THE LID WAS partway open, making the garbage can look like a short, fat man stuck in mid-yawn.
Schäfer leaned in over the plastic edge and pointed his flashlight down into the trash. The sweet stench of household waste hit him like a knee to the groin and kicked his jet-lag nausea up a notch.
“Was it down here?” he asked the colleague who had reported the discovery in the little alley.
“Yes. The dogs alerted us as we came out of Østre Anlæg Park around seven PM and started walking down Rigensgade.” The officer pointed toward the road that ran parallel to Kronprinsessegade. “It didn’t take them long to find their way here.”
“Have you been through the whole can? And all the trash cans here?”
The man nodded. “There’s only trash left. The team from NKC is about to open the bag.”
Schäfer glanced over at the group of crime scene investigators from NKC, Denmark’s National Forensic Center, standing by an unmarked police SUV at the mouth of the alley. The back of the car was open and the bottom of the trunk was covered with a thick, white tarp. A black trash bag sat on top of that. It was lit by projector lamps that had been set up.
Schäfer stepped away from the row of bins and started walking back over to the flashing blue lights. He walked past the frozen yards alongside Nybodergården Nursing Home, which abutted the little lane. In the windows he could see dimly lit living rooms furnished with plush furniture and droopy balloon curtains; picture frames containing hand-tinted photos of men in uniform and children with water-combed hair. A lonesome elderly person sat in each apartment, separated from the other residents by plaster walls covered in wallpaper, and Schäfer imagined the silence in there. He remembered it from the final years of his mother’s life in an equivalent catacomb of nicotine-colored degeneration. A silence that was broken only by the solitary ticking of the pendulum clock and sporadic rattling moans here and there throughout the property.
The sound of prolonged death.
Schäfer’s eyes fell on a small, shriveled woman, sitting in an armchair in one of the living rooms. Her milk-white hair stuck up from her scalp in random tufts, and her lower jaw looked as if it were resting on her chest. As he passed the window he saw that the woman was staring blankly, lost in her own thoughts, fossilized, with no view other than a row of stinky garbage cans.
Schäfer thought again of the Caribbean and Saint Lucia and the life of a retiree that one day awaited him over there and sped up.
“What have we got?” he asked as he reached the NKC team.
They stood clustered around the trunk. The bag that was sitting there had holes in it, partially from rats that had gnawed through the plastic in a couple of places, partially from the scalpel, which had just sliced open the rest of the bag.
“We’re going to examine it now,” said a female investigator that Schäfer didn’t know and then stuck a latex-gloved hand into the bag. When she pulled her hand back out, there was something on her fingertips that in the projector light looked like blood.
Schäfer instinctively tensed his stomach muscles to prepare himself for the kidney punch it would be if the next thing to come out of the bag was part of a ten-year-old’s body.
Dead children were always bad. Murdered children were worse.
The investigator cut the bag open a little more and carefully pulled a sticky, light gray clump out of it.
Schäfer scrunched up his eyes.
“What are we looking at here?” he asked, his pulse throbbing in his ears.
“It’s some kind of fabric,” the investigator said. She smoothed out the bundle. It had begun to stiffen around the edges and resisted a little. “A … sweatshirt. Adult size. Something from the trash spilled on it, something sticky of some kind, that maybe leaked into the holes in the bag, but try to see these red flecks here …” She pointed to a few stains on the front of the sweatshirt. “I can’t say for sure until we’ve had it analyzed, but it looks like blood.”
“It’s blood,” Schäfer affirmed. The sweet, metallic smell was unmistakable. That must be what the dogs had tracked.
“Do we have the boy’s DNA?” the investigator asked.
“We have his toothbrush and a hairbrush.” Schäfer nodded. “Is there anything else hiding down there?”
The woman inspected the bag and shook her head.
“All right,” Schäfer said. “Drive it over to the lab. You know what needs to happen, right?” He glanced at her through his eyebrows.
“This isn’t my first day on the job,” she said and smiled.
Schäfer started running down the list anyway. “We need to check the bag for fingerprints, and we need to know: What kind of trash bag is this? Is it from a roll of bags? What else is on the sweatshirt aside from blood? Fibers, hairs, etc. We need to get a DNA test done and fast. Tell the Forensic Genetics folks to park everything else and focus on this. You got that?”
She nodded.
“Good,” Schäfer said. “Get going!”
He walked back to his car and got into the driver’s seat. As he turned the key, he cast one last look back at the nursing home and saw that the old woman had gotten up. She was standing at the window, small and frail as a ceramic garden gnome, looking forlornly at him.
Schäfer waved once. Then he backed out of the alley and headed for police headquarters.
Schäfer tossed a sugar cube into his instant coffee and looked around for something to stir it with. There were no spoons on the tray, so he pulled a ballpoint pen out of his inside pocket and stirred the coffee a couple of times with that and then threw it on the table in front of him.
He looked at his colleagues seated around the large, oval conference table at police headquarters. The ones who had been there all evening and the ones who had not come in until midnight.
“Listen up, people,” he said, leaning in over the table. “It’s eight minutes after midnight, and we’re having a quick briefing on the search for Lukas Bjerre. What do we know right now? Augustin?”
Lisa Augustin stood up and walked over to a large bulletin board that was hung with photos, a map of the city, a timeline, and witness statements. She pointed to the area around Frederiksstaden and Østerbro.
“We know that the missing individual was brought to school this morning by his father. They left the family home, an apartment on Heibergsgade on the boring side of Nyhavn, at around seven twenty-five AM to bike to school.” She pointed to the address on the map. “Behind their building, where the family normally locks its Christiania cargo bike, they found that someone had sawed through the railing and their cargo bike was gone.”
“Coincidence?” Detective Nils Petter Bertelsen asked. He sat with his tanned arms crossed, listening to the case details with concentration. Schäfer did not attribute the glow under Bertelsen’s graying beard to a few weeks spent under Caribbean skies. With the exception of the deep, white grooves that radiated out from his eyes like the lines that come off the sun in a child’s drawing, he maintained a year-round solarium tan. Schäfer teased him every chance he got.
“According to the family, this is the third cargo bike they’ve had stolen, so we don’t see any immediate connection between its theft and the boy’s disappearance,” Augustin said. “But because of the theft, the missing boy and his father walked to school. Jens isn’t one hundred percent sure of the exact drop-off time, but he said that the crossing guard was still directing the morning traffic at the crosswalk in front of the school when they went by. Therefore we know that it couldn’t have been later than seven fifty when they reached this point.” Lisa Augustin drew a red X on the map with a felt-tip pen. “We have witnesses who place the boy here in the schoolyard, but no one that saw him anywhere else in the school.”
“Which witnesses are we talking about?” Bertelsen asked.
“We have a statement from a military psychologist, Gerda Bendix. As far as we know, she’s the last person to have seen Lukas.”
“What time was that?”
“She saw him walk into the school building as she was on her way out after dropping off her daughter. It was a couple of minutes past eight at that point, and after that we’ve got zilch. None of the employees at the hotel behind the school or the shops at Østerport Station remember having seen the boy during the day.”
“What about the parents? Are they suspects?”
“They were both at work all day. Solid alibis.”
“And that soldier woman. Has she been cleared too?”
“She’s not a soldier. She’s a military psychologist, and yes, she has also been cleared. All of the involved parties have been thoroughly checked out.”
“Have there been any recent sex crimes in the area or any other factors along those lines that you’ve considered?”
“The usual assholes are out there—a couple of registered pedophiles in the neighborhood over by the Rosenborg Castle Gardens. We’ve been to their places and there’s nothing to go after there,” Augustin said.
Schäfer pitched in: “The boy told his parents about a man who had recently tried to make contact with the kids at the rec center by passing them apples over the bushes from out on Øster Voldgade. They call him the Apple Man.”
“Like in the song?” Bertelsen asked.
Schäfer nodded. “Yup. So mention that name to everyone you talk to in the neighborhood. Ask people if they know the individual in question. Maybe other kids have talked about him. Someone must know who he is.” He turned to Michael Voss, the information technology coordinator from Computer Forensic Investigations. “What do we know about the boy’s cell phone? Anything new?”
Voss shook his bald head. “We pinged his cell phone and it’s turned off. The last cell tower that picked up a signal from the phone is located here …” He walked over to the map of the greater Copenhagen area and put a finger in the middle of a heart-shaped splotch.
“When was that?” Schäfer asked.
“Sunday at 5:54 PM. In other words: A long time before he disappeared.”
“What else?”
“We’re working on reviewing the video materials from the surveillance cameras at Østerport Station to see if we can spot the boy boarding a train. But there is a ton of footage from four different platforms. It’s going to take all night, maybe longer,” Voss said.
“What about having a psychologist profile a possible perpetrator?” Bertelsen asked. “Do we have any plans to do that?”
“Yes,” Schäfer nodded. “We’ve assigned that to Joakim Kjærgaard.”
“What about Michala Friis? Can’t we bring her in?”
Schäfer shook his head. “My impression is that Ms. Friis is too busy at the moment saving lives in the financial world to help us. And by ‘saving lives’ I mean ‘making money.’ So we’ll have to make do with whatever Kjærgaard can come up with.”
Schäfer grabbed hold of the edge of the big conference table to stabilize his delayed feeling of jet-lag nausea, which had reared its head over the course of the evening.
“All right,” he said. “Bertelsen, you take over tonight, and this will be a pure relay, friends. If someone needs a rest, pass the torch on before you sit down. We have a lot of officers out on the streets right now, but they need all the help they can get, so get going, people. We need to find that boy!”
Nils Petter Bertelsen nodded and signaled for his partner at the end of the table to get up.
Bertelsen was an experienced detective, and Schäfer had known him since the police academy. Over the last four years, they had both picked up far younger wingmen from the deputy superintendent. Schäfer was content to have been teamed up with Lisa Augustin, while Bertelsen had been stuck with the obnoxious young Lars Bro. A classic millennial, a typical newbie who walked with his feet angled in a ten and two o’clock position. Schäfer did not envy Bertelsen at all.
“We’ll meet back here again in six hours,” he said and got up.
There was no moon in the sky when Schäfer pulled up in front of his little red brick house in Valby. Apart from the porch light shining above the front door, and a faint glow from the kitchen, the house was dark.
Schäfer tried not to make any noise as he let himself in. He set his file folder on the kitchen table and hung his jacket up on the back of one of the chairs. Then he opened the fridge and smiled in gratitude at the sight of the shelves, which were now packed like Tetris blocks, full of fresh fruit and vegetables, fat-marbled steaks, cold cuts, and chilled cans of beer.
Hallelujah!
He pulled a Carlsberg Classic out of the plastic six-pack holder and pulled up on the tab. Then he sat down at the table and opened the folder. Lukas’s face smiled at him from the top of the pile.
How could the boy just disappear from the face of the earth without having run into a single teacher at the school, without having made a blip on a single radar?
Schäfer had torn the story apart at the seams. The father’s alibi was solid, and so was the mother’s for that matter. But there was something about Anne Sofie Bjerre that had left Schäfer with a funny feeling.
She was a private school teacher, and she smelled unmistakably like alcohol, but not like someone who had been to the annual Christmas party and had an ordinary hangover. This was the very faint, licorice-like fog of someone who drinks straight out of the bottle—a smell you can only identify if you’ve grown up with it. And Schäfer had.
He looked at the time and exhaled heavily. It was already 2:08 AM.
Four hours, he thought. That wasn’t enough sleep, but it was all he was going to get.
He drank a long sip of the beer. Then he pushed the half-empty can across the table away from him, closed the case file, and headed for the bedroom.
He got into bed with all his clothes on and leaned into Connie’s sleep-warmed body. Her skin was soft and beautiful, black against the white sheets.
Schäfer closed his eyes, and the bed immediately started to rock very gently, like a dinghy on a lake.
Damned jet lag.
He sat up, rearranged his position, straightened out his pillow, lay back, and started the process over again.
The third time, Connie opened her eyes a crack.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
“Nothing.” Schäfer leaned closer and kissed her. “Just go back to sleep.”
He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. He tried to shake off the aftermath of the air travel, even though he knew that was an impossible task.
Four hours in a seaplane the size of a slipper. Twelve in a Dreamliner in a row right by the bathrooms. It would take a few days before the ground underneath him was still again.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to think about palm trees and tropical humidity, to picture endless days of sunshine and sand between his toes as he sank further and further down into the mattress. But when he finally fell asleep, he saw only one thing in his dreams.
Lukas’s face.