Farewell to Freedom (33 page)

45

L
OUISE CLIMBED THE STEPS TO THE PASTOR
'
S KITCHEN DOOR AND
tapped the knocker a couple of times. She smiled shyly at the tall, dark-haired woman who opened the door a second later. Camilla had told her about the housekeeper on their way out there, but now she realized she was interrupting them in the middle of a conversation. There were three girls sitting around the table talking softly in a language Louise didn't understand. Now their conversation stopped, and they all looked down at the table a little uncertainly to avoid looking her in the eye.

“Could I come in to speak to Henrik Holm?” Louise asked in English.

The housekeeper pointed over to the church without saying anything, but her meaning was clear enough, so Louise smiled and thanked her before turning to walk back across the courtyard, where the sexton had just come into view.

“He's in the middle of a wedding rehearsal with a couple who's getting married here this weekend,” the sexton said, squinting slightly at the sun as he turned and looked at the clock on the church tower. “I think they'll be done soon.”

“Oh, that's fine. Then I'll wait for him,” Louise said and walked over to sit down on a bench in the sun. It was positioned so she had her back to the whitewashed church wall and had a wonderful view of the cemetery, where the beechnut buds were just about to open.

It still didn't make any sense to her, that someone would remove the infant's toe to harass or provoke Henrik Holm, but sometimes it didn't take much to make people act based on emotion. Often it seemed like a trivial matter to other people, but to the person who felt like they'd been wronged, a relatively simple occurrence could cause their world to fall apart.

A couple in their mid-thirties walked out of the church with the pastor. Louise watched them say good-bye and didn't get up until Pastor Holm started walking toward the residence.

“Hi,” she called, and apologized for coming by unannounced. “There was just one thing I wanted to discuss with you.”

He turned around, surprised, and smiled when he saw her. “No problem,” he assured her. “Let's have a seat,” he suggested and they walked back over to the bench.

Instead of getting right to the point, Louise said she'd just met his new housekeeper.

“What does Jonas think of her?”

“He hasn't said much,” the pastor admitted. “But I think that's a good sign. Tereza told me yesterday that for the last month she's been the leader of a network that tries to help Eastern European woman who've been forced to come to Denmark and work as prostitutes against their will. The network tries to help them get back home safely.”

Louise listened with interest and thought about Pavlína. A network like that would be great for her.

“There are already a number of people involved, and I got the sense that there would be even more. So I gave them permission to meet out here, where they can talk in peace.”

Louise sensed a new dedication in his voice and was sure it hadn't been there during her last visit. But his eyes seemed tired and kept darting around the courtyard anxiously and over toward the parking lot, as if he was having a hard time concentrating.

“If they're not already familiar with The Nest and Stop Trafficking in Women, they might like to talk to them some,” Louise suggested. “They also have some resources that can be used to help victims get back home, even putting a little money in their pockets, so they can get by for a while and not be susceptible to being rounded up again right away,” Louise explained. She could tell that this was all news to him, but that he was clearly interested.

Louise took a breath, which ended up being a little deeper than she'd planned, and then turned to face him and changed the topic.

“You should have told us that Jonas is missing his right pinky toe,” she said, watching him to see what his reaction would be.

When there was none, she continued:

“It's certainly possible that that isn't significant, but that is a piece of information we're going to need to include in our considerations as we investigate the case.”

Finally he nodded and leaned forward so that his forearms were resting on his knees with his fingers interlaced. He nodded again, but remained silent.

“It makes us think there might be a personal motive behind the event,” Louise explained, watching his wiry hair flutter a little in the wind as he shook his head.

“I can't imagine there is one,” he said, focusing intently on his fingers, which were moving in and out of each other. “I wouldn't have even given it a thought myself if Camilla hadn't mentioned it yesterday.” Louise could almost physically feel his reluctance to talk any more about it.

Finally she was forced to ask, “Are there many people who know about his little defect?”

The pastor slowly shook his head.

“Whether there's any connection or not, I'd like to ask you to make a list of the names of the pregnant women you have had any recent contact with for any reason,” she requested. “And also a list of names of anyone who has already scheduled a baptism or who has at least discussed possibly wanting to baptize a child in your church.”

She hazarded a guess that having a pastor who was familiar from his media appearances might make people more interested in him.

“Maybe we should also consider whether you might have written something recently that might have triggered this action,” she concluded.

Finally he turned to her, and to her surprise she saw a look of profound irritation in his eyes. She jumped slightly when he suddenly got up from the bench.

“I'm going to need to ask you to respect that as a pastor, I'm bound to keep certain things confidential. But having said that, I don't need to even think about it to know that there haven't been any episodes here in the church that could have triggered what you're thinking of.”

Louise was about to tone things down a little, but didn't have a chance to say anything before Henrik continued:

“If someone wanted to come after me because of the things I write, then I can pretty much promise you it would've happened a long time ago. But you're welcome to go through everything if you think it might have some significance. All my columns and commentaries are on my Web site.”

She hadn't meant to make him mad, and she was so surprised at his intense response that she just sat there staring at him as he walked back toward the kitchen door. Then she closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun and composed herself for a second with the back of her head resting against the wall.

She decided to cut through the cemetery and walked along, lost in her own thoughts, her eyes trained on the gravel, which is why it wasn't until she'd passed the young girl on the path that it occurred to her that there was something familiar about her. Louise turned around, but then she wasn't sure it had been Hana. From behind, it was only the long blonde hair that confirmed her guess.

At the end of the graves, she exited through the gate and crossed the street before continuing on into Frederiksberg Park. When she reached the lake, she stopped abruptly and enjoyed the view of the swans and coots walking along the shore. The mild spring weather reminded her that summer was on its way. Suddenly she felt an almost overwhelming urge to get out of town, to head for the fields and woods and water, and she sat down on the bench closest to the ice cream stand, which wasn't open for the season yet, and pulled out her phone.

A quick glance at her watch told her that it was just past four when she sent Mik a text message inviting herself to go kayaking with him on Holbæk Fjord. “If you have the kayaks ready in an hour, I'll pay for dinner at the harbor when we get back to shore,” she wrote and smiled as she pressed
SEND
.

The response came before she'd even had time to get up off the bench.

“Great. See you soon.”

46

M
IK
R
ASMUSSEN AND
L
OUISE OVERSLEPT
. S
HE
'
D PLANNED TO
leave at about 7:00; now it was almost 8:30. Of course they'd ended up having Irish coffees when they got back to his traditional thatch-roofed farmhouse after they'd eaten soup, monkfish cheeks, and a “sumptuous symphony of chocolate,” as the chef had elegantly dubbed the four different chocolate desserts that had been served together in one square glass dish and dusted with powdered sugar.

They hadn't gotten much sleep, but her body felt great and she was humming “Wake up; it's a wonderful morning” as she backed out of the courtyard and blew him a kiss through the driver's side window.

Once she was on the highway she turned on the radio and sang along to “Billie Jean,” glad that P4 still played Michael Jackson even though most people had come to label him as a pedophile freak.

She stopped in Frederiksberg to park her car and biked the rest of the way in to Police Headquarters. She was still humming as she biked along Gammel Kongevej with her sunglasses on and the wind in her long, dark curls, and out in front of Police Square she spotted Mikkelsen walking down the sidewalk.

“Hey!” she called, waving to him, before swinging her leg over the saddle of her black mountain bike. “You want to walk up with me?”

He nodded, breathing a little heavily.

“Too many cigarettes and not enough exercise,” he admitted.

Louise was about to add, “And too much barbecue,” but managed to bite her tongue. It really wasn't any of her business.

“Are you guys meeting?” she asked Mikkelsen and nodded to the guy at the front desk as she showed her ID.

“Yeah,” Mikkelsen grunted, still not quite having caught his breath. “We really want to find out where the Albanians are meeting with the girls now when they make their payments. They're not going to Central Station anymore.”

“Could they have put their business on hold for a bit?” Louise suggested, but Mikkelsen shook his head, smiling.

“No. No way,” he said. “That's the last thing they'd do, even though they know we're watching them.”

She gave him a blank look.

“You have to keep in mind that even if they get caught and charged with pandering or, in a worst-case scenario, trafficking in women, the penalty isn't that high. Compared to what they make in a single day, it's not enough to scare them. It's no skin off their noses if they wind up in the slammer for a year or two, because they're raking in so much money when things are going well.”

Louise listened with interest as he continued:

“Right now, human trafficking is the most lucrative crime. That's where they get the money to buy weapons and drugs.”

That last bit was a little dig, justifying why they still ought to take down the people behind the scenes, even if it was only for a year or two.

Louise stopped outside her office and watched Mikkelsen as he continued two doors down the hallway and knocked on Toft and Stig's door.

It was five to ten when she said good morning to Lars, who was facing his screen but watched her as she took off her jacket and turned on her computer.

“Good
morning,”
he teased, implying that he'd been working for several hours already and that he no longer really considered it morning.

“Yeah,” she said apologetically. “I overslept. I should've called you when I woke up, but I didn't think about it.”

He hurriedly shook his head.

“You didn't need to.”

Suddenly she noticed something in his expression that she hadn't seen before.

Louise sat down and looked at him.

“Were you afraid something had happened to me?”

His eyes were back on his computer, but after a second he nodded and admitted that the thought had crossed his mind.

She smiled.

“You were worried about me,” she said, and he looked embarrassed.

He mumbled something about given what had happened to Camilla, it didn't hurt to pay a little extra attention.…

“You shouldn't be apologizing. I'm just glad you care,” she exclaimed, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. Toft stuck his head in and she saw Suhr standing behind him.

“Could we come in?” Toft asked.

She nodded, casting a quick glance at Suhr to discern whether he'd noticed that she'd come in late in order to decide if she ought to apologize. If he hadn't noticed, she didn't see the point in drawing his attention to it.

“We succeeded in getting a picture of that Serbian man, Bosko,” Toft said.

Louise could tell right away that Suhr did not deserve any of the credit for this accomplishment. Toft, in his terrier-like style, had doggedly pursued and obtained the photo.

“We sent the picture around to all the precincts last night, but so far no one has responded to it,” Suhr reported. “But at least they have him up on their radar now and the patrols have been informed.”