Only One Life: A Novel Part 8

"h.e.l.lo," she said, offering a hand. "Detective Louise Rick. I'm with the Holbaek Police Department."

The man shook her hand and introduced himself.

"Michael Mogensen," he said, seeming a bit hesitant.

"I know," Louise said, smiling. "I was just looking at the pictures you've been taking of Dicta. Those are some big plans the two of you have been cooking up there."

He nodded a little self-consciously.

"I'd really like to help her. It would be fun for me as well if she got discovered and became famous."

"I noticed that you also knew Samra."

"Yes, a little," he said. "I promised Dicta I'd drive her out to Honsehalsen cemetery so she can lay a bouquet of flowers and light a candle."

The door behind Louise opened.

"I'll be right there," Dicta yelled, disappearing back into the house. A moment later she returned, wearing a jacket and ready to go.

Louise went to her car and smiled at them as the photographer gallantly opened the station wagon's door for the young woman.

10.

WHEN LOUISE GOT BACK TO THE POLICE STATION, SHE MET Samra's father and a woman in the hallway. She guessed it must be the mother, Sada, because she was wearing a headscarf and keeping her eyes stiffly trained on the floor. They were following Soren Velin to the corner office where Bengtsen and both interpreters were ready for them. Louise nodded to them and hurried to her own office. Once there, she cautiously knocked before entering and found her partner in the middle of questioning Samra's older brother. Without interrupting, she took a seat and listened in.

"Where'd you get the car from?" Mik asked.

"From a friend, like I said!"

There was no trace of anger in the young man's tone, just a stubbornness that told them they shouldn't count on finding out any more than he'd already told them.

"But it isn't your car?" Mik continued.

Samra's brother shook his head.

"Does that mean other people might have used it in the last week?"

There was no response.

Mik Rasmussen leaned forward and asked, "Did you use the car Tuesday night?"

Hamid nodded. "I wasn't anywhere near Honsehalsen."

His Danish was very good considering he'd only been living in the country for four years, Louise noted, although he did have a tough time p.r.o.nouncing Honsehalsen.

"I'm not saying you were," Mik interrupted. "I really just want to know if anyone else might have driven that car out there."

Samra's brother shook his head.

"Did your sister have a boyfriend?"

Mik had changed topics so quickly that it seemed as if Hamid needed a moment to reboot before he answered the new question. He shook his head.

"Who do you hang out with?"

"People from school."

They had determined that he went to trade school, and in addition to a morning job where his father worked, he also had an after-school job at the local Kvickly supermarket. Ruth was already working on getting a list of his cla.s.smates in case they needed to talk to them.

Louise leaned back to listen in on the questioning session. She was surprised that her partner was being so aggressive with his questioning. Louise was more a fan of the cognitive interview method, in which you guided the subject through an explanation in his own words at his own pace. She had always found that more productive. But every now and then it just failed to get anything out of a subject, and then of course you had to be more aggressive.

"Does it bother you when girls have male friends?" Mik asked, changing topics again.

"Why the h.e.l.l would I care about that? Girls can have male friends. What kind of silly preconceptions do you have?"

"So you feel that way even when your sister is involved?" The tone the question was asked in was filled with a confrontational sarcasm.

There was a bang as Hamid angrily slapped his hand against the desk instead of responding, and in a way Louise couldn't blame him for losing his temper if the interview had been going like this from the beginning.

"Was your sister dating anyone?" Mik asked again, in a more subdued tone.

The brother shook his head and hid his face in his hands as he shrugged his shoulders.

Mik set down the pen he had been holding in his hand. "That's enough for now," he said and asked Hamid to wait until the interview had been typed out so he could read through it and sign it. Once that was done, Mik said, "It may be that we need to talk to you again." He followed Samra's brother to the hallway and held out his hand, but the young man ignored it and just scurried off.

"I guarantee you that got to him," Louise exclaimed as Mik stepped back in and closed the door.

"He spent the first half hour evading everything I asked about, so I did that to get a reaction," Mik responded, and Louise got the sense that he had taken her comment as criticism. Instead of getting into it, she started focusing on her computer to avoid spoiling the mood just because they approached things differently.

"All right. I admit that he got to me too," Mik said after they had each sat staring at their screens for a few minutes. "But I'm having a hard time accepting his att.i.tude toward immigrant girls and their male acquaintances. There must be a fundamental acceptance of what's permitted for girls. And yet here it seems like everything is divided into two categories. There's plenty of tolerance toward immigrant girls in general, but that tolerance is severely curtailed when it has to do with the female members of your own family."

Louise thought about that for a moment and then nodded. "She was kind of viewed as the family's property and then suddenly that turns into something else," she said, remembering what a sociologist from the University of Southern Denmark had explained to her when she was on the Norrebro case.

"That's really the crux of it when you're talking about honor and shame," Louise continued after a moment. "In families where those concepts are significant, people don't care that much about honor or shame when it doesn't have to do with their immediate family members. And in those cases when something does happen to offend the family's honor, it doesn't become dangerous until someone from the neighborhood starts talking about it. As long as the problem is only known within the family's four walls, no one has to react to it. It's so strange that there's such a huge difference between the world in general and the inner circle."

Mik watched her while she talked, and she could tell that he wasn't putting much stock in her explanation. But that was one of the important things she had learned during the case she had just wrapped up. It wasn't until it became publicly known that the family couldn't control their own daughter that the girl had to die. In the case in Norrebro, the death sentence had been p.r.o.nounced by an uncle and his three sons. They wanted the girl killed before any of the other girls in the family became infected by her loose behavior.

"The world is a strange place. I don't understand that way of thinking," Mik admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

Louise smiled at him and said that there weren't many Danes who did.

"Jette Petersen is here," Ruth announced from the doorway. She asked if they were ready for her and when they wanted the cla.s.smates to come in.

"Maybe we ought to see about borrowing a room at the school so we can do it while school's in session tomorrow?" Mik suggested and received a nod of confirmation from the administrative a.s.sistant.

"That'll save us a ton of coordination. Good idea," Louise said, standing up to go receive Samra's homeroom teacher.

"I'll write up the parents' and brother's interviews and update what we have in the case file on the family from before," Ruth said before heading back to the command room.

Storm came in to ask them if they could also talk to the women's shelter the mother had stayed at to find out what information they had on the family. Louise took a seat on the edge of her desk as he spoke.

"We just need to find out if the parents were having problems with the girl, before we latch on to our suspicions," Storm said.

"I'll call the shelter right away," Mik offered, pulling out his papers and flipping through them. He left the office to find somewhere quiet to call from so Louise could start her conversation with Samra's teacher. Louise followed Mik into the hallway and asked Jette Petersen to come in.

"Would you like some coffee?" she asked.

The teacher looked tired, as if she'd been crying. Her eyes were red and there were streaks of mascara under her bottom lashes.

"We told the students right after their lunch break," she said, "and then we gathered Samra's cla.s.smates in the gym afterward and told them what had happened. It was the single worst experience of my twenty years of teaching."

Louise let her sit for a moment.

"I'd actually thought the girls would take it the hardest. But several of the boys reacted quite strongly. Also in a somewhat unfortunate way."

"In what way?" Louise asked.

"Obviously they were all really shocked, but I don't think they'd ever thought much about the fact that Samra and two of the other students in the cla.s.s who aren't ethnically Danish came from different cultures. But now suddenly they're all aware of this and cursing all immigrants and wanting them to go home. Of course they're mostly reacting to the feelings of helplessness and grief," she said after pausing to think for a moment.

Louise nodded.

"There've already been journalists outside the school asking the students about Samra's family. About whether they'd tried to force the girl into an arranged marriage, whether maybe that was what triggered the killing. And that kind of thing is enough to stir up trouble among the kids."

"But there wasn't anything like that, as far as we know," Louise said.

Jette Petersen shook her head.

"Now we just need to help them stick together and talk about what happened so we don't end up with a worse schism in the cla.s.s-or the school, for that matter. No one has been sentenced yet and we don't know what happened, but they've already made up their minds," Jette said and then in the same breath added that it was both good and bad that the newspapers had been featuring stories about honor killings so prominently because of course that affected the kids' opinions about what must have happened when a girl like Samra was suddenly murdered.

Louise agreed with her, but had a hard time seeing how it could be any other way. At the moment, she couldn't think of a single murder case where a young immigrant girl had been killed and it wasn't the family that was behind it. But of course you had to be careful about leaping to conclusions, even though that was also where the police had been focusing their investigative resources.

After a moment during which they each sat lost in their own thoughts, Louise asked Jette to describe Samra, both how she fit into the cla.s.s socially and as a student, anything that might help the police put together a more nuanced picture of the girl that could lead them to a motive.

11.

"IT'S CLEAR SHE WAS VERY WELL LIKED AND GOT ALONG FINE IN cla.s.s," Louise said, addressing the others in the command room later. "Her parents didn't forbid her from attending cla.s.s events and other activities at school, but even so, there were problems at times. Sometimes her father wanted proof that she was really at school if there were late cla.s.ses or something."

"And Jette Petersen didn't have the impression that Samra had much to do with her cla.s.smates outside of school hours," added Mik, who had been present during the last part of the conversation.

"As we already know, Samra occasionally saw a couple of the girls," Louise continued. "For the first few years after she started school here in fifth grade, she played handball with a bunch of kids from school, but that only lasted a couple of years. Then she quit."

"Something happens around the time girls start p.u.b.erty," Dean explained. "When they transition from childhood into p.u.b.erty, they no longer have the same freedom. Up until that point their fathers are in charge of their upbringing and they are welcome to play and spend time with other kids their age. But once the girls menstruate for the first time, all that's over. Then the upbringing becomes the mother's responsibility and their freedom is noticeably curtailed. And if things go wrong for a girl, it's the mother's fault. So they're kept at home and not allowed to hang out with boys the way they could before."

"Are you Muslim?" Louise blurted out. She knew he was from the former Yugoslavia and was now married to a Dane, but she wasn't sure it was polite to ask.

He shook his head. "Catholic," he replied. "But where I come from, there were a lot of Muslims."

"Well, then your familiarity with the cultural concepts will give us a head start," Skipper said.

Louise noted that, when viewed from the outside, their little group was quite diverse: a woman, a couple of older men with years of experience and strange habits, and a couple of young bucks who really wanted to make their mark. She smiled at Dean when he responded, "Now I'm afraid of disappointing you."

For a second he looked self-conscious.

"So we'll a.s.sume that Samra al-Abd didn't have that big a circle of friends. She occasionally spent time with some of her girlfriends after school and on the weekend, but she was kept under relatively tight rein at home," Storm concluded, looking at Louise and the others to see if there were any objections.

"I agree that she was under very tight control from her parents," Soren Velin said, and gave a recap of his and Bengtsen's questioning session with the parents. They had both denied knowing anything about their daughter's disappearance.

"They say that their daughter didn't have many friends and preferred to spend time with her family," Bengtsen began before pouring some coffee into a plastic mug. "Yet her father maintains that he didn't really get worried about her being gone until she still wasn't home when they got back from visiting his brother in Benlose. And that sense of worry was only reinforced when he heard the news on the radio the next morning at nine."

Now it was Mik's turn to report. "I spoke to the women's shelter," he began. "She was there six months ago, and the woman I talked to remembered the family quite well. She said that Samra was rather beaten up when they arrived. Apparently from being hit, but she wouldn't talk about what had happened. So they got the story from her mother. The family voluntarily returned home after about five days, and there haven't been any more reports of violence since then."

Everyone in the room sat digesting that for a moment before Storm spoke again.

"The preliminary results are back from the technical inspection of the father's boat," he said. "They didn't find any traces to suggest that he'd been carrying a concrete slab in the boat. There's no doubt it would have left scratch marks. There was also nothing to suggest that the boat was the scene of the crime. They're still studying the pictures."

Storm looked over at Skipper. "You head out to the house and examine her bedroom."

Skipper nodded so his hair billowed gently.

"How's it going with the cell phone printout?" Storm asked. This was aimed at Bengtsen and Velin.

Bengtsen pointed to the table in front of him where there were two sheets of paper.

"It's here," he replied. "She mostly sent text messages and we've located the numbers. Her family and some of the girls from school. No unknown numbers, no surprises," he said, sounding disappointed that he didn't have anything more helpful to report.

Skipper and Dean stood up to go help the crime-scene technicians examine the girl's room.

"Remember to check if she had access to a computer," Storm called after them, and Dean turned in the doorway. "And if she did, obviously bring it back," he continued, and then directed his attention to Bengtsen and Velin.

"We need to set up audio surveillance in the home," he said and suggested that that be done the next time the family came in for questioning.

That was Soren Velin's specialty and he nodded right away, so Louise guessed that he'd already done the prep work for that.