39

THEY CALLED OFF THE SEARCH FOR THE NIGHT AT 2:00 A.M., BUT Louise had trouble falling asleep once she was finally lying in her bed. At eight the next morning, there were once again search teams throughout the entire town, and canine patrols fanning out so they were searching the area from all sides. About twenty to thirty volunteers had shown up to help, and Bengtsen had broken them up into groups and was in firm control of who was in charge of each individual search team and where they would be searching.

“All basements and attic spaces, stairwells, and bike sheds must be investigated,” he instructed his people.

The missing-persons report ran every hour on the radio news update, but by midday there still wasn’t any sign of the girl.

Louise was sitting in her office with a cola and a piece of pizza before the meeting she and Mik had scheduled with a photographer from Venstrebladet to retrace the route Dicta had followed late Saturday night after she left Liv’s house. Louise pushed the pizza container to the side a little and pulled a padded envelope from the Pathology Lab closer to her. Flemming had sent her the photos from Samra’s autopsy, and she flipped slowly through them. When she came to the page with the pictures of the back of Samra’s head, she was puzzled by the vellum-colored yellowish marks on the back of the girl’s neck. Suddenly she thought they bore a certain similarity to the rounded marks they had found on Dicta.

Flemming hadn’t measured the distance between the marks on Samra’s head, because he hadn’t considered them relevant. They were so obviously incurred after the girl’s death. Now Louise borrowed the ruler from Mik’s soccer mug and determined that the distance here was also three centimeters. In other words, both girls had been in contact with the same object. Not that that brought them any closer to what might have made the distinctive rounded marks. Skipper and Dean hadn’t found anything in the family’s home during their search, nor anything in Ahmad’s apartment or his shop. But for the first time they had something concrete that linked the two killings. Louise got up and went to the command room where Ruth was working on her own. The rest of the group was still out with the search teams.

Louise set down the stack of photos and pointed out the marks.

“The spacing is the same as the ones Flemming found on Dicta,” Louise pointed out; and right then she was interrupted by Mik, who had just walked in the door.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked, explaining that the photographer had arrived.

Louise left the stack of photos on the administrative assistant’s desk and they hurried down the hall to meet Michael Mogensen, who was on his way to their office.

“I’m a little late,” he apologized and said that he’d just returned. He had been on assignment with one of the search teams because they were doing a story on the girl’s disappearance for the paper.

They took the stairs down to the cars, discussing the missing girl as they walked.

The suburban street where Liv and her parents lived was quiet. Only one lone car drove by while Michael Mogensen set up his tripod and got his large digital Canon camera ready.

“How wide should the shot be?” Louise heard him ask. “Is it going to be the whole road, or just the driveway?”

“The driveway and a bit of the street so people can recognize the location,” Mik responded, stepping over to hold some of the photographer’s equipment as he unpacked things.

Louise followed them at a distance. Mik was the one who’d put together the list of locations they wanted to show in the paper: Liv’s house; the kiosk up on the main road, which Dicta had been seen entering; then Nygade; and finally the parking lot behind that, where she’d been found.

The photographer got ready and did a layout. He suggested that they put a small photo of Dicta in every single picture so readers associated her face with the four locations.

When they were done on the street in front of Liv’s house, he led the way in his car down to the kiosk on the main street, and they parked right behind him. He jumped quickly from the car, fishing his equipment out of the trunk. He set the camera up on the tripod and adjusted the height so he could get the kiosk and a little of the main street with it.

“I’ll take a couple of shots,” he said, moving the tripod a little farther out into the street. “Then we can look at them and decide if we’re done.”

Mik had gone into the kiosk to buy something to drink and a couple of bags of candy, so Louise nodded to the photographer that that was okay. She smiled at his thoroughness. To her it was just a couple of pictures of a kiosk on a main road, but he made it seem like a bigger assignment in which the angle, lighting, and width of the shot were crucial to the success of the project.

He changed lenses and said that he just wanted to take a couple more shots with a wide-angle lens, and he asked her to hold the tripod while he squatted down to organize all his various lenses. Every time a car drove by, Louise followed it with her eyes to see if there was a little dark-haired girl in the back seat. The whole time, her eyes were checking front steps, gates, and stairs leading down to basement doors. She watched the pedestrians walking toward her and thought: Could they have done it?

“It may make the most sense to leave the cars here,” Michael said when he was done. “Once we’ve got it all, I think you should come back to the studio and select the specific photos you want to run with. Then I can submit them to the editor right away.”

He swung his heavy camera bag up onto his shoulder, and Louise quickly reached out and grabbed the tripod so he wouldn’t have to carry everything. It was pretty heavy.

As they headed toward Nygade, a young couple emerged from the brewery, and she heard them talking about the dead girl’s little sister, who had disappeared. Louise turned around to get a closer look at them and tripped over the edge of a sidewalk slab that was slightly uneven. She was losing her balance and the tripod toppled from under her arm, but her reflexes were faster than her brain, and she stretched her right leg out in an attempt to prevent the plate at the top that the camera screwed onto from smacking against the ground at full force. It hammered into her shin instead.

“Fuck!” she muttered, struggling to rescue the tripod. “Let me take that,” Michael said, quickly coming over to help her out.

Louise moaned and shot an angry look at Mik when he briskly asked if she had everything under control.

As they proceeded, her leg throbbed, and she felt a drop of blood trickling down toward her sock. Up by the alley, she found a place to sit down and watch the photographer work. Just as conscientiously as before, he got his camera ready, set up the tripod, and took pictures of Nygade and the alley leading into the parking lot. Once those were done, they gathered up all the stuff and continued down the alley toward the parking lot to wrap things up at the location where the body had been found.

Mik gave Michael his instructions. There were still flowers there, both recent additions and the bouquets that had been left there since Dicta’s savaged body had been found. The photographer was clearly moved to find himself at the scene of the crime and pointed out a large bouquet of white roses that he himself had brought. Still, he remained meticulous and focused as he got started photographing the site, so the readers could see that Dicta had been lying in the rear corner of the parking lot, down by Lindevej.

Louise reached out to take the tripod when Michael started packing up, but gladly left it to Mik when he offered to carry it back to the cars.