Only One Life: A Novel Part 27

Dean had pulled his chair back a little and was stretching out his legs. "This all suggests your basic honor/shame scenario," he said and looked at Skipper. "One life doesn't matter that much when you look at their entire extended family-the ones living here in Denmark and the ones back home in Jordan-in which this kind of thing generally has ripple effects that people would prefer not to deal with."

Louise could tell that Mik was going to contradict him, but he stopped himself.

"What about Hamid?" she asked.

Louise hadn't talked to Hamid herself. She had concentrated on Ibrahim and felt that eventually the two of them had built up a decent rapport. Mik had continued with Hamid, even though they still hadn't clicked.

"He's sick of it," Mik said. "And I also get the sense that he's afraid of what's going to happen. Whether they end up in jail or get kicked out of the country. He talks a lot about school and his friends, but he says he didn't know anything about his sister having a boyfriend. I had hoped, and still hope, that he could tell us who the boyfriend is. But apparently there isn't anyone who can."

"What did the techs find? There must be something that can tie them to the two killings," Louise said, and was immediately followed by Dean, who asked, "What about the wiretap?"

"Nothing noteworthy," Storm admitted, "which is to say, no increased activity; but all three family members consented to let Bengtsen and Velin do a cheek swab on them, so we can check their DNA profiles. No DNA material was found on Samra and we have to a.s.sume that any that might have been there was washed away in the water, but we did secure several samples from Dicta. We just haven't heard back yet from the Forensic Genetics Lab if there was enough to construct a profile."

Storm moved on to the witness statements. "Several people saw Dicta down on the big lawn behind Hotel Strandparken on Sat.u.r.day afternoon when she was doing the photo shoot Michael Mogensen told us about. She went home to eat a little past six and left her house again at seven-thirty to bike over to Liv's place, where she was going to spend the night. She arrived there fifteen minutes later and stayed with Liv until a bit after eleven, when she left. Dicta said she was going to meet the photographer and promised to come back before the next morning, so Liv wouldn't have to explain to her parents where Dicta had gone."

"And she was exchanging text messages with Tue Sunds all evening," Louise interjected.

Storm nodded and continued. "After that, the father of one of her cla.s.smates saw her on Ahlgade entering a shop, and a couple of witnesses also saw her downtown at that late hour, but no one can tell us with a hundred percent certainty exactly where they saw her. But the route fits nicely if she went from Liv's place toward Nygade and then on up to the train station. After that, there's no trace of her. Where was she going?"

"To Copenhagen," the detectives said, all speaking at once, and Storm nodded again.

"Yes, we're a.s.suming that she went to the station to take the last train into the city at 11:45 P.M."

"But she never boarded," Bengtsen concluded, lost in contemplation for a moment. "Should we try to recreate the route she took from Liv's place to the scene of the crime?" he asked, looking slowly around the table.

"We have a good working relationship with Venstrebladet," Dean added, and said the paper had been known to include photos before if the police requested it to jog people's memories.

"That's not a bad idea," Bengtsen agreed, looking at his younger colleague. "Let's get one of their photographers to walk the route with us and take pictures of the locations where we know Dicta was seen and of the actual crime scene."

Storm nodded and thought for a moment. "Let's do it. But we can't do the same thing for Samra, because she wasn't killed out at Honsehalsen. She was brought out there after she was killed."

"The duty officer just received a call from the harbor master that someone vandalized Ibrahim's boat yesterday or last night," Ruth interrupted, having just walked in the door. She said that someone had painted extremely cra.s.s messages all over it.

"Maybe that means we should start paying attention to the threats against the family. At least as long as the mother is still living in the apartment with those two little ones," Ruth said, taking a seat.

The group went silent. The newspapers had already described the mood in town as a lynch mob out to get the al-Abd family and other Muslim families as well. People were lumping all the Muslims together in terms of a.s.signing blame for the two girls' deaths. But until now the anger that had arisen had not been manifested in any kind of physical a.s.sault.

They discussed a.s.signing officers to protect Sada and her children or maybe moving them out of town.

"Let's contact Venstrebladet," Storm said, concluding the meeting. "We need to get those photos taken tomorrow."

They all stood up and trickled out into the hall, heading off to shut their office doors before going to eat, when the cell phone in Louise's pocket started vibrating. She could see that it was Camilla and answered it with a perky "What's up?"

Mik stepped on the back of her heel, giving her a flat tire, when she abruptly stopped, listening to her friend's torrent of words. When she hung up, she called her colleagues together before they had a chance to disappear into their offices.

"Aida is missing," she said loud enough for everyone to hear her.

"What do you mean, 'missing'?" Skipper asked, stopping in the doorway to his and Dean's office.

Louise explained that Camilla had just received a call from Sada, who had explained, with some confusion, that the two children had had permission to go down and play in the sandbox before dinner. Dysseparken's minimal playground facility was off the end of the parking lot in front of the al-Abds' building.

Storm called them back into the command room and asked Louise to finish explaining.

"When Sada went down to get them, Jamal was sitting there alone, playing, and when she asked him where his sister was, he just said she'd left. Sada spent the last hour running around looking for her daughter until she called Camilla a second ago and asked her what she should do."

"The little girl could have gone to visit someone," Velin suggested. "But we have to react, given the threats people have been making against them the last several days. We have to go find that girl."

Louise agreed. They needed to act immediately. It really didn't matter what kind of mischief Aida might have gotten into. It was embarra.s.sing that the police hadn't responded to the threats. They had talked about providing some kind of protection for Sada and the little ones so many times, but it just hadn't been done.

"Why the h.e.l.l didn't she call us?" the MTF captain asked, irritated.

"Because-" Louise began, and Storm finished her sentence: "So far, we haven't done anything besides split up her family.

So we're not her first choice to turn to when she needs help. We're going out there."

38.

ASMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE "OF ETHNIC BACKGROUND"-as Skipper put it-were gathered in the parking lot. Storm pulled Louise aside with a tug on her arm.

"Go find out what the mother says," he told her and then returned to the others to start a search.

Louise spotted Sada right away. She was sitting on a bench with Jamal on her lap surrounded by a crowd of people. Louise made it to the middle of the crowd and was standing right in front of Sada before the woman noticed her and pointed over to the sandbox through her sobs. Just then Camilla came running up to them and Sada made room for her on the bench.

Everyone standing around moved back a little, uneasy about the level of intimacy they perceived between the blonde journalist and the Jordanian woman. Louise understood their reaction. This was an unfamiliar situation: an outsider was unreservedly offering the same degree of concern and caring they had been providing.

"Maybe she went over to someone's house?" Camilla asked when Sada looked up at her. And at that second, Louise had no doubt that Camilla was there as a private person and not as a journalist.

Aida's mother shook her head. In the background, Louise noticed that Mik and Skipper had started organizing the people who had turned out to help into a search party.

"Maybe somebody was bothering her, so she hid?" Camilla suggested, stroking Sada's arm as she spoke.

Louise looked at her. That wasn't unlikely, based on what Camilla had described the crowd of teenagers doing to Sada and the kids outside the train station.

Sada shook her head again. "Then Jamal would have been scared too," she said, "but he was sitting here quite calmly, playing, when I came to get them."

"When did you last see her?" Louise asked, leaning over to hear Sada's quiet voice.

"Four o'clock. They came down to play when I started making dinner."

That was over two hours ago. That was a long time for a four-year-old girl to be away, but it wasn't normally long enough to report a person missing. But this wasn't a normal situation.

Louise walked over to inform the rest of the police officers what had happened, and over the next half hour the local police got a search going that would focus on the area around Dysseparken to begin with. There was still a small hope that she had gotten wrapped up playing with a friend and lost track of the time or wandered off. It was well past dinnertime, and if she'd forgotten the hour, her hunger would soon remind her that it was time to go home.

Louise was picturing worst-case scenarios. How had the little girl been lured away from her younger brother? Did she struggle, or did she go along trustingly? The thoughts piled into her head, and Louise wished again that they'd managed to do something to provide more protection for Sada and the two children.

Word of the girl's disappearance had started to draw a crowd. Some people were standing off to the side in small groups; others came over to ask if they could help with the search. People were ranting or chatting. Among all those who expressed fear for what might have happened to the four-year-old girl, there was also the odd remark that the family had brought the girl's disappearance on themselves, that they deserved it after what they'd done.

Storm had handed over command of the search to Bengtsen, who knew the town and all the local officers who'd been brought in to help. Two canine units were also on their way. His voice was stern and his words succinct and precise. There wasn't any room for mistakes. At the same time, there was a push to appeal to the public so any potential witnesses would step up sooner rather than later. The faster they closed this case, the faster they could calm the anti-immigrant mood smoldering in the town, which had already had too much of an impact.

"Dean will stay with Sada in case the girl turns up on her own. The rest of us will join the search. We'll split up the town into zones and each take charge of one area," Storm commanded.

"Should Ibrahim be informed?" Mik asked, but then shook his head.

Louise agreed. There wasn't anything he could do to help.

Camilla came over to them. The autumn twilight was upon them, and that would only make the search more difficult.

"I'm going to help search," Camilla said once she reached Bengtsen, ignoring the protests of the local officers. She mentioned the unpleasant episode in front of the train station again. "Maybe I could recognize those guys if I saw them again. We have to find her tonight, otherwise it means something happened to her."

39.

THEY CALLED OFF THE SEARCH FOR THE NIGHT AT 2:00 A.M., BUT Louise had trouble falling asleep once she was finally lying in her bed. At eight the next morning, there were once again search teams throughout the entire town, and canine patrols fanning out so they were searching the area from all sides. About twenty to thirty volunteers had shown up to help, and Bengtsen had broken them up into groups and was in firm control of who was in charge of each individual search team and where they would be searching.

"All bas.e.m.e.nts and attic s.p.a.ces, stairwells, and bike sheds must be investigated," he instructed his people.

The missing-persons report ran every hour on the radio news update, but by midday there still wasn't any sign of the girl.

Louise was sitting in her office with a cola and a piece of pizza before the meeting she and Mik had scheduled with a photographer from Venstrebladet to retrace the route Dicta had followed late Sat.u.r.day night after she left Liv's house. Louise pushed the pizza container to the side a little and pulled a padded envelope from the Pathology Lab closer to her. Flemming had sent her the photos from Samra's autopsy, and she flipped slowly through them. When she came to the page with the pictures of the back of Samra's head, she was puzzled by the vellum-colored yellowish marks on the back of the girl's neck. Suddenly she thought they bore a certain similarity to the rounded marks they had found on Dicta.

Flemming hadn't measured the distance between the marks on Samra's head, because he hadn't considered them relevant. They were so obviously incurred after the girl's death. Now Louise borrowed the ruler from Mik's soccer mug and determined that the distance here was also three centimeters. In other words, both girls had been in contact with the same object. Not that that brought them any closer to what might have made the distinctive rounded marks. Skipper and Dean hadn't found anything in the family's home during their search, nor anything in Ahmad's apartment or his shop. But for the first time they had something concrete that linked the two killings. Louise got up and went to the command room where Ruth was working on her own. The rest of the group was still out with the search teams.

Louise set down the stack of photos and pointed out the marks.

"The s.p.a.cing is the same as the ones Flemming found on Dicta," Louise pointed out; and right then she was interrupted by Mik, who had just walked in the door.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked, explaining that the photographer had arrived.

Louise left the stack of photos on the administrative a.s.sistant's desk and they hurried down the hall to meet Michael Mogensen, who was on his way to their office.

"I'm a little late," he apologized and said that he'd just returned. He had been on a.s.signment with one of the search teams because they were doing a story on the girl's disappearance for the paper.

They took the stairs down to the cars, discussing the missing girl as they walked.

The suburban street where Liv and her parents lived was quiet. Only one lone car drove by while Michael Mogensen set up his tripod and got his large digital Canon camera ready.

"How wide should the shot be?" Louise heard him ask. "Is it going to be the whole road, or just the driveway?"

"The driveway and a bit of the street so people can recognize the location," Mik responded, stepping over to hold some of the photographer's equipment as he unpacked things.

Louise followed them at a distance. Mik was the one who'd put together the list of locations they wanted to show in the paper: Liv's house; the kiosk up on the main road, which Dicta had been seen entering; then Nygade; and finally the parking lot behind that, where she'd been found.

The photographer got ready and did a layout. He suggested that they put a small photo of Dicta in every single picture so readers a.s.sociated her face with the four locations.

When they were done on the street in front of Liv's house, he led the way in his car down to the kiosk on the main street, and they parked right behind him. He jumped quickly from the car, fishing his equipment out of the trunk. He set the camera up on the tripod and adjusted the height so he could get the kiosk and a little of the main street with it.

"I'll take a couple of shots," he said, moving the tripod a little farther out into the street. "Then we can look at them and decide if we're done."

Mik had gone into the kiosk to buy something to drink and a couple of bags of candy, so Louise nodded to the photographer that that was okay. She smiled at his thoroughness. To her it was just a couple of pictures of a kiosk on a main road, but he made it seem like a bigger a.s.signment in which the angle, lighting, and width of the shot were crucial to the success of the project.

He changed lenses and said that he just wanted to take a couple more shots with a wide-angle lens, and he asked her to hold the tripod while he squatted down to organize all his various lenses. Every time a car drove by, Louise followed it with her eyes to see if there was a little dark-haired girl in the back seat. The whole time, her eyes were checking front steps, gates, and stairs leading down to bas.e.m.e.nt doors. She watched the pedestrians walking toward her and thought: Could they have done it?

"It may make the most sense to leave the cars here," Michael said when he was done. "Once we've got it all, I think you should come back to the studio and select the specific photos you want to run with. Then I can submit them to the editor right away."

He swung his heavy camera bag up onto his shoulder, and Louise quickly reached out and grabbed the tripod so he wouldn't have to carry everything. It was pretty heavy.

As they headed toward Nygade, a young couple emerged from the brewery, and she heard them talking about the dead girl's little sister, who had disappeared. Louise turned around to get a closer look at them and tripped over the edge of a sidewalk slab that was slightly uneven. She was losing her balance and the tripod toppled from under her arm, but her reflexes were faster than her brain, and she stretched her right leg out in an attempt to prevent the plate at the top that the camera screwed onto from smacking against the ground at full force. It hammered into her shin instead.

"f.u.c.k!" she muttered, struggling to rescue the tripod. "Let me take that," Michael said, quickly coming over to help her out.

Louise moaned and shot an angry look at Mik when he briskly asked if she had everything under control.

As they proceeded, her leg throbbed, and she felt a drop of blood trickling down toward her sock. Up by the alley, she found a place to sit down and watch the photographer work. Just as conscientiously as before, he got his camera ready, set up the tripod, and took pictures of Nygade and the alley leading into the parking lot. Once those were done, they gathered up all the stuff and continued down the alley toward the parking lot to wrap things up at the location where the body had been found.

Mik gave Michael his instructions. There were still flowers there, both recent additions and the bouquets that had been left there since Dicta's savaged body had been found. The photographer was clearly moved to find himself at the scene of the crime and pointed out a large bouquet of white roses that he himself had brought. Still, he remained meticulous and focused as he got started photographing the site, so the readers could see that Dicta had been lying in the rear corner of the parking lot, down by Lindevej.

Louise reached out to take the tripod when Michael started packing up, but gladly left it to Mik when he offered to carry it back to the cars.

40.

THEY BOTH SAID YES TO MlCHAEL MOGENSEN'S OFFER OF COFFEE, and he hooked his digital camera up to his computer to download the photos before disappearing up into his apartment to put the coffee on. Louise noticed that the gash on her shin was still bleeding and walked over to pull a paper towel off the roll that stood on a small table under the window.

She sat down on the sofa and rolled up her pants leg. The blood had spread into a smudged stain. She carefully dabbed it clean and held a fresh paper towel up against her leg to stop the trickle of blood. Michael came back down with the coffee, mugs, and a carton of milk under his arm.

"Well, are you ready to look at them?" he asked as he sat down in front of his monitor.