by Inger Wolf
The man and wife were reacting to the crisis each in their own way. Maja’s mother, Helle Nielsen, sat across from them with a cold, silent stream of tears running down her cheeks. She was a thin woman in her mid-forties, with a longish, colorless face. Her uncombed blond hair was cut in a page. For several minutes, they waited respectfully while she composed herself. She’d been told the news earlier that morning; a light-blue robe hung loosely over her nightgown, which nearly blended in with the sofa. Maja’s father, Bo, paced relentlessly in his black suit. He was also pale. The only sign of emotion he showed was his clenched fists. Off to the side, a clumsy Labrador pup slunk around with its tail between its legs.
It was much too early to be questioning these people. Only four hours had passed since Helle and Bo learned the horrible news and their world collapsed. But here they were, and they had a job to do; there was no avoiding it. Finally, Trokic cautiously broke the ice.
“I know this is a terrible time, and I’m so very sorry about Maja. But we need to find out as much as possible about her, to help us put together what happened.”
“I suppose so.” Bo swiped his bald head. “Her cousin came out and told us; he explained you’d be stopping by before long. We’d just as soon get it over with, so we can be left alone.”
“First, I should say that we know very little as of now,” Trokic said. “We can’t rule out suicide.”
The father looked back and forth between Trokic and Taurup. “Maja would never do that. And I can’t at all imagine who could have done this to her. It must be some psychopath she ran into. Have you checked the insane asylums and all the filthy criminals running around the city?”
His words were indignant, yet he spoke without expression. When would he crack? Or would he? A clock ticked in the background. A slow monotonous sound that reminded Trokic of a metronome.
“We’ve already started our investigation.” Trokic glanced over at the B&O stereo, the PH lamp above the glass table at the other end of the room, the numerous porcelain figures. Maja Nielsen had grown up in a prosperous, financially secure home. But had she been happy here? What lay behind the room’s closed doors other than white walls? Taurup sat beside him, blinking his weary eyes.
“Of course, we’ll let you know if anything comes up,” Taurup said.
“When was the last time you saw Maja?” Trokic continued.
“It must’ve been five or six weeks ago,” her father said. “She was here for dinner; it was my birthday. In spite of everything, she never forgot our birthdays.”
Trokic made a mental note of, “in spite of.” So. Maja hadn’t come home often.
They both looked over when her mother finally spoke, though she still sounded choked up. “We didn’t see much of her after she moved out. She’s always been a bit of an introvert, even more so as she grew older, unfortunately. I think perhaps she blamed us for not being there for her enough when she was young. We both worked too much at our cannery; we only recently sold it. For several years, we were terribly busy with a new division up in Sweden, and she spent a lot of time alone. Though, of course, she had her grandmother; she lives nearby. And my sister and her cousin.”
She hesitated. “She might have felt we failed her, but we never talked about it. And now, of course…”
She stared at the table in front of her. Trokic jotted down a note. “You say you didn’t know so much about her life the past few years. What about boyfriends, that sort of thing?”
“She was seeing a real estate broker, but she never brought him over to meet us. His name is Martin Isaksen. He has his own agency; I believe it’s called ‘Mansion’.”
Trokic nodded and wrote down the name. “Her apartment is in bad shape, very bad, in fact. We found some blood on the wall, and she had several cuts on her arms. Our pathologist believes they were self-inflicted. Is this something you’d noticed?”
“Of course not,” Bo Nielsen said. “Maja would never ever do that!”
Trokic studied him a moment. There was something in his eye. A flicker of uncertainty. Or was it guilt?
“Definitely not,” Helle Nielsen added.
The Labrador pup squatted off to the side and peed. A small yellow pool appeared on the wood floor. She sniffed it and looked up with guilty eyes. Maja’s mother brought in a roll of paper towels and dried it up. The clock ticked in the silence.
“Have you kept her old bedroom?” Trokic said.
She sat down and shook her head. “No, we converted it into a guest room a few years ago.”
“Okay, is there anything in particular you’ve thought of or would like to add? Someone, anyone who might have had something to do with her death? Situations that come to mind? Any unusual behavior at any time?”
They both shook their heads again.
“Do you have any knowledge of her having trouble with anyone?”
“No,” her father said, “nothing like that either. In fact, everything seemed completely normal. She was busy with school and work, and we were looking at a new apartment for her. She was never a troublemaker.”
“I’d like for you to make a list of everyone she knew. Especially girlfriends and former boyfriends.”
He handed them his card. “You can email the list or call me.”
Trokic glanced discreetly at his phone. A text from Detective Lisa Kornelius: Bach was ready to begin the autopsy at the Department of Forensic Medicine.
“We’ll be doing the autopsy on Maja soon. If you’d like to see her when we’re done, we can arrange it in the nearby chapel.”
“We’d like that.” Her mother began crying silently again.
“We can also arrange crisis counseling if you wish?”
Bo Nielsen shook his head. “No, we’ll deal with this ourselves.”
Trokic wasn’t surprised. “All right. I’ll call you when the autopsy is finished.”
Chapter Four
Trokic had read once that humans have around twenty million olfactory cells. As he drove alone down Randersgade toward Skejby Hospital, his windshield wipers on high, he wished he didn’t have a single one of the little bastards. Traffic was still heavy, and he turned up the volume on the 30 Seconds to Mars number, “The Kill,” as he tapped his hands on the wheel to the relatively subdued drumming. Recently, he’d stuck the heaviest of the heavy metal CDs in the back of his glove compartment, to make way for a slightly lighter sound in the Civic. Very slightly.
The visit to Maja Nielsen’s parents had been a cool, clinical affair. What was it like being Bo and Helle Nielsen? Living in all that whiteness? If he’d been the one who’d moved out, he wouldn’t have hung around there one single minute longer than necessary.
He parked in front of the red buildings at the Institute and sat for a few moments, listening to the end of the song. Then he shut off the stereo, hopped out, and sprinted the twenty meters to the door in the pouring rain.
It wasn’t nearly as bad, though, after the Institute had moved to the hospital. No sense in being a whiner, either. The nauseating odors had been reduced to a minimum by a highly effective ventilation system that every year sucked out the smell of five hundred bodies at their first stop in death. The Institute wasn’t quite as repulsive to him as it used to be. And yet. He imagined the smell hiding in tiny, inconspicuous spots. In a lab coat swishing by, or a sample being taken from one room to another.
The young woman had already been laid out on the steel table. He was close enough to notice small details. The dark, bushy eyebrows, the remains of the slightly broad nose, the small ears set back on her head. Her eyes were closed, and though facial expressions on cadavers never revealed what had happened prior to death, there was something horrifying about this young body. Those scraps of paper with times and places back in her apartment—what was that about? The final thoughts of an insane woman?
The only person Trokic had brought along was Jan, who would be doing the photography. It was almost like old friends palling around as they waited for the autopsy to start. Ba
ch removed the dirty, stinking flowered dress from the victim, stuck it in a paper bag, and handed it to Trokic, who would deliver it to the Forensic Center.
“It looks like she hasn’t had a shower for some time,” Bach said. “And her clothes are filthy.”
There was a quiet dignity to the pathologist’s movements, a respect for the woman she had been. Once Trokic had asked him what he believed happened after death. Nothing at all, Bach had answered. Life, to him, was a cycle, where the body decomposes and becomes a part of nature. In a way, it was also a more beautiful and likely possibility than a permanent vacation with a bearded old man.
“The skull has been fractured. Hemorrhaging under the dura mater, the outer membrane, typical of blunt force trauma. A few fragments are lodged in the brain, there’s a nasal fracture also, it looks as though the head rammed into a solid object during the fall. There are fractures of the heels, fracture and dislocation of the pelvis, a compression fracture of the spinal vertebra, cervical fracture.”
It was hard for Trokic to look at so many fractures. He’d seen much in his time. Strangulation, knifings, a woman shot in the face with a sawed-off shotgun. Fifteen months earlier, he’d witnessed the worst autopsy of his life when an eight-year-old boy had been strangled in Giber Creek in Mårslet. But at least that boy had been in one piece. Trokic wasn’t thrilled about broken, splintered bones sticking out all over the place.
“How high?”
Bach switched to his faux-cheerful voice. “Usually, if you want to be sure before jumping, or if you’re pushing somebody, whatever the case, you need to be up on the fifth floor. You’ll seldom survive that. Less would probably have killed her if she’d landed the wrong way, which she obviously did here. I would guess that she landed on a very uneven surface, her legs took the initial blow and her head and neck then rammed into something sticking up. Something hard.”
He lifted her fingers one by one and took a sample of the material under her fingernails. “Seems to be a bit of soil here. Probably the same as what’s on her clothes. Her nails are ripped up, as if she’d scraped them against something. She might have been trying to hold onto the edge of a balcony or something before falling.”
Jan leaned in close and took his photos silently. He showed no emotion; he could just as well have been on a shoot for a furniture catalog. When Jan wasn’t with the head forensic technician, Kurt Tønnies, he was noticeably reticent, as if the missing synergy between them held him back.
“Christiane is here with us for a while, by the way,” Bach said in passing, as if he weren’t busy dissecting a young woman only a few years younger than his own daughter. “Or I should say, above us, at Forensic Chemistry. She’s on the home stretch with her education, doing her thesis on poisoning. She’ll probably end up stuck here in this building. She’s also talking about a Ph.D., here with me.”
Bach sighed in annoyance. “I admit, I’ve tried to talk her out of it. She’s stubborn as a mule. Not that she doesn’t have what it takes, she does, it’s just…”
“Yeah, I get it,” Trokic said, trying to gently deflect the mood of disapproval. “It’s not exactly CSI here, is it?”
“No, it is not, definitely not. So okay, she’s witnessed an autopsy during her medical studies, but she’s a sensitive girl. She has no experience with the really bad cases.”
Trokic nodded politely. He had no desire whatsoever to talk about Torben Bach’s daughter, who as a teenager had sent him a constant stream of passionate love letters. While Bach took blood samples, Trokic steered the conversation back to the victim. “What about the cuts on her arms?”
“They weren’t all done at once, as I told you earlier. Some of them are a few days old, others are from a week ago, maybe ten days. They look bad, but they’re not all that deep.”
“So, you’re sure none of them were inflicted after death?”
Bach lifted his head and smiled incredulously. “Dead people don’t bleed, Daniel.”
“No, of course not. Were they suicide attempts?”
Bach shook his head.“No. They’re nowhere close to the artery. It looks more like self-mutilation. Like these young girls who cut themselves. The cuts are typically parallel and usually on the right arm of southpaws like her and vice versa. And as you can see, most of the cuts are on her right arm.”
“So, you think she’s left-handed.”
“I do, and of course you should check that. There are also signs of tentative incisions. After all, it hurts, and sometimes you have to work up the courage to cut deeper.”
“And there’s no sign of her letting someone else do it?”
“No, it would have looked a lot different.”
Bach stood up and studied her a moment. “Although…”
“What is it?”
“You can see she has a cut on the back of her left arm too. If she is left-handed, as right now we assume she is, she probably didn’t do that one herself. It’s odd.”
Trokic thought back to the apartment. Had there been a cup on the coffee table with the handle turned to the right? Had there been someone else in there shortly before she died? “But if she was brave enough to cut herself, why didn’t she go through with it and cut her artery? That would’ve been the easiest way out. Since she lived on the third floor, she needed to look for some place to jump. And that makes it more difficult.”
“I don’t know, Daniel. There’s a lot of blood involved; maybe she didn’t want to see it. Or have other people see it. So, she decided to jump somewhere else.”
Bach resumed his work and spoke quietly into the microphone. Trokic stared at the earthly remains on the table in front of him. Everything she must have been seemed to have disappeared with all the knife cuts. All that was left was flesh and blood and bones. Had she really killed herself? Or had she been pushed off a tall building and moved by her killer? The self-inflicted cuts didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t been killed, surely?
They were almost done, and Trokic needed a cigarette and a cup of coffee. Jan had already packed up his camera, and he stood staring blankly with his arms crossed.
“When do you think I can get a report?” Trokic said.
“I’ll send something to you later today,” Bach said.
Trokic turned to Jan. “Let’s go home.”
The woman filled the entire hallway with her presence. She leaned against the wall with an unlit cigarette in one hand, a stack of papers in the other. “I’m here at the Institute for a while. I’m writing my thesis upstairs in Chemistry.”
Trokic played it cool. “Yes, your father told me.”
Bach’s daughter had grown from a messy teenager into a true neo-hippie. Black short skirt, black blouse open over a pink T-shirt, large stone on a leather string around her neck, high black leather sandals. Zero makeup. Christiane’s hopelessly naïve letters ten years ago, back when Trokic had just started at Homicide, had been difficult to deal with, to say the least. And Bach had been embarrassed and angry with his daughter. How old was she now? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? There wasn’t a single hint of worship in her eyes, as far as he could tell. They were cool and observant, taking measure of what appeared before them. She studied him as if he were some mysterious animal that had crawled out of a hole. Jan stood beside him, fidgeting impatiently.
“They’re starting me out by having me help with the analysis of samples on this case,” she said. “So, you’ve been warned if I call you.”
She sent him a tiny smile. As if it was the last thing she wanted to do. Trokic didn’t know how to respond, and several seconds went by before he said, “And when can we expect the results of these samples?”
He hoped she wasn’t going to follow in her father’s footsteps. It was very difficult for him to avoid forensic pathologists in Århus. Also, the rumors about her had made the rounds, which didn’t make things one bit easier. Rumors of her going through several men, dancing in stilettos on tables in punk bars when she got drunk, hopping into the ocean at least once a week in fr
ont of a crowd of male onlookers. Trokic didn’t want to know what was going on.
He wondered if Bach had any idea what his daughter was up to, or if the rumors were exaggerated. They always were. When they weren’t outright lies. But anyway. Christiane gazed at him as if she was wondering what he was thinking. Then she shook her short, unruly hair, frowned, and spoke without expression.
“Surely, you’ll get the results by tomorrow, don’t you think? Let’s count on that. I’ll take care of the blood samples up in Chemistry; one of the bio-analysts will help.”
She handed him her card. “My office number is in the corner if you have any questions.”
She turned and walked away. No goodbye.
Back in the car again, Trokic thought over what he’d learned. The autopsy had confirmed some of their theories, but too many questions were left unanswered. He checked his watch. Time for a chat with Maja’s cousin.
Chapter Five
Assistant Detective Lisa Kornelius had a bone to pick with her boss. A big one. In his green T-shirt, Trokic sat with his back to the window, patting down the rooster tail that sprang from his black hair, as if it wasn’t his fault she had to be in court in a half hour. On her way into the station that morning, Lisa had heard about the young woman found in Town Hall Park, a case that sounded a lot more interesting than defending IT evidence in a courtroom.
She set aside her own concerns for a moment and took a good long look at Maja Nielsen’s cousin, Simon Møller, sitting across the table from her. Her first thought was practical—cynical, actually, very much so. Here was a valuable source of information about the victim, right in front of their noses. A coincidence, perhaps, but it was undeniably a major plus.
