Anette helped herself to a cookie and discreetly glanced at her watch. Had she flown all the way to the Faeroe Islands for this?
* * *
ONE, TWO, THREE, four, five. Jeppe ran his fingers over the notches carved into Esther de Laurenti’s doorframe overnight. A little five-pointed star cut so that the thick, gray paint had fallen off in flakes around the scratches. It removed any doubt in his mind. She was in danger. He was glad that he had set the surveillance in motion. Especially if she was going to keep corresponding with the presumed killer. There was still residue from the fine dust the dactyloscopy technicians had left behind when investigating the doorframe for fingerprints earlier in the day. More prints, more evidence that probably wouldn’t be useful, either. More stars.
Stars. Julie Stender had had stars tattooed on her wrist. There was obviously a pattern, but what did it mean? What was the killer trying to convey? Esther finally opened the door with the dogs barking around her feet. She looked worn-out. The apartment, on the other hand, was cleaner than the last time he was there.
“There there, calm down, you little tyrants. Come in, they’re harmless.”
Jeppe skirted his way around the dogs and into the unexpectedly tidy living room. The wood floor had been scoured and the space smelled fresh.
“How are you doing? Have you recovered some from your fright last night?” He sat down in the armchair without having to move aside a stack of books or reposition any dirty dishes.
Esther sat on the sofa across from him.
“I don’t really know. I’ve been so set on getting you folks to believe that he was really here. And now that you do, it’s beginning to sink in what that means. That I’m not safe here.”
Even though she looked tired, there was a new determination in her eyes. Jeppe had seen this happen before to the next of kin in murder cases. She had become angry.
“You have started writing to the person we must assume to be the killer?”
“I know.” She held up a hand to stop him. “It was ill-advised of me to do that. I didn’t think it through before—”
“It wasn’t just ill-advised, it was extremely dangerous and potentially an obstruction of the police investigation.” Jeppe eyed her seriously.
“I’m aware of that.”
“The connection between your responding to the killer and his presumed visit here last night cannot be ignored. He could easily have killed you.”
She bowed her head in response.
“That having been said…” Jeppe cleared his throat. “Yes, that having been said, naturally it does open up certain possibilities that could potentially be beneficial to the investigation.”
“Wait, now let me just understand this.” Esther eyed him with a skeptical furrow in her brow. “Have I obstructed the investigation or have I abetted it?”
He couldn’t help smiling. She sat for a moment, watching him. Then she smiled, too.
“We will do our best to watch out for you. I have requested and been granted two officers to be posted at your front door for twenty-four hours a day starting this evening and continuing for the next several days. But no matter what, you have to understand that you’re exposing yourself to danger. Communicating with a murderer is one thing, but provoking him, as you did last night, that’s just stupid and won’t benefit anyone.”
She held both hands up to prevent further chastisement.
“I agree,” she conceded. “But you’re saying that if we can agree on the messages, then it might help the investigation that I write to him?”
“Possibly.”
She nodded slowly as if considering something.
“Have you seen his latest post?”
“The poem? Yes, I was reading that at the station right when you called. What does it tell you? He writes that he’s giving you a hint about his identity.”
Esther’s eyes shifted from side to side.
“I don’t know who wrote it. But there is a clear theme of children, a betrayed child, unwanted. Something about Julie’s abortion, maybe?”
She gave him a questioning look. Jeppe thought of Anette, who was probably sitting across from the teacher’s Faeroese mother at this very moment. Had Hjalti’s death had anything to do with the abortion? With the killer’s poem?
“Does anything else come to mind when you read it?”
She thought for a while, then shook her head.
“Okay, then. Read it again later today and see if any new thoughts pop up. And then I’ll ask you to reply. To be totally honest, I don’t know what it will take to draw him out in the open. You’ve been pretty lucky so far. But no provoking him! And I need to approve whatever you write, before you send it!”
“Don’t worry. I won’t take any more chances.”
Jeppe leaned forward, determined to make her understand what they were getting into. Unknown, shark-filled waters. In the dark and with chunks of meat tied to their ankles.
“In and of itself it’s a risk—no, not a risk, a big risk—communicating with him at all. Far beyond the limit of what we would normally allow. I hope you understand that.”
“I understand.” She returned his serious gaze. “But I’m already in over my head. My house, my book, Kristoffer’s death, and now the star by my door. We both know that this is somehow about me.”
They nodded simultaneously. Without saying as much, they had made an agreement, an agreement to swim out into the depths, an agreement that he would protect her while they swam.
Jeppe nodded again. “Good. Something else: That dinner last spring, have you made a list of the guests yet?”
She pushed a slip of paper across the table. He skimmed it.
“Thank you. Can you remember what topics you discussed during dinner?”
“What we discussed? It was last March!”
“Please try. It might be important. Did Julie talk to any of the guests, Kingo, for example? Did anything unusual happen? Anyone bicker? Anything might be significant.”
“Okay, I’ll try to remember,” Esther said, shaking her head. “Why do you mention Kingo specifically?”
“We’re interested in knowing more about him, especially about his friendship with Julie’s father. How well do you know him?”
“Only through friends, and then of course the writers’ group. I’ve run into him at parties a good handful of times.”
She looked as if she were holding something back, but Jeppe couldn’t figure out what it might be.
“What do you think of him?”
“I guess like most people I’m impressed by him. He’s talented and charming, tremendously knowledgeable about literature and art. But he’s actually not very nice. Courteous and well-mannered, but not especially friendly.”
“Do you have any plans to go out today?” Jeppe asked, changing the subject. He stood.
“I owe Gregers a visit at the hospital. I was thinking of going late in the afternoon.”
He glanced at his watch. The guard was due to arrive around eight o’clock.
“Okay, just stick to places where there are a lot of other people. Call or text me on my cell phone when you’re on your way home. I’ll make sure someone is here to keep an eye on you after you get back.”
On his way to the door, she grasped his hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Thank you, Jeppe. Thank you for taking care of me!”
* * *
ANETTE DISCREETLY BRUSHED the crumbs off her chest and reached for another cookie. They had a slightly odd, stale taste, but if you washed them down with coffee, they would do. She glanced over the old kitchen and was reminded of images from rural Denmark two hundred years ago. Imagine living so primitively on this side of the new millennium!
Luckily Signhild Patursson did not seem to notice Anette’s skepticism, nor did she need to be urged to talk.
“Hjalti wrote to me, beautiful letters, and told me about his love for Julie. To him she was a… a dream girl. He didn’t understand how dangerous it was to court such
a young girl. She was too young to fall in love, was only toying with him. And then, yes, then she got pregnant. Yes, yes, that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. That wasn’t meant to be at all.”
The old woman started rocking from side to side. Her voice grew emotional, and she fumbled nervously with the cuffs of her gray knit sleeves.
“Julie’s father was very, very angry. The whole town was angry at Hjalti. He had to leave and come back home to the Faeroe Islands. Moved in here and lived with me. He lived here until the end.” She fell quiet and bowed her head.
Anette’s butt was starting to hurt from sitting in the hardwood chair. The Faeroese officer was waiting outside in the car, ready to drive her back to the airport. But the way things were going, she wouldn’t even make the evening flight to Copenhagen. She cleared her throat and rested her elbows on the table.
“Can you think of anyone up here who has reason to hold a grudge against the Stender family? Hjalti’s brothers, for example? Someone who might hurt Julie as an act of vengeance against her father?”
“He murdered my son!”
Anette cowered at the sound of Signhild Patursson’s sudden anger.
“You mean that Christian Stender drove Hjalti to kill himself by separating them and forcing Julie to have an abortion?”
“That’s not what I mean at all. He murdered him. Flew up here, found Hjalti, and pushed him off the cliff. I’m an old woman, I can’t prove anything. People laugh at me, my own family laughs at me. The police never wanted to listen. But I assure you that Hjalti was not suicidal when he died, quite the contrary. He had just learned he was a father.”
* * *
FLICK, FLICK. THE ruled pages of his notepad hissed past his thumb as he flipped through. Jeppe squinted and tried to catch the sentence, the word, that would break through the fog and show him the next step. He had just given a witness permission to communicate with the killer. Truth be told, he felt completely and utterly in over his head.
The paper kept sticking to his thumb. Jeppe inspected it. A wrinkle-like dash cut horizontally through the little lines at the tip of his thumb. He had never noticed it before. But it must have always been there, because our fingerprints don’t change over the course of our lives.
Jeppe hesitated, then picked up his phone and called Clausen in Forensics.
“Yes, go ahead.” Clausen sounded efficient and friendly as always.
“Hi, Clausen. Kørner here. A question: If we assume that the imprint of a hand that your fingerprint expert found in Julie Stender’s apartment, which verifiably belongs to Kristoffer Gravgaard—”
“Sigh Gravgaard, you mean,” Clausen interjected unnecessarily.
“Yes, yes. If we assume that Kristoffer Sigh Gravgaard didn’t make that imprint, either in connection with the murder or in another context…”
“…which he could easily have done, of course. For example, while cleaning or during some experiment—”
Jeppe cut him off. “Which we consider to be relatively unlikely, all things considered. Listen up, Clausen, if he did not make that print himself, how would it have gotten there?”
“Yes, so, if he did not make it himself, then it would have been planted by someone.” A hesitant note had crept into Clausen’s voice. Jeppe could hear his footsteps and a door being closed.
“Exactly. But how? How do you plant a fingerprint and who could have done it?”
“Planting a fingerprint is no simple matter. First of all, you would of course need to have the fingerprint you wanted to plant. In this case, Kristoffer’s. And then from a purely technical perspective, I’m not completely clear on how you would proceed. Do you want me to ask one of the dactyloscopy techs about this?”
Jeppe imagined him grilling the fingerprint experts. “No. I think that’s a bad idea, Clausen.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. He let him think for a moment.
“There’s no way, Kørner. Completely out of the question! We have the best, most experienced techs. Kristoffer made that print himself. This isn’t some movie, for crying out loud.”
“What about that civilian? David Bovin?”
“What about him?’
“Calm down, Clausen, we’re on the same team here. I’m just asking. Could Bovin have planted that print? He’s new to me. How well do you know him?”
Clausen sighed into the phone. Jeppe could hear him typing.
“I just found his personnel sheet on the intranet. This is completely far-fetched, this is. You get that, right?” He read the contents: “ ‘David Bovin, Knud Lavardsgade Four, Second Floor Right, date of birth August 14, 1977. As you know, he is not police but was hired at NCTC as a civilian dactyloscopy technician last spring in a routine hiring round,’ ” Clausen continued. “I was actually the one who hired him. I think we interviewed three people and he was everyone’s top choice. Calm and straightforward with a mixed background as a, what was it again”—more typing and Clausen’s breathing for a few seconds—“oh yeah, a landscape architect for the City of Copenhagen, good language skills and a commercial driver’s license. Completed the training modules quickly and well. You know, we train our techs ourselves, before we hire them permanently. He got a score of one hundred fifteen out of one hundred seventy-nine correct on the very first pattern combination test. You only need to get eighty correct to pass.”
“What else do you know about him?”
“What do you want, his employee number?” Clausen sounded fed up with the conversation.
“No, damn it. I want to know what he’s like. As a person.”
“As a person! Oh, good Lord. He’s quiet and nice, friendly and professional and can evaluate fifty fingerprint forms in half an hour, whereas most of his colleagues need an hour. We consider him the most promising dactyloscopy tech we’ve had in years… Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
“Clausen, you know I’m entitled to ask about these things. The circumstances around that print stink. You know that as well as I do.”
Long pause.
“Yes, I know that.”
“Could I ask you to gather all the background information you can on Bovin and the other techs who were at the crime scene? Leave out the canine unit and the medical examiner, we’re looking for someone who can plant fingerprints.”
“What about me? Who’s looking into me?”
Jeppe sighed. “You don’t need to worry about that right now, but, Clausen…?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t mention this to anyone, okay? No one!”
Clausen hung up without saying goodbye.
CHAPTER 26
“Author, painter, debater—he’s a busy guy, our good Erik Kingo.”
Sara Saidani bit into a slice of healthy-looking bread and chewed with concentration. Jeppe’s stomach rumbled, and he realized to his astonishment that he was hungry. Starving, actually.
“Do you have any more of that squirrel food or whatever it is?”
“Paleo bread.” She broke off a piece and handed it to him. Jeppe took a bite and pointed to the screen as he munched.
“What else?” He moved a little closer and tried to ignore the scent of vanilla that surrounded her.
She opened a new page and explained. “He invests in stocks, bonds, and private equity funds and I would say that he is relatively well off. In the gallery, he sells works for six-figure sums, and on top of that he makes quite a bit from book rights and arts funding, so he has plenty of resources. He owns a large condo in town, a home in San Sebastián, the cabin in the community garden, and a stake in Portulak, the fine-dining restaurant. Twice a week he kayaks with the Copenhagen Sea Kayaking Club and he sits on the board of the Freetown of Christiania Fund—friends with designers, writers, and rock musicians as well as the corporate world.
“Married?” Jeppe gave up on the bread; it was too much work after all. He would have to get a candy bar out of the machine instead.
“At one time, yes, to Helen Bay Kingo, you kno
w, the woman with the dance school and those big sunglasses. But it didn’t last. They had a child, a son, who’s an adult now. Oscar Kingo.”
“Any criminal record?”
“Not exactly, but I did find something worth looking into.”
Saidani opened a folder containing printouts of newspaper pages. She unfolded a front page of Ekstra Bladet from 2010.
The headline read, “Kingo’s Assistant Denies Rape!”
She studied him with her big brown eyes and Jeppe felt a pull in his stomach that was in every way inconvenient. Maybe Saidani reminded him of someone, maybe that was why. He broke the eye contact.
“Kingo has had paid assistants or protégés, if you will, for many years,” she continued. “Young men, whom he takes under his wing. They help him with every conceivable odd job and he teaches them about art and takes them to all the right places, I assume.”
“Sex?”
A fleeting smile crossed Saidani’s face, which made the heat rise in his cheeks.
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell. The assistant in question, Jake Shami, had been with Kingo for almost two years when this incident occurred. And it was pretty weird. Shami was accused of entering under the pretext of collecting donations for the Red Cross the home of a woman named Karen Jensen and then attempting to rape her. It came out of the blue. Shami was an artist himself, and had exhibited at the prestigious events like the Charlottenborg spring show. People said he was talented. But after that incident and a subsequent stint in prison, he completely disappeared from the art world. Erik Kingo didn’t back him up, not even when the case first began. In fact he threw him under the bus in his witness statement, saying that he had always suspected Shami to be a pervert.”
“ ‘A pervert.’ He said it that bluntly? Were there any unusual circumstances about the attempted rape?”
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