by Inger Wolf
Trokic drummed his fingers on the table. “Everything’s a possibility at the moment. We really don’t have much more to give you.”
The mood during the rest of the briefing was cordial and undramatic, and when the photographers were finished snapping off photos with the persistence of the first man on the moon, when the crowd headed for the exit, he breathed a sigh of relief. No one had asked about the animal rights activist being run over. Maybe the news wasn’t out yet. Or maybe they were only interested in Maja Nielsen.
When the reporters were gone, Trokic said, “I talked to Agersund yesterday. It looks like his sick leave will be long term, so I’ll have to take over for him. At least for a while. And since I’ll be stuck with all his responsibilities, someone gets mine. And you’re the logical choice.”
Taurup suddenly looked full of hope. “Does that mean Morten Lind isn’t my partner anymore?”
Trokic nodded. “For the time being.”
“Sounds great!”
“Yeah,” Trokic agreed.
Taurup’s smile was subtle but impish. “So, who gets to be Morten’s partner during the investigation?”
Trokic searched the drawer of his desk for a CD. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Okay. Just not Kornelius, she doesn’t deserve that.”
“Exactly what is it you have against Lind?”
Taurup wrinkled his nose and kicked at a wadded-up ball of paper on the floor. “He’s dry as sandpaper, as the Sahara. Believe me, I’ve tried to light a fire under him, it’s like a few billion years ago, trying to create life out of the primordial soup, and he—”
“Okay, okay, I get it. But we’re going to have to make this work somehow.”
Taurup sat silently on the edge of the desk for a few moments. “She had a point, that journalist. We need to check construction sites. Maja was covered with dirt. Like she’d been dragged over bare earth.”
Trokic nodded. “I’ll be talking to the techs in just a bit. Let’s hear what they have to say. They’re checking the dirt samples. When Kornelius gets back from Skejby, you two pay a visit to Maja Nielsen’s ex-boyfriend; we couldn’t get ahold of him yesterday.”
Trokic’s phone rang. Kurt Tønnies, the head technician at Forensics. “Where the hell are you?”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I hope so because I have a few goodies for you.”
Chapter Twelve
The Forensic Center was located on the floor above the CID. It was manned by ten technicians and an office assistant. Literally manned—at the moment, there were no female technicians working there, nor had there been for the past eight years. Possibly it was a coincidence, or perhaps the job didn’t appeal to female officers. The techs always had their noses stuck in the worst part of an investigation, and whereas Trokic’s work was limited to most of the murders committed in Århus, the techs were called in when someone was killed anywhere in the district.
Tønnies had worked there as long as Trokic, and he’d been appointed head technician several years earlier. The graying man’s expression was permanently serious, underlined by the reddish bags under his eyes. He was one of the most direct people Trokic knew. The silent witnesses, as Tønnies called the technical evidence, spoke their own language, and he felt there was a certain beauty to it. It could be misinterpreted, but it never lied. Tønnies was also proud of his work. “We’re not playing a guessing game here,” he often said, when they were searching for answers.
“So, how are things this morning?” Tønnies said. “Happy to get a little help to nab another bad guy, right?”
“That would definitely be nice.”
“Looks like we’re holding all the cards up here, right?”
Trokic tried to look humble. “You most certainly are.”
“All right then. We have tire tracks. Very interesting tracks, too. First things first, though. Follow me.”
They entered an office where photos of two tire tracks were hanging on a back-lit evidence board to bring out the patterns and grooves. Earlier cases had given Trokic experience in working with tire track evidence. Entire books were filled with examples of tracks, but that was a slow process. Which is why the techs had been inspired by foreign colleagues and, in collaboration with Lisa, had recently created a database of tracks. By searching keywords, they could find the right tire and make a visual match. The database had already helped them on several cases.
“We think these two tracks come from the left and right rear tires,” Tønnies said. “The driver backed up over the bike path and onto the grass. What’s interesting is that there are two brands of tires. Michelin and a Dutch brand, Vredestein.”
He tapped both photos. “Vredestein is a very rare tire. Obviously, he’s changed one tire; he might’ve had a flat. If you find a car with these two different tires on back, it would be a strong indication that the car had been in the park.”
Tønnies looked like the cat that just ate the bird. And Trokic definitely was pleased; too often they had to work in the dark, so to speak. But this was solid evidence, a clue they could follow. Not like human beings leading the police on wild goose chases.
“But,” Tønnies continued, “the thing is, these are winter tires, which means he’ll probably be changing them before long. They’re relatively new, though, so it’s doubtful they’ll be thrown away. Remember to take a good look in a suspect’s garage.”
“Right now, we’ve got nothing,” Trokic admitted. “I almost think the press knows more than we do.”
“Let’s see if you feel the same way after you hear what else I have for you.”
Tønnies was openly gloating now. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “We also took a precise measurement of the distance between the back tires, and we’re working at the moment to find the possible car suspects. We’ll get back to you on that.”
Trokic peered at the photos of the tracks. They were meaningless to him. “And when can I expect this information?”
“We’re working our asses off on this. I’m not going to promise you anything, but it could lead to something. We don’t see a lot of this type of thing.”
Tønnies reached down in the pocket of his white coat and pulled out a roll of fruit-flavored Mentos. He eagerly pulled one of the mints out for himself and held the roll out to Trokic. “Want one?”
Trokic shook his head.
“Your loss. Personally, I’ve been eating like a sumo wrestler since they banned smoking in the building. I’ve put on five kilos. I wonder if they’ve thought about how that damages our health? A smoker who turns fat. What bullshit…”
Trokic mulled all this over. When they collected this type of evidence, they had to contact retailers and garages and maybe even all the owners of a certain car model, if it came to that. It could be an enormous amount of work. And if they found the owner of the car, they couldn’t be absolutely certain that he or she was the one who had disposed of Maja Nielsen at the park. Worst-case scenario was, they might be sending officers out to check hundreds of cars to find someone who had made an illegal turn the previous evening. But they had no choice. They had to follow up on it.
“I’ll get back to you today or tomorrow, I should have an answer by then.” Tønnies looked like he felt sorry for Trokic.
“What about fibers? And the dirt on her clothes?”
“So, you don’t think we’ve given you enough? The fibers have been sent to Copenhagen. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you, but of course they can be useful if this turns out to be a homicide. They could be linked to a possible killer.”
“And the dirt?”
“Now, that might lead to something. Our geological expert will likely be able to tell us quite a bit, and we can take samples from various places and compare them. You must have people out looking.”
“So, this geology guy will be able to pinpoint where she died?” Trokic said, hopeful now. “Somebody suggested a construction site.”
“I wouldn’t p
lace any bets on that right now. But okay, it’s an idea. And sometimes we’re lucky; sometimes we find fascinating things in soil samples. They can point us in the right direction.”
“That’s good to hear anyway. We need to find where she died to have any idea of what really happened.”
“You’ll know as soon as we know. Like I say, we’re working our butts off here, twenty-four seven. I’ve drank so much coffee that I’m pissing mud.”
He opened the door and Trokic walked out.
Trokic had just sat down to have a look at the departmental budget when his cell phone rang. It was his Serbian contact, the police chief from Beograd, Dragan Delic.
“I was discussing the case about your cousin with one of my friends, a journalist here in town,” Delic said. “He said it rang a bell about a case he covered at the ICTY five years ago.”
Trokic straightened up in his chair; a stack of papers fell off the side of his desk. “ICTY? The war crimes tribunal in Haag?”
“Yes. He said it concerned the prosecution of a Bosnian-Serbian soldier, one of the men responsible for gang rapes during the war. Many times, he took women to a building used as a bordel.”
Trokic shuddered. He’d heard far too much of that type of thing. Gang rape in particular had been used to break down Bosnian Muslim women, who had been herded together like cattle at collection centers around the country. Many of them had ended up as entertainment for the soldiers. Girls had also been subjected to white slavery. Which in itself indicated an unusual level of cruelty.
Now Trokic was worried. “But what does this have to do with Sinka?”
“I can’t be sure.” It sounded as if Delic lit a cigarette. “But I checked the ICTY court records on the net and read the testimony he talked about. No names were named, of course, all persons involved in the case are referred to by number, but there was a young woman who said something very interesting. She was held captive at a school where she met two young women from Zagreb. Not much was said about it; they didn’t even have numbers in the records. Only that they were taken to Karlovac in Croatia and then on to Bosnia. After what you’ve told me, I think this is worth looking into.”
Trokic’s stomach sank. Karlovac had been hit hard during the war because it was close to the front lines. He’d visited the city two years earlier and had seen the buildings, pockmarked and pierced from bullets. The place had seemed dark and dismal to him. As if a black fog from the nearby four rivers had risen and slid over to cover the city. But what worried him was the motorway close to Karlovac that led west, toward the ocean and the countless islands. Which had been Sinka’s destination.
“But how do we investigate this if we can’t identify them from the court records?”
“Leave it to me,” Delic said. “I’ll try to find the witness, but it won’t be easy. I have no idea how to go about it; there must be a witness protection program in place.”
Almost definitely so, Trokic thought. The question was, did it work? From what he’d heard, people who were going to testify at Haag had dropped like flies. Several of the accused had been released simply because of a lack of witnesses.
“If I manage to find her, I’ll ask if she knows more about the two Croatian girls. In the meantime, you can have a look at the case if you’d like.”
He gave Trokic the case number and hung up. Questions banged around inside Trokic’s head: could this be why Sinka and her friend Ana had never returned? The family had imagined all sorts of things, from a car accident to being slaughtered by a Serbian patrol. But not this.
Tønnies knocked on the door and stuck his head inside. “I sent two men over to check the rear courtyard of Maja Nielsen’s boyfriend on Park Allé. Negative.”
“Nothing at all suspicious? We need something, no matter how little.”
“No. Sorry, but that’s not where she fell.”
Chapter Thirteen
A young girl with short, spiky, mousey-brown hair and smudged mascara guarded the bed of the animal rights activist. Earlier, the doctor in charge had told Lisa that the chances were slim of Anja Mikkelsen ever waking up. And if she did, it would probably be with permanent brain damage.
The young girl cried soundlessly, and some time went by before she finally looked up at Lisa and blew her nose. “So, who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Lisa Kornelius; I’m a detective with the Århus Police. My colleagues and I are trying to find the hit-and-run driver who did this to Anja. And you are?”
The girl shrugged. “I’m her friend. Mette. We’ve known each other for ten years; this is so horrible, just so horrible. It’s weird to think she won’t wake up again, she looks so, I don’t know. So whole. But the doctor said her head was hit really hard.”
Lisa nodded and looked over at the silent figure in the bed. Her head was wrapped in an enormous bandage, there were large abrasions on both arms, and she was attached to an IV. Only a few tiny parts of her, a bit of pale skin and a few strands of reddish hair, were visible.
Lisa spoke quietly. “How do you know each other?” She pulled a chair over to the bed, closer to the girl.
“Through DAMD.”
“And that’s your animal rights organization?”
“Yeah. We’ve both been members since the very start. I don’t know what we’ll do without her. Anja was our leader and my best friend.”
Mette clutched her handkerchief and made an effort to get ahold of herself. Her spiky hair was tangled up, and her pink blouse was wrinkled, minor details she probably lacked the energy to deal with.
“Besides heading up the organization, what else does she do?”
“She’s a veterinary nurse at a vet clinic.”
That makes sense, Lisa thought. “Do you know anything about last night, when she was run over?”
Her friend nodded slowly. “Five of us had just held a meeting at Peter’s; he’s one of the others in DAMD. He lives in a house in Tilst, right on the edge of town. It was close to midnight when Anja went home. She was the first one to leave; her bus was coming before mine. It’s about a half kilometer to the bus stop. It’s pretty deserted on that stretch, and there’s just a few streetlights. And that’s where she was hit. I came a half hour later and saw the ambulance and talked to the policemen.”
“Do you think she heard the car?”
“I don’t know. There’s this constant buzzing sound when you walk there. It’s some sort of industry or something, I think. That’s actually the only thing you hear.”
“Had she been drinking?”
Mette shook her head and looked over at her friend. “None of us drink very much, and anyway most of us had to work the next day. Today. It was already getting late, we’d been talking about the girl they found in the park. Anja was pretty interested in it. Of course, it didn’t have anything to do with us, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen much here in town.”
“Exactly what does your organization do?”
Lisa hated to ask. Hearing about animal abuse and being confronted with the consumer habits that contributed to it made her sick to her stomach. It was unbelievable how primitive people could be when it came to safeguarding life on this ancient planet, where humans had existed for only the blink of an eye.
“Different things,” Mette mumbled. “We stand up for animal rights in general; we don’t specialize in any one area like some of the other groups. Some of them focus on the fur industry, others fight against using animals in experiments, things like that. But we focus on individual cases of animal abuse, any kind of animal or situation. And we’re more hard-core.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Mette smiled. A glint of anger sprang up in her gray eyes, and her fists were clenched. “If my friend wasn’t laying here so close to dying, I wouldn’t say one word, but we can’t let whoever did this get away with it.”
“So, you don’t think it was a coincidence that Anja got hit?”
“Hell no, they drove right up on the sidewalk and ran her down. I’ve
got a few ideas of who it might be. We aren’t exactly popular with some people, you know. What’s going to happen if I let you in on a few things?”
“Some things I can choose to ignore,” Lisa said.
“Good. Since you ask, sometimes we take action, you could say. Like, several times we’ve gone undercover as farm workers and revealed cases of neglect and outright abuse. Both on farms and in animal shipping. We’ve made video clips and sent them to the local police.”
Lisa had heard of several animal rights groups around the world who used that method. Some of them uploaded the videos directly onto YouTube, videos that disgusted much of the general public.
Mette gazed at her friend in the bed. “But there are other times too, and we do try to stay legal, but once in a while, we probably go a little too far.”
“Maybe you’re the ones who liberate the minks, things like that?”
“No, that was the fur activists. That’s not something we see eye to eye on because how can those animals survive in nature when they’ve lived all their lives in a cage? And what are the consequences for other animals? But okay, at least they gave the minks a chance.”
“But if that’s not it, who is it then? Who might have wanted to harm Anja?”
“I can’t give you any names, but it could be one of the farmers we’ve gone after. Or some of the others we’ve pissed off.”
Lisa sighed. “Can’t you be more specific?”
Mette looked doubtful as she blew her nose. “If I do, then I’m letting you in on some of the things we do. I’m not so crazy about that.”
“I understand. But you do want us to find whoever’s responsible, if they did this on purpose, right? It could have happened to any of you. And all of you might be in danger.”
Mette sighed heavily and sat for a moment in silence.
“There was that thing in Videbæk. It was really bad, a herd of cows, way too crowded. I don’t understand why a vet or somebody else hadn’t reported it. But this farmer caught a lot of shit about it, ‘cause it was so extreme. He lost a hell of a lot of money.”
