HELOISE KALDAN AIMED the gun at the man at the big double desk in the middle of the room.
He sat as if in a trance, his eyes glued to the screen in front of him, hammering out a drum solo on the edge of the desk with his two stiff index fingers while the music poured out of the cell phone on the desk in front of him.
One hard strike on the hi-hat, as his left foot worked the pedal of an invisible bass drum.
Welcome to the jungle. We’ve got fun and games.
Heloise looked at the dark brown curls that covered his broad forehead and the white, freshly ironed shirt that was a little too tight around his muscular upper arms and chest.
She smiled at the sight.
Such a gifted man, she thought. So smart, so talented, and so extraordinarily vain.
She leaned farther in the doorway, silently, slowly, and put her finger on the trigger.
“Bøttger?”
“Hmm?”
Journalist Mogens Bøttger looked up from his computer the second the foam bullet hit his chest. An animal-like sound came out of his mouth, and he propelled himself backward in his office chair.
“What the hell?!”
He looked angrily up at Heloise, who was weeping with laughter, both hands on her knees. With the pill tucked safely in her pocket she felt light, almost cheerful. The day had started out so gloomily, and now it felt like she had an escape route. She could wipe the slate clean and start over.
Like dodging a bullet!
“You should have seen yourself,” she exclaimed, laughing.
“Kaldan, you … jerk!” Mogens complained and grabbed the right side of his chest. “That freaking hurt!”
“Oh, please!” Heloise blew the imaginary smoke off the muzzle of the fluorescent-green Nerf gun. “It’s a toy. How painful could it possibly be?”
“All right, give it here then!”
Mogens got up. At six foot eight, he towered over her. He tried to wrest the gun out of her hand.
“You’ll see how it feels!”
Heloise tossed the plastic gun away, toward the far end of the room, where it landed on an old, beat-up Chesterfield couch.
“Okay, okay, you win!” she said, holding both hands up in surrender.
Mogens reluctantly let go of her and sat back down in his desk chair, his facial expression childishly aggrieved.
“You look like one of the old men from The Muppet Show when you laugh, Kaldan. You know that?”
He made a goofy face and raised, then lowered his shoulders in a carefree caricature gesture, mimicking her silent laughter with a silly smile so big you could stuff a slice of watermelon in.
“That’s you, Kaldan! An old, laughing buffoon.”
Heloise smiled and sat down at her desk across from him.
He nodded toward the couch.
“Where’d you get the murder weapon from anyways?”
“It’s Kaj’s.”
Mogens’s eyebrow bent into a skeptical arch over his left eye.
“I’m sorry, what?” He turned down his music. “Did you say it’s Kaj’s?”
His surprise was well justified.
Kaj Clevin was an older gentleman with age spots who worked as a food critic for Demokratisk Dagblad. He was known for being a self-righteous snob who nursed a latent hatred of anything that might appeal to the proletariat, and his restaurant reviews were always narrowly targeted at the fraction of readers who shared his enthusiasm for what Heloise described as gastro-masturbation.
“What in the world would Kaj be doing with a neon-colored Nerf gun?” Mogens asked.
“He brought his grandson to work last week,” Heloise said with a shrug. “The kid must have forgotten it here.”
Mogens’s eyes widened.
“That ugly little monster with the underbite who was running around making a fuss in here the other day?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“That was Kaj’s grandson?”
Heloise nodded.
“Ugh,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to say ugh about a kid.”
“Oh, I don’t give a shit. He looked like an orc!” Mogens jutted out his lower jaw, his eyes focused on some point in the distance. Then he turned his brown eyes to Heloise again and turned his palms upward. “Am I right?”
Heloise shrugged and started pulling notepads and work papers out of her black leather shoulder bag.
“I’m right,” Mogens said. “But to be fair to the young orc, there are exceptionally few kids who are actually charming. When I drop Fernanda off at day care in the mornings, they’re all sitting there with snot pouring out of their noses … absolutely beyond disgusting. Plus, they smell bad!”
“Don’t hold back, Bøttger. Come on, tell me what you really think.” Heloise smiled. She took out her phone and opened an email she had received from Morten Munk in the research department with the subject line Veterans vs. Background Population: Suicide Rate.
“If I can’t share this kind of thing with you, Kaldan, then who? You’re the only person I know who hasn’t been brainwashed. You remember my sister, right?”
“What about her?”
“She used to be such great company. She always had something exciting to contribute to the conversation, an interesting perspective. But then she met Niels, Nordea-Niels as they call him because of his job at the bank. And then they had kids, one of each—and okay, they’re very cute, they are. But now they’ve moved to Holte, where they bought a one-story house and an electric lawnmower with all the bells and whistles in terms of attachments and special features.”
“So what?”
“So now she’s just mind-numbingly boring.”
“But is she happy?”
“Of course she’s happy! But it really doesn’t suit her.”
Heloise suppressed a laugh.
“Well, then it’s a good thing that having a kid didn’t change you.” She eyed him sarcastically.
Mogens responded with an annoyed shake of his head.
“Of course you change, otherwise you’d be made of stone. But I have preserved my cynicism, and that is a darned important attribute in a person.” He emphasized his point with an insistent index finger.
“If you say so, Captain Haddock.”
“It’s true! Plus, it’s one of the reasons I like you so much, Kaldan. You’re one of the most cynical people I know.”
“Aw, that’s almost too kind of you.”
Mogens bowed his head in respect, as if he had just knighted her.
“Never change!” he urged.
“Don’t worry,” Heloise said wryly. “There’s no risk of that.”
She read the email from Morten Munk regarding what they had learned about suicide among veterans. Then she called Gerda, her best friend. It was her third try today. Gerda usually called her right back, and it rarely took more than an hour before she at least texted.
Today an unusual radio silence had prevailed.
“Hi, it’s me again. Please call me,” Heloise said after the beep. “I need your help with the article I told you about the other day.”
She ended the call just as the investigative team’s editor, Karen Aagaard, poked her head through the doorway.
“Where the hell is everyone?”
Heloise turned in her seat and looked toward the door. Then she smiled.
“Oh, hi! I thought you were out sick today.”
“I’m not sick. What’s going on? Where is everyone?” Karen peered critically at Heloise over the rim of her horn-rimmed frames and nodded over at the empty desks in the room. She was usually the department’s breezy motherly presence, but today she was giving off a surprisingly toxic vibe.
“I don’t know,” Heloise said, raising an eyebrow in surprise. Then she shrugged. “Out, I guess?”
“Editorial meeting. Now!” Karen barked.
Without another word, she turned on her heel, and you could hear her royal blue stilettos clicking, making a grouchy tsk-tsk-tsk sound all the way down the hallway to the meeting room.
Heloise and Mogens looked at each other.
Heloise shrugged and stood up.
“Are you coming?”