Farewell to Freedom (13 page)

They walked back over to Lars and Miloš, who were sitting in the police car, waiting. As soon as he saw them, the Serb leaped out of the car's front seat and rushed over to meet Pavlína with his arms outstretched. He put them around her shoulders and pulled her into an embrace.

“The girls have to show up at the main train station every morning and pay the two Albanians. They do that at the entrance onto Istedgade,” Louise said when she reached her partner.

Lars walked the couple steps over to Miloš and thanked him for arranging the meeting with Pavlína.

“We promise we'll keep an eye on those two,” Lars said and explained that the police needed evidence to support Pavlína's story before they could do any more.

Before they parted, Louise requested that the interpreter ask if Pavlína would stop by the pathology lab and identify the dead woman, because no one had confirmed her identity yet.

“We'll also make sure to issue the Czech police a request to locate her mother so she can be notified of her daughter's death,” Louise said, shaking the hand Pavlína held out to her.

12

T
HE WAITRESS HAD JUST COME AND SET ANOTHER DOUBLE IN FRONT
of Kaj when Camilla's cell phone rang. It was almost 10:00, and she didn't recognize the number on the display.

“Yes?” she said, holding a hand over her other ear to help her hear. She pulled her chair back a little and sank farther back into the corner, trying to shield herself from the jukebox music.

Flemming Larsen, the coroner, began by apologizing for calling so late.

“But to be honest, I forgot I had the message in my pocket and didn't happen to think of it until now,” he admitted.

“That's perfectly okay,” Camilla said. “I'm in a pub in Vesterbro and may have had a little too much to drink … so maybe we'd better talk tomorrow. But there's still one thing I want to ask.”

Flemming laughed and apologized for interrupting her evening.

“I was trying to get hold of you because I wanted to do a piece on the murder that happened just across from where I'm sitting. But I'm having a hard time getting my boss to bite. He doesn't think we have enough to go on. All we have is that the victim is presumed to be a foreign prostitute. Do you have any more information on what happened to her?”

Camilla nodded across the table in response to the question of whether she wanted another round. Meanwhile, the coroner hesitated a little on the other end of the line.

“It was a straightforward execution-style killing,” Flemming finally said, making it clear that this information was off the record. “It was on the brutal end of the scale—she never had a chance to defend herself,” he went on. “During the autopsy, I identified a number of lesions on her body from blows, which she appears to have sustained before death. So this wasn't the first time someone had been after her.”

“That sounds atrocious,” Camilla said, her adrenaline surging through all the alcohol.

“I think there's every reason for you to follow up on this story,” Flemming said.

Camilla totally agreed, and she was determined to tackle the story, whether Høyer wanted to run it or not. But it wasn't that easy, of course, she thought. Especially not since Holck was obviously more intimately acquainted with Copenhagen's prostitution scene than she had previously realized.

“There are so many prostitutes who are abused and raped. No group of people is more vulnerable to violent assaults than they are. We treat them when they take refuge at The Nest, where they are routinely sent to the Center for Victims of Sexual Assault at the hospital.”

Camilla had the sense that Flemming had more to say on this topic, but she was starting to zone out so she suggested that she call him back so they could have this conversation when she had her notepad and was somewhere quieter.

“Sure, just give me a call,” Flemming said and gave her his cell number, which she wrote on the back of a receipt.

Camilla pulled her chair back over to the table and drank a little of her beer while Kaj started telling her a story about another great French chef from the past, Auguste Escoffier, who had once been a visiting chef at Copenhagen's luxury Hôtel d'Angleterre.

“When he wanted to finish his menu off with
poires Belle-Hélène
, he got so angry that he almost left the country,” Kaj said, and a merry glint entered his bleary eyes.

“Why?” Camilla asked. She was eager to move on from thinking about the girl who'd had her throat slit across the street.

“Because they wanted to top it with whipped cream!”

Camilla had no idea what Kaj was talking about, so he had to explain that it was a deadly sin to put whipped cream on top of a dessert that consisted of vanilla ice cream, poached pears, and high-quality melted chocolate.

“Whipped cream!” he scoffed. “That's something cooks do when they don't know any better and can't be bothered to listen. But this was
his
dessert. He created it,” Kaj said indignantly, “and they wanted to pull it down to a more plebeian level, which is how so many people have served it since.”

His words dripped with derision.

Camilla smiled at him, thinking she would have loved to eat in this man's restaurant. Sadly, she had met him twenty years too late.

They sat in silence for a bit while an old Johnny Cash number played from the jukebox in the background:

“Because you are mine, I walk the line,” Kaj sang along in a dark voice when they got to the chorus. His tired eyes had come to rest on the window and the doorway across the street.

Camilla realized that she wasn't angry at her boss anymore and that she'd had her fill of beer.

“I saw her,” Kaj said suddenly, turning his head to Camilla as the song finished.

“The murdered woman?” Camilla asked after a pause and then followed his gaze out the window to the doorway across the street.

Kaj nodded.

“Did you tell the police?”

He shook his head and said that he didn't have any plans to, either.

“Yes, but it's important,” Camilla began, and he interrupted her by reaching a hand across the table and taking hers so she stopped talking.

“That's not always how it works in the real world,” he said, pulling his hand back again. “I really want to be able to come and go here in my own neighborhood without being afraid. Even though our local beat cop, Mikkelsen, is nice enough, eventually they'll ask me to testify in court, and that's not going to end well for me.”

“No, now listen here,” Camilla blurted out, after ordering another round. “You can't just
not
go to the cops. That woman was
executed
. Her throat was slashed.”

Kaj sat there eyeing her. His face was lined with deep wrinkles, his hair gray, but he couldn't be older than his mid-fifties, she guessed. His eyes were dark and held the experiences of a long, hard life, which made her feel like a naïve schoolgirl.

“All right,” she said. “I don't know shit about that. I only know that no one is willing to talk in this case. All I know is that she was really young, and now she's dead. It's just completely … intolerable!”

Camilla knew she sounded ridiculous, but she meant it. In her beer-induced stupor she really wished she could have saved the girl, but it was too late. She also wanted to save Kaj, and the killers shouldn't get away with what they'd done, either.

Kaj didn't say anything, so Camilla spoke again.

“What did you see?”
she wanted to know.

He studied her for a minute, and she sensed the alcohol hadn't had anywhere near the effect on him as it had on her. But of course he was also probably more used to these quantities.

“I really want to tell you what I saw, and you should also feel free to write about it if you want. But you have to guarantee me that you won't reveal me as your source.”

“Of course,” Camilla exclaimed. Then she went over to the bar for a mineral water and some paper from the waitress's notepad.

13

“I
KNEW HER PERSONALLY—THE GIRL WHO WAS MURDERED
. H
ER
I name was Iveta, and she has a little daughter who lives with the grandmother back in the Czech Republic. Sometimes I helped Iveta send money home to them. I could tell she was having some problems, but she wouldn't tell me what was going on because she didn't want me to get messed up in something. She had gotten word her mother was sick, and the last time I talked to her she was quite worried about her daughter and
really
wanted to go home.”

Camilla took her notes in tiny letters so she'd have room for the whole story on the small pieces of paper.

“Sunday night I saw her turning onto Skelbækgade off of Dybbøls Bridge. She was walking down opposite side of the street from me. She spotted me and started waving when she answered her cell—I was close enough to hear the ring tone. I was sitting outside drinking a beer and relaxing right over there on the steps.” He nodded toward the front door of the bar that opened onto the street. “At first I thought she was going to come over to me. Instead, she stepped into that gate over there.” He pointed toward the entry into Kødbyen. “So I assumed the phone call was from a john who was en route. It took only about five minutes before a car stopped, and a man got out of the back seat and followed her inside. But a few minutes later he came back out and jumped into the car, which sped away.”

Camilla flipped the paper over and started writing on the back.

“I realized something was wrong, and I went over there as soon as they were gone. But when I saw her I knew there was nothing I could do. So I called the police from that pay phone in back.” He tilted his head toward the back of the bar, where there was a phone mounted on the wall.

“Did you see what make or model the car was?”

He nodded, and said it was a dark Audi A4, and he was also sure that the driver was the Albanian Iveta worked for.

“You have to talk to the police,” Camilla said. “They'll put you into witness protection and take good care of you.”

“Yeah, yeah. They promise so much.” He shook his head. “I've done what I need to do for Iveta and her little girl. It's up to you now whether this information makes it any further,” he said and emptied his glass.

Camilla nodded.

“But I have no idea where you heard all that from. If anyone should happen to ask,” he emphasized again.

“No, of course not,” Camilla said and got up to go pay the tab. It was time for her to go home. Even though she'd already decided her boss could go fuck himself, Kaj's account had pushed their spat aside. Considering the eyewitness report she was going to write up for the next day's edition, she would serve the story to her editor on a silver platter first thing when he showed up for work.

“Are you going stay for a bit?” she asked when she returned to the table.

“Oui, encore une minute, madame,” Kaj replied in his Danish-accented French.

Camilla had added two hundred kroner to the tab and told the wait staff it was for Kaj in case he wanted another round.

14

I
T TOOK
L
OUISE A LONG TIME TO RETURN HIS CALL
,
BUT WHEN SHE
found another message on her answering machine when she returned from Bella Center, she finally sat down on the sofa and dialed Mik Rasmussen's home number.

“A foreign prostitute was murdered,” she apologized, feeling for a second that it was totally wrong that she even had to explain herself. “We've been looking for witnesses the last several nights and are still hoping to find someone who saw something.”

They had been dating since the fall. The relationship had started when Louise was on a case in Holbæk while assigned the Danish National Police Mobile Task Force.

Mik and she were partners on that case, and Louise had fallen in love and let herself be whisked off her feet and into Mik's world—with his idyllic farmhouse and his love of sea kayaking. They'd also taken a wonderful vacation to Växjö in Sweden, where they kayaked on lakes and rivers, gathered mushrooms, cooked over a campfire, and had sex under the open sky. And for a while, she thought a long-distance relationship was the ideal answer for her, with Mik in Holbæk and her in Copenhagen. Things had been wonderful at Christmas when they went shopping together along Strøget, Copenhagen's downtown pedestrian shopping street. Hand in hand, sipping warm mulled wine. But with the distance, they hadn't ended up seeing each other quite as often since then.