Farewell to Freedom (10 page)

“It's nothing serious,” Lars said. “I just needed a little space from home.”

He got up and retrieved the bread from her bike basket.

“Let's go in and hear what they have to say.”

Louise got up and followed him, deciding not to pry any further into his home life at the moment. She was all too familiar with that feeling and respected him for taking the space he needed for himself.

“I understand there's news in the Skelbækgade case,” Suhr began, once everyone had helped themselves to bread and their coffee cups were full.

He looked at Louise and Lars, who both nodded and explained the visit from Miloš Vituk. Lars added that afterwards he had driven by the witness's address, followed him, and seen that he had the girl with him.

Louise saw Willumsen furrow his brow, and it looked like he was going to say something, but Suhr beat him to it.

“Interesting,” Suhr said. “We'll have to run a check on the two Albanians. But maybe that's already been initiated?”

Willumsen shook his head and confessed that he had decided they should observe for a little longer before they put anything bigger in motion. But in the light of what Lars had seen, there was probable cause to believe there was something to the Serb's story.

“Let's identify the two people we're talking about—Arian and Hamdi—with their full names so we can get a court order and set up a wiretap,” Willumsen said, and asked Toft and Stig to take care of that.

Suhr nodded and pulled a hand through his short gray hair before turning to look at Louise and Lars, asking whether they thought they ought to get a court order for Miloš Vituk also or if they believed his story.

“We probably ought to, since he intentionally caused trouble for the two Albanians by putting them in our crosshairs,” Louise admitted, nodding as the possibility occurred to her. “But it seemed more like he came in because he was starting to fear that they were just going to keep raising their extortion price.”

“First of all, we have to determine if any laws have actually been broken,” Willumsen said. “We all know how hard it can be to figure out if something is common procuring or if it is in actual fact a case of trafficking in women. Meanwhile, if the two Albanians might be connected to the murder in some way, then we're interested in them.”

His eyes wandered around the table and stopped on Stig, who signaled that he wanted to say something.

“We have to keep the pressure on that whole scene and try to get someone to start to move,” Stig suggested.

Louise followed him with her eyes as he tipped forward in his chair and started rapidly tapping his pen against the table, filling the room with loud clicking sounds. It was a bad habit he had that had bugged Louise for years. Now she looked away, forcing herself to ignore the pen.

“And they say,” Stig continued, pausing for dramatic effect, “that the girls, the Eastern European ones, have to pay about 400 kroner a day. Someone cons them into thinking they own the street and the girls have to pay to work there.”

He leaned back and tossed his pen onto the table.

Louise sighed, glad that Mikkelsen wasn't here to hear him. That would have sent his blood pressure through the roof.

“We should keep that in mind,” Stig added, looking from Willumsen to Suhr. “Because if the same men are working with the trafficked girls, we ought to be able to spot them by keeping an eye on the money when it's handed over. There must be a discernible pattern.”

Louise couldn't hold her tongue any longer. “It is absolutely true that someone has made a sham business of extorting money from the people on the bottom of the food chain on the street, but there are also quite a few Danish prostitutes who've figured out that there's money to be earned that way, and they are demanding money from some of their fellow prostitutes. It's turned into a regular business practice. Everyone's cashing in on their struggle to make money,” she said, her eye trained on Stig's pen, which was about to roll off the edge of the table.

Stig flashed her an irritated look. He squinted his eyes a little and was about to respond, but Willumsen beat him to it and assigned the next task to Stig with a subtle gesture of his index finger.

“That is exactly what I want you to check out. Set up surveillance on the area, and keep an eye on the girls. Don't do anything. Just find out if there's a pattern.”

Louise glanced away to avoid the look she was sure Stig was giving her. What Willumsen was asking of him was going to require a lot of legwork, but she didn't feel sorry for him. He'd brought it on himself.

After the meeting, they milled about in the hallway outside Louise and Lars's office.

“Do we know anything about the two Albanian men already?” Toft asked, looking at Louise and her partner.

They both shook their heads.

“I'd be surprised if Mikkelsen couldn't tell us who they are,” Toft said, offering to call his old friend. He and Mikkelsen had been partners for the brief period Mikkelsen worked as a plain-clothes officer keeping an eye out for disorderly conduct.

“I'd really like to have a chat with Pavlína,” Louise said, looking at Lars, who concurred.

Willumsen nodded and said, “Do that as quickly as possible. It'll be interesting to hear her version.”

“I'll contact MiloÅ¡ Vituk and set up a meeting,” Louise said. “And then I was thinking that we ought to do a round of all the brothels and massage parlors in the neighborhood and see if the woman might have worked in any of them.”

Willumsen nodded at the suggestion before turning back to Stig.

“We can certainly start putting pressure on the street scene, as you suggested,” Willumsen said, “but make sure it's not too obvious, because then our folks will be way too easy to spot later if we seriously need to keep an eye on them.”

Willumsen looked around at everyone again to make sure they understood he was serious. The bottom line was that they weren't going to have an unlimited amount of manpower to call on if there happened to be a major break in the case.

10

C
AMILLA FELT SAD AND EMPTY AS SHE SET HER BAG OF BEER
bottles on the counter. She pulled one leg up under her as she removed the first lid and took a swig. Markus had gone to his dad's house after school and was going to stay for the weekend, because it was his grandmother's birthday and the whole family was staying at an inn. Camilla was planning to spend the rest of the day and evening enjoying all the beer she could drink while she sniffed around Skelbækgade and Halmtorvet and took a stroll up Istedgade. She changed from her skirt and high heels into jeans and rain boots. She wasn't planning for this to be an investigative reporting trip. She was just curious to see what Copenhagen's prostitution scene looked like at street level.

She'd had yet another run-in with her editor. It had all started when Terkel Høyer arrived that morning by slamming his office door behind him. A minute later the phone on Camilla's desk rang.

He was yelling when he told her that the free alternative paper had run a big interview with a woman—featuring her name and picture—who had come forward to say she had seen a young mother outside the church with a bundle in her arms. She also claimed she saw her open the door to the church and after a moment come back out empty-handed, disappearing down Stenhøj Allé.

Høyer lowered his voice a little and asked her to come to his office.

It turned out the article continued inside the paper, describing what the woman looked like in detail, with long blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Not very old, maybe just a teenager. No, she hadn't been with anyone, and she had gone quickly into the church and had come quickly back out. And no, the woman didn't think she'd seen her before. So it couldn't be someone who lived on the street, because she thought she'd recognize most of the women who lived along this section of the wide avenue in Frederiksberg, actually a separate city surrounded by Copenhagen on all sides. The witness stated that she even knew “the ones in the large mansion on the corner at the end of the street. Well, didn't
know
them socially, that is,” she was quoted as saying, “just what they looked like.”

Camilla threw the newspaper onto Høyer's desk after skimming the story and asked before he could why they hadn't scooped the story.

“Don't you wonder why she chose to take such an important witness statement to a free paper instead of telling the police what she saw?”

Høyer twitched in his chair and spluttered angrily into her face that he couldn't be bothered to wonder things like that because that wasn't what sold
real
newspapers like theirs. She turned her back to him and returned to her office.

First she called the Bellahøj precinct to find out if they knew about this witness and ask why they hadn't mentioned it to her the day before when she spoke to them. The officer on duty claimed he hadn't heard about any new witnesses. Then she called her own source, Rasmus Hem, who sounded sincere when he vehemently insisted he had never heard of the woman until reading her statement in the free paper. He flatly denied it was because they hadn't been persistent enough looking for witnesses.

“But we did bring her in for questioning this morning,” he hastened to add.

Camilla decided to head over to the precinct to hear the woman's explanation first hand and—as she had to admit—to steer clear of Høyer, who was still pissed off. Before she could leave the building, however, Camilla's morning got even worse when the paper's longtime photo editor suddenly appeared in her office doorway asking how the hell a journalism student from one of the smallest papers in the country had scooped them on this angle while Camilla kept claiming there was no new information to run about the case. Holck, as he was called, said she should know this was exactly the type of case that appealed to their readers:
Children and dogs! That's what sells papers!
And then he took a few steps into her office, glaring at her the whole time, saying he was starting to doubt she could handle the story professionally since her own son was involved.

What a day it had been. Camilla drank half of her beer in one gulp. It had been a long time since she'd sat on a bench drinking beer out of a bottle, and maybe it was a mistake, too, she thought as emptied it. But there was something that felt liberating and reckless about sitting out here alone without having to be accountable to anyone.

She had lost it with Holck, yelling at him that
first of all
it most certainly was not a journalism student but an extremely well-paid, established journalist that that free paper had hired from Denmark's premier newspaper,
Berlingske Tidende
, and
second of all
she was way fucking closer to the story than any of these other reporters because she had held that little baby in her arms. And she was not done making her point when Holck walked right over to her, leaned in over her desk, picked up her cell phone, and pointed to its camera lens.