Blue Blood (Louise Rick)

by Sara Blaedel

  ‘Yes,’ Louise said convincingly. ‘We want to make a deal with you so you make it out of this situation as levelheadedly as possible.’

  ‘So you actually think I can get something out of this?’ His tone was full of contempt.

  She hoped he would relent so they could keep the conversation going, and at the same time she glanced at her watch. It would take another half hour at least before the team got out here from the city. That was a long time to wait, with things moving at this excruciating pace.

  Other hostage takers would start gushing like a waterfall and then demand they have a private plane waiting for them out at Tune Airfield to take them out of the country, and then recite anything at all that they could recall from similar situations in American movies. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t seem desperate in that way, didn’t get carried away and ramble on, talking faster and faster. Instead it was like he was weighing and contemplating each word he said.

  Louise could hear Susanne crying in the background.

  ‘If you let her go, I’ll come in and take her place,’ she suggested.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with you?’ he asked, with surprise in his voice.

  ‘You could talk to me.’

  He sounded amused. ‘But you don’t even know me. Why would it help to talk to you?’

  It struck Louise that he sounded like a businessman on a conference call, and she didn’t really feel like she was bringing anything to the table that he would consider appealing.

  She had a choice: tell him he was right, that maybe it wouldn’t do him any good to talk to her, or brazenly lie.

  ‘First of all, I can guarantee that I will do everything in my power to help you so that we can wrap this business up calmly and quietly and find a solution that you will be satisfied with,’ she said convincingly. ‘Let Susanne go and I’ll come in, and then we’ll talk about it. I could also be your bargaining chip with the negotiating team if you’d rather wait for them and find out what they have to offer.’

  He mumbled something she couldn’t make out. Then: ‘You don’t know me, so you wouldn’t understand me. Plus, I don’t have any use for you.’

  He sounded resigned.

  Louise took a deep breath, inhaling the air deep down into her gut.

  ‘Actually, yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I know you, and you know me.’ Well, ‘know’ was a bit of an exaggeration, but in a way they did know each other. They would have, anyway, if he’d shown up for their coffee date.

  The silence on the other end of the phone became brooding.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Call me “Princess”,’ Louise said, leaning against the wall by the front door.

  Silence. She started shivering, even though the sun was beating down on her. She had pushed them both all the way, to a place where a response was unavoidable.

  She heard a sound from inside the house and turned to wave Lars over.

  ‘I’m going in,’ she whispered, so it wouldn’t be audible over the phone. ‘Call headquarters and get them to send a patrol out to Karin Hvenegaard’s place. He may have paid her a visit, too.’

  Lars looked away and was about to say something angry but stopped himself. She could tell from his clenched jaw muscles. Then he turned his face toward her again and put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Watch out for him,’ Lars urged. ‘We don’t know why he came here today, but he’s already killed one person.’

  So far she agreed with him.

  ‘He’s a hunted man,’ Lars continued. ‘If he lets her come out, it’s because he thinks he can get more out of this situation if he uses you as a hostage.’

  Louise knew her partner was right, but honestly right now she was afraid that Jørgen thought he would do better by holding on to Susanne.

  She stepped back over to the front door and listened. She saw Suhr and Heilmann rushing across the parking lot, and she could tell that Suhr wanted to tell her something. But just then the door between the living room and the entryway opened and Susanne came into view, guided by an arm. She was bleeding from her neck and stood there frightened, staring at the floor. Her hands were tied together tightly in front of her, and Louise noticed that Jørgen hadn’t used his usual cable ties. This looked like some kind of cord he’d found lying around in the apartment.

  ‘She won’t come out until you’re in.’

  Louise quickly glanced at Suhr, and, before he had a chance to object, she stepped into the apartment with all her muscles tensed and took up her position next to Susanne. She briefly considered trying to yank Susanne out the door with her so they could both be free, but she let go of the idea. If that didn’t succeed, there was nothing else to fall back on. She put both her hands behind her head to signal that she was not armed and would not attack, and she noticed his grip on Susanne’s arm loosen.

  ‘Go,’ she told Susanne.

  Louise stood for a second, watching Susanne hurrying away from the building. An effervescent feeling of relief and victory managed to trickle through her before, a second later, she felt a strong hand cinch in around her elbow and pull her into the living room, where she stumbled and struck the couch.

  30

  Jørgen stood there for a long time, watching Louise as she slowly got up and hesitantly sat down properly on the couch.

  ‘You knew?’ he asked, standing over her so she had to crane her neck to look up at him.

  She shook her head. Immersed in another role, she was speaking as the girl who had seen him in town.

  ‘I went to Tivoli to meet you, but you didn’t come. I saw Henning instead.’

  She sensed his surprise when she mentioned his brother’s name.

  ‘Your brother is dating my best friend,’ she explained.

  ‘Camilla?’

  He was still standing there, studying her. There wasn’t anything aggressive or menacing about his appearance, and, somewhere deep inside her, that hurt. He seemed confused and uncertain, as if he had been forced into accepting a deal he didn’t want.

  ‘Yeah, Henning told me about your lunch together and about how Camilla had to go to Roskilde and how you left right after her,’ Louise said, presenting the chain of events in a slightly more simplified version than what had really happened. ‘Did you follow her here?’ she asked.

  It took a little while before he nodded, as if he was considering whether he had anything to lose.

  ‘You look like each other, you and your brother – at least from the side. When I saw Henning, I recognised his silhouette,’ Louise said and explained that she had seen Jørgen on the metro CCTV footage when he had walked Christina Lerche to her train at Kongens Nytorv.

  He listened, but she couldn’t tell what was going on in his head.

  ‘Suddenly I could see how it all might fit together,’ Louise said. ‘So I came out here.’

  She watched his face. Even though he didn’t seem particularly threatening right now, she was well aware that that could change in an instant. And there was something about his contemplative expression and the fact that he didn’t seem stressed that made her extra-vigilant.

  He was waiting for her to say more. Suddenly the silence felt interminable and she sensed her own anxiety as she tried to think of something more to say. She didn’t dare glance down at her watch to see how much longer she had to stall.

  ‘Your brother was the one who told me your name is Jørgen,’ Louise said.

  She saw officers in SWAT gear walk past the window. They were getting into position, so she surmised the negotiating team had arrived.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ Jørgen finally said. He had taken a seat and was moving the fingers of both hands in and out of each other like gears engaging and disengaging. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  Louise refrained from commenting on that last remark, but she took it as an opening that might allow her to win his trust.

  ‘I don’t think that either, that you killed her … intentionally,’ she added after a brief pause.


  He pulled his hands back, as if he’d burned them, and then quickly leaned toward her.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ his voice was suddenly a hiss. ‘She wasn’t dead when I left. She tricked me.’

  There was a smash as he gesticulated wildly with his hands and knocked over an empty teacup. He stared intensely into Louise’s eyes. ‘It was her own fault!’

  She nodded to show she agreed with him. Suddenly there wasn’t much time. She had been trying to drag things out to this point, but now the problem was whether she had enough time to talk him down before the SWAT team outside was ready to take over the conversation and she would have to make do with being a weapon in the negotiations.

  She tried to reassure him. ‘She didn’t die until you’d left the apartment,’ she said in a convincing voice. ‘The coroner called me and told me that it could easily have taken a fair amount of time before she died.’

  She could tell that he had heard the words but didn’t understand what they meant. He was focused solely on having his innocence confirmed, she noted, which was classic behaviour in these types of situations.

  ‘You won’t be charged with murder,’ she said, hoping he would find that comforting because he would undoubtedly be charged with manslaughter. Actually, she wouldn’t be surprised if Suhr decided to charge him with second-degree murder anyway, since they were investigating the case as a death by aggravated battery.

  ‘She wasn’t supposed to die.’ His voice didn’t have the same aggression in it, but it was still accusing. ‘She invited me over, and she was the one who wanted to take things into the bedroom,’ Jørgen explained.

  Louise nodded silently as he spoke, noting that he wasn’t stupid. Of course he would stubbornly maintain that what happened was consensual. He was guaranteed to do that when Susanne’s case went to trial, too. So it would be up to Susanne and her lawyer to prove the opposite.

  He glanced out the window, passively following what was going on outside. Traffic had been stopped, pedestrians were being held back. The only activity was of various police who had taken up positions in the car park and all around the perimeter of the building. Louise glanced over at the clock on the living-room wall. It felt as though she had been sitting across from him for hours.

  ‘There wasn’t anything wrong,’ Jørgen said, not really to Louise, ‘but then suddenly it went wrong anyway. Completely wrong, obviously.’

  For a second she thought he was going to start crying. She wanted to ask him which part he thought had gone wrong, but didn’t dare. She had the sense that that was precisely the problem – he didn’t understand what the catalyst had been. He had had his own plans when he packed his rape case and headed off on more dates; if those plans couldn’t be carried out to completion, perhaps he looked at that as something going wrong. That was a boil she had no intention of lancing right now. The forensic psychiatrist could deal with that one, because she was pretty sure there would be a psychiatric evaluation in his future. She heard voices outside the front door, not voices so loud they were meant to be heard inside the apartment; they were just the sounds of people discussing something, which told her it was almost time. Her stomach tensed, and she could feel her pulse.

  ‘I promise that you’ll get the best legal representation.’ Louise looked right at him. At first his eyes wandered, but then she managed to establish eye contact and she spoke slowly, with weight behind each word. ‘If we go out now, I’m sure Camilla will do everything in her power to help you.’

  She was just tossing things out there, but she got a response. She saw it in his eyes, and that made her proceed.

  ‘The negotiating team is about ready to take over, so I can’t do any more for you. And in a second the SWAT team will come in. If we walk out first, they will no longer consider this a hostage situation.’

  She was running out of things to say, and he seemed calmer now. She saw the officers in tactical gear and the sharpshooters taking up their positions.

  ‘It would also be nice to get this wrapped up before too many media people show up,’ she added.

  She had already noticed a number of photographers standing back behind the barrier that the police had set up.

  ‘If anything goes wrong, I’m taking you with me when I run,’ he said after a long pause for consideration. His voice was once again a hoarse whisper.

  She nodded, knowing he wouldn’t have a chance to run off anywhere once they stepped out the door. He would be shocked by the size of the armed police response. She felt a pang in her heart at betraying him and wished he would come with her now so he wouldn’t have to go through the whole negotiation process. If he didn’t come out voluntarily, they would send the elite anti-terror unit in after him. Of course he wouldn’t know it was them. He probably had no idea that in Denmark, taking someone hostage is classified as an act of terrorism, nor that the very best-trained forces were always deployed to extract a hostage from a situation like this.

  He got up and paced back and forth in the living room.

  ‘We’ll go together,’ he said, giving her a look that she had a hard time interpreting.

  His eyes were both ferocious and scared, but outwardly he still seemed calm, as though he was sure this whole scenario was taking place because there had been some misunderstanding. As if there had been a mistake. A wrong number. Something that actually didn’t have anything to do with him. Louise was not entirely confident, but she stood up anyway and nodded, aware that this could end very badly.

  ‘Is Camilla out there?’ Jørgen asked, looking at her enquiringly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Louise replied with a shrug. She hoped she wasn’t.

  He walked over slowly and stood in front of her. ‘I’ll do it because you promised you would help me. And because I’ve decided that I would really like to get to know you.’

  She shuddered. Does he really not get that’s not an option? It struck her with even more clarity that he did not consider his assaults crimes. He was not picturing the charges the police would file against him later that night. He is completely fucked up, and then some. He’s a textbook sociopath! ran through her mind.

  ‘Why did you come see Susanne today?’ Louise asked as Jørgen began pushing her toward the door.

  ‘She wrote in the paper that I’d killed someone. That’s not true. She knows me and knows I’m not like that.’

  Louise sank. There was no way she could look him in the eye.

  ‘You know, not all girls find it normal to be bound and gagged. It could easily seem frightening if that wasn’t something you’d agreed on beforehand …’

  She stopped talking because his face seemed to shut down.

  They were at the door.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘I’ll call them and tell them we’re coming out.’

  He watched her while she dialled and relayed a brief message to Suhr. Fear had taken hold of him, and there was nothing ferocious left in his eyes – just nervousness. His eyes wandered. He gripped her arm, ready to push her out in front of him when they opened the door.

  ‘When you open the door, we’ll walk slowly down the path through the front yard,’ she said urgently, worried that he might not understand what would happen if he moved too quickly.

  He pushed the handle and opened the door. Suhr was standing at the end of the path, staring at them but not doing anything.

  They took their first steps very slowly, like an animal cautiously moving into unfamiliar territory. Jørgen pushed her ahead of himself like a shield; once they’d made it a couple of steps beyond the front door, he suddenly stopped, taking in the whole scene. There were sharpshooters on several rooftops, aiming at him. Officers in tactical gear formed a ring all the way around the perimeter of the building. To Louise, the crowd of people loomed as an inscrutable mob, but it seemed as though he was memorising the details.

  With a violent shove, he pushed her further ahead. The motion was so brutal that Louise had the sense that he had planned to
dart back into the house and stand his ground, but had decided that he probably wouldn’t be able to pull her back with him. She saw Suhr subtly shake his head with his eyes locked on something behind her, either urging Jørgen not to do anything stupid so they could get this over with, or maybe it was a signal to a marksman who was probably up on the roof behind her.

  Suhr started walking toward them. Behind him, the officers who would make the arrest were ready. Louise made eye contact with Lars and recognised a couple of the people who she knew were part of the negotiating team. They had withdrawn to the side and were standing in the neighbour’s front yard, watching everything play out without their help.

  Louise stopped and let Jørgen walk past her. He didn’t condescend to look at her as he slowly walked toward Suhr, but as he passed her he said, very softly, ‘I trust you.’

  She watched him as the tactical teams and officers in bulletproof vests swooped in to handcuff, search and arrest him. She watched them walk over to the parked cars, where four men climbed into the back of a dark blue van to sit with him. Louise vaguely registered Suhr walking over and standing next to her, and heard him ask if she was okay.

  She shook her head and discovered that her legs were shaking underneath her. She noticed how the strength started seeping out of her body. She wasn’t okay at all, she thought.

  The crime-scene investigators prepared to enter the apartment. It hit her that she didn’t know what had happened to Susanne, but that would have to wait.

  It took a little while before she noticed the photographers’ flashbulbs aimed at her as well as Jørgen. Frightened, she turned around so her back was to them.

  Lars came over, put his arm around her, and pulled her away. ‘Come on,’ he said, supporting her as they started walking over to the car. She saw Nymand, Roskilde’s chief of police, approaching with his hand outstretched and a big smile. She looked the other way and picked up her pace.

  Her partner opened the door and helped her in. Her muscles weren’t obeying, her legs were trembling and her hands were restless.

  ‘Do you think he was planning to rape her again? He had tied her hands,’ Lars said as they drove back down Københavnsvej toward the motorway. ‘Or did he come to kill her? Also, the uniforms they sent out confirmed that he had not gone to see Karin Hvenegaard.’