by Sara Blaedel
“We’ll also make sure to issue the Czech police a request to locate her mother so she can be notified of her daughter’s death,” Louise said, shaking the hand Pavlína held out to her.
12
THE WAITRESS HAD JUST COME AND SET ANOTHER DOUBLE IN FRONT of Kaj when Camilla’s cell phone rang. It was almost 10:00, and she didn’t recognize the number on the display.
“Yes?” she said, holding a hand over her other ear to help her hear. She pulled her chair back a little and sank farther back into the corner, trying to shield herself from the jukebox music.
Flemming Larsen, the coroner, began by apologizing for calling so late.
“But to be honest, I forgot I had the message in my pocket and didn’t happen to think of it until now,” he admitted.
“That’s perfectly okay,” Camilla said. “I’m in a pub in Vesterbro and may have had a little too much to drink … so maybe we’d better talk tomorrow. But there’s still one thing I want to ask.”
Flemming laughed and apologized for interrupting her evening.
“I was trying to get hold of you because I wanted to do a piece on the murder that happened just across from where I’m sitting. But I’m having a hard time getting my boss to bite. He doesn’t think we have enough to go on. All we have is that the victim is presumed to be a foreign prostitute. Do you have any more information on what happened to her?”
Camilla nodded across the table in response to the question of whether she wanted another round. Meanwhile, the coroner hesitated a little on the other end of the line.
“It was a straightforward execution-style killing,” Flemming finally said, making it clear that this information was off the record. “It was on the brutal end of the scale—she never had a chance to defend herself,” he went on. “During the autopsy, I identified a number of lesions on her body from blows, which she appears to have sustained before death. So this wasn’t the first time someone had been after her.”
“That sounds atrocious,” Camilla said, her adrenaline surging through all the alcohol.
“I think there’s every reason for you to follow up on this story,” Flemming said.
Camilla totally agreed, and she was determined to tackle the story, whether Høyer wanted to run it or not. But it wasn’t that easy, of course, she thought. Especially not since Holck was obviously more intimately acquainted with Copenhagen’s prostitution scene than she had previously realized.
“There are so many prostitutes who are abused and raped. No group of people is more vulnerable to violent assaults than they are. We treat them when they take refuge at The Nest, where they are routinely sent to the Center for Victims of Sexual Assault at the hospital.”
Camilla had the sense that Flemming had more to say on this topic, but she was starting to zone out so she suggested that she call him back so they could have this conversation when she had her notepad and was somewhere quieter.
“Sure, just give me a call,” Flemming said and gave her his cell number, which she wrote on the back of a receipt.
Camilla pulled her chair back over to the table and drank a little of her beer while Kaj started telling her a story about another great French chef from the past, Auguste Escoffier, who had once been a visiting chef at Copenhagen’s luxury Hôtel d’Angleterre.
“When he wanted to finish his menu off with poires Belle-Hélène, he got so angry that he almost left the country,” Kaj said, and a merry glint entered his bleary eyes.
“Why?” Camilla asked. She was eager to move on from thinking about the girl who’d had her throat slit across the street.
“Because they wanted to top it with whipped cream!”
Camilla had no idea what Kaj was talking about, so he had to explain that it was a deadly sin to put whipped cream on top of a dessert that consisted of vanilla ice cream, poached pears, and high-quality melted chocolate.
“Whipped cream!” he scoffed. “That’s something cooks do when they don’t know any better and can’t be bothered to listen. But this was his dessert. He created it,” Kaj said indignantly, “and they wanted to pull it down to a more plebeian level, which is how so many people have served it since.”
His words dripped with derision.
Camilla smiled at him, thinking she would have loved to eat in this man’s restaurant. Sadly, she had met him twenty years too late.
They sat in silence for a bit while an old Johnny Cash number played from the jukebox in the background:
“Because you are mine, I walk the line,” Kaj sang along in a dark voice when they got to the chorus. His tired eyes had come to rest on the window and the doorway across the street.
Camilla realized that she wasn’t angry at her boss anymore and that she’d had her fill of beer.
“I saw her,” Kaj said suddenly, turning his head to Camilla as the song finished.
“The murdered woman?” Camilla asked after a pause and then followed his gaze out the window to the doorway across the street.
Kaj nodded.
“Did you tell the police?”
He shook his head and said that he didn’t have any plans to, either.
“Yes, but it’s important,” Camilla began, and he interrupted her by reaching a hand across the table and taking hers so she stopped talking.
“That’s not always how it works in the real world,” he said, pulling his hand back again. “I really want to be able to come and go here in my own neighborhood without being afraid. Even though our local beat cop, Mikkelsen, is nice enough, eventually they’ll ask me to testify in court, and that’s not going to end well for me.”
“No, now listen here,” Camilla blurted out, after ordering another round. “You can’t just not go to the cops. That woman was executed. Her throat was slashed.”
Kaj sat there eyeing her. His face was lined with deep wrinkles, his hair gray, but he couldn’t be older than his mid-fifties, she guessed. His eyes were dark and held the experiences of a long, hard life, which made her feel like a naïve schoolgirl.
“All right,” she said. “I don’t know shit about that. I only know that no one is willing to talk in this case. All I know is that she was really young, and now she’s dead. It’s just completely … intolerable!”
Camilla knew she sounded ridiculous, but she meant it. In her beer-induced stupor she really wished she could have saved the girl, but it was too late. She also wanted to save Kaj, and the killers shouldn’t get away with what they’d done, either.
Kaj didn’t say anything, so Camilla spoke again.
“What did you see?” she wanted to know.
He studied her for a minute, and she sensed the alcohol hadn’t had anywhere near the effect on him as it had on her. But of course he was also probably more used to these quantities.
“I really want to tell you what I saw, and you should also feel free to write about it if you want. But you have to guarantee me that you won’t reveal me as your source.”
“Of course,” Camilla exclaimed. Then she went over to the bar for a mineral water and some paper from the waitress’s notepad.
13
“I KNEW HER PERSONALLY—THE GIRL WHO WAS MURDERED. HER I name was Iveta, and she has a little daughter who lives with the grandmother back in the Czech Republic. Sometimes I helped Iveta send money home to them. I could tell she was having some problems, but she wouldn’t tell me what was going on because she didn’t want me to get messed up in something. She had gotten word her mother was sick, and the last time I talked to her she was quite worried about her daughter and really wanted to go home.”
Camilla took her notes in tiny letters so she’d have room for the whole story on the small pieces of paper.
“Sunday night I saw her turning onto Skelbækgade off of Dybbøls Bridge. She was walking down opposite side of the street from me. She spotted me and started waving when she answered her cell—I was close enough to hear the ring tone. I was sitting outside drinking a beer and relaxing right over there on the steps.” He nodded toward t
he front door of the bar that opened onto the street. “At first I thought she was going to come over to me. Instead, she stepped into that gate over there.” He pointed toward the entry into Kødbyen. “So I assumed the phone call was from a john who was en route. It took only about five minutes before a car stopped, and a man got out of the back seat and followed her inside. But a few minutes later he came back out and jumped into the car, which sped away.”
Camilla flipped the paper over and started writing on the back.
“I realized something was wrong, and I went over there as soon as they were gone. But when I saw her I knew there was nothing I could do. So I called the police from that pay phone in back.” He tilted his head toward the back of the bar, where there was a phone mounted on the wall.
“Did you see what make or model the car was?”
He nodded, and said it was a dark Audi A4, and he was also sure that the driver was the Albanian Iveta worked for.
“You have to talk to the police,” Camilla said. “They’ll put you into witness protection and take good care of you.”
“Yeah, yeah. They promise so much.” He shook his head. “I’ve done what I need to do for Iveta and her little girl. It’s up to you now whether this information makes it any further,” he said and emptied his glass.
Camilla nodded.
“But I have no idea where you heard all that from. If anyone should happen to ask,” he emphasized again.
“No, of course not,” Camilla said and got up to go pay the tab. It was time for her to go home. Even though she’d already decided her boss could go fuck himself, Kaj’s account had pushed their spat aside. Considering the eyewitness report she was going to write up for the next day’s edition, she would serve the story to her editor on a silver platter first thing when he showed up for work.
“Are you going stay for a bit?” she asked when she returned to the table.
“Oui, encore une minute, madame,” Kaj replied in his Danish-accented French.
Camilla had added two hundred kroner to the tab and told the wait staff it was for Kaj in case he wanted another round.
14
I T TOOK LOUISE A LONG TIME TO RETURN HIS CALL, BUT WHEN SHE found another message on her answering machine when she returned from Bella Center, she finally sat down on the sofa and dialed Mik Rasmussen’s home number.
“A foreign prostitute was murdered,” she apologized, feeling for a second that it was totally wrong that she even had to explain herself. “We’ve been looking for witnesses the last several nights and are still hoping to find someone who saw something.”
They had been dating since the fall. The relationship had started when Louise was on a case in Holbæk while assigned the Danish National Police Mobile Task Force.
Mik and she were partners on that case, and Louise had fallen in love and let herself be whisked off her feet and into Mik’s world—with his idyllic farmhouse and his love of sea kayaking. They’d also taken a wonderful vacation to Växjö in Sweden, where they kayaked on lakes and rivers, gathered mushrooms, cooked over a campfire, and had sex under the open sky. And for a while, she thought a long-distance relationship was the ideal answer for her, with Mik in Holbæk and her in Copenhagen. Things had been wonderful at Christmas when they went shopping together along Strøget, Copenhagen’s downtown pedestrian shopping street. Hand in hand, sipping warm mulled wine. But with the distance, they hadn’t ended up seeing each other quite as often since then.
“Do you want to come up for the weekend?” Mik asked without commenting on her case. “A few of us from the club are going to take the kayaks out along Cape Tuse on Saturday. We’re going to bring food and set up camp when we feel like it.”
“I’m going to be working this weekend. Unfortunately,” Louise added as she suddenly realized just how much she wanted to see him, that awkward guy with the crooked front teeth. “But maybe we could take a trip when this case is over?”
He laughed into the phone.
“Don’t you think there’ll be a new case then?”
“Oh, stop,” she cried, hoping he could hear that she was smiling. “If you start driving now you could actually be here in Frederiksberg within the hour.”
“Deal,” he quickly replied, snatching the invitation. “You put the coffee on and I’ll bring the rest. I just have to take the dogs for a quick walk before I leave.”
He hung up. Irish coffee had been a staple of theirs ever since their night together sitting on a bench enjoying the view from his farm. He had just happened to offer her one after they’d finished their beer. Now it was “their” drink, and they had since explored the difference between whiskey with an e—which is Irish and not quite as smoky—and whisky with no e—also known as scotch, and totally out of place in an Irish coffee.
She smiled and pulled her legs up onto the sofa. She was far too tired to skip a night’s sleep. On the other hand, a good, thorough roll in the hay would surely reinvigorate her and give her more energy than eight hours of deep sleep.
15
CAMILLA WAS SITTING AT HER COMPUTER WHEN HER BOSS CAME into the office at 9:30. His blonde hair was still wet from his shower, and she guessed he’d run his standard fifteen kilometers before coming in. Her own head felt heavy, and the light from her screen hurt her eyes. She would have stayed home if she hadn’t stormed out of the office so dramatically the day before—and if she hadn’t been so eager to serve up Kaj’s eyewitness statement for her boss along with his morning coffee.
He stopped in her doorway and watched her collect the pages of her article.
“What’s going on with you?” His tone was caring, and he sounded concerned. “You look sick.”
She nodded and was surprised that he didn’t start by commenting on their argument. Maybe they were starting to butt heads often enough that he no longer noticed.
“Yeah, I’m going to go home in a bit,” Camilla said with a nod before holding out the printed pages to him. “I’ve been looking into that murdered Czech girl on Skelbækgade. She was evidently snuffed by her own pimp, and I have something here you should read.”
Høyer stepped into her office and walked over to her desk to take the papers from her.
“The police don’t have any witnesses or leads yet,” Camilla continued. “But this is a person who knew the woman. He saw her go through the gate into Kødbyen off of Skelbækgade, and he also saw the guy who followed her in.”
Høyer stood there for a second just looking at her before reaching for the article. He was about to say something, but she cut him off.
“You should consider me out sick today. Which in practical terms means I’m not here and I’m not turning anything in for the paper. But if you want to print this article—and will respect the fact that I want to keep my source one hundred percent confidential—then you can blow this story wide open, because this witness hasn’t talked to any other members of the press. And you can also be sure that this isn’t just something he made up,” she said, knowing that Kaj hadn’t told anyone else.
Høyer sat across from her and skimmed the two pages she’d handed him.
“But you also need to understand that I’m going to contact the police and pass on the information contained in this article,” Camilla said.
Her editor set the pages down and leaned back, resting his arms on the arms of the chair.
“Well, I should say so. How sure are you that this witness is telling the truth?”
“As sure as I am that it’s a travesty to put whipped cream on top of authentic poires Belle-Hélène,” she replied, enjoying the confusion in Høyer’s eyes.
“Well, all right. I’ll look at it. Kvist’s report from Silkeborg won’t be ready to run until tomorrow, anyway.”
Fatigue suddenly washed over Camilla.
“Let me tell you one more thing,” she said, mustering her courage. “Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative crimes out there. And here you sit with a hard-on over some rich people’s paintings worth a lousy coupl
e million.”
She stood up.
“I’m going to go home and nurse my cold,” she said. “Call me if you decide to run it.”
Camilla’s voice was calm and she managed to keep her irritation under wraps. “But first I’m going to go hand over the witness statement to the police. I’ll get them to sit on the new information and keep it from the rest of the press until tomorrow so you can have the scoop if you decide to run it. But I can’t ask them to withhold it any longer than that.”
She ran into Holck in the hallway. She was wearing her sunglasses, but pushed them up onto her head as he approached her. He averted his gaze, and before he had quite reached her and would be forced to look her in the eye, he turned and vanished into an empty office. But even that was enough for Camilla. She now knew that seeing him with a prostitute the day before would add a whole new dimension to their already tense relationship—meaning he wouldn’t be able to walk all over her anymore.
Camilla biked a printout of her article over to Copenhagen Police Headquarters. She parked outside the building, called Louise, and asked for five minutes. She had to wait for a bit at access control before the guard had time for her, and when she said that she was there to see Detective Louise Rick, he gave her a blank look.
“Where does this person work?” the guard asked.
Camilla explained that Louise worked in Unit A before the re-org, and the guard flipped in confusion through a binder and asked Camilla for an office number, which of course she couldn’t remember. Finally Camilla gave up on waiting and called Louise herself, asking her to come down and escort her up.
Her hangover was becoming more and more obtrusive, and Camilla guessed that the only reason she had been able to get up that morning and write her article was that, in all probability, she hadn’t actually been sober yet. She had filled herself with black coffee before sitting down at her keyboard to write, and once done, read her piece through several times to be sure it didn’t ramble too much. But with the article written and her mission almost complete, she realized she was about lose all steam as her head started to throb.
