29

“I DON’T THINK HE KNOWS THE ADDRESS,” LOUISE EXPLAINED, standing next to the duty officer’s desk in the middle of the large command center on the top floor of police headquarters, holding out her hands in an apologetic gesture. “But I suddenly had this suspicion that a reporter from Morgenavisen—who Susanne’s been in touch with—might have let the address slip without thinking about it.”

The duty officer smiled at her and said, “You really don’t need to apologize. I would have been more than happy to dispatch Nymand and every other available uniform out to Roskilde.”

He stood up and asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee. Telephones were ringing and dispatchers were directing patrols and emergency responses to various addresses throughout the Copenhagen metropolitan area. She overheard a request for a CSI team at a fire downtown, and it struck her how you stepped into another world when you came up here. The hectic life, the sound of the countless telephones and police scanners—they just didn’t have that down in her division. There was a quieter, almost pious atmosphere down there, where people moved around in the dark, curving hallways, where footsteps echoed, and everything seemed old-fashioned. Ops was the place at police headquarters that reminded Louise most of the other Copenhagen precincts she had worked at before she got promoted to homicide.

He returned with two cups.

“I haven’t heard from her, so there’s no reason to be worried,” he said, setting the cups on the desk. “I’m sure she’s still sitting there chatting with her mother.”

Louise stiffened and asked him to repeat, word for word, what Susanne had said.

“She said that everything was fine. And that she was just sitting there chatting with her mother.”

Louise was already backing toward the door as he finished speaking.

—

“WE’RE GOING TO ROSKILDE,” LOUISE YELLED TO LARS, WHO WAS still at his desk with the phone to his ear. She quickly grabbed the keys to a patrol car from Heilmann’s office and signed one out in the logbook. She concluded that Heilmann must have gone home already. Her computer was off, at any rate.

Lars was right behind her as she bounded down the stairs, but he still hadn’t asked what had happened.

“I was supposed to meet Bjergholdt in Tivoli, but he didn’t show. Camilla’s boyfriend Henning came instead.”

She gave him a quick summary, which was enough to justify to her partner that she was ordering him to head out to Roskilde half an hour before his children’s daycare closed.

“Couldn’t we just call Susanne and see if she’s okay?” he asked sensibly as they sped down the highway.

Louise contemplated the option for a moment, then said, “Obviously it’s possible that I’m overreacting. We can certainly hope that’s the case,” she added. “But if Susanne was trying to tell us something on the phone, it must be because he was there. And if he is, calling could have disastrous consequences. He would immediately suspect she’d said some kind of code word.”

Louise’s head was spinning. Lars was in the passing lane, flashing his lights whenever someone didn’t move out of his way quickly enough.

“Whatever she’s doing, we can be one hundred percent certain that she’s not having a pleasant evening chat with her mother,” Louise said emphatically. “Definitely not after her mother wrote an open letter to Morgenavisen that upset Susanne so much that Camilla was forced to cut her lunch short to drive out there and see her.”

Once she had said that, she suddenly had doubts. Susanne had taken so many big steps in the past few weeks, done things she would never have done when Louise first met her. Maybe she asked her mother to come over after Camilla’s visit so they could really talk things through. Louise was secretly relieved she hadn’t had a whole emergency response team rush out to cordon off the area and storm the apartment.

She sighed deeply.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” she said, running her hand through her hair, which was down. “I just have a terrible feeling. But I am fully aware I’m a little off my game these days, so I really don’t know if my hunch is worth paying attention to or not.”

Lars gave her a quick glance before focusing his concentration back on the road and their high speed.

“I fucking thought I was pregnant,” Louise blurted out, apropos of nothing.

She noticed that he slowed down a little and looked at her, so she hurried to add that it had turned out to be a false alarm.

“It was just my imagination,” she said with a slightly forced laugh. “That wouldn’t have been a good idea. But actually I don’t think it would have ruined my intuition,” she said, to bring the conversation back to Susanne.

“No, I’m sure it wouldn’t,” Lars said, pulling into the middle lane. “But obviously if you were preoccupied with all that, it might make you a little more sensitive than usual, you know.”

It took them twenty minutes to drive to Roskilde. Traffic was actually moving along nicely the whole way out on Københavnsvej, but once they got to Røde Port it was backed up.

Louise sat in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard. She knew that would only irritate her more, but she couldn’t stop. All the annoyance bottled up inside her was seething, and the excess energy had to come out one way or another.

“Don’t ride their bumper like that,” she nagged Lars as they finally approached the parking lot in front of the cluster of two-story buildings where Susanne’s ground-floor apartment was located. They parked out of view and approached the apartment through the other front yards so they couldn’t be seen from Susanne’s living-room or bedroom windows, but only from the kitchen and bathroom.

“What are we going to do?” Lars asked as they stopped in front of the neighbor’s apartment.

“I’ll go over and knock, while you wait over here,” Louise said. “If she’s sitting in there chatting with her mother, we’ll go in and say hi. If he’s there, you call it in to ops and get them out here while I see if I can grab Susanne.”

Lars stopped, his phone out and in his hand. “Are you sure I shouldn’t come in too?”

Louise nodded quickly. “The whole thing will go smoothly. It’s mostly just a matter of securing her. If he makes a run for it, we’ll let him go and hope there’s a patrol car nearby that can pick him up.”

It looked as if Lars were going to protest, but Louise started walking before he could say anything.

She walked up the walkway through the front yard until she was right up against the building. With her back to the wall, she moved over to the kitchen window and peeked in.

The kitchen was empty. The door to the living room was ajar, but the crack was so narrow that it was impossible to see anything through it. She ducked under the frosted glass of the bathroom window and proceeded around the building to peer into the living room. Two tealights were lit in small holders, and there were cups and a teapot on the coffee table. That calmed her down, but she couldn’t see any people. The muscles in her body relaxed a little when she realized how unlikely it was that Susanne had been sitting there drinking tea with her rapist.

Louise walked back around to the front door and rang the bell, nodding to Lars to signal that there was someone home. No one came to open the door. Before ringing the bell again, she tried the knob and determined that the door was locked. This time, she held her finger on the ringer for several seconds and heard the sound cutting through the apartment’s entryway.

“We’re going in,” she signaled to Lars.

When he got close enough, she said, “Susanne wouldn’t leave with the candles lit.”

Louise rang the bell again and walked around to the other side of the building. With her hands against the glass, she peered in to see if the ringing doorbell had triggered any response. She watched her partner walk toward the shed and trip over the low, newly planted hedge that separated the front and back yards. She rushed over to help him find something they could use to shatter the glass in the front door. They found a couple of pavers in the shed.

“If they’re in there, they know we’re here,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Lars picked one of the pavers up in both hands and hammered it with all his might against the thick pane of glass in the front door. Louise expected it to shatter and was surprised that it yielded only enough to make a small hole. Lars kept hitting it until the hole in the heavy-duty glass was big enough he could reach an arm through and unlock the door.

“Susanne!” Louise shouted into the apartment.

The air was silent. Instinctively she knew someone was there and called out again. She opened the door and stepped in over the broken glass on the floor of the entryway.

“Susanne!”

She thought she heard a door open as she stepped farther into the entryway.

“Leave, or I’ll kill her.”

The voice was ominous, and the words were enunciated quietly and clearly. Louise guessed the voice came from the apartment’s bedroom. She quickly turned to see if Lars had heard what had been said. She saw that he’d already pulled back and was calling ops for backup. They would contact the Roskilde Police right away, but she also knew it would take the negotiating team at least an hour to arrive. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember if she’d seen any of the crisis negotiators or tactical response folks around the division. Some of the officers were specially trained to handle hostage situations. But she drew a total blank and wasn’t actually sure who was even in those groups.

Louise realized she would have to handle the situation herself. She had decided to go in, and now she couldn’t just pull back and wait for the others to get here. I have to talk to him myself if I want to keep him from taking it out on Susanne, she thought. The local police would arrive soon to cordon off the area. The situation would be locked in, and she had to try to buy some time.

She took a step back and yelled that he should calm down, that she was here to help resolve the situation.

“I have a knife. Get out and close the door,” he yelled.

Louise stepped back over the glass shards, thinking that it wasn’t helping anything that they were standing around shouting back and forth at each other. She could win some time if she could get a real dialogue going with him.

“Couldn’t we have this conversation over the phone?” she suggested through the front door.

He didn’t respond.

She offered to toss her cell phone in and then call it.

He still didn’t respond.

“Jørgen.” She pronounced his name loudly and clearly. “I really want to talk to you,” she said, fully aware that using his name could either help or hurt her. And there was still the risk that she had the wrong guy. That it would turn out to be someone else in there with Susanne. Some other deranged lunatic who had now fixated on Susanne as a result of the article and diary entries.

She took her cell phone out of her pocket and stepped back into the apartment again, over the glass on the floor of the entryway. She opened the door to the living room, squatted down, and slid the phone as far into the room as she could, then quickly got up and stepped back out the front door again to help him feel like she wasn’t pressuring him.

—

LARS WAS DONE TALKING TO THE COMMAND CENTER.

“They’re on their way,” he said before handing her his phone so she could dial her own number. It rang for a long time before the voicemail recording said that Louise Rick was unable to take the call. She hung up and put the call through again. For the first time in many days, the vague fog was gone from her brain. She felt present, her concentration on high alert. She knew that she shouldn’t underestimate the man she was dealing with. Sociopaths want attention, she reminded herself, and she was going to have to play his game if Susanne was going to make it out of here alive.

He answered her phone the third time she called, but didn’t say anything. She could just hear breathing.

“Is Susanne alive?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” he confirmed after such a long pause that she almost gave up and decided he wasn’t going to respond.

“Can I have some kind of sign?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything, but Louise could tell he was moving.

“Yes....” It sounded as if Susanne had forced the word out under duress.

“Susanne, this is Louise,” she said trying to sound as if everything were calm and relatively under control.

“Shut up,” he said into the phone.

She ignored his rough tone and continued calmly, “If you don’t do anything to her, I can help you out of this situation. I know you’re calling the shots, but won’t you tell me what this is about?”

Unfortunately she had a very clear sense of what this was about. Jørgen knew that Susanne could testify against him if the police managed to find him. Karin Hvenegaard would also be able to ID him. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn’t given a thought to Karin out in Rødovre since she had visited her. Maybe Jørgen had already paid her a visit. It wasn’t hard to see that things were heating up for him.

Of course he’s feeling threatened, she thought, his predicament becoming clear to her. The two aggravated sexual assaults were now the least of his troubles. The things he’d done to Karin and Susanne were serious enough, but Christina Lerche’s death brought his crimes to another level. No wonder he was feeling the pressure.

Louise spoke firmly in a calm, quiet voice, and strangely enough she also felt calm on the inside. She wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what might happen, just trying to win time. If she succeeded in talking him down enough, he might relent and accept the wisdom of coming out and letting Susanne go.

She continued in a controlled voice. “I know you didn’t kill Christina Lerche,” she said into her phone. “Her death was an accident.”

She registered that a number of squad cars had already pulled into the parking lot. More would be coming to set up a perimeter. Now it was a question of keeping the dialogue going until the negotiating team got there and took over, and there was a chance that they would succeed if she fed him everything he wanted to hear in a gentle stream.

He still wasn’t saying anything.

“It would go a long way if you came out on your own now,” she continued. “Then you could keep the situation from spinning out of control.”

If only he would say something. It concerned her that he remained so quiet. When the silence and the faint static on the line continued, she got nervous that he’d put the phone under one of the couch cushions or somewhere else that would block the sound. He could have closed the door to the bedroom where Susanne was. Louise was suddenly struck by the chilling realization that he could be assaulting Susanne right now, even as she stood here, naïvely continuing to talk to him.

She went over to the door and knocked loudly. Leaned forward and listened.

“It’s too late,” the ominous voice finally said into the phone.

She couldn’t be sure what he meant, if he meant it was too late for Susanne or for the situation as a whole. She hoped he meant the latter and seized on his words.

“It’s never too late if you act rationally. It will benefit your case overall if you let her go now.”

“I don’t believe you. I can see the police.”

“Those are just patrol officers. They’re here to cordon off the area. That’s the normal procedure before the negotiating team arrives to take over. I’m no expert, just an ordinary assistant detective.”

“Negotiating team? You want to negotiate?”

“Yes,” Louise said convincingly. “We want to make a deal with you so you make it out of this situation as levelheadedly as possible.”

“So you actually think I can get something out of this?” His tone was full of contempt.

She hoped he would bite so they could keep the conversation going, and at the same time she glanced at her watch. It would take another half an hour at least before the team got out here from the city. That was a long time to wait, with things moving at this excruciating pace.

If he was desperate, he would start gushing like a waterfall and then demand they have a private plane waiting for him out at Tune Airfield to take him out of the country, and then he would recite anything at all that he could recall from similar situations in American movies. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t seem desperate in that way, didn’t get carried away and ramble on, talking faster and faster. Instead it was like he was sitting there, weighing and contemplating each word he said.

She could hear Susanne crying in the background.

“If you let her go, I’ll come in and take her place,” Louise suggested.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“You could talk to me.”

Suddenly he seemed amused.

“But you don’t even know me. Why would it help to talk to you?” he asked.

It struck Louise that he sounded like a businessman on a conference call, and she didn’t really feel like she was bringing anything to the table that he would consider appealing.

She had a choice: tell him he was right, that maybe it wouldn’t do him any good to talk to her, or brazenly lie.

“First of all, I can guarantee that I will do everything in my power to help you so that we can wrap this business up calmly and quietly and find a solution that you will be satisfied with,” she said convincingly. “Let Susanne go and I’ll come in, and then we’ll talk about it. I could also be your bargaining chip with the negotiating team if you’d rather wait for them and find out what they have to offer.”

He mumbled something she couldn’t make out. Then: “You don’t know me, so you wouldn’t understand me. Plus, I don’t have any use for you.”

He sounded resigned.

Louise took a deep breath, inhaling the air deep down into her gut.

“Actually, yes, I do,” she said. “I know you, and you know me.” Well, “know” was a bit of an exaggeration, but in a way they did know each other. They would have, anyway, if he’d shown up for their coffee date.

The silence on the other end of the phone became brooding.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Call me ‘Princess,’” Louise said, leaning against the wall by the front door.

Silence. She started shivering, even though the sun was beating down on her. She had pushed them both all the way, to a place where a response was unavoidable.

She heard a sound from inside the house and turned to wave Lars over.

“I’m going in,” she whispered, so it wouldn’t be audible over the phone. “Call headquarters and get them to send a patrol out to Karin Hvenegaard’s place. He may have paid her a visit, too.”

Lars looked away and was about to say something angry but stopped himself. She could tell from his clenched jaw muscles. Then he turned his face toward her again and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Watch out for him,” Lars urged. “We don’t know why he came here today, but he’s already killed one person.”

So far she agreed with him.

“He’s a hunted man,” Lars continued. “If he lets her come out, it’s because he thinks he can get more out of this situation if he uses you as a hostage.”

Louise knew her partner was right, but honestly right now she was afraid that Jørgen thought he would do better by holding on to Susanne.

She stepped back over to the front door and listened. She saw Suhr and Heilmann rushing across the parking lot, and she could tell that Suhr wanted to tell her something. But just then the door between the living room and the entryway opened and Susanne came into view, guided by an arm. She was bleeding from her neck and stood there frightened, staring at the floor. Her hands were tied together tightly in front of her, and Louise noticed that Jørgen hadn’t used his usual cable ties. This looked like some kind of cord he’d found lying around in the apartment.

“She won’t come out until you’re in.”

Louise quickly glanced at Suhr, and, before he had a chance to object, she stepped into the apartment with all her muscles tensed and took up her position next to Susanne. She briefly considered trying to yank Susanne out the door with her so they could both be free, but she let go of the idea. If that didn’t succeed, there was nothing else to fall back on. She put both her hands behind her head to signal that she was not armed and would not attack, and she noticed his grip on Susanne’s arm loosen.

“Just go,” she told Susanne.

Louise stood for a second, watching Susanne’s back hurrying away from the building. An effervescent feeling of relief and victory managed to trickle through her before, a second later, she felt a strong hand cinch in around her elbow and pull her into the living room, where she stumbled and struck the couch.