Only One Life (28 page)

“Did that man have something to do with the murders?” Ibrahim al-Abd asked from the row of chairs along the wall. Sada was sitting next to him, well hidden behind her veil, which was wrapped tightly over her face.

Something had happened to his face since she’d seen him last. Something dry and stiff had come over it, like bread that had been left out too long. He had expressed intense grief when they had last been together; now he expressed nothing, and his eyes watched her with a lackluster gleam. She walked over and sat down next to them.

“We came because we’re afraid the new murder will make you forget about our daughter,” Ibrahim began. “I presume now you’re probably only interested in the Danish girl, whom Samra knew?”

Louise mollified them by explaining that murder investigations didn’t work that way. You didn’t just drop one case because a new one came along.

“Obviously, at the moment, we’re trying to identify who murdered Dicta Møller. But you can rest assured, we’re still doing everything we can to find out what happened to your daughter.”

Sada gazed at her with a dark, unhappy look, which made Louise want to put her arm around the woman and comfort her. Instead she said that the police would really like to speak to them at some point in the near future, to find out what they knew about Dicta and the two girls’ friendship.

“Please don’t let our daughter end up on the back burner,” Ibrahim pleaded. His voice cracked, and his wife looked down at the gray-laminate floor.

Louise knew what he meant. So she tried to calm them by explaining that a team of eight people was still working on their daughter’s murder, working what must be described as expanded hours.

“We promise to let you know as soon as there’s anything new,” she said, holding out her hand as she stood up to join everyone else in the command room.

“Was it the same killer?” Storm asked as she opened the door.

The others were sitting around the table and the meeting was under way.

Bengtsen shook his head and was backed up by Skipper, who had extensive training in criminal profiling.

“The two girls’ murders can’t be compared.” Skipper stood up and walked over to the dry-erase board, where he drew the two girls as stick figures and wrote “organized” and “disorganized” over their heads.

Louise pulled out a chair and accepted the cup of coffee Søren handed her.

“One murder was committed by someone organized, one by someone disorganized,” Skipper continued. “The organized one was thinking about his or her own safety and planned how to dispose of the body in advance, and we can certainly assume that the culprit doesn’t live in the proximity of Hønsehalsen. The act suggests that there was a relationship between the killer and the victim.”

Everyone seemed to agree.

“The murder of Dicta Møller, on the other hand, appears to have been committed by someone disorganized, and in terms of motives I think it’s obvious that it was an emotional act stemming from a feeling like revenge or jealousy, for example. It was a spontaneous killing, and the murderer could easily have been seen from one of the surrounding apartments. Everything suggests that the location where the body was found was also the scene of the crime.”

Louise had noticed that there were first- and second-floor apartments with windows looking out over the parking lot and had thought that the murderer was lucky no one had seen anything.

Storm stood up and moved to stand next to Skipper, from where he addressed the room.

“At present there are no commonalities between the murders of these two friends. Thus we will continue to investigate the two cases individually,” he said and added that of course they should remain more attentive than usual to the coincidence that both girls were in the same class.

“A number of the ninth-grade parents have already called, expressing serious concern,” Ruth interrupted. “They’re afraid more students in the class may be in danger.”

“I have a hard time believing that we’re dealing with a murderer who has set out to systematically wipe out a whole school class,” Storm said, running his hand through his hair, “but of course it’s impossible to rule that out at this point.”

He turned to Bengtsen and said, “Maybe you should drop in on the ninth-grade class and fill them in a little on our work. A small bit of information often goes a long way in calming people’s fears.”

Bengtsen nodded and said he’d do that right away.

“We should talk to the local photographer who worked with Dicta,” Storm said and looked at Louise.

She sat there for a moment as Bengtsen left and the others stood to go. She was thinking about Dicta Møller and all her dreams. Yes, when Mik came back, they’d have to get hold of Michael Mogensen, but first they had to go out and take a look at Dicta’s room. There had to be something there that could advance the case.

29

T
HE PASTOR WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN WITH
D
lCTA
’
S PARENTS
when Mik and Louise came to the front door. Both Anne and Henrik Møller came to greet them when they rang the bell. A bunch of bouquets of flowers, still wrapped in cellophane, along with small white cards that hadn’t been opened or read yet were sitting on the counter. The pastor stood up and shook hands with Mik and Louise.

“It appears that sorrow has settled over our town for the time being,” he said.

There was something very forthright and confidence-inspiring about him, and there was a peace in the kitchen even though the grief was also palpable and visible in both parents. The mother’s eyes were red and puffy, her nose bright and shiny and rubbed almost raw from wiping and countless handkerchief dabs. The father’s face was ashen and withdrawn, his eyes glassy, but there was no sign of tears.
So he hadn’t gotten that far yet
, Louise thought, but it would come. In some people, the crying and flood of tears happened right away, while in others the grief had to take root in all of their cells before the reaction came.

“We would really like permission to look around Dicta’s room. Do you have anything against that?” Louise asked, after they’d both said no-thank-you to coffee or joining the parents at the table.

“Of course we don’t have anything against that,” Henrik said immediately. He stood up and led the way and opened the door, but remained frozen in the hallway as if he didn’t have the strength to go into the bedroom that still contained so much of his daughter’s spirit in all the things that were in there.

They could hear that Anne had started crying again and the pastor was comforting her. Louise turned her attention to the girl’s room. She’d been there before, but with Dicta, and hadn’t been so interested in the things in the room but instead had been focusing more on what the girl had told her.

There was a big round disco ball hanging in one corner of the room above a small circular table that was so covered in thick, pink pillar candles that there was only space for an old-fashioned alarm clock with a bell on top. The bed was a futon, which was currently made up as a sofa adorned with two cream-colored pillows.

At the end of the bed, hidden behind the open door, hung a large vanity mirror with bare bulbs screwed into a wood frame all the way around it, like you might see in a theater dressing room or like a professional makeup artist might have. Under the mirror hung an open shelf with more hair and body-care products, makeup and perfumes—along with a curling iron and a flat iron—than Louise had seen gathered anywhere else, even at Camilla’s place.
Overwhelming and completely unnecessary for a young woman with the appearance nature had imbued Dicta with,
Louise thought. Along the opposite wall there was a narrow desk and a tall bookshelf. To the left of the desk a little stereo system was mounted on the wall and in the corner there was a tall, narrow CD holder.

A Fatboy beanbag chair filled up the space just to the left of the door. The trendy, oversized version of the classic 1970s beanbag chair was pink and matched the candles on the table. On the floor next to that, there was a big pile of fashion magazines. A quick glance showed that they were
Costume, Eurowoman, Sirene,
and
Bazaar.
There was also a TV and a small black iPod on the table under the disco ball. The only thing missing was the computer Bengtsen and Velin had already picked up. On the wall over the desk, there was a photo collage that Dicta had made herself with pictures of several of the biggest international models on catwalks from around the world.

“She was a beautiful girl,” Mik said, as Dicta’s father stood in the doorway.

Henrik nodded and asked if they needed him to stay while they looked through her things.

“No, we can manage on our own,” Louise hurried to say. It would be better if she and Mik could talk undisturbed without worrying about offending the girl’s parents.

“We’ll see if she wrote anything about her meetings with Tue Sunds,” Louise said once she’d taken a seat on the sofa to get an overview. Mik had gently put his arms around her waist as he slipped around her to enter the room and she could still feel his hands on her body. It irritated her that she was receptive and, besides, it wasn’t okay that he touched her that way. He would never have done that before their night together.

She followed him with her eyes as he opened Dicta’s closet and started slowly flipping through her hangers. Not surprisingly, the closet was crammed full. The floor of it was littered with shoes and boots. The room overall was neat and tidy on the surface, but as soon as you opened something, an awful mess was revealed. This young woman obviously had not yet developed any sense of order yet, or she just hadn’t been interested in that.

Louise got up and started with the bottom shelf in the bookcase. It was mostly textbooks and three-ring binders; the two shelves above that were books, children’s and young adult; and then there were computer games,
The Sims
and
The Sims 2.
Louise was guessing they hadn’t been used in a while, because there weren’t many kidlike things left in the room anymore.

Then there was the shelf with the photo album and a thin scrapbook. Louise took both of them over to the sofa to look through.

A lot of pictures had been taken of Dicta. Louise could see that this must have been done over a long period of time, possibly over a year, because she had changed over time. Louise left the album sitting on her lap and flipped open the scrapbook. Several stores in town had used Dicta in their ads, and Michael Mogensen had also used her often as a model in the photos accompanying stories in the local paper. There were also clippings showing her as a movie extra. He had apparently done what he could to make her dream of a modeling career come true, Louise ascertained, lingering for a bit over the clippings Dicta had pasted on the front page of the scrapbook and drawn a thick border around with a felt-tip marker. They were quotes from a couple of the biggest names in Danish modeling.

“Remember your goals. A single picture can ruin your career.”

That was surely true,
Louise thought, letting her eyes move down to the next frame.

“The first time you see your picture on the cover of
Vogue
, the sky falls and the world opens up. That’s the best.”

Dicta had double-underlined “the best.”

Louise read the first quote to Mik.

“Then why the hell did she send a picture to
Ekstra Bladet?”
he asked.

Louise shrugged. She started looking through the rest of the shelf to see if maybe there was a calendar or day planner that Dicta might have written something in. Something like that might also reveal how many times she’d been to Copenhagen, and Louise would take great satisfaction in slapping it down on the table in front of Tue Sunds and asking him to provide some more details on his first statement.

“It was probably, like Sunds said, because she was impatient to be discovered,” Louise said after a long pause.

Mik had picked up a little athletic bag from the bottom of the closet. He started spreading out the contents on the floor. Skimpy tops, short skirts of both denim and softer material. He picked up a narrow yellow belt and a small white bikini the size of the one Dicta had been photographed in.

“Could this be the one she took to Copenhagen?” he asked, checking the bag’s exterior pockets. A small picture of a young, very blonde-haired boy fell onto the floor as he pulled out a flowered, worn, standard-size notebook with the word
PRIVATE
written neatly in a white field on the front.

Mik sat down with his back against the open closet door and opened the book. Louise watched him, curious.

“Read it out loud,” she urged, annoyed at his silence.

He looked up at her after having skimmed a few more pages. “It isn’t Dicta’s.”

Louise gave him a quizzical look.

“‘My big brother got a job at Kvickly today,’” Mik read. “Dicta was an only child.”

Louise nodded, and he turned the page in the book.

“‘Saving up for a bigger cage for Snubby.’ This was written last summer,” Mik said, after glancing at the date in the top corner, but Louise was already up off the sofa. She snatched the flowered notebook out of his hands before he had a chance to react.

“It’s Samra’s,” she said, sitting down with the book in her hands. Flipping through it, she could see that the young girl had started the diary in May of the previous year.

“There are big jumps in the dates every once in a while, and somewhere near the end, several pages are missing,” Louise said after having quickly skimmed it.

Mik had gotten up from the floor and had come over to sit next to her. They sat in silence and read until they came across a poem Samra had written about her white rabbit.

“You and me. Me and you. We’ll never get out. You in a cage. Me behind a wall. We are the same. We’ll never be free. But happiness can touch us now. Your soft fur and tiny nose undo the big knot within me and make me happy inside. Thank you. I love you, my little furry animal.”

“That’s the one they killed and served to her to punish her for coming home late,” Louise said dryly.