The Killing Forest (13 page)

I
t took only five minutes to drive from the school to the farm where Sune's parents lived. The courtyard was deserted when Eik parked his junker Jeep Cherokee beside the big walnut tree.

He knocked a few times, then opened the door and shouted, “Hello!”

Louise followed him into the hallway. Eik shouted again, but no one answered. They waited a moment before entering the living room and calling Jane's name. Louise walked over to the bedroom door and knocked. “Jane, it's Louise—may I come in?”

She thought she heard a noise, and she opened the door a crack. Only a streak of sunlight broke through the edge of the closed curtains. “Jane,” she repeated.

“Louise! Have you found him?”

Louise pulled a chair over to her old friend's bed and motioned for Eik to come in. “Jane, we're here about Sune. My colleague spoke with Lars earlier today. He said that your son came home. We need to talk to him; we believe he might have witnessed a serious crime.”

Jane's lips quivered, and she turned away. She took a deep breath then looked back at Louise, her eyes full of tears. She shook her head. “It's not true. He hasn't come home.”

She reached for Louise's hand and squeezed it. “You have to find my son before they do! Help me…”

The rest of her words were drowned out in a long sniffle. Louise gave her the handkerchief that lay on her night table.

Louise stroked her hand mechanically.

“All I want now is to see Sune again before I die.” Jane looked up, her eyes pleading. “They drive around looking for him at night. He's just a boy. He doesn't understand what he's up against!”

Louise held her hand as she leaned forward. “Jane, you need to tell us what's happened. Is it something we haven't heard about?”

Her old friend nodded slowly. Tears rolled down her sunken cheeks, but her voice was steady as she told them about the initiation ceremony out in the forest, the ritual everyone had been looking forward to.

“But something happened that night, and I can't get anyone to tell me what. All Lars will say is that Sune suddenly disappeared. I know my husband; I can sense that something very bad happened, and I'm afraid that they're going to harm Sune.”

Anxiety flared up inside Louise. Eik brought over another chair, and she made room for him.

“Tell us what you know,” he said, “and start at the beginning, so we can understand just what happened.”

The sound of his calm, low voice made Louise regret that she hadn't let him sit by the head of the bed. Jane regarded him for a moment, as if considering what to say. Then she turned back to Louise.

“I'm not sure if you know anything about this, but it goes a long way back, to when we were kids. Klaus was a part of it, too.”

Louise lifted an eyebrow and shook her head. “What goes a long way back?”

“Their brotherhood. They made a vow to stand together and protect each other. Just like Odin and Loke. They're blood brothers.”

Louise's anxiety turned into an icy chill at this sudden mention of Klaus, along with things that Louise had never been aware of. “What are you talking about? Asatro?”

“So they mixed their blood?” Eik asked. “Is that what you mean? And made vows to each other?”

Jane nodded, her head barely leaving the pile of pillows. “You could put it that way. It's just more complicated; it's something peculiar to our group, and they take it very seriously.” She paused for a moment. “Apparently more seriously than I was aware of.”

“And how is your son mixed up in this?” Eik asked.

“I don't know exactly what happens during the ritual. It's only for the men. It's secret. They call it a rite of passage. A sacrifice must be made in order to gain something. They call themselves blood brothers, a term with roots in Nordic mythology. That's where our beliefs come from.”

Louise could hear the fear behind her words.

“The boys are accepted into the brotherhood at their initiation ceremonies. It's different for girls, more like a confirmation without a priest. Girls confirm their belief in the Nordic gods and they're accepted among the adults. But it's special for the boys, becoming part of the inner circle. They make a vow to support each other. It's a male thing. Sune had been looking forward to it for a whole year, and that's where he was the evening he ran away.”

It sounded more like an initiation into a biker club to Louise, but that's also how Thomsen and his gang seemed to think of themselves.

“Do they also vow to avenge each other?” Eik asked.

Jane's expression darkened. She nodded. “Yes, exactly. But what keeps me awake at night is the part of the oath that says, if you leave the fellowship you're an outcast. I don't know what's happened, but ever since you told us that Sune was hiding in the forest, I've feared the worst.”

They sat for a while in silence. Finally Louise asked who was in the inner circle, and who would have been in the forest the evening Sune disappeared. She was afraid she knew the answer.

Jane stared straight ahead for a few moments, then spoke to Louise. “Thomsen, of course, and John Knudsen from Særløse. Do you remember him? They called him Pussy.”

Louise nodded.

“And Lars Hemmingsen, he also ran around with Ole Thomsen back then, even though he lived out in SÃ¥by.”

“The mason?” Louise asked. She was fairly certain he was the man Camilla had fired during the renovation of Ingersminde; when Frederik had refused to let him work as a moonlighter to avoid paying tax, he'd begun to work slower.

“Yes. And my Lars. And René Gamst. Though he wasn't there that night, of course. I don't know if there are more. I've always just assumed it was the same group from the old days, back in school.”

They hadn't mentioned the body of the young prostitute, and Louise started to ask Jane about her when Eik leaned forward.

“Why haven't you told the police about this before?” he asked.

Jane stared blankly for a moment. “I didn't dare. I didn't dare turn their anger on us, with me lying here like this.”

She paused for a moment. “But what do I have to lose now?” she mumbled, as if she was talking to herself. “At any rate, nothing is more important than my son.”

She was beginning to fade. Louise realized that the person in the most trouble from Jane talking to the police was Jane's husband.

“I know Sune well enough to know he'd come home if he could, that he'd want to be with me at the end. I've heard Lars get up many nights, I've seen the car lights when he backs out. Sune is out there, and I believe he's afraid.”

“We found the body of a young prostitute in the forest where Sune is hiding,” Eik said. “She disappeared the same night as your son, and we think he might've seen something, and now he's too frightened to come home. Do you know anything about this?”

For a moment Jane looked as if she had fallen asleep, but then she shook her head and opened her eyes. “Did she die that night?”

“It's too early to say. But no one has seen her since she dropped her son off at her sister's, on the way to a job.”

Jane hid her face in her thin hands. “The men perform a fertility ritual.”

She paused, her face still hidden.

“And they…” Eik said.

“And they hire a prostitute…”

Jane's shoulders began to shake.

“They share a prostitute?” Louise said, almost shouting now. Immediately Eik laid a hand on her arm.

Jane lowered her hands from her face. “I don't know, but I think that's what happens. Lars has never talked about it. What I've heard comes from Ditte, the bricklayer's wife. Once they had an argument, and he told her that even though the prostitute was young, and a lot of the men shared her, she was a lot better than what he was getting at home, which was nothing.”

“Christ,” Louise whispered.

A car outside drove up to the house.

“Find Sune.” Jane gripped Louise's arm. “Find him before they do.”

Louise had almost reached the kitchen when the front door opened. The butcher walked in.

“Are you going to tell us what happened out in the forest, the night Sune disappeared?” she snarled. She walked up to him. “Your son isn't home.”

“We take care of our own. We never asked you to butt in.” The butcher's face was expressionless.

“You lied to us,” Louise said. “That's bad enough. But you're also withholding information from the police, and I intend to press charges if you don't start cooperating.”

His face hardened, but she didn't stop. “And if we find out that you or your friends are connected with the murder of the young prostitute we just dug up in the forest, I'm going after you and I'm going to put you away. For a long, long, long time. Do you understand?”

Louise knew there could be trouble if the butcher had the smarts to complain that the police had threatened him. It was a small risk to take, she thought. And worth it.

W
e have to find that boy, and now,” Louise said, back in the car with Eik. “If Sune saw Thomsen and his gang kill Lisa Maria, they're going to stop him from talking.”

“What kind of a father is this butcher?” Eik said. She'd never heard him so angry before. He drove way too fast down the narrow gravel driveway; Louise put a hand on his arm to calm him down. He seemed to be channeling all his anger through the gas pedal, and he didn't slow down until he rammed his head against the roof of the car after hitting a pothole. “You just can't treat your child that way.”

“You're right.” Louise said. “This is how people behave when they get involved with Ole Thomsen. He and his buddies have their own rules, and unfortunately too many people get tangled up in them.”

She'd never heard about the brotherhood, but she wasn't surprised. Especially after Klaus's parents telling her about the janitor and Gudrun. They covered up for each other; they always had. She couldn't care less what they called themselves, but she wasn't going to let them get away with forcing a fifteen-year-old boy into this sick form of solidarity.

“Pull over; let's wait until we know where we're going.”

Before he got out of the car for a cigarette and to let Charlie run, she was calling Nymand to make sure he was organizing the search for Sune. “I believe a group of men from around Hvalsø murdered the prostitute,” Louise said. She explained that the boy had likely witnessed the killing. “And I suspect that they're looking for him, because he's a witness and can testify against them. We have to protect him.” When Nymand asked why she suspected all this, she told him about the initiation the night the prostitute disappeared. “If they can't be directly tied to the murder, we at least need to talk to them. They were in the area at that time.”

Nymand cleared his throat. “There's nothing in the preliminary results from Forensics that points to her being killed in the forest. I'm afraid we're going to have to wait.”

“Shit!” Louise tried to calm herself down, realizing she might be pushing things because she was burning to get Big Thomsen. “Okay. But for your own sake, make sure the techs have a look at the clearing behind the girls' graves. There's a bonfire site, and a big oak with a partially hollow trunk. Let's talk again when they've examined the area.”

Louise knew how that sounded; she was telling him how to employ his personnel, when she had absolutely nothing to do with his murder investigation. But she had to take a chance.

“Eik and I are going to talk to four of the men who were there that night.”

“Oh no you're not!” Nymand yelled. Louise held her phone away from her ear. “If you think these specific men could be involved in the murder, my people will talk to them.”

“These specific men are involved in my investigation,” she answered. “They
may
have something to do with the murder.”

She knew it would be a feather in his cap if he could tell the media that the police already had carried out the first interrogations in the murder case. So she gave him the four names and said they had spoken with the boy's parents. She promised to send him the report on what Jane had told them as soon as she'd written it.

“We're very close to where two of the men live. We'll take care of them, but the last man lives out in Kirke SÃ¥by.”

Camilla had told her that. Otherwise, she'd had no contact with the mason since she'd left Hvalsø.

“Put the screws to him,” she said. She explained that Lars Hemmingsen had admitted to his wife that he and his friends hired a prostitute once a year for a fertility ritual in the forest. “In other words, they gang-bang her to honor Freya.”

Nymand had no more to say.

“Turn to the right up here,” she said.

“Where do we start?”

“Thomsen, in Skov Hastrup. And if it turns out he's moved in permanently with Bitten, we'll have to take a drive into the forest.”

Louise was surprised to realize that she suddenly looked forward to confronting her old demons. She was ready.

“I think we should keep Jane out of this,” she said when they were close to Thomsen's house. “Let's hear what they have to say about the initiation rites. This won't take long. I just want to see their reactions when we tell them we know about their brotherhood. When we're finished here, we're going to Holbæk.”

She saw that Eik wanted to know more, but he just nodded.

They turned off the highway and drove down a small road with broad ditches. Thomsen's whitewashed farmhouse appeared just after a short curve, and immediately she spotted his Toyota Land Cruiser parked close to the house, beside an old black Mercedes.

They drove in and parked. Big Thomsen and a gray-haired man were walking around out by the woodpile behind the house. She recognized the old police chief, dressed in blue coveralls and holding a chain saw.

“Damn it!” she said. “His father's here. Thomsen won't tell us anything.”

As if he would have anyway!
she thought.

Before she was even out of the car, Thomsen and his father were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, their arms crossed. They watched their visitors without a word, but when Louise and Eik began walking across the gravel parking lot, Roed Thomsen stepped forward.

They did nothing Louise could characterize as threatening, but it would be hard to look more contemptuous. Despite that, she tried to sound friendly when she said they were happy to find Thomsen at home. She didn't offer her hand; she knew instinctively he would ignore it.

“We'd like to talk to you about Sune's initiation. We understand you were both there that evening. Of course, you know that the boy hasn't been seen since.”

Slowly, old Roed Thomsen turned his head and looked at his son. Big Thomsen was leaning back slightly; he appeared to be looking down at Louise. “That was a private affair,” he said.

“We'd like to hear what happened anyway,” she said. She refused to be provoked. She looked him in the eye without blinking.

For a moment he seemed to be weighing his words, but then he shook his head. “We celebrated the boy's birthday and partied,” he said. “His father brought along some good cuts from his shop, and we drank some beer.”

Eik stepped forward. He was a big-city cop in a black leather jacket and just as tall as Ole Thomsen. He lit a cigarette in Thomsen's face and threw the match down on his property. The fat man in overalls struggled to maintain his contempt.

“What are these rituals actually like, to get into your brotherhood?” Eik blew smoke toward the two men. “We know about the oath ring, and the business about pledging loyalty. And silence.”

Louise could have killed Eik. He was talking too much. He needed to stop.

“But what about the test of manhood? How to prove your courage.”

Now it was Eik leaning his head back, looking down at Big Thomsen, who glanced over at his father.

The old police chief laughed drily. “Boys nowadays don't have any guts. Might be that school softens them up; it's not like it was back when I grew up.” He asked Eik what sort of test of manhood he was talking about.

A muscle quivered under Big Thomsen's eye, but he kept his mouth shut.

“You met out in the forest,” Eik said, unruffled by the elder Thomsen. “And made a sacrifice, I'm assuming.”

“How much do you really know about all this?”

Roed Thompson had taken over now. Even if Louise hadn't known the old man, she would have seen that he was used to doing the talking. He did the questioning; other people didn't question him.

“Not a whole lot,” Eik answered calmly. “I messed around with stuff like that when I was a kid.”

“It's not something you mess around with!” Big Thomsen snorted. He gave Eik the evil eye and stepped forward. “The Church Ministry recognized Asatro as a religion ten years ago, so don't you come here with your disrespect and mock us.”

“We're not intending to disrespect anybody,” Eik said. He flipped his cigarette in an arc. It landed beside the Land Cruiser's left front tire.

“Why should I stand here and tell you about something you don't even take seriously?” Big Thomsen continued, his voice full of scorn.

“Because we've found the body of a young woman who disappeared the night you had your fun in the forest. And because we're interested in what happened.”

“I don't know anything about that,” Big Thomsen said.

“Right now, the area is being fine-combed. Every leaf is being turned over, and you can be absolutely sure we're going to find out if there's the slightest connection between your little party and her death.” Eik nodded at him to emphasize his point.

“You still have no right to come in here and accuse us, just because our beliefs come from nature, not the church,” Roed Thomsen spat out at him.

His hands were in the pockets of his coveralls and his chest was puffed out—it wasn't hard to see where his son got his attitude from, Louise thought.

Eik stepped back. “We're not accusing anyone of anything,” he said. “We're just asking you to describe what you do. The rituals when you make sacrifices.”

“I'm going to have to ask you to leave my son's property now, or else I'll sue you for slander,” the old police chief said. He waved them back to their car.

“Don't worry, I think we've got enough,” Louise said, looking at Big Thomsen. “We need to get to Holbæk anyway, to talk to René. Shall I tell him hello for you?”

She enjoyed seeing the marine-blue irises of his eyes turn black with anger. They both knew he had no chance to coach René about what and what not to say.