Call Me Princess Part 5

Suhr had walked back over to the giant dry-erase board hanging at far end of the break room.

She opened her eyes again but avoided looking at him. She didn't feel like listening to whatever he was about to say.

"The mother of the victim was extremely upset that the police, quote, weren't doing anything to find her daughter's a.s.sailant."

Louise could hear in his intonation that the mother hadn't spared any details. "That b.i.t.c.h," she muttered, gulping down the remainder of her mostly cold coffee.

"How far have you guys gotten on a description of the suspect? And what do we have that can identify him?"

He stood ready in front of the blank dry-erase board with an uncapped blue marker in his hand.

"We still don't have a usable description," Heilmann said. "The plan was for Rick to have Ms. Hansson go through photos yesterday, but then the Nykbing Sjaelland operation came up, so we had to postpone that until today."

Heilmann calmly explained that they still didn't know if there was enough biological material to run a DNA a.n.a.lysis, but the DNA lab was hoping to have the results later this week or early next week. She said this a little hesitantly, because in reality it might also take until the week after next, and no one really wanted to think about that.

"Could you then just explain why you guys went to Nykbing when you've got more than enough on your plate here at home?" Suhr asked with an undertone that Louise couldn't interpret. Either Heilmann had told him how ridiculous it was that she and Lars had been ordered to go to Nykbing when all they ended up doing was chauffeuring the suspect back to headquarters, or Suhr had had no idea that Heilmann's team was out there during yesterday's arrest.

"We were a.s.sisting because we were ordered to," Heilmann replied, gesturing by faintly nodding her head that the request had come from Willumsen. She stared directly at Lieutenant Suhr as she spoke.

Willumsen followed the whole thing, unconcerned.

"I want to have something actionable after lunch," Suhr continued, bellowing. "There is a lot of attention on rape cases these days, especially when the parties met each other online, and a case like this one might drag out over several weeks if the media latches on to it. We can a.s.sume they'll publish that the victim was gagged and bound. The mother obviously isn't planning on keeping her mouth shut about the way she found her daughter, but apparently she doesn't know that her daughter met the perp online. Her version makes it sounds like a complete stranger forced his way into her daughter's apartment. The story will undoubtedly blow up if it comes out that the victim invited the suspect in."

Louise knew Suhr was already picturing the headlines.

"You need to close this case, and I will not tolerate you spending time on other cases before this one is out of the way. If you've got anything pressing on your plate, you'll have to hand it off to someone else." Suhr cast a quick glance at Willumsen. "And it has to come through me."

Louise glanced at Heilmann as they stood up, but she couldn't tell whether she was satisfied with the lieutenant's direct rebuke of Willumsen.

"Let's just meet in my office and touch base on this," Heilmann said on her way out the door.

"Was your pal Camilla the one who called the lieutenant?" Michael Stig asked as they sat around the desk in Heilmann's office.

"I don't know. I haven't spoken with her," Louise answered defensively.

"Maybe it'd be a good idea for you to call Camilla Lind and find out what the mother is saying and why she went to a newspaper with the story," Heilmann said.

Louise was about to suggest that someone else should make that call, but then it occurred to her that she didn't want to draw any more attention than necessary to her relations.h.i.+p with Camilla.

"Okay, I'll give her a call, but I've got an appointment with Susanne at ten. She's coming up here so we can try to nail down a description."

"The perp's online profile isn't up any more," Toft informed them. "I went into Susanne's profile to check her inbox and the messages she had gotten from Bjergholdt, and as far as I could tell his profile has been deleted."

"That was probably one of the first things he did after he wiped off her blood," Stig interjected.

"Shouldn't we also see if we can find any other women Bjergholdt was in contact with via the dating site?" Lars suggested.

"We should track any accounts that exchanged messages with 'Mr. n.o.ble,'" Toft said.

Louise raised her eyebrows, wondering if Bjergholdt's profile name were somehow an allusion to his being from a blue-blooded family. Or whether it meant he was an attractive guy or something.

"Come to think of it, what was Susanne's profile name?" Louise inquired, curious.

"'Snow Wite,' without the h."

"Ah, the spelling with the h was probably already taken," she remarked.

"The Web site's administrator can trace any messages exchanged with 'Mr. n.o.ble.' If they balk at that, we'll sic CCU on them."

This made Louise think of the guys from Ghostbusters showing up with those vacuum-like gadgets on their backs, exorcising ghosts. It's actually kind of the same thing, she thought: we're looking for something that can't be seen.

"Have you told the photo lab you're coming?" Heilmann asked, looking at Louise.

Louise nodded and asked Heilmann if having Susanne look at the photo archive would jeopardize her ability to pick the perp out of a lineup later on. In cases where the victim has a lot of doubt about the perpetrator's description, they frequently ran into big problems with defense attorneys claiming that the reliability of the recognition is weakened when they present the victim with a series of pictures in advance. And it happens too often that when the police show pictures to a victim, it affects the victim's memory.

"Do we have any choice?" Heilmann said, looking at her.

"No, we really don't," Louise answered, annoyed that witnesses were so bad at recognition. People were so unbelievably bad at remembering details accurately. Dark-haired men become medium-blond. A face that that one witness remembers as having p.r.o.nounced features is remembered by another as having weak features.

"Or do we go to the press?" she suggested, interrupting the silence that had settled over the conference table. "We could describe the crime and look for other women who had something similar happen to them, and then hope they've got a clearer image of the suspect in their minds."

"Are we looking for other women?" Lars asked, looking as if he had been suddenly awakened from his thoughts.

"Not yet."

Heilmann had apparently already given this thorough consideration. "There is no doubt that when the story hits the papers, there will be a ma.s.sive chorus of folks saying Susanne herself is to blame for what happened to her. We can agree, can't we, that there is no reason to subject her to that as long as it can be avoided?"

Everyone nodded. Not just for Susanne's sake, but also because the uproar would make it hard for them to do their work.

"We need to get her to give us a description, and we'll look after the rest ourselves," Heilmann said, and then told Louise, "But find out what the mother is saying."

When they stood up, Heilmann asked Stig to drive out and have a word with Susanne's mother. The way she said it left no doubt that she meant he should drive out there and get her to shut up.

- LOUISE ASKED SUSANNE TO SIT IN THE CHAIR IN FRONT OF THE YELLOWED screen that the photographs would be projected onto.

In the room next door, the technician was pulling out the photos that matched the information they had given him: male, dark complexion, high forehead, dark eyes, smooth face. Those were the characteristics that had been noted in advance; height was plus or minus four inches, and age was plus or minus five years.

Before they got going with the slides, Louise wanted to show Susanne the s.e.x-offenders file, which contained photos of the people with previous convictions for s.e.xual offenses.

"They're using it in the room next door, but you can have it after we've been through the slides," the technician said when Louise asked for the file.

He snapped the slide carousel into place with a loud click and handed Susanne the control with the b.u.t.ton that advanced the carousel.

"Let's just forget going after a specific person," Louise told the technician before they got started. "Susanne is too fuzzy on what he looks like. We're looking for a type."

The technician nodded.

"Okay, we're ready now," Louise said. She took a pad of paper out and sat next to Susanne, explaining that she should just advance through the photos at whatever pace she wanted and take plenty of time.

Susanne nodded and pressed the b.u.t.ton to pull up the first photo that the technician had found in the comprehensive offenders' index that the police maintained.

"He didn't look at all like that," she exclaimed emphatically, sounding irritated.

Louise considered whether she should tell Susanne that in fact he was an exact match for the description Susanne had given them, but Louise knew it was hard to understand how precise a description had to be before you could pick out a person who even vaguely resembled the person you were looking for. It wasn't that easy to explain the wide range that "dark" and "dark hair" actually covered when someone described it that way, based on an image in their head.

Susanne clicked to the next image.

"His forehead wasn't that high, his temples are even higher," she said, studying the photograph of a sleepy man with tousled hair. It wasn't any easier to recognize people when many of them were groggy and disheveled because they were usually photographed the morning after their arrest.

Louise took down Susanne's comments on her pad of paper. "His eyes are prettier!" Susanne exclaimed.

"How so?"

"More honest."

"How so?" Louise repeated.

"They're more attentive."

"Explain."

"They aren't set as close as his." Susanne pointed at the screen.

Eyes not close-set, Louise wrote on her pad.

An hour later, she handed a piece of paper to the technician. Three times Susanne had exclaimed, "That's him!" And the first time her outburst triggered sobbing, after which she sat for several minutes staring out into s.p.a.ce.

Each time, Louise had suggested they take a break. The monotonous clicking when a new picture was called up was grating on their nerves, and sitting in the dark was making them sleepy. However, Susanne had quickly composed herself and said they should continue; but when Louise asked why she thought it was him, it turned out she actually wasn't sure.

"He looks like him. The mouth and nose are the same."

The technician came in and handed them a piece of paper with the names and details on the three people she had picked out. The first man, Karsten Flintholm, had done time for rape, and that made Louise's adrenaline surge. His picture would undoubtedly also be in the s.e.xual-offenders file. The two other men hadn't been previously connected to rape.

Flintholm was the only one Susanne had immediately responded to as she sat flipping through the blue binder of s.e.xual offenders, but she looked hard at the pictures that came up each time she turned a page. As though she's memorizing the faces, Louise thought, wondering if Susanne thought maybe she could learn to see the evil in them if she paid enough attention. Louise felt sorry for her and hoped it was some consolation that many of them looked quite average. There were only a couple where you could tell by looking that you probably wouldn't want to meet them on a dark night.

Louise called Lars and asked him to check the three names in the criminal-offender registry so they could see whether they were currently in or out of jail.

In addition to the three specific men, Louise described the general type of face Susanne had pointed out for the suspect. From her comments about a high forehead, eyes not closely set, and the other details that Louise had written down on her pad, the technician pieced together a description in the room next door and handed her a printout.

She took Susanne downstairs. Her face was hidden in the shadow of her baseball cap again, concealing her dark bruises. Initially Susanne said she would be taking sick leave from work for the rest of the week, but the crime-scene investigators had said that they had finished at her apartment that day, so she could move in again if she felt she was ready, and she was now contemplating going back into the office.

"Maybe you should stay with your mother until you've gotten a little distance from the attack?" Louise suggested before they parted ways. She considered mentioning that Susanne's mother had contacted the newspaper, to see if Susanne was aware of that.

"I'd rather go home."

"How is your mother taking all this?" Louise asked, curious. "It must have given her quite a fright."

"She called a locksmith so I could get the keys changed, and had a peephole and chain installed on my door. She doesn't know I was out on a date with him."

Susanne s.h.i.+fted her weight from one foot to the other. "Are you trying to keep that a secret?" Louise asked.

Susanne carefully touched the wound on her left cheekbone. "It's no secret. We just don't talk about stuff like that," she said after a long pause.

"You're not close?" Louise asked.

"Yeah, I guess you could say that. She has created her own image of what my life is, and it's not that easy for her to see beyond those preconceived notions."

Louise pulled her over to a bench on the landing. They spoke softly so their voices wouldn't carry through the stairwell.

"What does she want your life to be like?" Louise prodded.

"The way things usually are. I've lived alone for twelve years. I moved to the apartment downstairs when I was twenty, when I got my job at the bank. We've got our rhythm, my mother and I, and she really likes things this way. Everything's become routine."

"A routine you don't dare-or don't want-to break out of?"

"There's no need to change anything until there's a reason to," Susanne replied, evasively.

"Did you know that your mother got in touch with the press and told them your story?"

Louise still wasn't sure if it was a good idea to bring this up, but this was the closest thing to a heart-to-heart they'd had so far, where Louise was able to get some insight into the life that Susanne had been living until Monday night when she went out to dinner with the man who called himself Jesper Bjergholdt.

At first Susanne didn't respond to what Louise said, but then she kicked the toes of her shoes together.

"I didn't know that," Susanne admitted with a sigh. "But she can't understand why he hasn't been arrested." She glanced at Louise out the corner of her good eye. "She's afraid he'll come back."

"Are you afraid he'll come back?" Louise asked.

Susanne shrugged.

"I don't think I'm afraid... and yet... I don't feel anything. I might also run into him on the way to work, or he could be standing there when I get home."

She took off her cap, set it in her lap, and shook her short hair.

"It didn't occur to me in the least that that night could have ended in such a disaster, and it may sound strange after all that's happened, but I can't really imagine it happening again, either."

Louise watched her as she spoke. There was naivete and a protective sh.e.l.l around her that evidently had been there for many years, but at the same time she sensed that now there was also an awareness that you can't always control what life has in store for you.

"Maybe it's time you took responsibility for your own life," Louise suggested, noticing how absurd it was that Susanne had been so deeply hurt the very first time she had made an attempt to do something slightly out of the ordinary.

"Maybe."

"At any rate, you ought to talk to your mother. I don't think either of you should be talking to any more reporters," Louise said, looking for a way to make her next point so it wouldn't sound as harsh. "But now that the story is out, you're going to have to resign yourself to the possibility that the fact will come out that you knew the suspect in advance and that you had been out together."

Susanne put her cap back on and nodded. "And there's nothing wrong with that, either," she said, to convince herself of that sentiment.

"Not at all," Louise acknowledged.

She walked back to her office and threw the printout onto Lars's desk.