“Six,” Winter said. “You’re forgetting the child, Helene.”
“Where’s your murderer, then? Did he go along to Sweden or is he still in Denmark? Maybe even here in Alborg?”
“He may have just walked by out there on the street,” Winter said. “I don’t know. The murder in August in Gothenburg doesn’t necessarily point to him living permanently in Sweden, but he was certainly there then.”
“If it is a he,” Poulsen said.
Winter nodded mutely.
“Or there’s another possible theory,” she said. “That there’s still just one survivor left from that bank robbery-and I’m counting all six-but that it’s a woman. Brigitta.”
Winter nodded again.
“I think your face just went pale,” she said. “I’m probably just as pale as you are. That’s an even more horrific thought.”
“That would have meant having her own child killed.”
“Maybe she had no choice. Maybe she didn’t know. You know as well as I do that we’re treading along the very brink of human misery here.”
“Yes,” Winter said, “that’s part of the job.”
“But it’s also just a theory,” Poulsen said.
53
Winter swung his legs over the side of the bed, and as he walked toward the john he stubbed his toe against the bedside table. It happened once every season.
He swore and sat down to massage his toe. The pain shrunk to a dull ache, and he stood up in order to take care of his pressing need.
When he was back in bed, he looked up at the ceiling and thought about Beate Moller, whom he hadn’t seen. Is that what he would end up doing? Would he drive out to her house in the east of the city only to park a ways off and see her walk in and walk out?
He wouldn’t be alone. There would be another car parked out there or a motorbike that he would be able to see, or not. It would be a provocation. Perhaps from both sides. The woman would end up caught in the middle. What good could come of that?
Better to let Michaela speak to her, he thought. I’ll probably just screw things up.
“We have two unsolved murders gnawing at our souls,” Jens Bendrup said, as he sat on the desk in Winter’s office. “That wander like ghosts through the passageways of the soul.”
“Excuse me?” Winter raised his gaze from the computer screen.
“Old, unsolved murders,” Bendrup said. “Not to mention a couple of old armed robberies. Are you aware that the statute of limitations has run out on the Danske Bank robbery? It’s twenty years. Anything requiring a minimum sentence of eight years has a twenty-year statute of limitations here in Denmark. The same goes for murder. But stuff like that loses its meaning now that we’re linking the past and the present together, right?”
“What unsolved murders are these?” Winter asked.
“One of them, I believe, is a biker killing,” Bendrup said, “but as usual it’s impossible to find the evidence to back up the suspicions.”
“What happened?”
“A twenty-four-year-old woman was found with her throat slit in a toilet stall at the railroad station. She had a ticket to Frederikshavn in her purse. The train was scheduled to leave a half hour later, but she wasn’t on it. That was fourteen years ago, in ’84.
“At some point every year, I take out the case file and go through it. The Jutte case. Her name was Jutte, the girl who had her throat cut at the railway station. It’s my case-I have the whole preliminary investigation and now it’s even being transferred to the computer. Maybe that’ll improve our chances. I never forget. The case is going nowhere, and I can’t forget.”
“No new leads?”
“Little things pop up every year, of course, but nothing solid to go on. Then there’s Pedersen from Ringsted who calls every so often to confess. He confesses to everything, but I guess you get that kind of thing too.”
“Yeah.” Winter switched off his computer. “So you think that this murder of Jutte can be tied to the biker gangs?”
“To the Bandidos,” Bendrup said. “She was what you might call a passive member. Her boyfriend was a mechanic and a passive member too. But there’s no such thing when you’re dealing with these people. Maybe that was the message we-she-got in that damn toilet stall. But it wasn’t her boyfriend who did it.”
“Any other suspects?”
“Nothing solid or substantial.”
“You mentioned another murder,” Winter said.
“What? Yeah. A Mrs. Bertelsen. Four years ago. She was at a restaurant of the cheaper variety, left on her own, and disappeared. Eight months later somebody’s pet grubbed up a skeleton in an empty lot down by the docks. We found no personal belongings. Nothing. She was buried naked, and when we dug her up she was more than that. She’d been reported missing, and we ID’d her by her teeth. But that’s as far as we’ve come.”
Winter thought about Helene. He saw the lake. The narrow ditch like an open grave. The mossy ground. A seagull that shrieked a warning.
There was one more thing he wanted to do. First he called the Seacat office in Frederikshavn and changed his ticket, getting one of the last available seats on the 1515 boat home. He’d checked out from the hotel, and his suitcase was in his car parked in the lot opposite the Alcoholics Anonymous. It was just past noon.
Winter walked down the corridor to Michaela Poulsen’s office. The door was open. He saw her through it, hunched over her desk. Her hair was hanging loose today. He knocked on the door, and she looked up and waved him in.
“I’m leaving now,” he said.
“Right. Anything new on the home front?”
“Maybe. A bus driver claims he saw the girl. Could be. And then I’m dying to read through the preliminary investigation again.”
“So you said yesterday.”
“But we’ll be in touch soon again?”
“I hope so,” she said. “I’m trying to arrange to speak to Beate Moller. To start with. Then I’m going to speak to the judge, and the current owner, about the house in Blokhus.” She looked down at the papers in front of her and shook her head. “Once I’ve waded through all this mess.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a mess, literally. A mess of hooch! We found eighty thousand liters of the stuff on a farm halfway to Frederikshavn. Eighty thousand liters! That ain’t hay.”
Winter sat alone in a room on the ground floor with a sign that read “Newspapers on Microfilm” on the door. He placed the rolls of film in the machine and then stood to open the window of the stuffy room. Outside lay a pedestrian crossing, and the crosswalk man was glowing red. Even after he’d hitched open the window, it was still red. He read the first page of the
Jens Bendrup was interviewed, and Winter couldn’t help but smile at the young Bendrup with long hair and flipped-out sideburns. All the men he saw in the photos had flipped-out sideburns on October 3, 1972.
