“WHAT’S UP, ERIK? Long time, no see.”
Schäfer looked up from his papers and pulled his chin back in surprise. Former police psychologist Michala Friis stood in front of him, holding out a paper coffee cup so that the loose Rolex watch on her wrist slid down toward him.
As usual she was wearing black. Schäfer had never seen her in anything else. Her jeans fit like they had been painted onto her slender legs. Her long hair was half tugged into the collar of her turtleneck sweater under her trench coat.
“What the hell!” he said with a smile. He got up and accepted the coffee. Then he stuck out his paw. “Wow, it’s been ages!”
Friis smiled and shook his hand. She scrunched up her eyes. “But not long enough, or what?”
Schäfer shrugged and adjusted his belt. “That depends on whether you’re just stopping by to say hi or if you’re here to stick your nose into my case.”
Friis set her own coffee cup down on the desk. She unbuttoned her coat and tossed it onto the empty desk chair across from Schäfer.
Augustin wasn’t in yet. It was only just past seven. It was early even for Schäfer, who had been at it for a couple of hours now. It was more than conspicuous that Friis hadn’t just randomly stopped by with an extra cup of coffee. Schäfer guessed that Commissioner Per Carstensen had brought her in without consulting the head of the investigation.
Friis met his gaze and nodded. “He thought you could use my help.”
She ran a hand through her hair. It had gotten longer since he had last seen her, Schäfer noted. And blonder.
He raised an eyebrow. “He? Who’s he?”
“Carstensen.”
“Right.” He nodded. “But do you even have time for this sort of gritty work? Isn’t there some investment banker or real estate guy out there who urgently requires your assistance?”
Friis smiled knowingly.
She was willing to take a few jabs if that’s what it took to break the ice—and it was. Schäfer wasn’t going to let her waltz into his investigation without giving her a couple of verbal volleys as welcome. But he was in no way sorry to see her. Surprised, yes, and a little wary, but he knew better than anyone else that having Friis on your team in a murder investigation was entirely a good thing.
She was one of the country’s foremost experts in psychological profiling for criminals and murder victims and people in general, and until recently Schäfer had had more respect for her than he had for the rest of his colleagues in the investigative unit combined. Their paths had crossed many times over the years when she had worked full-time as a police analyst, and they had cooperated on almost every major murder case Schäfer had been involved in for the last ten years.
But these days Friis primarily worked freelance and primarily in the private sector. She still occasionally analyzed and profiled for the police but devoted most of her energy to big corporations that wanted to assess a potential client, a competitor, or what have you. There was more money to be made in the private sector—far more—and maybe that’s what bothered Schäfer. He had trouble understanding how a woman as talented as Friis could waste her efforts on those sorts of champagne-swilling geese and Cohiba-smoking assholes. Plus, her exit from the police had meant that for most murder investigations he was now forced to make do with the second best in the field, and Schäfer had a hard time not holding that against her.
“Anything else you need to get off your chest?” She smiled and held her arms out to the sides as if she were open to more abuse. “Any more insults? Let’s hear them. You’ll feel much better afterward.”
Schäfer shot her a wry look. “Nah … I imagine the fact that you sleep poorly at night due to your career choices is punishment enough.”
“I sleep fine.”
“Well, you’re lucky, then. I usually sleep like crap.”
Friis took her coffee cup from the desk and raised it to his in a toast. “Okay, are we done with this, then? Cheers!” She set her cup down again and raised both eyebrows. “Shall we get started?”
Schäfer made a sweeping gesture with his arm over toward the crowded bulletin board, which covered the back wall of the office.
“Mi casa es su casa.”
An hour later Schäfer had given Friis a thorough summary of the case. He had shared with her everything he knew about Lukas Bjerre, about finding Thomas Strand, the man in the pilot’s suit, the clues that connected them, the Apple Man, pareidolia, Doctors Without Borders—the works.
Friis sat in Augustin’s chair now with her hands clasped behind her head, looking at the bulletin board behind Schäfer.
“What does your gut tell you?” he asked. “Who’s behind this?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“My first thought is that you’re looking for a perpetrator who’s between thirty and forty,” she said. “Someone who’s experienced some form of trauma in their life.”
“Argh, isn’t that a little too easy?” Schäfer eyed her indulgently. “I mean, don’t they all have that?”
She ignored his comments.
“Maybe he grew up in an orphanage. Maybe he lived alone with a sadistic or dominating parent. One way or the other, there was some sort of defect in his life.”
“Do any of the people we’re looking at speak to you more than others?”
Friis got up and walked over to the board, where the picture of the man in the pilot’s suit was posted. She stood with her arms crossed, staring at the picture for a long time.
“We know that there must be a third person involved in the case,” Schäfer said. “The boy disappeared, Thomas Strand’s blood is on his jacket, and the man who got on the train Monday night was wearing Lukas Bjerre’s backpack—and it was the same guy that I saw at the Citadel the day we found the jacket. Is he our perpetrator? Did he kill Strand and kidnap Lukas?”
She shrugged. “He could easily fit the profile, but I need to know more about who he is and what circles he travels in to be able to say anything more.”
“What do you think the school backpack means?” Schäfer nodded at the picture. “Why did he dump the contents at the Citadel and then take the empty backpack with him?”
“Who says it’s empty?” Friis turned her head and looked at Schäfer over her shoulder.
“The boy’s schoolbooks were in the bushes.”
“Maybe he emptied the books out of the backpack because he needed room in there for something else.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “But I do know that it’s always a bad idea to make a categorical statement about something you don’t know for sure. You see a school backpack here and a bush full of books there and conclude that therefore the bag must be empty. And you could be right about that, too. I’m just saying: Maybe it’s not empty. Maybe the bag is serving some particular purpose. Maybe there’s an object inside it that needs to be transported from point A to point B without attracting much attention for some reason we’re not aware of yet. You know what they say about assumptions …”
“They’re the mother of all fuck-ups.”
“Nothing less.” Friis nodded.
Schäfer took a deep breath. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Then there’s the question of the woman Lukas Bjerre met a few times out behind the school.”
“What about her?” Friis asked.
“Well, for starters, who is she? And what makes you rule out a female perpetrator?”
“I’m not ruling anything out at the present time,” Friis said. “I’m just telling you what my first impressions are.”
“Okay. What else are you picking up on?”
She ran one thumb over her lower lip as she thought. “You’re working on the theory that someone abducted the boy from school on Monday morning, correct?”
Schäfer nodded. “Pretty much, yes.”
“That means you don’t think he ran away?”
“Like you, I’m not ruling anything out. But if someone’s going to run away from home, there needs to be a good reason for it and there needs to be a …”
“His mother being an alcoholic could be a good reason, couldn’t it?” Friis suggested.
“Well …” Schäfer’s expression was skeptical. “I know kids who grew up in families where the alcohol abuse was far worse, but they didn’t run away. In my opinion, that would take more than what’s going on in the Bjerre household.”
“Okay. What else?” she asked. “I interrupted you before …”
“Yes, one other thing that sticks out to me is that there’s no trace of the boy at Østerport. If you want to run away and you’re only a few yards away from a place where you can catch an express train to Timbuktu every two minutes, that’s the most obvious escape route. Plus the piggy bank in his bedroom was full of money. There must have been 700 to 800 kroner in it. And people don’t plan to run away without money in their pocket. And: where the hell would he go?”
“I don’t know, but there’s something about his going missing from school that doesn’t add up.”
“And that is?”
“According to all the statements obtained, Lukas is a highly gifted child. He’s not the type to voluntarily walk away with someone he doesn’t know. No one has described him as stupid or gullible, the sort of little boy that you could just lure away from the school with some candy or free apples, as you suggested earlier. Every indication is that intellectually he’s way, way ahead of his peers. He knows very well that he shouldn’t walk off with a stranger. So I simply don’t believe that some person he doesn’t know was able to lure him away from the school.”
“So he was taken from the school by force?”
“No, I think that’s also unlikely. Picture a perpetrator showing up at a school attended by—what—just shy of 600 students? And how many teachers and instructional assistants are there? Forty or fifty? If Lukas was grabbed by someone who wanted to drag him away, he would have yelled, and someone would have heard him. And he’s too big for someone to have been able to do a Disneyland maneuver on him.”
“What’s a Disneyland maneuver?”
“A Disneyland maneuver.” Friis flung out her arms as if this should be self-explanatory. “There have been many instances in amusement parks in the U.S. where little kids were kidnapped in broad daylight. Typically, the kidnapper hides in a public restroom and when some random kid walks in to go to the bathroom, they quickly subdue the child with chloroform or a similar substance.”
Friis rattled off the procedure as if she were reading a recipe out loud.
“They cut off the kid’s curls and change the kid’s clothes. In other words, in just a couple of minutes they transform a girl with long hair in a pink dress into what looks like a boy in jeans and a white T-shirt. Then they put the unconscious child into an umbrella stroller that they have brought with them and roll it right past the mother and father who are standing outside the restroom waiting.”
Friis sat back down in Augustin’s chair and clasped her hands behind her head again.
“Typically, it’s a father standing outside waiting, because he doesn’t feel like he can accompany his daughter into the women’s restroom.”
Schäfer shook his head in disgust. “What the hell kind of world are we living in?!”
She agreed, her eyebrows raised.
“Do you think someone drugged Lukas with something at school? Maybe poisoned him or knocked him out?” Schäfer thought about the warfarin stain on the jacket. Could rat poison be used like an anesthetic?
“And what?” She smiled. “Rolled him out of the schoolyard in a wheelbarrow? Hardly. That was exactly my point: He’s way too big for a stunt like that, so I think it’s unlikely that anyone snatched him from school against his will.”
Schäfer reached for the latte Friis had brought him and took a sip.
“So maybe he voluntarily went along with someone?”
“Maybe.”
“What about this Kiki, who wrote to the boy?” he said. “What do you think about her?”
“I could be wrong,” she said. “But my sense is that that person doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”
“Why not?”
“Because you said the boy had hidden the note you found, that it was inside a diary. Wasn’t that what you said?”
“A notebook. It was hidden under his mattress.”
“Children don’t hide letters and notes from people they don’t like or people they’re afraid of. If Lukas kept this note, then it’s because it meant something to him. Because she meant something to him. So, since we don’t know who Kiki is, we need to ask ourselves the following question to proceed: Who is Lukas Bjerre?”
Friis stood up.
“What’s going on inside his head?” she asked.
Schäfer walked over and stopped in front of the bulletin board with his hands at his sides. He nodded to the picture of the barn door. “He’s very preoccupied with those faces I told you about.”
She nodded. “Pareidolia.”
“Yes. What do you think about that?”
“I think that he seems like an inquisitive child. He’s very aware of the world around him—and watchful! Pareidolia is interesting specifically because the phenomenon is related to the Rorschach test. The one where you look at different random inkblots and describe your associations, whether you see a bat, a face, a woman’s spread legs, or what have you. It’s a test that reveals people’s innermost and maybe even subconscious thoughts. Their secret, deviant desires. Their biggest fear. Their dreams—and so on.”
Schäfer listened attentively.
“Similarly, pareidolia reveals something about our thoughts and about our personality,” she continued. “We all have the ability to see these faces, but how developed that ability is varies quite a bit from person to person and depends on the life we lead. People who are generally comfortable and optimistic and rarely worry about anything find it harder to decode these patterns as faces. But if you’re suffering from anxiety or are particularly sensitive, then you see faces as signs of danger all over the place.”
“But there’s no indication that the boy suffers from anxiety or anything like that,” Schäfer said. “On the sensitive side perhaps, but his teachers and parents describe him as a child who functions at a really high level.”
Friis was quiet, thinking. She turned her back to Schäfer and studied all the pictures hanging on the wall, one by one. They were pictures Schäfer had taken out of the family’s photo albums and hung up.
When she finally spoke, it sounded as if she were talking to herself, in a whisper.
“He’s not a happy child.”
“I’m sorry?” Schäfer looked at Friis’s back, his brow furrowed.
She turned to him. “He’s not happy.”
Schäfer shook his head, not understanding. “What are you talking about?”
He gestured over at the board that was covered with pictures of Lukas in every conceivable photo op situation. He was smiling in every picture.
“The kid is like a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes spokesmodel incarnate,” he said. “I have statements from everyone he associates with—his teachers, family, friends, and so on. Everyone describes him as a sweet, happy boy, a fun, clever kid.”
Friis walked over to the board and pointed at one of the pictures. “Who took this one?”
Schäfer shrugged. “As far as I can remember, it’s from a family vacation.”
He pulled the thumbtack out of the photo and read what it said on the back. It said Summer house life. Klint, July 2017.
“It was probably one of his parents who took it. Or his grandmother,” he said.
“It’s the only picture we have of him where he’s smiling,” Friis said.
Schäfer stared at her blankly. Then, slightly irritated, he pointed around at the rest of the board without breaking his eye contact with her.
“Do you see all the pictures here? I count at least twenty pictures where the kid is smiling.”
She shook her head. “No, you count nineteen where he’s faking a smile, and this one …” She slapped the picture from Klint with her palm. “This is the only one where his smile is genuine.”
“Elaborate,” Schäfer said with a wave of his hand.
“There are thought to be about eighteen different types of smiles, but only one of them is an expression of joy.”
“Eighteen types of smiles?”
“Yes. Some smiles occur because of pain or fear. Other smiles are due to people finding themselves in an embarrassing situation. There are also other people who express indignation, anger, or speechlessness with a smile, and people sometimes smile when they’re lying or confused.”
Schäfer looked puzzled. “Who in the world expresses anger by smiling?”
“Well, you did when I walked in the door. You gave me a smile that said: What are you doing here, you traitor? I don’t trust you, because you’d rather earn money than catch criminals.”
“Fair enough. Then what does this smile mean?” Schäfer looked at her, his teeth clenched and his lips apart in a defiant smile.
“That you grudgingly acknowledge that I know what I’m talking about, and that you’re not at all as clever as you think you are.” She pointed at the bulletin board. “Lukas is smiling in all these photos because he decided to smile. That’s a ‘say cheese’ smile, not a genuine smile. There is only one genuine smile: the so-called Duchenne smile.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the only smile that is an expression of true joy. It can’t be forced. It can’t be faked. It’s named for a French neurologist who was responsible for the first documented smile studies, done in the early 1800s. His name was Guillaume Duchenne. By electrically stimulating the facial muscles, he learned to distinguish between genuine, happy smiles and other types of smiles.”
“And how do you tell the difference?”
“In general people can only rarely tell, but I can. Specialists who know what they’re looking for can.”
“And what do you look for then?”
“During a genuine smile, the corners of the mouth move up and back. The fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid tilts downward, while the innermost part of the eyebrow lowers. That’s what creates the crow’s feet by the eyes known as laugh lines,” she said and pointed to her eyes. “When a person feels happy and smiles, then there’s both a voluntary and an involuntary contraction by two muscles: the zygomaticus major muscle—that’s the one that raises the corners of the mouth—and the orbicularis oculi muscle, which lifts the cheeks and produces the laugh lines around the eyes. The first is controlled by the frontal lobe. That’s where the voluntary, conscious movement takes place. The other muscle is controlled by the emotional center in the brain. Do you follow?”
Schäfer nodded.
“You can’t activate that latter one on your own,” she continued. “It only responds to emotions. In other words, you can’t fake your way into making the laugh lines around your eyes appear. So, with a fake smile—which we also refer to as a Pan Am smile, named for the airline’s cabin crew—the smile doesn’t reach the eyes. Only the corners of the mouth come up.”
Schäfer nodded. “So what you’re telling me is that you can’t make anyone get those Duchenne smile wrinkles by their eyes by holding up a camera and asking them to smile?”
“Well, you could if the person were already happy. Someone optimistic, who thinks the world is a wonderful place. In that case it doesn’t take very much to trigger a genuine smile, especially not in kids, who are generally more in touch with the joy of living than adults are. But this kid,” she pointed to Lukas. “He’s not joyful.”
Schäfer massaged his stubble as he contemplated this.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I’m thinking that it’s been a long time since I last had a case that made so little sense. Here I’ve got a boy who’s missing, a dead soldier, and an unidentified man in a pilot’s suit. These three people are connected, but no one can tell me how. To the contrary, everyone says that the boy is practically traipsing through life happy as a clam, and now you tell me that he’s not.”
Friis looked at her Rolex with a look of disappointment.
“What is it?” Schäfer asked.
“I have another meeting in half an hour, so unfortunately I’m going to have to run.”
Schäfer remembered his own meeting with Heloise and looked at his own watch, a cheap Casio he had had since the early nineties.
Friis put on her coat and gathered up the copies Schäfer had made for her. She put them in her big leather shoulder bag and looked up at him.
“I’ll look at the case again tonight and let you know if I find anything else.”
Schäfer held out his hand to her. “Thank you, Michala. I really appreciate it. And, hey, we miss you around here. If you ever decide to come back full time …” He held his arms out to the side to signal that she was always welcome.
She nodded. “Maybe someday …”
On her way out she turned around in the doorway and looked at Schäfer.
“Hey, I didn’t have a chance to ask you. How are things with Connie?”
Schäfer looked up, his eyebrows raised. “Connie? She’s doing great, thanks. Everything’s great.”
“Still the One?”
He nodded slowly, surprised at the question.
“Still the One,” he replied.
Friis smiled slightly. “I’ll see you around, Erik.”
Schäfer watched her long blonde hair disappear down the hallway and thought about those eighteen types of smiles.
Which type had she just given him?