Only One Life: A Novel Part 2

Louise heard the missing-person report break on the news on the local P3 radio station during the drive back to Holbaek. It was almost five o'clock when she parked behind the police station. Upstairs in the corridor she nodded at Mik Rasmussen, who was talking with a colleague.

Inside the sun-yellow command center, someone had set up a small fourteen-inch TV that was playing in the background at low volume, and there was coffee in the carafe. Ruth, the administrative a.s.sistant, and Storm were talking to Bengtsen about coordinating the first interviews with witnesses who might have known the girl. A communications guy was walking around, almost finished running a few extra outside phone lines, and Ruth was just getting a large database system up and running.

"Have you taken a look around the Station Hotel?" Ruth asked.

Louise shook her head and said she would drop her things off when they headed back there for a bite to eat.

"Have we gotten any leads from the missing-person report?" she asked with interest.

"A few tips have come in, but not really anything we can use," Ruth replied.

"But we have ten men circulating a description of the girl in town, so I don't think it'll take long for something to turn up," Storm added as he stood up. "Let's head over to the hotel and grab something to eat."

Ruth flipped the lid of her laptop shut and pushed aside the stacks of binders, pens, and pads that she had been quick to requisition before the investigation really got going. No one was going to have time to keep filing requisitions for everything they would need once the case was really under way. The mobile command center was almost ready.

At that moment one of the four telephones in the office started ringing.

"DNP Unit One Mobile Task Force, Ruth Lange speaking," she said, pulling back her voluminous hair.

"Okay, send her in. We'll come get her." She hung up and looked at Louise.

"There's a young woman here who thinks the victim we found may be a friend of hers. Can you go and talk to her? I just told your partner he could go home for a few minutes before dinner."

Louise nodded and poured a cup of coffee from the thermal carafe in the middle of the table before she grabbed a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen in case her computer hadn't been set up yet. The coffee sloshed over the rim and down the side of the cup, burning her fingers as she walked down the corridor. Swearing, she set the plastic cup down on the desk a little too hard, causing it to slosh more. She quickly wiped her hand on her pants and went out to meet the witness.

A tall, very pretty, very young blonde teenager was walking in slowly, uncertainty in her eyes.

Louise approached her with an outstretched hand and a welcoming smile.

"Hi, I'm Louise. Let's go in here." She pointed toward her office, which still seemed unoccupied and cluttered although her partner had already put his things away.

"Would you like a gla.s.s of water?" she asked as they stepped in.

The girl shook her head and sat down on the edge of the hard wooden chair that Louise had pushed toward the end of her desk.

The bags containing her laptops were still the way she had left them, but she waited to pull the pad of paper out of one of them, hoping that a little informal chat would get the girl to relax.

"What's your name?" Louise began, leaning back slightly in the office chair.

"Benedicta, Dicta for short...." The girl cleared her throat and repeated her name a little louder. "Dicta Moller. I'm in ninth grade at Hojmark School," she continued.

"And you're worried that girl we found out at Honsehalsen may be someone you know?"

It wasn't that uncommon for girls to worry about their female friends and contact the police if a girl was reported missing in the media.

"There's a girl who's in ninth grade with me but in a different homeroom who wasn't in school today," Dicta began.

Louise didn't rush her.

"She and I were going to get together this afternoon, and I haven't been able to get hold of her. She's not answering her cell, and no one answers when I call her at home." Louise nodded and waited again without saying anything. "I've been calling all afternoon."

"Do you think she might have taken off somewhere with her parents and forgotten about your plans this afternoon? Something unexpected may have come up."

Dicta thought for a moment as though the possibility hadn't occurred to her, but then she shook her head.

"She wouldn't have forgotten this. We were going to go through the photos," she said, now with more strength in her voice. "She was over at my house yesterday after school, and we talked about it then. One of the photos is going to be published this weekend in the paper."

Louise asked her to explain what kind of photos she was talking about and what paper she was referring to.

"I'm a model," the girl explained. "I model for a few stores, including Boutique Aube, and the paper is supposed to run their big ad on Sat.u.r.day. The photos were ready, and Samra was supposed to come to the photographer's and take a look at them. So she wouldn't have just taken off."

Tears started streaming down Dicta's cheeks, but she continued: "She would never do that. She keeps ..."

Dicta's emotions overwhelmed her, her words pouring out in a completely incomprehensible mess. Louise held out her hand to stop the flood of words.

"What does your friend look like?" she asked when the girl had calmed down a little.

Dicta straightened up and carefully dabbed the tears so they wouldn't ruin her makeup, as though she had only now discovered that she was crying.

"She has long, dark hair."

Louise sat up and grabbed her notepad.

"And is your friend ethnically Danish?" she asked, waiting for the next crucial answer.

"No," the girl replied hesitantly, as though she were afraid that was the wrong answer. "She's from Jordan."

"Does she have any distinguishing marks that you can think of? Or things she usually wears?"

Dicta fell silent, picturing her friend in front of her.

"She usually wears a watch. It's a Dolce & Gabbana knockoff. I bought it for her in Thailand-and she's also got a ton of bracelets. You know, bangles, where each individual one is thin, but you can wear a lot of them at the same time."

She used her index finger and thumb to indicate a width that Louise estimated at about four inches.

"Anything else?"

"Nothing that she wears regularly, but she does have jewelry."

"What about her clothes?" Louise asked instead.

"Just the usual. Jeans and T-shirts ... a lot of times she'll wear a top with a little blouse over it, and she has a beige jacket like they mentioned on the news on the radio."

Louise glanced down at the girl's feet and saw a pair of black Kawasakis. She pointed at them.

"Does she have a pair like those too?" she asked, knowing most of the girl's friends likely had them. She couldn't understand how the floppy little sneakers managed to stay in style. They'd been popular when she was the girl's age, as well.

Dicta nodded.

"We bought them together; hers are white."

The girl stopped, unable to think of anything else. Louise didn't pressure her, instead saying, "Okay, I've got all this information written down. The last thing I'll need is just your friend's full name and address, and also how to get hold of you in case we want to talk with you again."

"She usually always responds to text messages on her phone. I've also tried texting her, but she doesn't reply," Dicta said, instead of giving Louise what she had asked for.

"What's her name again?" Louise asked before Dicta started talking.

"Samra al-Abd. She lives on Dysseparken, apartment 16B," the girl said. She seemed to consider her words before continuing. "She comes over to my house a lot when her parents let her, but her father can be pretty strict; sometimes she's afraid of him. And now she's suddenly missing...."

Louise tried to rea.s.sure her by repeating that there could be any number of good reasons why her friend had missed school or blown off their plans to get together.

"There's no need to a.s.sume the worst," she said. Louise knew that lots of people saw ghosts in broad daylight when it came to persecuted immigrant girls and their fathers. Still, she had to admit that many of the things Dicta had told her might well indicate this was the right girl.

"Could I get your friend's phone number?" Louise asked, watching Dicta take her cell phone back out and browse through her contacts. Louise took down the number and also asked for her friend's home number on Dysseparken.

The girl pressed the b.u.t.ton a few more times and also gave Louise the parents' phone number.

Once she had written down both numbers as well as Dicta's, Louise nodded toward the cell phone and asked if Dicta happened to have a picture of her friend on it.

A moment later Dicta pa.s.sed her phone across the table and told Louise she'd taken the picture outside of school the week before.

Louise quickly leaned forward and took the phone, but the picture was taken from so far away you could see only the long, black hair and a blurry face. There was a certain similarity between Dicta's friend and the dead girl, but it was impossible to tell for sure if it was her.

"Unfortunately, this was taken from too far away for me to make her out properly," Louise said, handing back the phone. "Do you think you have a better one?"

The girl shook her head and explained that she had had more pictures on her old phone, but she had lost it.

"I might be able to find one at home," she offered, saying she would be happy to stop by with it the next day.

"It's a deal. Then hopefully we can rule out your friend as the girl we found," Louise told Dicta, thanking her for coming before walking her back out to the reception area. Then Louise quickly returned to the command center, but it was empty and the lights were off. She surveyed the offices, but Bengtsen was the only person still at his desk.

"Did everyone else go over to the hotel?" she asked. Bengtsen nodded without looking up from his copy of Venstrebladet, Holbak's left-leaning daily newspaper.

Louise went into her office and found Storm's cell phone number so she could call and update him on her conversation with the girl.

"Hurry over here and get some food, then we'll go over it after we've eaten," he said curtly.

"If it really is the friend, shouldn't we get in touch with the parents right away?" Louise objected.

"Of course, but we also need to eat; it's going to be a long night," he said. "Afterward we'll check out what other tips have come in on the missing-person report, and then we'll know where we stand before we start talking to people."

Louise would have continued protesting, but then she remembered that Storm called the shots. Instead, she went back in to see if Bengtsen wanted to join her.

He shook his head, but this time his eyes left the paper, and he looked at her.

"Aren't you going to eat?" she asked before leaving his office.

"Yes, but I prefer to eat at home," he said, briefly explaining that she should just head left when exiting the police station, and then take a right. Then she'd come to the Central Station Square where the train station and the Station Hotel were located.

"See you later," Louise said, heading back to retrieve her bags from the car before she set out on foot toward the hotel.

5.

LAST NIGHT HE CUT DEEP GASHES INTO HIS OWN FACE. He can't take it anymore; I have to keep an eye on him.

Camilla teared up as she read the old e-mail in her inbox. She was still deeply upset that Henning had shown up at the community center to tell her to her face that she should stay away. When she got back to her office at Morgenavisen, she immediately checked her e-mail to see if he had sent an explanation, but there wasn't any word from him. Now she sat there depressed, skimming through his old e-mail instead.

They used to talk to each other, she and Henning. They both thought their relationship was strong enough to handle what had happened in Roskilde. Camilla couldn't recall ever being so determined to fight for a relationship. Not even when she and Tobias had started drifting apart when Markus was about one year old.

A few weeks after Henning's brother was arrested, they had lunch at one of the colorful eighteenth-century restaurants on Franciscan Square, right off the pedestrian shopping district downtown. After coffee, they sat holding hands across the table, promising each other that their relationship would survive, despite the trauma they had shared in regard to the headline-grabbing online-dating case involving several brutal rapes.

"It's settled. It will always be the two of us," he said, and at the time that had filled her with relief. But then everything suddenly went to h.e.l.l-ending with that e-mail he'd sent saying he had to focus on taking care of his brother.

As she sat staring at her screen, she would have given anything in the world to just let go of him and move on, but she couldn't. He filled her thoughts, and she was close to exploding from the pain of longing to have him back in her life. He was the man who had finally shown her what it felt like to come home. He was the one: she had known it after their first week together.

Her hands were still trembling a bit as she opened the door to her editor's office to announce that she was back.

Terkel Hoyer was sitting behind his desk and didn't look like he was going to be heading home anytime soon either.

"No word from Holbaek since they issued the missing-person report," he said.

Camilla had been on the crime beat at Morgenavisen for several years and had gotten good at reading her boss. She could sense that he was all fired up about running something in the paper the next day.

"We've got to include every angle on the story. You're going to have to get someone local to talk, otherwise we'll just be rehashing what we did out in Slagelse the first few days after Ghazala Kahn was killed. There wasn't any depth to our coverage, and people lost interest in the story."

Camilla watched him for a moment. She didn't actually think there was anything strange about readers' avoiding the tragedy of an entire family joining forces to beat their daughter to death because she'd sullied their familial honor by marrying someone they didn't want her to. Camilla really couldn't blame readers for turning their backs on that one in disgust. At the same time, she understood what Terkel was saying. Over time, all the reporting on cases like these started to sound the same, so their coverage of this case would pack more of a punch if she could land an interview with members of the family. That probably wouldn't be so easy to accomplish, but she could certainly take it on as a challenge.

"And then of course you'll byline a report from Holbaek with local reactions and whatever else you can dig up."

She nodded and got to work packing up her laptop and throwing a few things into a small bag so she could spend the following day in Holbaek.

"But we still don't know if the girl is actually from there," she pointed out.

He conceded her point but thought it wouldn't hurt to stick to the plan all the same.

"I talked to Storm," he explained. "The MTF already has a team in town. It's probably not a bad idea to stick close to them. He agreed to give us an update on the case by phone later tonight, once they've gotten a little more information to put out. You stay here and write that tonight so we can run it in the next edition, and then drive out there tomorrow morning."

Camilla nodded and thought about Storm, whom she had a great working relationship with. He didn't have the same aloofness from the press that several of the other lead detectives had, which undeniably made it a little easier to enjoy friendly rather than irritable interactions with the police.

She went back to her office to pull out her calendar. Sometimes she was organized enough to jot down her family's and friends' plans. This was usually limited to her mother in Skanderborg, Markus's dad, and Louise. She started by calling Tobias to find out if he could take their son a day earlier than planned. Normally this week he was supposed to pick Markus up from his independent boarding school on Friday and keep him until Monday morning, but if he didn't have other plans he was usually more than happy to take Markus for an extra day.