Call Me Princess (11 page)

Karin stepped aside.

It had been a long time since they’d talked to each other. The last time they’d spoken, Louise had told her that she didn’t think they were going to be able to find Kim Jensen, her attacker, and Karin had seemed to accept that. She said something about that being the way things went when you went swimming out where you couldn’t touch the bottom and the current carried you away. She had nodded and thanked them for trying, and then she’d been given a lift home and had disappeared from Louise’s life and thoughts.

Until today, Louise hadn’t even wondered how she was doing, or even whether she was still alive, and that realization stung a little as she stepped into Karin’s apartment.

Karin still hadn’t asked why Louise had suddenly turned up, and Louise couldn’t discern any glimmer of curiosity in Karin’s eyes to suggest that she might ask. Instead, once they’d reached the living room, Karin asked, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Lunch was sitting in a pan on the table along with two plates and a pitcher of juice. Karin lived alone with her young daughter. Louise did the math and calculated that she must be almost four.

“Yes, please,” Louise replied.

The place had an open floor plan, so the living room and kitchen were one space. Louise said hello to Karin’s daughter, who was playing on the floor of her room, and then joined Karin in the kitchen, taking the two mugs Karin handed her from the cupboard.

“I came to talk to you about Kim Jensen. We’re dealing with a rape case that is sort of similar to what you went through. Obviously we don’t know if it’s him,” Louise hastened to add. “But I’ve read through your police report again, and there are some similarities that indicate it
might
be the same perpetrator. So I’ve come to see if I could get you to provide a few more details, even though we went through all of this back then.”

Karin finally turned around and looked right at her.

“Do you think you’re up to talking about it?” Louise hurriedly asked when she saw the blank look in Karin’s eyes. Not that that would make it any better if Karin’s answer were no, but Louise didn’t want to push her too hard.

Karin nodded and shrugged her shoulders. “Of course. If I can help.”

She walked over to the table and gathered the plates and glasses onto a tray, brought them back to the kitchen, and started washing the dishes. Without uttering a word.

Louise took a deep breath. “How’s work going?”

Karin had been working at a daycare when they last spoke, the lead teacher in her classroom. She was a slender woman, thirty-one years old. A woman who had seemed fully committed to whatever she was involved in. While taking her statement, the police learned she had been raising her daughter alone since the little girl was almost two; and between work and her child, it was nearly impossible to find time to date. She had decided to look for a boyfriend online in the hopes of making a family again.

“I’m not working anymore,” Karin said in a monotone as she pulled out a kitchen towel and started drying the dishes.

Louise was starting to get an uncomfortable sense of what had happened during the two intervening years, or perhaps more accurately what hadn’t happened. It had struck her the instant she stepped into the living room: there was something stagnant about the place. A stack of magazines lay under the coffee table, but there was no energy in the room, no spark, no spirit. Just emptiness, like a vacation home that had been closed up—and yet there were two people spending their days here.

They sat opposite each other around the coffee table. Louise had her notepad ready, and she scrutinized Karin, trying to determine what was going on inside her shut-down exterior. How was she responding to being contacted by the police again? Was she hoping that Kim Jensen would finally be caught, or was she indifferent after all this time?

“I want to ask you to think back and try to describe Kim Jensen’s physical appearance for me in as much detail as you can. In the police report you said that he didn’t have any particularly distinguishing features, but try your best to describe what he looked like.”

Karin sat there, staring at the coffee table. “The whole time since it happened, I’ve been trying to erase him from my memory. I’ve closed my eyes many times and imagined his face being swallowed by flames, but it never worked. His eyes keep burning into me. They follow me everywhere, watching everything I do.”

She spoke softly, slowly, as if it took a great deal of effort to choose her words. “He had dark brown hair, short, slightly wavy, sort of a little combed back.” She closed her eyes and sat there in silence for a moment. “He had really pretty eyes, greenish brown, and heavy, dark eyebrows. He had soft, full lips. Not really big lips, but they were unusual. If he’d been a woman, I think you would say he had a sensual mouth. Do people say that about men too?”

A shiver ran down Louise’s spine. Karin’s voice had suddenly changed. There was a passionate warmth to her words, one that shouldn’t be there because she was describing the man who had practically murdered her.

Sick
, Louise thought,
she must be sick.
Something was very wrong. The woman across from her was drowning, and it didn’t seem like anyone was doing anything about it. To the contrary, it seemed like a process that was calmly, quietly succeeding.

“Six-foot-one and what people online call an average build.” Karin made a little face at the impersonal description.

“Was he dark-skinned?” Louise asked, interrupting Karin’s steady stream of words.

Karin looked surprised and shook her head. “No. He was Danish, if that’s what you mean.”

Louise hastened to explain that that wasn’t what she’d meant—just if he had a dark or fair complexion.

“Fair.”

“When did you meet?”

“In early December, but he didn’t come over here until January.”

Louise turned to a fresh page in her notepad, and asked Karin to repeat the story.

“We exchanged e-mails and met at a café downtown, and then I invited him to dinner. He brought flowers and champagne. By that point, I had already fallen in love with him. We agreed that he would spend the night, and everything was as it was supposed to be.”

Again that warmth popped up in her voice, and the small hairs on Louise’s arm stood up. She had read through the chain of events in the report before she drove out here; but sitting across from Karin, who was almost ardently describing the events of the night that had ended so badly, was another matter.

“It wasn’t until quite late that he suddenly changed,” Karin said, as if she could tell what Louise was thinking. “At first he was kind, and everything was good. We smoked in bed afterward and cuddled.”

She hid her face in her hands and sat perfectly still.

After the cigarette in bed, the assailant had tied her hands to the bedposts with his tie and raped her for hours, with and without paraphernalia.

Once Karin calmed down again, Louise thanked her for the coffee and said that they were in the middle of an investigation. She prepared Karin for the fact that they might need to talk to her again if the case turned out to involve the same man.

“Have you talked to anyone about what you’ve been through? Have you been in therapy?” she asked on her way to the front door.

Karin gave her a look that said she had overstepped her bounds and grumbled “That won’t change what happened.”

“You may be right about that,” Louise said, “but it may change what happens in the future. It can make it easier to move on.”

“I’ve gotten used to it. That’s not what was supposed to happen, and now it’s best for things to just be calm here.” She’d opened the front door and was waiting for Louise to exit.

It hurt to say good-bye. It wasn’t hatred that hung like a fog around Karin: it was despondency. She clearly no longer believed in the good in people, and it would take more than some everyday conversation to restore her faith in their goodness.

Louise felt glum on her way back to police headquarters. It was simply unfair that a guy who had caused so much damage was free, she thought, strongly suspecting without any concrete proof that Kim Jensen was the man who had attacked Susanne. She tried to throttle her instincts. There were similarities, but surely there was a shitload of dark-haired rapists out there with comely features. As she drove down Hambrosgade and drove the car into the precinct garage, she thought about the even larger number of dark-haired men who had put their photos up on the various online dating sites.
This sucks
, she mumbled to herself as she parked. She waved at Svendsen, who’d been in charge of the fleet of squad cars here for many years. She wasn’t surprised to see him there so late in the day. He watched over those vehicles as if they were his own private property.

—

H
EILMANN WAS IN HER OFFICE WHEN
L
OUISE CAME UP.

“Jørgensen got ahold of the women who we know were in contact with the suspect,” Heilmann said. “He made a list of them. Those women are coming in tomorrow. But then Jørgensen’s wife called. One of the twins is in the emergency room, so he had to go home to watch the other one,” she said. “I doubt we’ll see him back here before Monday; you’ll have to talk to some of the women when they show up.”

Louise nodded. “I haven’t had a chance to start searching for dark-haired men yet,” she reminded Heilmann. “If we need that right away, someone else will have to take over.”

“That’s fine. That can wait. The girls’ statements are more important. And,” Heilmann paused for effect, “I really want to have you talk to Karsten Flintholm. We have an appointment with him tomorrow afternoon. He says he wasn’t even in town last Monday, but he has dark hair and dark eyes, and was one of the three men Susanne picked out of the books. If he doesn’t have a watertight alibi, we’ll do a lineup on Monday.”

That suited Louise just fine. She relished the thought of talking to him.
Even just hauling his ass in here will be fun.

“How many of the women are coming in tomorrow?”

“Nine. I’ll divvy them up between you and Stig.”

“It doesn’t seem likely that a woman who’s been subjected to the kind of assault we’re searching for would keep her profile up online,” Louise said. “Wouldn’t she go in and delete it right away?”

She had a hard time imagining what kind of information could be gained from interviewing the women, and how much of a description they could get. But, of course, you never knew.

Heilmann rubbed her forehead and said, “We don’t have anything else go on. The crime-scene investigators didn’t get anything else from Susanne’s apartment. Suhr is pacing around the division unable to decide if we should ask the public for help or if we should wait for the lab results to come back on the DNA and just hope we find a match in the database. Right now we have nothing, so we just have to work with what we’ve got and hope more leads turn up over the next few weeks.”

With that outlook, Louise realized there would be time to enjoy a quiet Friday night with Peter and a pleasant weekend with Markus; before she even left Heilmann’s office, she started planning a little trip out of town to visit her parents. Markus and Peter would both enjoy that.

She went in and studied the list Lars had compiled. Four women to interview, the first at ten o’clock. She turned off her computer and locked the door behind her.

Her bike was still parked outside the building and the air was still warm. She rode down across the cobblestones on Halmtorvet Square and felt like stopping for a cup of coffee at one of the cafés. She pulled off to the side and called Peter at home to see if she could entice him to join her.

“Doesn’t that sound nice?” she asked convincingly. She could sense him trying to find a way out of it, and when he finally did say yes, she was sure it was more to humor her than because he really wanted to. They’d hardly spent any time together all week because she’d come home so late each night. They agreed she would go in and order, and he would leave right away and be there shortly.

She waved as he came striding up the sidewalk. He looked tired, but like he was trying to snap out of it.

“Hi, honey,” he said, kissing her and taking a seat.

The coffee was already on the table, and she filled him in on her plan to go visit her folks out in the country the next day.

“What did Camilla say about Markus coming with us?” he asked, taking a cautious sip of his coffee.

“I haven’t asked her yet, but I can’t imagine her having any objections. He loves going out there. Camilla’s meeting a guy, so I bet she’ll just be glad to know that Markus is in good hands and being entertained. That way, she can relax and enjoy her weekend.”

Peter looked at her in surprise. “She’s seeing someone? When did all that happen?”

“I don’t actually know,” Louise said. “I was just thinking she’s been a little distracted lately. You know her. She usually calls several times a day, and now I hardly ever hear from her. I talked to her briefly earlier today, but it was mostly about my current case. And then she said she was having someone over on Saturday and asked if we would watch Markus.”

“Well, we’ll see how it goes,” Peter said, smiling. He sat for a bit, lost in thought, until he eventually stroked her cheek and then asked the waiter for a refill.

“C
AN
I
TAKE THE CAR?” SHE YELLED FROM THE BATHROOM. “
I won’t be late getting home, and
I’ll
stop and pick up the groceries on my way.”

Normally they kept their weekends free for each other, and Peter was the one who usually did the grocery shopping and cooking. They would eat breakfast together on Saturday, and afterward they would sit on the sofa talking about everything they hadn’t had time to do during the week.

Peter came back out of the kitchen holding a cup of coffee and dug the car keys out of his pocket. When he turned back toward her, she noticed dark circles under his eyes. She’d heard him get up at some point during the night and assumed he had been up working while she was sound asleep.