One, Two ... He Is Coming for You (3 page)

He didn’t even turn around, but just snorted at me. “I know my way
around. You would only mess the place up.”

Then he turned around, smiling at Julie and me, and placed a big plate
of scrambled eggs on the table in front of us.

I sighed and rubbed my stomach.

“Sorry, Dad, I’m too full. Julie, go get your bag upstairs. We are
leaving in five.”

Julie made an annoyed sound and rushed up the stairs.

My dad looked at me seriously.

“She misses him, you know,” he said nodding his head in Julie’s
direction. “Isn’t it about time she got to call him, and talk to him?”

I shook my head. I hated that she had told her granddad she missed her
father. Since I couldn’t leave my job until late in the afternoon, he had
suggested he would pick her up every day and they could spend some quality
grandpa-granddaughter time together catching up on all the years they missed of
each others’ lives. I liked that, but I didn’t care much about him meddling in
my life.

“I can’t have him knowing where we are.”

My dad sighed. “You can’t hide down here forever. If he wants to find
you, he will. Whatever happened to you up there, you have to face it at one
point. You can’t keep running from it. It will affect your daughter too. No
matter what he did, he is, after all, still her dad.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Just not right now, okay?”

As I got up Julie came down and dumped her bag on the floor before sitting
down again and taking another serving of eggs.

Where she would put it in her skinny little body I didn’t know but I was
glad to see her eat despite being so nervous about another day alone in the
schoolyard with no one to play with.

“She must be growing,” my dad said with a big smile. “That’s my girl,”
he said and winked at her.

I looked at the clock and decided that I too had the time to sit down
for another minute. The radio played an old Danish song from my childhood. My
dad started humming and tried to spin around with his cane. He almost fell but
avoided it in the last second and we all laughed. I began to sing along too and
Julie rolled her eyes at me, which made me sing even louder. The old cat
stopped licking herself and stared at us from the window. She would probably be
rolling her eyes too if she could.

It was one of those beautiful mornings, but a freezing cold one too. The
sun embraced everybody, promising them that soon it would triumph over the cold
wind. Soon it would make the flowers come out of hiding in the ground and with
its long warm arms it would make them flourish and bloom. I really enjoyed my
drive along the ocean and the sandy beach. The ocean seemed  angry.

I had promised headquarters to do a story today, an interview with an
Italian artist, Giovanni Marco, who lived on Enoe, a small island close to
Karrebaeksminde. It was connected to the mainland by a bridge. The artist had
made a series of sculptures that made the public angry because of its
vulgarity. The artist himself claimed that it was his way of making a statement,
that art cannot be censored. He had displayed the sculptures in the county’s
art festival, shocking the public and making people nauseous from looking at
them.

He was the same artist who once had displayed ten blenders each with one
goldfish in them in a museum of art, waiting to see if anyone in the audience
would press the button and kill the fish. He loved to provoke the sleepy Danes
and outrage them. At least they then took a position and cared about something.
I remembered he said he wanted to wake them from their drowsy sleep walk. I was
actually looking forward to this interview with this controversial man on the
beautiful island.

Giovanni Marco lived in an old wooden beach house  that looked like
it wouldn’t survive if big storm should hit the beach. Fortunately big storms are
rare in Denmark. We had a big one in 1999 as strong as a category 1 hurricane.
It was still the one people remembered and talked about. It knocked down trees
and electric wires. At least one tree hit a moving car and killed the driver
inside. That was a tragedy. It could definitely get very windy, but the
artist’s house would probably stand for another hundred years.

Barefooted, he welcomed me in the driveway with a hug and a kiss on my
cheek, which overwhelmed me since I had not been happy about male physical
contact lately. So I’m sure I came off stiff and probably not very friendly
toward him.

He was gorgeous and he seemed to know that a little too well. I never
liked men who thought too much of themselves, but this one intrigued me anyway,
which made me nervous and uncomfortable in his presence.

His blue eyes stared at me while he invited me inside.
It’s rare for
an Italian man to have blue eyes like that
, I thought. Maybe he had
Scandinavian genes. Maybe that’s why he had escaped from sunny Italy to cold
Denmark where the sun would hide all winter. His hair was thick and brown and his
skin looked very Italian. But he was tall like a Scandinavian. And muscular. I
hated to admit it, but it was  attractive.

Inside I was stunned by the spectacular view from almost every room in
the house: views of the raging ocean, of the wild and absorbing sea. I used to
dream about living like that. Well I used to dream about a lot of things, but
dreams have a tendency to get broken over the years.

Giovanni, in a tank top and sweatpants, smiled at me and offered me a
cup of organic green tea. I am more of a coffee person, but I smiled graciously
and accepted. We sat for awhile on his sofa, glancing out over the big ocean.

“So you have just returned from the big city?” he asked with an
irresistible Italian accent. His Danish was good, but not as good as I
expected. BI had read that he had lived in the country for more than 30 years. “What
made you come back?”

News of my return traveled fast in a small community, I knew that, but
how it got all the way out here, I didn’t know. Overwhelmed by his directness I
shook my head and said, “I missed the silence and the quiet days, I guess.” It
wasn’t too far from the truth. There had been days in the end, when the city
got to me, with all its smartass people drinking their Coffee “Lattes”. It used
to be just coffee with milk. I didn’t get that. But then again I didn’t get
sushi either. Even in the center of Karrebaeksminde they had a sushi restaurant
now, so maybe it wasn’t a big city thing.

“I miss that too when I’m away from here.” Giovanni expressed his
emotions widely with his arms, the way Italians did. “Especially when I go back
to Milan. I get so tired in the head, you know? All those people, so busy,
always in a hurry. To do what? What are they doing that is so important?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said knowing that I used to be one of those busy
big-city people always rushing off to something. Rushing after a story to put
on the cover. Never stopping to feel the ocean breeze or see the flowers pop up
at spring. But I wasn’t like that anymore. I had changed. Having to go off to
cover the war for the newspaper had changed me. Being a mom changed me. But
that was all history.

I began my interview with Giovanni Marco and got some pretty good
statements, I thought. I began to see the article shape in my head. But it
seemed more like he wanted to talk about me instead. He kept turning the
conversation to  me and my past. I didn’t like to talk about it, so I
gently avoided answering. But he kept pressing on, looking me in the eyes as if
he could see right through me. I didn’t like that and he began to annoy me. His
constant flirting with me was a little over the top. Luckily, my cell phone
started ringing just as he began asking about my husband.

“I better take this,” I said.

“Now? In the middle of our conversation? Now, that is what I think is
wrong with this world today. All these cell-phones always interrupting
everything. People using them on the bus, on trains, in the doctor’s waiting
room, rambling about this and that, and playing games. God forbid they should
ever get themselves into a real conversation. They might even risk getting to
know someone outside their own little world.”

He got up and looked passionately in my eyes, and I couldn’t help
smiling. He was indeed over the top, but it was  sweet.

“Now, tell me, what could be so vital that it cannot wait until we are
done?” He thrust his long Italian arms out in the air.

“It might be about my daughter,” I said and got up from the couch.

It wasn’t about Julie. It was Sara from the newspaper. She was almost
hyperventilating, trying to catch her breath. She was rambling.

“Take it easy Sara,” I said while holding a finger in my other ear to
better hear her. “Just tell me calmly what is going on.”

She took a pause and caught her breath. “A dead body. The police found a
dead body. I just heard it on my radio.”

“So?”

“Are you kidding me? That’s like the biggest story of this century down
here.”

I didn’t get it. Normally when we received news like that at my old
newspaper they just put in a small note on page five, and that was it. If the
police thought it was a murder and an investigation took place we would make a
real article about it, but still only place it on page five. And Sara didn’t
even know if it was considered to be a murder case or not. It was just a dead
body. For all I knew he could have died of a heart attack.

“Don’t people die in this place?” I challenged.

In Aarhus people died every week. With the gangs of immigrants fighting
the rockers people got shot and stabbed all the time. Of course they would
bring the story if a dead body was found. But it wasn’t like it was one of the
big ones.

“He might have fallen drunk or even had a heart attack,” I said trying
to close the conversation. “I will call the police and get something for a
small article when I come back, okay?”

”No, no, no. It is not okay at all. I called Sune. He is already on his
way down there. You have to be there before anyone else. I got this from the
police radio, remember? That means no one else in the country knows anything
yet. It is what you would call a solo story.”

I  liked the ring of that. I might get it on the cover of the
morning paper. Not bad on my second day.

“Okay, give me the address.”

5

Half an hour later, I arrived at the scene. As I got near the address, I
immediately knew this was no heart attack or just a drunken man. Four police cars
were parked in front of the same house, two of them called in from Naestved,
the biggest city nearby. I recognized a big blue van as one the forensic team
from Copenhagen used.

This was big stuff.

The entrance to the house was blocked by crime tape. On the other side
of the tape policemen searched wearing suits and gloves, writing in their
notebooks, marking trace evidence, dusting for fingerprints, and marking
shoeprints.

According to the radio report Sara had heard on the scanner, the victim
was a white male, 46 years old. But I already knew that when I got there. I
recognized the house and knew that it could only be Didrik Rosenfeldt. The
house used to belong to his parents when I was a kid. And Didrik would come
down here on summer vacation from boarding school. He was my sister’s age, and
I remembered them hanging out together one summer. But something happened and
she dumped him and never spoke of him again. He was a real asshole as far as I
knew. He used to come down here and flirt with almost anything that had a
pulse. He spent his time hanging out on his parent’s yacht in the port,
drinking with his friends from the boarding school, harassing people who were
different than they and had less money. A real prick, I would call him. That
probably hadn’t changed a bit.

I looked around at the small crowd of neighborhood kids who had gathered
in front of the house, peeking in. In the middle, a tall skinny guy stood out.
He had a green Mohawk and wore a leather band with spikes around his neck, a
leather jacket, and several piercings in his eyebrows, lips and nose. He wore
black make-up on his eyes and lips. He stood out in stark contrast to this
crowd of high society upper-class kids. In his hands he held a camera that
never left his eyes, constantly taking a series of pictures. As I got close to
him I noticed that he was missing two of his fingers on his right hand.

“You must be Sune,” I said when I approached him.

He didn’t look down at me, just kept on taking pictures non-stop.

“Mmm …”

“I’m Rebekka Franck. Did you see anything yet?”

“Nope.”

“Has the body been taken out yet?”

“Nope.”

Great
, I thought. Then there was a chance we could get a picture
of the covered body on the way into the ambulance. That was always a good shot
for an article of this kind.

“Don’t you think it’s  weird, since the body was found at six
o’clock this morning?” Sune asked me.

Now that he said it, I did. It was three in the afternoon. Weren’t they
in a hurry to get the body to the lab right away and find the cause of death?

“Yeah, what does that mean?”

“That the body has been hard to get out. Maybe it was lying under
something or was tied to something.”

I nodded. This guy knew how to use his head. Not many could do that
these days without getting hurt.

“Sounds likely.”

“It must at least be a messy crime scene since it has taken them so
long. There are a lot of people in there.”

I nodded again. This guy had been at a crime scene before. And it
probably wasn’t here in Karrebaeksminde where he got that kind of experience.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.

“Nope.”

”Copenhagen?”

”Christiania. Have been and always will be a Christianite.”