Kristoffer brought over her coffee cup and sat down on a Moroccan floor pillow facing her. Epistéme and Dóxa immediately climbed onto his lap.
“What happened downstairs?” he asked with the innocence of another universe. It made it even harder for her to answer.
“A… a body was discovered on the first floor. A young woman—they don’t know who. But it sounds serious. Foul play.” Her throat felt tight and she took a sip of her coffee. “And Gregers is in the hospital with a stroke or something. The whole world seems to be falling apart today.”
Kristoffer stroked Dóxa’s belly without looking up. Others would have asked panicky questions, overwhelmed by shock, but not Kristoffer. After a minute he merely asked, “What can I do?”
“The dogs need to be walked.” Esther felt gratitude wash through her, making everything a little easier to bear. “And if would you fix us some food for tonight?”
“Okay.” He nodded, still looking down. “I’ll take the dogs for a walk and shop for dinner. Maybe fish. I’ll see what they have down at the good fishmonger on Frederiksborggade.”
“Thank you, dear. Just take money from the purse in the hallway. You know where.” Esther leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and tried some breathing exercises to relax.
She could hear Kristoffer clinking in the hallway with dog collars and keys. He opened the door and gently ushered the dogs out into the stairwell. They immediately started barking.
“Is this where the owner of the building lives?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
Esther sat up and peered into the front hall. Kristoffer stood surrounded by the barking pugs, facing a man dressed in white.
“Yes, that’s right,” she yelled.
With some difficulty she got up from the deep chair and walked out to the front hall to greet the man. One of the crime scene technicians she had seen going in and out of the building the whole morning was standing in her doorway. He had unzipped his protective white suit, and a red line on his forehead revealed that he must have recently taken off his hood.
“I’m here to take your fingerprints,” he said, edging his way past Kristoffer and into the small foyer.
“Lovely,” Esther said, extending her hand. “They told me to expect someone. Esther de Laurenti, hello.”
The man set a heavy-looking briefcase on the floor without accepting the offered handshake. It had to be a tough job collecting evidence at a crime scene like this. Esther’s stomach clenched at the thought of what lay down on the first floor of her building.
“How do we do this?” she asked. “What do you need?”
“A table and your hands, that’s all. It’ll only take a second.” Esther rolled up her sleeves and led the way to her desk. To her surprise she saw Kristoffer still standing in the doorway, and she stopped to give him a warm smile. He looked stricken. Clearly he was just as shocked as she.
The wasp finally buzzes away from the jam-covered crumbs on the little plate and settles on a pile of books. A firm smack with the tape dispenser, and the crushed insect’s body is flung on its final flight out the open window.
She breathes in the city’s summer fragrance and decides to step out into the sunshine. Runs down the crooked stairs, hops on her bike, and zips through downtown Copenhagen. She rides down the narrow one-way streets, enjoying how the wind makes her eyes water. Buys a cup of coffee she can’t afford, and sits in the sun outside the café.
In her hometown there were no cafés. Chest tightening, she recalls the cold nights of her early youth—wearing a thin denim jacket, restlessly hanging out alternately at gas stations and soccer fields. The kids would all roam around in the dark, none of them wanting to be home. As if their aimless walking could take them anywhere. As if sipping Polish vodka from old Coke bottles could obliterate the boredom. When they tired of walking, they would hang out at the transit stop, watching buses drive by.
She lifts her face to the sun and enjoys her new life. The life. She doesn’t notice the man watching her a little way off. She doesn’t know the life she has just started enjoying is about to end.
CHAPTER 4
Back at the office, Jeppe and Anette sat down at their adjustable-height desk to come up with a battle plan. Jeppe fetched two mugs of coffee from the break room, his with creamer, Anette’s black with sugar. They had the same rank, but when they worked as a team he always fetched the coffee, and she drove the car. Those were pretty much the only things never up for debate—an old-married-couple refuge within their odd-couple partnership.
“Are we sure about the identification?” Anette began.
Now that they were seated across from each other, he noticed, much to his annoyance, how vigorous she looked compared to him. Her eyelids sported a fresh layer of blue, and she looked like someone who had had sex, a hearty meal, and eight hours of undisturbed sleep within the last twenty-four hours. It made him want to walk around the desk and tip her out of her chair.
Her question was rhetorical. They had compared the dead body’s general appearance and tattoo—two stars and some cursive text on the right wrist—with the many pictures they had found on the laptop from the crime scene. The victim was Julie Stender, one of Esther de Laurenti’s two young tenants on the first floor. If they’d have tried to ID the body based solely on its battered face, they probably wouldn’t have been able to.
“It’s clearly Julie,” Jeppe said. “Let’s see… her family lives in…” He flipped through his notepad. “Her parents live in a small town called Sørvad, in Jutland somewhere near the town of Herning. Can you look them up?”
Anette typed on her computer and then called the Central and West Jutland Police to get the ball rolling. This was not a call the Jutland police would be pleased to field. Jeppe turned a page in his notepad. When he was younger, he used to write everything in his notepads—ideas, thoughts, and plans for the future. Travel journals and love letters. Now he only logged work stuff in them.
He printed KNIFE PATTERN using ornate capital letters.
MALE ACQUAINTANCES
CAROLINE! he added.
TENANTS IN THE BUILDING
“Stender!” Anette barked into the phone. “S-T-E-N-D-E-R, got it? Christian and Ulla Stender. They live outside Sørvad on a street called Skovvej. Just inform them; don’t question—got it? We are coming out from Copenhagen to do that. Call us back after you’ve been there.”
She hung up without saying goodbye.
“There, you can cross that off your list, Jepsen!” she said standing up abruptly so that her slacks creased in unbecoming folds high on her broad thighs. “Should we get going with that briefing? We’ve got a shitload of work to divvy up.”
She marched off without waiting for a response. Jepsen! He hated it when she called him that. It made him feel like an insecure teenager being chastised by his older sister.
Jeppe’s heart sank thinking how the next few days were likely to go. This case would shut down Copenhagen once the media hit on it. He could already picture the headlines: “Young Woman Murdered, Abused, and Battered. Murderer Still at Large.” This was a case the police would normally brush off as wildly exaggerated—a woman-on-the-forest-floor case, meaning unlikely, happening mainly in crime fiction. Cases like this, where the perpetrator was not stooping over the victim when the police arrived, were in fact extremely rare. But they existed. And this was one.