by Sara Blaedel
There was no acceptable way to tell the dispatcher that she didn’t know if she would be sticking around that long. As she tossed her jacket aside and pulled off her cardigan, she felt a strange sense of calm allaying the fear that, a moment earlier, had been on the verge of making her flee the scene.
She unbuttoned his shirt and determined that the gunshot wound was in his chest, and she put some muscle into it as she leaned over him and pressed her cardigan against the bloody opening.
In a relatively calm voice, she started talking to the wounded man. If he could hear her, it might help him to know the ambulance was on its way. If he couldn’t hear anything, repeating those same words made her feel calm. She promised that she would stay until the EMTs got there and took him to the hospital.
“I told where the house is,” he whispered, still with his eyes closed. The words sounded like pebbles, but she understood and straightened up a little.
With her free hand, she pulled her cell phone out of her jacket, which she’d tossed on the floor when she took her cardigan off.
Louise’s number appeared after three quick taps.
“Just shut up for a second,” Camilla hissed into the phone, turning her head away from the injured man as Louise started to object. “I’m sitting in Stenhøj Church. The sexton is lying on the floor next to me. He’s been shot at least three times. The ambulance is on its way. I’m trying to keep the blood from gushing out of him until they get here.”
Finally Louise was starting to listen, and Camilla told her how she’d arrived at the church and found Otto Birch on the floor.
“While you’ve been standing around waiting, Bosko has been out here assaulting this poor, elderly man, and I know why, too. He’s looking for Henrik Holm and Jonas. We have to get to them before Bosko finds them.”
“What do you know about Bosko?” Louise asked, astonished.
Camilla felt like she could almost see inside Louise’s head, where the pieces were not quite all fitting together.
“Just get out here now; then I’ll explain,” Camilla implored, concentrating the whole time on pressing her cardigan against the wound. “It goes back to when the pastor and his wife were in Bosnia.”
59
THE AMBULANCE AND THE EMTS PULLED UP IN FRONT OF THE church just as Michael Stig parked in the courtyard.
Camilla ran out of the church toward them and pulled open the back door of the police car.
“We’re going to Sweden,” she yelled with her jacket over her arm, getting in. “I think Henrik Holm might have driven up to his farmhouse there, and I’m afraid Bosko is right on his heels.”
Louise hadn’t been able to tell Stig much as they stood in the doorway, and Louise suddenly ordered him to scrap the stakeout and drive out to the church, aside from the fact there was a seriously wounded man, and that it sounded like that might be where Bosko and Miloš Vituk had gone.
On the way to her colleague’s car, Louise had called Willumsen, who had just been notified of the shooting victim by the central duty desk, but it was news to him that Camilla was at the church. Louise told him Bosko was after the pastor. He did not want to obey Camilla’s request, though, and wanted to send Lars and Toft out to the church instead of Louise and Stig.
“Are you sure it was Bosko and Miloš?” Stig asked, looking at Camilla in the rearview mirror as she slammed the car door shut.
She nodded.
He watched her face in the mirror and listened as she started—in hectic snippets—in on her story, which was news to the two policemen.
Camilla desperately brushed a couple of long strands of hair out of her face before she continued.
“This morning he told me the whole thing. He said he had to disappear, and the man in the church, Otto Birch, said that he’d told where the house is. So I’m guessing that he went up there to start with, to gain a little time. He had no way of knowing that Bosko would react so fast.”
The gravel flew as Michael Stig put it in gear and backed up to where he could turn around, and it flew up and hit the underside of the car as he accelerated and then navigated his way out of the narrow driveway into the courtyard.
Louise looked at him in surprise. It was one thing that Louise knew Camilla well enough to know that her friend was serious about this, but Louise was taken aback that Stig didn’t ask any more questions before obeying Camilla’s orders.
Camilla sat still, breathing deeply for a bit as they sped down Stenhøj Allé. Then she leaned forward between the front seats and started to tell them, in more or less coherent sentences, why Henrik Holm had been forced to flee.
Louise listened intently while in her head trying to figure out who they ought to contact with the Swedish police to request assistance so they could have a patrol sent out to the pastor’s summer home and also get permission for them to drive into Sweden.
“Afraid I can’t help,” Camilla said, resigned, when Louise interrupted her to get the address. Louise then recommended that Stig get it from central dispatch.
“I don’t know the address. It’s a numbered road. It’s a little forest service road, and they use some idiotic system that doesn’t make any sense to people like us who are used to roads with names and houses with numbers. But I was there over Easter last year, and could certainly recognize the place. We just head up toward Helsingborg to start with, and then on toward Laholm.”
“We’ll take the Øresund Bridge over to Malmö in Sweden; that way we won’t have to wait for the ferry,” Stig decided, pulling onto the highway heading toward the airport.
Eventually Camilla’s breathing settled down some, and she told them about the forged birth certificate that ended up being the lifelong shackle Bosko had on the pastor, and how that had forced Henrik Holm to make his ultimate decision earlier that day.
“They forced Otto Birch to tell them where the pastor and Jonas had gone. And, fuck,” she exclaimed vehemently, explaining that she hadn’t been able to get ahold of Henrik even though she’d tried many times. “His cell phone is off.”
A desperate note had sneaked into her voice, but she tried to tone it down.
“Well, we don’t know how much Otto told them,” Louise said, turning to look at Camilla.
“No, but he told them where the house is and that’s enough,” Camilla responded, closing her eyes.
Louise received a text from Lars in which he wrote that he was just getting in touch with Otto’s next of kin and that he would go to National Hospital later and try to talk to him if he was conscious. Right now, he was on the operating table.
Camilla shook her head and sank into the back seat as they zipped past Kastrup International Airport, where a large KLM plane was slowly taxiing out to the runway. They continued on over the bridge that linked Denmark to Sweden.
With a sudden jolt, she sat up and slapped her hands to her face.
“Markus!” she cried so loudly that Michael Stig slowed down for a second. “He’s all alone at home, waiting for me. I told him I’d be right back.”
Choking up, she took out her phone, but ended up passing it to Louise and asking her to call Tobias and ask if he could go over and stay with their son until Camilla came home.
Louise found his number and explained as little as possible, but added extra emphasis when she said that it was a life-or-death matter and that she was the one who had forced Camilla to come. Actually that was a little unfair, because Tobias didn’t usually put up a fuss over getting a little extra time with his son, but every now and then he did accuse Camilla of being too disorganized. Once that was all arranged, Louise passed the phone back over the headrest.
“But you’ve pretty much got to assume that an elderly man says what he knows if a couple of guys show up and shoot his kneecaps to smithereens,” Stig said, getting back to Louise’s conclusion as they drove through the Øresund tunnel. “I’m guessing they shot before they asked their questions to show that they were serious, and then he told them what he knew.”
“But he did have the last
word,” Camilla admitted as she looked at the water on both sides of them.
Michael Stig nodded.
“Bosko doesn’t leave witnesses.”
Louise sighed and thought it was no wonder that Mikkelsen had been so concerned about the violent trend he saw beginning to show up on the scene a few weeks earlier. The kind of brutality they’d seen recently was unheard of—beyond even the knifings that got citizens and politicians so upset, even though they were standard fare in Copenhagen.
As they approached the tollbooth, Louise spotted the Swedish police cars. Louise had been notified that an APB had gone out in Sweden that Bosko was heavily armed and considered extremely dangerous, but if he’d made it over the sound more than forty-five minutes ago, then he’d gotten away before they started watching the border, and that would have been true of the crossing from Helsingør also, where officers had been stationed at both ends of the Scandline ferry route to Helsingborg.
Willumsen had ordered two men from the Nordsjælland police department to go to Helsingør and review the surveillance tapes from the ferry terminal, and two of Mikkelsen’s guys were doing the same thing at the bridge’s control center, but Willumsen had given Louise a quick call to let her know that it would take a couple of hours before they knew if a man matching the picture the police had circulated of Bosko had crossed the border.
As they pulled away from the tollbooth on the Malmö side, Stig pulled over and quickly jumped out to greet their Swedish counterparts, who were ready to follow them the rest of the way. Once he was back behind the wheel, he announced that while the Swedish police had been there, two Volvos of the model they were interested in had gone by, but neither of them with a driver of the nationality they were looking for.
“One was a woman, and she was Danish. I don’t know, I might consider moving to Sweden if I could afford to buy a car like that over here,” Stig said getting back onto the highway.
As they drove toward Landskrona, Camilla again started telling them how the pastor had discovered early that same morning that the network he thought his housekeeper was working with didn’t have anything to do with helping women from Eastern Europe.
“To the contrary,” she said indignantly. “The reason for the lively traffic in young women at his house was that they had to go out there to deliver their earnings. And Henrik wasn’t going to put up with that. There was no way he was going to let himself or his church be pressured into helping exploit young women like that.”
Suddenly things added up for Louise. Now everything fit together, but she wasn’t sure if she would have been able to put it all together, even though she’d been studying the pattern closely for several days and would have continued to do so.
Louise thought about Hana and the other young women who had passed her with their eyes on the ground, and of her conversation on the bench with Henrik Holm, whose eyes had kept flitting to the door whenever someone approached. But it hadn’t occurred to her that he had been under so much pressure. She didn’t doubt that at that point he still believed in the network’s and Tereza’s good intentions. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have spoken to Louise so passionately about it.
Michael Stig kept up the rapid pace, and the light greens of Skåne in the springtime flew past. Louise glanced at the speedometer and saw he was doing about a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour—but even so she had a niggling knot in her stomach that told her it was too slow. The tense silence made her reach over and flip on the radio, but after two verses she shut it off again and sighed, then leaned back and closed her eyes.
“He’s not coming back,” Camilla finally said, breaking the silence. “Not even if you succeed in catching Bosko.”
Louise thought about Jonas, who sometimes seemed both shy and a little withdrawn. Still, he had opened up that weekend he’d stayed with her.
She was assuming he knew the truth by now. Henrik would have a hard time explaining that they weren’t going back to the pastor’s residence without explaining why. Who even knew how much Jonas would understand? Louise thought, feeling a pang in her heart because everything the boy had considered part of his secure everyday life was gone just like that. But he was a great kid, and she was sure that with time he would adjust to the situation his parents had gotten him in.
They were driving the last way down E6 toward Laholm, when Willumsen called and said that a Volvo XC90 with Swedish plates had been spotted at the harbor in Helsingør.
“The car was rented from Avis in Malmö by a man named Hendrich Müller with an address in Hamburg, but there’s no trace of anyone by that name. So I’m sending some techs up to look at the car.”
“So he’s still on board as a pedestrian, or someone picked him up at the ferry terminal, or he had another car waiting,” Louise said, looking over at Michael Stig, who nodded to show that he’d understood the latest development.
“Miloš Vituk returned to his apartment half an hour ago,” Willumsen continued. “He came sauntering down from Vesterbrogade but was dumb enough to have a Smith & Wesson 38-caliber in his inside pocket. What an idiot. He’s being questioned by Toft as we speak.”
He gave a little satisfied chuckle.
“Where are you guys?” he wanted to know.
“We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes,” Louise said and glanced back at Camilla, who nodded in affirmation. “Ten minutes,” Louise corrected herself as she noted her colleague speeding up, even though they’d left the main road.
60
THE WOODS CLOSED IN AROUND THEM, AND THE ROADS GOT smaller. Stig had been forced to ease up a little on the speed and was now trying to avoid the worst of the potholes in the poorly maintained asphalt.
“Turn right up by that big farm,” Camilla ordered, pointing toward a forest road that was almost hidden behind a high pile of logs.
The pavement turned into gravel, and the speedometer was down to twenty as Stig coaxed the car along the uneven road.
None of them said anything, and aside from Camilla’s brief instructions to turn or go straight, there was an oppressive silence that became more and more intense the thicker the trees got around them and the closer they got to the pastor’s house in the woods.
Their Swedish colleagues were still right behind them, and the agreement was that they would stop a couple hundred meters before they reached the house.
“We’re going to go down around that little lake, and then there’s an old, dilapidated tractor where we turn off to his house.”
The sun had dipped behind the tall treetops, and an early twilight colored the light bluish gray through the narrow openings where it penetrated to fall on the forest road.
“The house is in there,” Camilla said, pointing toward a thick copse with yet another high pile of cut logs. Only a little white mailbox revealed that someone lived behind the dense trees.
Stig signaled and slowed down.
Camilla stayed in the back seat while Louise and Stig got out of the car to talk to their Swedish colleagues before they approached the house.
Camilla had rolled down her window, and aside from the police voices, it was completely quiet. Not a sound made it in here—no car engines, no noise. The only sound came from the birds flying low between the branches.
Most of all she wanted to run to the house and get the pastor and Jonas so they could get out of here, but she had been ordered to remain in her seat until they told her they were ready to go in. The two Swedish officers were armed, unlike Louise and Stig, and would approach the house first.
As they started walking, Camilla got out of the car and immediately noticed the scent of freshly chopped pine. A little farther in, the forest road ended and turned into a narrow path that led into a jungle of toppled trees—a relic from the powerful storms that had claimed large portions of the forest several years earlier.
Her fear impeded her movements, but when they waved to her from the driveway, she slowly started following the others. At first a little hesitantly, but then her footsteps became more
confident and finally she was jogging. Even from a distance she spotted Henrik’s black car, which was parked in front of the red-and-white wood house, and she saw the light in the kitchen window and the smoke curling up the chimney from the woodstove in the living room.
The two Swedish officers came around from the back of the house and nodded, as Louise signaled that they were going to enter.
“There’s no one visible in there,” one of the Swedes said, glancing up at the house’s second floor, where a window was ajar. “There’s no sign of a confrontation. Everything looks peaceful.”
After a quick knock on the front door, Louise waited for a second before pressing the door handle down and pushing the door open. She stood in the doorway, listening, before she took the first step into the foyer.
Camilla stood in the driveway watching her. She was still afraid and her muscles were stiff, her heart pounding, and her hands clenched, her fingernails cutting into her palms. At the same time, she felt like they’d made it in time. She filled her lungs with fresh forest air and slowly exhaled, feeling slightly dizzy.
Through the window, she watched Louise walking into the kitchen. The others had gone upstairs. Camilla watched Louise walk toward the living room, which they knew was empty. Camilla’s shoulders relaxed since the Swedish officers had already peeked in all the windows on the ground floor.
The wind pulled at her hair, blowing it over her face as she turned around and started walking around behind the house, over the large lawn, left wild and natural. She sat down at the table by the fire pit and enjoyed the silence for a second and the scent of the thick carpet of pine needles that formed a natural carpet under the tall trees.
Louise was puzzled by a sound from the room at the back of the downstairs and slowly walked forward through the living room, past the woodstove. She spotted Camilla out in the yard by the long, wide picnic table, which was made of a split tree trunk resting on two stumps.
