Call Me Princess (34 page)

“I didn’t kill her,” his voice was suddenly a hiss. “She wasn’t dead when I left. She tricked me.”

There was a clank as he gesticulated wildly with his hands and happened to knock over an empty teacup. He stared intensely into Louise’s eyes. “It was her own fault!”

She nodded to show she agreed with him. Suddenly there wasn’t much time. She had been trying to drag things out to this point, but now the problem was whether she had enough time to talk him down before the SWAT team outside was ready to take over the conversation and she would have to make do with being a weapon in the negotiations.

She tried to reassure him. “She didn’t die until you’d left the apartment,” she said in a convincing voice. “The coroner called me and told me that it could easily have taken a fair amount of time before she died.”

She could tell that he had heard the words but didn’t understand what they meant. He was focused solely on having his innocence confirmed, she noted, which was classic behavior in these types of situations.

“You won’t be charged with murder,” she said, hoping he would find that comforting because he would undoubtedly be charged with manslaughter. Actually, she wouldn’t be surprised if Suhr decided to charge him with second-degree murder anyway, since they were investigating the case as a death by aggravated battery.

“She wasn’t supposed to die.” His voice didn’t have the same aggression in it, but it was still accusing. “She invited me over, and she was the one who wanted to take things into the bedroom,” Jørgen explained.

Louise nodded silently as he spoke, noting that he wasn’t stupid. Of course he would stubbornly maintain that what happened was consensual. He was guaranteed to do that when Susanne’s case went to trial, too. So it would be up to Susanne and her lawyer to prove the opposite.

He glanced out the window, passively following what was going on outside. Traffic had been stopped, pedestrians were being held back. The only activity was of various police who had taken up positions in the parking lot and all around the perimeter of the building. Louise glanced over at the clock on the living-room wall. It felt as though she had been sitting across from him for hours.

“There wasn’t anything wrong,” Jørgen said, not really to Louise, “but then suddenly it went wrong anyway. Completely wrong, obviously.”

For a second she thought he was going to start crying. She wanted to ask him which part he thought had gone wrong, but didn’t dare. She had the sense that that was precisely the problem—he didn’t understand what the catalyst had been. He had had his own plans when he packed his rape case and headed off on his dates; if those plans couldn’t be carried out to completion, perhaps he looked at that as something going wrong. That was a boil she had no intention of lancing right now. The forensic psychiatrist could deal with that one, because she was pretty sure there would be a psychiatric evaluation in his future. She heard voices outside the front door, not voices so loud they were meant to be heard inside the apartment; they were just the sounds of people discussing something, which told her it was almost time. Her stomach tensed, and she could feel her pulse.

“I promise that you’ll get the best defense attorney.” Louise looked right at him. At first his eyes wandered, but then she managed to establish eye contact and she spoke slowly, with weight behind each word. “If we go out now, I’m sure Camilla will do everything in her power to help you.”

She was just tossing things out there, but she got a response. She saw it in his eyes, and that made her proceed.

“The negotiating team is about ready to take over, so I can’t do any more for you. And in a second the SWAT team will come in. If we walk out first, they will no longer consider this a hostage situation.”

She was running out of things to say, and he seemed calmer now. She saw the officers in tactical gear and the sharpshooters taking up their positions.

“It would also be nice to get this wrapped up before too many media people show up,” she added.

She had already noticed a number of photographers standing back behind the barrier that the police had set up.

“If anything goes wrong, I’m taking you with me when I run,” he said after a long pause for consideration. His voice was once again a hoarse whisper.

She nodded, knowing he wouldn’t have a chance to run off anywhere once they stepped out the door. He would be shocked by the size of the armed police response. She felt a pang in her heart at betraying him and wished he would come with her now so he wouldn’t have to go through the whole negotiation process. If he didn’t come out voluntarily, they would send the elite anti-terror unit in after him. Of course he wouldn’t know it was them. He probably had no idea that in Denmark, taking someone hostage is classified as an act of terrorism, nor in particular that the very best-trained forces were always deployed to extract a hostage from a situation like this.

He got up and paced back and forth a little in the living room.

“We’ll go together,” he said, giving her a look that she had a hard time interpreting.

His eyes were both ferocious and scared, but outwardly he still seemed calm, as though he was sure this whole scenario was taking place because there had been some misunderstanding. As if there had been a mistake. A wrong number. Something that actually didn’t have anything to do with him. Louise was not entirely confident, but she stood up anyway and nodded, aware that this could end very badly.

“Is Camilla out there?” Jørgen asked, looking at her inquiringly.

“I don’t know,” Louise replied with a shrug. She hoped she wasn’t.

He walked over slowly and stood in front of her. “I’ll do it because you promised you would help me. And because I’ve decided that I would really like to get to know you.”

She shuddered.
Whoa, does he really not get that’s not an option anymore?
she wondered. It struck her with even more clarity that he did not consider his assaults crimes. He was not picturing the charges the police would file against him later that night.
He is completely fucked up, and then some. He’s a textbook sociopath!
ran through her mind.

“Why did you come see Susanne today?” Louise asked as Jørgen began pushing her toward the door.

“She wrote in the paper that I’d killed someone. That’s not true. She knows me and knows I’m not like that.”

Louise sank. There was no way she could look him in the eye.

“You know, not all girls find it normal to be bound and gagged. It could easily seem frightening if that wasn’t something you’d agreed on beforehand....”

She stopped talking because his face seemed to shut down.

They were at the door.

“Wait a minute,” she said as calmly as she could. “I’ll call them and tell them we’re coming out.”

He watched her while she dialed and relayed a brief message to Suhr. Fear had taken hold of him, and there was nothing ferocious left in his eyes—just nervousness. His eyes wandered. He gripped her arm, ready to push her out in front of him when they opened the door.

“When you open the door, we’ll walk slowly down the path through the front yard,” she said urgently, worried that he might not understand what would happen if he moved too quickly.

He pushed the handle and opened the door. Suhr was standing at the end of the path, staring at them but not doing anything.

They took their first steps very slowly, like an animal cautiously moving into unfamiliar territory. Jørgen pushed her ahead of himself like a shield; once they’d made it a couple of steps beyond the front door, he suddenly stopped, taking in the whole scene. There were sharpshooters on several rooftops, aiming at him. Officers in tactical gear formed a ring all the way around the perimeter of the building. To Louise, the crowd of people loomed as an inscrutable mob, but it seemed as though he was memorizing the details.

With a violent shove, he pushed her farther ahead. The motion was so brutal that Louise had the sense that he had planned to dart back into the house and stand his ground, but had decided that he probably wouldn’t be able to pull her back with him. She saw Suhr subtly shake his head with his eyes locked on something behind her, either urging Jørgen not to do anything stupid so they could get this over with, or maybe it was a signal to a marksman who was probably up on the roof behind her.

Suhr started walking toward them. Behind him, the officers who would make the arrest were ready. Louise made eye contact with Lars and recognized a couple of the people who she knew were part of the negotiating team. They had withdrawn to the side and were standing in the neighbor’s front yard, watching everything play out without their help.

Louise stopped and let Jørgen walk past her. He didn’t condescend to look at her as he slowly walked toward Suhr, but as he passed her he said, very softly, “I trust you.”

She watched him as the tactical teams and officers in bulletproof vests swooped in to handcuff, search, and arrest him. She watched them walk over to the parked cars, where four men climbed in to sit with him in the back of a dark blue van. Louise vaguely registered Suhr walking over and standing next to her, and heard him ask if she was okay.

She shook her head and discovered that her legs were shaking underneath her. She noticed how the strength started seeping out of her body. She wasn’t okay at all, she thought.

The crime-scene investigators prepared to enter the apartment. It hit her that she didn’t know what had happened to Susanne, but that would have to wait.

It took a little while before she noticed the photographers’ flashbulbs aimed at her as well as Jørgen. Frightened, she turned around so her back was to them.

Lars came over, put his arm around her, and pulled her away. “Come on,” he said, supporting her as they started walking over to the car. She saw Nymand, Roskilde’s chief of police, approaching with his hand outstretched and a big smile. She looked the other way and picked up her pace.

Her partner opened the door and helped her in. Her muscles weren’t obeying, her legs were trembling, and her hands were restless.

“Do you think he was planning to rape her again? He had tied her hands,” Lars said as they drove back down Københavnsvej toward the highway. “Or did he come to kill her? Also, the uniforms they sent out confirmed that he had not gone to see Karin Hvenegaard.”

Louise shook her head, trying to pull herself together. Mostly she just wanted not to think about it for a little while, but she could certainly understand that he was interested. He had been standing right outside, after all.

“He didn’t come to kill her,” she said. Talking about it made her feel like she’d overcome something. “He came to convince her that he hadn’t killed Christina Lerche. To tell her that Christina had still been alive when he left her.”

Lars nodded and proceeded to say what Louise herself had already thought. “Jørgen knew Susanne could identify him and that eyewitness testimony would be important at trial.”

Louise explained Jørgen’s reaction to Susanne’s diary that the paper had published. “He felt like she was being unfair to him, blaming him for something he didn’t do.”

Lars glanced over at her quickly before picking up speed and moving into the passing lane on the highway. “What was he thinking?” he said. “Who goes on dates with a little kit full of paraphernalia for raping women?”

“I’m guessing that he would readily admit he has sadomaso-chistic tendencies and that he thinks that’s just fine.... Which, I mean, I suppose it is, legally,” Louise hurried to add, “if your partner is into that, too.”

Lars moved back into the middle lane, lowered his speed a little, and listened.

“That just wasn’t the case here,” Louise continued. “I’m sure they probably agreed to have sex, but I don’t think they talked about what kind of sex and when they would stop. At least Susanne didn’t mention anything like that. Quite to the contrary, she had a very strong response when I asked her if she was into that kind of thing—if it turned her on to be tied up, beat up, and raped. I just can’t believe that was something they’d discussed in advance, nor that the answer would have ever been yes.”

Lars sat shaking his head as Louise spoke, and then said, “Hey, do you remember that case from a few years ago? The one where the upstairs neighbor arranged to have the woman who lived downstairs from him raped?”

Louise shook her head, not remembering the case Lars was referring to.

“The guy went online, claiming to
be
his downstairs neighbor, and he got in touch with a young guy he invited over to act out a rape fantasy. He pretended to be his downstairs neighbor, and he wrote that she would leave the door to the apartment unlocked for him when she went to bed. So he could just let himself in. And that he should keep going, even if she screamed, so it would be as realistic as possible.”

Louise was beginning to remember the case. She definitely remembered reading about it, and for the first time feeling, in dead earnest, that she wanted to see the balls cut off a guy. What that upstairs neighbor had done was so beyond the pale, but his punishment had seemed negligible.

“He had the keys because he’d once watered her plants while she was away on vacation. So he just stopped by a hardware store and had copies made,” Louise added. “And the whole thing scared the shit out of that young guy.”

“Yeah, he wasn’t all that bright, was he,” said Lars. “And the upstairs neighbor was convicted.”

“Sick fuck,” Louise said.

Reminiscing about old cases perked her up a little bit. Even though it had been a relatively brief case, she remembered it because the perp had thought the whole thing up with such malice.

Lars said, “This guy today, Jørgen, he’s pretty fucked up, too. What was he like?”

“Basically calm and quiet,” Louise replied. “It seemed like he didn’t actually get it that he had committed a bunch of sexual assaults. He just feels misunderstood.” Louise thought about it for a bit before continuing. “I’m having a little trouble figuring out how calculating he was. It really didn’t seem like he was trying to hide. And that also fits with how it seemed more coincidental than planned that the subway security cameras didn’t get a good shot of him. On the other hand, he was extremely meticulous about covering his tracks when he e-mailed the women, and he was careful not to leave fingerprints in their apartments.”