Farewell to Freedom (5 page)

“Let's just go over and ask Nesip what sorts of rumors are going around,” Mikkelsen said, sounding like a local. He motioned for them to follow as he went down four steps into a basement grocery store, calling out: “Hello! Is the little shrimp working today?”

Louise saw a young immigrant boy behind the counter give him a high-five over the candy bins and the neat stacks of morning newspapers.

“He's in back,” the boy said in the thick, local neighborhood accent.

Mikkelsen led the way through the shop, and Louise noticed the boy following them with his eyes, curious. Apparently he wasn't concerned about a group of police officers tromping through the place.

In the back room the tea was sweet and the music was so loud that Louise had a hard time following the conversation when Mikkelsen sat down next to a small man who was apparently the shop owner. It seemed as if Mikkelsen was a friend, and Louise and Lars were merely along for the ride.

Mikkelsen placed the photo of the dead woman on the table, and Louise didn't need to hear what they were saying to see that Nesip didn't know her. She leaned forward to listen as Mikkelsen tried to ferret out what people in the neighborhood had been saying, and whether there was anything the police hadn't caught wind of yet. At one point, the Turkish man had a highly emotional outburst, his voice rising in passion and temporarily drowning out the Middle Eastern music as he expressed his great sorrow that the harsh reality of street life had claimed yet another soul.

Mikkelsen glanced over at them and winked as he paused in his questioning until the shopkeeper had calmed down a bit.

Ten minutes later they were back on the street again. They hadn't learned anything new, and the sweet tea had left a cloying sweetness in their mouths.

“So he didn't know her name, but apparently he had seen her walk by a few times lately, although he couldn't say whether it was a week ago or a month ago.”

They started walking back toward Halmtorvet. When Louise looked across the street, she grabbed Lars's arm—she had seen the same drunk who had been sitting on the steps outside the Høker Café when the body was found.

“Isn't that the guy?” she asked, pointing at the opposite sidewalk.

“It sure is, and it looks like he's finally on his feet,” her partner said. He told Mikkelsen that the man was one of the first witnesses he'd talked to. “But the guy was so far gone, he hadn't even noticed anything was happening.”

“Oh, that's Kai,” Mikkelsen said. “He lost his grip on reality years ago. He does better when he keeps to his own world. He drinks a liter or more a day, but he wouldn't hurt a fly. Sometimes he even makes his sofa available if someone needs a place to stay.”

The man was walking in their direction on the sidewalk on the other side of the street and stopped to lean against the wall of a building as he rummaged through his pants pocket. He finally pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and with great difficulty he removed one from the pack and then found his lighter.

Louise watched him as he started staggering forward again.

“He was sitting right across from the place where the body was lying. He must have seen her,” she said. Then she asked Mikkelsen if he'd consider having a word with the man. “Maybe he'd be more willing to recall something if you were the one asking.”

Mikkelsen stopped abruptly and glanced over at Kai, but then he started walking again.

“Okay, I'll do it, but not here. I'd rather catch him at home. Kai would catch hell if word gets out he might have seen something. People consider a guy like him worthless, and the people we're dealing with wouldn't blink at shutting him up for good.”

Kai was almost directly across from them now. He crossed the street, heading for the basement grocery store. When he got close, he recognized Mikkelsen and raised his hand in greeting.

“Ça va, monsieur?”
Mikkelsen asked, going over to shake his hand.

“Très bien, mon ami. Très bien,”
Kai slurred, a smile passing over his ravaged face. He let go of the officer's hand, pointed down at the store, and then raised his hand to his mouth as if he were tipping a bottle to his lips.

Mikkelsen smiled and gave him a slap on the back before Kai headed down the basement steps.

“He's okay. He was the chef at the Plaza Hotel until his wife dumped him, and then his son was killed in a car accident … or maybe it happened the other way around. In any case, his whole world fell apart, and he said goodbye to his old life,” Mikkelsen explained. “Let's take a stroll over to Istedgade. I want to show the photo to the folks at Club Intim. If this woman worked here in the neighborhood, she probably used their booths. Although I doubt the guys over there will feel particularly motivated to share, either.”

Rounding the corner onto Istedgade, Louise smelled the spicy aroma of grilling shawarma, and her stomach instantly contracted with hunger. She found a piece of chewing gum in her pocket, hoping that it would tide her over until she could get back to the office and the box of crackers in her desk drawer.

A group of men stood in front of the homeless shelter in the spring sunshine, clutching their beer bottles and chatting. A big dog had stretched out lazily in the middle of the sidewalk so that people had to walk in a circle around him. The street scene was a motley mixture, with everyone from bums to schoolchildren to the parents of toddlers who didn't bat an eye at the sex shops while maneuvering their strollers home around the African prostitutes.

Club Intim was three steps below street level. The officers edged their way single-file past racks of porn DVDs in the crammed shop.

Louise could tell that the guy behind the counter recognized Mikkelsen, and it took him only a quick glance at Lars and her to know that they weren't new customers. On the contrary, they were the sort of people he wanted out of the shop as quickly as possible.

Club Intim promoted itself as Denmark's leading porn theater, with four separate screens and signs advertising topless service and draft beer for 30 kroner. But only a certain clientele knew about the business transacted in the numerous private booths where prostitutes serviced their customers. The prostitutes paid 90 kroner per visit to rent a booth, and according to Mikkelsen, they could turn over three or four customers an hour.

Louise and her partner hung back as Mikkelsen stepped over to the counter to show the guy the photo of the murdered woman found on Skelbækgade. Louise perused the DVD titles. Bare breasts and spread legs—the packaging was basically the same on all of them.

Two men in their early twenties came out of the back room, which Louise later learned was a bar.
Topless and bottomless
, as Mikkelsen described it. She stepped aside to let the men pass. They gave her a knowing smile, and she made sure she had a response ready if they tried to proposition her. But just then a middle-aged man in a work jacket and white mason's cap came barging out of the other corridor where the theaters and sex booths were. He was clearly in a hurry, and on his way to the door he happened to bump into one of the younger guys, pushing him into a rack. A couple of DVDs fell to the floor. Without even pausing, the man rushed up the three steps to the street, but before he got any farther, the young guys were on him. A punch slammed the middle-aged man into the shop's front window with a loud bang.

Louise was up the stairs by the time he had taken the second blow, and she grabbed hold of the assailant. With a quick twist she had his arm pinned behind his back and her police badge out before Lars had even reached the entrance.

“All right, that's enough,” she said, nodding at the older man to let him know he could go. She was just about to ask the young guys for their names when a loud scream came through the open door. Lars quickly turned back, and Louise let go of the guy's arm to follow Lars as he ran back into the shop and down the corridor with the booths, toward the screams. Mikkelsen had remained inside while his colleagues dealt with the young guys, but now he followed them into the hall.

Inside the corridor Lars stopped abruptly. Louise ran into him with such force that he lost his balance and fell against the wall.

The African girl's body was naked. Small and slender, with her feet dangling thirty centimeters off the floor, she hung from a row of coat pegs on the wall with her arms stretched out on the coat hangers like a female version of Jesus on the cross. Her head hung limply to one side, her eyes were closed, and a thin stream of blood trickled down her cheek from a cut over her left eyebrow.

The screams stopped, replaced by faint sobs coming from a blonde girl standing in the doorway next to the coat hooks. She was wearing black lace underwear and rocked from side to side as she wept.

Mikkelsen and Lars lifted the girl down. Her legs trembled, but she was conscious. Louise took a blanket that someone handed her from a door that opened but then quickly closed again. She helped the girl sit down on the bed in a little booth that stank of sweat, semen, and poor ventilation.

“Do you speak English?” Louise asked, wrapping the blanket around the girl's shoulders.

The African girl shook her head listlessly as she reached for a paper towel that she tore off a roll on a small table. The cut over her eye was bleeding heavily now, and she dabbed at her cheek first, and then pressed the paper towel to her eyebrow to stop the bleeding. She looked like she'd taken more blows than the one that had split open her brow, but she looked away every time Louise spoke to her. Finally, Louise got up and left the woman alone to collect herself.

Mikkelsen was with the blonde who had summoned them with her screams. He knew her. The girl's name was Anita, and the needle tracks on her arms were so visible that it was obvious she had been using for a long time. Her sobs subsided, and she blew her nose loudly on the tissue Mikkelsen handed her.

“I heard him hitting her, but I had to finish with my customer before I could see if she was all right,” Anita said with a hacking cough. “And there she was, hanging there. Not making a sound. I thought she was fucking dead.”

“Did you see who did it?” asked Mikkelsen.

Anita shook her head.

“Was he middle-aged and a bit heavy-set, in a white mason's cap?” Louise asked, jumping into the conversation.

Anita looked at her and then shook her head again.

“No, that was the guy with me,” she replied. “He took off when his wife sent him a text message reminding him to buy some milk on the way home.”

She gave a hollow laugh as she turned around and started getting dressed with the door still open.

“He gave me an extra hundred,” she said, pulling her blouse over her head. “I'm sure he heard the guy punching her too. He probably thought the big tip would get him out of any obligation to find out if she was all right.”

“It happened before we got there,” Mikkelsen said once they were again standing outside on Istedgade. “So it's impossible to know who did that to her.”