Only One Life

ONLY ONE LIFE

SARA BLAEDEL

PEGASUS CRIME

NEW YORK LONDON

For Leif and Annegrethe

When women are seen as the carriers of a family’s honor they become vulnerable to attacks involving physical violence, mutilation and even murder, usually at the hand of an “offended” male kin and often with the tacit or explicit assent of female relatives
.

—Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Opinion Piece for International Women’s Day: Honor Killing and Domestic Violence,”

March 2010

An honor killing is the murder of a family member due to the belief that the victim has brought dishonor upon the family or community.

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that perhaps as many as five thousand women and girls a year are killed by members of their own families. Many women’s groups in the Middle East and Southwest Asia suspect the number of victims is about four times greater.

The perceived dishonor can be the result of dressing in a manner unacceptable to the family or community, wanting to terminate or prevent an arranged marriage, engaging in heterosexual acts outside marriage, or engaging in homosexual acts, amongst other things.

The most famous honor killing case in Denmark was that of Ghazala Khan, a nineteen-year-old woman who was shot and killed outside a train station in Slagelse, west of Copenhagen, in 2005 because her family disapproved of her choice of a husband. Nine people, including her father, brother, three uncles, an aunt, and two family friends were convicted of murder or accessory to murder in this case.

1

S
HE COULD JUST MAKE OUT THE BLUE FLASHES BETWEEN THE
densely grown tree trunks, but she couldn’t see how many police vehicles were at the scene. The forest road was bumpy with enormous piles of firewood on either side, blocking out the bright morning light.

Søren Velin sped up, shooting small rocks against the undercarriage of the car, which skidded a little whenever the road turned. They waved him through the police blockade, and he parked next to one of the squad cars.

Louise Rick got out. The road ended at a bluff where a small path led down the last stretch to the water, which extended smooth and calm across the sound to the tree-lined shore of Oro Island in the distance. From here Louise didn’t recognize any of the men in the huddle at the top of the bluff, so she grabbed her jacket out of the backseat and waited for Søren to lead the way.

“A fisherman found her,” a dark-haired, powerfully built man who came to greet them explained. He walked past Søren and offered his hand to Louise.

“Storm,” he said. “I’m glad you were willing to help us out.”

Louise shook his hand and smiled. Storm was the captain of the Unit One Mobile Task Force with the Danish National Police, and he knew as well as she did that willingness had nothing to do with why she was out here, on the shore of the sound just north of Holbæk an hour west of Copenhagen. Higher-ups had made the decision before she was even asked, and they had just been lucky that she was, in fact, also willing to help.

“We still don’t know how long she’s been in the water,” Storm continued as the three of them headed back toward the bluff. “The fisherman notified the Holbæk Police this morning at 8:35, saying he had spotted a motionless figure in the water. The girl had a heavy slab of concrete tied to her torso, which was keeping her submerged under about four and a half feet of water where the body was stuck in some chicken wire. The fisherman gave up trying to get her loose with his oar and called the police, who showed up along with an ambulance. The Falck Rescue squad just finished recovering the body.”

Louise noticed the search-and-rescue van with its trailer for the rubber raft that they had used to recover the girl. One diver had gone into the water to cut her free, then passed her off to the other diver, who hoisted her up into the raft. Now they were loading the rescue raft back onto the trailer. Louise walked all the way over to the edge of the bluff and saw the white sheet covering the dead girl’s body and the crime-scene technicians in their coveralls busy combing the shore for evidence.

“The local police have cordoned off the site, and as you can see the CSI techs are already at work,” Storm continued. “But we’re still waiting for a couple more cars.”

He interrupted his brief summary when they reached the others, and he introduced each of them in turn.

“That’s Bengtsen; he’s been with Holbæk’s crime division since before anyone can remember,” he said with obvious respect. “He knows everything worth knowing about Holbæk and the people who live here.”

Bengtsen nodded at her, but he kept his hands in the pockets of his tweed trousers.

Storm stepped over to a man with an olive complexion.

“Dean Vukić,” he said, and the man shook hands with Louise. There was something hypercorrect about his well-dressed style, the shirt and tie under his leather jacket making him look more like a banker than an assistant detective.

Another man offered his hand to Louise.

“Mik Rasmussen,” he said.

Like Vukić and Louise herself, Mik was in his mid- to late thirties.

“Louise Rick,” she said. Out of habit she was about to add “Unit A,” but she caught herself. She quickly looked around at all the new faces. It was quite a small group, and she wondered briefly how she would fare at finding her place in this pack.

After the briefing that morning back at Copenhagen Police headquarters with Unit A—her homicide investigation unit—Captain Hans Suhr had opened the door to the office that Louise shared with her partner, Lars Jørgensen. Louise had just set her coffee cup on her desk and was asking her partner about his adopted twins, who were home sick with the flu, when Suhr uttered in two short sentences that Louise’s former partner Søren Velin was on his way to HQ to pick her up.

“Starting today you’ve been temporarily reassigned to the Unit One Mobile Task Force with the National Police,” he said, already on his way back out the door.

Louise quickly jumped to her feet and stopped him in the corridor, wanting to know what was going on. Suhr’s response was curt and clear: because she was deeply familiar with cases like this one. Then he hurried off.

Louise went back to her office and took a sip of her coffee, shaking her head in response to her partner’s raised eyebrows, meaning that Suhr hadn’t given her anything to go on.

“Rape, I’m assuming,” she said on her way out the door with her bag over her shoulder, telling Lars she hoped his twins would feel better soon. On her way down the back stairwell to the exit onto Otto Mønstedsgade she thought it must be a rape case of a certain caliber since a local police force had called for assistance. It was only after she was sitting in the car next to Søren Velin heading out toward Cape Tuse—or more specifically, a nature preserve out there with the unusual name of Hønsehalsen, “the Chicken Neck”—that she realized she had misunderstood her boss.

“I have no idea whether rape was involved,” her former partner told her as she started asking him about the case, preparing for what lay ahead. “But it looks like the girl is from an immigrant background, and my understanding is that that’s why Storm really wanted you on this case.”

Louise sighed. She had just wrapped up a case like this, and she was still having such a difficult time letting go of it that she was considering seeing one of the police psychologists at the Counseling Services Unit to avoid any permanent trauma. As a young officer, she had always taken it hard whenever she was confronted with people’s personal tragedies, and she had worked to learn how to handle this. Even so, she still sometimes found herself succumbing again, and that’s what had happened with her last case, an attempted “honor” killing. The case had ended with a charge of aggravated assault, but Louise and the rest of her investigative team had absolutely no doubt that certain members of that family had actually intended to kill the sixteen-year-old girl, but they had botched the job, so now their eldest daughter was a vegetable in the neurology department at National Hospital in downtown Copenhagen.

“She was lying on her stomach,” Storm explained, pointing to a spot on their right not far out into the sound. “We don’t know who she is, but we think she’s between fourteen and sixteen years old, give or take. She didn’t have a purse or any type of ID on her.”

“The canine unit is on its way. Then we’ll have to see whether they can find anything that could identify her,” Bengtsen interrupted, coming over to stand next to the Mobile Task Force captain. “We can probably assume she was thrown into the water from a boat,” he continued, both hands still in his pockets and his eyes scanning the water. “It’s too deep here for anyone to have carried her out. A slab of concrete like that weighs quite a bit.”

Louise heard car doors slam shut and noticed a blue van now parked next to the other vehicles, and two men putting on their work clothes. She recognized one of them as Frandsen, head of Copenhagen’s former Forensics Division, which had just been renamed the Forensics Center. She walked over to say hi. Frandsen had recently turned sixty, and the Forensics Center had thrown a big reception for him at their offices on Slotsherrensvej, in Copenhagen’s Vanløse district. Louise had given him a little pipe holder carved out of mahogany for the pipe he always carried with him, even though she had never seen him light it in all the years she had known him. Whenever Frandsen pulled the pipe out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, she knew it meant he was concentrating.