WHEN THE SIGNAL was given, the battering ram splintered the frame. The door flew open with a bang and the next few seconds were a cacophonous inferno of shouting and heavy boots stomping into the apartment.
Eight SWAT team officers in tactical gear moved quickly, searching the small apartment room by room with automatic weapons in their hands.
“ALL CLEAR!” a voice yelled from the far end of the apartment.
Schäfer quickly followed the sound. It was freezing cold in the apartment and his breath lingered in the air behind him like smoke from a steam engine. He walked down the narrow hallways with his service weapon raised in front of him. The gun felt cold to the touch, familiar in his hands.
“Schäfer!” one of the officers called. “In here!”
Schäfer turned a corner and entered a bedroom with dark curtains drawn over the windows. There wasn’t any toppled furniture or any other signs of a struggle in there, but a faint odor of death had settled like a thin membrane over the room.
Thomas Strand lay in his bed.
The pillow under his head was black with congealed blood and his bald head was tipped backward at a violent, unnatural angle. A bullet hole the size of a blueberry went in through the left side of his lower jaw. It looked like he had been shot at close range—probably while he was asleep.
An assassination, Schäfer thought.
Lisa Augustin appeared beside him, considering the body.
Thomas Strand’s eyes were closed, and his facial features were distorted by the bullet that had ripped through his facial muscles and cranium beneath the skin. Blood had trickled out of all the bodily openings in his head, caked now in coagulated stripes down the man’s face, while yellowish blobs that looked like little marzipan stars had exploded over the body and the bedding.
Augustin stepped closer to the bed and squinted her eyes. “What is this stuff that’s all over everything?”
“I’m guessing mashed potatoes,” Schäfer said.
Augustin turned her head to give him a bewildered look. “Mashed potatoes?”
“Yeah, it’s an old trick. If you don’t have a professional silencer, you can use a large potato. You hold it in front of the muzzle, watch the angle, and then fire the bullet through the potato. It works nearly as well.”
Augustin smiled. “An old wives’ trick for murderers?”
Schäfer nodded. “Something like that.”
“How long do you think he’s been lying here like this?”
He shrugged, his eyes running up and down the body. “It’s hard to say. We need to wait for Oppermann.”
“And the boy?”
Schäfer shook his head. “He’s not here.”
The kitchen looked lonely, unused, as if Thomas Strand had never made a meal there. There were only drinks in the fridge: a six-pack of beer, a bottle of vodka, a shelf full of Red Bull. Most of the cupboards were empty. So was the dishwasher. And the trash can contained a couple of takeout containers and used disposable utensils.
“We need to find out how long he has been living here,” Schäfer said. “What did the neighbors see? Who came and went to the apartment? Have they seen any kids in the stairwell, and so on.”
Lisa Augustin nodded.
They moved on into the bathroom, where the unflattering hippie color scheme revealed that it had last been renovated sometime in the eighties. The walls over the checkerboard linoleum floor were covered in crackled tiles, and the shabby toilet was at least eight different shades of brown.
Schäfer leaned in over the edge of the moss-green bathtub, looking for any traces of blood. There were little dark, curly hairs on the drain cover and the bottom of the tub was dirty. A sharp sewage smell rose from the drain. It didn’t look like anyone had bothered to remove any evidence.
“There’s something here on the windowsill,” Augustin said from behind him.
Schäfer turned around and saw a thin streak of dried blood on the edge of the sill, as if something had grazed it very lightly. Something bloody.
Augustin pointed with her foot at a roll of black trash bags lying under the radiator on the floor by the window, which was ajar.
“Wasn’t the bloodstained sweatshirt found in a bag like that?”
Schäfer squatted down and looked back and forth between the roll of bags and the bloodstain.
He stood back up and put on a pair of latex gloves. He opened the mirrored cabinet over the sink and surveyed the contents. The shelves contained the usual toiletries: some deodorant, a disposable razor full of stubble, a toothbrush, toothpaste, aspirin, and mouthwash. There was a box on the bottom shelf, a white box of pills with a prescription label. The label sticker had been put on crookedly, so it was wrinkled, which made it hard for Schäfer to read the text. He held the box out to Augustin.
“What does this say?”
She took it and squinted. “It’s something called almotriptan. It says it’s for migraines.” She gave Schäfer a wry look. “I don’t think it’s going to help the headache he has right now.”
“Whose name is on the prescription?”
“Thomas Strand.”
“No, I mean: Who’s the doctor? Who wrote the prescription?”
“Oh, it was a … Jørgen Juul-Hansen at someplace called Havnegade Medical Practice.”
“Damn it!” Schäfer said, running his hand around the back of his neck.
“Were you hoping it would say Jens Bjerre?”
“Yes, it would really help the situation if we could find something to connect the various pieces of this crummy case.”
“Maybe Thomas Strand is a friend of the family,” Augustin suggested.
“Maybe.” Schäfer nodded.
They were interrupted by a forensic technician from NKC who wanted to enter the small bathroom.
“Can I come in?”
“Yes, we’ll give you some space now,” Schäfer said and herded Augustin out of the room.
They moved into the living room and looked around. There was an open pizza box on the coffee table with a couple of slices of pepperoni pie in it. There was also a box of Cocoa Puffs on the table and a bowl, which was glazed with chocolaty milk residue and dried pieces of puffed chocolate rice.
Schäfer carefully tilted a milk carton that sat on the parquet floor next to the table. He could tell that there was still milk in it.
“The victim ate his dinner in front of the TV and then went to bed without cleaning up,” Augustin suggested. “And then someone broke in overnight and what? Shot him?”
Schäfer growled evasively.
“How did the killer get in?” he asked. “Was the door unlocked?”
“No.”
“So whoever did this closed the door on their way out, but how did he get in, through the bathroom window?”
“He or she,” Schäfer corrected.
“Maybe they knew each other. Maybe the victim let the killer in before he went to bed.” Augustin slapped her upper arms to try to warm up. “Holy cow, it’s freezing in here.”
Schäfer didn’t say anything. He stared at the things on the coffee table.
“What are you thinking?”
“Cocoa Puffs,” he said. “Who likes Cocoa Puffs?”
“Kids.”
Schäfer nodded slowly. “Kids.”
“Do you think the boy’s been here?”
Schäfer didn’t answer that question. Instead, he asked a new one: “How did Thomas Strand’s DNA end up on Lukas’s jacket?”
Augustin bit her cheek as she considered that.
“Thomas Strand kidnaps Lukas, maybe as part of some plot involving a third person,” she suggested. “The third person kills Thomas Strand—and maybe Lukas as well—and then runs off. Or he kills Thomas Strand, kidnaps Lukas, and runs off.”
Schäfer didn’t say anything. There were too many unknown factors. Too many pieces that didn’t fit together.
A crime scene investigator came into the room. “It looks like the heat in the apartment was turned off,” he said. “All the radiators are cold as ice.”
Augustin shrugged. “Maybe they don’t work. It is an old building.”
Schäfer walked over to the nearest radiator and turned the thermostat to the left with his glove-clad hand. He heard the water running into the pipes right away and felt the heat spreading from the top of the radiator. He turned it off again.
“They work.”
Augustin looked puzzled. “Who the hell turns off the heat in their apartment in the middle of the coldest winter in a hundred years?”
“What makes a worse stink in an apartment building?” Schäfer asked. “A body in a heated apartment or in an unheated one?”
“So you think the killer turned off the heat to cover up the smell?”
“To make sure that the body wouldn’t be found for a while.” he said with a nod and turned to the investigator. “Make sure to dust for prints on the thermostats and check all the rooms and all the cupboards and drawers in the place for a poison called warfarin.”
The investigator got to work, and Schäfer turned to Augustin.
“We have the turned-off radiators and something that looks like a textbook assassination in the bedroom.” He pointed toward the room with his thumb. “We have the victim’s blood on Lukas’s jacket, and if we assume for a moment that the killer was the one who nabbed the boy from the school, then he did it without attracting attention to him or herself. That seems disturbingly professional, well thought out.”
They could hear voices out in the stairwell; cheerful greetings that echoed up the stairs.
Medical examiner John Oppermann appeared in the front doorway and Schäfer’s eyebrows shot up his forehead.
“What the hell, John?” he blurted out. “You shaved your mustache?”
Oppermann, who had been sporting a Thomson and Thompson style mustache for at least thirty years, smiled and ran his fingertips over his bare upper lip. Then he put on his work glasses.
“Well, which way to the main character here?”
Schäfer sent Augustin off to ring doorbells and question Thomas Strand’s neighbors in the building. In the meantime, he put on a protective suit and face mask and went into the bedroom where Oppermann was examining the body.
The scene of the crime was already contaminated by the numerous snow-wet combat boots that by now had plodded through every room in the apartment, but that’s how it went with these types of raids. There was a “shoot first, ask later” mentality in the SWAT team that the boys at NKC always bitched about.
An officer pulled the heavy curtain in the bedroom carefully aside to avoid sending too much dust around the room. The blazing white light from the sky pierced the room and made Thomas Strand’s contorted face look even more grotesque and waxy.
Oppermann took the body’s temperature and Schäfer averted his gaze. No matter what people had been subjected to in their final hour—whether they were mowed down by an AK-47, cut into little pieces, or dumped naked in the middle of street, there was nothing so humiliating as having a thermometer stuck up your butt without your consent. Schäfer felt that he owed every crime victim the respect of looking away.
“Hmm,” Oppermann muttered and shook his head. “It’s hard to establish a time of death when the body has been kept this cold. The body’s temperature is the same as the room’s so that doesn’t tell us anything other than that he’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours. Rigor mortis is also unreliable because of the cold. Livor mortis observed …” He paused and used his shoulder to scratch the mustache that was no longer there. A habit that would probably take a year to break.
He shrugged. “Twenty-four to seventy-two hours is my best estimate. So the time of death would be sometime between Sunday and Tuesday. You probably won’t be able to do much with that, but I can’t be any more specific right now. It’s going to be incredibly difficult to pin it down any more than that.”
“The earliest he could have been shot is Monday after eight PM,” Schäfer said. “His blood was found on a jacket belonging to the boy who went missing from Nyholm School Monday morning. So we can rule out Sunday.”
“Well, unless the deceased was shot Sunday and the boy got the blood on his jacket then.”
“You mean before he went missing?” That was a possibility Schäfer hadn’t considered.
“I don’t mean anything,” Oppermann said. “I’m just telling you what I see here, namely that the time of death is sometime between Sunday and Tuesday.”
Once Oppermann had finished his initial examinations, Thomas Strand’s dead body was moved into a body bag and transported to the Department of Forensic Medicine.
“I’ll start the autopsy as soon as I get back to the department,” Oppermann said.
Schäfer nodded. “I’m right on your heels.”
He turned to the window and looked out over the Rosenborg Castle Gardens, which were across the street. The castle rose majestically in the middle of the snow-covered park and made the whole area look like a Disney screensaver. Like something right out of a fairy tale, beautiful.
He turned to the bed and stared at the pool of blood that had seeped down into the mattress. There were bits of brain and potato on the headboard and on the floor were the clothes Schäfer presumed Thomas Strand had removed before getting into bed.
A pair of worn blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and dirty athletic socks turned inside out.
Schäfer sighed heavily as questions accumulated in his mind, like blood in a clogged artery.
If Thomas Strand had kidnapped Lukas Monday morning, had someone then assassinated him that same night and taken the boy? If so, what would be the motive for that? Who was the third party involved?
And more importantly still …
Where was Lukas now?