Call Me Princess Part 20

25.

WHEN LOUISE WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, HER HEAD WAS throbbing so violently that she lay there for a long time, pulling herself together before she slowly pushed herself over the edge of the bed into a sitting position. They had mostly drunk gin after dinner, and the taste was still in her mouth. She got up and brushed her teeth and scurried back into bed, while she waited for someone to pour her back into the bottle, as her father used to say when she was younger.

It had been a good evening, and even in the midst of her hangover she felt alive, as though something had been liberated inside her. She looked at the clock. She had an hour until she was supposed to meet Peter. Maybe she should cancel. Or maybe she ought to march right down to that cafe stinking of liquor and cigarette smoke and not give a d.a.m.n.

- "ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE OKAY?" PETER ASKED UNCERTAINLY AFTER they'd finished their second cup of coffee and had squared away all the practical matters about dividing up their possessions.

She nodded in affirmation and asked "How about you?" She had avoided asking before.

"Yeah, things are great," he said quickly.

That's a f.u.c.king lie, she could see that. Suddenly she noticed how he looked. He seemed sad, but was trying to hide it.

"I mean, obviously it's a bit of an adjustment," he added, watching her with an intent look that she didn't have the energy to interpret. "It's different."

She could imagine.

He looked at his watch and started getting ready to go. "We're going out to Lina's sister's place this afternoon. She's pregnant, and there's obviously a lot of baby stuff to talk about even though the little guy's not coming for another seven months."

Louise felt bad for Peter. He tended to use that sarcastic tone when he was starting to lose respect and to tune out.

The thought didn't hit her until she was back home, lying on the sofa. What would she do if he suddenly showed up at the door and wanted to move back in?

She closed her eyes, determined to push the thought out of her mind before she had a chance to start dwelling on it.

- WHEN SHE WOKE UP LATER IN THE AFTERNOON, SHE MADE HERSELF a big mug of tea, with of plenty of sugar and milk, and then sat down in front of her computer. There were lots of new pictures from a wild Friday night on the town. She discovered to her amazement that there was a whole alb.u.m from one of the places she and Flemming had been. She hadn't even noticed the photographer there, nor did she recognize any of the people in the pictures. She was forced to conclude she had actually been engrossed in the coroner's company.

She sat there idly, clicking through Copenhagen's night life, and had gone three or four pictures past it before her tired brain registered what her eyes had seen.

He was with three girls, showing off for the photographer. He was standing on the far left, talking to someone who wasn't in the picture. His aristocratic profile stood in sharp contrast to pretty much everything else in the picture.

She clicked on the picture and zoomed in so it took up the whole screen. She scrolled down over the photo and noticed the text box underneath. Not that she expected his name to be there, more because she was just on autopilot.

Prinzz.

They were calling him "Prinzz" now. She sat for a long time, staring, without being able to remember the three girls' names. She saw only his name with those two Zs and wondered if it could belong to someone else. But there wasn't anyone else in the picture. Just the four of them.

She s.h.i.+vered a little as she went back to the start page and typed "Prinzz" in the site's search box. She couldn't tell if it was her hangover still wreaking havoc on her body, or if it was agitation knowing he had been hanging out in the same part of town where she had been. She could have run into him. They actually could have been in the same place without her having realized it. She hit ENTER and found his profile. The alb.u.m under his profile name was empty, but the profile did have a "Send Prinzz a Message" link. Louise sat there staring for a long time, and then her fingers starting moving on the keyboard.

"I saw you downtown last night, but you weren't alone so I didn't want to bother you. Is there a place you usually go?"

Louise tried to imagine what Susanne would have written if it were her. Brief and not too self-confident at any rate. She signed it "TRIM" and pressed SEND, but regretted it right away. She should have thought it through in a state when her mental capacity was not diminished by a hangover. She wanted to arouse his curiosity, not set off his warning bells.

s.h.i.+t, she thought, cursing that she couldn't get the message back.

She was still sitting there, trying to collect her thoughts, a moment later when an icon blinked to tell her she had a message in her Night.w.a.tch inbox.

"Sometimes," he wrote succinctly.

Dumbfounded, she sat there staring. She had established contact, but it had almost been too easy. Again she suspected that she had the wrong guy. Maybe this wasn't even the guy who called himself "Prinzz." She was still so tired. Although her headache had abated, she was still thinking slowly, and she wasn't with it enough to come up with a plausible excuse to back out now and wait to reestablish contact once she was feeling better.

Another message from him: "Have I seen you?"

"No, I don't think so," she replied, starting to sweat. "You were surrounded by girls, so I totally don't blame you for not noticing me."

It would be dumb to break off contact, she now realized, since he was writing to her. If it turned out it really was him, she had to hold on, tooth and nail. She led the conversation to a neutral topic.

"Do you go out often?" she wrote.

"It depends. What about you?"

"No, not so much. I was just out with an old friend from school."

"Old? How old are you?"

She stopped to consider. Both Susanne and Christina Lerche were in their early thirties. It would be too much of a leap if she was much older.

"Thirty-three," she lied, adding that she hoped that wasn't off-putting.

"Not at all. Do you have kids?"

Yes or no, she wondered quickly. No, no kids to tuck into bed before dinner, she concluded.

"No, I haven't found the right guy yet," she wrote and then scolded herself silently: shut up, quick, this is too risky.

"Or maybe he hasn't found you yet," was the speedy response.

"Good answer," she wrote.

Phew, she thought, noticing that her forehead was damp with sweat.

"What's your name?" he wrote, not acknowledging her compliment.

Now the sweat really starting flowing. She wiped her brow with her sleeve and rubbed her temples. Then she quickly typed: "Call me Princess."

- LOUISE JUMPED UP ALL OF A SUDDEN AND STEPPED BACK FROM THE computer, unable to fathom the consequences of what she had gotten mixed up in. She went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on her face. At the same time, a feeling that she was on to something was bubbling inside her. Her exhaustion was easing, along with the last traces of her hangover. A wave of empowerment rolled up through her body. They had established contact. Now she just had to act sensibly.

She ought to contact Suhr or Heilmann so one of them could help decide how they should proceed. On the other hand, if she waited too long now, she risked his breaking off contact. He hadn't asked where she had seen him in town yet. Maybe he figured she'd seen him the night before. Or maybe people just took it for granted that people were checking the photos on Night.w.a.tch because they knew it let you track down people you had seen on the town.

She dried off her face and went back.

"Do you want to get coffee?" he had written while she was away.

She ran to the front hall to grab her cell phone from her purse. She quickly found Heilmann's cell number and called. It rang for a long time before it went to voicemail. Louise tried her home number, but there was no answer there either. She heard a sound from her computer and knew she had received a new message. She left a message on Heilmann's answering machine, asking her to call back.

"f.u.c.k," she said out loud as she hung up. It could be a long time before Heilmann called back, and she couldn't wait to respond to him. Irritated, she tried Suhr, who picked up after the second ring, but when she heard his voice, she could tell from his standoffish tone that she was interrupting something. She hung up, secretly rejoicing that her phone number wouldn't show up on his caller ID. What the h.e.l.l would he have told her to do, anyway? They could run a trace on her computer on Monday if they thought that would give them anything new.

Again she felt unsure if it really was Bjergholdt she had contacted. A man with so much on his conscience wouldn't be behaving so recklessly, right? The words were all muddled in her head, and she wouldn't have been able to explain to Suhr that she was sitting at her computer writing to someone who might not even be their suspect. She needed to be a little more sure.

"That sounds nice," she replied. Then she hit RETURN twice and continued, "I'm going out of town this weekend visiting my parents, but I'll be back Monday so maybe we can set something up when I get back?"

She sat there with a nervous knot in her stomach, waiting to see how he would react.

It took longer than before for him to respond. She wondered if she shouldn't have nailed down a specific time and was just about to write that they could decide on a time now when she received his response.

"Sounds good," he wrote. "What's your real e-mail address? I'll send you a line Monday. Take care of yourself, Princess."

She sank, struggling to think clearly. The Hotmail account she had been using at work was just her initials, but that didn't go with TRIM at all. She felt like she'd been caught in a lie, and hid her face in her hands, struggling to try to think coherently. Finally she gave up and wrote her Hotmail address, praying that he wouldn't get cold feet and ask her what TRIM, LR, and Princess had in common. But he just replied "See you soon," a second after she pressed SEND.

- SO, SHE HAD DONE IT. THEY HAD A DATE TO E-MAIL EACH OTHER ON Monday. Suddenly she felt hungry. Like a force of nature, she felt her body suddenly crying out for food. She went and opened her fridge, even though she knew there was nothing in it that would help her. Without even trying to fight her craving for a burger and a big container of fries, she shoved her feet into a pair of galoshes and headed down to the street get some takeout, replaying the exchange of messages in her head.

Had she written anything that could arouse his suspicion? Had she in any way said anything that didn't come across as natural? It also occurred to her that in her eagerness to tone things down, she might have come across as uninteresting. Maybe he'd lose interest before Monday.

Her thoughts were racing, spinning into an enormous mishmash by the time she got back to her apartment. She had ordered two cheeseburgers with extra bacon, even though there was almost no way she could eat more than one of them, but she felt like indulging. Feeling that her appearance screamed to all and sundry she'd been out most of the night-and wasn't particularly good at such things-she let herself back in through her building's main door holding a Jolly Cola and looked forward to collapsing.

26.

"YOU'VE GOT TO BE f.u.c.kING KIDDING ME. YOU'VE BEEN WRITING from your home computer after we set up a whole special work one just for that purpose?"

Michael Stig was leaning over Louise's desk sounding like a broken record. This was the fourth time he had repeated himself, although his actual word choice had changed slightly, and Louise was already fully aware that it might not have been the smartest decision. But she also knew that a civilian couldn't trace things the way the police could, so she didn't quite grasp why it was apparently such a huge disaster.

"Well, first of all, we should have blocked your IP address," Stig said at the investigative team's morning briefing.

The others listened with interest as Louise told them about Night.w.a.tch, and Heilmann commended her for establis.h.i.+ng contact when she had the chance. Even Suhr seemed impressed, although Louise had pointed out several times there was no way to even be sure she had contacted the right guy. She also explained the project she had Stine Mogensen working on, which was ultimately their best shot at contacting the suspect.

"Mogensen left the mixer with Bjergholdt that night," Louise reminded everyone present. "Last week I asked her to search for him whenever she was chatting online. They have chatted with each other before, so I thought maybe there was something distinctive about the way he expressed himself that she might recognize even if he were using a new profile name. But she hasn't found anything yet. So maybe this 'Prinzz' is just a wild-goose chase."

Louise said that mostly to tamp down their expectations a little.

Stig sat there shaking his head through the rest of the briefing, and Louise wished he would just go back to focusing on his f.u.c.king management training program. Finally she couldn't take it anymore. "Would you give it a f.u.c.king rest!?" she snapped.

She struggled with her rage and avoided making eye contact with him even though he was all up in her face as he scolded her for using her home computer. He was making a big deal out of nothing to make it seem like her actions had been irresponsible and reckless. Which they had, she was fully aware of that. But that didn't give him carte blanche to keep harping on it.

Suhr was standing in the doorway observing the drama without any change in his expression. It took a minute before Stig noticed him, gave everyone a quick nod, and left the room.

"Just keep going," Suhr said, ignoring the conversation he'd walked in on. "It won't be of real interest to us until we know for sure if it's him, of course. But don't be inviting him over to your place unless we're there."

Louise smiled at him and promised to be careful.

"The attacks we've seen from him so far aren't the kinds of things you get away with out in the open, so you just keep at it," Suhr encouraged.

She was glad that the lieutenant was being so low-key about the whole thing. There was still a long way to go, she thought, and she was sure Bjergholdt wouldn't even consider inviting her out to dinner until he was sure she was the type he was looking for. Which he couldn't know until they met in person. And she wouldn't be sure it was actually him until they met in person, either. Suhr's secretary interrupted them by coming in to let him know he had a visitor on his way up.

Louise looked at him askance, and Suhr smiled pessimistically and shrugged. "It's Susanne's mother," he said. "She's here to yell at me because I haven't found her daughter's rapist yet. Plus now she's p.i.s.sed that we moved her daughter so she can't get in touch with her."

"When is someone going to talk to her, really talk to her," Louise asked, "... and explain the situation and tell her that she is the reason Susanne doesn't want to have any contact for a while?"

Louise actually thought Jakobsen had already done that, but the woman obviously hadn't clued in.

"Now," Suhr said, an anguished look on his face.

Unbelievable what all falls under the job description of a homicide division lieutenant, she thought, watching him leave. She secretly wished a curse on Stig that on the very day he was promoted to lieutenant, if that ever happened, he would be inundated with stupid tasks like this.

- "I'LL BE IN A LITTLE LATE TOMORROW," LOUISE SAID WHEN SHE RAN into Heilmann in the hallway late that afternoon outside Suhr's office. She briefly mentioned that she had a doctor's appointment but didn't provide any further details, and the sergeant was tactful enough not to ask.

Louise wasn't very hungry as she biked home, and decided she would just make do with a couple of open-face sandwiches for dinner so she wouldn't have to stop and pick up any food. The whole way up to the fifth floor, she walked with her eyes trained on the steps in front of her and was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she almost crashed right into the person sitting on the landing outside her door.

"What on earth are you doing here?" she asked, looking at Peter in surprise-but she already knew.

His overnight bag was sitting in front of the door. He nodded at it and shrugged.

Her insides went cold, and an image of Susanne and her mother flashed through her mind. If Peter wanted to move back in, Louise wanted to move to an unlisted address, too. She realized right away how childish that thought was. She stepped past him and unlocked the door.

"Come in," she said.

Her thoughts were in disarray. She had completely pushed the instinctive reaction she had on Sat.u.r.day out of her mind, but now he was standing here and she had no doubt as to why.

"Didn't it work out?" she asked, heading into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

The atmosphere was awkward, and it was unreasonable of him not to start talking. But instead, Peter was leaving it up to her to break the ice and get the conversation going.

"I don't know," he finally said. "I think I need to really think things through."

That sounds sensible, she thought. Then the irritation hit her again. He hadn't even apologized about showing up unannounced, nor had he asked if this was a good time. And, actually, his timing sucked. She needed to go see if "Prinzz" had e-mailed. She'd been checking her Hotmail account from her laptop, but there hadn't been anything. She noticed she was feeling more and more nervous that "Prinzz" would back out at the last minute, and she had the weird sense she could force him to e-mail her by sitting at her computer and staring at her screen. This had been on her mind all day, and her mind was going a mile a minute. She didn't have any brain cells left to devote to thinking about Peter's problems.

"So what are you going to do?" she asked in a tone of voice that made it sound like his badminton game had been canceled.

"I miss you," he said.

Louise turned her back to him, wis.h.i.+ng he would stop. "You can't just move back in," she said, surprised that the idea had even occurred to him.

"I know that. I'm going to stay with Lars."