Call Me Princess (3 page)

The image of him holding the glass in his hand flashed before her eyes. It had irritated her a little when he’d made the promise, too, because he had already promised the same thing when she’d agreed to let him move in with her after he returned from nine months working in Scotland. He had originally accepted a job that required him to move to Aberdeen for six months to launch a new product for the international pharmaceutical company he worked for, but then somehow it had became another three months, and ultimately he hadn’t returned to Denmark until just before Christmas.

“Right back at you,” he said, and she smiled at the phone as she hung up and put it back in her bag. She browsed a little through an old magazine and read an article about a young woman with leukemia who needed a bone-marrow transplant to survive. The problem was that the worldwide donor registry didn’t have a single donor with the exact same tissue type as this girl. Hardly the mood-lifting reading material she was hoping for.

After an hour, Louise guessed that they were probably finishing up with the examination and went out to the corridor to see if she could find a pot of coffee and a couple of cups somewhere nearby.

“Good thinking,” Flemming said ten minutes later, as he sat down across from her.

She poured coffee into a cup and pushed it toward him. “How is she?” she asked.

“She went through something pretty violent,” he said.

Louise had already set a notepad and pen out on the table. She pulled them toward her and looked at him expectantly as he blew on his coffee.

“There was both vaginal and anal penetration,” he said, setting his cup down in front of him.

She started taking notes.

“There are fresh bleeding tears in the posterior wall of the entry to the vagina, and three tears in the skin radiating outward from the anus.”

“Did you find any semen?”

The words and tone made it sound as if this were the kind of stuff ordinary people talked about, day in and day out, but without this seemingly cavalier handling of the grim medical aspects of assault, it would have been impossible for them both to keep
doing
this, day in and day out.

“Nothing immediately visible, but she had some fluorescent stains on her back that may have come from semen, so I secured samples of those.”

Louise looked up from her notepad and asked, “Was there any in her pubic hair?”

Flemming shook his head and said, “He could hardly have penetrated her from the front the way her legs were lashed together. I think he penetrated her only from behind.” Then he added, smiling dryly, “But in this case, if he
had
approached her from the front, we would probably have found some evidence.”

Apparently, to Flemming’s great annoyance, it no longer seemed to be fashionable for women to have any pubic hair at all. That information made Louise chuckle in spite of herself, and made her feel extremely old-fashioned.

“What about the rest of her body?” Louise sketched a human body, ready to mark the locations where Susanne had been assaulted.

“There are bleeding erosions from the gag that he stuffed into her mouth,” he said.

Louise marked this on her sketch before he continued.

“Its ends were jammed against both corners of her mouth and cut their way into her skin. I’m assuming that the gag was left in the apartment and that it’s already been brought in to forensics,” he added.

Louise had seen the forensic unit’s impressive collection of gags, and the mere sight of all the horrible things perpetrators had come up with to stuff into their victims’ mouths to keep them from screaming made Louise’s cheeks burn as if she had been gagged as well. There was everything from wooden blocks in socks to various heavy wires wrapped in duct tape or bandages.

“And then there are two small blisters in the rectangular area where the duct tape had been—a hypersensitivity response, I’m assuming,” Flemming said. He continued: “In addition, she took some powerful blows to the face.”

“Was it someone she knew?” Louise asked, setting her pen down in front of her.

“His name is Jesper Bjergholdt,” the coroner said, glancing down at his notes, which he had stashed in the pocket of his lab coat, “and he lives on H. C. Ørstedsvej.”

Louise pulled out her phone and dialed Lars Jørgensen. Obviously, she should have asked Susanne herself while they were in the car. While she waited for her partner to answer, she urged Flemming to keep talking.

“They went out to dinner last night, Monday night, but I wasn’t able to really find out whether they had known each other for a long time or whether they had just met,” he said, a little apologetically. “She made a big point of explaining that they had had a nice evening and that she doesn’t understand what suddenly happened.”

Louise nodded to indicate that she was still listening.

“As we were finishing up, she started hinting that it may not actually have been him at all,” the coroner continued, gesturing with one hand to signal his doubt, “but she can’t explain what became of him and how another person could have gotten into the apartment.”

He paused to weigh his words.

“She’s pretty upset, though; there’s no doubt about that. She’s talking with the psychologist right now.”

“Could this Bjergholdt have slipped something into her drink?” Louise asked.

“That is obviously a possibility, but at the moment I don’t think so. We took a blood sample to send to the lab.”

“This will just take a sec,” she said into the phone when her partner finally answered from Susanne’s apartment. “The suspect’s name is Jesper Bjergholdt, he lives on H. C. Ørstedsvej, and they had been out to eat.”

She looked at Flemming and asked “Where?”

He shrugged and shook his head.

“I don’t know where,” she said to Jørgensen, “but I’ll call you once I’ve talked to her. See you later.”

She was about to hang up when it occurred to her that Susanne would probably appreciate leaving the sexual assault center in something other than a bathrobe. She added, “Do you think you could find some clothes in her closet and make sure they get over here? Then I’ll bring her back to headquarters.”

She put the phone in her bag and looked at her notepad to remind herself of how far they had gotten. Then she asked Flemming to continue.

“There are skin abrasions around her wrists and ankles, all the way around, about one centimeter wide, consistent with her hands having been bound behind her back with cable ties.”

Louise took notes in the same clinical language.

“There are also ligature marks from the cable ties because he had pulled them so tight. My guess is that her hands were dark purple and swollen when the paramedics cut her out of the bands, but by the time I examined her the swelling had gone down and the color was normal.”

Once everything had been written down, they sat and talked a little about the summer vacation Flemming was planning to take with his kids. It was the first time they would be going on vacation alone without his former wife since the separation, and the kids were excited about the idea of spending it in a covered wagon that would drive them through the forests of central Jutland.

“They really want to sleep in tents and cook their meals over a campfire,” he said, shaking his head before standing up and following her back out into the corridor.

They had just said good-bye when one of the psychologists affiliated with the center called down the corridor after Louise.

“Right now she’s suppressing what happened,” the psychologist said when she caught up with Louise. “She’s clear on most of the evening; but once they reached the bedroom, the chain of events gets foggy. I’ve referred her to a private-practice psychologist and recommended that she contact him in the next couple of days.”

Louise nodded and prepared herself for what could be a long victim’s statement if they were first going to have to make their way through a layer of repressed memories.
Maybe we’re not going to get anywhere.

She knocked on the door as she entered the small examining room where Susanne was lying.

“Some of your clothes are on their way over here,” she said, coming closer to her. “Once you’re dressed, we’ll drive over to police headquarters.”

Susanne closed both eyes. The whole left side of her face had swollen up so severely that Louise doubted Susanne was able to open that eye at all. The skin on her cheekbone was a mess.

“I know you’re tired and aren’t feeling particularly well, but it’s important for us to talk about what happened,” she said, feeling sorry for Susanne and sorry for herself, too, that she had to keep pushing her. “It’s important because we’d really like to find the guy that did this. But it’s also important for you to get everything you’ve got pent up and eating away at your insides out in the open. It helps to talk about it.”

She hoped that her words were making their way in past Susanne’s closed eyes. Right then someone knocked on the door, and Louise stepped over to open it. Outside stood a uniformed officer with a bag in his hand.

“Thank you so much,” Louise said, smiling and taking the bag, deciding not to let him into the room. She stepped back over to Susanne.

“Holler if you need help getting dressed,” she said, setting the bag on the foot of the bed.

Susanne had accepted the offer of a shower once Flemming had finished his examination. Now her short dark hair was plastered against her face. “I can do it,” she said, carefully opening her one good eye as she slowly pushed herself up onto her elbow.

“I’ll be right outside,” Louise as she stepped out and closed the door behind her.

“A
RE YOU HUNGRY?”
L
OUISE ASKED.
T
HEY WERE IN THE CAR ON
their way to police headquarters, and it had occurred to her that it might have been more than twenty-four hours since Susanne had eaten. She knew that the most they would find in the break room would be a box of crackers, so she didn’t mind stopping to pick something up, but Susanne shook her head.

When they got to the office that Louise and her partner Lars Jørgensen shared, Louise asked Susanne to take a seat and went out to check whether anyone else was still there at this late hour, but the place was totally deserted. Lieutenant Suhr’s door was locked, and the lights were off in Henny Heilmann’s office, although the lead investigator had left Louise a message that she could be reached at home after eight. Louise looked at her watch. It was almost eleven. She would wait and update Heilmann in the morning.

She got two bottles of mineral water from the little kitchenette behind the break room and returned to her office. In the hallway she heard footsteps in the stairwell and waited to see who was coming up before she went back to Susanne. She smiled when Lars walked through the revolving doors.

“Did you find him?” she asked out of curiosity before he’d even made it all the way over to her, since the force had had an hour to locate Jesper Bjergholdt.

“There’s no listing for a Bjergholdt on H. C. Ørstedsvej—or anywhere else in Copenhagen, for that matter.”

“Fuck,” Louise grumbled. “Are you guys done at Susanne’s apartment?” she asked, hoping in vain that maybe something promising had turned up there at the very least.

“The investigators are still out there.”

Louise nodded toward the door to their office.

“She’s in there,” she whispered. “I think it’s best if I speak with her alone.”

“Of course. I have her computer and cell phone. I’ll get a warrant tomorrow so we can copy her hard drive and get a printout of the calls on her cell phone and land line.”

Louise nodded and turned to go back into the office with the two bottles of water.

“Could you just ask her if she has a phone number for him?” he called after her. “I’ll be sitting at Toft’s desk, running some more searches on the name.”

“Sure,” she said and then walked into the room.

If anyone had asked her a year ago, she would have had a hard time imagining that she would appreciate Lars as much as she now did. She had been full of reservations when he had been assigned as a temporary replacement for her previous partner, Søren Velin, who was taking some time off from the team. But she had forgotten about her aversion to the change with remarkable speed, and since then it had been business as usual when Lars officially replaced Søren after he was transferred “on loan” to an elite national police task force, Unit One, and away from the Copenhagen team.

—

“N
OW
I
’D LIKE TO ASK YOU TO TELL ME ABOUT
J
ESPER
B
JERGHOLDT,”
Louise said after she set the water and a glass on the table in front of Susanne. “Did you talk to each other on the phone?”

If we could get a phone number that Lars could use to track him down tonight, that would be undeniable progress,
Louise thought.

“No, I never had his number.”

Well, that was that. Louise turned on her computer, and her screen flickered a little before it slowly made up its mind to work. “I’m just going to tell my partner that,” she said, picking up the phone.

A shadow slid over Susanne’s face, and she seemed to deflate a little. It struck Louise that it hadn’t even occurred to Susanne that at that very moment there was a whole team of people working on her case, probing into her entire life, shattering what little remained of her privacy.

When Louise hung up, she tried to strike up a conversation before starting the actual questioning. A lot would be riding on whether or not she would be able to establish a trust-based relationship with Susanne.

“First I need to ask if you would like to have a victim services counselor present when you give your statement.”

It took a little while before Susanne reacted. “No, I don’t want anyone else here,” she finally concluded.

“You might be grateful for it some day when the case goes to trial,” Louise said, just to make sure that Susanne knew the implications of her decision.

Susanne shook her head again, staring stiffly at one of the piles on Louise’s desk. “No, thank you,” she repeated.