Call Me Princess (28 page)

—

W
HEN
L
OUISE RETURNED FROM THE BRIEFING, SHE SAT DOWN IN
front of her computer, her mind wandering. Her stomach felt empty, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t had breakfast. She just hadn’t felt hungry, and by the time she finally did, she had a cigarette and a cup of coffee instead. Before, she would have gotten by on mineral water and apples, but that wasn’t enough anymore. Peter called and asked if they could get together for a cup of coffee over the weekend so they could work out how to divvy up their joint savings account and the possessions they had purchased together.

Suddenly the weekend seemed daunting. She caught herself wishing that something would happen so she could bury herself in her work and the time would fly by. After a lot of cajoling, she had agreed to go out with Flemming Friday night. They had spoken only once since he had been over, and she didn’t want to spend a whole evening talking about her failed relationship. On the other hand, she didn’t have any other plans, and it would do her good to get out.

She felt another wave of nausea after she ate a slightly stale piece of bread with butter she found in the kitchenette. She only just made it to the bathroom in time to crouch over the toilet bowl. Once back in her office, she found the number and called her doctor. A nagging suspicion had been creeping into her consciousness the last couple of days. At first she had tried to ignore it, but it continued to push its way to the front of her mind.

“He doesn’t have any openings tomorrow,” the secretary at her doctor’s office said emphatically, “and Monday the urgent cases from over the weekend will be coming in, so unless it’s an emergency, the first available appointment is Tuesday.”

Louise grudgingly conceded that it was not an emergency and made the appointment.

—

T
HE NEXT DAY,
L
OUISE FORCED HERSELF TO GO ALONG WHEN
L
ARS
came in and said it was time for lunch and that he had to go to the cafeteria because he had forgotten his lunch on the kitchen counter at home. There was a throng of people and a heavy odor of food. Again Louise’s stomach lurched. She considered stopping by the pharmacy on the way home so she could buy a test and find out for sure, but the idea was so awful that she just couldn’t face knowing.
God, what a sucky accident that would be,
she thought, following Lars to the end of the cafeteria line.

She stared dully at the fruit basket sitting next to the cash register and looked at the floor as the guys ahead of her filled their plates with steaming helpings of pork meatballs in curry sauce. She took a piece of rye bread and a banana and was ready to head back down to the office.

“Come on,” her partner said, nodding toward the long cafeteria table.

Louise reluctantly followed. She really just wanted to go back to the office and eat there so she could keep working. She had just briefed the lieutenant on an idea she’d had the night before and really wanted to get started.

“Fine by me,” Suhr had said, hurrying on his way.

She suddenly realized that Suhr was going easy on her. He was babying her because she had told him Peter had moved in with someone else, and Suhr thought searching dating sites would be easier on her while he had everyone else out searching for Bjergholdt and his victims. She was so furious at the special treatment that she couldn’t stop herself and, before she knew it, she was standing in his office, taking him to task, and lecturing him about how the Internet had become the preferred reality for lots of people. She was quite a way into her monologue before she noticed that Sergeant Heilmann was sitting in the chair across from Suhr, watching the whole scene with disapproval on her face.

“Uh, hi,” Louise said, nodding at Heilmann.

Then she turned back to Suhr and continued, while slinking back toward the door, “I suppose I could just search more later if you’d rather put me on something else.”

She stared him intently in the eyes with all the strength she could muster, hoping to convince him that she didn’t require any special treatment.

Suhr looked like a man who was finally ready to admit that he didn’t understand women. He had no idea what Louise was trying to tell him, so he decided to pretend she hadn’t said the last part. Instead he just gave her a friendly, if slightly bewildered, nod and asked her to keep doing what she was doing.

—

S
ITTING AT THE TABLE IN THE CAFETERIA WITH
L
ARS,
L
OUISE
discovered that she had forgotten how nice it was to listen to the conversation at the lunch table. She put off her work, fetched a cup of coffee, and got an update on the case about the man they had charged with murdering his ex-wife. The charges had been dropped, and Willumsen was so frustrated that he had decided to take a long weekend with his wife, and no one could remember him ever doing that before.

Everyone agreed that the most frustrating part was that there was practically a hundred-percent chance that the guy was guilty, but because it was perfectly reasonable that his fingerprints were all over her apartment and because a witness had felt pressured into making a false statement about something not pivotal to the case, but a false statement nonetheless, the whole thing had fallen apart. He’d walked out of Vestre Prison a free man and had already sent his children out of the country. Unless they found some new evidence, the police were going to be forced to accept that he would get away with stabbing his wife to death and they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

“That’s the way it is. We’re going to have to close the case. You just end up beating yourself up if you can’t let it go and admit that sometimes luck and circumstances favor the bad guys,” said Detective Pihl, who’d worked closely on the case, with a resigned shrug.

Louise agreed, but didn’t like hearing this, because the Bjergholdt case could easily end up the same way. If they couldn’t ID him soon, the case would land in the same cold-case pile, she thought. Their problem was just the opposite, though—they had the evidence, but not the guy.

—

W
HILE SHE WAS IN THE CAFETERIA,
L
OUISE RECEIVED A TEXT MESSAGE
from Camilla: “Do you want to get out of town this weekend?” Camilla and Markus were going to Sorø, and Louise was tempted, but she was seeing Flemming that night and having coffee with Peter on Saturday, so she sent a brief text back saying she couldn’t and then sat down at her computer.

Nightwatch.dk. She needed an account to get in. She didn’t have one, so she had to sign up for one first. She wanted to get Lars to help her, but he was gone when she got back from the cafeteria.

Well, I suppose I can probably figure it out on my own,
she thought, trying to think of a login name. She ended up using initials, just not her own. Instead, she stole her sister-in-law’s. Trine had changed her last name to Rick after she married Mikkel, but she kept her maiden name as her middle name, and it grated on Louise’s ears whenever she heard her say Trine Madsen Rick. It just didn’t go together.

Louise typed in TMR and hoped the site would accept a login name that was only three characters long. It didn’t. There had to be four. To her own childish amusement, she deleted Rick from her sister-in-law’s name, made her into Trine Madsen again, and shortened that to TRIM, which the site accepted. A colorful welcome screen popped up, and the menu bar on the left explained how to navigate on the site and which bars, nightclubs, and dance clubs you could visit on Nightwatch.dk. The goal was for late-night party animals to get photographed by Nightwatch’s photographers, who roamed around the city, and the pictures would be posted on the site.

Obviously you could also use your own camera. The site had really taken off, now that so many people had cameras in their cell phones. So people texted their pictures to Nightwatch.dk and wrote who they were out with or who they had met at the bar and maybe a brief comment. You used your Nightwatch profile name, and the pictures were posted right away. So then if you were surfing the site from home or on your smart phone and you saw a cute guy hanging out by the bar in one of these clubs, you could either hurry down there and hope he was still there, or you could write him if the picture was tagged with his profile name. Based on the pictures featured on the home page, it was obvious that not everybody realized they were being photographed, and yet their friends tagged them in the photos anyway.

Louise clicked on “Thursday” to see who she could have met if she had been in downtown Copenhagen the previous night: some guys named Søsser, Herring, and Danny stood awkwardly with their arms around each other smiling at the lens on the phone. Louise guessed it was a cell-phone camera because of the blurry images. She sighed when she realized there were eight pages of the same kind of tiny thumbnails she would have to click and zoom if she wanted to have any hope of making out the faces—and these thumbnails were just from one of the many downtown locations. She was starting to get a sense of how many pictures there must be for Friday and Saturday nights.

Tons of names and tons of drunken people. There were also pictures of people engaging in various types of transactions. She noted that she ought to tell drug enforcement about this while she was at it, surprised that people let themselves be photographed like this.

She kept going, zooming pictures, closing them again, and clicking the next one as fast as her laptop would permit. There were a few people her age! They were sitting at the bar drinking mixed drinks. The caption said “Sip” and “Motor3.” Louise double-clicked “Sip” and pulled up her profile. There weren’t any pictures on her profile, but you could e-mail her. Louise closed that and tried “Motor3.” His profile included a good selection of photos.

Lars was back, although Louise hadn’t really noticed him come in. She was deep in concentration, staring at her screen. She had just realized there were pictures from the dating mixer out in Holmen, but since she was being systematic about the whole thing, she was moving back through time and had only gotten to Saturday night so far. There hadn’t been any sign of Bjergholdt in the places she had tried, and she also knew there was only a minimal chance that she would suddenly recognize him in one of the pictures. But he had been at the mixer, and that demonstrated to her that he was the kind of guy who went out on the town, so it was worth a try.

Heilmann stopped by periodically after that and looked over Louise’s shoulder. The sergeant had been much quicker than Suhr to appreciate what Louise had found. The image quality of the mixer photos varied dramatically. In most of them, the lighting was so bad it was hard to see much but blurry figures standing against a dark background.

“We probably won’t be able to use them in a lineup with picture quality like that,” Heilmann said before returning to her own office. “But if you find him, we’ll get a tech to see if he can clean it up a little.”

Louise saw a lot of old friends as she leafed through, clip by clip. Stine Mogensen and her friend Annette showed up in several of the pictures, and she realized it would take more than “Duke” and Friday night’s experience to keep them away from the nightlife in the city.

He wasn’t there, she determined, feeling empty inside without knowing quite why she had let herself get her hopes up so much during her search. She closed the album of photos from the mixer and moved on to last Thursday without much enthusiasm. She was just about fed up with the countless photos. She jumped when her phone rang. She glanced at the display, but didn’t recognize the number.

“Unit A, Louise Rick speaking.”

“Hi, it’s Susanne. What did you think of my interview?”

Confused and mentally depleted, it took her a second to remember who Susanne was and what interview she was talking about. She looked up from her computer screen and focused on trying to snap out of it.

“I actually haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” Louise admitted, glancing over at today’s paper, which was sitting on her desk. “But I have it right here. Were you happy with it?”

“Very. I just talked to Camilla, who told me that the paper got a lot of positive feedback on it. People want to support me, make sure I’m okay, and help me find a new place to live and another job,” Susanne said, sounding happy.

“That’s great! But remember to keep a low profile,” Louise urged. She noticed what a damper that put on Susanne’s cheerful voice, and she regretted saying it immediately. It was amazing what an article like that could do. People came together when it was spelled out on paper for them that their fellow man was in need.

“I don’t mean you shouldn’t accept the help people are offering you,” Louise hastened to add. “Just that you shouldn’t rush into a new apartment or job right now while the paper is set to follow your every move.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Susanne responded a little stiffly, continuing in a more businesslike tone, “but I agreed with Camilla that I would write a sort of diary about my life in hiding, about my thoughts, and what it’s like having to move because you don’t feel safe anymore.”

Louise didn’t know if she should laugh or chew Susanne out. She decided to do neither, although her contemplations were cut short when Susanne continued, “I actually called to say you don’t need to worry about getting me a computer anymore.
Morgenavisen
is letting me borrow one.”

Louise rested her forehead in the palm of her hand. She didn’t know if it was bad or good for Susanne to have ended up in Camilla’s orbit. Maybe it would help her make a clean break from her old life and create her new identity, or maybe it would turn her into a media sensation—some poor thing people felt bad about for a while and then forgot about again just as quickly.

“Okay, I’ll shelve the request,” Louise said, “but don’t make any agreement with the newspaper that would allow readers to contact you directly, because then there’s a risk
he
will.”

Susanne mumbled something or other unintelligible, and Louise predicted that
Morgenavisen
would provide an e-mail address when they ran Susanne’s diary. Doubtless there were plenty of readers who would make use of the opportunity to contact her. Louise would bring this up with Suhr and Heilmann.