The Midnight Witness

by Sara Blaedel

  “Be careful. You don’t just elbow your way in with these people. You don’t belong there.”

  Louise realized too late that she’d waved another red flag in front of Camilla. “Listen,” she implored. “It takes years to develop the right sources. You can’t simply stroll into some hole and expect to be accepted as one of the gang. That’s not how it works. If anyone suspects you’re snooping around, they’ll tie rocks around your feet and dump you in the harbor.” After a moment she added, “But of course we’ll take care of Markus.”

  “Relax, it’s not going to be that way. I’ll let Holm deal with all that. But I can ask around and try to find the snitch she’s talking about.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Louise noted that Camilla hesitated. “The Finn. Do you know him?” Suddenly, Camilla looked tired.

  Louise shook her head. “How much are you thinking about getting involved in this?”

  She hoped this wasn’t a new crusade, but she sensed a spark in Camilla, and when that happened, her friend was off and running.

  “I’ll talk with this Finn guy, if I can find him, and then I assume Søren will take over. The drug trial starts tomorrow, a Dutchman and the Danish middlemen will be in court, and the ones they arrested Saturday have been charged and are in custody the next four weeks. Looks like they still haven’t found the Danish gang leader.”

  Her phone rang. “Hi, no, no, nothing’s happened yet. We’re still over at Louise’s. We’re coming home now.”

  She laid her phone on the table. “That was Mom. She was getting worried.”

  Louise checked her watch; it was past eleven. “Better get home then,” she said. She walked into the living room, where Markus lay on the sofa, buried deep in Peter’s arms. She called for a taxi while Camilla put her coat on and packed Markus’s things into a plastic sack.

  “How long is your mom staying?”

  “Until Sunday.”

  “It would be nice to see her.”

  “She’s going out in the country on Friday, but otherwise she just wants to spend time with her spiritual friends and Markus.”

  “I miss her. I’m always in a good mood when she’s around. Maybe she’s met some new spirits she can tell us about.” Louise lifted Markus up and handed him to Camilla. They said goodbye at the door, and Louise watched them walk down the stairs.

  Peter was up when she returned to the living room. “Wow, I passed out.”

  Louise nodded and smiled. “It’s almost impossible not to when you lie down and try to put a kid to sleep. That’s a really nice sweatshirt you bought him.” She felt a bit like an outsider.

  “I found it on Skindergade on the way home from my meeting. It caught my eye, and I just had to buy it.”

  “You’ll spoil him to death.” She laughed, and he pulled her close, told her this was how it would be as long as he didn’t have his own kids to spoil.

  “Then you’d better get some,” she said. She walked to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth.

  “Yeah, but it looks like that will have to wait, if the offer I just got turns out to be as good as it sounds.”

  She stopped and turned to him, her mouth full of toothpaste. “What offer?” She wiped off the foam running out of the corners of her mouth.

  “From our Scottish office.”

  She realized he was talking about what happened at the dinner with the Finns. “You make it sound like it’ll be all work and no play if you accept.”

  He walked into the bathroom. “If I do, I’ll have to move to Aberdeen for six months.”

  She spat and rinsed her mouth.

  “And I hope you’ll go with me.”

  9

  Let’s get started the old-fashioned way,” Suhr said as they sat in Heilmann’s office Thursday morning. The report from Forensic Genetics had arrived. As Louise already had heard, there was no usable material on Karoline Wissinge, so a DNA profile of the murderer wasn’t going to happen.

  Louise told them about Karoline’s abortion. Suhr sat quietly as she spoke, then nodded when she finished.

  “So, you’ve spoken with her doctor?”

  He seemed to feel she’d gone behind his back, not informing him beforehand about contacting the doctor. She was about to explain, defend herself, but at the last second, she held back. “Yes!”

  An awkward silence followed.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding at her. Louise tried to get her heartbeat under control.

  “Let’s keep that bit of information to ourselves,” the Homicide chief said, looking around the room pointedly. Clearly, he wouldn’t tolerate this being leaked to the press. “I’m expecting the autopsy report by noon.”

  “The boyfriend didn’t say anything about it?” Michael Stig said.

  She shook her head, annoyed at how he made it sound. Like it was her fault the family hadn’t mentioned the pregnancy or the abortion. “But, of course, I’m going to ask him.”

  “After lunch,” Suhr said, “Forensics is coming in. We’ll meet in my office, and the rest of the day we’ll go through the evidence we have, together with the officers assigned to us.”

  Several of them nodded. No one looked particularly eager, and Louise noticed that Heilmann was lost in her own thoughts.

  “When we meet, I want you all to bring a list of the facts you’re certain about, and we’ll brainstorm. We’ll continue until we have a clear picture of what happened.” He looked grim as he stood up and left the office.

  “Okay then, we’d better get to it,” Toft said, pushing his chair back to stand up.

  “If I could have a minute first,” Heilmann said, gesturing at him to sit again. “There’s something you should all know before this afternoon’s meeting.”

  The next few moments reminded Louise of the phrase so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

  Heilmann didn’t beat around the bush. “I’ve just been granted an open-ended leave of absence.”

  “Henny, what…?” Toft said.

  Odd, how personal he sounded, Louise thought. Unusual.

  “Perhaps you all know that my husband has been ill,” she said.

  Only Toft nodded.

  “He was improving, and we hoped the worst was over. But last Wednesday he was admitted to the hospital again, and on Friday they found a large tumor on the left side of his head.” Tears had swelled up as she spoke, and now they fell. After a moment, she dried them off with her index finger.

  Louise sighed heavily. “Can it be operated on?”

  Heilmann looked at her and shook her head. “Listen, I’m stopping today. Right now, in fact. I won’t be at the meeting this afternoon. I don’t know if they’re planning to promote someone, or if Suhr will be taking over the investigation.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, let me know,” Louise said after they all stood up.

  “Thanks. If I don’t come back to the department, take care of yourself.”

  Louise was startled. “Why wouldn’t you come back?”

  “I plan on it, but we don’t know how long I’ll be gone, and obviously they can’t promise to hold the job for me forever.”

  “They won’t get rid of you. At most they’ll appoint a temporary DCI until you come back.”

  Heilmann smiled weakly. “Thanks, but to tell the truth, that’s the least of my worries right now. I can’t even imagine myself working. Hopefully that will change later on, but right now I just need to let go of everything, concentrate on what’s happening at home.”

  Louise nodded. She thought about Peter. When they went to bed the night before, he had suggested she take a leave of absence and go with him to Aberdeen. Before he could finish, though, she’d cut him off. She wasn’t going to leave her job and play housewife in some Scottish city for six months.

  She pushed her conversation with Peter out of her mind. Even though Henny Heilmann’s situation made an impression on her, there was no way she should feel guilty about not putting her life on standby while Peter’s care
er took off.

  Camilla sat in the Metro on the way to work, considering what to tell Høyer about her meeting with the head of Narcotics. She was also anxious to hear if they’d given Søren Holm permission to be in on Wednesday’s raid, and if so, what he’d gotten out of it. Maybe she should ask him if he knew anything about the Finn. But first she would make some inquiries.

  The hallway outside the editorial offices was quiet, the doors closed. Her monitor crackled when she turned the computer on. She wanted to start by checking Infomedia, a database for articles published in major Danish newspapers. Maybe she could read up on what was happening in the drug underworld and check for names mentioned frequently in the articles.

  She typed in narcotics—over eight thousand results. She sighed and limited the search to the past year. A little over a thousand. Still too many. She had to be more specific. Drug gangs. Finally, she got it down to thirty-nine, which she could handle.

  She scanned the articles and found eleven that looked promising. Then she searched for drug raids; sixteen articles showed up, five of which looked potentially useful. She started reading them, noting in which articles the persons arrested were named. She printed them out. Also, the articles about Copenhagen’s drug underworld.

  She noticed that many of the articles in front of her were written by Holm and Frank Sørensen. A lump came to her throat when she began highlighting an article called “Prisoners’ Families Threatened by Drug Lord.”

  She was almost finished with the articles when Høyer knocked and came in. He asked her if she’d seen Holm. She shook her head. “I don’t even know what he got out of the police raid yesterday. Did they let him go along?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. He promised to let me know, but I haven’t heard from him since Tuesday evening.”

  Camilla stiffened. “He isn’t answering his phone.” She had a bad feeling about this, but she tried to come up with a plausible explanation. “He might have gone home to sleep. He’s been at it almost twenty-four seven. When I saw him Tuesday afternoon, he looked like a walking corpse.”

  She stopped abruptly, though not before that last word slipped out. Høyer didn’t react. Camilla sighed. She knew she was riling herself up, that everything going on around her was getting to be too much for her to think about rationally. She needed to focus and not see ghosts. Maybe handing everything over to Søren when he got back wasn’t so stupid after all. Then she could concentrate on Karoline’s murder and not have to cross swords with gangsters.

  She took a deep breath and leaned back. “Could we call his wife if he still has a home phone?” She breathed deeply until she felt herself relaxing.

  “Yeah, I’ll do that right now. He doesn’t like being disturbed at home, but I want to know where the hell he is. You have to keep track of your people.” He smiled a bit bashfully before walking back to his own office.

  Camilla could see he was worried, too.

  She decided to call Hans Suhr and ask if there was anything new in the Karoline Wissinge case. She would concentrate on that until Søren showed up. The thought of telling her much more experienced colleague about the talk she’d had with Birte Jensen, the deal she’d made with her, eased Camilla’s mind. She punched the number for Police Headquarters and asked for the chief of Homicide. While waiting, she realized she hadn’t heard if anything had come out of the article written for Willumsen about Frank Sørensen’s movements last Saturday. She’d have to check on that later.

  “Hans Suhr is currently in a meeting.”

  “How about Willumsen?”

  “Not in.”

  She hung up. It annoyed her that they always said to call later. You hardly ever got hold of them on the first try.

  Louise counted fifteen at the meeting, which had been moved from Suhr’s office to the conference room.

  “Let’s hear from Forensic Services first,” Suhr said, gesturing at Frandsen.

  Louise was the only woman in the room. Just as in Homicide, few women worked at Forensic Services, and apparently none of them had been assigned to this case.

  Frandsen lit his pipe before standing and walking over to the big screen in the corner of the room. “I’ll start by showing you what we filmed at the crime scene when we were called in.”

  Several of them turned their chairs to get a better look. Louise grabbed her notepad, ready to take notes, even though she knew they would go through everything later.

  The first thing to appear on the screen was the red and white barrier tape. A few techs were expanding the area initially blocked off by the first officers on the scene.

  The camera then showed the entire crime scene. The body wasn’t visible, but a few men walked in the background, setting up a tarp to block the view of curious bystanders.

  “The rain was definitely a big advantage for the murderer,” Frandsen said. He laid down his pipe.

  Louise nodded almost imperceptibly. Flemming had already pointed that out.

  The next image was a close-up of Karoline Wissinge. The camera zoomed in on the bruises on her throat. Her blond hair was wet and stuck to her pretty face.

  She swallowed. Karoline looked so terribly vulnerable lying there. The young woman’s life had been taken away, and Louise found it even more difficult when she thought of the embryo inside her.

  Small marks had been made in the earth around the bush, and a close-up showed a pair of footprints, a cigarette butt, and a wrapper from a bar of chocolate. Several of the things marked were so small that Louise couldn’t see what they were. It was getting dark, and several techs walked around with small, extremely bright spotlights. She was surprised the entire crime scene hadn’t been illuminated by then.

  Frandsen explained they had focused on searching for footprints. The rain could be useful in one way: There was a chance the murderer had left behind a set of visible impressions. Had it started to rain again, they would have lost many valuable footprints, which is why they had rushed to make castings of the ones they’d found. He explained that they’d also waited for the civil defense to arrive with a large tent to cover the body.

  Louise tipped her chair back. She hadn’t been asked to pick up shoes from Martin Dahl or Karoline’s ex-boyfriend, to be compared with the prints found. Apparently, they didn’t have anything useful. But clearly, they’d had to protect every potential clue for later evaluation.

  “We found two cigarette butts. Our examinations show they came from two people. One of the butts had disintegrated, but Genetics managed to do a DNA analysis on the other.” He looked around the room, as if he expected them to applaud.

  “Great,” Toft said. Several others nodded. They had so little to go on, and this could prove to be important.

  Louise smiled, too. She was impressed by how incredibly little it took to do a DNA profile on a human. Saliva and sweat contained no DNA, but it could be found in the tiny skin cells that sweat carried out of the body, or in the mucous cells in saliva. When you sneeze, the spray can provide enough DNA for a profile.

  “If there were any fingerprints on Karoline Wissinge, the rain washed them away.”

  The faces around the table drooped. He shut the TV off. Hans Suhr stood up and walked over to Niels Frandsen. “Rain is our enemy,” he said as dramatically as he could. They had absolutely nothing.

  Louise wrote down what had been said, though not because she couldn’t remember. She had to do something.

  She’d promised Karoline’s parents the police would do everything they could, but right now there were no leads. She was surprised how much her anger bothered her. In her mind she saw Karoline in the park, but immediately she put aside the image and instead saw her lying in the room at Forensic Medicine, cleaned up and looking nice. That helped calm her, though it did nothing to ease the discouragement she’d been feeling the past two days. Not one single breakthrough in the case. Had she been attentive enough to everything she’d discovered, the people she’d met? She could have been sitting across from the murderer, without
any sense at all of who he was. She hoped not. But she was having trouble concentrating, and that wasn’t like her.

  Suhr wanted everyone to briefly tell about whom they’d been in contact with. It took an hour. Louise told about the abortion and stopping by to talk to Flemming, about his observation that Karoline apparently hadn’t tried to defend herself. “Presumably she hadn’t been afraid. Maybe she didn’t have time to react, or maybe she didn’t expect to be assaulted.”

  They took a short break; most of them walked out for a cup of coffee. Louise followed them slowly. After filling her mug, she returned to the room at once. She needed a moment to herself before they started brainstorming.

  Suhr stood at the whiteboard, holding Flemming’s autopsy report. On the right he had written the pathologist’s estimated time of Karoline’s death, between midnight and seven a.m. Sunday. On the left he’d written One a.m., the time she’d left Baren. The space between was blank.

  Everyone drifted in and sat down. “What happened between one and seven?” He glanced around the room. “What the hell happened from the time she left her friends until she ended up in the park?”

  “Her boyfriend came to pick her up. He saw her with Lasse Møller, got jealous, and strangled her!”

  “Lasse Møller wanted more than just a walk. She shut him down, and he strangled her!”

  Louise had drawn a stick figure of a girl on her notepad, and every time a new idea came up, she drew a line from the figure and wrote the idea down.

  “Childhood friend from Frederikshavn confronted her before she got home. Maybe she’d told her boyfriend not to loan him more money.”

  By the time they finished, Louise’s head was spinning. Nothing was too stupid or unwelcome when they brainstormed; they listened to every idea, even though some of them were far-fetched.

  “We are going to bring in every person we have named here today for questioning,” Suhr said, “whether they’ve already been questioned or not. As far as other unknown persons possibly involved, we’ll have to hope our week-after canvass flushes them out. Like a witness who saw something Saturday night, but maybe didn’t connect it to the murder.”