THE WHEELS SLID out from under Heloise, and she gave up on biking any farther on the icy road. It had started snowing again. Fluffy flakes fell heavily from the sky in vertical columns, like anemone flower heads on a string. She pushed her bike the last few hundred yards down Ryvangs Allé and looked over at Svanemøllen Barracks on the other side of the train tracks.
Even though she could see uniformed soldiers on the grounds, the place didn’t have much in common with West Point. It was more like a LEGO version of a military base; the roofs of the tower’s parapets looked like a harmless lower jaw of baby teeth surrounded by rust-red brickwork gums.
It wasn’t exactly something that screamed superior force, not something that seemed particularly menacing. The sight reminded Heloise that the Danish military’s disarmament since World War II was one of the most frightening realities of all time. If the Russians come, we’re screwed, she thought.
She parked her bike in front of the barracks’ trauma center and took the stairs up one floor in just a few long strides. She had texted Gerda that morning that she would drop by around ten o’clock but hadn’t received a response. Heloise hoped to catch her between appointments, so they could grab a quick cup of coffee and have a chat.
She unwound the scarf from around her neck as she reached Gerda’s floor and was just about to push open the glass door to the therapy department when she felt a familiar rumble in her pocket. She recognized the number on her cell phone as one belonging to Demokratisk Dagblad and answered it, a little out of breath.
“Kaldan speaking.”
“This is Karen.”
“Hi, Karen. I’m glad you called,” Heloise said, unzipping her leather jacket. “I just arrived at Svanemøllen Barracks, and I want to find out if we can set aside space for an interview with a veteran who …”
“No, drop that story,” Karen Aagaard said.
Heloise contemplated for a second how to word her response. It was understandably a personal tragedy for Karen that her son had to go to war, but the paper had always selected its stories based on five news criteria: timeliness, relevance, conflict, identification, and sensation. They couldn’t suddenly start taking an editor’s private family circumstances into consideration, Heloise thought.
“Look, Karen, I understand that you don’t want to read about soldiers with PTSD right now,” Heloise began. “But I think that …”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Aagaard interrupted. “Mikkelsen and I are sitting here talking about the boy who disappeared, and we just realized that your friend is the lead detective on the case, that guy, Erik Schäfer.”
“So what?” Heloise already knew what was coming when the editor-in-chief got involved. Sensation, check! Increased newspaper sales, check!
“That means that you have access to an important source for this case,” Aagaard said. “Find out what’s going on—whether there’s anything the press doesn’t know about yet. So far we’ve assigned the newsroom to cover the story, but if it suddenly blows up—if the boy is found dead—then we need as many details nailed down as possible.”
Through the glass door to the hallway, Heloise saw Gerda’s office door open. Heloise saw her shake hands with a young man dressed in camo. The man saluted Gerda and then continued down the hall and out of view.
“I’m friends with Schäfer,” Heloise responded. “But that doesn’t mean that he tells me about the cases he’s working on.”
“Then you need to get him to open up.”
“How?”
“You’re a woman. Think of something.”
Heloise’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Relax. I didn’t say you should take your clothes off. I said, think of something. Use your imagination! It’s your job to dig up the stories, Heloise, and we want this story.”
“Like I said, I’m already at the barracks, so when I’m done here, I’ll stop by …”
Heloise didn’t have time to say any more before she realized that Karen Aagaard had already hung up. She put away her phone and was about to walk in when she saw a man she didn’t know with dark hair come out of an office and approach Gerda, who was standing in the hallway smiling at him.
There was something about his facial expression that gave Heloise pause. She put a hand on the door handle, but was hesitant to go in.
The man reached Gerda. She spoke to him, and his face lit up in a flirtatious smile.
Something felt wrong.
The man peered up and down the deserted hallway and then leaned in toward Gerda. His cheek grazed hers, but she didn’t pull her head back. Instead, she closed her eyes and her smile widened. The man whispered something and allowed a far-too-familiar hand to slide from Gerda’s neck down to the small of her back, where it lingered for a second. Then he walked away down the hallway, and Gerda disappeared back into her office.
Heloise stood still as acidic saliva filled her mouth.
Then she pushed open the glass door with an indignant shove.