Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  Louise was picturing worst-case scenarios. How had the little girl been lured away from her younger brother? Did she struggle, or did she go along trustingly? The thoughts piled into her head, and Louise wished again that they’d managed to do something to provide more protection for Sada and the two children.

  Word of the girl’s disappearance had started to draw a crowd. Some people were standing off to the side in small groups; others came over to ask if they could help with the search. People were ranting or chatting. Among all those who expressed fear for what might have happened to the four-year-old girl, there was also the odd remark that the family had brought the girl’s disappearance on themselves, that they deserved it after what they’d done.

  Storm had handed over command of the search to Bengtsen, who knew the town and all the local officers who’d been brought in to help. Two canine units were also on their way. His voice was stern and his words succinct and precise. There wasn’t any room for mistakes. At the same time, there was a push to appeal to the public so any potential witnesses would step up sooner rather than later. The faster they closed this case, the faster they could calm the anti-immigrant mood smoldering in the town, which had already had too much of an impact.

  “Dean will stay with Sada in case the girl turns up on her own. The rest of us will join the search. We’ll split up the town into zones and each take charge of one area,” Storm commanded.

  “Should Ibrahim be informed?” Mik asked, but then shook his head.

  Louise agreed. There wasn’t anything he could do to help.

  Camilla came over to them. The autumn twilight was upon them, and that would only make the search more difficult.

  “I’m going to help search,” Camilla said once she reached Bengtsen, ignoring the protests of the local officers. She mentioned the unpleasant episode in front of the train station again. “Maybe I could recognize those guys if I saw them again. We have to find her tonight, otherwise it means something happened to her.”

  39

  THEY CALLED OFF THE SEARCH FOR THE NIGHT AT 2:00 A.M., BUT Louise had trouble falling asleep once she was finally lying in her bed. At eight the next morning, there were once again search teams throughout the entire town, and canine patrols fanning out so they were searching the area from all sides. About twenty to thirty volunteers had shown up to help, and Bengtsen had broken them up into groups and was in firm control of who was in charge of each individual search team and where they would be searching.

  “All basements and attic spaces, stairwells, and bike sheds must be investigated,” he instructed his people.

  The missing-persons report ran every hour on the radio news update, but by midday there still wasn’t any sign of the girl.

  Louise was sitting in her office with a cola and a piece of pizza before the meeting she and Mik had scheduled with a photographer from Venstrebladet to retrace the route Dicta had followed late Saturday night after she left Liv’s house. Louise pushed the pizza container to the side a little and pulled a padded envelope from the Pathology Lab closer to her. Flemming had sent her the photos from Samra’s autopsy, and she flipped slowly through them. When she came to the page with the pictures of the back of Samra’s head, she was puzzled by the vellum-colored yellowish marks on the back of the girl’s neck. Suddenly she thought they bore a certain similarity to the rounded marks they had found on Dicta.

  Flemming hadn’t measured the distance between the marks on Samra’s head, because he hadn’t considered them relevant. They were so obviously incurred after the girl’s death. Now Louise borrowed the ruler from Mik’s soccer mug and determined that the distance here was also three centimeters. In other words, both girls had been in contact with the same object. Not that that brought them any closer to what might have made the distinctive rounded marks. Skipper and Dean hadn’t found anything in the family’s home during their search, nor anything in Ahmad’s apartment or his shop. But for the first time they had something concrete that linked the two killings. Louise got up and went to the command room where Ruth was working on her own. The rest of the group was still out with the search teams.

  Louise set down the stack of photos and pointed out the marks.

  “The spacing is the same as the ones Flemming found on Dicta,” Louise pointed out; and right then she was interrupted by Mik, who had just walked in the door.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked, explaining that the photographer had arrived.

  Louise left the stack of photos on the administrative assistant’s desk and they hurried down the hall to meet Michael Mogensen, who was on his way to their office.

  “I’m a little late,” he apologized and said that he’d just returned. He had been on assignment with one of the search teams because they were doing a story on the girl’s disappearance for the paper.

  They took the stairs down to the cars, discussing the missing girl as they walked.

  The suburban street where Liv and her parents lived was quiet. Only one lone car drove by while Michael Mogensen set up his tripod and got his large digital Canon camera ready.

  “How wide should the shot be?” Louise heard him ask. “Is it going to be the whole road, or just the driveway?”

  “The driveway and a bit of the street so people can recognize the location,” Mik responded, stepping over to hold some of the photographer’s equipment as he unpacked things.

  Louise followed them at a distance. Mik was the one who’d put together the list of locations they wanted to show in the paper: Liv’s house; the kiosk up on the main road, which Dicta had been seen entering; then Nygade; and finally the parking lot behind that, where she’d been found.

  The photographer got ready and did a layout. He suggested that they put a small photo of Dicta in every single picture so readers associated her face with the four locations.

  When they were done on the street in front of Liv’s house, he led the way in his car down to the kiosk on the main street, and they parked right behind him. He jumped quickly from the car, fishing his equipment out of the trunk. He set the camera up on the tripod and adjusted the height so he could get the kiosk and a little of the main street with it.

  “I’ll take a couple of shots,” he said, moving the tripod a little farther out into the street. “Then we can look at them and decide if we’re done.”

  Mik had gone into the kiosk to buy something to drink and a couple of bags of candy, so Louise nodded to the photographer that that was okay. She smiled at his thoroughness. To her it was just a couple of pictures of a kiosk on a main road, but he made it seem like a bigger assignment in which the angle, lighting, and width of the shot were crucial to the success of the project.

  He changed lenses and said that he just wanted to take a couple more shots with a wide-angle lens, and he asked her to hold the tripod while he squatted down to organize all his various lenses. Every time a car drove by, Louise followed it with her eyes to see if there was a little dark-haired girl in the back seat. The whole time, her eyes were checking front steps, gates, and stairs leading down to basement doors. She watched the pedestrians walking toward her and thought: Could they have done it?

  “It may make the most sense to leave the cars here,” Michael said when he was done. “Once we’ve got it all, I think you should come back to the studio and select the specific photos you want to run with. Then I can submit them to the editor right away.”

  He swung his heavy camera bag up onto his shoulder, and Louise quickly reached out and grabbed the tripod so he wouldn’t have to carry everything. It was pretty heavy.

  As they headed toward Nygade, a young couple emerged from the brewery, and she heard them talking about the dead girl’s little sister, who had disappeared. Louise turned around to get a closer look at them and tripped over the edge of a sidewalk slab that was slightly uneven. She was losing her balance and the tripod toppled from under her arm, but her reflexes were faster than her brain, and she stretched her right leg out in an attempt to prevent the plate at the
top that the camera screwed onto from smacking against the ground at full force. It hammered into her shin instead.

  “Fuck!” she muttered, struggling to rescue the tripod. “Let me take that,” Michael said, quickly coming over to help her out.

  Louise moaned and shot an angry look at Mik when he briskly asked if she had everything under control.

  As they proceeded, her leg throbbed, and she felt a drop of blood trickling down toward her sock. Up by the alley, she found a place to sit down and watch the photographer work. Just as conscientiously as before, he got his camera ready, set up the tripod, and took pictures of Nygade and the alley leading into the parking lot. Once those were done, they gathered up all the stuff and continued down the alley toward the parking lot to wrap things up at the location where the body had been found.

  Mik gave Michael his instructions. There were still flowers there, both recent additions and the bouquets that had been left there since Dicta’s savaged body had been found. The photographer was clearly moved to find himself at the scene of the crime and pointed out a large bouquet of white roses that he himself had brought. Still, he remained meticulous and focused as he got started photographing the site, so the readers could see that Dicta had been lying in the rear corner of the parking lot, down by Lindevej.

  Louise reached out to take the tripod when Michael started packing up, but gladly left it to Mik when he offered to carry it back to the cars.

  40

  THEY BOTH SAID YES TO MlCHAEL MOGENSEN’S OFFER OF COFFEE, and he hooked his digital camera up to his computer to download the photos before disappearing up into his apartment to put the coffee on. Louise noticed that the gash on her shin was still bleeding and walked over to pull a paper towel off the roll that stood on a small table under the window.

  She sat down on the sofa and rolled up her pants leg. The blood had spread into a smudged stain. She carefully dabbed it clean and held a fresh paper towel up against her leg to stop the trickle of blood. Michael came back down with the coffee, mugs, and a carton of milk under his arm.

  “Well, are you ready to look at them?” he asked as he sat down in front of his monitor.

  Louise walked over to the trash with the paper towel. As she was about to toss it in, she was struck by the familiar and distinctive rounded marks the blood from her wound had made. This time she didn’t need a ruler to know there were exactly three centimeters between them.

  For a moment she forgot to breathe. Then she turned around slowly and studied Michael Mogensen, as every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  Mik had not noticed Louise’s silence as he poured their coffee.

  Louise stood and gathered her thoughts for a moment, then calmly walked over and sat down next to the photographer. For a few minutes she watched as he brought photos up on the screen. Then she asked her question.

  Her partner only reacted the second time she asked. Michael Mogensen had his eyes firmly on the screen, but his fingers had stopped moving on the keyboard. He looked at her for a moment, and the look in his eyes convinced her that she was right in her suspicion.

  “Why did you kill them?” she repeated, waiting for his response.

  Mik came over and stood next to her, but Louise didn’t take her eyes off Michael Mogensen, leaving her partner to follow along as best he could. She could see him putting the pieces together as she passed him the paper towel with the two red marks that the screws on the plate the camera housing attached to had left on her leg. His face was serious and his voice calm as he closed in on the photographer.

  “Did you take Aida as well?” he asked.

  Finally Michael Mogensen turned his body toward them, allowing his eyes to remain locked on the screen and the picture of the suburban street where Liv’s home was.

  He hesitantly shook his head, speaking in such a low voice that they had to lean close to hear him.

  “That wasn’t me,” he said.

  Louise reached out and grabbed him. She forced him to look at her.

  “I don’t know where she is,” he continued in the same quiet tone. “I could never do anything to her.”

  He looked down, avoiding her angry face.

  “Why should I believe that when you’ve been so hypocritical—leaving flowers for both Samra and Dicta even though you were the one who killed them?”

  He mumbled something she didn’t understand, and she glanced up at Mik, who shrugged.

  “I’m going to ask you again. Were you behind her disappearance?” Mik said in a voice that Louise had trouble recognizing.

  “I haven’t touched her,” the photographer repeated, this time with more strength in his voice.

  The answer came so quickly and clearly that they were forced to believe him. Louise got up and went out into the hallway to call Storm and tell him they’d found their murderer but that he denied having anything to do with Aida’s disappearance. She told him that they needed no assistance. They would handle the arrest themselves and he would hear from her again soon.

  When she returned to the studio, she felt rage throbbing within her, but she was determined to keep it under wraps and exerted a great deal of effort to make her voice sound relaxed. There was no reason to fight him now when gaining his trust was key so they could get him to talk.

  “Tell us what happened between you and the two girls,” she encouraged.

  The photographer sat, his back hunched, nearly collapsed in on himself; but before he had a chance to consider whether or not he was going to say anything, she continued.

  “When it comes to Dicta, I’m guessing it was anger that made you kill her. Anger that she’d turned her back on you in favor of a Copenhagen fashion photographer. She hurt your feelings.”

  Louise avoided pointing out how small-minded this reaction was, because it wasn’t her place to define these things. A forensic psychologist would have the opportunity to do that later.

  “She humiliated me,” Mogensen corrected her immediately.

  Louise could tell that it wouldn’t be hard to get him to talk, so it didn’t surprise her when the words suddenly started flooding out of his mouth like loose gravel being tipped out of a truck bed.

  “She mocked me and became cruel. She said that I was a second-class, provincial photographer who would never make a name for myself any farther away than the village of Vipperød.”

  Louise nodded. That was what she’d figured. She would get the details of his explanation later during the official interrogation at the police station. But the answer to the next question wasn’t so obvious.

  “Why Samra? You hardly knew her, right?”

  She tried to establish eye contact with him.

  Finally something changed in his face. He turned to look her in the eye and what Louise saw in front of her was a big boy who was slowly falling apart.

  “I loved her,” he said, his eyes becoming moist.

  There was no trace of guilt in his eyes. Just a deep despair that confused Louise.

  “You were her Danish boyfriend?” Mik asked.

  Now Louise was the one left out in the cold.

  “If that was the case,” she said hesitantly, “then why did you kill her?”

  Again there was a long pause during which Louise tried to put the last pieces of the puzzle together herself.

  “She didn’t want me,” he finally whispered. “She said she wanted to go home to Jordan and marry someone from there. Someone Muslim like herself.”

  He spoke softly, but there was nothing tentative about his words. He really wanted to make them understand.

  “Why did she want that?” Louise asked, bewildered.

  His response took her completely by surprise and didn’t fit with the image she had formed of Samra.

  “Because she wanted someone who was like her and fit in with everything she knew,” he said, as if he didn’t quite understand it himself. “And then she said that Danish families didn’t have the same kind of solidarity that families had where she came from. She didn’t
want to be part of a family where people never really spent any time together even though they lived in the same house. She thought it seemed empty and wrong that I didn’t have more to do with my grandmother, since we lived so close together, and that I’m not really in touch with my other family members. In Jordan the whole family sticks together, they all take care of each other there. If one person is sick, the others bring food. It’s never lonely, and she missed and longed for the kind of togetherness she was familiar with. That’s why she wanted to go home to Jordan and marry a man from there.”

  “But she was happy enough to risk a lot to see you in secret, even though she didn’t want people to know about your relationship,” Mik prompted.

  “Was it because she knew that her parents would object to her picking you instead of a man from her own background?” Louise asked and noticed the adrenaline rushing through her body again.

  Michael started crying and hid his face in his hands as his shoulders shook.

  They let him be until he dried his face with both hands and looked up.

  “It wasn’t like that. She knew that they wouldn’t object. She was the one who didn’t want it, even though she was free to follow her heart. That’s what I couldn’t understand. I’ve never loved another person the way I loved her. She also claimed she loved me. But she still wouldn’t consent to being a couple.”

  “She was much younger than you. Far too young to know whom she wanted to share her life with,” Louise interjected.

  Michael shook his head.

  “Her father had given her permission to go home and visit her grandparents for Christmas. She said maybe she could find someone to marry.”

  When he saw Louise’s dumbfounded face, he continued: “She said that on Tuesday night when she came over after her parents were asleep and I gave her a necklace and asked her if she would marry me.”

  “You killed her because she said no?” Mik asked.

  “Samra tried to convince me that I would always be in her heart even though we weren’t together. I couldn’t understand that, and for me it wasn’t enough either. She was the one I wanted,” he said.