by Sara Blaedel
She took the elevator to the floor for the pathologists’ offices, where they wrote reports and such when they weren’t busy performing autopsies. Flemming came over and said hello, then they walked down the hall to his small office.
“Good to see you,” he said, after they sat down. “Coffee’s coming in just a moment.”
“That’s fine.” She smiled. The situation felt a bit awkward. She’d never talked with him this way before, to speculate, toss things around. “What do you think about this murder, what kind of a man is he?” She might as well acknowledge it: She was stumped.
He studied her for a moment, then he sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I really don’t know. There’s no doubt about the cause of death. While I was in there with her”—he nodded his head at the door—“I didn’t feel she’d reached the stage where she’d been seriously frightened.”
Louise nodded. She had her notepad out.
“Of course, you can’t see fear on a corpse,” he quickly added. “That’s only something you see in films. All bodies look peaceful. But she had no lesions or abrasions, no broken nails, no sign that she’d fought for her life. I mentioned that in the report, too.”
They eyed each other a moment. He’d finished with the autopsy report that morning, but the pathologist verifying the report had to read it before sending it on to the police.
Louise broke the silence. “I heard she was pregnant.”
He nodded and frowned in concern.
“Her boyfriend didn’t mention it when I spoke to him, but he might not have known. I’ll contact her doctor to hear if she’d gone to him about her pregnancy. And you’ve ruled out rape?”
Normally the investigator present at an autopsy informs others on the team of what the pathologist said during the examination, but Suhr had only passed on a few details. They would have to read the rest in the report.
“Yes. The severe lesions on her neck are the only signs of the man.”
“Is there any material for a DNA analysis?” To her surprise, she realized that in the back of her mind she’d hoped a DNA profile analysis would identify Karoline’s murderer; she didn’t believe some random attacker appeared out of nowhere and strangled a total stranger. She’d hoped there would be a match with someone they had already spoken to.
“It was raining cats and dogs Saturday night and most of Sunday. Almost everything was washed away; there’s nothing there for us.” He spread his arms out in apology.
“The murderer must have left behind some evidence!” Louise couldn’t accept that the best chance for a breakthrough in the case was eliminated, while nothing else was leading anywhere.
Suddenly he asked, “Would you like to see her?”
She thought for a moment, then she nodded.
She grabbed her things, and they walked out to the elevator. While they waited, Flemming said that Karoline’s parents were coming to view her one last time, therefore she’d been taken to the visitation room on the ground floor.
Thankfully they didn’t have to go to the basement. Louise had been there several times, and she never refused, but every time she walked down the long, tiled hallway with the glittering lights and incessant humming of the ventilation system, a heavy mood overwhelmed her.
On the ground floor, they walked into a waiting room, with the visitation room and examination room on one side, a row of offices on the other. It was deserted, but Louise smelled the cigarette butts. Someone had probably been waiting on the blue sofa a short while ago.
Flemming stuck his head in the office at the back and informed them that Louise Rick from Homicide wanted to see Karoline Wissinge. He was checking to make sure that Karoline was there. “Fine,” he said. She guessed that Karoline was behind the door in the back corner.
“When are her parents coming?” She glanced at her watch as they walked to the door. Almost five. She didn’t want to run into Hans and Lise.
“Five thirty or six. Her father was at work today and had to go home first.”
Yes, he was back at work. Louise hadn’t thought about that.
A white sheet covered Karoline. Louise recognized her easily, even though she’d only seen her face in photographs. Her wavy hair was golden blond, and she looked peaceful and calm lying there. Louise understood what Flemming meant. Nothing made her think this young woman had fought for her life. She noted the obvious abrasions on her throat.
Flemming followed her eyes and shrugged. It wasn’t true they used makeup to cover wounds and lesions.
“Her mother is bringing some of her clothes.”
Louise nodded.
“They’re also bringing a few things to put in the casket. Everything has to be taken care of now, because the funeral is Saturday.”
“I know. Suhr has ordered me to attend.”
She checked her watch again. She had to leave; her presence might remind the parents that the police had nothing new to report. She felt sorry for them. This would be the second time they had buried one of their children.
She smiled at Flemming. “Thanks for letting me see her. I’d better get back.”
She heard voices outside and crossed her fingers it wasn’t Hans and Lise.
A man stood with his back to them in the waiting room. He turned around when they came out. He looked shabby, yet something about him made Louise think she should know who he was.
Out in the hall she asked Flemming. He smiled. “Søren Holm from Morgenavisen. He’s spent most of the day arguing with the lab assistants because he wanted to see Frank Sørensen. He finally got it through his thick skull that he had to have permission from the police. Willumsen gave him the green light, and he finally got a look at him.”
Louise hadn’t thought about Sørensen being here, but of course, yes. “When’s his funeral?”
“It might be a while. We’re trying to determine what kind of knife he was stabbed with.”
Suddenly the thought of all these bodies overwhelmed her. She was light-headed, as if she lacked oxygen. And the place felt claustrophobic, even though it was spacious with a high ceiling. Flemming took her elbow and walked quickly to the exit.
“So, you’re waiting until we find the murder weapon that killed Sørensen?” she said as they stood out in the fresh air.
He nodded. “We also have to be certain what he was anesthetized with.”
“Yeah, I can see it might be a while before that funeral.”
“It’s rough on his wife, but she’s being incredibly gracious about it. She has this air of calm about her, like she’s the type of person who believes in fate.”
Louise thanked him again, and they said goodbye before she hurried over to the car.
How can you believe in fate when your husband is knifed to death, and your two-year-old son has lost his father? Sometimes Louise was amazed at people’s reactions.
Jørgensen was gone when she returned to the office. She called Martin Dahl and was told that Karoline’s personal physician, Dr. Madsen, lived on Østerbrogade. Louise didn’t want to mention that Karoline had been pregnant before she talked to the doctor. It was late, but she might get lucky; like her own doctor, he might have evening consultation on Wednesdays.
“She was here last week,” Dr. Madsen said when Louise explained why she was calling.
“She knew she was pregnant?”
“Definitely. She’d been pregnant before; she knew the symptoms. It’s just terrible what happened to that poor girl,” he added, before Louise could break in.
“Excuse me, you believe she’d been pregnant before?”
The doctor groaned a bit, as if he’d suddenly thought of doctor-patient confidentiality, but then he apparently remembered she was dead. And it was the police he was speaking to. “She had an abortion two or three years ago. I don’t remember exactly when, but I can find it…just a sec.”
Louise grabbed a notepad out of the pile of papers on her desk. She heard the doctor clicking the keys on his computer.
“Hmmm…�
�� Louise could almost hear him reading Karoline’s medical records. “It was four years ago. Time flies.”
“Is there anything there about who the father was?” Louise asked eagerly.
“No. Father unknown. I remember she felt awful when she came in to me. The pregnancy was an accident, and she was afraid her parents would find out. I felt bad for her. It’s always best to have someone to talk to and help deal with the situation, right from the start.”
Louise agreed. She wrote everything down; though she wasn’t sure the abortion was relevant to the investigation, at least they knew about it. She thanked him several times before hanging up.
The records from Karoline’s cell phone had arrived. The same five names and numbers dominated the list. Her parents, Martin, work, and the two girlfriends she’d gone into town with. She laid the list down and went into Heilmann’s office to tell her about the pregnancy, but her boss wasn’t there. Louise stood in the hall, not sure what to do. Finally, she knocked on Michael Stig’s door to hear if he had talked to Suhr about Karoline’s funeral.
“Hi,” she said.
Stig sat with his legs on his desk, reading. He smiled when he saw her.
“Did you tell Suhr?”
“Tell Suhr what?”
“About Saturday,” she said. “That you can’t make the funeral. Whoever he picks, it would be nice for them to know in good time.”
“I’m going. We agreed to meet here; we’ll go together.”
Louise groaned inside. He’d griped to her, but apparently, he had no problem kissing the boss’s ass. Should she just shrug it off?
“Okay then, it’s all settled.” She walked out. She realized what irritated her so much about Michael Stig: his fickleness. One minute he said one thing, the next something else. Plus, he was arrogant and chauvinistic as hell.
She decided not to waste any more time and energy on him. And to that end, it was best to keep as far away from him as possible. The terrifying thing was that a man like him could be her boss someday. Showing up for work would be hell.
She stuck her key in the door, and immediately a child’s footsteps pattered in the hallway. “Hi, Louise!” Markus shrieked. “Peter gave me a cool skater sweatshirt.”
“You look really cool in it.”
She admired the much-too-big red sweatshirt, grabbed the hood, and gave him a big hug. Then she walked out to the kitchen and immediately sensed the laid-back, homey atmosphere pulling her in. “Hi.”
She hugged Camilla. Peter stood up and put his arms around her, then planted a kiss on her forehead. He poured her a glass of red wine and refilled Camilla’s and his own.
She looked at Camilla. “How’s everything going?” Peter walked over to the kitchen counter and filled a plate for her.
“Good, really good in fact. Mom just arrived, and we should get home and keep her company, but like I’ve been telling Peter, it’s been a very strange day.”
Louise raised her eyebrows at her, then smiled at Peter when he set a plate in front of her. “Have you found a new job?”
“No, no, we cleared all that up. They agreed not to include a photo of the child.”
“Fine, so everything’s back to perfect.”
“I met with Birte Jensen, the head of Narcotics and Licensing,” Camilla said, ignoring Louise’s irony. “Do you know her?”
Louise shook her head slowly. “Only what I’ve been told. A real lady, I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t look like a policewoman, anyway. More like some rich woman involved in charities and clubs.”
Louise tried to remember what she looked like.
“I didn’t even react when she met me in the hall. I couldn’t imagine someone like her breaking up the big international drug cartels, but I guess you shouldn’t let appearances fool you.”
“She’s married to a lawyer who argues before the Supreme Court, and I think they live up by the Royal Forest. Why did you talk to her?”
“Willumsen asked me to call her.”
Louise was puzzled. Police leaders seldom got involved with journalists this way.
“It surprised the hell out of me, too,” Camilla said. She tipped her wineglass and drank. “She has a nice office, I’ll say that. Diplomas, fancy framed paintings on the wall, plush armchairs.”
“Come on, what happened?”
“Now I know what it feels like to be granted an audience with the queen. Very ceremonious, a little bit fake. It annoyed me; she was the one who wanted to talk to me.”
Louise smiled and looked at Camilla; she was pretty, with her blond hair hanging down on her shoulders, her big deep blue eyes. Like Birte Jensen, her appearance deceived most people when they met her. One thing was that she swore right off the bat. But her mind was sharp as a razor, and she never backed down. If someone avoided a question, she looked them straight in the eye and didn’t budge until she got a decent answer. Many times, she’d made Louise’s toes curl in such situations, but it was fun to watch people reassessing Camilla. She was no sissy.
“I told her I’d spoken with Willumsen, and I’d heard she met with Frank Sørensen on Saturday evening.”
Louise pushed back her plate and took a drink of wine. Again, she was surprised. “At Police Headquarters?”
Camilla nodded. “She wanted to fill me in on some of the stuff she and Frank had talked about. Maybe I should have told her to talk to Søren Holm—he’s the one covering the drug case for us. But since I was there, I figured I might as well listen to what she had to say.”
Peter and Markus had gone into the living room. Louise noticed how quiet it was, and she assumed the little man had conked out. It wouldn’t surprise her if the big man had, too.
“Seems they’ve had a surveillance going on in the Royal Hotel for quite a while, in connection with the drug case. She said they were expecting a shipment of what for some ridiculous reason they call ‘green dust’— like in some comic book. Why don’t they just call it heroin or cocaine or whatever the hell it is?”
“Because it has a light green color that makes it recognizable when it’s sold.”
Camilla raised her eyebrows, as if she was surprised her friend knew about things like that. “She said Frank stopped by Saturday evening, said he’d been told he could come along when the police moved in. He’d sniffed out what was about to happen, and it sounded like he’d been pushy, which annoyed the hell out of her. But they made a deal about where he’d be and who he’d be with when it all came down. The police had access to two hotel rooms. One they used to listen in on three other hotel rooms. And they had plainclothes cops stationed around the hotel, in the restaurant on the top floor, in the bar, down in the lobby.”
Louise visualized all that.
“The police used the second room for taking breaks, or if they felt too conspicuous.”
Louise was familiar with such operations, but she was glad she seldom took part in them. You could wait for days without anything happening.
“Jensen told Frank to just show up. She would be in the surveillance room, listening in on the rooms being bugged. Is it common to let reporters in on things like this?”
“It depends on the reporter and who’s in charge. What you’ve just told me isn’t normal. But he might have known something and was using it to pressure her with.”
Louise thought about what she’d just said. She wasn’t completely familiar with how Narcotics worked. There might be other advantages to working closely with the press that she didn’t know about. She did know that reporters often asked to be at the scene of a homicide and witness the start of an investigation, but she’d never heard of anyone being allowed so close.
“The reason this hasn’t come out is that Narcotics wants the places they have under surveillance to be a secret, and of course that’s understandable. The plan was that Frank would show up late that evening, hang out for a while in the bar, and if something happened, he would be tipped off. But he was ordered not to talk to any of the police.”
“So, did anything happen?” Louise was curious; she hadn’t heard about any raid.
“Yeah, it did. But Jensen wouldn’t go into that. They made a few arrests and confiscated quite a bit of heroin.”
“Was he there during the arrests?”
Camilla shook her head. “No one saw him.”
“If Jensen made a deal with him, isn’t it odd he didn’t show up?”
They thought for a moment. “Her theory is that Frank arrived at the hotel, but then he met a few of the men the police were after, either inside the hotel or outside. Obviously, he had something going on.”
Camilla stared into space for a moment. “Something he was holding over Jensen, otherwise she wouldn’t have let him be there. But also, something the bad guys didn’t want him to reveal. Maybe they decided to stop him. Not that the men who were arrested did it themselves. Things like that can be arranged on short notice.”
Louise thought about that. She stood up to put water on for coffee. “Why did she tell you all this? If they know who killed Sørensen, they’d want to round them up without telling anyone about it.”
“She wanted to make a deal. She’d scratch my back if I scratched hers.”
Louise sat down and leaned her chair up against the wall, then she crossed her arms and stared at her friend in curiosity. “What the hell do you have that she wants?”
“Nothing right now. But she gave me the name of one of their snitches and asked me to pay him a visit and twist his arm a bit.”
Louise was incredulous. “She gave you the name of one of their informants?” She poured the boiling water in the French press. “Why would he tell you more than he’d tell the police?”
She grabbed two cups out of the cupboard and set everything on the table.
“Jensen thinks he might hold something back from them that might put him in a bad light. He can’t be charged with anything for leaking information to a reporter. And anyway, snitches usually want to tell what they know.”
“How much of what you find out can you print?”
“I have free rein. She just wants to know what the talk in the underworld is.”
