“WHY ARE YOU drinking that shit?”
“Excuse me?”
“Milk.” Lisa Augustin nodded at the carton, sitting on the desk next to Schäfer. “Why are you drinking that?”
He shrugged. “It’s good for the bones?”
“It’s a hormone drink for baby cows.”
“What is your point?”
“Seriously? It’s full of bacteria. And fat. It’s disgusting.”
Schäfer’s eyes fell on Augustin’s sandwich, where pale slices of ham poked out between the lettuce.
“With all due respect, I don’t take dietary advice from someone who is willingly stuffing a slaughterhouse scrapfest sandwich into their gullet.”
“I’ll have you know that this is organic ham from Normandy.” Augustin lifted the top piece of bread like a magician who wanted to reveal the secret behind a card trick.
“It’s meat waste,” Schäfer said dryly.
She waved his comment away. “Ugh, whatever.”
“Just finish eating. Morning meeting starts in five minutes.”
The phone on the big double desk rang, and they both reached for it. Augustin got there first and flashed Schäfer a gloating smile.
“Too slow.”
She turned halfway around in her desk chair and answered the call with her back to Schäfer.
He immediately reached for the milk carton and quickly poured a dash of hormone drink into her soy latte.
Augustin hung up and said, “Meeting’s canceled!”
Schäfer looked up. “Why? What’s going on?”
“The boy’s been found.”
Schäfer got to his feet and put on his bomber jacket in one quick, fluid motion.
“Where?”
Augustin took a quick drink from her coffee.
“In the moat at the Citadel.”
The divers were all wearing identical black wetsuits, and their faces were hidden behind black face masks. Still, it was clear which ones were from the Frogman Corps and which ones were from the Greater Copenhagen Fire Department. The latter group included both men and women of varying sizes and builds, while the frogmen were all the same sex and had the same silhouette: shoulders that were as wide as highways, calves as big as Christmas hams, and necks you could split firewood on. They looked like steroid machines, robots from a futuristic movie, whenever they popped up at the surface of the water. Mechanical, experienced, impossible to shake.
A jet ski–sized ice breaker had created a long swimming lane the whole way around the fortress’s star-shaped moat, where the divers periodically stuck up their heads, like the dorsal fins of a pack of sharks.
On the muddy bottom they had found a couple of rusty bicycles, a moped, a baby car seat, bottles, glasses, shoes, keys, sunglasses, and other junk.
But no body.
“He’s not here,” one of the frogmen said. “We would have found him if he was. If he was tossed into the moat, he would either have sunk to the bottom if he was tied to something that could pull him down—an iron chain or something like that—or he would be floating on the surface, just beneath the ice.”
“Couldn’t he have drifted out to sea?” Augustin asked, nodding toward Øresund on the far side of the Citadel.
The frogman shook his head so that water droplets flew in all directions.
“The water inside the moat is pretty much still,” he explained. “There’s no current that could make anything the size of a human being float around in here, and even if there was, we would have found him in the grating at the outlet to the harbor. Unless you’re the size of a sardine, you can’t get out of here. It’s closed off the whole way around, like an aquarium.” He did a 360-degree helicopter swing with his muscular arm.
Schäfer nodded. “Okay, but we need to be absolutely certain, so you’ve got to go back down. Check and double-check. Go over the bottom with a fine-tooth comb. We can’t overlook anything.”
Lukas Bjerre’s jacket, which had been found under the ice, had been picked up by the forensic techs and driven out for evidence analysis by the NKC.
Schäfer turned toward the entrance to the Citadel, where he could see the teacher from Nyholm School through the windows of a police car. He walked over and opened the car door.
“Could you come out here for a sec?”
The man staggered out of the car with a little dog in his arms. His smeared mascara and the golden thermal blanket he had around his shoulders made him look like a young Asian Liberace wearing a Las Vegas show cape.
“I understand you’re the one who found the jacket,” Schäfer said.
“Yes,” the man nodded. “I was down by the water, and then I spotted the blond hair under the ice. And the eyes. Lukas always wears that Justin Bieber jacket, so I thought that …” He paused and bit his trembling bottom lip.
Over the teacher’s shoulder, Schäfer could see the growing group of people who had flocked to the opposite side of the police tape at the entrance to the Citadel. They were all attentively watching the divers in the water. All except for one, a man wearing a red cap, glasses with yellow-tinted lenses, and dressed in something Schäfer would describe as a pilot’s suit. The man was staring, strangely engrossed, in the opposite direction toward a point somewhere to Schäfer’s right.
Schäfer turned his head that way but didn’t see anything other than the many policemen wandering like weevils in a line formation up and down the snow-covered embankment.
“Have you found Lukas?” the teacher asked. A black tear slid down his cheek. “Is he dead?”
Schäfer was about to answer when he heard a loud yell from one of the investigators.
Schäfer started running over toward the sound.
“What is it?” he called out. “What have we got?”
“There’s something over here.”
The investigator led Schäfer over to some bushes and pointed to a laurel bush. The evergreen leaves acted as hundreds of little cocktail umbrellas, protecting a small cave in the ground right by the trunk.
Schäfer reached out and pulled the branches aside. It looked as if the things had just been tossed in there. As if someone had turned the bag upside down and shaken out the contents.
“We have a pencil case, schoolbooks, a lunch box,” the crime scene investigator said. He pulled out a hardcover math book and read the name on the name plate: “It says ‘Lukas, Class 3X.’”
The crime scene investigator grabbed the sausage-shaped black leather pencil case. The case was stretched taut around the angular contents, looking like a black snake that had swallowed a shoebox.
He unzipped it and looked inside.
“Bingo!” he said and held the pencil case out to Schäfer.
There was an iPhone inside, one of the larger ones. A 6 Plus or 7 Plus, Schäfer estimated. He took out his own phone and called Michael Voss from the Computer Forensic Investigations section.
“Voss, drop what you’re working on,” he said. “We found the boy’s phone, and I’m going to have it brought to you right away.”
Schäfer hung up and looked back over at the crowd behind the barricade. More people had gathered, and even from this distance he recognized several reporters from the tabloids, their eyes agleam with anticipation at the prospect of death porn.
Damned rats, Schäfer thought.
His eyes scanned the other faces in the crowd. There were women and children. Tourists who looked like they had just arrived on the latest cruise ship. Old men with their hands clasped behind their backs.
They were all watching the show on the other side of the police barricade, curious to see what would happen next.
Schäfer scanned the faces yet again, looking for what had given him the strange knot in his stomach before, a hunch.
The man in the pilot’s suit was gone.