“Did you have breakfast?”
Isak nodded absentmindedly.
Simon’s question seemed innocent, but as a matter of fact it was essential. Isak sometimes forgot to eat, and when he did, his antipsychotics caused nausea. The last time he threw up his Seroquel he disappeared on the hospital grounds and was missing for several hours. Later they found four ducks by the pond with their heads ripped off.
Simon had been working with Isak for nearly six months and was getting to know his history. The schizophrenia had emerged in his early teenage years, but because he already had an Asperger’s diagnosis, his family had long thought this was another disorder on the autism specrum. It had taken way too much time for him to get the right treatment. Simon had seen the last of the remaining hope fade slowly but surely from the family’s eyes as Isak’s condition deteriorated and his diagnoses piled up. Now his father mostly came to visit on his own, sometimes with a magazine or a book for Isak, always with a sad smile that broke Simon’s heart. His own father had never shown him that kind of devotion. Isak’s parents were loving people forced to watch helplessly as their son grew sicker and sicker and gradually moved further and further away from the dream of ever living a normal life.
“Do you want to go to the quiet room while the others have their phone time?”
“Yes, please,” Isak said, standing up abruptly.
He knew that Isak liked the little room decorated with floral wallpaper, scented oils, and soothing music, partly because it was a quiet place to read, but also because he didn’t have to see everyone else having fun online. Isak wasn’t allowed to access the internet.
“Do you have your book?”
Isak held up his worn copy of Papillon. He was over six feet tall, skinny as a Masai warrior, and had a wobbly, arrhythmic gait as if the floor sent shocks up through the soles of his feet with every step he took. In the quiet room he sank down into a beanbag chair, pulled his feet up under himself, and went back to reading.
Simon checked that the alarm was in his pocket. Isak was almost eighteen and would soon be transferred in the adult OPUS system, which provided integrated outreach treatment for young adults with psychotic symptoms, a transition that Isak wasn’t ready for at all. The idea was completely untenable. Where was he going to live? In a residential home for mentally ill students with a ratio of one day-shift social worker to ten youths? Or if there wasn’t room, then in a group home or a shelter? Or on the street even? If so he would clock in and out of hospitals and get worse and worse, until… How long would it last until things ended badly?
Simon closed the door with anger bubbling in his blood. It was clear to him that he needed to take drastic measures if he was going to change things.
* * *
KNIVES HUNG FROM hooks along the tiled wall next to electric oscillating saws and handsaws, heavy and robust work tools made to open rib cages and split skulls, a world of steel and disinfectable surfaces, clinical and precise, to handle the deceased’s waste, decomposition, and chaos. There were spray hoses, nonskid flooring, magnetic bulletin boards, and work lights, and every surface and corner had discreet holes to guide the messy bodily fluids and the final remnants of life away.
Jeppe Kørner snapped up his protective suit and glanced at the oversize grabbing claw that hung from the ceiling. He regretted the chorizo sandwich he had eaten for an early lunch, because the sausage turned out to be a gift that kept on giving. The autopsy hallway in the pathology department was not the place to be reminded of the taste of dead meat.
Next to Jeppe Detective Falck pulled a white scrub cap over his gray hair, which made him look more than ever like a cartoon teddy bear, Paddington perhaps, trapped in a cold world of stainless steel and bodies waiting to be cut open.
“I think they’ve already started.” Jeppe pointed toward the farthest autopsy bay and started walking. Paddington followed.
Professor Nyboe was standing next to a forensic tech and a police photographer by the stainless steel table in the middle of the room. Under the bright lights, they cast shadows over the lifeless body on the examination table, making its skin shine like patches of sunlit snow on a faded gray hill.
“Who do we have there?” Nyboe looked up, his long wrinkly neck evocative of an aristocratic tortoise. “Kørner and Falck, come on over. We’re just finishing up the external examination.”
Jeppe came closer and looked at the dead woman. She lay faceup, her chin raised slightly and the palms of her hands open, still naked with a waxy pallor, her jaw broad and her chin prominent. Her legs were muscular with varicose veins; the hair on both her head and genitals was graying and curly. In this, the very last bodily surrender, she was defenseless, every defect and flaw clearly visible. Still, there was a strange, frail beauty to the dead person lying on the table.
“Has she been definitively identified?”
“As suspected, this is Bettina Holte, fifty-four-year-old health-care aide. She lives in Husum with her husband and is the mother of two grown children. The family positively ID’ed her.”
Jeppe nodded to Falck and said, “Will you just make sure that the search has been completely called off?”
Falck took a couple of steps away and fumbled around with his protective suit, trying to get to his phone.
“And what did she die of?” Jeppe asked.
With concentration, Nyboe rubbed a cotton swab over one of her nipples and then deposited the swab into a sterile bag before replying, “She died of cardiac arrest, Kørner, like everyone else. You want to know more before I’ve done the autopsy?”
“Just tell me what you know now.” Jeppe suppressed a sigh. “If you would be so kind.”
“Kind is my middle name,” Nyboe replied.
Nyboe took a metal stick from the worktable behind him, one of those telescoping pointers that schoolteachers used to use in the old days when they had to point out Djibouti on the world map. Nyboe directed the tip of the pointer to the body’s wrist.
“Do you see those cuts? There, there, and there.” He moved the pointer from arm to arm and then to the hip.
Jeppe leaned forward. Across each wrist and on the top of her left hip, the skin gaped open in centimeter-wide slits, carved completely symmetrically over each other in two parallel lines. Twelve little cuts in total, meticulously made over three of the body’s major arteries.
“Bettina Holte bled out. I haven’t found any other external injuries apart from those cuts. So I can tell you this with a reasonably high probability.”
“Bled out?” Jeppe actively shut out the sound of Falck’s phone conversation in the background. “Isn’t it usually suicide when someone cuts their wrists and bleeds out?”
“Not in this case. I can assure you that this was not a suicide.” Nyboe moved the pointer back to the pale arm. “Can you see those red marks on her forearms? The woman was restrained with some kind of wide straps, also around the ankles, and maybe around the actual hand as well. The skin is red there at any rate.” He pointed again.
“Why around the hand?”
“So the victim couldn’t do this,” Nyboe said, raising his gloved hand, making a fist, and bending it forward. “That would stop the bleeding. Or slow it down at least.”