Call Me Princess (12 page)

“I’ll suggest to Camilla that I pick Markus up today,” Louise said. “That way, we can get an early start tomorrow morning. You look like someone who needs to unwind and relax a little.”

Having practically inhaled the first one, Peter turned around and went back to the kitchen to pour himself a second cup of coffee. “Okay,” he said from the kitchen, and then a moment later added that he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to get away from the office.

“I’m doing interviews all day, so I’ll be at Camilla’s place around five,” Louise guessed.

Peter stuck his head into the bathroom when he was ready to leave. “I’ll call when I know when I’ll be home,” he promised before turning to go. Louise heard the door click shut behind him.

—

“L
ET ME FUCKING TELL YOU SOMETHING, YOU FUCKING BITCH.
I
WASN’T
anywhere near Tivoli or Valby on Monday or any other day.”

Louise was losing her patience. For the last hour, Karsten Flintholm had been screaming and yelling and swearing at her. He’d been aggressive from the moment she sat down across from him and had pretty much repeated the same few sentences for the whole session.

“I told you. I was an hour away from Copenhagen in Ringsted with my wife and new baby.”

It turned out that he had gotten married during his last stint in jail. He had gotten a barely legal woman pregnant just before he went in, and now they were living in a glorified shack of a cottage out in her allotment garden on the outskirts of Ringsted.

Louise let him talk. Toft and Stig were on their way out to the address to see if the girl could give him an alibi, and until they had talked to her, Louise was going to keep Flintholm under close observation. He hadn’t known in advance what the police had wanted to talk to him about, so he hadn’t had a chance to coach his young wife on the answers. However, Louise was prepared for the possibility that he might have instructed her to back up his story: that they’d been together the whole time since he’d gotten out of jail.

“Here I am starting a family and settling down, and you’re all over my fucking ass here because of my past.” He sounded like a petulant child, but certainly didn’t look like one with his unkempt hair and tattoos covering most of his exposed skin.

“We’re not all over your ass,” Louise said calmly. “We just want to know where you were Monday night. You were identified, and you ought to be familiar enough with how things work to know that we have to check out your story.”

He leaped out of his chair and lunged at Louise, but she was on her feet before he got to her. She grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. She gave it an extra jerk upward, which really wasn’t necessary, but he could take that as thanks for all the shit she’d had to sit here listening to him spew for the past half hour.

He glared at her but backed down. She sat down again, ready to proceed. He was thirty-two, but looked much younger. His short, dark hair was gelled back. When he looked at Louise, there was a measure of detached evil in his eyes, but she had no doubt that some women would find him charming. He had an attractive nose and soft lines around his mouth, although it was a little hard to see anything charming about him right now. There was something unsympathetic and cold in his face. He had a lack of respect and an obvious desire to show it.

“And you still don’t want to tell me what you were doing Monday night? You, your wife, and your child?”

He didn’t respond, didn’t bat an eye. She didn’t want to get all worked up. She was very conscious of her own short fuse.

Louise calculated that the others would soon be at the location down in Ringsted. It couldn’t take more than an hour to drive down there and find the house. Before she’d started questioning him, she had arranged with Toft and Stig that they would call when they arrived and let her know if the young woman was home; when the phone call came, the phone hardly had time to ring once before she had the receiver to her ear.

“They’re there and getting started now,” Heilmann said.

Louise hung up and sat silently for a moment, watching Flintholm. He had been staring daggers at her, trying to figure out what was going on from the moment she answered her phone.

“They’re in Ringsted,” Louise said. “Now we’ll just wait and see what your wife has to say.”

“She won’t say shit!” he snorted, and his tensed jaws relaxed a little.

“Well, that’d be dumb,” Louise said, “because then they’ll haul her in here, and your child will be placed with social services.”

She held her breath, a little nervous that this would provoke a new outburst, but he seemed to have regained his composure. So she continued: “If she feels any shred of responsibility, she’ll talk. And if you’re sure she’s going to confirm your story, then everything will be fine.”

“You obnoxious bitch!” he hissed, but he stayed in his seat.

“You’d best shut up. Otherwise I might start getting the impression that you’re hiding something.”

She made a show of picking up the stack of interview summaries from the women she’d spoken with earlier in the day. As she’d predicted, none of them had met “Mr. Noble,” only exchanged e-mails with him. But two of them had kept up their correspondence long enough that they’d swapped e-mail addresses with him instead of writing via their dating profiles.

She knew that CCU was already working on the two women’s computers to see where “Mr. Noble” had written from. It didn’t take them long to figure out that he had used another publicly accessible computer each time. She kept reading, intentionally ignoring Flintholm, who grunted or swore periodically.

One thing both women had in common is that they were similar to Susanne Hansson, personality-wise. They were introverts and weren’t all that self-confident. Since her first chat with Susanne, Louise had been struck by the fact that Jesper Bjergholdt had never planned to exchange photos. He’d written to her that he preferred what was inside a person to what was on the outside.

Two of the women Louise had spoken to that morning had also fallen for that wording, whereas the other two had written him off for that same reason. They apparently assumed it meant he didn’t consider himself attractive, and they’d consequently lost interest in him.

She thought it was striking that “Mr. Noble” had insisted that they should write to each other for a long time before they considered meeting in person. Experts usually advised people involved in online dating to meet relatively quickly, or at least to talk to each other by phone after writing for a week. This can help them figure out if they have any chemistry sooner rather than later. But Mr. Noble and Susanne and these other women took the completely opposite route.

Louise could appreciate how the former would be very hard to gauge through a computer screen. Online, it was all too easy to fall for a person who was good at expressing himself in writing, and when you finally met in person it might turn out that you’d fallen in love with the words and not the person, hence the encouragement to make contact outside of cyberspace as soon as the spark struck. However, for “Mr. Noble,” these women falling in love with his words was exactly what he wanted.

“Mr. Noble” hadn’t given his phone number to any of the women Louise or Stig had talked to that day. Only one of the five women Stig had interviewed was still in touch with “Mr. Noble.” The rest had all quickly brushed him off as uninteresting or weird. The one that was still interested was yet another woman who was hungry for his words of reassurance: that perfectly ordinary people could find happiness too. And she seemed to feel like things were finally going her way.

The phone rang again. “Let him go,” Heilmann’s voice said. “His wife says he was home. Her parents came to visit, which has been confirmed. But make sure he knows we’ll call him in for a lineup if necessary.”

Louise hung up. She sat and looked at him for a minute before nodding to the door.

Finally something happened in his eyes. He leaned forward a little and glared at her before saying anything. His voice was malevolent: “If I ever get involved in some kind of situation that makes you guys lock me up again... ,” he let his eyes roam provocatively up and down her body, “I think I’d pick someone like you.”

Louise quickly counted to ten in her head, extended that to fifteen, and then stood up. “Good-bye.”

She stood there watching him as he shuffled out the door.
Fucking asshole
, she thought. An obnoxious idiot, he didn’t have the balls to attack her. It was pathetic. She’d just read up on his previous sentences, and according to the police reports the women he’d raped had all been weak targets. He’d assaulted one of them right as she left a bar, so drunk that her stomach would have been pumped if a medical evaluation had been requested. He’d pulled her into the bushes and raped her. Afterward, he’d run off and left her lying there. The woman hadn’t come to until the next morning, and even though she was pretty incoherent about what had happened, he was quickly apprehended. His DNA in her vagina made it impossible for him to deny the assault, although he’d claimed she was depraved and had gone to great lengths to lure him, a total stranger, into having sex with her. Even from the first interrogation session, he’d claimed the sex was consensual, but witnesses from the bar had confirmed that the victim, eerily also named Louise, had not been in any condition to say what she actually wanted when she’d left the bar. And his defense attorney had finally conceded that point, leading to a plea bargain.

There was no reason for Louise to stay and wait for Toft and Stig to return from Ringsted. She agreed with Heilmann that they would meet on Monday after Lieutenant Suhr’s morning briefing to see where their group stood with the investigation.

A couple of guys from the computer crime unit had stopped by Heilmann’s office late in the day with the results of their search of the three women’s computers. Determining that the women had exchanged e-mail addresses with “Mr. Noble” had given them all hope, but even from the very end of the hallway Heilmann could read, from the faces on the CCU team as they walked into the division, that the search hadn’t come up with anything useful. “Mr. Noble” had used the Internet café on H. C. Ørstedsvej and the Østerbro Library on Dag Hammerskölds Allé, so they were back to square one. A couple of detectives from the downtown precinct had been assigned to check in at those locations regularly. They were supposed to meet with the regulars Toft hadn’t yet spoken with, to look for anyone who might have noticed the dark-haired man, but that was a shot in the dark, as Suhr would say.

“People who go to places like that do it precisely to avoid contact with other human beings. They’re only fucking paying attention to what’s on the screen in front of them,” Suhr had said when they originally decided to ask around for people who might have noticed Jesper Bjergholdt. “But of course it’s one of the things we ought to try,” he conceded in the same breath.

—

L
OUISE DROVE TO THE GROCERY STORE TO GET SOMETHING TO FIX FOR
dinner before she picked up Markus. Camilla had said
“Great!”
right away when Louise asked if it would be okay if she picked Markus up before dinner.

“We’ll be home about four thirty, so I’ll have his bag packed when you get here,” she said, sounding excited that her son was getting to go out of town for the weekend.

Maybe her excitement also had something to do with the fact that she had suddenly been given a whole Friday night to herself, Louise thought, smiling, as she parked in the garage underneath the Kvickly Mart on Falkoner Allé. She was still thinking about her friend as she navigated her shopping cart along the refrigerated cases, trying to decide what to make for dinner. She sensed that Camilla was very eager to meet this new acquaintance. It wasn’t like her to be so secretive, and that made Louise curious. Camilla wasn’t normally one to hold back on details when she met a man, but it rarely lasted longer than a couple of dates. And there were long dry spells in between her relationships.

Louise had occasionally suspected that Camilla went on these dates just to please her friends—and especially her mother in Skanderborg, who never hid her opinion that her daughter spent too much time on her career and way too little time on herself and her own needs. On the other hand, the few times Camilla had kept her dates to herself, it was usually because they meant a little more to her. Over the years, Louise had learned that, in those cases, there was no point in asking.

She gave up on the idea of anything that required more culinary skill than turning on the oven. She’d spoken with Peter before she left police headquarters, and he still couldn’t tell her when he would be home. He’d been curt, and she’d hurried to say that she would fix something for herself and Markus, so he shouldn’t feel any pressure to rush. She grabbed a bag of chicken wings from the frozen-foods aisle, deciding that that would be a good thing to eat in front of the TV.

—

L
OUISE PARKED IN FRONT OF THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO
C
AMILLA’S
building and rang the buzzer.

“Is it you? Come on up!” Markus’s voice yelled through the speaker on the entrance phone.

She noted her own happiness as she hurried up the stairs. A loaner kid was really the perfect arrangement for the way her life was set up, she thought before preparing herself for the maelstrom of a reception she usually got.

“Mom’s in the shower,” Markus said when they finished hugging.

Louise smiled at him and said that they’d best not bother her then.

“You’re not bothering me at all,” Camilla said, sticking her head out of the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a green towel. A second later, she came out into the hallway wearing a short terrycloth bathrobe, smelling of perfume, and gave Louise a kiss on the cheek.

“Markus is looking forward to this,” she said, going out to the kitchen to turn on the oven.

Louise followed her and stood in the doorway. “Is your date coming over here?” Louise mimed so Markus wouldn’t hear her question.

Camilla nodded.