The Midnight Witness

by Sara Blaedel

  Louise barely listened as the others spoke about their plans for the day. Two detectives were going to knock on more doors around Silver Square to find witnesses.

  “We’re working hard on Lasse Møller’s circle of friends, looking into his past,” Michael Stig said, nodding at the detective beside him who apparently was helping.

  “Since you’re digging into backgrounds, there’s someone you might be able to find,” Louise said. She leaned over the table. “Karoline’s boyfriend, Martin Dahl, has an old childhood friend from Frederikshavn who’s doing some dealing, and occasionally he forgets to pay for his product.”

  Stig raised an eyebrow. “And what makes you think this childhood friend has something to do with the murder?” He tilted his head and stared at her.

  “Dahl loaned him a chunk of money once. The friend paid him back, but I think we should have a look; there could be more to the story.” She paused a moment. “Not because it’s necessarily relevant to the murder, but it’s good to stay on top of things.”

  “Okay, interesting,” Stig said. “Was Karoline involved in that sort of thing, too?”

  “Not at all. She blew up at Martin when he loaned his friend the money.”

  “It’s definitely something we need to know, if their friends are involved in that type of crime,” Heilmann said. She glanced at Stig. “Take care of that. All right, shall we get on with it?”

  She glanced at everyone in the room before gathering her papers and leaving the office.

  “Incredible the energy that woman has,” Toft said, with respect in his voice. “You’d never think she’s taking care of a sick husband at home.”

  “What? Her husband’s sick?” Louise said. She’d met Victor Lau several times. He was a good-looking man, about sixty, sporty and tanned most of the year, as many die-hard sailors are.

  “They found a tumor in his brain six months ago, and they operated around Christmas. That’s why Heilmann was gone then.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Okay, I think. It’s been a couple weeks since I asked about him, but she said he’s recovered from the operation, and they were very optimistic.”

  Louise nodded thoughtfully. Should she say something to her boss, or act as if nothing was wrong? “I can’t understand why I haven’t heard about this.”

  “It’s not so strange,” Toft said. “No one talks about it around the department. I don’t think many people know, and she doesn’t want our sympathy.” He gathered his papers and walked out.

  But he knew, Louise thought.

  “I’ll try the last two again,” Louise said when she and Jørgensen were finally back at their desks. “If we can’t get hold of them, we’ll have to go over to the hospital.”

  Neither Signe Jensen nor Jesper Mørk answered, so Louise skimmed the reports on the two who were questioned that morning before filing them.

  Louise had already prepared the three folders Monday morning. The red would be sent to the defense lawyer, the blue containing the originals was for the judge, and the police prosecutor would get the green one. The folders were new and thin, but before the investigation was over, they would most likely be overflowing with paper, their edges torn and creased. Actually, it was a bit chilling but also exciting to her when she slipped the first files into the folders.

  Usually she wrote a report before people being questioned left, so they could read and sign it immediately. But she didn’t always get the reports copied and filed at the same time. Usually they ended up in a pile on her desk.

  Jørgensen had just walked out when Jesper Mørk called.

  “Department A, Louise Rick.”

  “I got your message,” he said, after an exchange of hellos. He sounded tired, and Louise guessed he’d had a night shift and had just woken up.

  “Thanks for calling. I’d like to speak to you about the murder of Karoline Wissinge. I understand you’ve known her for some time.”

  She sensed him stiffening, heard him light a cigarette. “I have to get to work,” he said, less tired now.

  “That’s fine, we’ll meet you there.”

  After a long pause, he said, “My shift starts at three.”

  “We’ll be there a few minutes past three. We also need to talk to Signe Jensen.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “That depends on how much you have to tell us.”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  He sounded surprised. Why couldn’t people just accept that when the police talk to them, they simply want to know what they know? “Just tell us a bit about Karoline, and if you know something that might help us in connection with what happened Saturday, I would be very grateful if you’d share it with me.”

  “See you then.” He hung up.

  Jørgensen was back. “Which one was that?”

  “Jesper Mørk. He’ll be at work at three; I told him we’ll be there a little after.”

  “Then we’ll be able to talk to her other colleagues in the department, too. Should we try to call Signe Jensen again, so she knows we’re coming?”

  Louise nodded. Her cell phone rang. Camilla sounded ecstatic.

  “I’ll call,” Jørgensen mouthed, reaching for the paper with Jensen’s phone number.

  “She was fantastic,” Camilla gushed. “You’d love her. She’s the kind of person everyone wants to be friends with.”

  “Who?” Louise’s voice radiated indifference, which she hoped Camilla would hear.

  “Helle Sørensen, Frank’s widow.”

  Louise had completely forgotten about the interview.

  “She’s younger than us—that I hadn’t imagined. Am I interrupting something?”

  “I’m on my way out.”

  That wasn’t enough to stop Camilla. “Unfortunately, the boy wasn’t there. The photographer was pissed about that. He wanted a shot of a weeping widow and little Liam.”

  “I see,” Louise said, mostly to show she was still listening.

  “But Helle’s story is incredible, you don’t need to see her crying with her kid on her lap.”

  That a story wasn’t good enough without a photo of a sobbing mother and child sickened Louise. The story was the same, with or without photos.

  “And she made it clear, no photos of Liam in the paper. It was hard enough to get her to talk.”

  “She could have just said no,” Louise said.

  “Yeah, but she felt she had an obligation to Frank. Apparently, it’s something they talked about once.”

  That was too much for Louise. She couldn’t imagine exposing herself to a national paper in a situation like this, a family member in a murder case. “Sick,” she managed to get in.

  “Frank did a lot of these kinds of stories himself over the years, and he always said if anything ever happened in his home tragic enough to catch the media’s attention, he’d damn well speak out, too. He felt he had to, otherwise he couldn’t look himself in the mirror.”

  “Because he’d asked others to tell their stories?” Louise was still acting as if she were a part of the conversation.

  “Yeah, and now Helle feels she owes Frank to do the same. She says it’s what he would have wanted. I’m not so damn sure I could do it.”

  “No, and that’s why you ought to consider covering something else. Lifestyle, or fashion. Where you don’t have to push people into doing things you wouldn’t want to do.”

  Louise knew Camilla was impervious to any objections when she was in this mood, but she tried anyway. Double standards was a phrase that popped up in her head when their conversations reached this point. “Anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  “No, just wanted to share my good news. Talk to you later.”

  “Did you get hold of Signe Jensen?”

  Jørgensen shook his head. “I left a message. We’ll have to track her down at the hospital.”

  Louise stood up and walked to the door. “I’ll see if there’s a car available.”

  “Already d
one.” He fished the key out of his pocket. “If we leave now, we can fill the head nurse in before they show up.”

  Louise grabbed her jacket and noticed the newspaper on Jørgensen’s desk. “Is it okay if I take that along?”

  He tossed it over to her, and she stuck it under her arm. They headed down the hall.

  She and Velin usually took turns driving, but it made sense somehow for Jørgensen to drive, since he’d picked up the key.

  In the car, she opened the newspaper. Journalist Brutally Murdered dominated the front page, along with a photo of Frank Sørensen. The murder of Karoline Wissinge was also mentioned. If she’d been raped, too, the photo on the front page would probably have been bigger, Louise thought. She looked further inside the paper and found Camilla’s half-page article.

  “Maybe we should take a look at any unsolved rape cases,” she said. “The ones where the victims have choke marks like what Flemming found on Karoline.” She looked over at Jørgensen; she knew it was a shot in the dark.

  A moment later, he nodded. “That might be a good idea.” He glanced at her. “When we get back, maybe we can check up on cases about internet dates that led to reports of rape.”

  Department A also handled rape cases. Murder, violent crime, and vice. Or as they usually put it: blood, spit, and semen. Many rape accusations came from women who met a man on the internet. Several gruesome cases had shown up in the past few years. The investigations were extremely difficult; it was a different type of rape than what happened on the street. Often during interrogations, it came out that the sex was consensual—to begin with. The trouble occurred when there was disagreement about when it should stop. Maybe that was the kind of guy who had assaulted Karoline. A guy who wanted to do more than just follow her lead.

  Louise remembered a woman who had dated a guy, Kim Jensen, for a month. They’d met on the internet and went out five times before she invited him home. She lived in Rødovre; he came from Hørsholm. In Louise’s mind’s eye she saw the thin woman, late twenties, a single mother with a young daughter. She’d been so badly abused that the doctors at the National Hospital’s Center for Victims of Sexual Assault were deeply shaken when they called the police. When they went to pick the guy up, it turned out that Kim Jensen had disappeared into thin air. His online profile had been deleted. The phone number he’d given her no longer existed, and most likely his name wasn’t Kim Jensen. In addition to the violent assault, the woman was filled with shame about having been with a man she hadn’t really known. The humiliation was almost as bad as the pain.

  Louise shook the memory off. She was glad that Jørgensen was going along with her suggestion, even though it probably wouldn’t help. One point for him.

  “How’s it going?” Terkel Høyer stood in the doorway.

  Camilla smiled. “Fine. I’m sending it to you now.”

  “What about the photos?”

  “Christian surely must be about done. He’s over on the computer working on them. I’ve seen the portraits he took; they look good.”

  “Send me the article; I’ll read it while he’s finishing.”

  He ducked out again, and Camilla read what she had written one last time before sending it. Sometimes the words just flowed out, and later she’d be surprised they came from her. Usually it was some of her best writing. The passages difficult to write were often a bit awkward.

  She glanced out the window. Earlier, the rain that began the day before had intensified; it had looked as if it could last all day, but now it was clearing up. The King’s Garden was dreary and showed no signs of spring. She decided to run up to the cafeteria. She’d skipped lunch, but she had time to catch a bite before writing the captions.

  “Looks great,” Høyer said when she returned. “Sounds exactly right. You’re a star; you sketch them perfectly. She’s a dear woman, isn’t she?”

  Camilla nodded. “Very. It’s like I’ve known her forever.”

  A door slammed outside, and footsteps marched down the hall. The photo editor burst into the room in a rage. “What the hell is this? We can’t get a goddamn photo of the kid?”

  At first Camilla didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You have no goddamn right to interfere with the photographer.” Høyer and Camilla were both astonished; the man looked like he wanted to strangle her.

  Camilla was numb. “What are you talking about?”

  “What’s going on?” Høyer said.

  Holck had been the photo editor of the paper longer than anyone could remember. He was brilliant at his job, but his temper was legendary. And it exploded when someone barged in on his territory. “Little Miss Lind here went along with not getting a photo of the widow and the kid together. Unbelievable. But we’re printing that shot. Thank God for archives; it’ll be an old photo, but we’ll just have to live with that.”

  Camilla gasped. “No, you won’t,” she yelled. She flew up out of her office chair, which smacked against the wall. “Helle said no to a photo of the boy, and I promised her we wouldn’t use one.”

  Holck sneered at her. “When the hell did you become managing editor? You’re not authorized to promise shit. Your job is to scribble some words down, and we’d all appreciate it if you kept to that and let the rest of us do our jobs.”

  Saliva shot out of his mouth as he turned and marched back to his office.

  “Explain,” said the managing editor.

  “Helle asked us to keep Liam out of the article. That’s why he wasn’t home when I came. And she doesn’t want us to use another photo of him. We have to respect that, damn it.”

  Høyer eyed her for a long moment. “Stories are always better when you can see who they’re about. You know that. Can’t you explain that to her?”

  Tears came to Camilla’s eyes. What were they doing? Here she’d handed them a top-notch interview, and now it sounded as if it wasn’t worth shit without a photo of the mother and son. For a moment, she thought about letting herself explode, but she backed off. “What can I say. I don’t know what it is you want. She’s completely against us using that photo.”

  “Did you pressure her?”

  She couldn’t believe this. He wouldn’t have had the heart to do it, either. He knew her much better than Camilla, who after all had only met Helle once. “She said no.”

  After a few moments, she said, “Terkel. Helle is absolutely devastated. She totally doesn’t want her son involved, or to see a front-page photo of him torn up about his father. She only agreed to the interview because she felt it was what Frank would want.”

  “And that’s why it shouldn’t be so hard to explain we need a photo of her and her son together.”

  “How can you say that? We can’t twist her arm about this.”

  “We’re going to have to figure out something.” He walked out of the office.

  This couldn’t be happening! What about the plain old good, solid story? What the hell were they thinking? She’d done what no one else had been able to do; none of the other papers had even gotten a foot in the door, and now it wasn’t good enough because the goddamn photographers thought they needed a photo of someone sobbing. The story was the important thing.

  Suddenly, Høyer appeared in the doorway. “We’re checking the archives. I’m pretty sure we have a photo of Helle and Frank and Liam together. They were at some reception last year we covered, with a lot of celebrities, remember?”

  She didn’t.

  “Otherwise you’re going back to Helle to convince her,” he continued.

  She thought about that for a moment. “I won’t do it.” She stared straight ahead.

  He stared at her. “Yes, you will. It’s your job!”

  While she collected herself, Holck appeared around the corner and stood in the doorway. Without so much as a glance at Camilla, he told Høyer all they had was a photo of Frank standing with baby Liam in his arms. “We need a newer photo.”

  Høyer agreed. “Check stock photos, otherwise we’ll have to do it.�
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  “I’ll send Christian out to find Helle’s parents. You know where they live?”

  “I think they live in Viby or Borup, but we can find that out.”

  Camilla stood up and confronted them. “You can forget about that.” She turned to her boss. “I want to talk to you in private.”

  She walked over and slammed the door on Holck, who barely managed to step back and not get hit. “You’re not doing this. I’m pulling my interview if you don’t believe it’s good enough without that photo.”

  “Camilla, don’t make a scene about this. It doesn’t reflect well on you.” He sounded cold.

  “You can’t treat Helle this way. We have to keep our word.”

  “I didn’t promise her anything, and my word goes here at this paper. Whatever deals you’ve made, that’s your problem. You know how things work here. If we can get that photo, we will. We don’t give up until we’ve tried everything. That’s how you usually do it.”

  Camilla had to swallow that. She’d hunted down lots of school photos of kids when the parents or family wouldn’t give her one. Danish School Photo worked all over the country, and often they could come up with a photo when classmates or friends wouldn’t part with one.

  “I promised. She trusted me, and that’s why the interview is so good. She’d never have talked to me if I hadn’t promised to not push her on that photo.”

  “I care a lot about Helle and Liam,” Høyer said. “But that doesn’t stop me from doing my job. Let’s see if we can find one, otherwise you’ll have to go back to her.”

  “I won’t do that. And just try to print my interview if you use a file photo.”

  “Oh, come on, Camilla.”

  She was close to tears, so she stood up, grabbed her bag, and stalked out the door. Out in the hallway she ran into Holck; she nearly punched him in the gut, but she held back at the last second.

  When she reached the street, she decided to find a café and drink a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream. She started down St. Regnesgade and noticed Søren Holm coming her way. She panicked and looked around for a place to hide; she didn’t want to talk to a colleague right now. But he was lost in thought, plus he looked like hell. It occurred to her he might need a warm cup of something, too.