Call Me Princess (24 page)

“Well, that is the risk you run when you go looking for media attention,” Louise had answered on her way out the door. She avoided turning around to look back at him. He was the last person she was going to feel sorry for.

“Would you mind?” Susanne asked, reaching for Louise’s cigarettes.

Louise was so surprised, she just watched as Susanne awkwardly extracted a cigarette from the pack rather than help her out or offer her lighter.

“Help yourself,” she finally replied, sliding her lighter across the table toward Susanne.

“Well, you’re certainly opening up to new experiences,” she continued with a quick smile. She had no intention of quashing the emancipation and curiosity that were beginning to emerge. “Have you ever tried smoking before?”

Susanne shook her head, holding the cigarette clumsily between her fingers.

“To begin with, then, don’t inhale. Pull the smoke into your mouth and then blow it out again. Once you’ve gotten used to the taste, then you can start drawing it down into your lungs,” Louise explained in her best teacher’s voice, scarcely believing that she was instructing someone on how to best acquire what was otherwise a very bad habit.

It had been more than twenty years since she had taught anyone how to smoke. And even then, it wasn’t because she had been especially experienced as a teenager. As far as she remembered, she had been one of the last ones in her class to give in and follow the pack. But after she started, she hadn’t been shy about helping others pick up the habit.

There were more people in the warehouse now. The big crowd just inside the door had spread, and now people were streaming in, visible only as vague silhouettes, lit up in brief glimpses by the flashing, flickering lights that followed the thumping beat of the music.

“Let’s walk around,” Louise suggested in a few minutes, after they put out their cigarettes.

Louise and Susanne meandered slowly through the space, schmoozing so it wouldn’t seem too much like they were looking for something, but Louise quickly discovered that that was exactly what separated them from everybody else. Everyone was scanning the room, staring unabashedly at the nametags of each person who walked by. Groups had formed around the tables, while some people stood by themselves, waiting for someone to come talk to them.

The dance floor was already packed. People weren’t pushing their way across it. Instead they skirted around it and continued on into a little alcove off the back of the large hall. The alcove had been set up as a lounge with pillows on the floor and soft music, which was barely audible in contrast with the thunderous noise from the enormous club speakers in the large hall. Susanne and Louise sat down a little restlessly, peering around until they had scanned the whole alcove, and agreed that he wasn’t there. Then they made their way back to the bar area and found a table to stand near.

“He’s not coming,” Susanne said and asked for another cigarette.

Louise shook one out of the pack and was inclined to agree.

“How long are we going to stay?” Susanne asked.

“Until it’s over. There’s just as much chance he’ll show up during the last thirty minutes as now.”

Lars came over and stood by their table. He shook his head and turned the corners of his mouth down discreetly.

“It’s going to be a long night, but I’d be a jerk if I didn’t at least flirt back a little,” he said, letting his eyes wander through the crowd. “And it’s even more horrifically boring standing outside.”

He jumped as a pair of female hands covered his eyes from behind, pulling his body back into an embrace. He quickly spun around and found himself face to face with Camilla, who was only a few inches shorter than him.

“Hi!” Camilla crooned.

Lars seemed bashful, but smiled. They had met several times at police headquarters, and after he’d become Louise’s partner, Camilla had added him to her list of police sources—which he put up with, good-naturedly. Actually, he seemed to like her, and his sudden attack of shyness only drove the point home to Louise.

“Do you have a lot of people here?” Camilla asked inquisitively, looking around.

Louise ignored the question, instead asking Camilla where Henning was.

“Oh, he just had to pick up his brother, but I think they’ll be here in a bit,” she said, making a face at Louise. “I’ll introduce you!”

Louise smiled, and then remembered how Peter had accused her of not accepting the fact that Camilla wanted to find a man and start a family. So she hurried to add that she was excited and looking forward to meeting them. But something in the way she said it wasn’t fully convincing, and she could tell that Camilla had picked up on that.

“I’m just going to go the bathroom,” Susanne said, interrupting the slightly tense atmosphere that followed Louise’s statement.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Louise asked Camilla, changing the topic yet again.

Camilla nodded and said, “I’m actually looking for the event organizer. I want to interview him briefly as part of the story I’m doing on this whole phenomenon.”

They parted ways when Camilla spotted the photographer she had arrived with, and Louise starting looking around for Susanne.

—

T
HE PLACE WAS PACKED.
L
OUISE TRIED TO KEEP AN EYE ON
L
ARS’S
back as he disappeared into the crowd to search the room one more time. She caught sight of Susanne’s short, dark hair by the door leading to the restrooms.

Louise kept her eyes trained on Susanne, which is why she noticed the second Susanne’s eyes locked onto something. She saw Susanne falter for a second and then stiffen.

Louise quickly looked over to see who had triggered Susanne’s response, but it was hard to tell who she was looking at. Louise started pushing her way through the crowd, trying in vain to make eye contact with Susanne. Annoyed, she forced her way through the crowds blocking her way and ignored the grumbling comments she provoked.

There he was.

Louise stopped short when she saw his wavy collar-length hair. He was talking to two women she estimated to be in their late twenties. Then he turned halfway around, and his profile was so clear that the adrenaline started pounding through her veins.

She wanted to run over to the exit and alert the team outside, but didn’t dare leave Susanne. She quickly pulled her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and dialed Heilmann’s number, but the call didn’t go through. Irritated, she stared at the display and realized she had no service. There wasn’t even one bar on the scale indicating signal strength. Of all the times.... She searched feverishly for Lars, but couldn’t see him, so it was up to her to make sure Susanne found her way outside quickly so she wouldn’t have to confront her rapist.

Of course they had talked about what she should do if she suddenly found herself face to face with him, and Heilmann’s orders had been clear: “Do not speak to him. Turn around and walk toward the exit, so he doesn’t have time to make any threats.”

And yet Susanne wasn’t heading toward the exit. She was standing there as if nailed to the spot, allowing herself to be jostled back and forth by the crowd of people heading toward the restrooms in a steady stream.

The wavy hair and the aristocratic profile were no longer within Louise’s field of vision when she finally reached Susanne, grabbed ahold of her arm, and started pulling her along. She quickly realized that Susanne’s feet were not obeying, so Louise put some muscle into it, and was practically dragging Susanne across the floor while irritatedly scanning the room for Lars. She thought she caught a glimpse of Jesper Bjergholdt heading toward the lounge room with those two young women.

Louise finally let go of Susanne’s arm once they were outside, giving Susanne a moment to recover a little while she walked over to alert Michael Stig and Thomas Toft, so they’d be ready.

They came when she waved them over. She saw Heilmann coming from over by the cars holding her phone to her ear. Louise guessed she was advising the extra people, who were on site to assist, that the ball was in play, and they should be on the alert if it turned out he was there.

“We’ll go in and get him,” Stig said the second Heilmann lowered her phone. Heilmann gave him a look and took charge.

“In a second we’ll have two people stationed by the loading bay doors around the side of the building, and the three of us will stay here,” she said to Stig and Toft. Then she spotted Susanne and walked over to take charge of her. Heilmann put her arm around Susanne’s shoulder and led her quickly over to the car she was using as a base of operations, and opened the rear door on the passenger side.

“Rick, you go in and find Jørgensen. I’ll keep an eye out for our guy,” she said once she returned from the cruiser. “If Jørgensen doesn’t have any reception in the warehouse either, one of you will have to come out and let us know the second the suspect seems like he’s about to leave.”

Louise went back inside and started looking for her partner. She found him with Camilla by one of the tables near the bar. Slightly annoyed that he was standing there making small talk while the shit was hitting the fan, Louise approached and interrupted their conversation.

“Let’s take another spin around the room,” she said, worried that this would tip Camilla off that something was up, but her friend just waved at them and headed out into the crowd, as though she had been just waiting for a chance to slip away. Louise guessed that Henning had shown up or must be on his way, at any rate. Louise moved quickly, tugging Lars along, very aware that to other people she must look like a woman putting the moves on him.

“He’s here,” she said, letting go of her partner’s jacket.

She quickly filled him in on what had happened and where she had last seen the suspect, and they headed purposefully toward the lounge, trying to look like a couple who had just met. Small groups of people were clustered together sitting on the pillows on the floor, other people were standing and leaning against the wall, because most of the places to sit were already taken. Louise and Lars stopped just inside the heavy sliding doors and started scanning the crowd.

“He was wearing a white shirt,” it occurred to Louise to mention.

That quickly ruled out quite a few men, leaving only a few potential targets, and it didn’t take long to determine that none of them was their guy.

Louise still felt the adrenaline pumping blood faster through her body, and she recognized the tense expression on Lars’s face. If he was there, they’d get him.

“He’s not in here,” her partner determined, and they went out of the lounge back out into the main room, an inferno of light, music, and people.

They stood for a long time watching people dance, concentrating on spotting the ones in white shirts who had dark hair. Louise craned her neck and thought she spotted one of the women the man had been talking to, but Bjergholdt himself was nowhere in sight. They started scanning for him, walking among the countless tables that formed small islands in the vast room even though they knew at this rate they would be lucky to pick out a specific person in a crowd of two thousand. It was incredible enough that Louise had spotted him the first time—or, more accurately, that Susanne had.

Once they had been all the way around the room without results, they agreed to do the rounds one more time in case he had been in the bathroom, and after yet another round they decided to go outside. Louise stopped as they walked by one of the two women she had seen the suspect talking to, and she told Lars to go on ahead. She wanted to make one last try.

The woman knew who Louise was talking about right away.

“Duke,” she said, and repeated it when Louise didn’t respond. “That’s his login name.”

“I thought it was ‘Mr. Noble’!” Louise said, noting that either he really did have some blue blood in his veins or he was somehow preoccupied with the nobility.

The young woman shrugged and didn’t seem to know or care what Louise was talking about. “He left a while ago,” she said, seeming like she was wrapping up the conversation.

That really got Louise’s heart rate up. “The other young woman you guys were with, is she a friend of yours?”

“Yeah,” the woman said. At first she stared blankly at Louise, but then a suspicious look crept into her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

It was obvious that she considered Louise a rival. She had already started walking away when Louise reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Did they leave together?” Louise asked pointedly and didn’t have time to rephrase her question before the girl had twisted her arm free and started accusing her of a bunch of irrelevant stuff, which Louise didn’t even bother paying attention to.

“Look, I’m a police officer, and I’m going to have to ask you to step outside with me,” Louise said.

It was either the words “police officer” or Louise’s tone that decided the matter, because the woman went with her without any further ado as Louise took a firm hold of her arm and started to lead her out of the room.

“Do you know this Duke’s real name?” Louise asked, after asking the girl her own name.

The girl shook her head, a little bewildered at the situation and also quite drunk, Louise now realized, although she was still with it enough to tell Louise her name was Annette.

“Did your friend leave the party with him?” Louise prodded.

A shrug was the woman’s only reaction, which caused Louise to lose her patience. Her tone grew sharp, and any friendliness she had so far made an effort to display disappeared.

“Annette! Tell me if your friend left the party with that man, the one who calls himself ‘Duke.’”

At last the severity of the situation seemed to dawn on the woman. Not that she actually understood why it was important, but she understood that
something
was going on and that it affected her friend.

She finally acknowledged, “Yes, they left together.”

T
HEY CLIMBED INTO THE UNMARKED SQUAD CAR SO THEY COULD
talk privately, and Louise could almost feel Susanne’s eyes on them from the next car over.