Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  Suhr’s forehead had contracted into deep wrinkles, but he remained silent.

  “You’ll have to go check out the maternity wards, and if there are cases that seem interesting, compare the DNA. If that doesn’t give us anything, we’ll have to broaden our search by asking the public for help and appealing to people to get in touch with us if they know a pregnant woman whose baby bump has disappeared, but the woman doesn’t have a baby in her arms.”

  Lars started shaking his head.

  “Who are you going to assign to assist them?” Suhr asked, looking at his lead detective. Willumsen’s eyebrows shot up as if he had no idea what Suhr were talking about.

  “To begin with, we’ll handle this ourselves. We’re going to have to be able to keep several balls in the air,” Willumsen pronounced, once he finally detected the heavy silence that had settled over the room. “Working on one case at a time is a luxury we just don’t have.”

  Louise nodded. This wasn’t the first time and certainly wouldn’t be the last that she wouldn’t have a chance to follow a case through to its conclusion. She took the thin case folder Willumsen handed her and got up to follow Lars back to their office.

  35

  “WHAT DOES IT SAY IN THE REPORT WE GOT FROM THE pathology lab?” Lars asked, waiting patiently while Louise plugged in the electric kettle on the shelf and got a mug with a tea bag ready.

  He opened the window and a mild spring breeze blew in, freshening up their office a little.

  By the time the water was finally boiling, he had the phone to his ear and was waiting to talk to the court. They were going to need a warrant to obtain the patient lists from the various maternity wards.

  Louise set down her cup of tea and opened the case file, which so far contained only two pieces of paper. She started reading but was interrupted when her partner hung up, having obtained the warrant.

  “Read it aloud,” he asked, unscrewing the lid to a bottle of mineral water and pulling his chair back so he had some support for his back when he put his legs up on the edge of the desk.

  Saturday, April 26, at approximately 10:55 A.M., a woman entered the front door of Stenhøj Church.

  “That was Camilla,” Louise explained before continuing.

  There was a bundle wrapped in a towel lying on the floor immediately inside the door. The woman ran out of the church without touching anything. Approximately ten minutes later, Detective Louise Rick, Copenhagen PD, arrived. She was at the church on private business. The detective and Pastor Henrik Holm of Stenhøj Church examined the bundle together, which turned out to contain a naked newborn male infant who was dead at the time he was found.

  “This doesn’t really say that much,” she said and skimmed the rest of the text before she continued.

  The area was cordoned off, and scent dogs were brought in to try to pick up a trail. They didn’t find anything. Preliminary questioning: negative.

  “Nada,” she commented and read on.

  A preliminary postmortem was conducted at the scene and an autopsy the following day. The male infant’s weight was 3,750 grams and length was 50 centimeters.

  “Well, that’s completely normal, so the mother must have been to term,” commented Lars, who was the more knowledgeable of the two of them about babies, even though his own twins had been adopted from Bolivia when they were about six months old. They were seven now and had left a little of the craziness behind them. They used to be terrors, though, and on several occasions when their father brought them to work they had taken great satisfaction in scattering case files all over the office. She continued, brushing the twins out of her mind:

  The umbilical cord appeared to have been severed by biting or tearing and was not tied off. It was 17 centimeters long. The time of birth was estimated as one to two days prior to the discovery of the body. The child’s race was Caucasian.

  Louise glanced up from the report.

  “Well that pretty much just means he’s not black or Asian, so it doesn’t narrow it down that much. Caucasian is still a pretty broad spectrum.”

  Her partner nodded and asked if there was any more, but she shook her head and pushed the piece of paper away.

  “Nothing aside from the fact that he had thick dark-brown hair.”

  They were interrupted when Suhr, after a quick knock, opened the door and sat down on the low shelf just inside the doorway.

  “I talked to Sillebrandt out at the Bellahøj precinct. He’s still got four people on the case and is offering to expand the search for witnesses so that they’re looking for people who might have seen something around the church from Friday night until Saturday morning. That’s the time frame during which we assume the boy was left. They’ve found two witnesses who said independently that they saw an older model light-green car by the cemetery around 6:00 Saturday morning. One of the witnesses, an elderly man, who was out for his morning walk with his Labrador retriever, was very sure that it was a Fiat Regatta from the mid-1980s. He had a similar model himself, just in red. The other witness is a young guy who was on his way home to sleep off a night on the town and all he remembered was that there was an old light-green ‘bucket of bolts,’ which he peed on. And that description certainly fits pretty well if we’re talking about a car that’s over twenty years old.”

  The homicide chief smiled, probably because he never let his own Volvo get more than two or three years old before he traded it in on a new one.

  “Based on the witnesses’ statements, our colleagues have been searching for a Fiat Regatta in that color. They found seven registered in Sjælland, and they’re looking into the owners. But otherwise they don’t have anything,” he continued, scratching his chin, which was thoroughly shaved every morning and slathered with expensive aftershave. “I recommend that we accept their offer to expand the search for witnesses.”

  Louise and Lars nodded. So she had been right when she’d thought she could tell what he was thinking in Willumsen’s office. Obviously he was aware that the group leader couldn’t leave this entire case to just two people, but since the homicide chief was a polite man, he hadn’t challenged his subordinate on this point in front of everyone else. He had bitten his tongue instead.

  “Let’s start by going after the most obvious. Concentrate on checking the hospital lists of women who are supposed to give birth soon or have just done so.”

  He looked at them to confirm that they agreed.

  “Take the metro Copenhagen region,” he continued after they both nodded. “In other words, Hvidovre, Herlev, Glostrup, National Hospital, Frederiksberg, and Gentofte, and let’s see what we get from that.”

  “We already requested a warrant so we can get the hospitals to hand over the basic information on the women of interest,” Lars said, receiving a satisfied nod.

  “I’ll send a press release to the Ritzau News Service in a bit, and I’ve already arranged for us to meet a TV-Avisen reporter at the church for the 6:30 P.M. broadcast. In addition to that, I’m planning on appearing on the TV2 News at 7 P.M. We’re going to have to go public with this, and I don’t understand why Bellahøj hasn’t already been more aggressive with this. Sillebrandt hasn’t been very proactive.”

  Louise scrupulously avoided looking over at Lars. Not because there was that much gossip about the homicide chief, but people did joke about his frequent appearances on TV. Louise didn’t actually think he overdid it. To the contrary, she was glad to have a boss who was respected by the general population, and no one could deny that when they hit a dead end with a case, this approach was usually what brought them new leads.

  “While we wait for the lists from the hospitals, I want to drive out and see Henrik Holm and run through the whole thing with him one more time,” Louise said. “Maybe there’s something he just hasn’t thought of. And I also want to mention the light green Fiat to him.”

  “Bellahøj already talked to him,” Suhr said as Louise was collecting her purse from the floor and stuffing her cell phone into her pocket.
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  “Yeah,” she replied, “but now the case has been assigned to us, so we’ll talk to him.”

  The homicide chief nodded and smiled at her.

  “Of course.”

  “We also need to tell him about the pathologist’s report, before the whole story is splashed all over the media,” she added. “But you’re not planning to mention the toe when you talk to the press, are you?”

  He seemed to consider it for a brief moment, but then he shook his head.

  “Not to begin with. As long as we don’t know if that has any significance, we might as well spare people that detail. But mention it to the pastor. How the hell should I know—maybe there’s some sort of religious significance to it that our limited insight into Biblical history is causing us to miss.”

  “Well, that’s a possibility,” she conceded, and then told him that Pastor Holm was a little worried that the two tragic events would harm his church.

  “You certainly can’t blame him for that. I read his column yesterday,” Suhr said as Louise was on her way out. “It was about the ‘maternal instinct,’ which doesn’t always kick in right away, and he wrote about the scientific explanation, which is that the production of female sex hormones drops off dramatically after giving birth, and that can affect both a woman’s attitude and her maternal instinct. His own theory was more that the infant’s soul just needed time to settle into place before it was ready to bind itself to its mother and awaken those strong feelings in her. Some just took longer to move in than others, as he put it. It was very interesting, but the piece was obviously inspired by Baby Girl’s mother, so he must have written it before the boy’s body was found.”

  “Why did it happen two times, so close together?” Louise asked, her mind back on the stillborn little boy. “Years can go by without there being an abandoned baby.”

  “Every once in a while we have cases of abandoned stillborn infants just months apart, and in rare cases even just weeks. Unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon,” Suhr corrected. He was interrupted by Stig, who had stopped to listen from the open doorway as he unscrewed the lid from a half-liter bottle of cola.

  “I’d hazard a guess that you won’t be finding the mother in the upper echelon of society,” he said with the same conviction in his voice he had used when he’d informed Louise that you could always tell by looking at a whore if she came from Eastern Europe. “It’s only in the lowest classes that children aren’t viewed as status symbols. Quite the contrary, they’re sometimes perceived as trash if you’re unlucky enough to get pregnant, and then it’s easier to get rid of the kid than struggle with some government caseworker about institutions and forcible removal.”

  Stig paused for effect and took a swig of his soda.

  “After all, it’s easier to dump a kid than take responsibility,” he continued. “And the people we’re talking about here certainly aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, so it’s not really a surprise that they use the same place as a dump. That way, they don’t have to have a single original thought.”

  Louise had a hard time stomaching his tirade and thought about just walking out and leaving him to the others, but hung back when Stig continued.

  “Do they know if the stillborn baby’s mother was a drug user?”

  Stig looked from Louise to Lars.

  Lars shrugged and looked over at the provisional report, which was in front of Louise. She shook her head.

  “We don’t know yet,” Suhr said and got up off the shelf.

  “The baby’s autopsy was yesterday,” Louise reminded Stig. “The results from the blood tests won’t be back until this afternoon or tomorrow.”

  “If this were my case, I’d be asking the crackheads and hookers some questions before I spent too much time on the mothers who’ve been dutifully going to their prenatal appointments and eagerly awaiting the birth of their babies. Those other women, though, you can certainly imagine that there might be some of them who aren’t particularly eager to go through official channels with their pregnancies. Especially not if they already knew from the beginning that they were going to get rid of the kid,” he concluded before disappearing off to his office.

  Suhr stood there in the doorway, watching him go.

  “Actually, he might have a point,” Suhr said, resting an arm on the doorframe as a thoughtful expression came over his face. “Have a chat with the folks at The Nest and find out if they know anyone who had started to show but never turned up with a baby.”

  Louise sat with her elbows on her desk and her head resting heavily in her hands. There was always someone who was good at putting other people to work. He could have offered to ask around himself since he was out there anyway, working on those two murder cases, but that would have been too much to expect.

  Before Louise heard the sound, she felt the phone in her pocket start vibrating. Blocked, the caller ID said. She excused herself, assuming it must be a personal call, maybe her mother, who she had never called back over the weekend.

  “Hi, it’s Jakobsen,” the crisis psychologist said, and Louise instinctively glanced at her watch. Camilla had had an appointment at 9:15 that morning. It was eleven now. For a second she was afraid, thinking maybe he’d decided to admit her friend or drug her so heavily that felt he ought to inform Louise.

  “She never showed up,” he said tersely, sounding irritated. He was already overbooked before she’d managed to persuade him to squeeze Camilla in, so he was justified. “She didn’t even call to cancel.”

  Louise stared out the window. Camilla had still been asleep when she left a little before eight, and she had assumed her friend would wake up on her own and make sure she got off on time.

  “I tried calling your place, too, because I understood she had spent the weekend there, but no one’s answering, and she doesn’t answer the cell phone number I had for her either.”

  “I don’t get it,” was all Louise could think to say. “I’ll stop by home and get her. I’m really sorry. She must have overslept,” Louise apologized, and added that Camilla had been very tired since her experience out at the church. “I should have made sure she got up myself.”

  “Call me when you get ahold of her. We’ll have to set up a new appointment.”

  Jakobsen still sounded pissed.

  Lars and Suhr were looking at her as she put her phone back in her pocket.

  “Camilla just blew Jakobsen off,” she explained. “I have to drive home and find out if she’s okay.”

  Lars nodded, but she could tell that Suhr was about to lose it, given all the work they had ahead of them.

  “It won’t take long,” Louise promised, pulling on her jacket. “And it’s on the way to Stenhøj Church anyway.”

  36

  AT FIRST SHE COULDN’T FIND THE ALARM CLOCK ON THE nightstand, so she propped herself up on her elbow and then spotted it down on the floor. Still half asleep, she reached for it and saw that it was almost ten.

  Camilla had been up most of the night, but she must have eventually fallen asleep just before dawn. She hadn’t heard Louise or Markus get up. He had slept on a mattress on the floor right next to her bed, and the whole time she was lying there awake, staring into the darkness, she had listened to his relaxed breathing.

  She set down the alarm clock, and after she rubbed her eyes she spotted the note on the nightstand.

  I LOVE YOU MOM. MARKUS.

  She read the sentence again and suddenly felt afraid and let the affectionate note flutter down onto the comforter as she lay back down on the pillow. It occurred to her that she didn’t feel anything. The warmth she usually felt in her heart when she read one of his little declarations of love did not come, nor did the smile that always appeared without her even being aware of it, nor did she picture his face. And she didn’t try to imagine him sitting in the kitchen writing it for her.

  Again it struck her that everything that was usually inside her was gone. And she was scared to think that it might be gone forever if even one of
Markus’s little notes couldn’t make her happy. When she thought about it, she realized that what she mostly felt was apathetic.

  She closed her eyes and lay there for a long time without moving. Kaj had kept appearing in her thoughts overnight. She thought about his life, which she didn’t know shit about aside from the few details he’d shared with her, and at one point overnight she had cried because it was so unfair that she’d had to postpone his funeral. She realized she’d been looking forward to the funeral, to taking care of it, doing a little something for him, decorating with flowers and playing Johnny Cash for him.

  She pulled the blanket up over her head and lay like that for a long time. She heard the phone ringing in the living room, but pulled the blanket in closer around her face and lay there until it stopped. She’d turned off her cell phone the previous evening. It was on the nightstand, and she couldn’t be bothered to turn it on. She was sure there would be at least one message from Høyer.

  Suddenly she remembered Jakobsen and her appointment with him at National Hospital. She couldn’t remember what time it was for—it was on a slip of paper in the kitchen—but she knew she was already too late.

  She swung her legs out over the edge of the bed and wriggled a little on the mattress to reach the sweatpants she’d tossed on the floor before she climbed into bed. She kept the T-shirt she’d slept in on and went to the bathroom.

  The phone rang again, but she closed the door and sat down on the toilet. She wasn’t hungry and didn’t need coffee, didn’t have any needs. The only thing she could feel was an all-encompassing melancholy. All the same, she decided to go out and get a little air.