SCHÄFER PULLED OVER to the curb and nodded at the silver-gray Audi that was parked in front of the apartment building in Hvidovre.
“Isn’t that the model of Audi he owns?”
Nils Petter Bertelsen double-checked the license plate in the system.
“Yeah, that’s right. The vehicle is registered to one Salah Mahmoud Abu Al-Fadl Ahmed.” Bertelsen pronounced the name in an accent and raised his eyebrows at Schäfer.
Schäfer nodded. “I guess that means he’s home.”
He leaned forward in the seat to look out the windshield, peering up at the top of the apartment block, a hideous, fifteen-story-tall monstrosity in the middle of Rebæk Søpark. The building was occupied by a stew of various tormented souls, petty criminal bums, addicts, immigrants, and young college students who couldn’t afford to live in downtown Copenhagen. This was far from the first time Schäfer had come to this address to haul a suspect in for questioning. And it wouldn’t be the last.
“What floor does he live on?” he asked.
“Twelfth floor. Apartment 124.”
“All right, let’s go pick him up.”
Schäfer and Bertelsen left their car in front of the main entrance and walked into the building. The elevator smelled like a mixture of curry and urine, and Schäfer’s shoe soles stuck to the floor where a puddle of some indeterminate red liquid had coated the linoleum.
When the elevator doors opened on the twelfth floor, an ash-colored mountain of a person squashed his way into the elevator car. The man was dragging an oxygen supply with him and had a CPAP mask on over his nose and mouth. His arms were so padded with fat that it looked like he was stretching them out to the sides even though they hung limply from his shoulder sockets.
“Excuse me,” Schäfer said. He sucked in his gut and squeezed his way past the man, managing to avoid touching either him or the elevator wall.
He peered down the long, dark hallway that extended out on either side of the elevator.
“This looks like an apartment building in some slum in Rio de Janeiro,” Bertelsen said. “You know, one of those ones that the tradesmen abandoned before they were done and now people are living on the thirty-third floor of a building without any outside walls.” He looked around. “It’s weird that some people would choose to live here.”
“A lot of them don’t have a choice,” Schäfer said. “But, yeah, there’s an overrepresentation of real humdingers out here. Last year Augustin and I questioned a suspect who lived a couple of floors down. We had a case where a female postal worker from Rødovre had disappeared on her third day of work, and witnesses thought they had seen her talking to this guy down at McDonald’s.” Schäfer nodded in the direction of the fast-food restaurant they had seen on their way into the building. “So of course we came by to have a little chat with the guy, feel him out a little bit, you know. And you know what we found in his bathtub?”
“The missing postal worker?”
“Nope. Twelve decapitated chickens.”
Bertelsen furrowed his brow. “What?”
“Twelve chickens that he had bought at various locations all around the greater Copenhagen area so as not to arouse suspicion—not that I have any idea who would have seen that as a concern—and that he had then ripped the heads off with his bare hands. One by one.” Schäfer made a gesture as if he were opening the tops of a row of invisible beer bottles.
Bertelsen raised his eyebrows. “Why in God’s name did he do that?”
Schäfer shrugged. “To see what it felt like, I guess. Apparently he was into that kind of thing.”
“Chickens?”
“Yup. It’s called avisodomy. Do you know what that is?”
Bertelsen shook his head with a look that suggested that he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“No, I didn’t either,” Schäfer said. “But I found out. It’s a bird fetish. I don’t know which is worse—that there are people who get turned on by birds or that there are so many of them that that shit actually has a name.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Bertelsen scrunched up his eyes and eyed Schäfer skeptically.
“Nope.”
“A bird fetish?”
“Yup.”
“So the man had …” Bertelsen wiggled his eyebrows and nodded suggestively. “With chickens?”
“Yup.”
“Ew!” His face contorted in disgust. “But what about the postal worker? Did you ever find her?”
An image of the woman’s naked, discolored body flashed through Schäfer’s mind. Her long, blonde hair wrapped tightly around her neck. Her blueish white lips contracted in fear. The zip ties digging into her slender wrists …
“Yes,” he nodded. “We found her in a dumpster back behind Big Bowl in Valby, raped and strangled.”
“And the killer?” Bertelsen asked.
Schäfer shook his head and set off walking down the hallway.
“Still on the loose.”
They found apartment 124 at the end of the long hallway and stopped in front of the door. A pyramid of shoes of various sizes sat in front of it, the toes all worn out. A pair of black rain boots in a men’s size stood in the middle as if someone had just taken them off.
Schäfer put his ear to the door and listened. He heard a quiet conversation going on somewhere in there but couldn’t make out what they were saying or even what language they were speaking. He tried to hear where in the apartment the voices were coming from. He knew what the floor plan looked like from earlier raids. All of the apartments in the complex were identical, all of them studio apartments with a sleeping loft and a balcony facing either Copenhagen or, on the other side, Brøndbyøster. He knew that to the left of the front door there was a small, rectangular bathroom, and that the apartment’s only room—a combination living room, kitchenette, and bedroom—was straight in from the door.
He pulled his service weapon from his shoulder holster, pointed to the peephole, and signaled to Bertelsen that he should stand to the right of the door, out of sight. Then Schäfer changed his mind and covered the peephole with the palm of his hand.
He knocked on the door with his pistol grip.
There was movement inside the apartment. A baby started crying. Schäfer heard a woman’s voice somewhere inside. She spoke in Arabic, her voice loud and annoyed, as if she were scolding someone.
He knocked on the door again.
He heard someone approach the door from inside. There was a pronounced scraping sound from in there as if someone were pulling a key or other sharp object across the inside of the door.
It was quiet for a moment. Then the woman’s voice could be heard again.
“Who is it?”
“I need to talk to Salah,” Schäfer said. “Is he home?”
“Who’s asking? First I need to know who’s asking.” She spoke Danish with a thick accent. Her words fell in hard bursts, the vowels sharp.
“I need to talk to Salah. It’s important,” Schäfer said.
The woman was quiet for a moment. He heard her whisper something. Another voice—a male one—whispered back. They continued back and forth like that for several seconds without anything happening.
Schäfer tried an old trick: “Tell him I have the money I owe him.”
He looked at Bertelsen and shrugged. The trick was not all that original, but it usually worked. People’s need to control the situation typically vanished when you dangled some money in front of them.
“Okay,” the woman said. “Just toss it in the mail slot.”
Schäfer smiled to himself. “No, that’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just come back another day. Tell Salah I say hi and tell him I’ve been …”
“No, okay. Wait!”
The instant the door was opened ajar, Schäfer rammed it hard with his shoulder. He stepped into the entryway with his Heckler & Koch raised in front of him. A slim woman in a hijab immediately started screaming, and Schäfer grabbed her shoulder with his free hand.
“Police,” he said, guiding her farther into the apartment.
Bertelsen flew past them into the room. “Hands up!” he yelled to the man in there. “Down on the floor. Hands behind your head. Behind your head, I told you.”
“How many people are in the apartment?” Schäfer asked, looking back and forth between the woman and the bathroom door, which was ajar behind her.
She didn’t answer his question. Instead, she eyed him defiantly with heavily made-up eyes and issued what sounded like a fatwa against him.
Schäfer didn’t understand a word of what she said, but the gist of her message was clear.
He gave the door to the bathroom a kick so it swung open and hit the wall behind it with a bang.
“What the hell are you doing?” the woman yelled. “You’re ruining my door! You’re going to pay for that.”
Schäfer ignored her. He gazed at the bare white tiles, the shower’s caulk-stained glass door. He ransacked the room with his eyes. There was no one in there.
He looked at the woman again and nodded toward the living room.
“Go have a seat.”
“I want to see a warrant.” She tilted her head back and pointed her chin at him. “You can’t just walk in here without a warrant.”
Schäfer smiled. “You’ve been watching too many movies. This is Denmark. So please do as I’m asking. Have a seat in the living room.”
The woman reluctantly turned around. She stepped over the man, who lay on the living room carpet with his hands behind his head and walked over to a cradle in the corner. She picked up the crying baby and shushed it.
Schäfer looked around.
There was way too much furniture in the small studio apartment. There was a jumble of knickknacks and decorations packed onto every horizontal surface. Most of the things looked like heirlooms or flea market finds, a blend of patinaed items and worn-out junk. One wall in the small apartment was covered with photo wallpaper showing a beach with palm trees. It was presumably meant to make the apartment look bigger—or Denmark feel less Danish.
Schäfer nodded to Bertelsen, who grabbed the man’s hands and raised him into a sitting position.
Schäfer regarded the face in front of him and furrowed his brow. The man, who was kneeling as if in prayer, had round cheeks and bushy eyebrows that grew together, forming a unibrow.
Schäfer looked at Bertelsen again. “That doesn’t look like the guy in the archive photo, does it?”
Bertelsen turned toward the man. “Salah Ahmed?”
The man’s only answer was to spit, hitting one of Bertelsen’s trouser legs.
Bertelsen grabbed him by the collar with both hands and lifted him in one quick, angry motion.
“Stop!” the woman exclaimed, trying to come between them. “That’s my little brother. He hasn’t done anything. We haven’t done anything. Get out of here!”
“Where’s Salah?” Schäfer asked.
“I don’t know. At work, probably? I don’t know!”
“His car is parked out front …”
“I have no idea where he is, I’m telling you.”
“And who are you? His girlfriend? His wife?”
“I’m his wife.”
The baby started crying again, and the woman rocked it mechanically up and down in her arms.
“Is the baby yours?” Schäfer asked.
She held the baby closer to her chest and confirmed this with a calm nod.
Schäfer noticed a framed picture hanging on the wall behind her. A picture of a smiling extended family, twelve or fourteen people. Women, men, and children. Siblings, grandparents, cousins. On the right side of the photo he recognized Salah Ahmed from the archive photo.
“Okay,” he said and nodded toward an armchair in the corner of the room. There were holes in the upholstery and the foam rubber was sticking out, yellow with dirt. “If you could please have a seat. We have a couple of questions about your husband.”
Schäfer and Bertelsen questioned Salah Ahmed’s wife and brother-in-law but did not find out how his fingerprints had wound up on Thomas Strand’s radiator. Neither of them seemed to know anything about the case, and Schäfer didn’t have the impression that this was due to any unwillingness to cooperate. She wasn’t lying, the wife. There had been a genuine blank look in her eyes—an almost defensive incomprehension—when he had shown her the picture of Strand. Schäfer was convinced that she hadn’t heard of the man before. The brother-in-law had been harder to read but had also not offered them anything useful.
Schäfer and Bertelsen left the apartment and walked back to the elevator.
“Let’s try to have the car brought in and looked at,” Schäfer said. “Get it checked for evidence.”
A figure came around the corner at the opposite end of the dark hallway. The person was wearing a hoodie with the hood on and pulled well down over the forehead. The build was masculine, broad shoulders and narrow hips, he was walking with a casual posture, a bit leaned back. He was carrying a McDonald’s bag in one hand and swinging it lazily back and forth as he walked.
Schäfer stuck his right hand into his jacket and grabbed hold of his gun.
When the man noticed them, he immediately broke the rhythm of his gait. He slowed down but kept coming toward them.
Schäfer heard a cell phone ring. The sound came from the man, and Schäfer figured it must be his wife trying to warn him.
“Salah Ahmed?” Schäfer called.
The man instantly tossed aside the fast-food bag, turned, and ran back down the hallway.
Schäfer and Bertelsen sprinted after him. They rounded the corner by the elevator and pushed open the door to the stairwell. It was pitch black inside. Bertelsen hit the light switch, but the lights didn’t respond. There were no windows to let in the daylight.
They could hear the man’s footsteps rattling down the stairs like a drumroll against dried cement.
“You take the elevator,” Schäfer said. “I’ll take the stairs.”
Even going down, thirteen flights were enough to leave Schäfer winded. Salah Ahmed was younger and obviously in better shape. Schäfer swore under his breath as he involuntarily slowed down. He felt his way along in the darkness with one hand on the railing and the other on his gun. He had reached the fourth floor when he noticed a light somewhere below him. He heard a door closing. Then everything around him went dark again.
“Damn it,” he muttered and forced himself to kick it up a notch.
At the ground floor he cautiously opened the door the man had run out. It led out behind the building and Schäfer could see a bike shed off to his left. To the right there was a snow-covered lawn with a jungle gym, a swing set, and a playhouse. There weren’t any people out there, no kids playing. One swing swayed gently back and forth in the wind, its rusty chains squeaking. The only other sound was the hum of traffic from Avedøre Havnevej, which ran in front of the building.
Schäfer followed the freshly made footprints in the snow. They led around the building to the parking lot. As soon as he turned the corner, the footprints mingled with hundreds of other shoeprints into one big porridgey mess from people who had walked to or from the parking lot.
Schäfer’s eyes scanned the area.
He sensed a shadow behind a parked delivery van and started toward the vehicle. He was only a few feet away when Salah Ahmed jumped out of his hiding place and ran.
“Stop,” Schäfer yelled. “Police!”
He fired a warning shot, but the sound did not slow the man’s sprint.
The man was halfway to the gray Audi when Bertelsen materialized out of the blue and performed a brutal rugby tackle to Ahmed’s chest.
The man’s legs looked like they kept moving down the street as his torso was stopped by the blow. He did half a backflip and landed on the asphalt with a pained moan.
Bertelsen put a knee on his back and handcuffed him.
Schäfer caught up to them and leaned over forward with his hands on his thighs, huffing and puffing.
The man on the ground cursed and swore.
“The time is 1:08,” Bertelsen said, pulling him up into a standing position. “And you’re under arrest.”