At this point Marcus Jacobsen broke in. He could see that the new team members were itching to ask questions. Better to anticipate them.
“Annelise Kvist and her mother and children will be given the witness protection that the case demands,” he said. “To start with, we’re going to move them to another location, and then I’m sure we’ll get her to talk. In the meantime we need to bring in the narcotics squad. I understand that a considerable amount of synthetic THC was found in her body, most likely Marinol, which is the most common kind of hash in pill form. We see it quite often in pusher circles, so let’s find out where it can be bought locally. I also understand that traces of crystal meth and ethylphenidate were found. An extremely unlikely cocktail.”
Carl shook his head. The killer was certainly versatile. Slashing the throat of one victim in a park and then gently slipping pills down the throat of the other. Why couldn’t his colleagues just wait until the woman started spilling the beans on her own? He opened his eyes and found the homicide chief staring right at him.
“You’re shaking your head, Carl. Do you have a better suggestion? Have you got some other creative ideas that might give us a lead?” He smiled. But he was the only one in the room who did.
“All I know is that ingesting THC will make you throw up if too many other weird things are stuffed down your throat. So the guy who forced her to swallow the pills must have been really good at it, don’t you think? Why don’t you just wait until Annelise Kvist herself tells you what she saw? A couple of days, more or less, aren’t going to make any difference. And we’ve got other things to keep us busy.” He glanced around at his colleagues. “Well, at least I do.”
The secretaries were busy, as usual. Lis sat at her computer wearing a headset and pounding on the keyboard like a drummer in a rock band. Carl looked for a new, dark-haired secretary, but no one fit Assad’s description. Only Lis’s colleague, the department’s infamous version of “Ilse, the She-Wolf ”-called Mrs. Sorensen by her coworkers-might reasonably be said to be a brunette. Carl squinted his eyes. Maybe Assad saw something in that surly face of hers that was invisible to everyone else.
“We need a decent photocopier in the basement office, Lis,” said Carl, when she stopped drumming on the keyboard and gave him a big smile. “Could you make sure that happens by this afternoon? I know they have an extra one over in the National Investigative Center. It hasn’t even been taken out of the box.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Carl,” she said. And he knew it would get done.
“I need to speak to Marcus Jacobsen,” said a crisp voice next to him. Carl turned and found himself face to face with a woman he’d never seen before. She had brown eyes. The most insanely delicious brown eyes he’d ever seen. Carl felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Then the woman turned to the secretaries.
“Are you Mona Ibsen?” Mrs. Sorensen asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“We’ve been expecting you.”
The two women smiled at each other, and Mona Ibsen stepped aside as Mrs. Sorensen got up to show her the way. Carl pressed his lips tight as he watched her disappear down the hall. She was wearing a short fur jacket, short enough so he could see the lower curves of her ass. Promising, but not a young woman, judging by her curves. Why the hell hadn’t he noticed anything about her face other than the eyes?
“Mona Ibsen? Who’s that?” he asked Lis, trying to sound casual. “Something to do with the murder of the cyclist?”
“No, she’s our new crisis counselor. A psychologist. As of today she’s assigned to work with all the departments here at headquarters.”
“Is that right?” He could hear for himself how foolish he sounded.
He suppressed the butterflies in his stomach and went over to Jacobsen’s office, opening the door without bothering to knock. If the boss was going to bawl him out, it damn well better be for a good cause.
“Sorry, Marcus,” he said. “I didn’t know you had company.”
She was sitting so that he saw her in profile, with soft skin and lines at the corners of her mouth, more the result of smiling than boredom.
“I can come back later. Sorry for interrupting,” said Carl.
She turned to face him as he uttered these words of cringing servility. She had a distinctive mouth. Full, Cupid’s-bow lips. She was clearly over fifty, and she gave him a faint smile. Damned if his kneecaps didn’t turn to jelly.
“What do you want, Carl?” Marcus asked.
“I just wanted to say that I think you should ask Annelise Kvist whether she also has a relationship with the killer.”
“We did that, Carl. She doesn’t.”
“No? Well, then I think you should ask her what the killer does. Not who he is, but what he does.”
“We’ve already done that too, of course, but she refuses to tell us anything. Do you think they worked together?”
“Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, she’s somehow dependent on this man because of the work he does.”
Jacobsen nodded. Nothing more was going to happen until they moved the witness and her family to a safe place. But at least Carl had gotten a look at this Mona Ibsen.
She was damned gorgeous for a crisis counselor.
“That’s all,” Carl said, with a smile that was bigger and more relaxed and virile than ever before, but it wasn’t returned.
He put his hand to his chest for a moment where he felt a sudden pain near his sternum. A hell of an unpleasant sensation. Almost as if he’d swallowed air.
“Are you OK, Carl?” asked his boss.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just some aftereffects, you know. I’m OK.” But that wasn’t quite true. The feeling in his chest was not good at all.
“Oh, excuse me, Mona. Let me introduce you to Carl Morck. A couple of months ago he was involved in a nasty shooting incident in which we lost one of our colleagues.”
She nodded at Carl as he tried to pull himself together. Squinted her eyes a bit. Professional interest, of course, but at least that was better than nothing.
“This is Mona Ibsen, Carl. She’s our new crisis counselor. Maybe you’ll get to know each other. We’d like to have one of our best colleagues completely back on his feet.”
Carl took a step forward and shook her hand. Get to know each other. Damn right they would.
He was still under a spell when he ran into Assad on his way down to the basement.
“I got finally through, Carl,” he said.
Carl tried to push the vision of Mona Ibsen into the back of his mind. It wasn’t easy.
“Got through to what?” he asked.
“I called TelegramsOnline at least the ten times, and got only through fifteen minutes ago,” Assad said while Carl tried to collect his thoughts. “Maybe they can then tell us who sent the telegram to Merete Lynggaard. They are working on it, at least.”
18
It didn’t take long at all for Merete to get used to the pressure. A slight rushing in her ears for a few days, and then it was gone. But the worst thing was not the pressure.
It was the light shining overhead.
Eternal light was hundreds of times worse than eternal darkness. The light revealed the pitiful state of her life. A freezing room. Grayish walls, sharp corners. The gray buckets, the colorless food. The light provided ugliness and coldness. It brought with it the realization that she couldn’t break through this armored box of a room. That the lifeline through the retractable door couldn’t be used as a means of escape. That this cement hell was her coffin and her grave. Now she couldn’t simply close her eyes and slip away whenever it suited her. The light forced
