23

“SO WE’LL GO PUBLIC AND LOOK FOR OTHER YOUNG WOMEN HE’S victimized in the past.”

Suhr’s voice rumbled through the break room during Monday’s morning briefing. Louise felt like she’d lost her grip. She’d woken up Saturday morning feeling extremely sick to her stomach, and she had thrown up numerous times over the next few hours. In the end, she swallowed her pride and called Camilla, even though she knew Henning was probably there and that she would be interrupting their Saturday plans. But Louise just couldn’t bring herself to call her mother.

She hadn’t told her parents much about the breakup. They knew there’d been a fight, but they didn’t know what to make of Peter moving out of the apartment, and Louise still didn’t feel ready to explain it.

Camilla came over Saturday afternoon and sat with Louise as she lay on the sofa, pouring out her grief and despair. Louise was astonished at how easily she cried, but stubbornly insisted she wasn’t crying about the breakup.

“Are you lonely?” Camilla asked cautiously, getting up to put in the Big Fat Snake CD she had brought over. Camilla firmly believed that their music helped everything.

Louise shook her head firmly and then closed her eyes, carried away by Anders Blichfeldt’s amazing voice. When she eventually opened them again, she reassured Camilla that she had actually been longing for a little solitude.

“I just feel like I’ve become so fragile inside. Like I might shatter if I get hit by a stone.” That was the best way Louise could explain how little was left of her strength, which she’d always taken for granted.

Camilla was tactful enough not to bring work up while Louise was so upset, but questions about the previous night’s singles event were looming behind her comforting words and nurturing tone. Camilla stayed until late afternoon, when she and Henning planned to drive out to his place in Sorø and spend Saturday night there. Markus was staying with his father.

The tears and the nausea had abated by the time Louise waved good-bye to Camilla from the stairs. Louise accepted that she had to live with her body’s way of working through the breakup, but she set Sunday night as her deadline for getting over it. She thankfully still had one more day to wallow in self-pity, she thought to herself, as she watched Camilla get into her car and drive away.

—

“NOW WE’RE CLOSING IN ON HIM, AND WE WON’T BACK DOWN UNTIL we’ve got him,” Suhr bellowed on, yanking Louise’s attention back to the morning briefing.

Her colleagues did not pile the blame on her when she showed up for the briefing as she had feared they would. When she woke up, a few minutes before the alarm went off, she inhaled all the way down to her gut and decided that, from this moment on, her life would continue as it had before—just without Peter. Sadness, loneliness, and a broken heart were feelings she could have; they just couldn’t be all. Then she got up and thought she was doing better. She managed to sound almost natural when Michael Stig—the only one who had done so—passed her in the hallway and asked her how the hell she could let Bjergholdt escape into thin air when it had been her job to keep that from happening.

“He left,” Louise said in a steady tone and walked off to the briefing.

“We’ll show the CCTV footage from the subway station if we have to, but we’ll start without it,” Suhr said.

“Maybe I should check if Duke’s profile is still up,” Louise suggested, interrupting the lieutenant. “He doesn’t know we’re on to that name,” she continued.

Suhr grumbled a little as he considered that, but finally nodded and then pointed at Heilmann. “We’re going to meet after this,” he said, nodding at Louise to indicate that she would attend as well.

—

LOUISE WAS ALREADY SITTING AT HER COMPUTER SEARCHING WHEN Suhr knocked on the wall next to the open door to her office. Lars had gone to get coffee, so Suhr sat down in his chair.

“So, what are you going to do if you find his profile still up?” Suhr asked. He had mentioned this before, joking that Louise should go out with the perp. Now a deep wrinkle formed above his nose as he awaited her answer.

Louise mulled it over for a moment. What did she plan to do, actually? They couldn’t trace him just from his profile information. If they really lucked out, he might have posted a picture, and then they’d at least have something to take to the public. If not....

“E-mail him,” she responded. “Then maybe we can trace him.”

Lieutenant Suhr sat staring out the open door to the corridor. Louise assumed he was keeping his eye out for Heilmann, and knew he would feel better if Heilmann agreed that it was a good idea for Louise to contact their man.

“Although I haven’t found him so far,” Louise added, to Suhr’s relief. “I need to get hold of Stine Mogensen and ask how she was writing to him, because he isn’t listed on any of the online dating sites I’ve checked.”

Just then they heard rapid footsteps. Heilmann turned the corner without stopping and was suddenly standing in the middle of the office with agitated red splotches on her cheeks.

“He was at Susanne’s apartment!”

—

HEILMANN HAD ALREADY SENT A PATROL CAR OUT TO SUSANNE’S address, and she asked Louise and Lars to follow it out there.

Susanne had been in her apartment since Louise dropped her off early Saturday morning. She hadn’t stepped outside all weekend and hadn’t had any contact with anyone—not even her mother. Monday morning, she stepped out to buy a few groceries, and when she came home half an hour later, she found an envelope that he’d slipped through her mail slot while she was out.

“He wrote very briefly that he had been thinking about her a lot,” Heilmann said.

“A threat?” Suhr asked.

Heilmann shrugged. “That’s sure how I’d take it,” she said, “but we’ve seen how erratically he acts. It’s hard to say whether he’s dissociative or a sociopath. But we need to get her out of that apartment right away.”

Then Heilmann looked at Louise and said, “I ran into Lars out in the corridor. He’s waiting for you. Make it clear to Susanne that she’s not under house arrest or anything. She’s free to come and go, both down there and in the city, but she shouldn’t go around broadcasting her new address.”

Louise nodded, already on her feet. The apartment Jakobsen had lined up was on the outskirts of Roskilde, about half an hour west of Copenhagen. Heilmann leaned over Louise’s desk and wrote the address on a notepad. Suhr asked them to call in when they’d gotten Susanne set up in her temporary residence.

Louise powered down her computer and decided she’d stay out in the field the rest of the day. She had tried breaking the case by scanning through men’s profiles several times and was a little irritated that that approach wasn’t panning out yet. She kept hitting dead ends and having to start over again with broader and broader search terms. At the same time, another thought had started percolating in the back of her head: maybe they could leverage the fact that Stine Mogensen had been in touch with Jesper Bjergholdt. But now that would have to wait, too, because once again something else had come up that took priority.

—

SUSANNE HAD A SUITCASE AND A WEEKEND BAG PACKED AND READY by her front door. She and Heilmann had agreed that Susanne would label the other things she wanted brought to her new place, and the police would have someone would come and move them later in the day, but since the new place was fully furnished she mostly just needed clothes.

Louise felt bad for her. This whole thing might be over by the end of the week, but it might also take months. After the morning briefing, Heilmann explained that the woman Jakobsen had borrowed the apartment from was out of the country, so Susanne could stay there for at least four months if need be. Jakobsen felt that, whether or not Bjergholdt was apprehended, Susanne could use some peace and quiet and the space to find herself. He advised her to give up her own apartment and find a different permanent place to live where she wouldn’t be so close to her mother anymore. That was a significant step in her treatment, which was well under way.

Louise sensed that Jakobsen was concentrating more on the profound impacts and scars that Susanne’s mother had inflicted on her daughter than on the superficial wounds and scrapes that had come from the rape itself, even though those were also serious on a different level.

“When can I get my computer back?” Susanne asked as they carried her bags down to the car, where Lars took them and put them in the trunk.

“You should probably plan on being without it for a little while. It’s been submitted into evidence,” Louise advised.

“Well, is there any way I could borrow another one in the meantime?”

“I don’t know,” Louise answered, holding the car door for her.

She couldn’t figure Susanne out. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by the message Bjergholdt had slipped in her mail slot. Or by having seen him at the party. At least Louise couldn’t really see any signs of anything resembling fear. Perhaps that could be ascribed to the freedom Susanne felt at escaping the overbearing clutches of her mother.

“What do you need a computer for right now?” Louise asked once, they were seated in the car.

Susanne was on a long-term leave of absence from work while she underwent counseling with Jakobsen.

“Not for dating,” Susanne said. “Just for fun.”

Louise didn’t respond, but decided that she would call Jakobsen to ask if there was any risk that Susanne might decide to get in touch with Bjergholdt if she had that option. She took some comfort from knowing that Susanne would have just as much trouble finding him as the police did.

“I want to try to find a new job and another apartment,” Susanne said. “I don’t want to go back to Valby.”

Lars looked like he was about to say something, but stopped himself.

“First, you should get some distance from all of this,” Louise said, wishing she didn’t sound so much like a self-help book. Susanne had a good point: Louise would have wanted the same thing.

As they drove into Roskilde, after a long silence Susanne casually mentioned that she had agreed to tell her story to a reporter from Morgenavisen.

Louise sighed deeply and hoped that Lars would say something this time, but he kept his eyes trained on the road as they exited the highway and drove through Røde Port, an industrial zone being redeveloped as a residential and commercial area.

“That’s your decision, but don’t invite any reporters down here. If an article mentions where you’re living, it will undermine the whole purpose of moving you here. Agree to meet the reporter only back in Copenhagen,” Louise suggested, feeling suddenly exhausted. She had such good advice for how other people should live their lives sometimes, but then when people didn’t follow her advice, she would get irritated and shrug them off as stupid.

“You do whatever you want in terms of this newspaper interview,” Louise said, smiling at Susanne, “but make sure you get to read it before they print it.”

Susanne obviously didn’t grasp why that was important. She apparently has no idea that that’s the only way to guarantee they don’t fuck up her story, Louise thought.

—

SUSANNE’S NEW APARTMENT WAS ON THE GROUND FLOOR OF A two-story building surrounded by a landscape of paths that ran through a whole little development of yellow buildings that all looked the same. It had two rooms, lots of natural light, and a little deck out back. Susanne entered cautiously, as though she was afraid of scratching the light birch flooring. She walked to the center of the room and inspected her temporary home.

“This is nice,” was her first comment, and her smile reached all the way up into her eyes.

It wasn’t until Susanne was in the kitchen that it hit Louise how utterly awful the woman’s life must have been. Susanne Hansson was actually starting to flourish, Louise thought, lost in her own thoughts as she watched her. Susanne was about to bloom despite what she’d just been through—and had put herself though.

“I hope you’ll settle in all right even though it’s just temporary,” Louise said before holding up her hand to wave good-bye.

—

LOUISE SPENT THE NEXT TWO DAYS ON VARIOUS ONLINE DATING SITES, trawling through the profiles for all the dark-haired men who were about thirty. She even visited sites specifically intended to help farmers find girlfriends, and BeautifulPeople.dk, a site ostensibly for especially attractive Danes. She poked around through men who were searching for their soulmates.

Stine Mogensen and “Duke” had met each other on Dating.dk, and Toft had already been in touch with the people who ran the site, who had quickly reported back that the profile he was looking for had been deleted. It had been set up by a user with a Hotmail address, so there was no reason to assume the name, address, or phone number would be correct, but they were checking anyway. But they also determined that the profile name “Duke” was already in use again, this time by a twenty-year-old guy with shoulder-length blond hair, if you could believe his profile photo. Just to be sure, they checked him out and verified that he was the person he claimed to be.

Louise called Stine and explained that she had no idea how to go about chatting with someone on a dating site. She asked Stine to try to find “Duke” again, even though he might be using a different login name.

“I don’t think he’s there anymore,” Stine said. “I haven’t talked to him for a couple weeks.”

Stine had been very standoffish at first, not wanting to push “Duke” into the arms of the police. It wasn’t until Louise explained she was investigating the murderer/rapist all the newspapers were talking about that she agreed to help, rather shaken.

“If you find him online, call me the second you’re sure it’s him,” Louise said, adding that obviously this was something that should just stay between them.

“Don’t tell Annette or any of your other friends that you’re helping me with this,” she said sternly.

Louise was astonished how many different online dating sites there were. She hardly knew where to start. With “Mr. Noble” and “Duke” in mind, she paid particular attention to profile names that had anything to do with nobility or aristocracy, and she sat bolt upright in her chair when she stumbled across “The_Count,” who according to his profile was a twenty-eight-year-old blond man.

Louise wrote and asked him to send a picture, explaining that she wanted to see who she was writing to, and very shortly a photo appeared in the inbox at her new Hotmail address, which Lars had set up precisely for this purpose.

The_Count was soon ruled out, as were RedBaron and King, but each time she felt that rush and a wave of hope rising, and then fading again just as quickly when the incredible variety of photos appeared in her inbox.

Now she understood better why a number of girls had given up and stopped writing to Bjergholdt. Apparently it was quite common for people to just send their pictures. This caused some trouble for Louise as she tried to figure out how she could avoid sending her own picture. She ended up resorting to the most pathetic excuse of them all: Sorry, I just don’t think we’re right for each other, she would write whenever the guy she was e-mailing sent her his picture.

She felt bad and wondered if it would be fairer if she briefly explained that she was a police officer searching for a specific individual, but that didn’t seem feasible either, she thought. You never knew. They might decide to go into a chat room and tell everyone there was a cop fishing around online. Weirdly, so far no one had asked her to send her photo first; she always brought it up first.

Suhr had been buzzing around the corridors since Tuesday morning when his “wanted” announcement had appeared in all the big newspapers. He had decided to withhold the still from the subway CCTV footage. “That’s the card we still have up our sleeve,” he commented at Tuesday’s morning briefing.

A number of tips had come in that same morning from frightened women who said they had been in contact with him but had never met him in person.

Michael Stig loudly derided them as “all those annoying tips.” Toft shushed him, taking him to task and saying he ought to welcome all tips. There was no telling which one might break the case.

Louise smiled as Toft talked his partner down in a calm voice. They had already started following up on the potentially interesting leads.

A phone call came in from a woman in her mid-thirties who for the last six months had been keeping a secret of the nightmare she’d experienced following what she had thought was a successful dinner date at her home.

As recently as March, another woman had had what she described as a “nasty” experience. But she wasn’t sure it could be called rape since she’d “asked for it.”

Even Lieutenant Suhr was shaken by how unsure the women were about where the boundary between rape and consensual sex was and what people were apparently willing to subject their bodies to. He sat in Heilmann’s office, reading through the reports that were written up as the tips came in.

“If it hurts and you ask the man to stop and he keeps going anyway, then people have to realize that that shifts it from something consensual to assault,” Suhr growled, infuriated, arranging the pages he’d read into a neat stack.

“It’s just not that simple,” Heilmann said without looking up.

Obviously Suhr was aware of that. It was just so obvious, when you sat there looking at a whole stack of tips, that these women should have reported the incidents. The definition of rape had changed since online dating came onto the scene. They saw more instances of cases where a couple had agreed to meet and to have sex. They just didn’t agree on when to stop and how rough it would be. Proving that an assault had occurred could be difficult in cases like that.

They also received loads of messages about men who looked nothing like the suspect they had described. Blond, jet-black hair, short, fat, foreign, not foreign, older, younger. One of the junior detectives who had been tasked with answering the phone had to sort through all of them. He knew where to draw the lines for whom to include.

—

“I WANT TO SEE THE MESSAGES BJERGHOLDT SENT,” LOUISE SAID, stepping into the doorway to Suhr’s office on Wednesday afternoon. Suhr and Heilmann were sitting there quietly discussing which tips they should follow up on. “Maybe I can figure out what it is about them he responds to. There must be something or other that triggers him to target these particular women,” she continued.

She had already made copies of the profiles of women Bjergholdt had contacted, and there was a pattern. They were reserved. Not a word about sex or decadent or expensive habits. They just wanted a couple candles on the table, to spend time one on one with someone, and to feel safe. These women preferred movie theaters to bars, family togetherness and leisure activities to a career.

Suhr waved for her to come in.

“I need to figure out what turns him on,” Louise explained. She needed more time and was glad she didn’t need to fight for it. Suhr had already decided that she should continue her search while the detectives worked on the tips and talked to persons of interest.

“Toft has all the correspondence between him and the two victims. You can copy the whole stack,” Suhr said, returning his attention to the papers in front of him.

The DNA results had come back from the pathology lab earlier that day. They showed that the semen in the condom and the pubic hair found on the floor of Christina Lerche’s apartment both matched the samples collected from Susanne’s back. Based on the suspect’s signature, or M.O., as Heilmann usually called it, they had already assumed they were dealing with the same man, but now they had concrete evidence. There was no doubt that this was an important step forward and a big relief for Suhr. In addition, another match showed that the man who called himself “Kim Jensen,” claiming to be from Hørsholm, who had raped and beaten Karin Hvenegaard two years earlier, was in fact the same person as Bjergholdt.

Three victims.

Louise was inclined to agree with Suhr that there were bound to be more. Maybe as soon as Stig got back from taking the statement of a woman whose description of an assault last year was strikingly similar to Karin’s.

—

LOUISE SAT DOWN HEAVILY WHEN SHE GOT BACK TO HER OFFICE. Fatigue washed over her. The sheer quantity of online profiles made the task seem insurmountable, and she still didn’t understand what kinds of things made people respond to a certain profile. Maybe there were special rules that she just hadn’t figured out yet as a newbie to the world of online dating. She picked up the phone and called Camilla.

“Hey, could I read your articles on online dating?” she asked. “That series you did, and anything else you’ve got in your archives.”

Camilla sounded busy and touchy. It didn’t sound like she was planning to set down what she was working on to comply with Louise’s request.

“If it can wait until I get back in a couple of hours, I’ll put together a packet for you,” Camilla offered, intentionally packing up her things as audibly as possible as they talked.

Camilla had catapulted through the ranks on Morgenavisen’s crime beat in the last year. She had free rein to do what she wanted as long as Terkel Høyer, her editor, could count on as many front-page stories from her as possible. It had been a long time since Camilla had had to call around to the various police precincts to find out what was on their blotters for the day. It had also been a long time since she had been sent to a pretrial hearing; if she ever went to one now, it was to cover a story she had pitched herself. Otherwise, those sorts of mundane assignments now fell to the intern or to Ole Kvist, even though he had been with the paper a lot longer than Camilla.

“I’m on my way out to do an interview for a piece I’m writing tonight. So I’ll be here if you stop by later,” Camilla said. “I probably won’t have time to chat, but I can have the articles ready for you.”

It wasn’t hard for Louise to figure out that Camilla must be referring to the interview with Susanne. Printing her story while the investigation was still in full swing would obviously be a scoop. But Louise didn’t comment on that.

The earliest she could pick up the material would be around six or seven, but she could head straight home from there and read it that evening. Maybe that would help her learn some of the unwritten rules of the online scene that she was ignorant of. Not that Susanne was an experienced online dater, but maybe she had stumbled onto something because she had been so totally raw and honest about what she was looking for.

Louise had already read a couple of the e-mails Bjergholdt and Susanne had written to each other, but then she set them aside again, deciding to wait until she had read Camilla’s articles. Now she was back searching for dark-haired men, and she found herself lingering a number of times on profiles that captured her interest. Not because they struck her as anything Bjergholdt might be lurking behind, but because Louise found the guys’ self-portrayals intriguing on a purely personal level.

Before leaving, she warned Heilmann that Morganavisen was going to be publishing an interview with Susanne the next morning. Louise was just shutting down the laptop she had been issued for her searches when Suhr walked in.

“Hey, do you think you can get Camilla Lind to reprint the information about the suspect we’re looking for, along with the interview?” he asked. “It’d be good to keep that fresh in people’s minds.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be talking to her,” Louise said. Why doesn’t he fucking pick up the phone and call her himself? she thought.

He muttered something she didn’t catch before he turned around and disappeared.

—

SHE ENJOYED HER BIKE RIDE UP TO ROSENBORG CASTLE GARDENS, just catching sight of the Renaissance verdigris spires over the wide-crowned trees, then turning north onto Kronprinsessegade, where Morgenavisen’s offices occupied a beautifully restored two-hundred-year-old neoclassical building. She parked her bike and headed up the stairs to the third floor, where the crime desk was located. Camilla was there, concentrating on writing, when Louise walked in.

Camilla looked up from her screen, but seemed in another world.

“Do you have time for a cup of coffee?” Louise asked.

Her friend shook her head and said, “My deadline is in an hour and I still need to get it okayed.” Camilla nodded at what she’d written.

Louise was glad that Susanne had remembered to ask to read through the piece before it was published—if she indeed was the one Camilla had interviewed. Louise briefly contemplated mentioning that Suhr wanted her to reprint the description of the suspect, but decided to drop it.

“All right. Let’s get together another time,” Louise said, taking the plastic binder containing the articles Camilla had printed out for her. Camilla had changed since Henning had entered the picture. She no longer had the same need to spend time chilling out with her friends, or maybe Louise just noticed it more since she was living alone now.

“Henning and his brother are stopping by tonight. You’re welcome to come over. Markus will be there too,” Camilla said, explaining that Christina had picked him up from school.

That babysitter was God’s gift to the single mother. She had known Markus since he was in kindergarten and jumped at the chance whenever Camilla couldn’t pick him up from his after-school program.

“No, thanks, but that’s sweet of you,” Louise replied. She just wasn’t up to it, but it was sweet of Camilla, and she really did want to meet Henning—just not tonight. They gave each other a quick kiss on the cheek good-bye. Louise walked back down to her bicycle and rode south along The Lakes separating downtown Copenhagen from Frederiksberg, turning onto Gammel Kongevej.

—

SHE WASN’T MUCH THE WISER BY THE TIME SHE FINISHED READING Camilla’s articles about the dating culture later that evening, but it had occurred to her that the online dating scene could be divided into two groups: people who set up a profile exclusively to find a partner or companion, and people for whom this became a lifestyle. Susanne, Christina Lerche, and Karin Hvenegaard belonged to the former group, whereas Bjergholdt was in the latter. She still couldn’t decide if it was meeting strange women that drove him, or the knowledge that he could hide his true identity—or if he entirely lacked those kinds of psychological motivations and was just using the Internet as a supply source for his fetish. Either way, he was icy and calculating from the start and exploited the anonymity the Internet provided. Or maybe he had started out with more genuine intentions and discovered how much freedom he had later. There was no way to know, she concluded, as she tried to piece together a pattern in her mind.

On the other hand, she had no doubt that the Internet and that type of online contact had now become a part of his life. He traveled in those circles. That was proved to her when he showed up at the mixer. Those two young women had known him. She still hadn’t heard back from Stine Mogensen, actually, so she must not have found him yet.

Louise tried to picture him. What the fuck kind of person was he? Chivalrous, courteous, polite, she wrote on a piece of paper. Orders multiple-course dinners and calvados with his after-dinner coffee. Invites people to the quaint old wharf at Nyhavn, goes to hip dating mixers. He’s urbane, she concluded. He’s familiar with Copenhagen and knows his way around here. He walks his dates back to the subway, and shows up at Susanne’s apartment.

Something dawned on her as she was reading Camilla’s articles. It didn’t matter so much where you met online, but rather that you had a life in the virtual world at all. You met new people over the Internet, formed new connections. People went online to play Yahtzee. Camilla had written about a woman who spent eight hours a day playing Yahtzee online with people she had never met in real life. Her best friends were people she knew from the site. As the virtual dice tumbled across the screen, they would write back and forth to each other, and that obviously allowed them to form close, intimate bonds.

When she had first read about that woman, Louise had a hard time taking it seriously. She was about forty, was apparently quite normal-seeming and extroverted, and didn’t have the least bit of trouble getting to know other people, either at work or in her free time. In the article, she discussed the world that had opened up to her when she started surfing the Net. She talked mostly about her Yahtzee friends, calling those friendships both deeper and far more intimate than the ones she had with her friends who she hung out with in the real world. She made a big deal about saying that she had never felt a need to meet these online friends face to face. What they shared belonged in the Yahtzee universe, and it was better not to mix that with her everyday life. But that didn’t mean that it was less important to her. She had made sure to emphasize that at the end of the article.

Louise understood exactly what Camilla meant when she compared the woman’s two lives to people who had a vacation home somewhere remote but spent their everyday lives in the city. Those two lifestyles didn’t necessarily have to merge, either. Maybe the appeal was just that, switching back and forth between rubber rain-boots and stilettos, as Camilla had poetically put it. All the same, it struck Louise that living in a cyberworld to that degree could outcompete living in the real world. Scary, especially since Louise mostly used the Internet only to Google things, check the weather, or e-mail. With a sigh, she gathered the articles together into a pile and got ready for bed.