Farewell to Freedom (4 page)

The officer sounded a bit tired, and he leaned back in his chair. “But if nothing comes of our efforts,” he added, “the child will be put up for adoption. Until adoptive parents can be found for her, I assume that she'll be placed in an orphanage, presumably Skodsborg.”

“Isn't someone going to take care of her?” asked Jonas, who had stood up as the officer was talking.

“Of course they will. Some very nice ladies will take good care of her until she gets new parents.”

“But there must be something else you can do. Maybe the towel could give you a lead,” Camilla interjected, removing her arm from Markus's shoulder as he, too, stood up.

“We'll certainly do everything we can. But at least the baby's alive, and if the mother doesn't want her, it's probably best for the girl to be placed with a couple who really wants a child,” said the officer. Then he asked the pastor for a phone number where he could be reached.

As the officer stood up to leave, he gave his business card to Holm and handed one to Camilla as well. She noted that his name was Rasmus Hem, and she automatically nodded when he said that she was welcome to call him if her son happened to remember anything else. Standard procedure, she thought, sticking the card in her pocket.

The boys disappeared upstairs to Jonas's room. Camilla shifted her gaze away from the stairs and nodded to accept the pastor's offer of another cup of coffee. A huge pall had fallen over the kitchen, and the silence weighed heavily between them.

“What a mess,” said Pastor Holm, sinking onto a chair by the table and reaching for the sugar.

Camilla tried to imagine what would drive a mother to abandon a newborn to an uncertain fate, but in all the scenarios she considered, she couldn't find a credible explanation.

“Can you think of any pregnant women who have been here?” she asked instead.

“I've been racking my brain like crazy, but the only pregnant woman who comes here on a regular basis is Mette, and she hasn't delivered yet.”

He shook his head and glanced at the clock on the wall.

“I have to go write a column for the paper,” he said, gazing out the window at the church. “But I don't suppose they'll need me for the next couple of hours.”

Camilla shook her head and got up. It was almost 11:30, and she called Markus downstairs to say she was leaving.

“I've got to get back to the paper,” she said, running her fingers through his hair, flattening out a couple of tufts that he immediately re-tousled so it stuck out all over the place.

She smiled at him and placed her hands on his shoulders as she looked into his eyes, trying to determine whether he was still upset. But she relaxed, realizing that he was impatient for her to leave so he could go back up to Jonas.

“I'll call as soon as I can get away,” she promised, giving him a kiss on the cheek and another on his forehead before he writhed out of her grasp. Shouting “Sure, fine,” he disappeared up the stairs.

Camilla turned to face Pastor Holm and smiled. “Well, it looks like they've moved on,” she said, and, thanking him for the coffee, she left.

4

“Y
OU WON
'
T FIND A SINGLE PERSON ON THE STREET AT THIS HOUR
of the day who might have seen anything,” Mikkelsen informed Louise and Lars when they arrived at the local precinct. A clerk had showed them to Mikkelsen's office, which had a window overlooking Halmtorvet, Copenhagen's old Haymarket Square, which was now somewhat gentrified and lined with cafés and restaurants. The gray-haired detective with his small horn-rimmed glasses crossed his arms and glanced outside before telling them he'd already spoken with a few individuals last night who usually knew a thing or two about events in the area.

“Were they able to tell you anything?” Louise asked. She wondered whether Mikkelsen had even been home to sleep, having immediately noticed the utilitarian daybed pushed up against one wall of his office when she came in. Currently it was covered with piles of papers and folders, but underneath was a cotton blanket with a floral pattern.

He shook his head but shrugged at the same time, as if to say that it wasn't always easy to know how much weight to place on their statements.

“I showed the picture around,” he said, pointing to the photograph taken the night before of the woman's face from the chin up. “Several people said they'd seen her, but they claimed not to know who she was. Or who she works for.”

“And you're positive she's a prostitute?” Lars asked.

Mikkelsen reclined in his high-backed office chair, pausing for a moment with his hands clasped over his round belly.

“We'll never get that fact confirmed a hundred percent,” he said, fixing his gaze on the wall behind them. “But I think we can proceed based on that theory.”

“A colleague claimed he could tell by looking at her teeth that she was from Eastern Europe. Does that sound right?” Louise asked, noticing at once how Mikkelsen's face tensed up and his expression darkened.

He leaned forward again, placed his hands on the desk, and said, “It's always nice to have colleagues who are smart enough to observe everything in a single glance, and who are ready to lump all the girls together. But it's not that simple. We're not dealing with brand-name goods here. We can't just assume that if they look a certain way, they must come from a specific region. These are human beings we're talking about, not some cultivar of a flower that you can look up.”

His tone was acerbic. This was obviously a pet peeve of his that came up a lot.

“So what's your best guess?” Louise asked.

“She could very well be from Eastern Europe,” Mikkelsen admitted, but then he smiled. “I'm not basing that just on her appearance. That's based on what happened to her and where she was found. Plus, I'd be more likely to know her a little if she were one of the Danish prostitutes. And lately I've also been getting the impression that things have been getting difficult in Eastern Europe for these girls, so more and more of them have been showing up in Denmark. Some of them work for pimps, others work for themselves, but ultimately they all have to pay to use the street.”

“Use the street?” Louise interrupted with a puzzled look. “What exactly does that mean?”

“Some of the nastier pimps think they're in charge of the street, and they make the girls pay between 300 and 500 kroner a day for permission to use it.”

“How the hell can they do that? If anyone ‘owns' Istedgade, surely it's not a bunch of foreign pimps,” Lars exclaimed indignantly.

“Do the women get anything in return after they pay?” Louise asked, staring at a large city map, hanging next to Mikkelsen's desk, that showed the Vesterbro District. There were also some photos on the wall, of Istedgade and its side streets from an era when the shop fronts looked completely different, Louise guessed from the fifties. In one of the pictures, a police officer was riding a bicycle, and another showed three men holding bottles of beer, raising them at the photographer in a toast. All of the photos were black and white.

Mikkelsen shrugged. “Sure, they promise them protection,” he said with a nod as he scratched his unshaven cheeks.

Louise understood this to imply that the prostitutes couldn't really count on this protection.

“They believe it because they have no other choice. They're told that the pimps are in cahoots with the police, and that they have to pay if they don't want to be thrown out of the country.”

“But don't the girls find the truth when they talk to each other?” Louise asked.

Mikkelsen shook his head and pushed his black-framed glasses up onto his forehead. There was something retro about their styling, but she was sure that he hadn't chosen them for fashion but because he'd actually owned them since the sixties.

“Keep in mind that many of the girls who end up here don't necessarily have the world's best education. Where they come from, bribes aren't uncommon to get the authorities to leave you alone. At the same time, these girls aren't used to having much of a say about anything. So when someone who talks louder than they do, so to speak, explains that these are the rules, they fall in line accordingly.”

“So who's controlling the girls this way?” Louise asked next.

“The crime bosses. The ones who work with the Nigerian prostitutes, the Roma gypsies, and the ones from Eastern Europe. There are girls walking around out there …” He tilted his head toward the window. “… who have no idea how many months there are in a year, or how many hours in a day. Those kinds of girls aren't going to rebel against someone who gives them an order. They do whatever they're told.

“They're here for only one reason, and that's to make money,” Mikkelsen continued. “Either for themselves or for the crime bosses who force them into prostitution. But whether they're here of their own free will or they've been forced into it, most of them dream of being able to put a little aside or to send money home to their families. When there's a middleman involved, there's not much money left over, so sometimes a few of them try to go it on their own.”

“Do you think that's what happened?” asked Louise, leaning forward a bit.

“It's possible,” Mikkelsen said, nodding.

Louise sat in silence for a moment, lost in her own thoughts, trying to put together a scenario that would explain the killing.

“Well, should we head out and see if anyone has shown up who might recognize the woman?” Lars suggested, interrupting her thoughts.

Mikkelsen stood up. “Let's do that,” he said. “But just think of it as getting some exercise, because I don't think our odds are all that good. If this is what I think, the girl didn't want to follow orders. So the only motive for the murder is to send a signal or a warning to the other girls, to show them what happens if they don't obey and do what they're told. And those guys do their job so thoroughly that there won't be any evidence for us to find, not even if we roll out our entire technical arsenal.”

Mikkelsen put on a black leather jacket, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his desk drawer and stuffed it in his inside pocket.

“And if anyone happens to be unlucky enough to have seen something, you can bet they're not going to feel like picking the perpetrators out of a lineup,” he added.

“But it is still possible that the victim was Danish and that the perp was a john, don't you think?” Lars asked as they made their way downstairs.

“I doubt it.” Mikkelsen's voice was quite firm. “If so, there would have been some indication of emotion. Not the kind of emotion that makes married people kill each other, but the more ambiguous kind that can pop up suddenly between a man and a prostitute: feelings of domination, rage, or possessiveness. We see it all the time when we pick up hookers who've been beaten. But there was no emotion in this case. She was slaughtered like an animal.”

Out on Halmtorvet, Louise squinted in the bright sunlight. They started walking down Sønder Boulevard. There were fewer cars now that the street had been closed to through traffic, but there weren't many pedestrians or bikers out either. Louise spotted a young drug addict leaning against the door in an entryway. The woman's purse had slipped out of her grasp and was lying on the sidewalk. Louise guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She was wearing stylish clothes: tight jeans and a short, light-colored leather jacket. Her short brown hair was disheveled, and at the moment she seemed to be going through hell. Violent spasms racked her body. She leaned her head against the rough bricks of the building and clung to the door, her fingers trying to locate one of the doorbells. Convulsions shook her body again, and she doubled over, gasping for air.

Mikkelsen went over to her and cautiously placed his hand on her shoulder. “What is it, Sanne? What's wrong?” he asked.

The woman didn't turn to look at him, instead raising her arm and trying to push him away.

Mikkelsen pressed one of the doorbells and a moment later the door buzzed. He gallantly held it open for her as she staggered unsteadily toward the stairwell, fumbling along the wall with one hand. Then she disappeared from Louise's view. Mikkelsen had picked up her bag and hung the strap over the woman's shoulder before pulling the door closed.

Rejoining his colleagues, Mikkelsen made no comment about the incident and just kept walking.

“It's always deserted around here in the early afternoon. But in an hour or two the johns will start heading home from work, and then the girls will show up,” he told them as he waved to a couple of middle-aged men sitting on a bench, each holding a beer. Louise fell in behind Jørgensen as a group of schoolkids passed them, taking up most of the sidewalk as they made their way toward DGI-Byen, the enormous conference center complex that included a gym, spa, and restaurant.

Mikkelsen was headed for Skelbækgade, which felt different to Louise in the daytime. There had been much more life on the street the night before than there was now.