutenant on an idea she’d had the night before and really wanted to get started.
‘Fine by me,’ Suhr had said, hurrying on his way.
She had realised then that Suhr was going easy on her. He was babying her because she had told him Peter had moved in with someone else, and Suhr thought searching dating sites would be easier on her while he had everyone else out searching for Bjergholdt and his victims. She was so furious at the special treatment that she couldn’t stop herself and, before she knew it, she was standing in his office, taking him to task, and lecturing him about how the internet had become the preferred reality for lots of people. She was quite a way into her monologue before she noticed that Sergeant Heilmann was sitting in the chair across from Suhr, watching the whole scene with disapproval on her face.
