“WELL?”
Editor Karen Aagaard looked around the conference room. She was like a prison guard doing cell inspections—ready to search the contents, flip up mattresses, and investigate hollowed-out deodorant containers in pursuit of illegal drugs, weapons—anything that might result in a whipping in the courtyard and a trip to solitary.
“What are you working on?” Aagaard glanced at Mogens, who began with his standard arrogance.
“I’m working on a story that has Cavling Prize written all over it,” he said.
Aagaard snorted.
“Let’s just hear what you’ve got before we start engraving your name on the little brass nameplate.”
“I have three sources who say that all the crime statistics released by the last government were significantly manipulated.”
“Manipulated? In what way?”
“They were incomplete, to say the least. Important numbers that went before the judge were left out. When they realized how overrepresented immigrants were, they decided not to include them in the overall statistics. They were simply scared of the outcry it would have caused if the truth came out. So they intentionally left immigrants out of the cumulative statistics, which artificially lowered the percentage of criminals from other ethnic backgrounds—just like they did in Sweden. The results were completely airbrushed.”
“Who decided to do that?”
Mogens shrugged.
“It was indubitably done at the ministerial level, but the national police commissioner must have been involved in some form or another.”
“And what would the purpose of this have been?”
“Politics!” Mogens flung up his arms to emphasize the obvious. “As long as the majority of the population believe that the horror stories are nationalistic propaganda, then Mr. and Mrs. Middle of the Road will stay calm. They intentionally misled Danes to make the immigration situation appear less critical than it is.”
“What kind of sources do you have?” Karen asked.
“Two officers from Station City and one from Central Station. They say the fact that the numbers were skewed is common knowledge among the police. They’re also sick and tired of dealing with immigrant gangs and bullshit, so they want the actual numbers daylighted.”
“Are any of them willing to go on record?”
Mogens shook his head.
“No one dares to say squat. But I have the actual numbers here.”
He took a little black notebook and swung it in front of Aagaard like a pendulum.
“So the story will compare the published statistics with the actual numbers and then question why this kind of monkeying around with the numbers was orchestrated. The turd lies on the red side of the fence, politically speaking, so someone over there has some explaining to do, as does the national police commissioner.”
“Okay.” Aagaard nodded. Her stance had softened a little. “I don’t think this is going to win you any awards, but fine. Have at it!”
“Kaldan?” she said, turning to look at Heloise. “What’ve you got?”
“I’m gathering material for a story on post-traumatic stress syndrome in veterans with the working title ‘The War’s Delayed Victims,’” she said. “In the last month alone, three veterans with PTSD have committed suicide. That’s a pronounced increase compared with the same month over the last ten years.”
Karen Aagaard’s mouth dropped down her face.
Heloise hesitantly regarded her editor. Aagaard’s dark hair was pulled tightly back into a ponytail, and her pearl stud earrings were in their customary place as well. But something looked … off. Then it hit her that Aagaard wasn’t wearing any makeup. Heloise couldn’t remember ever having seen her editor without it. Her winter-pale skin and tired eyes surrounded by eyelashes so pale they seemed transparent made Karen Aagaard look like a corpse that had bled to death. To put it mildly, it wasn’t a flattering look.
Heloise blinked away those thoughts and held up her cell phone. She pointed to a text exchange she had had with Gerda earlier in the week.
“I have a friend who works for the military. Her name’s Gerda Bendix. She’s a trauma psychologist and of course she can’t say anything about personnel matters, but I know that one of the individuals who died was a client of hers. So she might be able to help shed some light on the challenges soldiers face when they come home from war.”
Heloise pulled a sheet of paper out of her bag—a graph of military suicides since 2001—and pushed it across the mahogany table to Aagaard.
“When they deploy, the vast majority are really young men, who don’t have the slightest idea what awaits them when they get there. And now there’s been a fourth.”
“A fourth what?” Mogens asked.
“Suicide. As recently as yesterday, they found the body of a young female soldier, who—”
Karen Aagaard stood up.
Heloise looked at her in surprise. Mogens’s mouth opened in silent amazement.
“I have to run,” Aagaard said and started packing up her papers. “I totally forgot that I have a … We’ll have to talk about this another time, right?” She took a couple of steps backward, turned around to face the door, and left the room.
“What the hell?” Mogens said to no one in particular. Then he looked over at Heloise. “She’s acting really weird today.”
Heloise shrugged, still surprised.
“Mikkelsen said this morning that she was out sick, but then she showed up after all … I hope nothing serious is wrong with her.”
“With Karen? No way! She’s so ridiculously healthy that it makes you want to slap her. The woman has no vices at all, it’s infuriating. She’s probably just—” Mogens’s eyebrows shot up as he put two and two together. “Huh, it’s probably because of the business with Peter.”
“Her son?” Heloise asked. “What’s going on with him?”
“He’s going to be deployed again. I was with Karen yesterday when he called and told her. She went pretty pale then, now that I think about it …”
“I didn’t think he was still in the military,” Heloise said, her brow furrowed.
Aagaard’s son had been in the military for years, but for the last year he had been working as a shift manager for a credit and loan company, and Aagaard had been happy that his days of waging war were over.
“He resigned from BRF, because he wanted to ship out again,” Mogens said.
“And here I am talking about soldiers committing suicide.” Heloise sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Poor Karen.”
She glanced down at her phone, which was vibrating in her hand. Gerda’s number lit up the display.
“Ah, there you are,” she said into the phone. “I’ve tried calling you a few times, but maybe you’ve—”
“The school is crawling with police!” Gerda blurted out. Her voice sounded unusually loud, as if she were trying to talk over music.
Heloise felt a wave of cold sweat wash over her body. In a hundredth of a second images of various worst-case scenarios flashed through her mind.
A terrorist attack, a school shooting, a teacher unzipping his pants …
“Is Lulu okay?” Heloise asked. She was already on her feet.
“Yes. I’m sorry, I should have led with that. She’s with me,” Gerda said. “But one of the boys from the school is missing. I saw him being dropped off this morning and now he’s gone. No one has any idea where he’s been all day. I think he’s been abducted!”