Call Me Princess (33 page)

Louise realized she would have to handle the situation herself. She had decided to go in, and now she couldn’t just pull back and wait for the others to get here.
I have to talk to him myself if I want to keep him from taking it out on Susanne,
she thought. The local police would arrive soon to cordon off the area. The situation would be locked in, and she had to try to buy some time.

She took a step back and yelled that he should calm down, that she was here to help resolve the situation.

“I have a knife. Get out and close the door,” he yelled.

Louise stepped back over the glass shards, thinking that it wasn’t helping anything that they were standing around shouting back and forth at each other. She could win some time if she could get a real dialogue going with him.

“Couldn’t we have this conversation over the phone?” she suggested through the front door.

He didn’t respond.

She offered to toss her cell phone in and then call it.

He still didn’t respond.

“Jørgen.” She pronounced his name loudly and clearly. “I really want to talk to you,” she said, fully aware that using his name could either help or hurt her. And there was still the risk that she had the wrong guy. That it would turn out to be someone else in there with Susanne. Some other deranged lunatic who had now fixated on Susanne as a result of the article and diary entries.

She took her cell phone out of her pocket and stepped back into the apartment again, over the glass on the floor of the entryway. She opened the door to the living room, squatted down, and slid the phone as far into the room as she could, then quickly got up and stepped back out the front door again to help him feel like she wasn’t pressuring him.

—

L
ARS WAS DONE TALKING TO THE COMMAND CENTER.

“They’re on their way,” he said before handing her his phone so she could dial her own number. It rang for a long time before the voicemail recording said that Louise Rick was unable to take the call. She hung up and put the call through again. For the first time in many days, the vague fog was gone from her brain. She felt present, her concentration on high alert. She knew that she shouldn’t underestimate the man she was dealing with. Sociopaths want attention, she reminded herself, and she was going to have to play his game if Susanne was going to make it out of here alive.

He answered her phone the third time she called, but didn’t say anything. She could just hear breathing.

“Is Susanne alive?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” he confirmed after such a long pause that she almost gave up and decided he wasn’t going to respond.

“Can I have some kind of sign?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything, but Louise could tell he was moving.

“Yes....” It sounded as if Susanne had forced the word out under duress.

“Susanne, this is Louise,” she said trying to sound as if everything were calm and relatively under control.

“Shut up,” he said into the phone.

She ignored his rough tone and continued calmly, “If you don’t do anything to her, I can help you out of this situation. I know you’re calling the shots, but won’t you tell me what this is about?”

Unfortunately she had a very clear sense of what this was about. Jørgen knew that Susanne could testify against him if the police managed to find him. Karin Hvenegaard would also be able to ID him. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn’t given a thought to Karin out in Rødovre since she had visited her. Maybe Jørgen had already paid her a visit. It wasn’t hard to see that things were heating up for him.

Of course he’s feeling threatened,
she thought, his predicament becoming clear to her. The two aggravated sexual assaults were now the least of his troubles. The things he’d done to Karin and Susanne were serious enough, but Christina Lerche’s death brought his crimes to another level. No wonder he was feeling the pressure.

Louise spoke firmly in a calm, quiet voice, and strangely enough she also felt calm on the inside. She wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what might happen, just trying to win time. If she succeeded in talking him down enough, he might relent and accept the wisdom of coming out and letting Susanne go.

She continued in a controlled voice. “I know you didn’t kill Christina Lerche,” she said into her phone. “Her death was an accident.”

She registered that a number of squad cars had already pulled into the parking lot. More would be coming to set up a perimeter. Now it was a question of keeping the dialogue going until the negotiating team got there and took over, and there was a chance that they would succeed if she fed him everything he wanted to hear in a gentle stream.

He still wasn’t saying anything.

“It would go a long way if you came out on your own now,” she continued. “Then you could keep the situation from spinning out of control.”

If only he would say something. It concerned her that he remained so quiet. When the silence and the faint static on the line continued, she got nervous that he’d put the phone under one of the couch cushions or somewhere else that would block the sound. He could have closed the door to the bedroom where Susanne was. Louise was suddenly struck by the chilling realization that he could be assaulting Susanne right now, even as she stood here, naïvely continuing to talk to him.

She went over to the door and knocked loudly. Leaned forward and listened.

“It’s too late,” the ominous voice finally said into the phone.

She couldn’t be sure what he meant, if he meant it was too late for Susanne or for the situation as a whole. She hoped he meant the latter and seized on his words.

“It’s never too late if you act rationally. It will benefit your case overall if you let her go now.”

“I don’t believe you. I can see the police.”

“Those are just patrol officers. They’re here to cordon off the area. That’s the normal procedure before the negotiating team arrives to take over. I’m no expert, just an ordinary assistant detective.”

“Negotiating team? You want to negotiate?”

“Yes,” Louise said convincingly. “We want to make a deal with you so you make it out of this situation as levelheadedly as possible.”

“So you actually think I can get something out of this?” His tone was full of contempt.

She hoped he would bite so they could keep the conversation going, and at the same time she glanced at her watch. It would take another half an hour at least before the team got out here from the city. That was a long time to wait, with things moving at this excruciating pace.

If he was desperate, he would start gushing like a waterfall and then demand they have a private plane waiting for him out at Tune Airfield to take him out of the country, and then he would recite anything at all that he could recall from similar situations in American movies. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t seem desperate in that way, didn’t get carried away and ramble on, talking faster and faster. Instead it was like he was sitting there, weighing and contemplating each word he said.

She could hear Susanne crying in the background.

“If you let her go, I’ll come in and take her place,” Louise suggested.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“You could talk to me.”

Suddenly he seemed amused.

“But you don’t even know me. Why would it help to talk to you?” he asked.

It struck Louise that he sounded like a businessman on a conference call, and she didn’t really feel like she was bringing anything to the table that he would consider appealing.

She had a choice: tell him he was right, that maybe it wouldn’t do him any good to talk to her, or brazenly lie.

“First of all, I can guarantee that I will do everything in my power to help you so that we can wrap this business up calmly and quietly and find a solution that you will be satisfied with,” she said convincingly. “Let Susanne go and I’ll come in, and then we’ll talk about it. I could also be your bargaining chip with the negotiating team if you’d rather wait for them and find out what they have to offer.”

He mumbled something she couldn’t make out. Then: “You don’t know me, so you wouldn’t understand me. Plus, I don’t have any use for you.”

He sounded resigned.

Louise took a deep breath, inhaling the air deep down into her gut.

“Actually, yes, I do,” she said. “I know you, and you know me.” Well, “know” was a bit of an exaggeration, but in a way they did know each other. They would have, anyway, if he’d shown up for their coffee date.

The silence on the other end of the phone became brooding.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Call me ‘Princess,’” Louise said, leaning against the wall by the front door.

Silence. She started shivering, even though the sun was beating down on her. She had pushed them both all the way, to a place where a response was unavoidable.

She heard a sound from inside the house and turned to wave Lars over.

“I’m going in,” she whispered, so it wouldn’t be audible over the phone. “Call headquarters and get them to send a patrol out to Karin Hvenegaard’s place. He may have paid her a visit, too.”

Lars looked away and was about to say something angry but stopped himself. She could tell from his clenched jaw muscles. Then he turned his face toward her again and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Watch out for him,” Lars urged. “We don’t know why he came here today, but he’s already killed one person.”

So far she agreed with him.

“He’s a hunted man,” Lars continued. “If he lets her come out, it’s because he thinks he can get more out of this situation if he uses you as a hostage.”

Louise knew her partner was right, but honestly right now she was afraid that Jørgen thought he would do better by holding on to Susanne.

She stepped back over to the front door and listened. She saw Suhr and Heilmann rushing across the parking lot, and she could tell that Suhr wanted to tell her something. But just then the door between the living room and the entryway opened and Susanne came into view, guided by an arm. She was bleeding from her neck and stood there frightened, staring at the floor. Her hands were tied together tightly in front of her, and Louise noticed that Jørgen hadn’t used his usual cable ties. This looked like some kind of cord he’d found lying around in the apartment.

“She won’t come out until you’re in.”

Louise quickly glanced at Suhr, and, before he had a chance to object, she stepped into the apartment with all her muscles tensed and took up her position next to Susanne. She briefly considered trying to yank Susanne out the door with her so they could both be free, but she let go of the idea. If that didn’t succeed, there was nothing else to fall back on. She put both her hands behind her head to signal that she was not armed and would not attack, and she noticed his grip on Susanne’s arm loosen.

“Just go,” she told Susanne.

Louise stood for a second, watching Susanne’s back hurrying away from the building. An effervescent feeling of relief and victory managed to trickle through her before, a second later, she felt a strong hand cinch in around her elbow and pull her into the living room, where she stumbled and struck the couch.

J
ØRGEN STOOD THERE FOR A LONG TIME, WATCHING
L
OUISE AS
she slowly got up and hesitantly sat down properly on the couch.

“You knew?” he asked, standing over her so she had to crane her neck to look up at him.

She shook her head. Immersed in another role, she was speaking as the girl who had seen him in town.

“I went to Tivoli to meet you, but you didn’t come. I saw Henning instead.”

She sensed his surprise when she mentioned his brother’s name.

“Your brother is dating my best friend,” she said to explain.

“Camilla?”

He was still standing there, studying her. There wasn’t anything aggressive or menacing about his appearance, and, somewhere deep inside her, that hurt. He seemed confused and uncertain, as if he had been forced into accepting a deal he didn’t want.

“Yeah, Henning told me about your lunch together and about Camilla and how she had to go to Roskilde and how you left right after her,” Louise said, presenting the chain of events in a slightly more simplified version that what had really happened. “Did you follow her here?” she asked.

It took a little while before he nodded, as if he was considering whether he had anything to lose.

“You look like each other, you and your brother—at least from the side. When I saw Henning, I recognized his silhouette,” Louise said and explained that she had seen Jørgen on the subway CCTV footage when he had walked Christina Lerche to her train at Kongens Nytorv.

He listened, but she couldn’t tell what was going on in his head.

“Suddenly I could see how it all might fit together,” Louise said. “So I came out here.”

Louise did not dare mention that she had already known all that when she messaged him on Nightwatch. Even though he didn’t seem particularly threatening right now, she was well aware that that could change in an instant. And there was something about his contemplative expression and the fact that he didn’t seem stressed that made her extra-vigilant.

He was waiting for her to say more. Suddenly the silence felt interminable and she sensed her own anxiety as she tried to think of something more to say. She didn’t dare glance down at her watch to see how much longer she had to stall.

“Camilla was the one who told me your name is Jørgen,” Louise said.

She saw officers in SWAT gear walk past the window. They were getting into position, so she surmised the negotiating team had arrived.

“I didn’t kill her,” Jørgen finally said. He had taken a seat and was moving the fingers of both hands in and out of each other like gears engaging and disengaging. “I didn’t do anything.”

Louise refrained from commenting on that last remark, but she took it as an opening that might allow her to win his trust.

“I don’t think that either, that you killed her... intentionally,” she added after a brief pause.

He pulled his hands back, as if he’d burned them, and then quickly leaned toward her.