ERIK SCHÄFER SWITCHED off the siren as he passed the National Gallery. Word of the boy’s disappearance would spread soon enough, like lice at a Girl Scout camp, and the school’s parents would work themselves up into a foaming frenzy. There was no reason to accelerate the process.
He reached the school and parked his black, scratched-up Opel Astra half up on the sidewalk next to a statue of King Christian IV. His majesty peered at the school, which sat looking like a gigantic Monopoly hotel on a narrow strip between Østerport Station and the Royal Navy’s mustard-colored barracks.
The Nyholm School was to schools what the Marble Church was to churches, Schäfer thought. Not a dull avant-garde chapel with an organ whose pipes looked like the cylinders on an oil rig, but a place with a soul, with … spirit. He didn’t give a rat’s ass as to how many international awards the current era’s young star architects won or how many parades were held in their honor. They could build however many sustainable ski slopes, like the roof of CopenHill power plant, or however many eco-blah-blah buildings they wanted; Schäfer couldn’t stand all the glass constructions that had been popping up all over the city of late.
Sometimes he thought he must be the only person in all of Denmark who hadn’t been “drinking from the chamber pot,” a colloquial way of saying you’d lost your mind. Other times he figured he was starting to get old. Maybe both.
He scanned the schoolyard, where a crowd had now gathered in the twilight. Mothers and fathers stood in clusters, keeping their children on a tight leash, and even from far away he could decode their facial expressions. His efforts had been for naught. The lice were already starting to itch.
Schäfer spotted his partner of the last four years, Sergeant Lisa Augustin, as he passed the play court where a lanky, acne-ridden teenager was shooting hoops. Augustin stood with two uniformed officers, talking to a couple that—judging from their long, easy-to-read faces—Schäfer took to be the missing boy’s parents.
Aside from his height, the father resembled a young Robert Redford, Schäfer thought. Golden-blond hair, a pronounced nose, and a jaw that gave him an Old Hollywood sort of look. The woman at his side was also attractive but drowned out a bit in the crowd of mothers in the schoolyard—women who, like her, were wearing sensible shoes and coats that were appropriate for the weather. She looked practical and down to earth, a diametric opposite to Mr. Hollywood, but the look in her eyes stood out, Schäfer thought—a look of unmitigated horror.
Schäfer made eye contact with Lisa Augustin, and their reunion after five weeks apart was marked by a single nod.
She walked over to meet him, and when they reached each other, Schäfer asked, “Has he turned up?”
Augustin shook her head. Her blond hair was pulled into a tight knot on the back of her head.
“No, and it’s worse than I thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“The boy wasn’t in school today at all. No one knows where the hell he is.”
“What does that mean? When was he last seen?”
“This morning, here in the schoolyard. Witnesses saw him walk through that door there just before eight.”
She pointed to an old oak door behind them, one of the school’s two entrances off the schoolyard.
“But he didn’t show up in his classroom on the third floor when the first bell rang, so no one has seen him for …”—she looked at the TAG Heuer men’s watch that was strapped tightly around her sinewy wrist—“… for almost eight hours.”
“Eight hours?!” Schäfer repeated, the blood starting to tingle in his temples. “Why the hell didn’t the school react sooner?”
He looked around for a teacher or school employee, and his eyes fell on a middle-aged man leaning against the big climbing structure on the school’s playground. He was wearing a suit of armor made of spray-painted plastic, and the hilt of a foam sword stuck out under his one arm.
“His classroom teacher assumed the boy was out sick,” Augustin said. “Apparently there’s no procedure to check on absences during the day. That doesn’t happen until school gets out and they take attendance at aftercare.” She pointed with her thumb over her shoulder. “The Labyrinth—that’s what the aftercare program is called—is located here on the ground floor. Parents are supposed to notify them online if a child is sick, and if there’s an absence they weren’t notified about, then the teachers call and make sure the children were picked up or were out sick.”
“And?”
“And when the boy didn’t show up, they called the parents, who basically went into a coma, and now here we are.”
Augustin handed Schäfer a photo.
“This picture was taken at the beginning of the school year, but they say he has the same haircut and that he hasn’t changed much since August.”
The picture showed a boy with blond hair and thin lips, who looked curious, as if the flash had gone off right when he was asking a question. His blue eyes were wide and wary, his skin fair without seeming pale. He was a good-looking kid, Schäfer could tell. With those fine features and long, tangled eyelashes, he was pretty in a way that was usually reserved for girls.
“So that’s him,” Schäfer mumbled. He tucked the picture into the inside pocket of his bomber jacket and gazed up at the school building. “There must be hundreds of places in there to hide—attic, bathrooms, gym, storage rooms in the basement … We’ll need to search the whole thing. You said he went in here?”
Schäfer walked over and put his hand on the door handle, and it occurred to him that a school with old bones like this came with some inconvenient features. He had to put his full body weight into it to pull the oak door open.
Inside the entrance Augustin pointed to a large, two-lane, half-turn staircase, which ran along one side of the entrance hall.
“He usually goes up the stairs here to get to his classroom, but the back entrance to the school is right there. So he could basically have gone straight out there when he arrived this morning.” She nodded over at a door on the opposite side of the hall.
“You think he cut school?”
“It’s possible,” Augustin said, flinging up her hands.
Schäfer walked over and pushed open the door and immediately found himself out behind the school.
He looked around.
The Hotel Østerport was in front of him, a hideous, prison-like block of concrete. He walked to the left along the hotel until he came to an overgrown slope behind a chain link fence. The fence had been clipped open in several places, so gaping holes allowed free access to the slope, which led down to the train tracks behind the hotel. Østerport Station was located a little farther down the tracks.
Schäfer stepped through one of the holes and studied the area on the other side of the fence.
Could the boy have come through here? Could he have hopped onto a train or walked over into Østre Anlæg Park, which sat like a jungle on the other side of the transit station’s graffiti-painted walls?
Every train line in the city stopped at Østerport. There were departures headed for every corner of the world, and in eight hours the boy could have made it to Berlin, to Stockholm, or somewhere else entirely. They were too late getting started.
Way too late.
Schäfer’s thoughts were drowned out by a commuter rail S train, which pulled into the station, its squealing brakes ripping through the clear, frosty air. He walked back to Augustin with a finger in one ear.
“We need to search the whole school,” he said. “We need to obtain any surveillance footage from the hotel and down at the station and interview people in the area about whether they saw the boy during the day. Does he have a cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Get it pinged right away so we can see if it’s on or off and where it was last used. The witnesses you’ve already spoken to will need to be formally questioned.” He pointed ahead of him. “Østre Anlæg Park is over there on the other side of the tracks. So we’ll need to pick that apart, too.”
“That’s a big area.”
“Yup, so we’d better hop to it!”
Augustin held her phone up to her ear and asked, “How many people should I ask Carstensen for?”
Per Carstensen was the commissioner, and he had been uncharacteristically generous with his people lately. After the government’s decision to have the military take over a range of policing roles, the Investigative Unit had had enough manpower available for most of their duties. It was like a waterfront mansion for newly rich rappers from Copenhagen’s west side: an unaccustomed luxury, which everyone in the unit was afraid of losing again. But it was only a matter of time before they were bombed back to the Stone Age.
“We need to get a whole major circus set up,” Schäfer said. “And tell them to bring the dogs. We need to find that kid now!”
Augustin nodded.
“Eight hours …,” Schäfer said.
He and Augustin exchanged a look, and he could tell from the lines in her face that they were thinking the same thing.
“It’s getting dark now, and the temperature has dropped below freezing,” he said. “This is a total shit show.”