14
THERE WAS A TENSE SILENCE IN THE CAR. MARKUS WAS SITTING in the back seat with a comic book, munching on a snack. Peter was driving. Louise was staring out the passenger-side window. Given the situation, there wasn’t enough tenderness left over from the previous night to defuse the strained atmosphere between them.
Louise had gotten hold of Heilmann at eight that morning. She briefly told Louise to be at the pathology lab in time for an autopsy that would start at ten.
“A rape,” Heilmann said. “The victim was found gagged and bound with cable ties.”
Louise had quickly packed their bags. She waited until the bags were stuffed into the car and they were ready to leave before waking Markus. They had agreed that they would drop her off at the lab first, and then Peter would take Markus back to their place. It was too early to drop him off at Camilla’s.
On the way out to the car, Louise’s father told her that Roskilde had a new police chief. “Now that Nymand is out of there, maybe you should think about whether that might be a nice place to work.”
Louise gave her father a stiff smile, replying that it would take more than Nymand’s departure for her to consider transferring from the homicide division in Copenhagen to the criminal investigations division in Roskilde.
He tried to smooth things over by saying that he just thought she wouldn’t be under so much pressure if she worked somewhere other than police headquarters.
She explained that the opposite might well also be true, and then she took a deep breath before continuing: “Now, quit feeling sorry for me. I love my job.” She couldn’t stop the defensive tone that made her voice rise.
As they drove away, she turned to Peter and said: “And this is just part of what living with me means.” And then she thought there was really no way in hell it should be coming as a surprise to him.
The mood was definitely wrecked, and it irritated her because she was also angry that their Sunday had been ruined. It wasn’t like she had planned for it, but then it wasn’t like this was anything new.
—
“THE BODY WILL BE UP SOON. THEY’RE JUST WEIGHING HER, DOWN IN the basement,” Flemming Larsen said as he let Louise in the main entrance to the lab. Louise took a seat in the lobby. The lab was closed on Sunday, and she guessed that he had tried to postpone the autopsy until Monday but Lieutenant Suhr had insisted on having it done ASAP. That was a recurring theme. Whenever they got a body after hours, it took a lot of doing to get the pathologists to perform the autopsy right away. Their argument was that they could see better in the daylight. Suhr would maintain that he had an investigation to get started on. Then they would grumble back and forth until Suhr would finally pound his fist on the table and snarl, “If you have trouble making out the fucking details, why don’t you turn on some more goddamn lights.”
And then he would get his way.
“She wasn’t brought in until about nine o’clock last night,” Flemming said. “They had a huge contingent of CSIs over at the crime scene, so for once everyone agreed that we wouldn’t do the autopsy until today. They just needed a couple of people available to come in here and assist.”
Louise nodded. The pathologists couldn’t start until forensics sent a couple of people to watch the autopsy. And of course she knew that all available resources would initially be allocated to securing the crime scene. Otherwise, she still didn’t know anything, beyond the fact that a woman had been found dead in an apartment.
“Was it her own apartment? Where was it?” she asked.
Heilmann had been very snappish when they spoke that morning. “You’ll have to wait until the briefing,” she had said when Louise started asking her questions.
Now, Louise turned her barrage of questions toward Flemming instead. He shrugged and said, “I think it was her own place, out in Frederiksberg.”
When he said Frederiksberg, it suddenly occurred to Louise that she hadn’t called Camilla back yet.
“What was her name?” she asked.
“I haven’t gotten that far. She’s still being called ‘Emergency, Frederiksberg.’”
Louise thought that even if it did turn out that Camilla’s date had been with a guy she’d met online, she wasn’t the type of woman their perp would dare attack. There was nothing timid or insecure about her friend Camilla. The opposite. And they were talking about a person who put a great deal of effort into selecting and grooming his victims. He would have long ago determined that Camilla didn’t meet his criteria. Louise looked at her watch.
“Are you guys going to be sticking to the schedule?” she asked.
It was a quarter to ten and she hadn’t heard the elevator doors, so she assumed the victim’s body was still down in the basement.
“We may have to push it back a little. Suhr told us to wait for him, and he hadn’t left the victim’s apartment yet when I spoke to him a little while ago,” Flemming replied. “He may be coming with the pathologists.”
Louise and Flemming sat down across from each other in silence, waiting by the front entrance to let everyone in when they arrived.
“So, aside from this, did you have a good weekend?” Flemming asked.
Louise shrugged her shoulders. The nice part of the weekend had vanished the instant she listened to Heilmann’s phone message.
“We were down at my folks’ place in the country. Why?”
“I was on duty yesterday, too, so I was doomed to spend my weekend in here no matter what.”
Louise had often wondered what Flemming Larsen was like when he was at home on his own time. She knew he lived alone after a divorce two years earlier, but she didn’t know if there was anyone new in his life. Flemming and Louise had a great professional relationship, but they never saw each other outside of work. The only time she had seen him away from the office was at an event the year before when a group from work had gone bowling and had some beers. He had two sons who were about five and seven.
“Who found her?” she asked, changing the conversation back to the professional.
Flemming shrugged and said, “I don’t know. There weren’t any witnesses on site when I arrived. I think Suhr mentioned a female friend. There were a few indications that this time there will be quite a few clues to go by. The victim fought like crazy. Things were knocked over, and he left prints in several places.”
That was the most encouraging news Louise had heard all day.
“It looked like the situation sort of got out of hand for him, so he was less careful this time,” Flemming said.
Just then, they heard the buzzer from the other side of the glass sliding doors. Flemming stood up to let the people in.
Louise sat for a moment before following him. She heard Suhr’s voice and was glad he was there. For the more spectacular cases, Suhr tended to come observe the autopsies in person, along with one of the people from his office. In addition to this, two people from the forensics unit would attend, one photographing the body during the procedure and the other asking questions and taking notes.
“We need every single shred of information,” Suhr’s voice thundered as he entered. “Now we’ll catch him.”
The others were eagerly debating whether the tissue someone had already noticed under the fingernails on the victim’s right hand would provide enough DNA.
Louise joined everyone, saying hello to the lead forensic investigator, who set down her large bag and held out her hand to Louise. She had transferred to Copenhagen the year before from the forensics unit at Ålborg in northern Jutland. She was petite and slender; the first time Louise had met her, she’d mistakenly thought the woman was a trainee. She had to quickly reassess the woman’s delicate appearance, however, because it turned out Åse had a lot of experience and was only slightly younger than Louise.
Just then, the elevator started making noise. The body was on its way up from the basement for the autopsy.
Louise nodded to Suhr and Klein, the no-nonsense forensic investigator on duty. She didn’t recall ever having seen Klein without his lightweight blue windbreaker on. In the summer he would push up his sleeves, where they would sit, wrapping his arms like sausages, right above his elbows. In the winter he would wear several layers of sweaters underneath, but even when it was bitterly cold he just wouldn’t wear anything over that windbreaker.
Louise and Flemming chatted on their way up the stairs to the second floor, where the autopsy rooms were located, just beyond the changing room with its lockers containing sterile scrubs and gowns. It was quiet as everyone walked through the open door into the changing room.
Louise adjusted her pant legs inside the scrubs, gathering her long, thick hair and twisting the unruly curls before pulling a hairnet over it all. She had already stuffed her feet into a pair of blue plastic shoe covers, and finally she tied the mask on so it sat securely over her face.
As they started the autopsy procedure, she sat down toward the back on a lab stool with her notepad on her knee. The body lay under a white sheet on the autopsy table in the middle of the room.
Flemming removed the white sheet. The first thing Louise spotted was the long blond hair that hung down like a curtain. The sight was like a fist to the gut. Camilla’s apartment flashed before her eyes, sealed off with red and white crime-scene tape. She jumped off her stool and brusquely shoved Åse aside. Åse was just getting her camera ready so she could start photographing the body before they removed anything. The tape was still covering the victim’s mouth, and her arms and legs were tied together with heavy-duty plastic strips. Åse said, “Hey, watch it!” after Louise’s shove.
Both Flemming and Suhr knew Camilla Lind. Obviously they would have responded if the image that Louise suddenly pictured in her sick imagination had turned out to be true; but by the time she realized it wasn’t Camilla, it was too late for her to stop herself from rushing over.
“Sorry,” Louise mumbled.
She put a hand on Åse’s shoulder before quickly withdrawing, scolding herself for letting her thoughts run rampant. She had managed to see the face with the closed eyes and the thick piece of tape over the mouth. The deceased didn’t look like Camilla at all.
Her notepad had fallen to the floor when she leaped up.
“Her name is Christina Lerche,” Suhr stated, looking at Louise.
Louise felt like she had been found out. She tried to get a grip on herself as she bent down to pick up her notepad.
Back on her lab stool with the pad on her lap, she followed along as Flemming took the forceps and cut through the cable ties.
“Easy! There may be evidence in the closures,” Klein said. He held out a bag the coroner could drop the ties into.
“Now I’ll remove the tape,” Flemming announced, leaning over the victim’s face. Very cautiously he loosened one side. He could never have done it so quietly or slowly on a living person. With his white-gloved fingers, the coroner checked inside the victim’s mouth. When he was done, the vomit ran out, forming a little puddle on the shiny surface of the stainless steel table.
He turned toward them and observed, “The gag isn’t sitting flat.”
At the scene, he had determined that the victim had vomit in both nostrils and concluded, “Suffocation by vomit.”
“The gag must have slipped far enough back into her mouth that it triggered her gag reflex.” He bent over the body again. “The duct tape formed a complete seal, so she suffocated.”
Louise concentrated on taking notes while simultaneously reaching a conclusion in her own head: the perpetrator hadn’t suffocated his victim. He certainly caused her death, but was it premeditated murder?
Before Flemming proceeded, it was Åse’s turn again. She photographed the body’s back and right and left sides, this time without the cable ties or gag.
Klein cut the victim’s nails and took a sample of her hair while Flemming dabbed her nipples with a cotton swab to secure evidence. Louise studied the woman’s neck and chest. Those were areas where rapists often kissed their victims. Flemming placed the long swabs back into the carton and closed it carefully. When he was finished, he asked the lab technicians to come open the body.
Louise followed the others out into the hallway to wait. Their steps echoed faintly as they walked past the open tiled autopsy rooms: high ceilings, stainless steel tables, sinks, hand-held showerheads with extra long hoses for rinsing bodies and body parts. The whole place was clinical and cold, and ultimately completely utilitarian when you were in the middle of it.
She leaned against the wall and eavesdropped on Suhr, who was chatting with the forensics people. In the background, a saw started. Normally other tools and running water would have drowned the noise out. But today the insistent drone echoed through all the empty autopsy rooms before reaching the “murder room,” as they called the last one because it was twice the size of the others and thus had enough room for everyone who had to observe a forensic autopsy.
Louise was used to being there while the pathologists did their work, but something about that lonely sound from the saw, cutting through the silence, made her turn and face the other way. On weekdays when people were walking around working, the cold, clinical feeling was usually humanized some. But the Sunday-morning quiet made the sound of the saw too persistent to block out of her mind the way she would have liked.
Flemming called everyone back in by announcing, “We’re ready.”
The two lab technicians came out of the room removing their armor-like iron gloves. They hung them up side by side in the changing room. Louise backed up a little to give them room to get by, accidentally bumping into the row of white rubber boots the pathologists wore when they were working. She nodded to them as they left, and Suhr came over to her.
“I’m heading back to headquarters now; you’ll have to give the report on Flemming’s exam,” he said.
Louise nodded and watched him disappear, his steps precise and determined, making his gait a little stiff. The others had already taken up their positions around the steel table when Louise entered, walking back over to the lab stool, ready to continue taking notes.
“Oral cavity and nasopharynx filled with vomit. Same color as gastric contents,” she wrote, listening as Flemming explained that this was a case of asphyxia secondary to an internal obstruction. The victim would have lost consciousness quickly, probably within one minute.
“She was dead after about five minutes,” he said.
Louise’s hand was getting tired from writing in this awkward position, perched on a stool with her pad balanced on her knee.
“He used a hard object in her vagina. I’m guessing it was the dildo we found on the floor next to the bed. There are incised wounds, the edges are reddish, and there is blood around the opening,” Flemming announced.
Louise let the words flow onto the paper, but avoided looking over while the woman’s gynecological examination was going on.
An hour later, they were done. Flemming didn’t pause during the exam, but he did look over at Louise when he determined that the victim would still be alive now if the tape had been removed from her mouth.
She nodded, following his train of thought: Did the perp sit there, watching her suffocate?
—
LOUISE ACCOMPANIED FLEMMING BACK TO HIS OFFICE AFTER THEY SAID good-bye to Åse and Klein on the stairs.
She sat down in the chair across from his desk, her notepad still in her hand. She followed him with her eyes as he checked his messages and looked around for any notes that might have been placed on his desk.
Flemming sat down. His tall body made the desk and the chair under him look small. His desk was stacked with paper and folders, a hilly landscape leaving almost no free space on the desktop. They sat there in silence for a moment before he finally confirmed what she had pieced together herself.
“The vomiting occurred right after the gag in her mouth shifted, triggering her gag reflex.”
Louise didn’t say anything, waiting for the rest.
“When you look at the blows she sustained, it is reasonable to assume that the gag shifted because he hit her....”
She completed his thought for him: “So he watched her die and didn’t help?”
Flemming shrugged and said, “That’s a reasonable supposition.”
Louise shivered.
“I don’t think he likes women very much,” Flemming added.
His comment interrupted Louise’s train of thought and fed the rising wave of the hostility in her.
“No, you don’t say,” she exclaimed sarcastically. “He assaulted her, raped her, and then sat and watched her suffocate. Yeah, you don’t need to convince me that he feels nothing but contempt for the opposite sex.”
They agreed to talk again when the autopsy report was finished, if there was anything in it that required further clarification.
—
THEY PARTED WAYS OUTSIDE THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE LAB. Flemming walked her out and then went back inside. As the glass doors closed behind him, it occurred to her that Peter had dropped her off that morning, so she didn’t have her car or her bike with her.
Irritated, she started walking south down busy Blegdamsvej. It was almost one in the afternoon. She flipped open her cell phone and called Heilmann to say she was on her way back in.
Heilmann asked, “Could you go out to Susanne Hansson’s place and tell her what happened so she’ll be prepared when it leaks to the press?” Louise stopped for a moment as Heilmann spoke, but then slowly turned and started heading toward a bus stop. “I just spoke to her at her mother’s apartment, and I asked her to stay put until we arrive,” Heilmann continued. “And I explained that a new situation had arisen that we wanted to brief her on.”
Louise nodded, looking straight ahead. A new situation! You could certainly call it that. At any rate, it was now clear that the perp was far more antisocial than they had previously assumed.
“Maybe we should find out if there’s somewhere else she could stay until we catch him,” Heilmann suggested. “Given the developments, there’s a good chance he may decide to go back and stop her from telling us anything else.”
“The only thing I’m certain about is that there’s no limit to what he may do. The stakes are definitely higher now,” Louise responded as she fished out her bus pass, thinking how ridiculous it was that she was being forced to take the bus to see a witness.
“Are you going to stop by headquarters before you go back out to Valby, then?”
“Nope. I just got on a bus. I’m going straight there.”
Louise could hear Heilmann’s smile.
“I’ll ask Lars to drive out there and pick you up when you’re done talking to her. Then you two can also stop and check out the most recent crime scene.”