by Sara Blaedel
“I don’t know anything about a flight from Prague or some Ilana who didn’t show up. I suggest you tell the police about this yourself, just the way you told me, if you think they know what’s going on.”
The arms were around her shoulders before she saw them coming and she was lifted up off the chair.
“We’ll drive you over to the police and then you will tell them what I just told you. And tell them they should leave us alone.”
She was yanked toward the door. They quickly exited the premises, and Camilla felt like someone was holding the doors for her so she flew through until she was sitting in the back seat of the car and listening to the motor start.
“If I’m going to talk to the police, you need to drive me to Police Headquarters. I know someone there, someone I can make listen to me.”
Something had relaxed within her. The fear didn’t seem quite as paralyzing. On the other hand, she was fully aware that they would come after her again if she didn’t do as they instructed.
39
THERE WAS A PRINTOUT OF NAMES ON LOUISE’S DESK WHEN SHE returned from the pastor’s residence. She exhaled slowly as she skimmed through the pages, counting about fifty women who had been due to deliver their babies during the period of time they were looking at. There’ll be even more once we track down the women who were past their due dates, Louise thought and glanced over at her partner.
“Should we just divvy up the list and work our way through?” she asked Lars.
He nodded and noted dryly that of course calling the women wouldn’t do any good.
“You’re right about that,” she answered, undoing her ponytail and shaking out her hair before gathering it into a bun and wrapping the elastic around it.
“The only way is the hard way,” she said, mimicking Willumsen’s brusque tone, “and if we’re lucky, we’ll be done by August,” she added, spreading out the pages.
“I suppose you’re most interested in your local area, so why don’t you take Herlev, Hvidovre, and Glostrup? Then I can do National Hospital, Gentofte, and Frederiksberg,” she suggested and was interrupted by the phone on her desk ringing. It was the front desk informing her that a Camilla Lind was downstairs and wanted to talk to her. Would Louise come down and escort her in, or should they send her away?
“I’ll be right down,” she said quickly.
Lars gave her a questioning look.
“It’s Camilla. Of course she wasn’t there when I went home. I have no idea what she’s been off doing or why she blew Jakobsen off this morning. I was starting to get a little worried about her,” Louise said as she darted out the door.
Down in the courtyard, Louise stopped short when she spotted Camilla in the waiting area. The only sign of life on her was the red access badge she had clipped to the waistband of her loose gray sweatpants. Her face was pale and bore no makeup at all, and her hair was flat. But what stopped Louise in her tracks most was something in Camilla’s face, a tenseness that made Louise break into a jog for the last few steps before putting her arms around her friend.
They stood there for a moment, both stunned. Then Louise loosened her grasp and said that she was assuming Camilla wanted to come up to her office. Camilla nodded mutely, and Louise saw that she’d begun to cry. She put her arm around Camilla again and led her across the courtyard.
While she’d been downstairs, Lars had organized his list of names by addresses and had already planned the order of his visits. He’d turned off his computer and was standing up, his jeans jacket over his arm, clearly about to leave.
Camilla had stopped crying and dried her eyes on her sweater sleeves, but they still looked red. When they were still out in the hallway, she started telling Louise about what the two Albanians had done to her, and now she assured them both that she was only crying out of relief, that they hadn’t actually hurt her.
“Have a seat,” Louise ordered, pointing to the visitor’s chair.
Lars tossed his jeans jacket aside and offered to make a pot of coffee. Louise nodded to him and dug a ten-kroner coin out of her pocket, asking him to stop by the vending machine in the lunchroom on his way and buy a bag of gummy candies.
“They didn’t do it,” Camilla said once the door had closed behind him.
Louise took a seat and studied Camilla before she even tried to understand what Camilla was talking about. Had she been drinking? Or what was wrong? She wasn’t making any sense.
“They didn’t do what?” she asked.
“Kill Kaj. Or that prostitute in Kødbyen. They admit that they were on Skelbækgade, but she was already dead when he went into the courtyard.”
Camilla’s words swirled past her and Louise asked her to hold on.
“You blew Jakobsen off this morning even though he moved around his whole schedule and canceled another patient to make room for you,” Louise said, trying to slow the pace down a little. “Did you do that so you could go play private detective?”
Camilla shook her head.
“I overslept,” she apologized and promised to call Jakobsen to set up a new appointment if he was still willing to see her.
Lars pushed the door open with his foot and walked in with a thermal carafe, three cups, a bag of Eldorado, and a roll of chocolate cookies. Louise smiled at him and got up to close the door as he set everything down on the desk.
“Were they watching for you out on the streets?” Louise asked after Camilla told her about her morning and her visit to Central Station.
“Yeah, I was on my way to Halmtorvet to see if I could find one of Kaj’s old friends and I didn’t hear the car stop,” she explained and then blew on her coffee before taking a sip.
“What did the guys look like?” Lars asked to get the details squared away.
“The one who grabbed me had kind of smooth, shoulder-length hair and glasses.”
Louise and Lars exchanged looks.
“So it was Arian and Hamdi,” they agreed. And Camilla nodded when she heard the names.
“God damn it!” Lars pushed his chair back against the wall, put his legs up, and rested his mug on his knee. “Well, then they’ve figured out that we’re tailing them.”
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Camilla said, with a sarcastic little smile. The first one Louise had seen since she spotted her downstairs. “But I was supposed to tell you something—aside from the fact that they claim that they didn’t kill those two people. The guy you say is named Arian knew her and says that he’s sorry she’s dead and that he sped off to get the killer. That’s where he was going when he came back out of the building.”
“And what did they say that’s supposed to convince us it wasn’t them?” Louise urged, trying to get Camilla back on track.
“Something about how they were out at the airport waiting for a girl who never showed up. Apparently you guys were there, too,” she said, watching them until they both nodded in confirmation. “That girl was found dead in her room the day she was supposed to come. Her throat had been slit, and he recommended that you guys call your counterparts in Prague and ask about the Serb who was seen in the girl’s building at the time of her murder. According to them, he was in Copenhagen when the two murders here were committed.”
Louise suspected that Lars thought this was a story they had just come up with, as if the two Albanians were trying to hamstring him, and she had to admit she was leaning that way herself.
“We’ll bust them for unlawful imprisonment,” Lars said once Camilla was done. “How long did they hold you at the club?”
“No, no. Please, don’t bother,” Camilla responded quickly. “But you’re going to have to investigate whether there’s any basis to what they said, because otherwise they’re going to come after me again.”
“It’s not our case anymore,” Louise explained, watching a look of confusion come over Camilla’s face. “But I can either pass this on, or you can talk to Toft and Stig yourself. It’s their case now.”
Camilla stiffened, looking at them in disbelie
f.
“What does that mean? You mean only two people are working on it?”
“Well, and Mikkelsen,” Louise added.
“Two people were violently murdered and there are only three men on the case? What the fuck’s up with that?”
Louise wasn’t sure why Camilla suddenly sounded so agitated. Camilla set down her cup and looked like she was getting ready for battle.
“Some officers from the downtown precinct will back them up when they need it,” Louise said in an attempt to tone things down a little.
“Well, what the fuck are you two doing then, sitting around the office drinking coffee and eating chocolate cookies?” Camilla burst out, nodding toward the open roll of cookies on the desk. “The two people you suspect of flaying open two human beings just pushed me into their car and hauled me down to some basement room on Saxogade. What the fuck! You have to do whatever you can to catch these people!” she shouted frantically. “If what they said is right—that someone else did it—you’re going to have to go find out who it was.”
Camilla took a deep breath, down into her abdomen, and sank back in the chair.
“I’m sorry,” she said, rubbing her face to wipe the anger away. “It was just a huge shock to be detained like that,” she said. “And in a way, I think they were telling the truth when they said it wasn’t them. Why else would they have let me go?”
Since no one seemed to have an immediate response to her question, she instead asked why they’d been taken off the case.
“We’re investigating the stillborn baby you found in the church,” Louise said, quickly trying to assess whether it was a good idea to tell Camilla what Flemming had discovered. But before she was able to decide, Lars was already doing it.
“It turned out the little baby was assaulted after birth, and we got the case because the injury occurred after death.”
Camilla’s face stiffened into an incredulous grimace.
“Someone hurt him?” she asked, looking from Lars to Louise.
Louise nodded.
“His pinky toe was amputated,” she explained.
She watched the vacant look in Camilla’s eyes, which suddenly seemed to focus on a point just to the left of the window. Camilla stared at that spot for a second, trying to reason her way through this labyrinth of new information.
Then Camilla seemed to snap out of it. She asked, “From which foot?”
“The right.”
Camilla’s farewell was rapid and happened before Louise even had a chance to stand up. But Camilla turned around in the doorway and looked at her.
“Make sure you check your information,” Camilla urged before disappearing.
Louise just sat there staring at the empty doorway for a second before she turned to her partner and shook her head a little despondently.
“Do you think it was wise to let her just leave after what happened to her?” Lars asked, concerned.
Louise shrugged and rolled her chair up to her desk.
“I don’t know. I mean, we can’t put a man on her, and she’s also not the kind of person who would accept a bodyguard, even after a frightening experience like that.”
“But I guess it would be worth checking on whether the woman they were waiting for really was murdered,” Lars said.
Louise nodded.
“What was her name again? Ilana … but what was her last name?” Lars asked, flipping through the stack of papers in front of him. “Procházková. We’d better tell Willumsen what happened.”
“Let’s go tell Toft instead, then he can contact Interpol or e-mail the police in Prague directly,” Louise suggested, getting up. “Willumsen will just chew us out for not being done with the lists of all the mothers-to-be.”
She quickly walked over to Toft and Stig’s office, which was two doors down from her own.
“A Serb? Well, there are quite a few of those,” Toft exclaimed, scratching the thick, full beard he had grown over the winter, but which he already seemed to be rethinking now that the weather was warming up.
“But of course it ought to be checked.”
He crossed his arms in front of his chest and glanced over at the row of certificates and trophies he and Michael Stig had brought home from all their bowling tournaments, both in Denmark and abroad, as he contemplated.
“If I can find her name, I have a good relationship with a woman in the criminal investigations unit in Prague. She’s won a bunch of bowling tournaments and for a while she played professionally, but went back to police work after a couple of years. She said she missed it.”
Louise smiled.
“What do we know about this Serb?” Toft asked, pulling out a sheet of paper, but they had to disappoint him.
“Nothing, aside from that he was seen in the woman’s building. We don’t have a description, but the police down there apparently know who the Albanians were referring to. Or at least they told Camilla that asking for ‘the Serb’ would be enough.”
Toft nodded and stuck his plastic cigarette in his pocket.
“Maybe we should go pick up those two Albanians and haul them in here to find out if they have any more to tell us instead of letting them steer this investigation.”
Stig had appeared in the doorway with two sodas and a piece of fruit in his hands, and Lars made room so he could enter.
“Yeah,” Toft said. “There might be something to that, but let’s just check if they’re leading us off on a wild goose chase or if what they’re saying is true.”
He was already scrolling through his address book to find the Czech criminal investigations unit.
“Well, at least we don’t have to sneak around after them anymore since they already know we’re breathing down their necks,” Stig said, using one cola bottle to pop the lid off the other.
“Here she is!” Toft exclaimed, pointing at his screen. “I’ll write to her.”
“Well, we’d better be off,” Louise said, nudging her partner.
40
THERE WAS NO ANSWER AT THE FIRST DOORBELL LOUISE RANG, but the next address on the list was only two blocks away.
“Copenhagen Police. I’m detective Louise Rick. Could I come in and talk to you for a second?” she asked over the intercom after the woman answered.
When she got to the second floor, there was a woman standing in the hallway with a belly so enormous, it looked ready to burst.
Louise hurriedly smiled to allay the fear on her face, which is typical when receiving a visit from the police. Then she apologized for bothering her and explained why she was there. After the woman confirmed that her name was Gitte Larsen, Louise crossed her off the list and left.
Eight of the nineteen on her list lived in the four Bridge Districts—the dense residential neighborhoods of Nørrebro, Amagerbro, Østerbro, or Vesterbro, which had once been linked to central Copenhagen by gates through the old city walls—so she decided to cover them by bike. After that, she would go back to Police Headquarters and check a squad car out of the garage.
It was almost 8 P.M. and there were three women left on her list when she rang the doorbell at Maja Lang’s place. She lived in a little row house in Gentofte, and a dog barked noisily as the doorbell elicited a shrill melody.
Nothing was bulging on this woman. To the contrary, her skin was so pale it almost seemed translucent or blue, and the veins in her temples were visible, making her face seem sensitive and exposed.
Louise explained why she was there and felt a pang when she saw how the woman pulled back as if she’d struck her.
“It’s been almost three months since I lost her,” she said, slumping a little.
Pictures of autumn trees in warm golden colors hung on the wall behind her, and in the living room there was a lap blanket on the sofa as if she’d just gotten up. The candles were lit, and there was a quiet that suddenly seemed striking given that the row house was right off the heavily trafficked Lyngbyvej.
Maja Lang nodded toward a room that opened off the living room.<
br />
“We had everything all ready, but one morning suddenly I just couldn’t feel her, and I knew something was wrong. Really wrong.”
She pulled back and sat down on the edge of the sofa and pushed the blanket aside a little apologetically.
“Four days after that, they induced the delivery, and we buried her the last Saturday in January.”
She started crying and pointed to the armchair on the other side of the coffee table.
Louise quickly decided not to sit down and apologized profusely for having bothered her. On her way out, she swore to herself that Gentofte hadn’t struck Maja Lang off their list of women who were due. Now she’d ripped open the woman’s grief completely unnecessarily.
41
WHEN LOUISE AND LARS GAVE THEIR STATUS REPORTS THE next afternoon, they had to acknowledge that none of the women on the maternity ward lists seemed to have given birth outside the official health care system. In the last twenty-four hours they’d been in touch with everyone who had been due during the right time period in Region H, which included all of Greater Copenhagen.
Louise hadn’t gotten home to her empty apartment until almost 10:30 the previous night. Camilla had left a message on her kitchen table that she and Markus were spending the night at their own place because he needed to get some of his schoolbooks and his gym clothes there anyway. Louise had briefly considered calling to make sure her friend had calmed down after her dramatic afternoon, but didn’t want to risk waking them.
At 8:00 in the morning, she was back at it, starting with a couple in their early thirties who were busy timing contractions.
Two women had been admitted that same day with preeclampsia and were going to be kept under observation until their labors started. Four were having contractions, including the couple Louise had visited that morning. Everything had been the way it was supposed to with all the rest. They had opened their doors with their big bellies jutting out in front of them and had immediately been crossed off the list and given an apology for the disturbance.
