Call Me Princess Part 11

"If you don't find that man who molested my daughter," Susanne's mother continued, "then I'll be forced to go to the press again and ask for their help." She sounded like a patient defending her right to see a dentist to have an abscess removed.

During her entire tirade, the mother had not once noticed Susanne rocking side to side, her eyes completely vacant.

Louise couldn't be bothered to respond, which offended Susanne's mother, who slammed the door behind her as she left in a huff.

Louise gave Susanne's arm one final squeeze and then stood up and said good-bye.

- DOWN ON THE STREET BELOW, LARS WAS ILLEGALLY PARKED IN THE narrow drive that led to the building's inner courtyard. Louise slid into the pa.s.senger seat and sat there in silence as they headed out to Frederiksberg.

"How's your son?" she asked as they made their way over Valby Hill. She was watching the bicyclists struggling up it, their legs working in labored strokes.

"He needed seven st.i.tches," Lars replied.

Louise nodded, still looking straight ahead.

"And now the other one has a fever!" Lars continued.

"Oh, thank G.o.d I don't have kids!" Louise blurted out. Louise usually kept these types of thoughts to herself, but she didn't manage to catch this one in time.

Her partner glanced over and smiled indulgently-and a tad enviously, Louise suspected.

She was waiting for him to ask about the autopsy, but since he obviously figured she would just start talking about it, the silence ended up becoming awkward.

"He could have saved her," she began. "Flemming thinks the gag slipped back in her mouth when the perp knocked her over. If that's true, then she died within five minutes, and there's no f.u.c.king way he couldn't have noticed. She lost consciousness almost immediately."

Lars's jaw muscles tensed. "We have got to get this guy."

That indulgent smile he had given her as they discussed sick children was suddenly gone, replaced by an expression of single-minded determination.

"Toft and Stig are looking through Christina's computer," Lars said. "They'll hand it over to CCU tomorrow. This time, there have to be some f.u.c.king leads to go on. Every move he makes can't be so carefully thought out. He's bound to slip up on something."

Louise shrugged. Lars noticed this out of the corner of his eye and put more resolve in his voice.

"He must have written something we can use," he continued, turning to look at her.

"He could have written all kinds of things. It doesn't necessarily mean we'll find him," Louise retorted. "He could be sitting in an Internet cafe G.o.d knows where, luring his next victim into his trap at this very moment, and we have no way of knowing he's at it again."

"Why are all the f.u.c.king streets out here one-way?!" Lars growled, testily backing up while ranting about the neighborhood streets around the Frederiksberg neighborhood swimming center.

Louise was astonished and didn't respond. Her partner rarely lost his temper like that. They were both worked up, professionally and personally, and aggression was a natural way to deal with that.

She inhaled all the way down to her stomach and slowly exhaled before continuing.

"We have to persuade Suhr to warn the public about this guy," she said. "And then he'll have to a.s.sign extra personnel to watch the phones if he doesn't think we'll have time to talk to each of the frightened women who will inevitably call in and start indiscriminately reporting men by the truckload...."

She took another deep breath. "I wonder how much he already has planned out as he sits at the computer writing e-mails to lure these women into his trap," she mulled.

Her voice had grown calm again, and that clearly rubbed off on her colleague.

"I wouldn't be surprised," Lars said, "if he has pictured, to the smallest detail, what it will sound like when he tightens the cable ties around the women's hands and feet. How the plastic teeth will slide through the locking mechanism with small, sharp clicks." Lars made smacking sounds with his tongue to ill.u.s.trate. "The mere fact that he brings his 'rape case' with him on dates shows that he's planning to go all the way before he even leaves home," he concluded and then, after a short pause, added, "Anyway, none of my male friends bring plastic strips, duct tape, and condoms along with them in their briefcases."

He pulled into some angle parking under the trees on Adilsvej. The quiet street in the Frederiksberg neighborhood wasn't far from where Camilla lived, so Louise knew the area. They walked toward the entrance.

One of the crime-scene investigators' blue emergency response vans had pulled over between two NO PARKING signs. Christina Lerche had lived on the second floor.

Louise tried the handle of the locked main door before calling up on the security phone. She stood there peering up at the building while they waited to be buzzed in. Upstairs in the entry of Christina's apartment, they stepped over a toilet and bathroom sink that the CSIs had removed to inspect the drainage pipes and sewer line underneath.

"Have you found anything?" Louise asked from the hallway, calling into the bathroom where two investigators were leaning over the open drain.

"We can always hope that he was dumb enough to flush the condom down the toilet. Or maybe he took the time to rinse his p.e.n.i.s in the sink before he packed up his things," said Frandsen, the lead forensic specialist. He smiled optimistically and waved at Lars, before going back to concentrating on the drainpipe.

"What about fingerprints from the bedroom?" Louise asked.

"They were good. But we don't have a match for them in our database, so it's not a guy we've dealt with before."

Well, that definitively rules out Karsten Flintholm, Louise thought. His fingerprints were in the archive. She watched Frandsen as he got up to join them in the hallway. He fished his pipe out of his white overalls before walking off toward the bedroom with it. It wasn't customary to smoke at a crime scene, and Louise had never seen him actually light the pipe.

Louise stopped in the doorway to the bedroom, astonished. A large hole had been cut in the wall between the bedroom and the living room.

"It's not a load-bearing wall or anything," Frandsen said, smiling and taking the pipe out of his mouth. "There was evidence of the struggle on that section. I didn't want to risk not getting the whole thing, so we just took the wall down and ran it through the superglue-fuming chamber."

Louise nodded. In another case, she herself had helped examine a section of attic wall they had cut out and hauled into the forensics lab, where a technician put the section of wall into a large, airtight chamber along with fresh superglue in a heated reservoir. She had been amazed at the results: the glue vaporizes, and the vapor adheres to any latent fingerprints on the surface of the wall. The prints are then clear and relatively easy to see and photograph.

Louise walked over to the foot of the bed. "Is this where you think they fought?" she asked, turning toward Frandsen.

He nodded, and she studied the narrow s.p.a.ce between the bed and the wall.

"She must have kicked him with her legs together, and if she hit him it would have been with the sides of her arms and palms, or she could also have pushed straight into him with her fists clasped together," he said.

"Flemming found subcutaneous bleeding on her arms, so it seems conceivable that she swung her arms at him or used them to block his blows," Louise said.

A wicker laundry basket was tipped over. She guessed that it had been on the right by the foot of the bed opposite the door, and there was a chair in the corner with Christina's clothes on it.

"Actually, it's strange that he didn't stand things back up again before he left, to make it less obvious that there had been a struggle," Frandsen said, puzzled.

Lars joined them.

"He was very meticulous the first time," Louise said. "Is there anything in the other rooms?"

She walked into the living room, where a door leading to something that looked like an office was ajar.

"No, they went right into the bedroom."

"She had a pretty high blood alcohol reading. They must have had drinks somewhere," Louise informed the others as she walked over to the desk. There was an empty spot where the computer had been. The investigators had been studying the thin layer of dust that covered the top of the desk like a membrane.

"We thought he might have tried to delete something from her hard drive before he left. But he obviously knew we could probably recover whatever he deleted, because he didn't go anywhere near her desk-we found only her fingerprints in this area."

"Eureka!" The shout came from the bathroom, and when they got there, one of the forensic guys was sitting on the floor holding a flaccid condom he had fished up out of the toilet's drainpipe using a pair of thin, curved tweezers.

Louise and Lars stayed back while Frandsen went in and squatted down to study the find.

"Well, would you look at that?" Frandsen's contented statement filled the room with a mood of intense antic.i.p.ation, which Louise shattered with a question that she could just as easily have waited to ask until they had ridden the wave of progress for a minute.

"Can the evidence survive sitting in the sewer pipe for almost two days?"

Frandsen got serious again.

"Even if it takes a month to clean it up, we'll get a DNA profile out of it," he said, still with a confident, victorious air to his voice. "But you're right, it's harder to get DNA from a sample that's been kept wet. The forensic pathologists have to cleanse the cells, and they often have to cleanse the impure cells many times before they're pure enough to get a profile from. But, s.h.i.t, we will do whatever it takes."

He moved his pipe back to the corner of his mouth.

Louise's cell phone rang, and she stepped away from the group a little before answering.

The enthusiasm in Heilmann's voice was infectious. "One of Christina Lerche's girlfriends, who has keys to her apartment, found her yesterday afternoon. She's coming in here in an hour. Can you come talk to her?" Heilmann asked.

"We're leaving soon," Louise replied. "I'm in Christina's apartment now, and the CSI guys just found a used condom in the drain under the toilet. It's starting to look like we're getting somewhere."

Adrenaline coursed through Louise's bloodstream, and she pushed the faint pangs of hunger that had sneaked up on her in the apartment from her mind as she started mentally running through the interview she was about to conduct.

"I think the friend might have something interesting to tell us. It appears that Christina Lerche was not particularly tight-lipped when it came to talking about her conquests, so we can hope that she described the suspect to her circle of friends, if she had met him previously," Heilmann continued without stopping. "It would be great if you and Lars both came back, because I would really like Lars to be there when they go through her computer."

"Where's Stig?"

"He's busy with the MTP and won't be back until Wednesday of next week," Heilmann said.

Louise felt her lips purse. It still irked her no end whenever anything reminded her that Michael Stig had been selected for the police department's Management Training Program, which meant that he was out of the division about two days a week, and ultimately there was a risk he might one day be her boss. G.o.d forbid, she thought. Plus, she knew that Lars had also applied but had been pa.s.sed over. That had caused some tension in the group, what with Stig gloating and Lars grumbling.

"I'll tell Lars," Louise said.

She went back into the living room, where her colleague was studying the victim's CD case.

"Heilmann wants us back at headquarters. I'm going to do an interview, and you need to be there while they go through the victim's computer."

He nodded and looked around to solidify the details of the scene in his mind. The apartment was nice, simple, without any knick-knacks and tastefully furnished. The furniture might be from Ikea, but, combined with the lamps and the framed photographs on the wall, it looked fashionable. No piles of stuff, no mess, no throw-blankets draped over the arm of the recliner.

"What did she do?" Louise asked as they started toward the front door.

"Realtor," Lars said. He had flipped through a couple of the folders on the bookshelf in the office. "She worked for one of the big agencies north of Frederiksberg on Falkoner Alle."

Louise went to retrieve her purse and jacket from the victim's kitchen. The realtor thing didn't surprise her, because there was quite a bit of truth to the notion that you can learn a lot about a person by looking at their stuff. An air of quality pervaded Christina's apartment, which gave the impression of a tenant who knew quite a bit about interior decorating. That would make sense for a realtor.

Louise peeked in on the two CSI guys, who were both leaning over the drainpipe under the sink.

"Good luck, guys. See you later," she said and waved.

"Yup," Frandsen said, giving them a farewell salute with two fingers to his temple as she and Lars left.

16.

"I COULD TELL THIS GUY WAS DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS. Christina didn't talk about anything else after her first date with him."

Marianne With was sitting on the very edge of her chair. Christina Lerche's friend had twisted up her dark her and secured it to the top of her head with a clip. She had a nice complexion and wasn't wearing any makeup. She was thirty-three, just like Christina, and they had worked together for four years.

"She really enjoyed herself. She was a happy person. I envied her that."

Marianne seemed to slump, staring off into s.p.a.ce and receding into her own thoughts before she continued. "But she was also the kind of person you could easily think was sort of overdoing it. She was totally obsessed with online dating. She had profiles on G.o.d knows how many different dating sites, and she never made any secret of it. She sometimes went out with several guys in the same week, although she rarely went on more than one or two dates with the same guy. It was as though that first meeting was the only part that interested her. After that she'd toss them aside, discard them, and the next day she'd be at it again with someone new."

Louise observed the dark-haired woman as she spoke. There was no doubt that Marianne did not approve of her friend's behavior, but at the same time Louise detected a touch of envy in her voice. Christina's behavior, at least the way Marianne was describing it, was not unusual, though. A little while back, the division had held a Friday continuing-education meeting where a Swedish lifestyle researcher gave a talk about the increasing number of people who were becoming addicted to online dating.

"But it wasn't like that with this guy," Marianne continued.

The vaguely disapproving tone was gone from her voice. Now she just sounded sincere, and sad.

"I think he charmed her with his chivalry. The way she told it, she made it sound almost like some heroic deed that he had walked her back to the subway."

Marianne slumped again. She sat staring at the floor before straightening up and saying, "Sometimes I thought she deserved a good slap on the wrist."

Her voice started sounding choked up, and Louise braced herself for a bout of sobbing.

"She would get all irritated whenever a bouquet of flowers would show up at the office from one of her rejects," Marianne continued, her voice not breaking after all. "She lost interest so fast that the guys totally didn't get that the relationship was over." She paused briefly. "I really shouldn't be talking about her like this," she sniffled.

"What day did they see each other?" Louise asked, all her senses heightened, ignoring the witness's self-reproach. Her question was so abrupt that Marianne looked at Louise in confusion.

"What do you mean?"

"Tell me when Christina went out with him," Louise explained. "Where did they go, and when did he walk her back to the subway?"

"It must have been Monday or Tuesday."

"Do you mean only three or four days went by between when they met for the first time and when he murdered her?"

Louise was champing at the bit, but trying not to push Marianne too hard so she wouldn't freeze up.

"It felt like more time had pa.s.sed," Marianne said, "but it must have all happened the same week. We were at a training seminar the week before that. And they hadn't met each other yet then. But she did say she'd been e-mailing a guy who sounded interesting. I'm quite sure now that it was Monday. They were supposed to get together after work in front of those quaint old pubs along the quay in Nyhavn."

"Did they go out to eat?" Louise urged. "Or did they see a movie?" Louise searched her memory, trying to think of other things people might do on a first date.

"Uh-uh," Marianne said. "That was one of the things Christina thought was so great about him. They just went somewhere and talked, and it seemed like she was impressed to meet a guy who was both well-read and gentlemanly at the same time. She told me about how they had chatted for a couple hours before he politely asked if he could take her out to dinner on Friday. After she said yes, that was when he walked her back to the subway."

"So that was late afternoon or early evening?" Louise prodded.