by Sara Blaedel
“It’s a missing person report from a few weeks ago, but there’s something suspicious about it. Rønholt asked me to give it to you,” Mik hastened to add, as if he was apologizing. “A boy from Hvalsø disappeared.”
She groaned inside. She didn’t need more ghosts from her past creeping into her life, and certainly no more cases involving people she’d known while growing up.
“The boy’s name is Sune Frandsen,” Mik continued. “He’s the son of Frandsen the butcher. The one with the white van.”
Louise stiffened. The butcher. She had reported him for illegal sale of meat and dealing on the black market. Actually, all she had done was tell Mik about it, because she never could catch the men who once had been part of Klaus’s circle. He’d probably escaped with a warning, she thought.
“Okay,” she managed to say. “I didn’t even know he had a son.”
“Sune disappeared on his fifteenth birthday, which was about three weeks ago,” Mik said. “And we haven’t found a trace of him. He left his wallet and phone in his room. The family is already in a bad situation—his mother is dying from cancer. That’s had a big impact on the boy.”
Louise jotted notes down on a pad.
“He was in the eighth grade at Hvalsø,” Mik continued. “The principal of the school and the boy’s parents are afraid that he ran away from home to take his own life. His father describes him as unusually quiet before he disappeared. As I’ve said, he was very unhappy about his mother’s illness; he was having trouble dealing with it. The school reports that Sune had skipped a lot of classes the past few months, and that his classwork generally wasn’t going well. Apparently that wasn’t like him.”
Louise nodded. She was well aware that boys committed suicide more often than girls. Especially when carrying around this type of emotional burden.
“I still don’t see why you and Rønholt decided to give us the case.”
“Sune’s class teacher has just been in to see me,” Mik said. “He brought along a newspaper, Midtsjællands Folkeblad. It’s a local rag. Delivered door-to-door,” he added, as if the explanation was needed.
Louise knew the paper, which her parents got.
“He showed me a photo of a few fox cubs from an article in the paper’s nature section. They were taken from one of those photo hides that nature photographers use, so they don’t scare the animals away. The cameras take pictures automatically; they have a motion sensor or an invisible infrared ray. In other words, the photographer wasn’t there when the picture was taken.”
“Okay,” Louise mumbled, nudging him on.
“The fox cubs were, of course, in the foreground, but far back to the right there’s a boy sitting on the ground beside a small campfire. The teacher is absolutely certain it’s Sune.”
“Okay then, so all you have to do is find out where the photo was taken. Then drive out and bring him home,” Louise said. She still didn’t understand how this involved her unit.
“It’s not that simple,” Mik said. “Yesterday, when the paper came out, the teacher drove to the parents’ home to show them the photo, and it ended up with him being thrown out of the house, literally. Sune’s father ordered him to keep out of the family’s business. He refused to look at the photo, and he didn’t want to hear that his son could be hiding, in need of help.”
“How much does the boy in the photo resemble the butcher’s son?” Louise asked. She looked over at Eik, whose desk was pushed up against hers. Obviously he hadn’t been following the conversation; his eyes were glued to his computer screen. Louise realized she didn’t even know if any new cases had come in while she’d been gone, or if he was looking at some of the old cases they had been given. Somehow she had managed to push work completely out of her head.
“It looks a lot like him,” Mik said. “This seems to be a clear missing person case to me, and we’ve had it for two weeks now without making any real progress. That’s why I’m sending it to you.”
He was following procedure. When a missing person hasn’t been found within two weeks, local police stations shuttle the case on to the Search Department, which then picks up the investigation, tracking the movements of the person and collecting identification information.
It was almost too strange that the butcher from Hvalsø ended up on her desk, Louise thought. True, her unit—she and Eik—primarily investigated and did fieldwork, while their colleagues in the department for the most part worked in the office, coordinating registers and searching international data banks for personal information pertaining to searches. But she had been back for all of ten minutes and there he was. The butcher. If Mik had called Friday, it would have been Eik or one of the others who would been sent to the small mid-Zealand town.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of parents accepting the disappearance of their child,” she said. She glanced over again at Eik, who was still staring at the monitor. “In fact, they usually have a horrible time dealing with the situation, even when there’s a corpse involved.”
“Exactly,” Mik said. “Something’s wrong here, and that’s why I think you should look at it, too.”
4
Camilla Lind picked up the pace. What had looked like a small shower when she left home was now a downpour. Maybe she should turn around, she thought. But she loved the smell of the wet forest floor, the raindrops plunking her sweaty forehead.
She had begun running after moving into her in-laws’ large manor house, Ingersminde, in Boserup, not far from Roskilde. She never went very far, but at least she ran, which gave her the opportunity to explore the large section of private forest on the property.
The path narrowed and curved to the right, passing through a small thicket that quickly gave way to the more open space of forest. As she ran, she tried to come up with a good title for the interview she’d been working on all day. She was a freelance journalist, currently taking assignments for the paper in Roskilde, and once in a while they gave her some doozies. But it had been a pleasure to interview Svend-Ole at his little workshop out in Svogerslev. For the past thirty-five years he had emptied the slot machines in Tivoli, and he had a large collection of one-armed bandits in his garage that he and his wife enjoyed playing.
Suddenly Camilla caught sight of something between the trees. She slowed down. Everything looked blurry through the rain, but she could make out a boy crouching under a big tree, eating something he picked up off the ground. Even at this distance, she could see he was soaked to the skin, his wet hair plastered to his head.
She started walking over toward the clearing. As she drew closer, she smelled wood burning, a sour odor, and she noticed a large area where there had been bonfires, which made her wonder. She’d definitely never been here before.
“Hi!” she called out. “Aren’t you cold?”
The boy started when he heard her voice, then immediately jumped up and ran.
Which surprised Camilla, who called out, “Hey, wait!”
But the boy sprinted off. Strange, she thought. She decided to run after him.
Just before reaching the tree, her legs slipped out from under her. She swore loudly as she fell, landing on her stomach in a mud puddle.
Slowly she stood up. Besides being shaken by the fall, she was covered with mud. She walked over and sat down with her back against the tree. A wet pile of picked-over food lay where the boy had been sitting. She thought it looked like leftovers from a grill party. It troubled her that the boy had been eating it. Some animals in the forest seemed to have been feasting, too, from the looks of the several gnawed bones scattered around. But they’d left some of the food. They must have been interrupted. Maybe by the boy, she thought, shuddering.
She was getting cold, sitting there in her wet jogging clothes, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. Though the forest was private property, everyone had the right to walk through it, meaning that he had no reason to run. Some people did drive in, which was forbidden, but Frederik or the manager gave them hell when th
ey caught them.
Camilla winced from the pain in her knee. After standing up and carefully shaking her leg, she leaned over to wipe the mud off. Strangely enough, the mud was more red than brown. Suddenly she realized it was blood, not mud.
Desperately, she wiped her hands on the tree trunk, then she jogged through the trees toward a small stream she’d discovered earlier. She felt foul, unclean. Along the way she tore off leaves from saplings and bushes, and tried to wipe the blood off.
She was freezing by the time she found a path down to the stream. Cautiously, she stepped onto the stones sticking up out of the water and squatted to wash her face. She cleaned her arms with leaves and let the icy water run onto her legs. Muddy blood streamed down her thighs and calves. She scooped up more water; the thought of being covered in blood nauseated her.
She heard a sudden noise in the forest behind her, twigs being stepped on, something being dragged along the forest floor. She whirled around in fright and almost lost her balance at the sight of an old woman in a broad-brimmed straw hat, a long braid hanging down over her right shoulder.
“The wagons are rolling on the Death Trail,” she said. Her clear, ocean-blue eyes looked earnestly at Camilla. Then, using a sturdy limb as a cane, she turned on her heel and vanished silently and astonishingly quickly into the forest.
Camilla stood midstream, too shocked to speak to her. She had no idea where the woman had come from; had heard nothing until she was practically at her back. She didn’t even know if there was an entrance to the forest anywhere near the stream.
She hurried home in the twilight, dripping wet, her heart hammering in her ears.
5
Sune tried one more time. He’d found some dry twigs inside the hollow tree where he’d hung his hoodie up to dry, but couldn’t get a fire started with his lighter.
He thought about his mother. She always backed him up, like the time he wanted to be a Boy Scout. His father had said it was a silly idea, that he’d started playing handball when he was seven, and he couldn’t understand why his son wouldn’t give it a shot.
Your son doesn’t have the talent for it, she’d told him, after Sune did try. In the Boy Scouts, however, he earned every merit badge. Each time he brought one home, she proudly sewed it on his scout shirt.
Now his teeth chattered and his fingers were stiff from the cold, even though the rain had stopped. He’d waited over an hour before returning for the food he’d abandoned when the woman came running up and yelling at him. He knew he shouldn’t eat it—he could get sick—but he was so incredibly hungry. His body, not his brain, steered him to the trees toward the clearing. To the food.
Another group of Asatro held their sacrifices at the old oak. It was their leftovers he’d been eating. He’d watched them from his hiding place as they gathered around the bonfire. He had never met them; they were the ones who had expelled the Asa group his father belonged to. That he also belonged to now. The thought slammed into his chest so hard he could barely breathe.
At first his father and the others in the group had been furious about the decision of the Asa and Vanir religious organization, Forn Sidr, to expel them. Now, however, they seemed to think of themselves as nobler, because they were more faithful to the original customs. Not like the hippie types who were more interested in getting high and drinking their homemade mead, as his father put it.
He had spent many nights in the forest since his initiation. Twice he had found food at the sacrificial oak. What he’d gathered up after the ceremony had lasted a week. The second time, he’d packed the food in big leaves, hoping that would help keep it fresh.
Several hours had passed after the horrific events of his initiation before he dared sneak out into the clearing. The cars were gone, and he’d held his breath; the silence and the sharp light from the clear, starlit sky seemed threatening. A few embers from the bonfire still glowed, but he didn’t dare approach it to warm himself. He had no way of knowing if anyone had stayed behind to wait for him. At last he snuck around in the shadows of the trees over to the oak, where he knew they must have left a lot of the food his father had brought along.
He had tried to forget what had happened, to banish the image of the young woman smiling at him before she was killed. After the men had returned to the clearing without her, and the gothi had closed the circle and passed the oath ring around, they sat beside the bonfire, eating and drinking as if nothing had happened.
But so much had happened, and everything had gone wrong for Sune. Very wrong. He missed his mother. Every single night, he suffered from nightmares about her death. He saw white coffins and graveyards. He woke up bathed in sweat. He knew his mother grew weaker every day that he was away. But he also knew, full well, that he couldn’t return home without reconciling with his father and the others. And he wasn’t going to do that. Not after what he’d gone through that evening. He would never be a part of that; would never be like them.
He jerked around when he heard a car approaching on the narrow forest road, kicking over the small twigs and branches he’d arranged for the small fire before hiding in the tree.
They came looking for him every night. When they got too close, he picked up his things and ran. Like a hunted animal driven from its den, he hurried off to find another hiding place. He didn’t know who it was on any given night. They might be taking turns searching, he thought. He hugged his knees.
The fear of being found made his skin tingle. He had to get out of this area, go somewhere they wouldn’t be looking for him. He just didn’t know where. If only he’d gotten the stupid fire started earlier. His clothes would’ve been dry by now, and he wouldn’t be freezing.
He opened one of the leaves and gnawed on a cold pork chop, thinking about his mother again. Hopefully, his father was taking care of her. Sune used to go into her bedroom and sit and read to her when he’d come home from school. She wasn’t strong enough now to hold a book. Once in a while she fell asleep and snored lightly with her mouth half open, but he’d just kept on reading. When she woke up, she’d smile and say, “I guess I dozed off for a moment.”
His father didn’t like books. They were a waste of time, he always said. But he wanted his son to do well in school, so he didn’t complain when Sune read.
School, Sune thought, as he watched the red taillights of the car after it passed by. This was the final week of exams. How had his parents explained his absence to the school?
He swallowed the last of the pork chop, too quickly—and felt a sharp pain in his esophagus. He didn’t have anything to wash the food down with. Normally he drank from the stream, but he couldn’t go there now.
The car approached again, so he kept perfectly still. It drove by slowly, stopping several times while the driver peered out into the trees. Finally it left.
Sune had asked himself a thousand times if he shouldn’t just go home, but he realized that was no longer an option. He had defied the men, the brotherhood, by not receiving the ring and swearing an oath of silence together with the others.
6
Camilla closed the heavy front door, kicked off her running shoes, and barged into her husband’s office in her wet clothes.
“When you gut a buck or whatever the hell it’s called, you could clean up, you know. There’s practically a lake of blood out in the forest.”
Frederik looked up. “What is this, what’s happened to you?”
“I fell flat on my face in a big puddle of blood.”
Camilla didn’t know much about hunting or forest management, though she did know that Frederik had been out several times lately hunting bucks. But she had no idea what happened after the animal was killed, except that it had to be split open on the spot and gutted to make sure the meat wasn’t spoiled.
“As far as I know, there haven’t been any bucks gutted out there,” he said. “We haven’t hunted in over a week now. Where was it?”
“I don’t know exactly. But there’s a big tree, partly hollow, close to a cleari
ng with a bonfire site. It looks like someone has been there.”
Frederik stood up. He didn’t work at home very often. Most of his waking hours were spent in the management offices at Termo-Lux, a window manufacturer. But the board of directors had just accepted his ultimatum: If he was to stay on as managing director of the family business, he had to have one day off a week to work on his film manuscripts—and also to see something of his wife, he’d added, when telling Camilla that they had accepted his demands.
She had met Frederik Sachs-Smith in California, where over the years he had established himself as a film scriptwriter. He’d already had a hand in several big Hollywood productions; she had considered him a mixture of upper-class bohemian and cool businessman. The scriptwriting was something he did simply because he enjoyed it. While doing research for an interview with him, she had discovered that he was a more-than-competent investor; he’d turned his inheritance from his grandparents into a sizable fortune. He didn’t need to work.
When they fell in love, the plan had been that she and her son, Markus, would move in with him in Santa Barbara. But after the death of Frederik’s brother and the announcement that his sister had chosen for personal reasons to step down as managing director, their plans changed. He returned to Denmark.
At first, Camilla didn’t understand; Frederik had never hidden the fact that he had left Denmark to avoid becoming part of the family dynasty. He’d said numerous times that there had to be many others well qualified to head up the business. Gradually she came to realize that he had accepted the job for the sake of his father, not for the business. Walther Sachs-Smith had been forced off the board of directors of his own company the year before, as he had begun to prepare for his successor. Greed and a lust for power had driven Frederik’s two younger siblings to betray their father, who all too late discovered what they were up to.
Which was why Frederik put on a suit and tie four days a week now, to lead the business his grandfather had established many years ago.
