Call Me Princess (7 page)

“Yeah, listening to this is unbearable. Willumsen will have to come get him when he gets back.”

They agreed that Louise would take the man down to the holding cells in the basement under the headquarters building while Lars drove the car over to the parking garage.

When they met up again in their office afterward, Louise cast a tired glance around at the bare walls and noted that their office needed painting. It had only been a couple of months since their 1970s-era desks had been replaced by a newer style, with desktops whose height could be adjusted, but that just made everything else look even more out-of-date. The only personal touches were the two bulletin boards that she and Lars had covered with personal photos and souvenirs from some of their more spectacular cases. For example, they had put up the formula for how to make a light-green narcotic, which had been called green dust, and was a scourge throughout Copenhagen. Uncovering green dust was a case Louise’s friend Camilla had been very involved in and had nearly killed her.

Off on the right side of the bulletin board was an access card for an EU summit meeting. Louise thought that had been one of the most horrifically boring things she had ever had to do, but it was part of the compulsory duties that were occasionally part of being in the division.

She sat for a bit, collecting her thoughts as she let her eyes rest on her desktop, where there was a written phone message from Susanne, confirming that their appointment had been moved to the next day.

She called Peter at home and let him know she was on her way.

“I’ll put on a pot of tea,” he offered right away. “Have you eaten?”

Sometimes his motherly concern got on her nerves. She didn’t remember anyone ever making such a fuss over whether or not she’d eaten before she and Peter moved in together. Somehow, it made her uncomfortable. She convinced him that a cheese sandwich would be just fine.

L
OUISE POURED SOME COFFEE AND PASSED THE THERMAL CARAFE TO
her right. Most of the people attending the morning briefing in the break room already knew about the arrest at the summer house outside Nykøbing Sjaelland for the murder of the immigrant woman, something they had been working on for several weeks. The ones who hadn’t been there or who had only heard about the man’s interrogation, which had lasted until late into the night, were sitting and listening with interest to Lieutenant Suhr’s account.

“The couple had been separated for a good seven months. They’ve got two kids who were living with the mother in the apartment she was renting temporarily. There really wasn’t any problem at all, until the day she made it clear she didn’t want to get back together with him.”

“We think,” Willumsen interrupted, taking over, “that he must have picked the kids up on Saturday morning and dropped them off somewhere before going back for his ex-wife. That fits with the racket that an upstairs neighbor heard from the apartment around one o’clock in the afternoon. It’s hard to say if he planned to stab her to death or if it was an argument that got out of control, but she was murdered, stabbed nine times. He says he was with their kids until late Saturday afternoon, when he came back to drop them off, and he found her lying in a pool of blood in the living room.”

“How does he explain running off to a summer house that no one in his circle of friends knew about?” someone asked.

“He doesn’t. He says he didn’t run off. To the contrary, he says he withdrew a little to ‘work through his grief.’” Willumsen made air quotes with his fingers. “The CSI folks found his fingerprints all over his wife’s home.”

“You need to find the knife or some clothes with her blood on them,” Suhr said, standing up from where he’d been leaning on the edge of the table. “It’s not that hard to imagine him denying his guilt the whole way through and claiming that his fingerprints were obviously in her home since he regularly spent time there.”

Willumsen nodded. That was exactly what he himself had said before they arrested the man last night. Without any direct evidence, they would be in a weak position when they presented their side in court later that morning.

“I’m sure we’ll find something,” Willumsen said, “but there wasn’t anything at the summer house.”

“How is it going with the rape case?” someone asked.

Suhr came and stood by the end of the table where Heilmann, Louise, and Lars were sitting.

“
Morgenavisen
called me this morning. They’d like to know what we’re doing to track down the suspect.”

“How do
they
know about that case?” Louise demanded, lurching forward in her chair as she fought to slow her racing heartbeat and keep herself from blushing. She made a concerted effort to maintain a professional distance from
Morgenavisen,
where her friend Camilla Lind was a reporter, so that no one could accuse Louise of leaking stories to her: Camilla had the Copenhagen crime beat at the paper.

“That lady journalist of theirs got a call from Susanne Hansson’s mother last night,” Suhr said.

Louise sighed and closed her eyes for a moment.

Suhr had walked back over to the giant dry-erase board hanging at far end of the break room.

She opened her eyes again but avoided looking at him. She didn’t feel like listening to whatever he was about to say.

“The mother of the victim was extremely upset that the police, quote, weren’t doing anything to find her daughter’s assailant.”

Louise could hear in his intonation that the mother hadn’t spared any details. “That bitch,” she muttered, gulping down the remainder of her mostly cold coffee.

“How far have you guys gotten on a description of the suspect? And what do we have that can identify him?”

He stood ready in front of the blank dry-erase board with an uncapped blue marker in his hand.

“We still don’t have a usable description,” Heilmann said. “The plan was for Rick to have Ms. Hansson go through photos yesterday, but then the Nykøbing Sjaelland operation came up, so we had to postpone that until today.”

Heilmann calmly explained that they still didn’t know if there was enough biological material to run a DNA analysis, but the DNA lab was hoping to have the results later this week or early next week. She said this a little hesitantly, because in reality it might also take until the week after next, and no one really wanted to think about that.

“Could you then just explain why you guys went to Nykøbing when you’ve got more than enough on your plate here at home?” Suhr asked with an undertone that Louise couldn’t interpret. Either Heilmann had told him how ridiculous it was that she and Lars had been ordered to go to Nykøbing when all they ended up doing was chauffeuring the suspect back to headquarters, or Suhr had had no idea that Heilmann’s team was out there during yesterday’s arrest.

“We were assisting because we were ordered to,” Heilmann replied, gesturing by faintly nodding her head that the request had come from Willumsen. She stared directly at Lieutenant Suhr as she spoke.

Willumsen followed the whole thing, unconcerned.

“I want to have something actionable after lunch,” Suhr continued, bellowing. “There is a lot of attention on rape cases these days, especially when the parties met each other online, and a case like this one might drag out over several weeks if the media latches on to it. We can assume they’ll publish that the victim was gagged and bound. The mother obviously isn’t planning on keeping her mouth shut about the way she found her daughter, but apparently she doesn’t know that her daughter met the perp online. Her version makes it sounds like a complete stranger forced his way into her daughter’s apartment. The story will undoubtedly blow up if it comes out that the victim invited the suspect in.”

Louise knew Suhr was already picturing the headlines.

“You need to close this case, and I will not tolerate you spending time on other cases before this one is out of the way. If you’ve got anything pressing on your plate, you’ll have to hand it off to someone else.” Suhr cast a quick glance at Willumsen. “And it has to come through me.”

Louise glanced at Heilmann as they stood up, but she couldn’t tell whether she was satisfied with the lieutenant’s direct rebuke of Willumsen.

“Let’s just meet in my office and touch base on this,” Heilmann said on her way out the door.

“Was your pal Camilla the one who called the lieutenant?” Michael Stig asked as they sat around the desk in Heilmann’s office.

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken with her,” Louise answered defensively.

“Maybe it’d be a good idea for you to call Camilla Lind and find out what the mother is saying and why she went to a newspaper with the story,” Heilmann said.

Louise was about to suggest that someone else should make that call, but then it occurred to her that she didn’t want to draw any more attention than necessary to her relationship with Camilla.

“Okay, I’ll give her a call, but I’ve got an appointment with Susanne at ten. She’s coming up here so we can try to nail down a description.”

“The perp’s online profile isn’t up any more,” Toft informed them. “I went into Susanne’s profile to check her inbox and the messages she had gotten from Bjergholdt, and as far as I could tell his profile has been deleted.”

“That was probably one of the first things he did after he wiped off her blood,” Stig interjected.

“Shouldn’t we also see if we can find any other women Bjergholdt was in contact with via the dating site?” Lars suggested.

“We should track any accounts that exchanged messages with ‘Mr. Noble,’” Toft said.

Louise raised her eyebrows, wondering if Bjergholdt’s profile name were somehow an allusion to his being from a blue-blooded family. Or whether it meant he was an attractive guy or something.

“Come to think of it, what was Susanne’s profile name?” Louise inquired, curious.

“‘Snow Wite,’ without the
h
.”

“Ah, the spelling with the
h
was probably already taken,” she remarked.

“The Web site’s administrator can trace any messages exchanged with ‘Mr. Noble.’ If they balk at that, we’ll sic CCU on them.”

This made Louise think of the guys from
Ghostbusters
showing up with those vacuum-like gadgets on their backs, exorcising ghosts.
It’s actually kind of the same thing,
she thought:
we’re looking for something that can’t be seen.

“Have you told the photo lab you’re coming?” Heilmann asked, looking at Louise.

Louise nodded and asked Heilmann if having Susanne look at the photo archive would jeopardize her ability to pick the perp out of a lineup later on. In cases where the victim has a lot of doubt about the perpetrator’s description, they frequently ran into big problems with defense attorneys claiming that the reliability of the recognition is weakened when they present the victim with a series of pictures in advance. And it happens too often that when the police show pictures to a victim, it affects the victim’s memory.

“Do we have any choice?” Heilmann said, looking at her.

“No, we really don’t,” Louise answered, annoyed that witnesses were so bad at recognition. People were so unbelievably bad at remembering details accurately. Dark-haired men become medium-blond. A face that that one witness remembers as having pronounced features is remembered by another as having weak features.

“Or do we go to the press?” she suggested, interrupting the silence that had settled over the conference table. “We could describe the crime and look for other women who had something similar happen to them, and then hope they’ve got a clearer image of the suspect in their minds.”

“Are we
looking
for other women?” Lars asked, looking as if he had been suddenly awakened from his thoughts.

“Not yet.”

Heilmann had apparently already given this thorough consideration. “There is no doubt that when the story hits the papers, there will be a massive chorus of folks saying Susanne herself is to blame for what happened to her. We can agree, can’t we, that there is no reason to subject her to that as long as it can be avoided?”

Everyone nodded. Not just for Susanne’s sake, but also because the uproar would make it hard for them to do their work.

“We need to get her to give us a description, and we’ll look after the rest ourselves,” Heilmann said, and then told Louise, “But find out what the mother is saying.”

When they stood up, Heilmann asked Stig to drive out and have a word with Susanne’s mother. The way she said it left no doubt that she meant he should drive out there and get her to shut up.

—

L
OUISE ASKED
S
USANNE TO SIT IN THE CHAIR IN FRONT OF THE YELLOWED
screen that the photographs would be projected onto.

In the room next door, the technician was pulling out the photos that matched the information they had given him: male, dark complexion, high forehead, dark eyes, smooth face. Those were the characteristics that had been noted in advance; height was plus or minus four inches, and age was plus or minus five years.

Before they got going with the slides, Louise wanted to show Susanne the sex-offenders file, which contained photos of the people with previous convictions for sexual offenses.

“They’re using it in the room next door, but you can have it after we’ve been through the slides,” the technician said when Louise asked for the file.

He snapped the slide carousel into place with a loud click and handed Susanne the control with the button that advanced the carousel.

“Let’s just forget going after a specific person,” Louise told the technician before they got started. “Susanne is too fuzzy on what he looks like. We’re looking for a type.”

The technician nodded.

“Okay, we’re ready now,” Louise said. She took a pad of paper out and sat next to Susanne, explaining that she should just advance through the photos at whatever pace she wanted and take plenty of time.

Susanne nodded and pressed the button to pull up the first photo that the technician had found in the comprehensive offenders’ index that the police maintained.

“He didn’t look at all like that,” she exclaimed emphatically, sounding irritated.