Farewell to Freedom (26 page)

Louise had spent her time in the kitchen with a newspaper until she offered to go pick up some pizzas around seven. After that, they'd watched a 1970s Danish con-men movie about the Olsen Gang and turned in early.

Mik Rasmussen had called in the middle of the movie and asked if she wanted to come out to Holbæk on Sunday. He tempted her with sea kayaking, sex, barbecue—as long as the weather held—and maybe a single Irish coffee. She had been a little too curt when she turned him down and could tell right away that she'd hurt his feelings. She hadn't meant to do that, but she knew that what they had together was part of a totally different world right now. She spent most of the evening worrying that Jonas was regretting having accepted her invitation to spend the night. They hardly knew each other, so she'd told him several times that he should just let her know if he'd rather go home, but each time he'd said he wanted to stay.

They had all slept in on Sunday, and it wasn't until around 11:00 that they headed down to the Belis Bar for brunch. Camilla was still a little quiet and withdrawn, but when Markus came back from his dad's place in the early afternoon, they had managed to persuade her to join them in going to the pool. In the beginning, she just sat there wrapped in a big bathrobe watching the boys as they jumped off the diving boards, but then they lured her into joining them in going down the slide, which curved down into the pool from ceiling height, going in and out of the wall of the building, and the two boys almost threw up, they were laughing so hard, as Louise and Camilla thundered down into the water shrieking at the tops of their lungs.

When she took Jonas home that evening, she suddenly felt like she was part of a real family. Not that this was something she craved, but just then she had to admit it felt nice. Her mission had also been a success. The convalescents seemed to be doing better.

“We have a new case, so we're splitting up our resources,” Willumsen announced, his eyes on Louise as if he'd noticed that her thoughts were still elsewhere.

Louise straightened up and pulled her chair all the way in to the table.

“We'll have to make do with just two people continuing to work with Mikkelsen and his people on solving the Vesterbro case, while the other two move on to the new case.”

Stig was about to protest but was stopped by Willumsen's hand.

“It's too early to move people off this,” Toft said over the raised hand. “If we pull back, they get free reign again. You know there's no way we'll be able to get to the bottom of what they're up to and keep an eye on things without more people.”

“Of course you can, and I'm going to need to see some progress soon. We're not getting anywhere and nothing's happening,” he grumbled, staring grimly at them before straightening up and changing his tone. “This Saturday a dead infant was found out in Stenhøj Church in Frederiksberg. This is something you're aware of, Rick.”

It wasn't a question, and he wasn't expecting Louise to respond, because he continued.

“Our colleagues from the Bellahøj station were out there for a similar case a couple of weeks ago. In that case, the infant was found alive.”

He pulled the top sheet of paper out of the case file he had on the table in front of him.

“They did an autopsy on the infant yesterday afternoon, and I have the provisional findings here. Flemming Larsen writes.…”

He pulled his reading glasses out of his chest pocket. Louise felt the anxiety moving from her stomach toward her solar plexus. To anyone who knew anything about Willumsen, the sign was obvious. Something was wrong. They must have found something in the autopsy that changed the case from a family tragedy to a particular type of crime, otherwise the case wouldn't be assigned to them. The Bellahøj precinct was perfectly well equipped to handle most things on their own.

Louise considered Willumsen's face as he read the text, paraphrasing it in his own words. He ran through it quickly at first.

“The infant was wrapped, a newborn boy, no more than a couple of days old. The body had a faint greenish tinge as you might find with chorioamnionitis, or amniotic fluid infection, and it was still covered with dried blood and vernix caseosa.”

Here he slowed down slightly.

“Beyond that, Flemming writes that the umbilical cord had been crudely severed from the mother and the skin had peeled off in several locations.”

The door suddenly opened, and Suhr came in and sat down with a face that made it clear he wanted to cause as little disruption as possible, so they should just continue. The look was wasted on Willumsen, who didn't respond to the homicide chief's arrival at all.

“The peeling is a type called maceration and may indicate that the infant died prior to birth. But the reason this case has landed on our desks now is …”

Finally he looked up to make sure he had their attention.

“… that the infant is missing its pinky toe. And we're not talking about a birth defect. It was chopped off after the birth. The surface of the wound is smooth and even, so it was amputated with a sharp instrument. Flemming is sure the toe was removed after the boy's death, otherwise there would have been a reaction in the form of bleeding, and that is why he concludes with great certainty that we're talking about a stillbirth.”

Now Willumsen looked directly at Lars and Louise.

“This is your case now. Bellahøj will continue to investigate the abandoned baby that was taken to Skodsborg Orphanage a week ago. At the moment there is no reason to think that the two cases are connected, but obviously you should consider that. For the time being we'll run the two investigations separately and think of them as two separate cases. It's far more likely that the church was chosen because of all the media attention. The injury the infant boy incurred doesn't have anything to do with Baby Girl. She was in good condition when she was abandoned. This will definitely involve a ton of routine work, and I want you two to personally get in touch with all the mothers who were scheduled to give birth within the last two weeks, and the ones whose due dates are within the next fourteen days.”

Suhr's forehead had contracted into deep wrinkles, but he remained silent.

“You'll have to go check out the maternity wards, and if there are cases that seem interesting, compare the DNA. If that doesn't give us anything, we'll have to broaden our search by asking the public for help and appealing to people to get in touch with us if they know a pregnant woman whose baby bump has disappeared, but the woman doesn't have a baby in her arms.”

Lars started shaking his head.

“Who are you going to assign to assist them?” Suhr asked, looking at his lead detective. Willumsen's eyebrows shot up as if he had no idea what Suhr were talking about.

“To begin with, we'll handle this ourselves. We're going to have to be able to keep several balls in the air,” Willumsen pronounced, once he finally detected the heavy silence that had settled over the room. “Working on one case at a time is a luxury we just don't have.”

Louise nodded. This wasn't the first time and certainly wouldn't be the last that she wouldn't have a chance to follow a case through to its conclusion. She took the thin case folder Willumsen handed her and got up to follow Lars back to their office.

35

“W
HAT DOES IT SAY IN THE REPORT WE GOT FROM THE
pathology lab?” Lars asked, waiting patiently while Louise plugged in the electric kettle on the shelf and got a mug with a tea bag ready.

He opened the window and a mild spring breeze blew in, freshening up their office a little.

By the time the water was finally boiling, he had the phone to his ear and was waiting to talk to the court. They were going to need a warrant to obtain the patient lists from the various maternity wards.

Louise set down her cup of tea and opened the case file, which so far contained only two pieces of paper. She started reading but was interrupted when her partner hung up, having obtained the warrant.

“Read it aloud,” he asked, unscrewing the lid to a bottle of mineral water and pulling his chair back so he had some support for his back when he put his legs up on the edge of the desk.

Saturday, April 26, at approximately 10:55
A
.
M
., a woman entered the front door of Stenhøj Church.

“That was Camilla,” Louise explained before continuing.

There was a bundle wrapped in a towel lying on the floor immediately inside the door. The woman ran out of the church without touching anything. Approximately ten minutes later, Detective Louise Rick, Copenhagen PD, arrived. She was at the church on private business. The detective and Pastor Henrik Holm of Stenhøj Church examined the bundle together, which turned out to contain a naked newborn male infant who was dead at the time he was found.

“This doesn't really say that much,” she said and skimmed the rest of the text before she continued.

The area was cordoned off, and scent dogs were brought in to try to pick up a trail. They didn't find anything. Preliminary questioning: negative.

“Nada,” she commented and read on.

A preliminary postmortem was conducted at the scene and an autopsy the following day. The male infant's weight was 3,750 grams and length was 50 centimeters.

“Well, that's completely normal, so the mother must have been to term,” commented Lars, who was the more knowledgeable of the two of them about babies, even though his own twins had been adopted from Bolivia when they were about six months old. They were seven now and had left a little of the craziness behind them. They used to be terrors, though, and on several occasions when their father brought them to work they had taken great satisfaction in scattering case files all over the office. She continued, brushing the twins out of her mind:

The umbilical cord appeared to have been severed by biting or tearing and was not tied off. It was 17 centimeters long. The time of birth was estimated as one to two days prior to the discovery of the body. The child's race was Caucasian.

Louise glanced up from the report.

“Well that pretty much just means he's not black or Asian, so it doesn't narrow it down that much. Caucasian is still a pretty broad spectrum.”

Her partner nodded and asked if there was any more, but she shook her head and pushed the piece of paper away.

“Nothing aside from the fact that he had thick dark-brown hair.”

They were interrupted when Suhr, after a quick knock, opened the door and sat down on the low shelf just inside the doorway.

“I talked to Sillebrandt out at the Bellahøj precinct. He's still got four people on the case and is offering to expand the search for witnesses so that they're looking for people who might have seen something around the church from Friday night until Saturday morning. That's the time frame during which we assume the boy was left. They've found two witnesses who said independently that they saw an older model light-green car by the cemetery around 6:00 Saturday morning. One of the witnesses, an elderly man, who was out for his morning walk with his Labrador retriever, was very sure that it was a Fiat Regatta from the mid-1980s. He had a similar model himself, just in red. The other witness is a young guy who was on his way home to sleep off a night on the town and all he remembered was that there was an old light-green ‘bucket of bolts,' which he peed on. And that description certainly fits pretty well if we're talking about a car that's over twenty years old.”

The homicide chief smiled, probably because he never let his own Volvo get more than two or three years old before he traded it in on a new one.

“Based on the witnesses' statements, our colleagues have been searching for a Fiat Regatta in that color. They found seven registered in Sjælland, and they're looking into the owners. But otherwise they don't have anything,” he continued, scratching his chin, which was thoroughly shaved every morning and slathered with expensive aftershave. “I recommend that we accept their offer to expand the search for witnesses.”

Louise and Lars nodded. So she had been right when she'd thought she could tell what he was thinking in Willumsen's office. Obviously he was aware that the group leader couldn't leave this entire case to just two people, but since the homicide chief was a polite man, he hadn't challenged his subordinate on this point in front of everyone else. He had bitten his tongue instead.

“Let's start by going after the most obvious. Concentrate on checking the hospital lists of women who are supposed to give birth soon or have just done so.”

He looked at them to confirm that they agreed.

“Take the metro Copenhagen region,” he continued after they both nodded. “In other words, Hvidovre, Herlev, Glostrup, National Hospital, Frederiksberg, and Gentofte, and let's see what we get from that.”

“We already requested a warrant so we can get the hospitals to hand over the basic information on the women of interest,” Lars said, receiving a satisfied nod.