ON THE STROKE of eleven, Erik Schäfer pushed open the glass door into the National Forensic Center with an Ecco shoe that was worn to the point of being shiny. The center, commonly referred to as NKC, was in an old ramshackle building in Værløse. The center should have been torn down long ago and operations moved into new, state-of-the-art offices in Ejby, but a fire had put a temporary halt to the move.
He looked around in the empty, late-night lobby and discovered that Gloria—the old receptionist who had worked there for all the years Schäfer had been coming there—had been replaced. Or maybe this was just a temp. At any rate, a young, redheaded woman Schäfer didn’t recognize was sitting at the desk.
“Erik Schäfer,” she said with a smile as he approached the front desk.
He nodded contentedly. “Good evening.”
“You look tan,” the woman commented. She put both elbows on the counter and rested her chin on her folded hands. “Have you been off traveling?”
Schäfer raised an eyebrow and scratched his chin with his left hand. An automatic reaction; a quick flash of his wedding ring. “Mm-hmm.”
The woman nodded but didn’t say anything else. She didn’t look away, either.
Schäfer cleared his throat and pointed to the lab hallway with his thumb.
“Uh, um … Is Rud here? I have an appointment.”
She reached out and picked up her phone with a slender hand.
“Yes, hi. I have Erik Schäfer out here at the front desk for Rud Johannsen.” She hung up and nodded to the glazed double doors at the opposite end of the lobby. “He’s in Lab 4. You can go right in.”
Schäfer gave the counter a pat in thanks and unconsciously sucked in his gut as he walked over to the doors.
He found Rud Johannsen sitting at a desk covered with X-ray images, photos, tissue samples, and test tubes full of fluids of various colors. He was wearing a pair of black magnifying loupe glasses with a forehead light, and his shoulder-length, pigmentless hair looked as if he had just stuck a pair of chopsticks into an electrical outlet.
Schäfer smiled at the sight and gave him a friendly thump on the back.
“What’s up, Doc? Have you gotten your flux capacitor working?”
Rud Johannsen pushed the magnifying glasses up onto his head, looking confused.
“My what?”
“Your flux capacitor. You know, Back to the Future! You look like Doc Brown with that seine net of hair up there.”
“What kind of net?”
“Never mind,” Schäfer said, shaking his head. “What’ve you got for me?”
Rud Johannsen got up and left the room without saying a word. Schäfer had worked with him long enough to know that he should follow him.
He caught up with Rud partway down the lab hallway and they turned right into the anteroom of the forensic department’s evidence room, where they put on protective suits and face masks.
When Rud opened the door into the clean room where the evidence was kept, there was a sucking sound, as if the room took a breath. There was a large table in the middle of the room. The lights underneath the white glass tabletop lit up the surface and the object that was on it—the jacket that had been fished out of the Citadel’s moat.
“There are three interesting findings on the jacket,” Rud began, holding one bony index finger up in the air. “One: Traces of blood. Here on the right side of the collar.”
He turned off the ceiling lamps, plunging the room into darkness, and turned on a UV light. He sprayed luminol on the collar of the jacket and aimed the light at the area where a few small spots fluoresced, lighting up like blueish white fireflies.
“Do you see?” he asked and pointed. “There is smudging here … and here …”
Schäfer nodded. “How about DNA? What’s the time frame?”
“We collected samples—both from the jacket and from the sweatshirt from the trash can—and they’ve been submitted for rapid testing. So we’ll know something when we know something. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
Schäfer grumbled, disgruntled.
“It could be that we get the results tonight. It could be that we get them in the morning,” Rud said. “And, yes, it definitely is a pain having to wait, but every other test has been put on standby for this. We’re doing our best.”
“I know that.” Schäfer nodded. “And I appreciate it, Rud. What else have you got? You said there were three findings on the jacket?”
“Yes.” He turned the overhead lights on again and pointed to a microscope on a counter at one end of the room.
“Number two: We found a few hair fibers. Uniform, blond strands of hair, which have also been sent for DNA testing. They were stuck in the Velcro of the jacket’s hood closure.”
He switched on the microscope and gestured with his hand for Schäfer to take a peek.
Schäfer leaned forward.
The hair, which was magnified seventy-five times, looked like a blurry, golden-brown piece of straw.
“The structure and color indicate that the hair comes from the boy, so that doesn’t give us that much, but let’s wait and see what the DNA shows,” Rud said with a shrug of his shoulders. “I could be wrong. It doesn’t happen that often, but it happens.”
“All right. What else have you got?”
“Number three!” Rud flung his long arms out theatrically and raised one eyebrow. “There are traces of a rodenticide on one of the jacket sleeves.”
Schäfer straightened up. “Rat poison?”
“Yes, and an interesting type too.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are three main types of rat poison, which each work via a different mechanism to exterminate the pests. One is a neurotoxin, bromethalin, which kills a rat a few hours after it’s been consumed, usually via respiratory failure.”
“In other words?”
“The central nervous system collapses and the rat suffocates.”
Schäfer moistened his lips and nodded. “What else?”
“The next—fumarin—is a poison that is absorbed through the skin. It kills like this!” Rud snapped his fingers. “And it is one nasty way to go, causing acute nosebleeds, bloody urine and stools, bleeding gums, edema, fluid in the lungs, and so on. Capisce?”
“Capisce!” Schäfer nodded.
“The third most common rodenticide is called warfarin. Warfarin is similar to fumarin in the sense that it’s an anticoagulant, so the rat bleeds to death internally, and at extremely low doses it’s actually also used as a blood thinner for humans. It’s a poison that’s both odorless and tasteless, and unlike the other two types of rat poison, it’s slower acting—a stealthy son of a bitch that causes a prolonged, painful death.”
Rud pointed to the jacket sleeve.
“And here—on the ribbed cuff of the left sleeve—I found traces of a rodenticide that I wasn’t initially able to identify. But the results just came back from Toxicology.”
He pulled out an envelope, pulled the results out, and handed them to Schäfer.
“Formula: C19H16O4,” he announced. “It’s warfarin.”
Schäfer skimmed the pages. “So you say this is used in medication as well? Which means it would be something that a doctor would have access to?”
“Well, a doctor would have access to medical grade warfarin, but that’s not what’s on the jacket. What the boy was exposed to was a highly concentrated version. Pure rat poison, and any idiot can get his hands on that. Does the family live in a house? Do they have a rat problem?”
“No, in an apartment. On the fifth floor.”
“Then it’s very concerning that there’s rat poison on the jacket, I’d say.”
Schäfer folded the document up and put it in his inside pocket.
“Because you think that it indicates that … what? … that someone is killing the boy with this stuff?”
“I estimate that if nothing else, it’s plausible that you have yet another deadline hanging over your head if you want to find this boy alive.”
Schäfer looked over at the child-sized jacket on the light table and speculated on what kind of a monster would hurt a child. In his thirty years on the force, he had investigated almost 600 homicides, and an ordinary person had been hiding behind every single beast. In most of the cases he had been able to see the situation through the killers’ eyes, and it wasn’t hard to understand motives like revenge, jealousy, money, and sex. But—no matter what glasses Schäfer put on—there was no part of him that would ever understand how a person could make himself hurt a child.
He turned to Rud.
“Have you ever had a case where someone was killed with this stuff?”
“I’ve had cases where people have unintentionally ingested warfarin, but I haven’t personally worked on a homicide case where that happened. But conspiracy theorists believe that Stalin was killed with warfarin, that he was poisoned, murdered!”
“Stalin?”
“Yes, but don’t let the color of my hair fool you.” Rud smiled and ran a hand through his white mane. “That was long before my time.”