Call Me Princess (32 page)

“Henning and his brother Jørgen. We’re going to a show at the Glass Hall tonight. It was one I didn’t think you’d be interested in, otherwise I would have invited you to join us.”

“Do they know about any of the stuff with Susanne?” Louise asked urgently.

Before Camilla had a chance to respond, Louise heard the faint beeping noise that meant that she had another call.

“I have to go,” she said just as Camilla started to answer. “I have another call.” She hung up and then her phone immediately started ringing.

“Just relax. Everything was completely normal,” the duty officer responded from the operations desk, explaining that he’d just spoken to Susanne, who was having someone over.

“And it wasn’t a man,” the officer added before Louise had a chance to respond.

Louise stopped and exhaled.

“I gave her the number here at ops. If anything happens, I can get a patrol car out there right away. But as far as I can see on my screen, she lives at an unlisted address. So, are you saying that the perp has tracked her down?”

Louise felt the anxious energy slowly draining out of her body, leaving it heavy and calm.

“I obviously overreacted,” Louise said. “I guess I was seeing ghosts in broad daylight.”

She entered police headquarters and took the stairs up to the second floor as her pulse settled back into to a normal rhythm again.

Up in her office, she set down her purse and hung her jacket over the back of her chair. Lars was talking on the phone. He nodded to her briefly, concentrating on his conversation. Louise was annoyed at herself. Something had slipped away from her in the last couple weeks. Usually her judgment was dead on, but lately it seemed like she had lost that and kept working herself up into a tizzy instead of tackling things rationally. She could have just asked Henning to call his brother, and she could have called Susanne herself instead of getting the operations desk involved. Actually, she’d better go give the duty officer an explanation before he started spreading rumors that Unit A had a new drama queen.

S
HE CLUTCHED HER NECK, WHERE THE BLOOD STARTED POURING
out as he removed the bread knife from the cut he’d just made. It felt messy, the way it trickled down inside her blouse, between her breasts, and she didn’t dare look.

The scent of freshly baked bread emanated from the kitchen. The coffee table was set with cups and lit candles.

He breathed out, a vein on the side of his neck throbbing. She glanced over at him without moving.

Her blouse was sticking. She bent her head down so her chin was resting on her chest, to stanch the bleeding. The pain seared her neck, and she thought maybe this was pushing more blood out instead, so she raised her head so she was looking straight ahead again. She wasn’t crying.

Moving slowly, he set the bread knife down on the coffee table.

She hadn’t recognized the silhouette of his body through the frosted glass in the door when he rang the bell. She had not been prepared at all and didn’t have a chance to react before he was inside.

With his arms in front of him in a defensive gesture, he had walked slowly toward her, assuring her that he didn’t want to hurt her, just talk.

She had backed up, step by step, as he moved closer.

“You have to listen to me,” he pleaded, when they were standing in the kitchen.

Oddly enough, she wasn’t afraid. With her back to the refrigerator, she listened as he explained that he hadn’t killed anyone. That the whole thing was a misunderstanding. There was something earnest and honest about his voice that made her believe what he said.

Her eyes moved down over his face as he spoke.

Suddenly she remembered those eyes. She wanted to move in closer. Woodland lakes, she thought. They were dark with a shimmer of green.

Now she stared desperately at the bread knife lying on the coffee table. The wound burned, and her body was paralyzed. The fear that had subsided when he started talking to her in his calm voice was back, wrapping itself around her like a mantle of ice. It had happened at that instant. She recognized the dangerous glint in his eye, and saw the distorted expression on his face. It had changed the second the phone rang. He ordered her to sit still and not pick it up. In a few quick leaps, he was out in the kitchen; when he came back, the serrations in the stainless steel blade had sliced into the thin skin on her neck as he held her firmly in his tight grip and pressed.

“Answer it,” he snarled.

She reacted mechanically, speaking in a voice she was not in control of, and was surprised at how calm it sounded.

She felt the blood spreading into a stain on her chest.

In an almost invisible motion, he gestured for her to stand up. He took the bread knife from the coffee table and was right behind her, leading her toward the closed door to the bedroom.

“I
DON’T THINK HE KNOWS THE ADDRESS,”
L
OUISE EXPLAINED,
standing next to the duty officer’s desk in the middle of the large command center on the top floor of police headquarters, holding out her hands in an apologetic gesture. “But I suddenly had this suspicion that a reporter from
Morgenavisen
—who Susanne’s been in touch with—might have let the address slip without thinking about it.”

The duty officer smiled at her and said, “You really don’t need to apologize. I would have been more than happy to dispatch Nymand and every other available uniform out to Roskilde.”

He stood up and asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee. Telephones were ringing and dispatchers were directing patrols and emergency responses to various addresses throughout the Copenhagen metropolitan area. She overheard a request for a CSI team at a fire downtown, and it struck her how you stepped into another world when you came up here. The hectic life, the sound of the countless telephones and police scanners—they just didn’t have that down in her division. There was a quieter, almost pious atmosphere down there, where people moved around in the dark, curving hallways, where footsteps echoed, and everything seemed old-fashioned. Ops was the place at police headquarters that reminded Louise most of the other Copenhagen precincts she had worked at before she got promoted to homicide.

He returned with two cups.

“I haven’t heard from her, so there’s no reason to be worried,” he said, setting the cups on the desk. “I’m sure she’s still sitting there chatting with her mother.”

Louise stiffened and asked him to repeat, word for word, what Susanne had said.

“She said that everything was fine. And that she was just sitting there chatting with her mother.”

Louise was already backing toward the door as he finished speaking.

—

“W
E’RE GOING TO
R
OSKILDE,”
L
OUISE YELLED TO
L
ARS, WHO WAS
still at his desk with the phone to his ear. She quickly grabbed the keys to a patrol car from Heilmann’s office and signed one out in the logbook. She concluded that Heilmann must have gone home already. Her computer was off, at any rate.

Lars was right behind her as she bounded down the stairs, but he still hadn’t asked what had happened.

“I was supposed to meet Bjergholdt in Tivoli, but he didn’t show. Camilla’s boyfriend Henning came instead.”

She gave him a quick summary, which was enough to justify to her partner that she was ordering him to head out to Roskilde half an hour before his children’s daycare closed.

“Couldn’t we just call Susanne and see if she’s okay?” he asked sensibly as they sped down the highway.

Louise contemplated the option for a moment, then said, “Obviously it’s possible that I’m overreacting. We can certainly hope that’s the case,” she added. “But if Susanne was trying to tell us something on the phone, it must be because he was there. And if he is, calling could have disastrous consequences. He would immediately suspect she’d said some kind of code word.”

Louise’s head was spinning. Lars was in the passing lane, flashing his lights whenever someone didn’t move out of his way quickly enough.

“Whatever she’s doing, we can be one hundred percent certain that she’s not having a pleasant evening chat with her mother,” Louise said emphatically. “Definitely not after her mother wrote an open letter to
Morgenavisen
that upset Susanne so much that Camilla was forced to cut her lunch short to drive out there and see her.”

Once she had said that, she suddenly had doubts. Susanne had taken so many big steps in the past few weeks, done things she would never have done when Louise first met her. Maybe she asked her mother to come over after Camilla’s visit so they could really talk things through. Louise was secretly relieved she hadn’t had a whole emergency response team rush out to cordon off the area and storm the apartment.

She sighed deeply.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” she said, running her hand through her hair, which was down. “I just have a terrible feeling. But I am fully aware I’m a little off my game these days, so I really don’t know if my hunch is worth paying attention to or not.”

Lars gave her a quick glance before focusing his concentration back on the road and their high speed.

“I fucking thought I was pregnant,” Louise blurted out, apropos of nothing.

She noticed that he slowed down a little and looked at her, so she hurried to add that it had turned out to be a false alarm.

“It was just my imagination,” she said with a slightly forced laugh. “That wouldn’t have been a good idea. But actually I don’t think it would have ruined my intuition,” she said, to bring the conversation back to Susanne.

“No, I’m sure it wouldn’t,” Lars said, pulling into the middle lane. “But obviously if you were preoccupied with all that, it might make you a little more sensitive than usual, you know.”

It took them twenty minutes to drive to Roskilde. Traffic was actually moving along nicely the whole way out on Københavnsvej, but once they got to Røde Port it was backed up.

Louise sat in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard. She knew that would only irritate her more, but she couldn’t stop. All the annoyance bottled up inside her was seething, and the excess energy had to come out one way or another.

“Don’t ride their bumper like that,” she nagged Lars as they finally approached the parking lot in front of the cluster of two-story buildings where Susanne’s ground-floor apartment was located. They parked out of view and approached the apartment through the other front yards so they couldn’t be seen from Susanne’s living-room or bedroom windows, but only from the kitchen and bathroom.

“What are we going to do?” Lars asked as they stopped in front of the neighbor’s apartment.

“I’ll go over and knock, while you wait over here,” Louise said. “If she’s sitting in there chatting with her mother, we’ll go in and say hi. If he’s there, you call it in to ops and get them out here while I see if I can grab Susanne.”

Lars stopped, his phone out and in his hand. “Are you sure I shouldn’t come in too?”

Louise nodded quickly. “The whole thing will go smoothly. It’s mostly just a matter of securing her. If he makes a run for it, we’ll let him go and hope there’s a patrol car nearby that can pick him up.”

It looked as if Lars were going to protest, but Louise started walking before he could say anything.

She walked up the walkway through the front yard until she was right up against the building. With her back to the wall, she moved over to the kitchen window and peeked in.

The kitchen was empty. The door to the living room was ajar, but the crack was so narrow that it was impossible to see anything through it. She ducked under the frosted glass of the bathroom window and proceeded around the building to peer into the living room. Two tealights were lit in small holders, and there were cups and a teapot on the coffee table. That calmed her down, but she couldn’t see any people. The muscles in her body relaxed a little when she realized how unlikely it was that Susanne had been sitting there drinking tea with her rapist.

Louise walked back around to the front door and rang the bell, nodding to Lars to signal that there was someone home. No one came to open the door. Before ringing the bell again, she tried the knob and determined that the door was locked. This time, she held her finger on the ringer for several seconds and heard the sound cutting through the apartment’s entryway.

“We’re going in,” she signaled to Lars.

When he got close enough, she said, “Susanne wouldn’t leave with the candles lit.”

Louise rang the bell again and walked around to the other side of the building. With her hands against the glass, she peered in to see if the ringing doorbell had triggered any response. She watched her partner walk toward the shed and trip over the low, newly planted hedge that separated the front and back yards. She rushed over to help him find something they could use to shatter the glass in the front door. They found a couple of pavers in the shed.

“If they’re in there, they know we’re here,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Lars picked one of the pavers up in both hands and hammered it with all his might against the thick pane of glass in the front door. Louise expected it to shatter and was surprised that it yielded only enough to make a small hole. Lars kept hitting it until the hole in the heavy-duty glass was big enough he could reach an arm through and unlock the door.

“Susanne!” Louise shouted into the apartment.

The air was silent. Instinctively she knew someone was there and called out again. She opened the door and stepped in over the broken glass on the floor of the entryway.

“Susanne!”

She thought she heard a door open as she stepped farther into the entryway.

“Leave, or I’ll kill her.”

The voice was ominous, and the words were enunciated quietly and clearly. Louise guessed the voice came from the apartment’s bedroom. She quickly turned to see if Lars had heard what had been said. She saw that he’d already pulled back and was calling ops for backup. They would contact the Roskilde Police right away, but she also knew it would take the negotiating team at least an hour to arrive. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember if she’d seen any of the crisis negotiators or tactical response folks around the division. Some of the officers were specially trained to handle hostage situations. But she drew a total blank and wasn’t actually sure who was even in those groups.