Three, Four...Better Lock Your Door (15 page)

"Pretty sure. Why?"

"No reason." He shook his head. "So what do you want to know?"

"You wrote a book about the usage of lobotomies here in Denmark stating that you had documentation that said it was used all the way into the Nineties. What kind of documentation did you have?"

Mogens Holst sniffed and killed his cigarette in the ashtray.

"Could I see it?" I asked.

He looked at me with skepticism. It made me feel uncomfortable. Maybe Irene Hoeg had been right. Maybe he was a nutcase. But if he had the documentation then I wanted to see it. I felt there was a story there for me to tell.

"Why? What do you want to do with it?" he asked. "You know I have withdrawn the book, right? You do realize that I had to take it all back afterwards? No one believes in a word I said back then."

I know. That's something I wanted to talk to you about as well. Why did you withdraw everything?"

Mogens Holst sighed. "I had to. The bastards forced me."

"Who did?"

 He exhaled deeply. He picked up the pack of cigarettes and took out another one. The room was getting heavy with smoke as he lit the next one.

"They ruined my name," he said. "Cost me everything. My work, my family."

"Who? How?" I asked.

"I never found out exactly who was behind it. I do however have a pretty good picture of who it might have been. It happened over a short period of time. It started with my research funding being stopped suddenly. Then the university threw me out. Said my research wasn't valuable, told me I had been falsifying results. Later my publisher withdrew the book and told me to go public and apologize. Tell the world that I was wrong. Then my story was all over the media, the story about me being a drunk, a schizophrenic who was now self-medicating with alcohol. No one wanted to hear what I said anymore. Lost all my credibility, they said. The truth was drowned in a smear campaign about my personality."

"Why would they say all those things?" I asked.

He looked at me. Then he burst into laughter that led to a hoarse cough. "Because I am. They found my papers that stated I had been admitted several times to a mental institution when I was younger."

"So it wasn't a lie?"

Mogens Holst leaned over the table. He stared at me with narrow eyes. "No it’s true alright. But I never falsified those documents. Anyone who sees them will know they're true. I knew when I found them that this was explosive material. I just didn't realize how far into the system it reached."

"How far did it reach?"

"This is so big. It can overthrow the government. I didn't know it when I wrote the book, it wasn't until later that I realized that the current prime minister knows that these things have taken place and she has chosen to hide it. She was the minister of the department of health from 1990-1994. She was the one who approved it. Our current prime-minister, the leader of this country is responsible for this happening. If this is revealed she will be forced to resign."

I gasped. My heart was racing in my chest. This was an even bigger story than I had expected. "What did they approve? The usage of lobotomy?"

"They lobotomized kids all the way into the nineties. The last I have found record of was conducted in 1993."

"Wow. But they say that the use of lobotomy ended in the late Seventies?" I said.

"That's the story they are sticking to, yes. But it didn't. There was a place here close to Karrebaeksminde - Lundegaarden - where they sent criminal children and teenagers that they had no idea what to do with. They used them as lab rats, as experiments. The doctors there had a theory. They believed that the criminals were born with a defect in the brain that they could somehow fix. That was why they deviated, that was why they displayed such cruelty and indifference to other people. You have to remember that these kids were bad news; they were killers and rapists at a very young age. They were somebody no one wanted in society, someone they would have placed on a deserted island if possible. But they were too young to go to prison. So the doctors had a theory that they could somehow fix what was wrong with them. They just needed to find the right “wires” to cut, so to speak. They thought they could somehow “cut the evil out of them.” That was how it was presented to the minister of health back then. They were certain they had detected where the defect was in the brain that caused these kids to be evil. They thought they had found a way they could help these young people to get a normal life, a way to cure them so to speak."

"By lobotomizing them?" I asked startled.

Mogens Holst nodded. "They said that they had found a new method. That back in the days when they had done it on psychiatric patients they cut the wrong nerve paths. That was why it went wrong. But these doctors were certain they could do this right and make Denmark known all over the world for this research. Imagine being able to cure criminal teenagers? Imagine how much money the government would save on juvenile prisons and personnel by removing this burden, by pacifying these criminals who didn't contribute anything to our society and make them no longer a threat to ordinary decent people?"

"But what happened to them?" I asked still shocked at how this could have happened less than twenty years ago.

"They became apathetic of course. Some even died from brain damage. But it wasn't spoken about. No one ever missed them. In the system they weren't considered human. They were experiments. Their lives had no value."

I stared at Mogens Holst in shock. I couldn't believe him. I didn't want to believe him. I shook my head.

"This is horrible,” I said. "You have the documentation for all this?"

He nodded with a smile. "I do."

"Could I see it?"

Mogens Holst got up from the couch. He went into another room and then returned shortly after. A huge stack of files and papers landed on the desk in front of me. "You can have it all. Never did me any good. No one will ever believe me again. Not after they destroyed my name. My own wife even turned her back at me. Didn't believe I was right in my mind any longer, she said." Mogens Holst scoffed. "Maybe she was right. Look at me now. I’m a drunk and a lowlife. Nobody cares anymore."

I stared at the piles of paper. I had no idea what to do with this material, with this story. Would the paper run it? Would they dare?

Mogens Holst had put a copy of his book on top of the pile. I took it and read the back. According to the text there had been “many operations performed on children as young as eight years of age, even though their brains were not yet completely developed.”

I leaned back in my chair shocked by this. I couldn't believe that they had actually done this to children. I thought about what we did to them today. Drugging them with all kinds of things if they turned out to be just a little wild or uncontrollable. It seemed that the medical world had always been trying to explain deviant behavior and responding to it with medicine or surgery. These were children we were talking about. Criminals or not. This was not right. It had to be told.

I got up from the chair and grabbed all the files and papers.

"I hope you'll have more luck with this than I had," said Mogens Holst as I walked toward the door. He held it open for me.

I sighed. "I really hope I will too," I said.

C
HAPTER 26

I
BROKE OUT IN
a cold sweat while I drove back towards Karrebaeksminde. The papers and files were in the back seat. This was huge, I thought. This could be the story of my career. This kind of stuff could make or break a career. It was every journalist’s dream to come across material like this that could overthrow a government.

It had to have been the same for Mogens Holst as well back when he discovered this. It must have been the highlight of his career for him, the research, the book everything had to have been so big, and then ... then he was destroyed. Was that going to happen to me too if I chose to write the story? But what could they do to me? Disgrace my name? Discredit my career? Could I do this and not care about my future, about the price I would have to pay?

I wasn't sure. Yet I wasn't sure I could afford not to write this.

I parked the car in my usual parking spot and walked towards the office building. The streets were empty. Deserted, vacant, abandoned. Most of the small shops in the main street were closed down. Only a few remained open even if they knew nobody was going to come. Fear was slowly killing the town. People gave into their fear and stayed home. They only went out when it was absolutely necessary. Like going to work or going to school in the morning. Nobody went out for fun or at night, nobody shopped except for groceries, nobody went out to eat at the restaurants or stayed at the hotels. This was really bad. Everybody kept inside their houses, curtains closed, waiting for the next murder to happen, fearing they would be the next victim. How long was this supposed to go on? How long could the town survive this?

I opened the door and went up the stairs carrying the files and papers in my arms. With great difficulty I managed to open the door to the editorial room by pushing it with my back. Sune came to my rescue.

"Here let me grab some of that," he said and took the papers out of my hands. "What is all this?"

I exhaled and took off my jacket. "I'm not sure," I said. "It might just be the biggest story of my career or it might be the end of it."

I smiled. Then I told him what Mogens Holst had said and what I expected to find in the secret files. Sune and Sara were both shocked.

"So how are you doing here?" I looked at Sara and then at Sune. They had put up a whiteboard in the room and written all over it. I approached it.

"We tried to paint a picture of the three victims by writing down anything we found about them that could have any interest," Sune said and pointed at Susanne Larsen's name that was written on top. "For example we know Susanne Larsen was a mother of two, a boy and a girl, and she was married to a police officer in Naestved. We also know that she worked as a nurse at Naestved Hospital ..."

"What kind of nurse was she?" I asked.

Sune shook his head. "I don't know."

"I need that information too. I need everything. Everything looks great though. Very thorough."

"She was in palliative care," Sara said. "She helped patients who suffered from brain tumors or mental dysfunctions."

"Great. Put it down for me will you?"

Sara wrote it under Susanne Larsen's name. I stared at the whiteboard, studied it. I read where they went to school, where they grew up, about Susanne Larsen's husband and their children, about Anders Hoejmark's love for badminton that later lead to his job as the president of the club, about Linda Nielsen's severe depression that had started as many as twenty years ago and caused her to start overeating and be declared unable to work. I tried all I could but I didn't see any connection. Not an obvious one at least.

I grabbed a chair and stared at the whiteboard for a long time. Sune brought me a cup of coffee that I drank while thinking. All the information the last couple of days was mixed in my head, all the theories, all the thoughts, everything there had been said was twirling around in my head until I had a thought, an idea.

"What if ...?" I said.

Sune and Sara looked closely at me with anticipating eyes like they had expected me to speak a long time ago.

"Let's say that someone knew about this work that they did at Lundegaarden with the criminal children or maybe that person was even a part of it and believed that they could in fact help people with deviant behavior. Help them become normal or at least somewhat pacified and relieved from whatever made them do what they had done, relieved from being evil."

Sune and Sara stared at me with great skepticism.

"Just follow me here," I said. "Keep an open mind. Let's say that this person - who by the way must be out of his mind - but this person wants to keep doing these lobotomies and continue the work they began, maybe even thinking they were working for a good cause. Maybe he lost it recently and suddenly got the idea that he could help or maybe even get rid of people who were somehow wrong or who didn't behave right."

Sune looked like he understood. "You think the killer used to work at Lundegaarden and used to perform these lobotomies?"

I nodded. "It's a wild theory, I know."

"But Susanne Larsen, Anders Hoejmark nor Linda Nielsen were criminals."

"Maybe the killer is not getting rid of criminals but just people displaying morally wrong behavior, morally decadent. You see where I am going?"

Sara sighed. "But how do the victims fit into that?"

"Linda Nielsen was kind of disabled. She was declared unfit to work and could hardly take care of herself. But there wasn't anything really wrong with her physically that she hadn't afflicted upon herself through her depression. So maybe the killer sees it as morally bad behavior. She is a problem for society, she costs money, and she doesn't contribute."

"Just like the young criminals," Sune said.

"Exactly," I continued. "According to Mogens Holst that was the way they saw the children at Lundegaarden, as a burden. Their illness was something that had to be cured. Maybe this person is trying to ’clean up’ if you know what I mean."

"But what about the other two?" Sune asked.

"Susanne Larsen was unfaithful to her husband and not just having an affair like most do in cases of infidelity. She was having S&M - sex with strangers at hotels while her husband knew nothing of it."

"That's bad moral behavior alright," Sune said. "And Anders Hoejmark?"

I shrugged. "Well he was gay. It said so in the police report. People in the club told the police that they all knew he was gay but he was trying to hide it. They also said that there were rumors about him having sex with men in the men's dressing room after closing time, but they were never confirmed."

Sune and Sara looked at me while nodding. "Sounds like we have a plausible theory," Sune said.

"So the killer is someone who used to work at Lundegaarden?" Sara repeated.