“You weren’t able to get through to David Bovin?”
“Not at all. So I was relieved, not to say elated, when I heard that he had gotten himself a regular job. I thought… well, I thought maybe Kingo was losing his grip. I mean, he is getting up there.”
Jeppe cocked his head to the side. “Can you picture them continuing their partnership in a different way?”
“With Kingo you can’t rule anything out. That guy, Bovin, could easily still be working for him even though he officially has another job.” Shami sighed deeply. “That’s what he does, Kingo. He creates this fantasy universe where it’s you and him against the world and where no one else gets to decide what’s right or wrong. I can’t recall the feeling anymore, but back then we had created a world in which it made sense to force an old lady to have sex. Where it was art, liberation, revolution! I’m still ashamed talking about it.”
Shami closed his eyes and sat there, his back straight. He swallowed and nodded to himself.
“I loved him so much. I’ll never love anyone the way I loved Erik Kingo.”
“But your love wasn’t reciprocated?”
“Kingo only loves himself. In a pinch, possibly his son and his grandchild, and I’m sure that he himself would claim he loves art. But that’s a lie. Kingo only loves his own big, fat ego.”
Jeppe’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He just managed to think Anna before he saw the number and answered the call.
“Kørner speaking.”
“This is Hansen from PSAP. We have a witness who thinks she saw the wanted suspect, half an hour ago on the S train heading south. I sent a Mike out to question her on site. She said the man got off at Sjælør Station.”
A Mike was a motorcycle officer from the Traffic and Transit Department. Jeppe straightened in his seat.
“How sure was she?”
“Not a hundred percent, but quite sure. Described him well enough. Height and build matched and she seems like a reliable witness. We dispatched two cars.”
“Wait a second. Did you say Sjælør?”
Jeppe looked at the map of Copenhagen hanging on a bulletin board on the wall. Then he yelled, half to Anette, half into the phone.
“It’s him! He’s on his way to Kingo’s cabin at the community garden patch. HF Frem on P. Knudsens Gade. Send everything you’ve got. We’re on our way.”
“Wait!” said the voice on the phone. “There’s more. The suspect wasn’t alone. He had a little girl with him.”
The shock hit Jeppe like a kidney punch. He got up and put the phone back in his pocket, trying to understand. Then he started running.
CHAPTER 36
The area was already cordoned off when Jeppe and Anette parked in front of HF Frem. Two police cars were blocking off the road, two ambulances and four riot patrol vehicles right behind them. A handful of officers were directing traffic and curious onlookers away; others were busy escorting residents out of the area. Lima Eleven, the current site commander, stood in the middle of it all, handing out assignments. His neon yellow vest made him easy to spot. Jeppe approached him and tapped his arm.
“What’s going on in there? Hurry!”
“The suspect is holding a little girl hostage in a rowboat in the middle of the pond. He’s threatening to slit her throat if he doesn’t get to talk with Erik Kingo.”
“And where’s Kingo?”
The site commander pointed to a small group of people on the sidewalk. Kingo stood out with his bright linen suit and white hair that framed an uncharacteristically pale face.
“He just arrived and is getting a security briefing. Bovin apparently called him directly as well.”
“Has the AKS been called in?” Jeppe asked, referring to the tactical unit with its snipers and their precision rifles.
“Taking up positions around the pond as we speak. The area is being evacuated.”
Jeppe started walking toward Kingo, asking a final question over his shoulder: “Who’s the kid?”
“Kingo’s granddaughter, Sophia. The parents have been notified and are on their way.”
Jeppe and Anette reached Kingo. He looked up and yelled at them frantically.”
“The bastard has my granddaughter!” Suddenly he looked like an old man.
Jeppe addressed the policemen around Kingo. “Is he cleared?” and then to Kingo, “Come with me!”
He pulled Kingo along into the community garden, followed by a retinue of uniformed officers. There were no suspicious looks over the hedges today, no children playing in the yards. Three officers in bulletproof vests were standing on the dock in front of Kingo’s house, long weapons hanging down and eyes locked sharply on the dinghy in the middle of the pond. Jeppe spotted several armed policemen spreading throughout the shrubs and on wooden decks all the way around the little lake.
Even so, it was eerily quiet. The wind had settled, the pond reflected the surrounding cabins on its smooth surface. The only sound breaking the silence was a heartrending child’s cry.
At the rudder of a dark green wooden dinghy on the pond sat David Bovin with a knife in his hand and a little girl on his lap. Attached to the dinghy was a small inflatable raft. Jeppe saw that the girl was sitting too close for them to risk shooting, efficiently posing as a shield for her captivator.
“Sophia, honey! Grandpa’s here now,” Kingo yelled hoarsely to his granddaughter. Her wails intensified. He yelled again.
“What do you want, David? What the hell do you want from me? Let her go! She’s just a kid!” When there was no answer, he turned to the officers on the dock. “What does he want? Has he told you what he wants?”
One of the armed officers responded stony-faced, “He wants to swap her for you. If you swim out to him, then he lets the girl sail back in the raft.
“But that’s crazy,” Kingo said, the panic evident in his eyes. “He’ll kill me. What do we do?”
The officer calmly replied, “The only alternative is to wait until we get him within range and hope that he doesn’t hurt her before then.”
“That’s insane,” Kingo yelled. “We can’t risk that!”
Jeppe interrupted, “A negotiator’s coming, hopefully he can talk him down. He’ll be here within a couple of minutes.”
“A negotiator?! You can’t negotiate with a lunatic serial killer. There has to be something you can do!”
Kingo tottered out onto the dock and half lowered himself, half collapsed on his knees.
“The parents are here,” the officer’s radio crackled.
“I’ll keep them out for now,” Anette snapped, tearing herself away.
The last thing they needed was a couple of terrified parents on the sidelines.
Jeppe could hear his own heart pounding away. The colors around him were intensified by the adrenaline in his blood; the blue of the sky glared in his eyes. Kingo knelt like a glowing white figure on the dock. Like a fallen angel.
Jeppe pictured Julia’s face, cut to pieces and ruined, the fear, the grief in her father’s eyes. Pictured Kristoffer’s skinny body in the chandelier and heard Esther de Laurenti’s sobs. All that suffering. For a second he felt on his own body the pain Kingo’s power game had caused.
He ignored the officer’s warning and walked out to Kingo, squatted down next to him and leaned in close to his powerful face. Whispered close to his ear.
“Did you convince that man that Esther de Laurenti was his mother and coax him into killing Julie Stender as part of some kind of sick plan? Is it your fault that little girl is out there now? Your granddaughter?”
An imperceptible nod, almost nonexistent. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. The white fabric of Kingo’s jacket glared in his eyes, the flashes of light on the pond. Jeppe knew it was wrong but didn’t care.
“Then I think you should swim!”
Jeppe got on his feet and left the figure on the dock before he did something he would regret. Went and stood behind the officers. Waited.
Kingo sat motionless, looking at the
pond. Everywhere men were moving, standing, aiming, holding their breath; all around there was crawling, waiting, hating. And in the middle of it all, a child’s crying grew and grew until it filled the entire world.
In one rapid movement, Kingo stood up, took off his jacket, tossed it on the dock, and jumped in.
He was a good swimmer, only breathing for every third stroke as he front crawled to the middle of the pond without pausing. When he was a couple of meters from the dinghy, he stopped, said something to the girl, and kept going all the way to the side of the boat. Jeppe saw him reach his right arm up to Bovin, who tied it to the side of the boat with a rope, still with Sophia in his lap. Once Kingo was tied securely, Bovin carefully lifted the girl over into the inflatable raft and gave it a shove. Then he jumped into the water.
“Do we have him within range?” Jeppe demanded, watching intently.
“We need to get the girl safely ashore first.”
The inflatable raft bearing the crying Sophia had drifted a few meters and then come to a stop on the shiny water surface. Two officers pulled off their bulletproof vests and swam out to the raft, finally reaching it and towing it safely back to the dock. Only then Jeppe realized that he hadn’t been breathing all the while.
A third officer lay down on the dock and reached for the girl, lifted her up into his arms, to safety. Carried her, close to his chest, while stroking her back and making soothing sounds. At the foot of the dock he carefully set her down and let the paramedics check her over.
Jeppe looked at the little blond girl and felt a landslide inside himself, a deliverance he didn’t yet understand. He ran both hands over his face and wiped the sweat off on his shirt. The world was spinning, whirling and whirling. He walked closer to the group around Sophia, and reached her just as her parents came running down the path with Anette.
The instant before the girl was picked up and enveloped in her sobbing mother’s embrace, she looked straight at him and Jeppe recognized, without the slightest doubt in his mind, Julie Stender’s beautiful blue eyes.
* * *
IN THE MINUTES that elapsed from Sophia’s inflatable raft being pushed off until she was in her mother’s arms, Bovin had managed to capsize the dinghy so it was upside down. Jeppe had certainly noticed the movement on the lake, they all had, but the girl’s safety had taken priority over everything else. Now Bovin and Kingo were out of sight, probably hidden under the boat. The officers stood around helplessly, and the site commander gave Anette and Jeppe a questioning look. What now?
They heard Kingo yelling angry curses, but not Bovin.
An armed officer got on his stomach in the inflatable raft so only the sight of his gun and the tip of his helmet were visible over the edge of the boat. Another officer pushed the raft through the water with forceful swim strokes. The shores of the pond were dotted with officers dressed for action, rifles gleaming in the summer heat. It looked like choreography from Miss Saigon. It looked like the end of the world.
When the officer in the rubber raft was a few meters from the dinghy, there was an earsplitting scream, piercing like a pig being slaughtered. The dinghy rocked a couple of times. The officer lay still floating on the swells. Complete silence settled over the pond. Everyone maintained their positions, waiting. The swimming officer put his head in and looked under the water, signaled to the officers on shore, dove down under the dinghy, and then resurfaced.
He waved and shook his head. The dinghy was empty.
After a while the police divers finally arrived with a small boat and oxygen tanks, search lights, weighted belts, and swim fins and started searching the pond around the dinghy. Jeppe borrowed an empty patrol car and questioned little Sophia and her stunned parents. It turned out that a couple of hours ago David Bovin had strolled right onto the playground at the Apple Tree Nursery School, where he had lured Sophia away with promises of candy and a trip to Tivoli Gardens. The parents discreetly confirmed that Sophia had been adopted through a private adoption. They also reluctantly confirmed Jeppe’s other suspicion. Only after that last puzzle piece had fallen into place did he let them go to the emergency room to be checked over, body and soul.
Jeppe walked back to the pond and sat down on the dock in the warm sunshine. The realizations tumbled down on him like heat waves, turning his stomach. Police employees and divers passed him on their way to and from the pond, working and busy; they kept bumping into him. He didn’t pay them any attention.
Erik Kingo’s granddaughter was Julie Stender’s daughter, whom she had given up for adoption. He knew it. Couldn’t quite make out the big picture yet, but that was the missing piece that made everything fit. Six years ago, a distraught Christian Stender had confided in his friend—or perhaps Julie herself had told Kingo—that she was pregnant and Kingo had stepped up.
To help his crocodile bird.
To give his childless son the option of adopting a baby. What a gift to be able to give. Adopting in Denmark is a slow process. It can take four to five years to become parents, and the child you get might be up to three years old and arrive bearing scars of neglect or abuse. Kingo had been able to give his son a peach-skinned little baby, fresh from her mother’s womb, possibly carrying the family’s own genetic material. Not that he had told them that particular detail, presumably. That the child’s biological father was also its paternal grandfather could quickly become a bit of a mess.
A yell came from the pond, a diver waved.
The police boat sailed over to the diver, a rope was attached and a weight lowered. Several yells and divers pulling and pushing, a winch on the boat was activated. The windlass hummed, got stuck, the divers pulled, it started running again. A body broke the surface.
Jeppe shaded his eyes. A wet lump on the surface of the water, apparently just a bundle of organic material surrounded by sea-lion-like divers’ heads. It took a long time to get the bundle safely up out of the water; a lead weight, towlines, and ropes were removed, and there was more yelling back and forth.
A glimpse of dark hair. The lump was David Bovin.
He was placed on the police boat and brought ashore while the divers continued searching for Kingo. When the boat reached the shore, Jeppe saw that skin on Bovin’s belly had been sliced straight across from one side to the other and his guts were floating out.
Nyboe’s opinion, although he naturally refused to be pinned down until he had done the actual autopsy, was that Bovin had died by his own hand, cutting across his belly from left to right. Jeppe recognized the method from the movie The Last Samurai, seppuku, the form of ritual suicide of the samurai, performed to avoid the shame of falling into the enemies’ hands. Yet another drama.
White-clad crime scene investigators circled the body like ghosts chasing ghosts. They avoided looking too much at its face, which had smiled at them over coffee cups and computer screens for the last year and a half. You think you know a person. In the body’s trouser pocket, they found a half-dissolved slip of paper: a fastidiously folded-up little note. The note said merely: Star Child.
As the sun was setting over the pond, Erik Kingo’s body was found on the bottom with an anchor chain around its legs. His eyes had been squeezed out and were swaying like tentacles in the water in front of his face.
The eels had already started eating him.
CHAPTER 37
It took a bit of sweet-talking, but Esther de Laurenti finally managed to convince the friendly hospital porter to push her wheelchair out to the elevator and up to the fourteenth floor, where Gregers was. His operation had gone off without a hitch, that much she had found out, and by this point he was supposed to be awake and back in his room. In the elevator up, she felt her heart flutter and put a hand on her chest, surprised at how worried she felt about her old tenant. When she was wheeled into his room, Gregers was just being transferred into a wheelchair himself by two nurses. He couldn’t be doing that badly then.
“Hi, Gregers. Are you going out?”
The old man looked up as
if he had heard a ghost. When he saw her, he immediately reached his trembling arms out to her.
“I thought you were… Oh! I’ve been so worried. We were just on our way down to see you. Are you okay?”
Seeing his rare display of emotions, all the worry Esther had saved up over the last twenty-four hours burst. She reached out and grabbed his hand, and they sat, two weaklings in a maelstrom, trying to hold each other up. Gregers’s concern for her peeled away the last of her defenses until there was nothing left but grief and regret. Their sobs blended with the awkward words of comfort from the hospital personnel, who brought them water and tissues.
When the emotional storm had peaked and blown over, they were wheeled over to the window so they could sit side by side, looking out over the city while the staff hurried away, smiling.
Man, old people are so emotional!
And so, Lord knows they were. They sat, holding hands with the city lights at their feet. The natural order had been broken. The young had moved on, the old remained, and nothing made any sense other than the warmth the palms of their hands emanated to each other.
Kristoffer would be buried on Thursday, the same day as Julie Stender. She with thousands of kroner’s worth of flowers and a headstone made of granite in her family burial plot. He in a nondenominational service at the chapel in the Pathology Department followed by cremation. Esther had received permission from his mother to hold a wake at a café nearby and she hoped that many of his colleagues and friends would come. His mother had also agreed to let Esther pay for a burial place and a stone so that Kristoffer wouldn’t have to be buried with the unknowns. Esther needed someplace where she could go to visit, when she missed him too much. When the realization hit.
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