Three, Four...Better Lock Your Door (24 page)

Yes it was going to be a nice recreation where she could get ready for the second act of her plan undisturbed, Irene thought as she turned on the water in the bathroom. She would take one last shower in this house and then leave it forever.

Hardly had she stepped in and got her hair soaking wet before someone knocked on the front door.

C
HAPTER 42

D
R.
I
RENE
H
OEG PULLED
the front door open with a very aggressive expression. "What?" she yelled even before she looked at the person standing outside at the doorstep. She was wearing nothing but a bathrobe and a towel around her hair.

She had considered not opening it at all but the person ringing the doorbell had been very persistent and it had quite frankly become too annoying so she had finally given up and walked downstairs ready to give whoever it was quite the scolding of a lifetime. Dr. Irene Hoeg was tired of people interfering with her life and business. People should learn to mind their own business and not disturb decent people when they were trying to get out of this forsaken country where everybody was oh so proud to be caring about each other and no one was forgotten and left out and where poor helpless people could kill someone in a weak moment because they weren't well and then just get away with it because they were too young to be punished or declared mentally ill or psychotic at the moment of action. That was nonsense to Dr. Irene Hoeg. She did believe that some people couldn't help it because they had a defect in the brain, because they weren't wired right, but she also believed in evil. Some people were just cruel and needed to be hidden from the world and sedated or even pacified if necessary. She believed she had the cure for both.

But right now Dr. Irene Hoeg was standing in front of pure evil, and knew there was no way she would escape it.

"That dress," she stuttered.

"Pretty, isn't it?" the person replied.

"I ... I ..." but there were no more words. Irene Hoeg had run out of things to say. "I gave that to her," she mumbled.

"Yes you did," the voice replied.

Irene lifted her head and eyes from the sparkling blue dress and stared into the eyes of the person wearing it. To her disappointment the eyes resembled but didn't belong to the person she had given the dress to. She looked like her but Irene Hoeg knew it wasn't her.

"What do you want? Why are you ringing my doorbell?" she said.

The person in front of her giggled. "Well you locked the door. Normally I would just walk in."

Dr. Irene Hoeg sighed. So many memories came back to her in that instant. So many happy hours she had spent with this girl. She reached out and touched her cheek, stroked it gently. It didn't feel like her skin had felt. It was too rough. Had it only been her, could she just see her one more time, just touch her soft skin and kiss those red lips.

"Victoria ...," she said, her voice trembling from the memories that now overwhelmed her. The emotions were powerful, devastating, crushing. For the first time in twenty years, Dr. Irene Hoeg cried. She felt a tear in the corner of her eye and she didn't stop to wipe it away.

"You know she loved you, didn't you?" the person in the blue dressed looking so strikingly like her asked.

Dr. Irene Hoeg nodded. "All she wanted was a pretty dress to wear. She never had one she told me. So I bought this one for her. She looked stunning in it."

"She spent her life in one institution after the other," the person said. "Until you did that to her, until you made her into nothing but a vegetable." The person in the dress was shaking. "Why? Why would you do this to her?"

"I used to bring her to my office. I fell in love with her. She was so beautiful, so perfect. I could hardly believe it. I felt frustrated. I wasn't supposed to be with the youngsters, with my patients but I couldn't help it. I fell in love with her. I had the nurses bring her to my office late in the evening where I had sex with her. I used her. To compensate I gave her special favors at the institution. She was allowed to smoke cigarettes in her room, cigarettes that I gave her. I brought her better food on special days and celebrated her birthday with a nice dinner in my office. I even took her to the beach every now and then under the pretense that I was taking her to see her parent's grave and keep her focused on what she had done. I thought I was giving her a better life, but it was eating me alive."

Dr. Irene Hoeg was crying now. Tears were rolling down her cheeks as she stared at this woman from her past. The only real love she had ever experienced in her long life.

"So why kill who she was? If you loved my sister so much then why would you sign the papers stating that a lobotomy was the best cure for her?"

Irene Hoeg was bent forward in pain, overpowered by emotions she had tried so hard to escape for many years, dirty disgusting emotions that she thought she had under control.

"Because it was destroying me," she mumbled, sobbing, groaning. "My passion for her was destroying me. It made me soft. I have a purpose, a dream and I couldn't have someone like Victoria be in the way of that. I hated myself for signing those papers, but I had to. There was no other way out for me. I was falling for her, but she was dangerous to me. I was going into politics and I couldn't have this kind of dirt in my past." Irene Hoeg paused. Then she looked at the person in front of her, looked him straight in the eyes as she spoke. "But I wasn't the one who killed her. You were."

Dr. Irene Hoeg felt something grab her around the neck and she was pushed backwards into the hall of her own house. She muttered words but nothing but half-choked sounds spluttered out of her. The pain was excruciating but she knew she deserved it.

C
HAPTER 43

W
E CALLED THE POLICE
from the car. Sune drove while I spoke to Johannes Lindstroem and told him about our theory and that I believed that Christian Lonstedt was on his way to kill Dr. Irene Hoeg. If he wasn't already there.

"We'll send someone to check it out," he said. Then he paused. "Please promise me you will stay out of it."

"I'm sorry. No can do," I said as we hit the highway towards Copenhagen and Hellerup north of it where Dr. Irene Hoeg lived in her big villa. I heard Johannes Lindstroem protest wildly as I hung up. Christian was my business now and I had to stop him before he struck again.

I knew how the Danish police worked and it was going to take hours for Johannes Lindstroem to convince the local department in Hellerup to send a patrol to disturb not only one of the most prominent politicians in the country but also the most choleric one. There was so much bureaucracy in the Danish police, so many people who didn't want to make the difficult decisions and therefore postponed it by referring the problem to someone else. There was no way I was going to let Christian get away with another killing. It was bad enough that he had been there all this time, right under my nose without me even suspecting he could be the killer. I shivered at the thought of having sex with him in his apartment, his hands on my body, the same hands that had killed all these people in cold blood.

Sune looked at me while he drove. "Do we have a plan or anything?" he asked.

I shook my head. "To save a life I guess. Even if it is Dr. Irene Hoeg's. Christian needs to be stopped."

"Sounds like enough for me," he said and took the exit towards Hellerup. We speeded to the extent that Sune would lose his driver's license for life if he were caught. But he didn't and soon we parked the car in front of the house. I was sweating. I suddenly doubted that we knew what we were doing. How were we supposed to do this?

Sune took out a baseball-bat from the trunk of his car and swung it over his shoulder. Then he grabbed my hand and held it for just a second while we walked towards the white villa. He smiled comforting and that really helped.

No one answered when we rang the doorbell. My heart was racing. Had we come too late? The sound of turmoil came from an opened window upstairs. I looked up. Someone was struggling, fighting.

 "They’re up there," I said and pointed toward the window.

Sune pulled the handle. "It's not locked," he said and pushed the door open. We hurried inside and ran up the stairs. There was a scream, a bump and then silence.

We ran from room to room and found them in the bathroom. Christian was bent over Dr. Irene Hoeg's lifeless body on the floor. He had dropped the wig that was lying on the tiles next to him. Irene Hoeg had closed eyes; her head was bleeding from the back. Christian had the scalpel in his hand, ready to cut when I entered through the open door.

"Stop!" I yelled. "Victoria, stop!"

Christian turned and looked at me. The make-up was smeared all over his face. His eyes wore that cruelty in them that they had the last time I had seen him when he was about to make me his next victim.

When he saw me, he smiled. Then he giggled. "Come any closer and I'll cut her main artery."

I froze. Sune was right behind me. I raised my hand to hold him back. "Is she still alive? he asked.

"I don't know," I answered. My heart was pounding in my chest. There was blood on the floor next to her head, but it looked like she was breathing.

"You both came right in time for the good part," Christian said. "The final act." He stared at Irene Hoeg. Then he stroked her forehead and removed a lock of hair that had fallen down.

"The doctor hurt her head a little bit so she won't be attending the procedure, but I think we can go ahead and do it anyway," he said. "I thought about waiting till she woke up so she could see for herself how it is done, but you kind of ruined that."

"Is it important to you that she is awake?" I asked.

He turned and stared at me. "I prefer it that way. It makes it more fun."

"Did you wake up your parents just before you killed them as well?" I asked.

Christian nodded. "I did it for him, you know. Well for both of us, but mostly for him. He was hurting. I wasn't sure he would be able to survive it."

"You mean your brother, Christian?" I asked.

Christian smiled. "Of course. Who else? He was my only concern. See as I told you he was the weak one. I was strong I could take almost everything without letting it get to me. That was just who I was, but not Christian. He couldn't take the constant abuse."

"Did your parents abuse you?" I asked. "Was that why you killed them?"

Christian looked at me with menace in his eyes. It startled me. I felt Sune's hand on my shoulder.

"It wasn't only them," he said with distant voice. "It was all of their friends even acquaintances, anyone who was willing to pay what they asked. Every day it was someone new, every day new hands, new bodies, wrinkled bodies, old penises, hands touching us all over our bodies, pulling us, holding us down, penetrating us, forcing their sex in our mouths. Every single day of our lives. What really truly hurt was they didn't even charge them much for it." He paused and looked away. "I had to protect him. He wasn't able to do it himself. I had it all planned out and I needed him to help, but he backed out. Said he couldn't do it. I didn't understand after all they had done to us? How could he want to protect them? How come he didn't lust for revenge? How come he didn't want for them to suffer like we had? So I did it myself. I took the blame. Told them Christian had nothing to do with it. At least that way he would get his own life, he would be free to live. I told him to never visit, but he kept coming. He was a good boy, still is. I was the one who ruined everything for him."

"How?"

"I asked him to kill me. After the lobotomy I was nothing but a vegetable. I could hardly move. I sat in a wheelchair every day for years doing nothing but drooling. I hated it; I loathed myself and my helplessness. I was already dead. So when he came to visit I asked him to kill me. I begged him. Slowly over the years I took over his mind and showed him how to do it. I persuaded him like I convinced him to revenge what they had done to me. It is all my doing. Christian could never do it alone." He paused and sighed. "Now I would like to finish what I have begun."

"I can't let you do that," I said.

"Try and stop me," he said. "If you move I'll kill her."

It happened so fast I hardly noticed it. I felt Sune's hand push me backwards, and then from the corner of my eye I saw him swing the baseball-bat in the air and hit Christian in the face so hard he flew across the bathroom and landed on the tiles.

"Wow," I exclaimed. "Where did that come from?"

"I figured that if we moved he would kill her but if we didn't he would still kill her so we had nothing to lose."

I stared at Christian who lay still on the tiles. Blood was coming from where the baseball-bat had hit him. His eyes were closed but he was breathing. I exhaled. In the distance I heard sirens wailing.

C
HAPTER 44

W
E STAYED AND MADE
our statements to the police and several hours later we were in the car on our way back to Karrebaeksminde. Neither of us spoke much since we had spent the last hours explaining and talking to police officers. Explaining the entire case and the chain of events to them. Now we felt exhausted and all we wanted was to go home to our children. My dad had picked both of the kids up from school and brought them back to his house where they were now sound asleep on the couch as we entered the house. We carried them upstairs and put them in Julie's room. Then we walked down to the kitchen. Dad said goodnight and I found a bottle of wine that I opened and poured some into two glasses.

I lifted my glass and looked into Sune's eyes.

"Thank you," I said.

"Thank yourself. You solved the case."

"Couldn't have done it alone," I said and drank.

"True," he said.

I found my cell phone and called a number.

"This better be good, Franck," Jens-Ole said. "I just made popcorn and started the movie."