“I HAVE NO IDEA how I could have overlooked that.”
Lisa Augustin removed the pictures from the bulletin board in their office at police headquarters. The Lukas Bjerre case was officially closed, and they were taking down the investigation file and packing it away piece by piece.
Schäfer gave her a look that said, Come on!
“What?” she asked, raising her chin.
“You know very well what happened,” he said. “You forgot to ask the right questions because you were so dazzled by that trauma psychologist. You got sloppy, and it cost us. Period!”
“But she said she saw the father drop the boy off,” Augustin protested.
“Yes, and you should have asked what exactly her statement covered. You know eyewitness accounts can be unreliable. You should have checked and double-checked! Instead, you wrote in the case report that we had a witness who had seen the boy in the schoolyard. Not the father, the boy! Do you realize how many resources we could have saved if Jens Bjerre’s alibi had been doubted from the start?”
Augustin didn’t respond.
She looked down and started gathering up the documents on the desk. She opened the cardboard box on the floor and put the papers into it.
“Three strikes and you’re out, Augustin,” Schäfer warned her. “This was Strike One.” He scratched his beard stubble in annoyance and calmed down. Then he nodded. “Although I made a mistake, too.”
Augustin looked over without raising her head.
“I should have asked for all the witness statements to be corroborated. I was the investigative lead. In the end, it was my responsibility. So let’s say that we’re one-to-one, and then we’ll tighten up our act a little more next time. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” Augustin nodded.
Schäfer turned to the bulletin board and took down the map of Zealand with one firm tug. He crumpled it up and threw it in a high arc into the wastepaper basket. Then he proceeded to the rest of the investigative materials: pictures from Lukas Bjerre’s Instagram account, DNA results from Rud Johannsen, statements from teachers and instructional assistants, pictures of the down jacket under the ice at the Citadel.
He plucked it all down from the wall and carefully packed it away in the cardboard box.
“What about all the pictures?” Augustin nodded to the photo albums sitting on the shelf behind Schäfer’s desk chair. “What do we do with those?”
“Those go back to the family, to the mother. Could you carry them down to the mail room and have them sent off?”
Augustin nodded. “Is Lukas still at his aunt’s house?”
“Until the end of the month,” Schäfer said. “Then he’s going back home.”
Augustin did not look like she approved.
Schäfer shrugged. “Yeah, it sucks, but that’s how it is. It’s not our job to fix dysfunctional families. We’re not social workers. We’ve done everything in our power, and now the boy moves along in the system.”
“The system that’s already failed him once,” Augustin pointed out dryly and gathered up the photo albums from the shelf. “Is there anything else we need to send so I don’t need to make two trips down there?”
Schäfer shook his head, and Augustin left the room with the photo albums in her arms.
He ran a hand over the back of his head and looked around for anything else that needed to be archived. He walked over to the bookshelf and started gathering up the various documents they had received from Michael Voss. The photos of Finn Weinrich from the surveillance videos from Østerport Station were on top of the pile.
Weinrich had been questioned by both Augustin and Schäfer, and apart from a pathological fixation on young children likely due to his own developmental disability and childlike outlook, there wasn’t anything to suggest there had been anything suspicious about his interactions with Lukas. The man had been cleared in the case and sent home. Schäfer had watched the mother leave with her adult son, as if he was a dog on a leash. Yet another child left with an unfit parent.
Schäfer gathered up the documents in front of him and carried the stack over to the cardboard box. He quickly flipped through the papers as if it was a bundle of freshly printed banknotes and set them in the box.
Then he closed the cardboard box, put on his jacket, and left the office.
Schäfer took a pack of Kings out of his pocket and pulled one cigarette out of it. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth without lighting it and nodded warmly to the colleagues he passed as he strolled down the hall, heading for Otto Mønsteds Gade.
He had made it to the stairs and had just put his hand on the door handle when something made him stop. A tingle in his scalp at the back of his neck.
Schäfer stood still as he tried to decipher the feeling.
What was it that didn’t add up?
He turned around and quickly returned to his office.
He walked straight over to the cardboard box and opened it. He peered into the box, questions whizzing around in his head.
What was it that had triggered that prickling sensation in his scalp?
He pulled the thick stack of papers back up out of the box and set it on his desk. It was the summary of the boy’s internet history, websites he had visited, role-playing apps, Netflix streaming history, Google searches. Augustin had been through the whole stack the night they received it and reported that nothing odd had stuck out.
Schäfer’s fingers worked quickly, his eyes scanning the boy’s searches.
Warcraft … war lords …
Then he stopped.
He pulled the page out of the stack and held it up in front of him, his hands shaking. It was a word that Lukas had searched for on the internet six days earlier. Just a single word, typed into the search bar in Google.
Warfarin.
Schäfers eyes raced up and down the page. Why the hell had the boy done a search for a rat poison?
He could see that the search had resulted in a bunch of different web hits, and Lukas had clicked on an article from a regional newspaper in northern Jutland with the headline: Bank Director Uses Rat Poison to Kill Wife.
Schäfer opened his computer and found the article. It was a couple of years old and was about a murder case in Sennels, a little village outside of Thisted.
Schäfer read quickly, his eyes jumping from subheading to subheading.
The branch manager of the local Jyske Bank had been charged with putting rat poison in his wife’s vodka. His wife had died of massive internal hemorrhaging after having consumed the beverage.
Schäfer looked up, staring into space.
How had Lukas gotten warfarin on his jacket? And why hadn’t Schäfer seen the Google search until now?
He clenched his teeth and cursed Augustin.
Strike Two.