Only One Life (2 page)

“I guess we’re back in business,” Frandsen said, pulling a large wooden box out of the back of the vehicle. “And here I was just getting a taste for the golden years.”

Instead of throwing a big birthday party for the family, Frandsen and his wife had chosen to spend two weeks in Thailand on vacation.
They must have just gotten back
, Louise thought. She smiled because he hadn’t spent even a second wondering what she was doing at a crime scene so far from Copenhagen, a sure sign that he was wholly focused on the task he was about to start.

After he got all of his equipment together, he followed his team out to the bluff, and Louise walked over to the people standing with Dean and Mik, who had just gotten back from talking to a woman who had been out walking her dog.

“Nothin’,” Dean said. “That woman lives on a farm right around here and takes her dog on walks through these woods twice a day.”

A big black Citroën rolled up.

“It’s Skipper,” Søren said, waving at the car.

Louise had heard of him over the years. He was a fixture at the Mobile Task Force and National Police, and he had a reputation for unparalleled skill with crime-scene investigation and details. Another thing she had heard about Skipper was confirmed by the muffled sound of music booming behind the closed windows of his car. On their way out here, Søren had told her about Skipper’s enormous passion for jazz fusion, which was a complete mismatch with his understated sweater, proper Windsor knot, and otherwise distinguished and reserved appearance—including his neatly groomed gray hair combed back in a soft wave.

Louise introduced herself to Skipper, then Søren added that she had been his partner before he joined the Mobile Task Force.

“Well, then I’m sure we can’t get anyone better,” Skipper said with a warm smile. “Glad to have you with us.”

“Thank you,” she said, wondering what else Søren had told him. She watched Søren as he spoke to two of the local uniforms. He had already been with Unit A homicide at the Copenhagen PD for a while when Louise was offered her job there, and they had enjoyed a really good working relationship for a couple of years before he shifted to a new job.

The CSI techs were working on the bluff and at the edge of the water. There would be hardly any traces of DNA left on the girl because she had been in the water, but they were taking thorough photographs of the body and scene, bagging items from along the shore, and two men were focusing exclusively on finding footprints and tire prints. The coroner from Copenhagen had also shown up, Louise discovered. Flemming Larsen’s six-foot-six frame was impossible to miss, even though he was standing with his back to her as he balanced his bag on his knee to fish something out of it. When he turned around and caught sight of Louise, he set the bag down and walked toward her with a big smile on his face.

“Does your being here mean this girl’s from Copenhagen?” he asked, surprised, giving her a hug that lasted a bit longer than Louise would have preferred. She had worked with Flemming on many of her cases, and lately they had also been seeing each other a little outside of working hours, but no one else needed to know that.

“They sent me out here to assist the Mobile Task Force,” she replied, thinking it sounded a bit strange.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t think Suhr and the rest of Unit A could spare you. Is it permanent?”

“It’s just for this case—and I’ll think they’ll manage,” she answered, thinking that the only person at Copenhagen PD who seemed to have a problem with her working with the Mobile Task Force was Michael Stig. But that was probably just because he thought they should have picked him.

“Good luck, and give me a call some night when you’ve got time to go out and have a glass of wine.” He walked over to pick up his bag as Frandsen returned from the shore, announcing that the coroner could proceed with his
in situ
examination of the body.

Louise followed him to the bluff and looked down as Flemming removed the sheet and squatted next to the girl. She was lying on her back on the black, wet shore of the sound, her eyes closed and the slab of concrete still tied to her stomach.

Her long-sleeved T-shirt and lightweight beige jacket had slipped off a little, revealing how the rope had dug into her skin. The coroner carefully pushed her long, dark hair to the side so it wasn’t plastered to her face like yarn anymore. Then he started his examination of the body.

Louise listened in as he leaned over and reported to Skipper, who had appeared with a notebook to record keywords.

“Unidentified woman found a short time ago,” Flemming started, focusing initially on the face. “No petechiae in the conjunctiva or surrounding the eyes. Around the abdominal region a—” he studied the rope for a moment before continuing—“blue nylon rope is visible, approximately three to four yards in length tied with a square knot with one end wrapped around the subject’s waist and the other around a concrete stepping stone measuring twenty by twenty inches. Livor mortis visible on the abdomen, which does not disappear when pressure is applied. This suggests the victim has been dead for at least four to five hours. Rectal body temperature is eighty-one degrees, and the water temperature is sixty-two,” he said and then looked up at Skipper.

“What do you think about the cause of death—did she drown? And how long has she been here?” Skipper asked, taking a step closer.

Flemming stood up and crossed his arms as he contemplated the girl on the ground. Then he shook his head.

“I can’t tell what she died from. There are no signs of force, but I don’t think she tried to inhale underwater. Otherwise she’d have foam both in her mouth and around it. But obviously that may have washed off. The petechiae are sparse and reddish; she has goose bumps over her entire body, which we often see in individuals who have been in water. And there is pronounced wrinkling on the fingers, palms, toes, and soles—but that shows up only after a few hours.”

He concluded by saying that, judging from the rigor mortis, petechiae, and the body temperature, he would tentatively estimate the girl had been dead somewhere between nine and fifteen hours.

“When can we get her autopsied?” Skipper asked, waving Storm over so he could give his approval for the autopsy and lean on the coroner if he said all the autopsy rooms were in use.

Flemming looked at his watch and then at the two men.

“We can get started at one o’clock, provided you can get Falck Rescue to dispatch their bone bus out here that fast,” he said darkly.

The bone bus
. Louise shook her head. The nickname had stuck whenever people talked about transporting a body. In some cases it was highly appropriate, but in others it seemed more jarring. Such as now. They put the girl into a white-plastic body bag, and she was ready for transport to the forensics lab in an ambulance with covered windows. Impersonal and cold for a young girl, whose identity they didn’t even know.

For a moment Louise had an urge to ride along with the girl so she wouldn’t have to make the trip alone, but the vehicle wasn’t like an ordinary ambulance with a seat for a family member. This ambulance was stripped bare so there was room only for two stretchers, and there was a large exhaust fan in the ceiling. She pushed the idea from her mind.

After the coroner left, Storm started heading for the cars to drive back to Holbæk PD headquarters.

“That means she might have been in the water since midnight,” Storm said just before opening the door of his car. “Let’s get going.”

Louise took one last look at the scene before climbing in next to Søren, and they drove back along the forest road.

2

H
OLBÆK
P
OLICE
D
EPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS WAS IN AN ELEGANT
, old-fashioned building of red brick with white window trim, making it look both impressive and well maintained. Storm led the way, and Louise followed him up one hallway and down another before they reached the Criminal Investigation Division. The offices were arranged in a row—some detectives shared, others had their own. The latter was the case with Bengtsen. His was a corner office with windows facing both the front of the police station and the large green lawn and pond at the end of the building. By contrast, Mik Rasmussen and Dean Vukić shared a smaller, darker office where there wasn’t room for much, other than desks and bookshelves.

Louise had a hard time imagining how they were going to find any room for the extra help they had called in. Earlier, Søren had told her about a case in which they had squeezed an extra detective in at a little schoolhouse-style desk out in the hallway, and another case in which they kept moving a detective around, but this time it wasn’t going to be that bad because right then her old partner emerged from an empty office. He ran his hand through his longish blonde hair as he looked at the weekend bag and two computer bags he had set down on the floor in front of him.

“Are you moving in?” she asked, walking over to him.

“It’d probably be smarter to wait until we know who we’ll be working with, but it’d be nice to have a proper place to sit,” he said. At that moment Storm stuck his head out a door at the end of the corridor.

“Everybody’s meeting in here,” he shouted, waving for them to join him.

They entered what must have been the division’s conference room, and Louise guessed this was likely where the Criminal Investigation Division normally held their morning briefings. The walls were painted a warm yellow reminiscent of a child’s drawing, with the sun a little too heavy and saturated with color—over the top for a small room, but the light from the tall windows here compensated for the compact feel. In front of one window they had a large whiteboard set up similar to the one they had in the briefing room at the Copenhagen PD, with bits of blue and green lines that the eraser had missed. On another wall there was a large dry-erase calendar next to an enlarged map of the area around Holbæk. Someone had decorated the opposite wall by tacking up a Matisse print, and an overhead projector was tucked away in the corner behind the door. Louise sat next to Søren, grabbing one of the lined legal pads stacked on the table with a few pens, which must have been left over from a previous meeting.

“I think he’s going to split Mik and Dean up, and you’ll get partnered with one of them,” Søren whispered to her.

Louise looked at both of them. One would be just as good as the other. It was standard procedure to form teams by mixing local and backup officers, so she wasn’t even going to start hoping for any particular outcome. She had also quickly determined that she was the only woman in the group, so it might well be that the local boys were sitting here wondering about their prospects of being partnered with her. She had heard stories about local police officers calling in sick because they felt invaded when backup suddenly showed up from the Mobile Task Force and started screwing with their routines. Her thoughts were interrupted when Storm started speaking.

“Nobody has reported the girl missing, so we’ve put out notices to all police districts about the discovery, and we’ll be going to the press with a missing-persons report,” he said, opening the meeting. “Without a photo, initially,” he added. “We’ll stick to describing just the clothes she was wearing when she was found. If that doesn’t turn anything up, we’ll have to release one of the forensic pictures. We just don’t want to risk her parents’ finding out that way,” he said, and several heads in the room shook. “We’ll set up three teams …”

At that moment the door opened, and a woman with elegant orange hair and red lips came in with a bag over her shoulder and a laptop under her arm.

“Hi,” she said, smiling.

“Ruth Lange,” said Storm, gesturing toward her. “Ruth is our administrative assistant.”

Warm hellos filled the room.

“Ruth and I will hold down the command center, which will be here in this conference room,” Storm said, pointing at the yellow walls.

“The teams are as follows,” he continued, once Ruth had set her things on the table and taken a seat. He looked around the room. The local officers were sitting next to each other. Louise was sitting next to Søren Velin, who stood out in his cargo pants and black turtleneck. Skipper was to her left.

“Skipper and Dean,” said Storm, “you two are responsible for the site where the body was found. In other words, all of the technical evidence.”

The two men smiled and nodded to each other.

“Louise Rick and”—he looked down at his papers—“Mik Rasmussen. We’re putting you two together to identify her family and social circle. We’ve got to find out what the motive might be. Rick has some experience working with ethnic minorities,” he continued. Louise furrowed her brow. She wouldn’t have gone that far, but she wasn’t going to correct Storm right now.

“Bengtsen, you and Søren Velin will handle telecommunications and question potential witnesses in the area.”

Bengtsen set his pad on the table and nodded in satisfaction.

Louise guessed it was probably more the telecommunications and any subsequent wiretapping that he was happy about, and not working with Søren, because she had noticed Bengtsen sizing up her former partner. They would make an odd couple, Bengtsen with his tweed and corduroy and Søren with his very casual style.

People started talking a little across the table, especially Skipper and Dean, who seemed quite happy with each other. Louise smiled at her newly assigned partner, who quickly looked down after having given her a quick nod.

Storm told everyone to quiet down and took control of the meeting again.

“We don’t know anything about the victim. Flemming thinks she was dead before she was placed in the water, but he can’t say with any certainty, so we’ll need to wait for the autopsy.”

Storm got up and pointed at Louise and Mik.

“And you two will attend the autopsy. I just got off the phone with Frandsen—he’s the head of the Forensics Center in Copenhagen,” he added, in case anyone in the room didn’t know who he was. “He’ll make sure one of his people is ready around one o’clock so the autopsy can get started on time.”