The Midnight Witness

by Sara Blaedel

  “We have no idea what happened,” Jørgensen said. “We have an unconscious woman in here, that’s all we know. Could you take it from the beginning?”

  The Finn glanced at him before turning back to Louise. “She’s the one who killed the two reporters. It just took me too long to figure it out.”

  He sighed heavily, then sipped at his coffee. “And she was going to kill Camilla Lind.”

  Jørgensen took over again. “What makes you believe the head of Narcotics wanted to kill Camilla Lind?”

  “I suppose because Lind suspected what was going on, just like the other two.”

  “And what was going on?”

  The Finn closed his eyes and held his head in his hands for a few moments. “She cheated me. I’ve been helping her this past year. I thought we were trying to nail Klaus West, but it turned out that she was West.”

  “Don’t you think we should continue this at Police Headquarters?” Jørgensen pushed his chair back to stand up.

  “I’ll go in with you, but I’d like to tell you what happened first.”

  Louise tried to pull herself together to follow what he was saying.

  “I’ve worked with Jensen off and on for several years. She scratched my back, I scratched hers. Last spring, she asked me to help with Klaus West, and there’s nothing I’d rather see than that man getting what’s coming to him.”

  The Finn paused a moment. “He killed my sister.” His voice was calm, but his eyes flared with hatred.

  “They’d made a few arrests. One guy was dealing for West. They gave me his cell phone and a locker key he had in his pocket when they nabbed him.”

  Louise’s muscles knotted as she listened. She leaned back in her chair and stretched to loosen up.

  “Jensen said the drugs were being delivered to a storage locker on Vestergade. My job was to pick the drugs up and sell them. I was given the names and numbers of several customers, and what was left over I sold to some old connections I have. The money was to be stashed back in the locker. The idea was that people in her department could keep an eye on who was buying.”

  He looked away. “At least that’s what she wanted me to think. And I swallowed it. But she’s the one who stashed the drugs in the locker and then told me to go get them. And who picked up the money later on.”

  He sat up. “I’m sorry about what happened to your friend.”

  “How do you know Camilla Lind is my friend?”

  He smiled weakly. “It’s pretty obvious, after your performance at the King’s Bar. You talked to my friend. Like I told Lind, he wanted to find out who you two were. When you asked about me, he figured you knew my sister. That’s why he agreed to pass along Camilla’s phone number. Then when I told Jensen about it, she said the dark-haired woman must be you.”

  The woman at reception knocked and stuck her head inside. “We have news.”

  Louise jumped up and followed her.

  Camilla lay with an IV in her arm and a plastic tube in her nose. Her eyes were closed when Louise came in and introduced herself to the two doctors beside her bed. They smiled at her, which Louise took as a good sign.

  “She’s regaining consciousness,” one of them whispered, leading Louise a few steps away. “A moment ago, she mumbled something. It sounded like ‘the goddamn bitch.’” His face was a question mark.

  “That sounds about right,” she said. She stepped back over to the bed and laid her hand on Camilla’s cheek. “The bitch is gone. You can come out now.”

  Louise brushed the strands of blond hair off her face. Camilla had a large abrasion on one cheek and a long cut on her chin. “It’s over,” she said softly as she caressed her friend’s cheek.

  “She killed them.” Camilla’s voice was hoarse and weak, wheezy. She opened her eyes and felt around for Louise’s hand.

  Louise choked up. Her friend seemed so frail, which her angry words only served to underscore.

  “Markus?” Camilla blinked a few times and fought to keep her eyes open.

  “Christina is staying with him.” Louise saw no need to tell her about the boy’s fever and calling the doctor.

  Camilla sighed and closed her eyes.

  “It’ll be a few hours before she really wakes up,” one of the doctors said. He told Louise that she could stay in the room with her friend.

  “I’ll just step out and tell the others, then I’ll be back,” she said.

  When she returned to the lounge, Suhr was sitting with a steaming cup of coffee, listening to the Finn’s story. He looked up at Louise.

  “I’m staying with Camilla tonight,” she said.

  He nodded. “Is she awake?”

  “Not really, but she had enough spunk in her to call Birte Jensen a bitch, so she’s getting there.”

  He smiled.

  26

  Peter ripped the lid off one of the large pizza boxes. The steam rose and clouded up under the lamp above the coffee table. “Ham or pepperoni?”

  “Ham,” Markus squealed. He lay under the blanket at one end of the sofa.

  “Pepperoni for me,” Camilla said from the other end. She looked at her son. The hospital had given her strict orders to rest, and she and Markus had been installed in Louise’s guest room for the weekend. She had suffered a few heavy blows to the head, and even though the drug she’d been given was almost out of her body, her headache persisted.

  “When did the hospital release you?” Peter said.

  “We were at Police Headquarters at one. They offered to let me stay at the hospital to give my statement, but I wanted to get home.”

  “What the hell possessed you to go into that courtyard alone?”

  Peter leaned forward to hear her story. Louise had already heard it so many times that she didn’t want to listen. It was horrible, and she was angry at Camilla for being so irresponsible. At the same time, she was so relieved that Camilla was all right. She almost sobbed at the thought of her friend ending up with her spinal cord severed.

  Markus had taken his pizza and cola into the bedroom to lie in the big bed and watch cartoons on TV.

  “I wasn’t alone. I was there with Jensen, to follow the police operation and find out who was behind all this.”

  Louise could hear Camilla still believed she’d acted sensibly.

  “But there wasn’t any police operation,” Peter said. He’d just flown back from Aberdeen, and he still didn’t know all the details.

  “I couldn’t know that.” Now Camilla didn’t sound so self-assured. She stared at the ceiling, her pizza untouched.

  Peter took Markus’s spot on the sofa. “How did she drug you?”

  “It was in the coffee I drank. I’m not clear on what happened after we left the car. I was excited about being in on the action, I remember that, but everything changed in the courtyard. Jensen started acting weird. I couldn’t recognize her voice, didn’t understand what she said, and then I got scared. But it was the drug kicking in. Then I realized that if John Bro was right, she could have taken the heroin out of the storage room.”

  Louise went out to put water on. She brought three coffee cups back and set them on the coffee table. “Did you even see the Finn?”

  “No. I could feel my face on the asphalt, but I didn’t hear anything. And that’s all I remember.”

  Louise sat down. “The Finn said that Bro contacted him earlier in the day.” She filled Peter in on who Bro was.

  “He knew the Finn was involved in dealing the heroin,” she said to Camilla. “The Finn was the connection between Jensen and all the buyers.”

  Camilla sighed heavily. “Apparently, Bro convinced the Finn that Klaus West wasn’t the one delivering the heroin to the locker on Vestergade. That it had to come from someone in the police. That’s when the Finn suspected Jensen was using him, and it made him furious. All he’d wanted was to destroy West. He followed Jensen when she left headquarters. At the time, he didn’t know she was meeting me; he’d just decided to tail her, to see if he could confirm his
suspicion.”

  “She must have gone home for the syringe and the knife,” Peter said. “Surely she was smart enough to not have them in her office.”

  Louise shrugged. “The knife could have come from our storage room; we’ve confiscated plenty of knives. Jensen’s learned about forensic pathology over the years—that helped her. You have to know some anatomy to be able to cut a spinal cord.” She thought of the talks pathologists gave occasionally at headquarters. “But anyway, it was all well thought out. The victim dies within five or ten minutes, and there’s not much blood. And to be on the safe side, she gave them an overdose.”

  She pushed aside her plate with the dry edges of pizza crust, stood up, and went out to get the coffee. The apartment was quiet except for the cartoon voices squawking from the bedroom. When she came back, she set the cups in place and filled them.

  Peter eyed Louise. “Did the Finn know she was a murderer, too?”

  “When Jensen and Camilla got out of the car, he was just a few steps ahead of them, watching closely. He hid in the shed with the trash cans, and he heard everything they said.”

  Camilla had already heard the Finn’s story, but she was all ears.

  “He heard Jensen say that Camilla was too insignificant to stop her. And that’s when he realized what was about to happen.”

  Peter hadn’t touched his coffee. He was fascinated by the drama that had played out while he’d been negotiating his salary with the Scottish production manager.

  “The Finn snuck out of the shed and saw her pull a syringe from her pocket. By then you were already on the ground.” Louise glanced at Camilla. “He attacked her from behind and grabbed the syringe and stuck her in the neck with it. She died of an overdose.”

  The story hung heavily in the air for a few moments.

  “Why did she do it?”

  The same question had been asked repeatedly all day at Police Headquarters.

  Louise took several moments to sort things out in her mind. “She was rich; it couldn’t have been the money. The most logical answer is that she was on some power trip, she did it because she could. She juggled nonexistent evidence and witness statements without anyone suspecting her. She had it all thought out, and she manipulated the Finn and Camilla, knowing that if they both supported the narrative she’d created, it would be believable.”

  Peter nodded in agreement.

  “Klaus West wasn’t in the Royal Hotel the evening Frank Sørensen was murdered. The raid did take place, they seized a large cache of drugs, and because she was the one who claimed she’d seen him, it was a lot more credible. She used people. No one wondered about her being in the storage room, there was nothing strange about it.”

  Camilla rubbed her forehead, clearly tired now. “One hell of a game she was playing.”

  “Anders Hede was just a small fish. He had nothing to do with any heroin to be delivered yesterday. But when she said it was going to happen, no one doubted her.”

  “No, no one would, would they.” Peter gave Camilla a friendly clap on the knee.

  Louise thought about all the pieces that had fallen into place that day. “She must have been the one who planted the six hundred grams of heroin in the apartment West used for his base. And the butterfly knife. Of course, it had been wiped clean of fingerprints. It takes a sharp person to plan and execute all that.”

  “It’s crazy, insane,” Camilla said. “What did she have against Klaus West? It sounds so personal.”

  “He claims he’s never had anything to do with her. But with his record, it’s logical to suspect him of this kind of thing.”

  They all jumped when the door buzzer rang. Peter went out in the hall to see who it was.

  “Pretty impressive,” Camilla said. “I remember thinking she had style. That must’ve been right before I fainted.”

  Louise heard Peter talking to someone out in the hall. He shut the door, and a few seconds later he came in with a forest of a bouquet, twenty times as big as the ones he occasionally pulled together himself to give her.

  “‘To Camilla Lind, Morgenavisen’s most beautiful employee. Get well soon!’”

  He laid it on her blanket, and instantly she was hidden underneath it. “This is incredible! Wow!”

  She stuck her head into the flowers.

  “The champagne man,” Louise said. Then she remembered she’d never told Peter about the evening at the bar. “Klaus West,” she added. She regretted saying where Camilla could be found.

  Her friend set the bouquet on the floor while Peter went out to find a bucket large enough.

  “Who was it sitting and crying in the hall outside your office today?” Camilla asked. “You were talking to him when I came out of the bathroom.”

  Louise’s face clouded over. “Jesper Mørk. He was Karoline Wissinge’s boyfriend in nursing school.”

  “Come on, let’s hear it!” Camilla said.

  “He was brought in early this morning, and as I understand it from what Suhr said, he confessed immediately.”

  Peter called out from the kitchen, asking them if he should open a bottle of wine.

  “Yeah, but bring along a cola for the patient,” Louise said.

  “Well, what happened?” Camilla said.

  “The day before Karoline’s murder, she had lunch with him. When we arrested him, he said she’d gotten pregnant back when they were together, but she had an abortion because she’d met someone else. Which ended their relationship. He was still in love with her, though.”

  Peter set a glass in front of Louise.

  “Then last Friday they were sitting together in the hospital cafeteria, and he begged her again to leave her boyfriend and come back to him. They’d had that conversation several times, and she’d always refused. Then she told him she was pregnant, that she was looking forward to telling her boyfriend. It must have been too much for him, way too much, because he was waiting for her when she came home late Saturday night. He talked her into taking a walk with him.”

  “She must have wondered what he wanted,” Camilla said.

  “He admitted to Stig that she tried to cheer him up when he accused her of breaking his heart. And he still claims that deep down she still loved him.”

  “He sounds crazy. Do you have anything that supports his confession?”

  “They found Karoline’s bag in his apartment. And he was the one who wrote the card I found with the flowers at the crime scene. ‘Thy will be done.’ Because she wanted a child with someone else and not him, he thought it was God’s will that she should die!”

  “Unbelievable!”

  “Yeah, scary, isn’t it? He’s being evaluated mentally. It didn’t seem to matter to him whether he was caught or not. We found two cigarette butts at the crime scene, and he said he was smoking while they sat and talked. I’d be surprised if one of them isn’t his.”

  “This world is filled with lunatics!” Camilla said. She leaned back on the sofa, her eyelids drooping. “How the hell did you find out it was him?”

  “Last night in the hospital, I was sitting there looking at the whiteboard above your bed. And I remembered I’d seen one like it, just bigger, in the lounge on Mørk’s ward. The writing on the whiteboard was the same block lettering as on the card I found. So this morning I called the ward’s head nurse, Anna Wallentin, and she checked the work schedule. Mørk had taken a night shift the day before we were there, and he was the one who’d written on the whiteboard.”

  Camilla looked impressed. “What did Stig say when you told him?”

  Louise grunted. “What do you think? He said there was no way the motive could be a broken love affair.”

  “Wow, you’re the one who’s a bit touchy now, aren’t you?”

  “Look who’s talking! At least I haven’t threatened to resign because I couldn’t get along with my colleagues.”

  Their phone rang. Peter walked over and answered it, then he held his hand over the receiver and looked at Camilla. “It’s a journalist from the
news department at Danish Broadcasting. The story is going to be on the evening news, and he wants to know if he can do a phone interview with you.”

  Camilla sat up and stared at him.

  “No, absolutely not,” Louise said. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Yes,” Camilla yelled, “of course I’ll do it.”

  “What about the Finn?” Peter said, after Camilla had walked out to the bathroom to freshen up before speaking to the journalist. “He’s looking at a long prison sentence.”

  Louise shrugged. “That’s hard to say. He did save Camilla’s life, and the question is, will he be charged with acting as a middleman for Birte Jensen. It doesn’t look like he made any money at all, and he was collaborating with the police. I really don’t know what’s in store for him.”

  She yawned. The cartoon show was over, and they hadn’t heard a peep out of Markus. She guessed he’d fallen asleep.

  Peter took their plates out to the kitchen and opened the dishwasher. “I better get home. I have to get up early, and I still have to pack.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Pack?”

  “My contract says I’m starting April 1. That’s Wednesday.”

  “You’re starting on Wednesday? But you don’t have to go home now to pack your clothes, and there’s not so much else you’ll be taking along right now, is there?”

  He looked serious now. “I’m subleasing my apartment. I’ve thought this over, a lot. When I get back from Aberdeen at the end of September, I want to move in with you. And if that’s not what you want, I’m afraid it’s over between us.”

  Slowly his words began to sink in.

  “I want to be with you, I don’t want there to be any doubt about that. But since you’re not ready to make a sacrifice for me in the short term, maybe it’s just not in the cards for us to be together forever.”

  Louise thought about Heilmann, who hadn’t been in doubt about what was most important to her. She spoke quietly. “I am willing to make sacrifices for you. But I also need to do my job, and anyway, you’re coming back.”

  She reached for his hand. “Exactly,” Peter said. “And when I do, you’ll have made your decision.”