Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  Louise nodded and asked him to explain in more detail.

  “There’s nothing more to say. I just couldn’t stand to listen to any more whispering behind my back and didn’t feel like I should have to keep defending myself for something I didn’t do. So my temper got away from me.”

  Louise nodded and proceeded.

  “Did Dicta have what it takes to make it as a model?” Louise asked, picturing the tall girl with the prominent cheekbones. Louise had no doubt that the girl had radiated charisma and the boys certainly turned to look at her in the street, but forging a career was a totally different matter.

  He contemplated that for a bit before he started nodding.

  “I think she had a reasonable shot. She was just too impatient. She expected the agencies to line up the instant they heard about her, and it just isn’t that easy,” he said. “She apparently posed a little for a photographer up here and he succeeded in building up her image of herself into something really amazing in her own mind, but reality isn’t like that.”

  “She was actually used as a model here in town,” Louise said to vindicate Dicta a little.

  “It’s a hell of a long way from a picture in a free small-town newspaper to the big magazines,” he said, and in an instant arrogance swept the relaxed look off his face.

  “Well, actually, it was Venstrebladet,” Louise pointed out, grabbing the chance for a new angle. “Give me an idea how many visits it takes to a celebrity photographer to get three thousand crowns’ worth of portfolio pictures.”

  That shook him a little, but he didn’t respond.

  “And does it often happen that you drag it out all day and invite them out for sushi and other goodies after the pictures are taken?”

  He didn’t say anything, so she kept going.

  “Last Saturday around 11:00 P.M., I ran into Dicta in front of the train station here in Holbæk. She was so drunk, she was hunched over in the middle of the bike racks throwing up.”

  He was about to say something when she interrupted him and kept going, her voice still calm and steady.

  “A visit to a café and sushi up in your penthouse apartment. Why did you want to impress her when she was already in high spirits from the adventure she had set out on?”

  He sat there with a wrinkle in his brow, which showed that his rage was building; she discreetly followed his attempts to control it.

  “I think you misunderstood that,” he said finally. “Did she tell you that story? It’s true that we ate brunch and that I invited her out for a glass of champagne after the pictures were taken. I usually do that when I wrap up a job.”

  “But she made up the part about your opening multiple bottles that night?” Louise asked, watching him.

  He nodded.

  “Did she also make up your eating sushi together?”

  He said that Dicta had been hungry before she went home.

  “She had the money to pay you three thousand crowns, but not to buy herself a hot dog at Nørreport Station?” Louise let the question hang in the air, and then continued: “How many times did you see her that day?”

  She could see that he was going to deny that he had seen her at all since then, so she reformulated the question. “How many times did you have contact with her?”

  He remained silent.

  “She came by a couple of times,” he finally said, “so we could pick which pictures would go in her portfolio. But otherwise I didn’t see her.”

  “Did you agree to her sending that picture to Ekstra Bladet?” Finally some response was visible in his eyes. They squinted, nearly closed, and darkened. “What fucking picture?”

  Louise explained about his picture of Dicta appearing in Ekstra Bladet.

  “I didn’t fucking send in any picture. How do you think it makes me look if people see my name next to a page-nine girl?” he asked, outraged and angry.

  Louise couldn’t restrain herself. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how you look. How do you think Dicta looks? Now, you tell me what the fuck went on between the two of you. I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about you and your actual intentions.”

  He pulled back slightly in his chair and seemed more surprised than threatened.

  “There’s nothing else to tell.”

  Louise took a deep breath before she spoke again.

  “I’m sorry I got all worked up. But I actually knew Dicta Møller in connection with another case we’re working on, and it was terrible to see her lying down there in the parking lot with her skull crushed.”

  He had once more pulled his compassionate look down over his face when he said that that was perfectly all right, but his eyes were hard again when Louise repeated the question about how his photo of an undressed Dicta had ended up in Ekstra Bladet.

  “She must have sent it in herself,” he said, almost snorting the words.

  Louise stood up to go check with Storm if it might not be a good idea to hold off on pressing Tue Sunds any harder until they’d ransacked Dicta’s room and had maybe found more that would help them get a picture of the relationship the two of them had had.

  “Agreed,” Storm said and then told her that Dean had been in touch with Ekstra Bladet’s photo editor, who had just gotten back to him with the information that the picture had been sent in by the girl herself with a return envelope that was addressed to her own address. Dean had also checked that the account the money was supposed to be deposited into was Dicta’s.

  Louise leaned against the wall and stood there for a moment, feeling how the energy that had been coursing through her during Tue Sunds’s questioning had now suddenly left her body.

  Storm left her in the hallway. He was going to see Søren Velin, who was studying Dicta’s laptop with a technician.

  Louise returned to her office and told Tue Sunds that an officer would be ready to take him back to the city within ten minutes. She held out her hand politely and thanked him for coming in.

  “Did I really have any choice?” he asked, as he gathered his white sweater up off the floor, where it had slid, and tied it around his waist.

  “Yes, you could have refused. Then we would have been forced to arrest you, and then I wouldn’t have thanked you so nicely afterward,” she replied, following him out.

  28

  LOUISE WAS SCURRYING TO THE COMMAND ROOM FOR A MEETING with the others and hadn’t noticed their presence until she heard a hoarse male voice behind her.

  “Did that man have something to do with the murders?” Ibrahim al-Abd asked from the row of chairs along the wall. Sada was sitting next to him, well hidden behind her veil, which was wrapped tightly over her face.

  Something had happened to his face since she’d seen him last. Something dry and stiff had come over it, like bread that had been left out too long. He had expressed intense grief when they had last been together; now he expressed nothing, and his eyes watched her with a lackluster gleam. She walked over and sat down next to them.

  “We came because we’re afraid the new murder will make you forget about our daughter,” Ibrahim began. “I presume now you’re probably only interested in the Danish girl, whom Samra knew?”

  Louise mollified them by explaining that murder investigations didn’t work that way. You didn’t just drop one case because a new one came along.

  “Obviously, at the moment, we’re trying to identify who murdered Dicta Møller. But you can rest assured, we’re still doing everything we can to find out what happened to your daughter.”

  Sada gazed at her with a dark, unhappy look, which made Louise want to put her arm around the woman and comfort her. Instead she said that the police would really like to speak to them at some point in the near future, to find out what they knew about Dicta and the two girls’ friendship.

  “Please don’t let our daughter end up on the back burner,” Ibrahim pleaded. His voice cracked, and his wife looked down at the gray-laminate floor.

  Louise knew what he meant. So she tried to calm them by explaining
that a team of eight people was still working on their daughter’s murder, working what must be described as expanded hours.

  “We promise to let you know as soon as there’s anything new,” she said, holding out her hand as she stood up to join everyone else in the command room.

  “Was it the same killer?” Storm asked as she opened the door.

  The others were sitting around the table and the meeting was under way.

  Bengtsen shook his head and was backed up by Skipper, who had extensive training in criminal profiling.

  “The two girls’ murders can’t be compared.” Skipper stood up and walked over to the dry-erase board, where he drew the two girls as stick figures and wrote “organized” and “disorganized” over their heads.

  Louise pulled out a chair and accepted the cup of coffee Søren handed her.

  “One murder was committed by someone organized, one by someone disorganized,” Skipper continued. “The organized one was thinking about his or her own safety and planned how to dispose of the body in advance, and we can certainly assume that the culprit doesn’t live in the proximity of Hønsehalsen. The act suggests that there was a relationship between the killer and the victim.”

  Everyone seemed to agree.

  “The murder of Dicta Møller, on the other hand, appears to have been committed by someone disorganized, and in terms of motives I think it’s obvious that it was an emotional act stemming from a feeling like revenge or jealousy, for example. It was a spontaneous killing, and the murderer could easily have been seen from one of the surrounding apartments. Everything suggests that the location where the body was found was also the scene of the crime.”

  Louise had noticed that there were first- and second-floor apartments with windows looking out over the parking lot and had thought that the murderer was lucky no one had seen anything.

  Storm stood up and moved to stand next to Skipper, from where he addressed the room.

  “At present there are no commonalities between the murders of these two friends. Thus we will continue to investigate the two cases individually,” he said and added that of course they should remain more attentive than usual to the coincidence that both girls were in the same class.

  “A number of the ninth-grade parents have already called, expressing serious concern,” Ruth interrupted. “They’re afraid more students in the class may be in danger.”

  “I have a hard time believing that we’re dealing with a murderer who has set out to systematically wipe out a whole school class,” Storm said, running his hand through his hair, “but of course it’s impossible to rule that out at this point.”

  He turned to Bengtsen and said, “Maybe you should drop in on the ninth-grade class and fill them in a little on our work. A small bit of information often goes a long way in calming people’s fears.”

  Bengtsen nodded and said he’d do that right away.

  “We should talk to the local photographer who worked with Dicta,” Storm said and looked at Louise.

  She sat there for a moment as Bengtsen left and the others stood to go. She was thinking about Dicta Møller and all her dreams. Yes, when Mik came back, they’d have to get hold of Michael Mogensen, but first they had to go out and take a look at Dicta’s room. There had to be something there that could advance the case.

  29

  THE PASTOR WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN WITH DlCTA’S PARENTS when Mik and Louise came to the front door. Both Anne and Henrik Møller came to greet them when they rang the bell. A bunch of bouquets of flowers, still wrapped in cellophane, along with small white cards that hadn’t been opened or read yet were sitting on the counter. The pastor stood up and shook hands with Mik and Louise.

  “It appears that sorrow has settled over our town for the time being,” he said.

  There was something very forthright and confidence-inspiring about him, and there was a peace in the kitchen even though the grief was also palpable and visible in both parents. The mother’s eyes were red and puffy, her nose bright and shiny and rubbed almost raw from wiping and countless handkerchief dabs. The father’s face was ashen and withdrawn, his eyes glassy, but there was no sign of tears. So he hadn’t gotten that far yet, Louise thought, but it would come. In some people, the crying and flood of tears happened right away, while in others the grief had to take root in all of their cells before the reaction came.

  “We would really like permission to look around Dicta’s room. Do you have anything against that?” Louise asked, after they’d both said no-thank-you to coffee or joining the parents at the table.

  “Of course we don’t have anything against that,” Henrik said immediately. He stood up and led the way and opened the door, but remained frozen in the hallway as if he didn’t have the strength to go into the bedroom that still contained so much of his daughter’s spirit in all the things that were in there.

  They could hear that Anne had started crying again and the pastor was comforting her. Louise turned her attention to the girl’s room. She’d been there before, but with Dicta, and hadn’t been so interested in the things in the room but instead had been focusing more on what the girl had told her.

  There was a big round disco ball hanging in one corner of the room above a small circular table that was so covered in thick, pink pillar candles that there was only space for an old-fashioned alarm clock with a bell on top. The bed was a futon, which was currently made up as a sofa adorned with two cream-colored pillows.

  At the end of the bed, hidden behind the open door, hung a large vanity mirror with bare bulbs screwed into a wood frame all the way around it, like you might see in a theater dressing room or like a professional makeup artist might have. Under the mirror hung an open shelf with more hair and body-care products, makeup and perfumes—along with a curling iron and a flat iron—than Louise had seen gathered anywhere else, even at Camilla’s place. Overwhelming and completely unnecessary for a young woman with the appearance nature had imbued Dicta with, Louise thought. Along the opposite wall there was a narrow desk and a tall bookshelf. To the left of the desk a little stereo system was mounted on the wall and in the corner there was a tall, narrow CD holder.

  A Fatboy beanbag chair filled up the space just to the left of the door. The trendy, oversized version of the classic 1970s beanbag chair was pink and matched the candles on the table. On the floor next to that, there was a big pile of fashion magazines. A quick glance showed that they were Costume, Eurowoman, Sirene, and Bazaar. There was also a TV and a small black iPod on the table under the disco ball. The only thing missing was the computer Bengtsen and Velin had already picked up. On the wall over the desk, there was a photo collage that Dicta had made herself with pictures of several of the biggest international models on catwalks from around the world.

  “She was a beautiful girl,” Mik said, as Dicta’s father stood in the doorway.

  Henrik nodded and asked if they needed him to stay while they looked through her things.

  “No, we can manage on our own,” Louise hurried to say. It would be better if she and Mik could talk undisturbed without worrying about offending the girl’s parents.

  “We’ll see if she wrote anything about her meetings with Tue Sunds,” Louise said once she’d taken a seat on the sofa to get an overview. Mik had gently put his arms around her waist as he slipped around her to enter the room and she could still feel his hands on her body. It irritated her that she was receptive and, besides, it wasn’t okay that he touched her that way. He would never have done that before their night together.

  She followed him with her eyes as he opened Dicta’s closet and started slowly flipping through her hangers. Not surprisingly, the closet was crammed full. The floor of it was littered with shoes and boots. The room overall was neat and tidy on the surface, but as soon as you opened something, an awful mess was revealed. This young woman obviously had not yet developed any sense of order yet, or she just hadn’t been interested in that.

  Louise got up and started with the bottom shelf
in the bookcase. It was mostly textbooks and three-ring binders; the two shelves above that were books, children’s and young adult; and then there were computer games, The Sims and The Sims 2. Louise was guessing they hadn’t been used in a while, because there weren’t many kidlike things left in the room anymore.

  Then there was the shelf with the photo album and a thin scrapbook. Louise took both of them over to the sofa to look through.

  A lot of pictures had been taken of Dicta. Louise could see that this must have been done over a long period of time, possibly over a year, because she had changed over time. Louise left the album sitting on her lap and flipped open the scrapbook. Several stores in town had used Dicta in their ads, and Michael Mogensen had also used her often as a model in the photos accompanying stories in the local paper. There were also clippings showing her as a movie extra. He had apparently done what he could to make her dream of a modeling career come true, Louise ascertained, lingering for a bit over the clippings Dicta had pasted on the front page of the scrapbook and drawn a thick border around with a felt-tip marker. They were quotes from a couple of the biggest names in Danish modeling.

  “Remember your goals. A single picture can ruin your career.”

  That was surely true, Louise thought, letting her eyes move down to the next frame.

  “The first time you see your picture on the cover of Vogue, the sky falls and the world opens up. That’s the best.”

  Dicta had double-underlined “the best.”

  Louise read the first quote to Mik.

  “Then why the hell did she send a picture to Ekstra Bladet?” he asked.

  Louise shrugged. She started looking through the rest of the shelf to see if maybe there was a calendar or day planner that Dicta might have written something in. Something like that might also reveal how many times she’d been to Copenhagen, and Louise would take great satisfaction in slapping it down on the table in front of Tue Sunds and asking him to provide some more details on his first statement.