Only One Life: A Novel Part 28

Louise walked over to the trash with the paper towel. As she was about to toss it in, she was struck by the familiar and distinctive rounded marks the blood from her wound had made. This time she didn't need a ruler to know there were exactly three centimeters between them.

For a moment she forgot to breathe. Then she turned around slowly and studied Michael Mogensen, as every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Mik had not noticed Louise's silence as he poured their coffee.

Louise stood and gathered her thoughts for a moment, then calmly walked over and sat down next to the photographer. For a few minutes she watched as he brought photos up on the screen. Then she asked her question.

Her partner only reacted the second time she asked. Michael Mogensen had his eyes firmly on the screen, but his fingers had stopped moving on the keyboard. He looked at her for a moment, and the look in his eyes convinced her that she was right in her suspicion.

"Why did you kill them?" she repeated, waiting for his response.

Mik came over and stood next to her, but Louise didn't take her eyes off Michael Mogensen, leaving her partner to follow along as best he could. She could see him putting the pieces together as she pa.s.sed him the paper towel with the two red marks that the screws on the plate the camera housing attached to had left on her leg. His face was serious and his voice calm as he closed in on the photographer.

"Did you take Aida as well?" he asked.

Finally Michael Mogensen turned his body toward them, allowing his eyes to remain locked on the screen and the picture of the suburban street where Liv's home was.

He hesitantly shook his head, speaking in such a low voice that they had to lean close to hear him.

"That wasn't me," he said.

Louise reached out and grabbed him. She forced him to look at her.

"I don't know where she is," he continued in the same quiet tone. "I could never do anything to her."

He looked down, avoiding her angry face.

"Why should I believe that when you've been so hypocritical-leaving flowers for both Samra and Dicta even though you were the one who killed them?"

He mumbled something she didn't understand, and she glanced up at Mik, who shrugged.

"I'm going to ask you again. Were you behind her disappearance?" Mik said in a voice that Louise had trouble recognizing.

"I haven't touched her," the photographer repeated, this time with more strength in his voice.

The answer came so quickly and clearly that they were forced to believe him. Louise got up and went out into the hallway to call Storm and tell him they'd found their murderer but that he denied having anything to do with Aida's disappearance. She told him that they needed no a.s.sistance. They would handle the arrest themselves and he would hear from her again soon.

When she returned to the studio, she felt rage throbbing within her, but she was determined to keep it under wraps and exerted a great deal of effort to make her voice sound relaxed. There was no reason to fight him now when gaining his trust was key so they could get him to talk.

"Tell us what happened between you and the two girls," she encouraged.

The photographer sat, his back hunched, nearly collapsed in on himself; but before he had a chance to consider whether or not he was going to say anything, she continued.

"When it comes to Dicta, I'm guessing it was anger that made you kill her. Anger that she'd turned her back on you in favor of a Copenhagen fashion photographer. She hurt your feelings."

Louise avoided pointing out how small-minded this reaction was, because it wasn't her place to define these things. A forensic psychologist would have the opportunity to do that later.

"She humiliated me," Mogensen corrected her immediately.

Louise could tell that it wouldn't be hard to get him to talk, so it didn't surprise her when the words suddenly started flooding out of his mouth like loose gravel being tipped out of a truck bed.

"She mocked me and became cruel. She said that I was a second-cla.s.s, provincial photographer who would never make a name for myself any farther away than the village of Vipperod."

Louise nodded. That was what she'd figured. She would get the details of his explanation later during the official interrogation at the police station. But the answer to the next question wasn't so obvious.

"Why Samra? You hardly knew her, right?"

She tried to establish eye contact with him.

Finally something changed in his face. He turned to look her in the eye and what Louise saw in front of her was a big boy who was slowly falling apart.

"I loved her," he said, his eyes becoming moist.

There was no trace of guilt in his eyes. Just a deep despair that confused Louise.

"You were her Danish boyfriend?" Mik asked.

Now Louise was the one left out in the cold.

"If that was the case," she said hesitantly, "then why did you kill her?"

Again there was a long pause during which Louise tried to put the last pieces of the puzzle together herself.

"She didn't want me," he finally whispered. "She said she wanted to go home to Jordan and marry someone from there. Someone Muslim like herself."

He spoke softly, but there was nothing tentative about his words. He really wanted to make them understand.

"Why did she want that?" Louise asked, bewildered.

His response took her completely by surprise and didn't fit with the image she had formed of Samra.

"Because she wanted someone who was like her and fit in with everything she knew," he said, as if he didn't quite understand it himself. "And then she said that Danish families didn't have the same kind of solidarity that families had where she came from. She didn't want to be part of a family where people never really spent any time together even though they lived in the same house. She thought it seemed empty and wrong that I didn't have more to do with my grandmother, since we lived so close together, and that I'm not really in touch with my other family members. In Jordan the whole family sticks together, they all take care of each other there. If one person is sick, the others bring food. It's never lonely, and she missed and longed for the kind of togetherness she was familiar with. That's why she wanted to go home to Jordan and marry a man from there."

"But she was happy enough to risk a lot to see you in secret, even though she didn't want people to know about your relationship," Mik prompted.

"Was it because she knew that her parents would object to her picking you instead of a man from her own background?" Louise asked and noticed the adrenaline rushing through her body again.

Michael started crying and hid his face in his hands as his shoulders shook.

They let him be until he dried his face with both hands and looked up.

"It wasn't like that. She knew that they wouldn't object. She was the one who didn't want it, even though she was free to follow her heart. That's what I couldn't understand. I've never loved another person the way I loved her. She also claimed she loved me. But she still wouldn't consent to being a couple."

"She was much younger than you. Far too young to know whom she wanted to share her life with," Louise interjected.

Michael shook his head.

"Her father had given her permission to go home and visit her grandparents for Christmas. She said maybe she could find someone to marry."

When he saw Louise's dumbfounded face, he continued: "She said that on Tuesday night when she came over after her parents were asleep and I gave her a necklace and asked her if she would marry me."

"You killed her because she said no?" Mik asked.

"Samra tried to convince me that I would always be in her heart even though we weren't together. I couldn't understand that, and for me it wasn't enough either. She was the one I wanted," he said.

The photographer let his chin fall down against his chest and closed his eyes.

"And when she went home, she said she wasn't following her heart but that it would be easier for her. But it was all just lies. Because if she really wanted to, she could have just moved in here with me."

Louise cleared her throat. "Unfortunately, I don't think it was that easy for her," she began, picturing the pages from Samra's diary.

The room was silent. Only the sounds of their breathing made the air vibrate.

Louise thought of Ibrahim and Hamid. It surprised her that neither one of them had distanced himself more vociferously from the crime. That alone had cast suspicion over them. They had denied it and hadn't wavered on their statements, but they hadn't seriously defended their innocence. Now that it was clear they weren't behind the killings, she realized that each of them must have suspected the other after the crime Ahmad had subjected his niece to.

Ibrahim had suspected his brother of the killing, but didn't want to turn him in until he was sure of what had happened. That was what he'd been trying to figure out when he went to see Ahmad the day after Samra disappeared.

Maybe he was also afraid that Hamid had acted on his own initiative to make his father and uncle happy, if he knew about his sister's secret.

Ahmad probably suspected Ibrahim of killing his own daughter so she wouldn't cast shame over the family once the relationship with the Danish man was revealed. That would make sense to Ahmad. Louise also knew from Camilla that for a while, Sada had suspected her husband was behind the murder, although later her suspicion had pa.s.sed to Ahmad. No one in the al-Abd family had ever really suspected anyone from outside the family of doing it.

"I must now officially inform you that the time is 6:21 P.M. and you are under arrest, charged with the murders of Samra al-Abd and Dicta Moller," Mik said to Michael Mogensen.

The he asked the photographer to stand up and he started frisking him, before putting a hand on his elbow and leading him out to the patrol car.

41.

"LET'S ISSUE A PRESS RELEASE RIGHT AWAY," STORM SAID when Louise and Mik returned to the police station with Michael Mogensen. The photographer was received by two officers who were ready to process him so Louise and Mik could join the others in the command room.

"It's important that we let the media know that this case did not involve an honor killing. Maybe that will make whoever's behind Aida's disappearance come to their senses," Dean said.

"We'll release Ibrahim and his son immediately and tell them what's happened," Storm said, looking over at Ruth. "I wonder if we'll be fined for their arrests. We're sure to receive a claim for compensation for wrongful imprisonment that's going to f.u.c.king hurt more than just our public image."

The administrative a.s.sistant raised an eyebrow and nodded thoughtfully before agreeing that he was right.

"But there was no other choice, what with the situation the way it was," Skipper interrupted.

"All the family members seemed to suspect each other and no one was telling us what they knew, so it's really not that surprising that we suspected them as well," Louise said, reaching for a bottle of soda before she started telling everyone about Michael's arrest.

"Late Tuesday evening, after Ahmad had gone home and once her parents were asleep, Samra sneaked out to see her boyfriend. Out of fear that her parents and brother would discover their relationship, Samra hadn't allowed any phone calls between them. Instead they arranged their future meetings in person when they were together. Michael Mogensen thinks it was about eleven when she came over. He had lit candles and bought her flowers, because he had been planning to ask her to marry him that night, so it took him completely by surprise when she said she had come to tell him that she had arranged with her parents to send her back home to Jordan."

"Ouch," mumbled Bengtsen, pa.s.sing the cookies around again as Louise continued.

"He gave her the thin gold chain she was wearing around her neck when she was found. But he didn't understand why she didn't want him, or why she would rather find a husband in Jordan when the time came."

"Who says that's what she wanted?" Skipper asked.

"That's what Michael Mogensen said," Mik responded and then let Louise continue.

"Michael thinks it's because Samra wanted the kind of close extended family life she would have had with someone from her own traditional background. After having read her diary, I don't think the family relationship was the main reason. I mean, just think about what her uncle did to her. It might have been part of the reason, but I think mostly she was looking for an excuse to call it off."

"To escape from the double life she'd been leading, which was making it hard for her to be a 'normal' Danish teenager," Dean added, and Louise nodded.

"I know that a lot of Muslim girls who suddenly choose to go back to their family's traditional values do it to achieve some peace of mind," Louise continued. "The struggle is twice as hard, the struggle that the young immigrant girls have to fight, because by becoming 'normal Danes' they know they can expect to end up lonely and isolated, cut off from their families and their closest friends. And that network doesn't just get replaced by a new one. In that sense, it's a totally different kind of women's liberation than what Danish women have been through," Louise concluded, letting her elbows sit on top of the table as she pensively rested her chin in her hands.

"Poor girl," Ruth said, staring straight ahead.

Mik cleared his throat. "Michael Mogensen has a boat that he keeps out in Horby Marina by Cape Tuse," he said. "Michael says he suffocated Samra with a sofa cushion, then carried her out and put her in the trunk of his car and drove out to his boat."

"His tripod was in the trunk too, and that's where the marks on the back of her head came from," Louise added. She was annoyed that she hadn't realized the photographer had access to a boat back when she'd seen the pictures of Dicta that had been taken on the deck. She honestly just hadn't given it a thought, because their suspicions had been focused elsewhere.

"We'll get it checked out," Storm said. "And obviously the same goes for his car and his studio. And you'd better remove the wiretap in Dysseparken now that they're being released," he added with a look at Velin.

"That also means that those tire impressions we found out at Honsehalsen are completely irrelevant, right?" Skipper asked, and Dean nodded.

"But how does Dicta's murder fit into this story?" Ruth asked, looking over at Louise.

"It really doesn't. It doesn't sound like Dicta knew anything about the relationship between her best friend and the photographer. Apparently Samra hadn't told anyone. Dicta was presumably not in the best mood when she left Liv's place after her humiliating rejection by Tue Sunds, and was pretty much primed to take it out on someone. Michael Mogensen thinks it was a little past midnight when he happened to see her crossing the street in front of the train station. He pulled up alongside her and she said that she had missed her train and he offered to drive her home. After she got in, she started mocking him, and he pulled into the parking lot to let her out. But after she got out, she kept belittling him, and eventually he lost it."

"You can pin down all the details when you talk to him," Storm interrupted, then he asked Louise and Mik to start preparing to question the photographer, so they would be ready for the preliminary examination.

An hour later, news of his confession was everywhere. The local TV news team was getting ready to do a live interview with Storm when they went on the air around nine o'clock, and the Dagbladet journalists had already started gathering in the lobby of the police station, waiting for the press conference Storm had called for immediately after his television appearance. Louise was trying to block out all the commotion so she could concentrate on Michael Mogensen's questioning, which she and Mik were going to begin as soon as the uniforms were done processing the arrest.

The crime-scene specialists had just arrived in town and had started turning the photographer's apartment upside down. The car and the sailboat at Cape Tuse would be brought in for thorough examinations, but even after just a cursory look at the tripod they had agreed that that was what had been used to crush Dicta's skull. Both the weight and the size and location of the rounded screw heads fit the lesions with the three-centimeter s.p.a.cing.

Louise was sitting in her office behind her closed door, reviewing the notes from the first questioning session they'd had when they visited the photographer. So she didn't answer the phone until the fourth ring, and she was dismissive and snappish with her greeting.

"I just heard," Henrik Moller said, without paying any attention to her standoffish tone. "I'm at home and just told my wife. I wasn't sure if she'd heard the news. I need you to come over right away." He didn't give her any time to object before he hung up.

Louise felt like she'd been stuffed into a deep, black hole. The last thing she wanted to spend her remaining energy on now was Dicta's unhappy, unbalanced mother.

She stood and Mik looked up.

"What was that?"

"Henrik Moller. He just told his wife that Samra's parents are innocent and that the actual murderer has been caught. He wanted me to come over right away."

"Do you want me to come too?"

She shook her head. "You don't need to do that. I think he just wants me there to confirm that the case is really closed. It won't take long."