Farewell to Freedom (15 page)

Stig lingered after the others left.

“Funny, I thought for a second I had seen you down on Sønder Boulevard last night,” he said, his eyes running down Camilla's Malene Birger designer dress and high-heeled shoes. “But it must've just been someone who looked like you, because this lady was sitting on a bench drinking beer with an old alcoholic.”

Camilla smiled at him, saying that sounded pleasant enough, but she'd taken her son to his break-dancing class.

Louise knew that was a lie. Markus had had break-dancing Monday—and that had been his last class. And then Louise recalled the same woman Lars was talking about. She wouldn't be surprised if Stig had seen correctly. Louise walked her friend back to the main entrance and when Camilla said she was going home to bed, Louise gave her a hug.

“I'm going to do the same just as soon as I can,” Louise said, waving after her.

17

C
AMILLA WAS IN HER JOGGING CLOTHES ON HER WAY OUT THE DOOR
Saturday morning when her phone rang. For a second, she considered ignoring it. She and Louise had a brunch date, and she was determined to get her run in beforehand.

Her story had filled the entire front page and two pages inside the paper the day before. The intern's last assignment before he went back to school was to put together a fact box on prostitutes murdered in the last few years in Vesterbro and also in the rest of the country. There were also several brutal killings in Ringsted and Ålborg. Not that they seemed connected; it was mostly just evidence of the ferocious violence that these marginalized women were subjected to, an angle Camilla was perfectly satisfied with.

“I'm going to have to cancel,” Louise said after Camilla walked back into the living room and picked up after all. “There's been another murder.”

Camilla could hear people talking in the background and a car driving by.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I'm standing down on Sønder Boulevard. The victim is in the courtyard in one of the buildings off the street.”

“Is it a prostitute?” Camilla wanted to know, already fearing a recurrence.

“No.” The answer seemed calming, in a way. “It's one of the drunks,” Louise continued. “Mikkelsen IDed him before I got on the scene. It was pretty savage, not something you want the families seeing who have a view into the courtyard.”

Camilla sank down on her sofa's armrest. “Is it Kaj?” she asked softly, feeling an iron fist clench in her stomach.

“How the hell do you know him?” Louise asked, surprised.

“I just know him,” Camilla responded tersely. “I'm coming down there.”

“I don't think that's wise. They won't let you see him either.”

“God damn it! I don't want to see him, either. But don't you get it? He was the one who told me about Iveta and the Audi. How the hell did they find out it was him?”

Camilla's voice broke as the iron fist grew bigger and was now so large that she had a hard time getting up. Suddenly she started shivering as the room seemed to contract around the sofa.

“Ah,” Louise said. “Well, then you'd better come. We've cordoned off the courtyard and our cars are parked out front, so it ought to be easy for you to find us.”

Camilla saw the investigators from far away, as well as the ring of curious bystanders gathered on the sidewalk. As she moved closer, she could hear people guessing what had happened. She recognized a couple of people from the pub and the guy from the grocery shop on the corner.

Louise was standing by one of the blue vans, talking to Niels Frandsen, the head of the Forensics Department. The barrier tape was strung across the entrance to the courtyard.

“He's still in there,” Louise said after Camilla parked her bicycle and greeted Frandsen, “so we'll stay out here.”

An ambulance with tinted windows came around the corner, and Louise took Camilla by the elbow and pulled her to the side a bit.

“Flemming just finished examining the site and doing the preliminary postmortem exam,” she said. “They're getting ready to move the body.”

“It's been a long time since we've seen anything this bad,” Frandsen admitted when he heard that Camilla knew the deceased. “We speculate that he was knocked down here in the archway before being pulled into the courtyard.”

The ambulance stopped and Frandsen walked over and undid the police tape so it could drive in.

He followed it over to talk to a couple of his people. Their faces were strained, and they were talking together quietly as they passed by. Behind them came Suhr, followed by Willumsen.

Camilla confirmed that Kaj had been the source for her story and vigorously shook her head when asked who could have known that.

“What happened to him?” she whispered to Louise once they were alone. She noticed her heart racing while the rest of her body felt completely stiff.

She could tell that Louise didn't know how to respond.

Just then the pathologist ducked under the police tape and Camilla took her eyes off the gurney, which had just been pulled out of the ambulance.

“It's nasty,” Flemming confirmed with a grim look. “Not something I've seen before.”

“What happened to him?” Camilla repeated, now with a shrill desperation in her voice that she couldn't suppress.

Flemming and Louise exchanged a quick glance.

“The killers stretched out his four limbs and tied each between four benches, and then they gave him a variation on the Colombian necktie,” Flemming said, watching her.

“And what's that?” Camilla asked, uncomprehending.

“The Colombian necktie is something the mafia does to people who rat to the police,” Louise explained and took hold of Camilla as she began to sway.

“Normally what you see is the throat slit ear to ear and the tongue pulled through the gash. But in this case, his throat was cut vertically and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth with a knife inserted through the incision.”

“So this variant could be called a Balkan necktie,” Camilla said sadly, thinking about the two Albanians and leaning against the wall for support.

Louise had just suggested Camilla go back home when Suhr emerged from the courtyard, putting his arm around Camilla's shoulder when he reached her.

“I would really like to have you take a look at his face before the ambulance takes him away,” the homicide chief requested. “We need to know for sure that we're talking about the same man who was your source.”

Camilla nodded mutely and followed him under the police tape.

“Everything here will make sense if it is him,” Willumsen said once they were in the courtyard.

Make sense
, Camilla thought, spotting the body of the former chef ahead of her. Now the iron fist was so enormous it pushed its way up into her throat and obstructed her breathing. She could inhale only in brief gasps.

“We'll show you only the top of his face,” Suhr said reassuringly when Camilla's footsteps started to stiffen in reluctance.

There were a fair number of people in the courtyard. The first person Camilla recognized was Mikkelsen, who was sitting slumped over on a bench, his face ashen, and his eyes staring vacantly at the asphalt under the green tarp that had been stretched out as a shelter to keep people in the building above from seeing the body. The CSI techs had made a white outline underneath the tarp to show where the body was found, although Kaj was on a gurney now, the ropes with which he had been bound to the benches dangling off the sides. The four benches had been pulled from the courtyard's two seating areas and arranged like the vanes of a windmill, jutting outward from the spot where the body was left. His arms and legs had been fully stretched out at right angles from his torso, so he looked like a capital H on its side.

Camilla forced herself to look at Kaj's body on the gurney. It had been zipped inside a white body bag. The homicide chief now cautiously pulled the zipper down a few inches.

She recognized Kaj just from his hair and the deep wrinkles on his face, and she cried as she nodded in confirmation. Suhr didn't unzip the body bag any farther than the mouth so Camilla couldn't see the deep incisions that ran from the Adam's apple, where the knife had entered, down to his chest, where it had been stopped by the breastbone. The homicide chief held her by the elbow, supporting her when she turned and started to walk away.

“I suggest that we drive over to HQ and have a chat,” he said as they started to make their way back out to the sidewalk.

Camilla heard the rear doors of the ambulance close, and she leaned against the wall as it pulled away, heading toward National Hospital where the morgue was.

Flemming squeezed her arm as he walked by, and Louise said they were ready to go.

Toft, Mikkelsen, and Stig stayed behind with Willumsen while Lars and Louise went with Suhr and Camilla.

“I just don't get it. How could it end like that?” Camilla asked as Louise opened the back door of the car and helped her in. “No one could have known he was the one who told me what happened.”

Camilla leaned her head against Louise's shoulder and kept her eyes closed for the short drive in to Police Headquarters. Camilla was reliving glimpses of the afternoon and evening she had spent with Kaj, and thinking about her article as well. She'd gone through it several times—including after she was sure she was totally sober again. But there was nothing in it, nothing that could identify him in any way. She didn't get it.

But she had no doubt that it was her fault he had been murdered so viciously and left in plain view in his own courtyard. Humiliated and chastised.

18

T
HEY WERE SITTING IN
L
OUISE AND
L
ARS
'
S OFFICE
. S
UHR HAD
brought in an extra chair, and Camilla had downed two cups of black coffee before she suddenly leaped up, racing down the hall to the bathroom with her hand over her mouth.

A copy of the paper with her article was sitting out when she came back, and they agreed that nothing in the story could have identified Kaj Antonsen as her source.

“The only thing I can see right off the bat that might have helped someone figure it out is the picture of you in your byline,” Louise said, pointing to the small photo of Camilla that appeared next to her name under the title of the article.

Suhr reached for the paper as Louise pointed this out.

“If someone recognized you after seeing you with Kaj the day before the article ran, then they could have guessed your source,” Louise explained, watching Camilla struggle with more nausea as she realized that she'd so carefully obscured anything that would point to Kaj while ignoring the possibility that her own identity might give him away.

Suhr nodded.

“It's certainly possible that it could have happened that way,” he agreed after he asked where she and Kaj had talked and who might have seen them together.

“Everyone,” Camilla replied honestly. “Obviously I had no idea it would turn into a story like this. I was only there to get a sense of the neighborhood. I'm not really that familiar with Istedgade and that area. I also didn't know how visible the prostitutes were in the street scene. I was interested in the case of the murdered prostitute, but then I met Kaj and we got to talking, had a few beers together, and lost track of time.”

Louise wrote as Camilla talked.

“Afterward, we went over to the bar, Café Høker, and we were there for a few hours while he filled me in on how a proper
poires Belle-Hélène
should be made—without whipped cream, of course,” she added, unable to hold back the tears.

There was a knock on the office door. Toft apologized and stepped in along with a tech.

“We found the Audi late yesterday afternoon,” he told Suhr. “And last night I installed a tracker on it. It's parked out in Valby, and we just went and checked if it had been anywhere near Sønder Boulevard and the courtyard where the body was found. But it's still in the same location and hasn't been driven.”