Farewell to Freedom (30 page)

Then Camilla seemed to snap out of it. She asked, “From which foot?”

“The right.”

Camilla's farewell was rapid and happened before Louise even had a chance to stand up. But Camilla turned around in the doorway and looked at her.

“Make sure you check your information,” Camilla urged before disappearing.

Louise just sat there staring at the empty doorway for a second before she turned to her partner and shook her head a little despondently.

“Do you think it was wise to let her just leave after what happened to her?” Lars asked, concerned.

Louise shrugged and rolled her chair up to her desk.

“I don't know. I mean, we can't put a man on her, and she's also not the kind of person who would accept a bodyguard, even after a frightening experience like that.”

“But I guess it would be worth checking on whether the woman they were waiting for really was murdered,” Lars said.

Louise nodded.

“What was her name again? Ilana … but what was her last name?” Lars asked, flipping through the stack of papers in front of him. “Procházková. We'd better tell Willumsen what happened.”

“Let's go tell Toft instead, then he can contact Interpol or e-mail the police in Prague directly,” Louise suggested, getting up. “Willumsen will just chew us out for not being done with the lists of all the mothers-to-be.”

She quickly walked over to Toft and Stig's office, which was two doors down from her own.

“A Serb? Well, there are quite a few of those,” Toft exclaimed, scratching the thick, full beard he had grown over the winter, but which he already seemed to be rethinking now that the weather was warming up.

“But of course it ought to be checked.”

He crossed his arms in front of his chest and glanced over at the row of certificates and trophies he and Michael Stig had brought home from all their bowling tournaments, both in Denmark and abroad, as he contemplated.

“If I can find her name, I have a good relationship with a woman in the criminal investigations unit in Prague. She's won a bunch of bowling tournaments and for a while she played professionally, but went back to police work after a couple of years. She said she missed it.”

Louise smiled.

“What do we know about this Serb?” Toft asked, pulling out a sheet of paper, but they had to disappoint him.

“Nothing, aside from that he was seen in the woman's building. We don't have a description, but the police down there apparently know who the Albanians were referring to. Or at least they told Camilla that asking for ‘the Serb' would be enough.”

Toft nodded and stuck his plastic cigarette in his pocket.

“Maybe we should go pick up those two Albanians and haul them in here to find out if they have any more to tell us instead of letting them steer this investigation.”

Stig had appeared in the doorway with two sodas and a piece of fruit in his hands, and Lars made room so he could enter.

“Yeah,” Toft said. “There might be something to that, but let's just check if they're leading us off on a wild goose chase or if what they're saying is true.”

He was already scrolling through his address book to find the Czech criminal investigations unit.

“Well, at least we don't have to sneak around after them anymore since they already know we're breathing down their necks,” Stig said, using one cola bottle to pop the lid off the other.

“Here she is!” Toft exclaimed, pointing at his screen. “I'll write to her.”

“Well, we'd better be off,” Louise said, nudging her partner.

40

T
HERE WAS NO ANSWER AT THE FIRST DOORBELL
L
OUISE RANG
, but the next address on the list was only two blocks away.

“Copenhagen Police. I'm detective Louise Rick. Could I come in and talk to you for a second?” she asked over the intercom after the woman answered.

When she got to the second floor, there was a woman standing in the hallway with a belly so enormous, it looked ready to burst.

Louise hurriedly smiled to allay the fear on her face, which is typical when receiving a visit from the police. Then she apologized for bothering her and explained why she was there. After the woman confirmed that her name was Gitte Larsen, Louise crossed her off the list and left.

Eight of the nineteen on her list lived in the four Bridge Districts—the dense residential neighborhoods of Nørrebro, Amagerbro, Østerbro, or Vesterbro, which had once been linked to central Copenhagen by gates through the old city walls—so she decided to cover them by bike. After that, she would go back to Police Headquarters and check a squad car out of the garage.

It was almost 8
P
.
M
. and there were three women left on her list when she rang the doorbell at Maja Lang's place. She lived in a little row house in Gentofte, and a dog barked noisily as the doorbell elicited a shrill melody.

Nothing was bulging on this woman. To the contrary, her skin was so pale it almost seemed translucent or blue, and the veins in her temples were visible, making her face seem sensitive and exposed.

Louise explained why she was there and felt a pang when she saw how the woman pulled back as if she'd struck her.

“It's been almost three months since I lost her,” she said, slumping a little.

Pictures of autumn trees in warm golden colors hung on the wall behind her, and in the living room there was a lap blanket on the sofa as if she'd just gotten up. The candles were lit, and there was a quiet that suddenly seemed striking given that the row house was right off the heavily trafficked Lyngbyvej.

Maja Lang nodded toward a room that opened off the living room.

“We had everything all ready, but one morning suddenly I just couldn't feel her, and I knew something was wrong. Really wrong.”

She pulled back and sat down on the edge of the sofa and pushed the blanket aside a little apologetically.

“Four days after that, they induced the delivery, and we buried her the last Saturday in January.”

She started crying and pointed to the armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

Louise quickly decided not to sit down and apologized profusely for having bothered her. On her way out, she swore to herself that Gentofte hadn't struck Maja Lang off their list of women who were due. Now she'd ripped open the woman's grief completely unnecessarily.

41

W
HEN
L
OUISE AND LARS GAVE THEIR STATUS REPORTS THE
next afternoon, they had to acknowledge that none of the women on the maternity ward lists seemed to have given birth outside the official health care system. In the last twenty-four hours they'd been in touch with everyone who had been due during the right time period in Region H, which included all of Greater Copenhagen.

Louise hadn't gotten home to her empty apartment until almost 10:30 the previous night. Camilla had left a message on her kitchen table that she and Markus were spending the night at their own place because he needed to get some of his schoolbooks and his gym clothes there anyway. Louise had briefly considered calling to make sure her friend had calmed down after her dramatic afternoon, but didn't want to risk waking them.

At 8:00 in the morning, she was back at it, starting with a couple in their early thirties who were busy timing contractions.

Two women had been admitted that same day with preeclampsia and were going to be kept under observation until their labors started. Four were having contractions, including the couple Louise had visited that morning. Everything had been the way it was supposed to with all the rest. They had opened their doors with their big bellies jutting out in front of them and had immediately been crossed off the list and given an apology for the disturbance.

Maja Lang and a very young girl that Lars had spoken to out in Glostrup were the only ones for whom things had not gone the way they should have. The young woman had had an acute abortion as the result of a serious traffic accident she had been involved in a month earlier. When Lars visited her, she had just returned home from the hospital and assumed that was why the maternity clinic still hadn't been informed of what had happened.

Louise glanced over at the door in irritation when someone knocked three times, hard, and was about to ask whoever it was to go away and let her work when Toft came in and said he'd just received an e-mail from Jana Romanová.

“She's a detective at Bartolom
ě
jská Street, which is Prague's ‘hard' police precinct,” he explained, closing the door behind him. “She confirmed that last week Monday they found Ilana Procházková in an apartment just behind Václavská Street, where a lot of the city's prostitution takes place.”

Louise reached for the half-empty roll of chocolate cookies and offered Toft one before she helped herself and pushed them across the desk to Lars.

“Okay,” she said, feeling the little hairs on her arm stand up.

“True enough, her throat had been slit. Jana's going to have the most important details from the pathology report and the crime scene investigation results translated into English and promised to e-mail them ASAP.”

Louise rested her head in her hands. This was starting to feel like a Sudoku, where someone had switched all the numbers around.

“Did you ask what she knew about the Serb?” Lars asked out of curiosity, taking a bite of his cookie.

Toft got a deep wrinkle in his forehead and nodded pensively.

“Yeaaah. She's guessing the guy they're referring to is named Bosko. They know him from the prostitution scene, but she hadn't heard that he had allegedly been seen in the area. They did have a couple of witness statements that said that a man with short hair and a leather jacket had been seen in the building, but he hadn't been identified yet.”

“What else was she able to tell you about him?” Louise asked, taking another cookie. “I mean, it certainly sounds like she knows who he is.”

“Nothing else. She seemed a little reticent about him, but maybe that's because she wants to look into him first and see if there's a connection. They're working on finding a match for the fingerprints they found in the apartment and in the stairwell right now. The results aren't back yet. And she said there was a lot of blood around the body, which means that the jugular was severed and sprayed, and the murderer must have had a fair amount of blood on him when he left the scene. And that doesn't match the description of the man witnesses saw leaving the building around the time of the murder.”

“Well, then, I guess you're going to have to get ahold of Arian and Hamdi and get them to tell you more,” Louise said. “If they think there's a connection, and if they want to get out from under the cloud of suspicion.”

“They're being picked up right now,” Toft nodded and said that Mikkelsen and Stig were going to question the two Albanians. He would stay in touch with Jana, so they could compare the technical findings from Prague with what they'd found at the murder locations in Copenhagen to help determine if the cases were connected.

“That's good, because that will let them know that Camilla held up her end of the agreement,” Louise said after Toft had shut the door behind him.

Willumsen had asked them to turn in a report to him once they had finished going through the list.

Willumsen nodded toward the conference table when they knocked, and quickly gathered up the papers that were spread out in a little heap in front of him.

“Was there anything suspicious?”

He stood up and came over to sit down across from them.

“Unfortunately not,” Lars said. “But I suppose it would have been awfully lucky if it had been that easy.”

The lead detective nodded and rubbed his chin, as he thought about it. “Let's just compare with what Bellahøj found in their search for Baby Girl's mother,” he said, and added that it would surely take a couple more days—or maybe a week—before the boy's DNA came back.

“So I guess there's no way around it. We're going to have to appeal to the public and ask people to come forward if they noticed a woman walking around with a big belly but without a baby carriage since then. Obviously we run the risk of offending someone by assuming that she might have been pregnant if she turns out to have only gotten a little fat, but that's a risk we'll just have to take,” he said, looking as if it wouldn't bother him in the least to hurl an insult like that.

The lead detective got up and walked over to the stack of papers, which he hadn't had a chance to look at yet.

“Do the techs have anything on the towel he was wrapped in?” she asked, looking at Willumsen.

He shook his head absentmindedly as he flipped through the pages.

“Yes, here!” he exclaimed when he was almost through. “But all it says is that they can tell from the brand that it was made for the Føtex chain.”