EVEN THOUGH CHRISTMAS was long over, the candied apples were still on display atop the counter in Nyhavn, and the sweet scent of mulled wine hung heavy in the air. Schäfer and Augustin passed the vendor booths and then waited as an armada of tourists lurched past on Segways like a flock of stray Minions. They moved in uncontrolled, random jolts, clearly inexperienced on the devices.
“Those things ought to be banned,” Schäfer said.
“I hear you,” Augustin nodded. “Tourists on e-bikes and Segways and whatever other oddball transportation devices—it’s nuts.”
“Oh, by the way,” Schäfer said as they crossed the street. “When we get into the Bjerre family’s home, we’ll go through the boy’s room and look for anything that seems like it might be important to the case. But we’ll keep our cards close.”
Augustin nodded.
“There’s already a ton of media coverage. I don’t want the leads we’re looking into right now to be leaked, because you know what’ll happen then.”
“A waste of everyone’s time.”
“Exactly.” Schäfer nodded.
In cases that received media attention, one of the biggest challenges the police faced was dealing with all the false confessions that popped up. Just before Schäfer’s trip to Saint Lucia, he had researched a case where an elderly woman had been knocked to the ground in a laundromat in Christianshavn, a mugging that had wound up becoming involuntary manslaughter. When she fell, the woman, who had been whacked in the back with a baseball bat, had hit her forehead on the edge of a table and had ended up bleeding to death on the floor. There had been no fewer than four confessions in the case, but none of the confessors had realized what only the police and the actual perpetrator knew:
That the culprit was a woman.
Video recordings from the laundromat showed very clearly that it was a woman who had struck the elderly woman. A detail that the public never found out about, and that had made it easy to dismiss the four men who had turned up at police headquarters during the investigation looking for notoriety.
In some strange way, Schäfer had a far easier time understanding people who committed crimes than people who confessed to crimes they hadn’t had anything to do with. But that’s just how the world was, he thought. Crazy.
They found the address they were looking for and Schäfer pressed the buzzer with his thumb. He stood in front of the camera, which hung beside the front door, so they could identify him from their apartment. They were buzzed in and took the elevator—an old, creaky one, which looked like a prop out of The Great Gatsby—to the fourth floor, where they were met by an elderly woman in the doorway to the apartment.
She was a petite woman dressed in a pair of loose-fitting black leather pants and a multicolored sweater with sleeves that seemed short on her thin arms. The look in her ice-blue eyes was resolute but anxious. The gray-brown roots of her coal-black mane revealed that her hair had been dyed—and not recently.
Schäfer cast a quick glance at the last name on the brass plate next to the door and nodded politely to the woman.
“The Bjerre family?” he asked.
“Yes, please come in.”
The woman stepped into the little entryway and then stepped back to let them pass.
“It’s in here. I’m Marianne,” she said, holding out her hand. Her voice sounded raspy, like a lifelong smoker’s. “I’m Lukas’s grandmother.”
She led them into the kitchen, and Schäfer looked around.
The apartment was meticulously furnished, tasteful and impersonal like a display window. Plants bulged vigorously in crenellated white pots on the kitchen table next to Mason jars filled with granola, oats, and wild rice. The candles in the cubical Kubus candleholders had never been lit, and a Kay Bojesen monkey figurine made of burnished teak hung by one thin arm from the wire of the Poul Henningsen pendant light fixture over the long, white-lacquered table.
There was no indication that actual people lived here, no newspaper sections spread across the table, no wrung-out dishcloths hanging over the kitchen faucet giving off a slightly sour scent. It was a Teflon home, decorated with a lucid, watery glaze, and they were met by a couple of eyes with dark, swollen lids and moist lashes at the far end of the room.
Jens Bjerre sat on a Børge Mogensen sofa, staring into thin air in bewilderment. The academic’s sofa, as Schäfer called it. Aesthetics must trump comfort when you had an MD, he thought, as his and Jens’s eyes met.
He looked like a man desperately waiting to wake up from a nightmare.
His wife, on the other hand, looked as if she still hadn’t fully comprehended the seriousness of the situation. Anne Sofie Bjerre perked up when she came into the kitchen and saw Schäfer and Augustin. She seemed to be clinging to the belief that the police would be able to resolve the whole thing. Like a naïve child who believes her parents can solve any problem in the world.
“Is there any news?” she asked hopefully.
“We found Lukas’s jacket and some of his school things,” Schäfer said.
It grew so quiet in the room that they could hear a megaphone from one of the canal tours down in Nyhavn. A lively voice boomed, welcoming new tourists aboard, and the tour guide’s cheerful tone reinforced the feeling of speechless horror that filled the kitchen.
The grandmother broke the silence.
“His jacket?” Her voice was only a whisper.
“Yes,” Schäfer said. “We found the items at the Citadel. The jacket was in the water there, and we …”
“But … but …” Jens stood up and shook his head dismissively. “But what does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything. That means nothing!” He turned to his wife. “He could still have gone somewhere. He could have hopped on a train, and maybe … maybe he forgot his jacket at school when he left and then someone took it and …”
“It’s below freezing,” Augustin said. “We don’t believe he went out willingly without his jacket on.” Her tone was professional and cool.
Anne Sofie looked at her stiffly, wide-eyed. Then she burst into tears and her husband pulled her to him so that she vanished into his embrace.
“It’s too early to draw any conclusions.” Schäfer nodded soothingly to Jens. “Right now we’d just like your permission to see Lukas’s bedroom. There could be something in there that will lead us in a new direction, a clue that we haven’t found yet.”
The idea was to give the parents something to cling to without promising them anything Schäfer couldn’t deliver. Most of all, he needed time and space to be able to do his job.
“Come on,” the grandmother said and started off down a long hallway. “It’s this way.”
Schäfer and Augustin left the parents in the kitchen and followed the grandmother. She showed them into a room with walls painted a shade of greenish blue. The shelves were full of board games, books, and role-play items. There was a bunk bed in the corner made of wood that had been painted black with a bed on the top level and a workspace in the little cave underneath. The desk was covered with comics, notebooks, and hand-drawn illustrations, and there were wood shavings and graphite bits from pencil sharpening spread across the whole desktop. A well-organized, cozy mess.
“Please let us know if there’s anything we can do. If you have any questions about the things in here or anything …”
“Thank you. Marianne, that’s your name, right?” Schäfer asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you live nearby?”
“No, I live just outside Roskilde, but I’m here several times a month. I’ve been watching Lukas every other weekend since he was little.”
Her voice shook as she spoke. Then she looked Schäfer straight in the eye.
“Is there something you’re not telling us?” The tears welled up in her eyes. “Is he … is he dead?” She held her hand up over her mouth, as if it scared her to hear her own words.
Schäfer shook his head and put a hand on her shoulder.
“We’re not keeping anything from you.”
She released the air in her mouth, which she had been holding in. “So there’s still hope? We’re … beside ourselves with worry.”
Augustin started looking in drawers and the closet, while Schäfer walked the grandmother out of the room.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Augustin asked once Schäfer had closed the door.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” he said and pulled out a drawer.
For the next half hour, they went through the things in the room with a magnifying glass, but nothing stuck out. Nothing gave them the sense that the boy had been preoccupied with anything other than superhero comics, plastic weapons, role-playing, and complicated LEGO figures, which were all perfectly assembled and lined up on the shelves and the windowsill.
“Those look more like display models than toys,” Augustin noted.
Schäfer took a piggy bank down from one shelf. He pulled the rubber stopper out of the bottom and looked inside. The bank was filled with ten and twenty-kroner coins, and a 500-kroner bill and 100-kroner bill had been stuffed in through the slit. Yet another sign that the boy’s disappearance wasn’t planned, he thought.
Augustin lifted the mattress and looked underneath. Between the mattress and the slats in the frame there was a little notebook.
“A diary?” she suggested.
Schäfer reached for it and flipped through it. Most of the pages had been drawn on. Monsters. Random short sentences without context. In the middle of the book there was a pencil sketch of a headless person. The body stood upright, the arms outstretched to the sides, and the head sat at its feet, its mouth frowning and its eyes blazing.
“What does that say under the picture?” Schäfer passed the notebook over to Augustin.
She focused intently on the letters, which were too small for Schäfer to make out, and read out loud.
“It says, Toke is a jerk. Ha ha ha.” She lowered her voice and looked at Schäfer. “Maybe he isn’t as gentle and compliant as his parents think, this Lukas kid.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they seem to have this impression that he’s an overly intelligent wonder kid who’s always sweet and easygoing.” She held the drawing up for Schäfer. “But maybe he has an internal Mr. Hyde.”
“We all have an internal Mr. Hyde,” Schäfer said. “It’s going to take more than a drawing of a boy he doesn’t like to arouse suspicion. Plus, the teachers and staff back up this impression of a quiet child, and maybe the drawing is his way of dealing with some frustrations that he doesn’t dare vent in reality. The other kids in class are also scared of this Toke.”
“Maybe, but if we imagine that he—”
A small piece of loose paper fell out of the notebook and Augustin froze. She picked up the slip of paper and looked at it. It looked worn, faded, and old.
“What’s that?” Schäfer asked.
“It’s not the same handwriting as the notebook,” she said. “It looks like an adult’s or an older child’s handwriting.”
“What does it say?”
“It says, I’m keeping my eye on you, Lukas. —Kiki.”
“Kiki?”
“Yes.”
“Does it say anything else?”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
Schäfer scratched his neck and looked thoughtfully at Augustin.
“Come,” he said. “Bring the slip of paper with you.”
They returned to the kitchen where Jens was now sitting alone at the table. There was nothing in front of him—no phone, tablet, coffee cup, or anything else to occupy himself with. He was just sitting there in silence, staring into space.
He looked up when Schäfer and Augustin entered the room.
“Did you find anything?” he asked, getting up.
“It’s hard to say at this point,” Schäfer said. “But we have a question. Is there anyone in your family or in your circle of acquaintances named Kiki?”
“Kiki?” Jens furrowed his brow as he considered that. Then he shook his head. “No, I don’t think I know anyone by that name. Why?”
“How about at the school? It could be a nickname or a shortened form? Maybe someone named Kirsten or Kristina or something like that?”
Jens turned his upper body toward the living room. “Fie?”
Anne Sofie appeared in the kitchen doorway. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her lips and eyes were swollen and red.
“Has Lukas ever mentioned a Kristina or Kirsten from school to you?” Jens asked. “Or anyone named Kiki?”
Anne Sofie took a step into the kitchen.
“Kiki,” she repeated. She walked over to the sink and filled a glass with water. She took a long drink and then turned back around to face them.
“No,” she said. “Not anyone Lukas has told me about. But ask at the school—there’s so many grownups over there, it’s hard to keep track of all their names. Why do you ask?”
“Because he has a slip of paper from someone named Kiki in a notebook,” Augustin said.
“A slip of paper?”
“Yes, a note. Someone named Kiki wrote that she was keeping an eye on him.”
“Keeping an eye on him?” Jens’s brow furrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Schäfer said. “But it doesn’t ring any bells?” His eyes bored into Anne Sofie’s.
She looked away and seemed to be groping around in the dark for something that made sense.
“It could be someone he met online,” Augustin suggested. “Someone who follows him on Instagram or Facebook, or whatever he uses.”
“Lukas doesn’t use social media,” Jens said.
Schäfer and Augustin’s eyes met quickly from across the room.
“What about Instagram?” Schäfer asked.
The boy’s father shook his head. “No, we have a rule that he needs to be thirteen before he can use that kind of thing.”
“And you’ve been keeping an eye on that consistently, or what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, have you made sure that he’s not using social media behind your backs?”
Jens shook his head, not understanding. “We’ve never felt the need to check. We told him that he’s not allowed to, and we trust him to follow the rules. Lukas always follows the rules.”
They were interrupted when Schäfer’s phone rang in his pocket. He excused himself and stepped out in the stairwell.
“Yes, hello?”
“Schäfer?”
“Yep!”
“This is Rud.”
“Hi, Rud. I’m glad you called!” Schäfer said.
Rud Johannsen was an evidence analysis specialist and split his time between the Forensic Genetics Department in the University of Copenhagen’s medical school and the NKC. Lukas Bjerre’s jacket and the bloody sweatshirt from the trash can had been delivered to him as soon as they were found.
“Well? Is there any news?” Schäfer asked.
“Maybe … maybe …” As usual Rud Johanssen sounded as if he were wavering a bit and confused.
“Yes or no, Rud?”
“Come by later. Tonight! I’m waiting for the results from Toxicology and … well, it’ll take the rest of the day and early evening. So, should we say around eleven PM? The results should be back by then.”
“Eleven.” Schäfer nodded. “I’ll see you then.”
He went back in to say goodbye to the Bjerre family.
“We’ll keep you posted,” he said. “If you hear anything at all or if you happen to think of anything, please call. But steer clear of the press. The fewer details they know about, the better.”
Schäfer stuck out his hand, and Jens took it.
“What should we do in the meantime?” he asked.
“This might sound odd, but the best thing you can do is actually to try to make the time pass with normal, everyday things,” Schäfer said and glanced at the grandmother, who had started making dinner at the kitchen island behind Jens. “Sitting here staring into space won’t speed the investigation up. So, I know it’s hard, but try to grade some homework, organize some patient records, or whatever it is you usually do, and meanwhile we’ll do our best. I promise you.”
Schäfer and Augustin left the apartment.
As the elevator door closed and the metal cage began to move downward, lurching and creaking, Augustin glanced at Schäfer with an eyebrow raised and whispered:
“Did you see the mom when we asked about the name Kiki?”
“Mm-hmm.” Schäfer nodded.
“She was lying.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”