Call Me Princess (30 page)

She sat there with a nervous knot in her stomach, waiting to see how he would react.

It took longer than before for him to respond. She wondered if she shouldn’t have nailed down a specific time and was just about to write that they could decide on a time now when she received his response.

“Sounds good,” he wrote. “What’s your real e-mail address? I’ll send you a line Monday. Take care of yourself, Princess.”

She sank, struggling to think clearly. The Hotmail account she had been using at work was just her initials, but that didn’t go with TRIM at all. She felt like she’d been caught in a lie, and hid her face in her hands, struggling to try to think coherently. Finally she gave up and wrote her Hotmail address, praying that he wouldn’t get cold feet and ask her what TRIM, LR, and Princess had in common. But he just replied “See you soon,” a second after she pressed
SEND
.

—

S
O, SHE HAD DONE IT.
T
HEY HAD A DATE TO E-MAIL EACH OTHER ON
Monday. Suddenly she felt hungry. Like a force of nature, she felt her body suddenly crying out for food. She went and opened her fridge, even though she knew there was nothing in it that would help her. Without even trying to fight her craving for a burger and a big container of fries, she shoved her feet into a pair of galoshes and headed down to the street get some takeout, replaying the exchange of messages in her head.

Had she written anything that could arouse his suspicion? Had she in any way said anything that didn’t come across as natural? It also occurred to her that in her eagerness to tone things down, she might have come across as uninteresting. Maybe he’d lose interest before Monday.

Her thoughts were racing, spinning into an enormous mishmash by the time she got back to her apartment. She had ordered two cheeseburgers with extra bacon, even though there was almost no way she could eat more than one of them, but she felt like indulging. Feeling that her appearance screamed to all and sundry she’d been out most of the night—and wasn’t particularly good at such things—she let herself back in through her building’s main door holding a Jolly Cola and looked forward to collapsing.

“Y
OU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME.
Y
OU’VE BEEN WRITING
from your home computer after we set up a whole special work one just for that purpose?”

Michael Stig was leaning over Louise’s desk sounding like a broken record. This was the fourth time he had repeated himself, although his actual word choice had changed slightly, and Louise was already fully aware that it might not have been the smartest decision. But she also knew that a civilian couldn’t trace things the way the police could, so she didn’t quite grasp why it was apparently such a huge disaster.

“Well, first of all, we should have blocked your IP address,” Stig said at the investigative team’s morning briefing.

The others listened with interest as Louise told them about Nightwatch, and Heilmann commended her for establishing contact when she had the chance. Even Suhr seemed impressed, although Louise had pointed out several times there was no way to even be sure she had contacted the right guy. She also explained the project she had Stine Mogensen working on, which was ultimately their best shot at contacting the suspect.

“Mogensen left the mixer with Bjergholdt that night,” Louise reminded everyone present. “Last week I asked her to search for him whenever she was chatting online. They have chatted with each other before, so I thought maybe there was something distinctive about the way he expressed himself that she might recognize even if he were using a new profile name. But she hasn’t found anything yet. So maybe this ‘Prinzz’ is just a wild-goose chase.”

Louise said that mostly to tamp down their expectations a little.

Stig sat there shaking his head through the rest of the briefing, and Louise wished he would just go back to focusing on his fucking management training program. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. “Would you give it a fucking rest!?” she snapped.

She struggled with her rage and avoided making eye contact with him even though he was all up in her face as he scolded her for using her home computer. He was making a big deal out of nothing to make it seem like her actions had been irresponsible and reckless. Which they had, she was fully aware of that. But that didn’t give him carte blanche to keep harping on it.

Suhr was standing in the doorway observing the drama without any change in his expression. It took a minute before Stig noticed him, gave everyone a quick nod, and left the room.

“Just keep going,” Suhr said, ignoring the conversation he’d walked in on. “It won’t be of real interest to us until we know for sure if it’s him, of course. But don’t be inviting him over to your place unless we’re there.”

Louise smiled at him and promised to be careful.

“The attacks we’ve seen from him so far aren’t the kinds of things you get away with out in the open, so you just keep at it,” Suhr encouraged.

She was glad that the lieutenant was being so low-key about the whole thing. There was still a long way to go, she thought, and she was sure Bjergholdt wouldn’t even consider inviting her out to dinner until he was sure she was the type he was looking for. Which he couldn’t know until they met in person. And she wouldn’t be sure it was actually
him
until they met in person, either. Suhr’s secretary interrupted them by coming in to let him know he had a visitor on his way up.

Louise looked at him askance, and Suhr smiled pessimistically and shrugged. “It’s Susanne’s mother,” he said. “She’s here to yell at me because I haven’t found her daughter’s rapist yet. Plus now she’s pissed that we moved her daughter so she can’t get in touch with her.”

“When is someone going to talk to her,
really
talk to her,” Louise asked, “... and explain the situation and tell her that
she
is the reason Susanne doesn’t want to have any contact for a while?”

Louise actually thought Jakobsen had already done that, but the woman obviously hadn’t clued in.

“Now,” Suhr said, an anguished look on his face.

Unbelievable what all falls under the job description of a homicide division lieutenant
, she thought, watching him leave. She secretly wished a curse on Stig that on the very day he was promoted to lieutenant, if that ever happened, he would be inundated with stupid tasks like this.

—

“I
’LL BE IN A LITTLE LATE TOMORROW,”
L
OUISE SAID WHEN SHE RAN
into Heilmann in the hallway late that afternoon outside Suhr’s office. She briefly mentioned that she had a doctor’s appointment but didn’t provide any further details, and the sergeant was tactful enough not to ask.

Louise wasn’t very hungry as she biked home, and decided she would just make do with a couple of open-face sandwiches for dinner so she wouldn’t have to stop and pick up any food. The whole way up to the fifth floor, she walked with her eyes trained on the steps in front of her and was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she almost crashed right into the person sitting on the landing outside her door.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked, looking at Peter in surprise—but she already knew.

His overnight bag was sitting in front of the door. He nodded at it and shrugged.

Her insides went cold, and an image of Susanne and her mother flashed through her mind. If Peter wanted to move back in, Louise wanted to move to an unlisted address, too. She realized right away how childish that thought was. She stepped past him and unlocked the door.

“Come in,” she said.

Her thoughts were in disarray. She had completely pushed the instinctive reaction she had on Saturday out of her mind, but now he was standing here and she had no doubt as to why.

“Didn’t it work out?” she asked, heading into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

The atmosphere was awkward, and it was unreasonable of him not to start talking. But instead, Peter was leaving it up to her to break the ice and get the conversation going.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I think I need to really think things through.”

That sounds sensible, she thought. Then the irritation hit her again. He hadn’t even apologized about showing up unannounced, nor had he asked if this was a good time. And, actually, his timing sucked. She needed to go see if “Prinzz” had e-mailed. She’d been checking her Hotmail account from her laptop, but there hadn’t been anything. She noticed she was feeling more and more nervous that “Prinzz” would back out at the last minute, and she had the weird sense she could force him to e-mail her by sitting at her computer and staring at her screen. This had been on her mind all day, and her mind was going a mile a minute. She didn’t have any brain cells left to devote to thinking about Peter’s problems.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked in a tone of voice that made it sound like his badminton game had been canceled.

“I miss you,” he said.

Louise turned her back to him, wishing he would stop. “You can’t just move back in,” she said, surprised that the idea had even occurred to him.

“I know that. I’m going to stay with Lars.”

Louise couldn’t think of anything to say, but was glad that at least he realized it would be better for him to sleep on a mattress at his buddy’s place than to even consider sleeping on the couch at her place.

“I just wanted to let you know that,” Peter said.

“Thanks,” she replied, a little sarcastically. She shrugged. “I guess.”

She walked him to the door and stood there, watching him descend the stairs with his overnight bag over his shoulder. Her head was about to explode. She shut the door and stood there, lost in thought.

—

W
HEN
L
OUISE LOGGED IN A LITTLE LATER TO CHECK IF THERE WAS
anything in her inbox, she found that “Prinzz” had suggested: “We could get coffee at Tivoli tomorrow, if you want.”

Of course
, she thought. He knows how easy it is to hide in the crowds at the popular old amusement park.

Camilla called and said she would drop by for a second and then hung up before Louise could tell her it wasn’t a good time. Louise quickly e-mailed “Prinzz” back to ask where and when to meet.

“Café Viften, four o’clock,” he replied succinctly, and then: “(You know what I look like.)”

“Cool,” she wrote with no idea where Café Viften was. She sat there drumming her fingers for a bit. She sensed restraint in the tone of his brief message and wanted to keep the dialogue going to reassure herself that he wasn’t thinking of backing out. Instead, she logged out of her mailbox and went to the kitchen to make herself a ham sandwich. She had just sat down to skim today’s
Urban
when Camilla buzzed up from downstairs.

Louise was guessing that Peter had called her and that’s why she’d insisted on stopping by.

“Hi, I’m a little busy so I can’t stay long,” Camilla said when Louise opened the door for her.

Louise smiled, shaking her head.
She
wasn’t the one pressuring her friend to squeeze a visit into her busy schedule.

Camilla sat down at the kitchen table, hunching over a bit.

“What the fuck is up with Peter?” she asked, eyeing Louise as though she expected an explanation. They briefly discussed the fact that there was pretty much no chance in hell Louise was going to take him back, and Louise found it comforting that Camilla was tepid in her support of Peter, as well. Camilla listened to what Louise had to say, and disagreed only halfheartedly when Louise said the trust was broken and it was no use for them to try again.

When they ran out of things to say on that topic, Camilla pulled a handful of pictures out of her purse and spread them out on the kitchen table as she eagerly described Henning’s idyllic farmhouse. There were also some pictures of Camilla and Henning holding hands.

Louise noticed again how attractive he was. Not flashy, but tall and dark-haired. Exactly Camilla’s taste.

“That looks wonderful,” she said, dutifully adding that she looked forward to visiting them out there.

“Couldn’t you come out this week or next weekend sometime?”

Louise dragged her feet. She felt guilty that she kept postponing on Camilla, so she tried changing the topic instead. “Do you talk to Susanne often?”

“Every day,” Camilla replied. “I’m actually on my way over to see her now.”

Louise raised her eyebrows, waiting for her to go on.

“We got such a response to her diary today,” Camilla said. “We’re drowning in e-mail.”

Louise hadn’t been following all this.

“Susanna wrote a diary for us about her reaction to the rapist killing his next victim. She calls him a monster and says that in the pit of her stomach, she can picture what Christina Lerche’s last minutes must have felt like. It was really very moving.”

There was something sarcastic about Camilla’s tone that bugged Louise.

“Well, she’s right, you know,” Louise exclaimed. “It could just as easily have been her. She was lying there hogtied with tape over her mouth for hours, so if anyone knows what Christina Lerche must have felt, it would be Susanne.” It irked her that Camilla had been the one urging Susanne to share her story in the first place, so it wasn’t right for her to be so fucking condescending now that she had.

“Of course,” Camilla said. “And she described it so well it really made people sit up and pay attention. I’m just so disgusted that that’s what it takes these days to make the readers feel something.”

Louise stopped feeling so defensive. “Maybe it’s time for you to find a different job?” she suggested, as she had done countless times before.

Camilla shook her head, promptly dismissing the idea. “Why would I do that? Now that I finally know what it takes to make a compelling story!” she exclaimed, starting to gather and put away her pictures. “Well, I’ve got to head out to Roskilde. I’ve got a whole bag full of e-mail we received for her today. I printed it out. Plus a bouquet of flowers from the editor-in-chief. Høyer is pretty excited about this story, to put it mildly.”