Call Me Princess (15 page)

“Sorry,” Louise mumbled.

She put a hand on Åse’s shoulder before quickly withdrawing, scolding herself for letting her thoughts run rampant. She had managed to see the face with the closed eyes and the thick piece of tape over the mouth. The deceased didn’t look like Camilla at all.

Her notepad had fallen to the floor when she leaped up.

“Her name is Christina Lerche,” Suhr stated, looking at Louise.

Louise felt like she had been found out. She tried to get a grip on herself as she bent down to pick up her notepad.

Back on her lab stool with the pad on her lap, she followed along as Flemming took the forceps and cut through the cable ties.

“Easy! There may be evidence in the closures,” Klein said. He held out a bag the coroner could drop the ties into.

“Now I’ll remove the tape,” Flemming announced, leaning over the victim’s face. Very cautiously he loosened one side. He could never have done it so quietly or slowly on a living person. With his white-gloved fingers, the coroner checked inside the victim’s mouth. When he was done, the vomit ran out, forming a little puddle on the shiny surface of the stainless steel table.

He turned toward them and observed, “The gag isn’t sitting flat.”

At the scene, he had determined that the victim had vomit in both nostrils and concluded, “Suffocation by vomit.”

“The gag must have slipped far enough back into her mouth that it triggered her gag reflex.” He bent over the body again. “The duct tape formed a complete seal, so she suffocated.”

Louise concentrated on taking notes while simultaneously reaching a conclusion in her own head: the perpetrator hadn’t suffocated his victim. He certainly
caused
her death, but was it premeditated murder?

Before Flemming proceeded, it was Åse’s turn again. She photographed the body’s back and right and left sides, this time without the cable ties or gag.

Klein cut the victim’s nails and took a sample of her hair while Flemming dabbed her nipples with a cotton swab to secure evidence. Louise studied the woman’s neck and chest. Those were areas where rapists often kissed their victims. Flemming placed the long swabs back into the carton and closed it carefully. When he was finished, he asked the lab technicians to come open the body.

Louise followed the others out into the hallway to wait. Their steps echoed faintly as they walked past the open tiled autopsy rooms: high ceilings, stainless steel tables, sinks, hand-held showerheads with extra long hoses for rinsing bodies and body parts. The whole place was clinical and cold, and ultimately completely utilitarian when you were in the middle of it.

She leaned against the wall and eavesdropped on Suhr, who was chatting with the forensics people. In the background, a saw started. Normally other tools and running water would have drowned the noise out. But today the insistent drone echoed through all the empty autopsy rooms before reaching the “murder room,” as they called the last one because it was twice the size of the others and thus had enough room for everyone who had to observe a forensic autopsy.

Louise was used to being there while the pathologists did their work, but something about that lonely sound from the saw, cutting through the silence, made her turn and face the other way. On weekdays when people were walking around working, the cold, clinical feeling was usually humanized some. But the Sunday-morning quiet made the sound of the saw too persistent to block out of her mind the way she would have liked.

Flemming called everyone back in by announcing, “We’re ready.”

The two lab technicians came out of the room removing their armor-like iron gloves. They hung them up side by side in the changing room. Louise backed up a little to give them room to get by, accidentally bumping into the row of white rubber boots the pathologists wore when they were working. She nodded to them as they left, and Suhr came over to her.

“I’m heading back to headquarters now; you’ll have to give the report on Flemming’s exam,” he said.

Louise nodded and watched him disappear, his steps precise and determined, making his gait a little stiff. The others had already taken up their positions around the steel table when Louise entered, walking back over to the lab stool, ready to continue taking notes.

“Oral cavity and nasopharynx filled with vomit. Same color as gastric contents,” she wrote, listening as Flemming explained that this was a case of asphyxia secondary to an internal obstruction. The victim would have lost consciousness quickly, probably within one minute.

“She was dead after about five minutes,” he said.

Louise’s hand was getting tired from writing in this awkward position, perched on a stool with her pad balanced on her knee.

“He used a hard object in her vagina. I’m guessing it was the dildo we found on the floor next to the bed. There are incised wounds, the edges are reddish, and there is blood around the opening,” Flemming announced.

Louise let the words flow onto the paper, but avoided looking over while the woman’s gynecological examination was going on.

An hour later, they were done. Flemming didn’t pause during the exam, but he did look over at Louise when he determined that the victim would still be alive now if the tape had been removed from her mouth.

She nodded, following his train of thought:
Did the perp sit there, watching her suffocate?

—

L
OUISE ACCOMPANIED
F
LEMMING BACK TO HIS OFFICE AFTER THEY SAID
good-bye to Åse and Klein on the stairs.

She sat down in the chair across from his desk, her notepad still in her hand. She followed him with her eyes as he checked his messages and looked around for any notes that might have been placed on his desk.

Flemming sat down. His tall body made the desk and the chair under him look small. His desk was stacked with paper and folders, a hilly landscape leaving almost no free space on the desktop. They sat there in silence for a moment before he finally confirmed what she had pieced together herself.

“The vomiting occurred right after the gag in her mouth shifted, triggering her gag reflex.”

Louise didn’t say anything, waiting for the rest.

“When you look at the blows she sustained, it is reasonable to assume that the gag shifted because he hit her....”

She completed his thought for him: “So he watched her die and didn’t help?”

Flemming shrugged and said, “That’s a reasonable supposition.”

Louise shivered.

“I don’t think he likes women very much,” Flemming added.

His comment interrupted Louise’s train of thought and fed the rising wave of the hostility in her.

“No, you don’t say,” she exclaimed sarcastically. “He assaulted her, raped her, and then sat and watched her suffocate. Yeah, you don’t need to convince me that he feels nothing but contempt for the opposite sex.”

They agreed to talk again when the autopsy report was finished, if there was anything in it that required further clarification.

—

T
HEY PARTED WAYS OUTSIDE THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE LAB.
Flemming walked her out and then went back inside. As the glass doors closed behind him, it occurred to her that Peter had dropped her off that morning, so she didn’t have her car or her bike with her.

Irritated, she started walking south down busy Blegdamsvej. It was almost one in the afternoon. She flipped open her cell phone and called Heilmann to say she was on her way back in.

Heilmann asked, “Could you go out to Susanne Hansson’s place and tell her what happened so she’ll be prepared when it leaks to the press?” Louise stopped for a moment as Heilmann spoke, but then slowly turned and started heading toward a bus stop. “I just spoke to her at her mother’s apartment, and I asked her to stay put until we arrive,” Heilmann continued. “And I explained that a new situation had arisen that we wanted to brief her on.”

Louise nodded, looking straight ahead.
A new situation!
You could certainly call it that. At any rate, it was now clear that the perp was far more antisocial than they had previously assumed.

“Maybe we should find out if there’s somewhere else she could stay until we catch him,” Heilmann suggested. “Given the developments, there’s a good chance he may decide to go back and stop her from telling us anything else.”

“The only thing I’m certain about is that there’s no limit to what he may do. The stakes are definitely higher now,” Louise responded as she fished out her bus pass, thinking how ridiculous it was that she was being forced to take the bus to see a witness.

“Are you going to stop by headquarters before you go back out to Valby, then?”

“Nope. I just got on a bus. I’m going straight there.”

Louise could hear Heilmann’s smile.

“I’ll ask Lars to drive out there and pick you up when you’re done talking to her. Then you two can also stop and check out the most recent crime scene.”

“T
HERE ARE NUMEROUS INDICATIONS THAT
J
ESPER
Bjergholdt”—Louise and Lars had decided to continue calling him that until they determined his real identity—“has just committed another very serious crime, which cost a young woman her life.”

Louise spoke slowly, gift-wrapping her words. She rolled, folded, and tied little bows around each individual sentence. Still, there was no mistaking her meaning. It could have been Susanne who ended up on that stainless steel autopsy table. That was really what she was saying, and Susanne got the message—although Susanne tried to distance herself from it emotionally.

“But you’re saying it was an accident that she died?” Susanne said hesitantly.

Louise nodded, but her gesture was not convincing. Then she continued: “He didn’t plan for the gag to slide back into her mouth and make her throw up. But he didn’t help her, either, when it happened. He did nothing to save her. To the contrary, he let her die.”

The indifferent expression that had clouded Susanne’s face since the first time Louise met her at Hvidovre Hospital had returned. Susanne’s eyes moved slowly. Just from looking at her, the amount of effort it took for her to pull herself together before she finally said something was evident.

“How can you know it’s the same person who did this?” Susanne asked.

“We can’t know for sure yet, but it’s the same M.O.,” Louise replied, realizing Susanne didn’t understand what she meant. “The details of what happened to you have not been made public. No one knows about the cable ties he used or the gag you had in your mouth. So it’s reasonable to assume that this is the same man, not a copycat.”

Susanne’s head made a couple of small, mechanical nods as Louise spoke, but she didn’t seem as though any of it was registering. Her whole body had started trembling. She wasn’t crying, just sitting there shaking as though a fist were rattling her body from head to toe. In silence she rocked back and forth with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She shut Louise out and disappeared into her own hollow world.

Louise contemplated going to the living room and calling Susanne’s mother, but instead she remained seated, laying her hand on Susanne’s shoulder.
Maybe this wasn’t the right time to talk about moving to another location,
she thought. It seemed almost abusive to force this fragile woman to deal with anything else by highlighting the risk that her assailant might come back looking for her in the near future. On the other hand, Susanne might be thinking these same thoughts right now, on her own. Maybe her fear of this provoked all the shivering. She might even find the idea of moving somewhere else comforting.

While Louise sat there thinking this through, she pulled out her cell phone and texted Lars that he would have to be patient because she couldn’t leave Susanne quite yet.

“Of course you feel scared because he’s not in custody yet,” Louise tried.

No reaction.

“Our sergeant suggested it might be a good idea for you to move somewhere else while we look for him,” Louise continued. She spoke in a subdued voice and patted Susanne’s shoulder until she started to calm down and the tension in her body abated a bit.

“Do you have someone you could stay with for a while?” Louise asked gently.

Susanne seemed to consider that, but then shook her head. They sat in silence for a moment.

“Is he going to come back?” Susanne asked looking up. She no longer had the vacant stare, but Louise couldn’t interpret what her eyes were hiding. Maybe fear, but Louise didn’t think so. Perhaps doubt, or failure to comprehend. Or a fear of something else that Louise just couldn’t relate to.

“I don’t know,” Louise answered honestly. “But there
is
a risk. You do know what he looks like, so you could identify him.”

“Yeah, but I can’t remember!” Susanne burst out.

“True, but he doesn’t know that.”

“Then say that. Get them to write that, that I can’t remember anything.” Her tears welled up and her voice was desperate.

Louise squeezed Susanne’s shoulder and started patting her back again in a soothing motion. “Well, maybe that’s what we should do. But then your whole story will come out, and that might not be that pleasant. Worse, perhaps.”

Susanne’s shoulders relaxed a little. “That doesn’t matter,” she said hoarsely, wiping her nose. “It’s worse walking around like this, without anyone knowing why.” Silence settled between them before Susanne started to explain what she meant.

“I went to work on Friday....” Susanne had to push the first few words out; but once she got started, it came out as a torrent. “But it was no good. I left again after two hours. People were staring at me, and I could tell they were all talking about me. But no one came over and asked me why my face looks this way. Everyone was avoiding me, even though their eyes were following me everywhere. I couldn’t stand it, so I left.”

“I think you should seriously consider staying somewhere else for a while,” Louise repeated, overcome with compassion. She knew how weird people get about other people’s suffering and how this weirdness creates a distance that is often painful. Plus, the weirdness happens right when the person can least cope with feeling rejected by friends and co-workers.