GRADUALLY THE WORLD had stopped swaying beneath Erik Schäfer’s feet. After three days on Danish soil and a couple of nights of shallow sleep, he felt more or less like himself again. Now a completely different sort of discomfort took over: the feeling of not being able to make a breakthrough in the investigation.
He sat heavily in his desk chair at police headquarters and looked at the file in front of him. Lisa Augustin sat on the other side of the desk. The coffee between them had grown cold while they had tried to knead the different clues in the case together into one coherent mass. No matter how they looked at it, they could not find a common thread.
There were 227 pictures in Lukas Bjerre’s Instagram account and from those 227 pictures, there was only one recurrent theme that appeared multiple times.
The barn door.
Lukas had shared the picture four times over nine months, but there was no pattern to the timing of when he had done it. There were 23 days between the first and second times, 173 days between the next two, and 55 between the third and final times, when he had uploaded it the day before he disappeared. They had noted the dates and checked if anything in particular had happened in Lukas’s life on those days, but neither the school nor the boy’s parents could account for any outings or events that had taken place on the dates in question. The police had obtained access to both Jens and Anne Sofie Bjerre’s calendars and the school’s old weekly schedules, and Lukas’s class had just had regular school on all four of the dates and no coincidences among the after-school activities.
While all the other photos in his profile were tagged with words that had to do with the subject matter (#banana, #outlet, #clouds, #mud, etc.), all four of the photos of the barn door were accompanied only by hostile, aggressive hashtags (#die, #Imgoingtokillyou, #satan, #youwilldie).
There was no doubt in Schäfer’s mind. It was critical to the investigation that they find that barn.
He was putting together a summary of all the rural areas on the island of Zealand, where they knew for sure that the boy had been in the last year, either on school field trips or with his family, places where it was plausible that one might run into a barn like the one in the picture.
Schäfer looked at the map of Zealand hanging on the wall. Red pins marked places they knew the boy had stayed. He had visited his grandmother near Roskilde several times, both on his own and with his parents. He had gone to camp with his class in a little hamlet in Odsherred, and other field trips had taken them to the forested area of Hareskoven, just northwest of Copenhagen, to the Faxe Limestone Quarry, and to the Knuthenborg Safari Park drive-through zoo. Augustin had downloaded pictures from the field trips from the school’s intranet, but so far there wasn’t anything that seriously triggered Schäfer’s radar.
Where the hell was this kid?
Schäfer needed someone who could help interpret the psychological evidence in the case, to read the things between the lines that he didn’t have the expertise to decipher on his own. He cursed Michala Friis for having resigned from her position with the investigative unit. Her successor didn’t possess a tenth of her skill at spotting critical details.
“Have we heard anything from Joakim Kjærgaard?” Schäfer asked.
Joakim Kjærgaard was the police psychologist, who had taken over Friis’s job when she transitioned to the private sector.
“Not yet,” Augustin said. “I talked to him last night and he still seemed to be stuck at square one.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Schäfer asked and looked down at the paperwork again.
Augustin got up and stretched her neck from side to side. Her vertebrae made a loud crunching sound and she sighed heavily.
“Lunch?” she asked.
Schäfer shook his head without looking up.
“I’m just going to grab a bagel from the cafeteria. Can I bring you anything?”
He shook his head again and Augustin left the room.
“All right,” Schäfer said to himself, rubbing his palms together. “Let’s start from the beginning.”
He started listing facts, muttering, and concentrating:
“The boy collects faces. There’s one motif that recurs: that barn door. And then there’s the warfarin on his jacket … Did someone poison him? How did the jacket end up at the Citadel? And who’s the Apple Man?”
Schäfer looked at his notes, groping around in his mind.
“Argh, damn it!” he mumbled, running his hands up and down over his cheeks. He leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed. He didn’t open them again until the phone on the desk in front of him started ringing.
“Hello?”
“Ah, hello hello.”
“Rud?” Schäfer’s voice sounded hopeful through the phone. “Tell me you’ve got something.”
“We got the results back on the DNA, and I’m sending them to you … now.”
The computer in front of Schäfer dinged as a new email arrived in his inbox.
He clicked on the link and opened the email.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“The first test results are from the swab from the sweatshirt you found in the trash can. There is only one blood type—one person’s DNA.”
“And? Do we have a match?”
“We have a match.”
Schäfer closed his eyes. “Is it the boy’s blood?”
“No, it belongs to a Thomas Strand, age twenty-nine,” Rud Johannsen said.
Schäfer opened his eyes again, his brow wrinkled. “Who’s he?”
“Born in Haderslev, lives on Sølvgade in Copenhagen. He’s a sergeant major and has worked for the Danish military since 2010. But they kicked him out just after New Year’s, because he was charged with assaulting a civil servant.”
“Is that all we’ve got on him?”
“No, he’s got a few priors and quite a few charges that were filed but then dropped for one reason or another. All of the cases involved violence or threats of violence.”
“Against children?”
“No, nothing like that. He’s mostly been in bar brawls, but there have been quite a few of them.”
Schäfer could hear fingers moving quickly over a keyboard.
“And then there’s the DNA results from the boy’s jacket,” Rud said. “Those little bloodstains.”
“Yes?”
“The results are the same. Same person.”
“Thomas Strand?”
“Yes.”
Schäfer thanked Rud for the call. He hung up and yelled to everyone in the department.
“Time to roll!”