THERE WERE SIX surveillance cameras along each of the four tracks in Østerport Station. That meant that the police needed to plow through twenty-four videotapes, each one twelve hours long, to see if they could spot Lukas Bjerre in the crowd of almost 100,000 people who had gotten on or off the trains at the station on Monday. It was like looking for the infamous needle in a haystack.
Michael Voss scratched the back of his head with the eraser end of a pencil. He shook his head and looked tiredly at Schäfer, who had just come back from police headquarters after his visit to the Pathology Department.
“This is like Where’s Waldo,” he said. “I mean, if you image a black and white version of Where’s Waldo where the pages of the book are 100 by 100 yards. We’ve cleared the first six hours, so we’re halfway there.”
Voss and his team in Computer Forensic Investigations had been working around the clock since they had received the tapes on Monday evening. An almost endless row of computer screens lit up the dark room inside police headquarters. IT specialists sat in a line, alternately pressing play and pause, as they reviewed each frozen frame for anything that stuck out.
“What have you found?” Schäfer asked.
“So far we haven’t found shit and now it’s almost crap o’clock again.” Voss looked at his watch. “It’s going to be another long night in here.”
“All right. Let me know if you find anything,” Schäfer said and headed for the exit.
“Yo, Voss!” One of the men in front of one of the computers called out. “You might want to come and look at this.”
Schäfer stopped.
He followed Voss over to the guy who had called out. He was quite young. Schäfer thought he looked like a big kid—a kid who was suffering from a serious vitamin deficiency, lanky and sallow, pale in that way that only gamers who live off potato chips and soda look.
“Well?” Voss crossed his arms and nodded at the screen. “What are you working on?”
“The recordings from Monday between four and seven PM.”
“Why the hell are you looking at those?” Voss raised his arm as if he wanted to give the boy a disciplining swat to the back of the head. “Those weren’t the ones I asked you to check, you ninny.”
“No, but I’ve already checked the others, and there wasn’t anything, so I thought I would go ahead with …”
“Your job isn’t to think. Your job is to follow orders,” Voss said. “What did you find?”
“Check this out.” The guy typed something on his keyboard.
Schäfer stepped over to the screen. “What are we looking at?” he asked.
“Track 4, Monday, 6:13 PM.”
The playback was set to a sort of choppy slow-motion, which made all the movements in the image look robotic. Schäfer saw the B train pull up to the platform. People in shades of gray crowded together by the train doors. Passengers got out; new travelers boarded. Then the doors began to close.
“Now look …,” the IT specialist said and pointed.
A man appeared on the right side of the screen and put his hand into the gap between the automatic sliding doors. The doors opened again, and the man boarded the train. Then the doors closed behind him and the train left the station.
Voss shrugged. “So?”
The young guy rewound the tape, going back a couple of seconds, and then hit play again. This time he paused the playback right when the man stuck his hand between the closing train doors with his back to the camera.
Schäfer felt his cheeks grow hot and the hair follicles at the back of his neck tingled in that familiar way.
The man on the platform was wearing a backpack. It was impossible to make out the color from the recording, but the LEGO Ninjago logo was clear on the side of the backpack. As was the Stormtrooper reflector that hung from the zipper.
“I’ll be damned,” Schäfer mumbled.
“The boy’s backpack,” Voss said, clasping his hands together in satisfaction behind his head. “It’s like I always say. If there’s video evidence, we’ll find it!”
“Can you zoom in on him?” Schäfer asked.
The IT specialist typed something and enlarged the man’s image.
“But that’s the only angle we have of him,” he said. “We don’t have anything that captures his face.”
Voss leaned closer to the screen, scrunching up his eyes. “What kind of a weird outfit is he wearing?”
Schäfer closed his eyes tight and the blood in his veins started to boil.
Damn it!
He had had him. He had had him and he had let him get away.
Schäfer opened his eyes again and looked at the man on the screen.
“It’s a pilot’s suit,” he said.