The Midnight Witness

by Sara Blaedel

  Camilla brought two bottles of beer into the living room, and she and Louise plopped down on the sofa.

  “I really thought he was going to leave when I wouldn’t promise to write what he wanted,” Camilla said as she poured beer in her glass. The foam overflowed before she could set the glass down. “Shit.”

  Camilla held it while Louise went into the kitchen for a rag.

  “I was nervous as hell when you walked by Svejk,” she said when she came back. “Weren’t you?”

  “Not really. He was friendly; he just suggested we have a cup of coffee instead of a beer.”

  Louise sat back down.

  “I don’t think he did it because he thought someone was listening in,” Camilla said.

  “I was getting seriously worried, anyway,” Louise admitted. She took a drink of beer.

  “I thought maybe you would be, but I couldn’t really say anything before I took my coat off and he left for a moment.”

  “You did the right thing, but I was just sure he’d spotted us. And you never know what people will do under pressure.”

  They sat for a while, absorbed in their thoughts.

  “It surprised me when your boss started in on that quid pro quo stuff. I feel like a total greenhorn when I hear things like that. I know it happens; I just haven’t been a part of it before.”

  “Yeah, but you made a great impression; now you’re one of the people the police can trust. That’s good for you, isn’t it? Or what?”

  “Yeah, sure. You just make it sound like I joined some intelligence service.” Camilla laughed, but Louise knew she was proud of the confidence the head of Homicide had in her. “I wonder if the apartment really exists.”

  “Yeah, and if it does, it’s going to be very interesting to see what they find. We really need a break in this case.” Louise glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get home.”

  Camilla jumped up. “I’ll call a taxi.”

  “I’ve got to pick the car up at the parking lot.”

  “You shouldn’t be running around out there alone now. The taxi can take you to the car.”

  Louise was fine with that. She’d put in a long, full day. An eventful day. While Camilla called, she went out and put on her coat, yawning as she buttoned it up. Suddenly, she felt completely exhausted.

  20

  Peter shook her gently. Louise had vaguely heard the alarm clock ringing and him getting up. Her body felt heavy as lead. She crawled further under the comforter and buried her face in her pillow.

  “Up we go.” His words sounded like someone calling from afar.

  Silence. Heavy, tired. She counted…eight, nine, ten. Without opening her eyes, she threw her comforter aside and cringed when the cold air slapped her warm skin.

  “Come on, get up.” Peter stood beside the bed. “It’s past seven; you have to be out the door in a half hour.”

  She forced her eyes open. “Coming.”

  She sounded raspy and dull. She rubbed her face, pushed her skin around with both hands.

  “Hon, don’t squash your nose all over your face. It makes you not look like your charming self!”

  She looked up in surprise; she hadn’t noticed him standing there.

  “I’ve got to be at the airport in an hour.” He swept her hair out of her face. Now she remembered: He was flying to Aberdeen; he’d been invited for a look at where he’d be working.

  “I’ll see you Friday afternoon,” he said.

  She nodded and let him pull her to her feet, then she wobbled out into the bathroom to brush her teeth. That much she owed him before kissing him goodbye.

  “The car key’s on the kitchen counter,” he yelled on the way down the stairs.

  Louise found a clean pair of jeans in the closet, and while she put them on she thought of the conversation between the Finn and Camilla. The apartment might be another dead end. She finished up and walked out to the hall without checking herself in the mirror. She had mascara in her bag; she’d deal with it at headquarters. Camilla never left her apartment without makeup on.

  Louise parked on Otto Mønsteds Gade. Jørgensen hadn’t shown up yet when she reached the office, though it was five to eight. She turned on her computer; the chances were decent that the startup would be finished by the time she got back from the morning briefing.

  She entered the lunchroom and sat down at one of the long tables. After a moment, Suhr walked in. He had deep, dark circles under his eyes, and he looked like death warmed over. Twice.

  Louise guessed that they’d found the apartment.

  “Good morning. It finally looks like we caught a break.” He sounded surprisingly fresh.

  Several in the room greeted him back. Louise glanced around. Everybody looked beat, and yet she sensed the energy behind the weary eyes. Most of them had been working practically around the clock, but now they were all ears.

  Occasionally, Peter accused her of being an adrenaline junkie, during the periods when work filled about 80 percent of her day, sleep the rest. You get a rush, and lack of sleep is just a minor detail—that’s how she usually ended the discussion.

  Suhr was going over the main points of Flemming’s autopsy report.

  “Jesus!” said the officer across from Louise when Suhr explained about the overdose Holm had been given before being stabbed.

  “Yeah, it’s safe to say it wasn’t voluntary on his part,” Suhr said.

  He stood in front of the whiteboard that filled most of the wall. The courtyard behind Vestergade 28 had been sketched with a blue marker, and every spot where something linked to the corpse had been found was marked in red.

  Suhr said the techs were now certain that Holm had been killed in the courtyard. He also said that even though Forensic Medicine wouldn’t finish the final autopsy report until later that day, Flemming Larsen was convinced that the same type of weapon had been used in both murders, possibly a long, narrow butterfly knife.

  Suhr didn’t say a word about the apartment, and several times during the briefing she felt he was avoiding her eyes. After he finished, she sat for a few moments before standing up. Immediately he called her name.

  “Could we have a word in my office?”

  She nodded. “Of course.” There was a distance between them that hadn’t been there last night when she’d left. “How about a cup of coffee?” she added, hoping to lighten things up.

  “That sounds good, I might need it. Let me just send a message to Willumsen.”

  Holding on to two cups of coffee, she walked a tightrope to his office.

  “Need a hand?” Jørgensen said when he met her in the hall. He grabbed one of the cups and followed her.

  “Thanks. Where were you?” They reached Suhr’s office and set the coffee down.

  He stifled a yawn. If anything, he looked even worse than their boss, Louise thought as she caught herself staring. “What the hell have you been up to all night?”

  He sighed dramatically and leaned against the conference table. “First I wrote out all the interviews from the paper.”

  She’d forgotten all about them.

  “When I finally got through all of them, Suhr came back from your little adventure and asked me to go out with him to look for an apartment in Vestergade.”

  “Good Lord, you were in here that late?” Now she felt sorry for him.

  He nodded. “Unfortunately!”

  “Too bad you didn’t find anything.”

  He looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Suhr walked in and gestured for her to sit down. Jørgensen left without explaining.

  “Good work last night,” Suhr said, after sitting down and reaching for his coffee.

  Louise was puzzled, but she waited for him to explain what happened after she’d gone home.

  “We found the apartment.” Suddenly he smiled broadly. “Did you think I was going to keep you in the dark about it?”

  She shrugged; what did he expect her to say? He was acting oddly, she felt.

&n
bsp; “We were in there most of the night. I decided not to announce it this morning so the news doesn’t come out until we’re ready. With regards to Camilla Lind, I mean.”

  She smiled at him. He knew that sounded like he didn’t trust the others in the department, and he added that of course no one would let the cat out of the bag. But anyway. So, the only ones who knew about the apartment were those who had been with him.

  “That’s fine.” She nodded to show that she got it, she agreed with him.

  “It was 26C. And we knew what we were looking for, so it wasn’t difficult.”

  She leaned across the table, eager to know. “Did you find anything?”

  For a moment he considered what to say. “Maybe. We found a small plastic pot with WS5 powder in the kitchen.”

  She didn’t understand.

  He smiled. “It’s a green coloring agent; it gives things a greenish tint!”

  Louise laughed. “You don’t mean to tell me that Klaus West stood in his kitchen and poured green coloring over uncut heroin.” Louise visualized that and laughed even harder. “It sounds totally insane.”

  “It’s almost certainly the source of the green in the heroin. Jørgensen was sharp enough to make the connection.”

  Louise shook her head. It sounded too crazy. “Was there anything else?”

  “Not much, except for some papers that could be records of his sales. We’ll have to look through them, of course.”

  “What about Sanne Hansen? Where was she?” The name the Finn had said was on the door.

  “We haven’t got that far yet.”

  “I can’t understand why they hadn’t already found the apartment.”

  Her boss looked at her and slowly shook his head. “We don’t understand, either. But he’s a sharp guy, no doubt about that. That’s how he’s survived up to now, by his wits. That probably explains it.”

  Louise chewed on that for a second. “Probably so.”

  She’d been hoping for more, much more, and now she was disappointed. “No drugs?”

  “They hadn’t found any when I left. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Jensen has her people going through the apartment with a fine-tooth comb, together with the techs. We called her early this morning.”

  Of course, Louise thought. Since no murder weapon or anything to connect Klaus West with the murders of the two reporters had been found, the apartment was more interesting for Narcotics.

  “When Jensen heard we bugged the Finn yesterday, she said he’d run into serious trouble with Klaus West about four years ago.”

  Louise perked up.

  “He was selling for West. Not just on the street, but bigger deals, in discotheques around town, places like that. After a year or so he wanted out, but West said no.”

  Suhr looked grim. “We’re talking about broken bones, and worse. When the Finn didn’t do what he was told, West got his little sister hooked on heroin, and last year she died of an overdose. Twenty-seven years old. West denied knowing her.”

  Fucking shithead, Louise thought.

  “The Finn wants him in prison, and he wants him there yesterday.”

  She nodded. “You can hardly blame him.”

  “That explains his motive, anyway.”

  “It also explains why he needed Camilla,” Louise said, after a moment’s pause. She’d wondered why the Finn hadn’t simply told Birte Jensen what he knew, but now she understood. “By going through her, he wouldn’t be suspected of snitching. At least not so easily. Maybe Klaus West was suspicious, but this way he could never be sure it was the Finn.”

  “Yeah, you have to be sneaky to survive.”

  “But how does all this help us?”

  “Jensen is still sure that West is our man. We just need to keep looking; she’s convinced we can find something. The techs are going through the basement and attic rooms; another team is tearing the apartment up. I spoke with her just before the briefing, and she said she’d try to be here when Camilla shows up.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Which won’t be long.”

  Louise tried to make sense of all this for several moments. Someone knocked on the door; Suhr’s secretary stuck her head in and said Camilla Lind and Birte Jensen were waiting outside. He walked out to greet them.

  Louise shook Jensen’s hand when she came in, then she quickly said hi to Camilla.

  Jensen’s cheeks were splotched, her eyes glittering. They sat down at the conference table. “We’ve got him,” she said.

  Suhr raised his eyebrows. “‘Got him’?”

  “We found a small butterfly knife with traces of blood. Forensics has it. It’s almost certain they can prove the knife is the type the killer used; the blade matches the puncture wound.” Jensen paused dramatically. “And in the bottom of a closet we found a little box that happened to hold six hundred grams of pure heroin. So…” She turned to Louise and Camilla. “Your little excursion yesterday was a great help to us!”

  Louise stared at Jensen as her words soaked in. “And the coloring agent?” Suddenly she recalled the absurd image in her brain when Suhr had told her what they’d found in the kitchen.

  Camilla frowned at her in confusion.

  Birte Jensen nodded. “That’s right. His trademark. A chemist from Forensics called me up this morning. He said that Vegex Chlorophyll WS5 is a food colorant. He tried mixing it with some talcum powder and pure heroin, and he’s pretty sure that’s how Klaus West made his green dust.”

  Camilla could hardly believe it. “Talcum powder!”

  Jensen explained. “Pure heroin is cut with lactose or talcum powder. Heroin sold on the street is thirty to 40 percent pure. Before it’s cut, it’s 80 to 90 percent. Take that and you’ll die, your respiratory organs will be paralyzed, and your heart will stop. So, heroin doubles in weight when it gets cut.”

  After a few moments of thoughtful silence, Jensen excused herself. “I have a meeting with the prosecutor in ten minutes. We have enough to charge him with this new evidence.”

  “You’re also pressing charges?”

  Suhr hadn’t said a word since she told them about finding the presumed murder weapon, but now he was alert. Before Jensen could answer, he leaned over the table. “When will the results on the knife come in?” he said, his voice stern.

  Louise leaned back in her chair and eyed them. She glanced at Camilla; her friend looked tense as she listened.

  Jensen’s voice, in contrast to Suhr’s, was silky. “Of course, we’ll let you know. I’ll call just as soon as I find out.”

  “I’ll call them myself. I’m sure you have plenty to do.”

  His words were cold, which made Louise cringe. She didn’t at all enjoy being in the middle of this power struggle.

  Jensen held her hands up in surrender and smiled. “All right, he’s all yours. I’ll take over when you’re through with him.”

  Suhr nodded, satisfied now.

  “Before I leave, I think we should plan on how to handle the press,” Jensen said, looking back and forth between him and Camilla.

  “I promised the Finn that we’d publish a photo of Klaus West, and ask people to contact us if they think he’s living in their apartment building. We’re doing that tomorrow.”

  “We can’t wait to charge him until tomorrow,” Jensen said, leaning down to pick up her bag under the table. “We have to go public with what we have.” She raised an eyebrow at Suhr. “Don’t you think?”

  “We made a deal yesterday, but I can see it’s going to be hard to keep our promise.”

  Camilla stood up. “What do you mean ‘hard to keep’? You have to keep it. Please!”

  In the awkward silence that followed, she stared pleadingly at the head of Homicide, who looked sheepish.

  “No one could have known this would happen. The evidence has been filed, the charges are being made now. But under no circumstances will we say anything about finding the apartment through a tip.”

  The end of Camilla’s nose was pure white. “Co
me on—you can’t do this.”

  Louise could see her friend was struggling to speak calmly.

  “The Finn will find out, and then he’ll think I’m screwing him around. I don’t dare do that!”

  “I’ll have a word with him,” Jensen said as if it were no problem at all. “Clearly, we can’t have you seeming to be someone who doesn’t keep their word.”

  She walked over to Camilla. “I’ll tell him what we found. He’ll understand we must proceed with this. And I’ll make sure he gets something in return later on.”

  Camilla nodded resignedly and shrugged, as if they were talking about something that no longer concerned her.

  Jensen quickly circled the table and shook everyone’s hand before leaving. Suhr stood up and pulled a chair over to Camilla.

  “I understand your reaction, but sometimes things happen, and we have to act. We really have no choice in this situation; we have a killer we’ve worked hard to find.”

  Camilla slumped in her chair, her eyes glued to the table in front of her, her face expressionless as he spoke. Louise felt sorry for her.

  “You have to nail him!” Camilla straightened up and turned in her chair to Suhr, leaning toward him until their faces were inches apart. “It’s okay; I understand. But what do I get?”

  Louise breathed easy now, her stomach unclenched. She pressed her lips together to suppress a smile. If you mess around with Camilla, you’re going to pay.

  “What?” Suhr was startled for a moment, then he began to laugh. “Of course you’ll get your piece of the cake.” He laid a hand on her shoulder and stood up. “Give me time to find out about all this; right now I don’t know any more than you do.”

  He walked over to his desk. “I’m sure we’ll put out a press release, and I promise, you’ll hear from me. The next few hours are probably going to be hectic, though.”

  Camilla stood up and put on her coat. “Can I print what we’ve talked about here?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Right now, you can write that we found what we presume to be the murder weapon. But I’d like to hear from the techs before you quote me.”

  “What about the six hundred grams of heroin and the food coloring?”