“WHO HAVE YOU talked to?” Schäfer asked, looking at Lisa Augustin when they were back in the schoolyard.
“Jens and Anne Sofie Bjerre,” she said, pointing to the parents.
They were arguing with a couple of uniformed officers and a woman who looked like a comic strip line drawing, so paper thin that she seemed two-dimensional.
“That woman they’re talking to runs the aftercare program. I also spoke with that woman over there.” Augustin pointed to a tall, dark-haired gazelle of a woman who was standing in the middle of the schoolyard with a cell phone in one hand and a child in the other.
“And with that teacher over there.”
She nodded toward a young, androgynous figure who looked like they might be Asian. The person had long black hair that had been gathered up into a fountain on top of their head, makeup around the eyes, and a distinctly masculine build. Schäfer was having a hard time deciding if it was a man or a woman.
“A Kevin something-or-other,” Augustin said.
A man, then. I’ll be damned, Schäfer thought, scanning the rest of the schoolyard.
“What about Mr. Game of Thrones over there?” He nodded with his chin toward the role player, who was still standing by the jungle gym sobbing.
“His name is Patrick …” Augustin glanced down at her notes. “Jørgensen, teacher’s aide. He and Lukas were working on a project on the playground; something involving a sword fight. They were supposed to have a duel today.”
Schäfer raised one eyebrow. He was equally jealous and suspicious of adults who were that in touch with their inner child and their tear ducts. There was quite simply something unnatural about grown men who ran around wearing dress-up clothes and playing make-believe. And crying.
He looked back over at the gazelle. She was talking to one of the other parents, whose back was turned to Schäfer. He could tell from her breath—which emerged visibly from her mouth in tense, steamy bursts in the cold air—that she was upset. There was something about her face that rang a bell somewhere inside him, a memory he couldn’t put an image or words to.
“Who’s the supermodel?” he asked as the wails of emergency response vehicles materialized in the distance.
“Here name’s Gerda,” Augustin answered without consulting her notes. “Gerda Bendix.”
Schäfer knew why the name had already stuck. The woman was almost provocatively beautiful, and if there was one thing Lisa Augustin was particularly fond of, it was beautiful women.
“She’s the mother of one of the girls at the school and, as far as we know, the last person to have seen the boy.”
“Bendix?” Schäfer repeated, scratching under his chin so the stubble made a surprising amount of noise. “Where do I know that name from?”
The woman Gerda Bendix was talking to turned toward Schäfer and a feeling of cheerful astonishment instantly spread through his chest. He had been wrong. It wasn’t another parent from the school. It was Heloise Kaldan, the journalist.
Kaldan spotted him just then, and her face lit up in a smile. She started walking over to him immediately.
“Hi, Schäfer,” she said once they stood face to face. “Welcome home.”
He smiled warmly. “Heloise.”
They hadn’t seen each other for a few months, and under normal circumstance he would have given her a hug, maybe even lifted her up and shaken her a little in excitement. But this wasn’t a normal circumstance.
“Well, you sure got here fast,” he commented instead, a bit warily.
It wasn’t unusual for the press to show up so early in an investigation, but usually only the tabloid rats—the bloodthirsty, obnoxious ones—came sniffing around at stage one. Demokratisk Dagblad and other serious media rarely covered personal stories until they had some sort of relevance to the public, and even then the coverage was mostly refreshingly concrete and respectful.
Schäfer had only been on-site at the school for a couple of minutes and Heloise Kaldan was already there, ready to ask questions. That was unusual. And not entirely unproblematic.
“I’m not actually here for work,” Heloise reassured him, as if she could smell his skepticism. “Well, I guess I should say I’m never not at work, but the newspaper didn’t send me.”
“Oh?” Schäfer raised an eyebrow.
“You remember my friend Gerda …” She nodded behind her.
Yes, of course. That’s where Schäfer knew the woman from. They had met each other one time at the National Hospital the previous year when Heloise had been a patient. But he had been too preoccupied with the case he was investigating to pay any real attention to her.
“Although since I’m here anyway, I’d really like to hear a little more about what’s going on,” Heloise said. “What can you tell me? Do you think he was abducted, or did he run off? What do you think?”
Schäfer regarded her hesitantly as he considered his options.
Here we go again, he thought.
There were a handful of people he had tried to coexist with when things were at rock bottom. People he had clawed for until his fingernails bled. Schäfer felt bound to them in a way that would last his whole life. He knew that. That’s how he felt about the men from his unit, the people he had been stationed with during the Gulf War, as well as medical examiner John Oppermann, with whom he had stood in mass graves in Kosovo. He felt the same gloomy shared understanding with his old police partner, Peter Rye, and now also with Kaldan.
There was a mutual understanding between them, a covenant that not even Connie could understand. He always shared his experiences with his wife, though, without leaving out any details or thoughts. He needed her care, needed her to listen to what he shared. But she would never be able to understand what the daily shadow of death did to him, for the simple reason that, thank God, she had never experienced it herself.
These days it was standard procedure at police headquarters to cry your heart out to the police psychologists after you’d worked on a particularly gruesome murder case or horrific accident. The younger police officers were willing to allow academics with manicured fingernails and neatly pressed slacks to psychoanalyze them, but Schäfer refused. He couldn’t imagine anything hollower than showing the scars in your heart to someone who had never been the first one to walk through a doorway with a loaded Heckler & Koch in their hand, someone who hadn’t inhaled the stench of death and didn’t know how it made you want to gargle bleach and scrape your mucus membranes with a spoon.
Was he supposed to sit there and talk about the dark sides of his job with someone whose frame of reference consisted of PowerPoint slides about the self-reinforcing cycle of anxiety and cognitive self-help tools?
Schäfer didn’t give two shits about that kind of thing.
But Heloise Kaldan had tried staring into the depths herself, and it was there—at the edge of the abyss—where Schäfer had met her last year when a wanted murderer had started sending her letters, letters that had forced her to face her own reality and say a final goodbye to her father. Her father’s death had made it clear to Heloise that the world was fundamentally a crummy place, and that realization had settled over her like a cold, impenetrable membrane. She had become cynical, and Schäfer recognized something of himself in her. But there was one thing that would always remain a wedge between them: her job.
Could he trust Heloise in a life-or-death situation?
Absolutely.
When it came to work?
That was another matter.
Schäfer cleared his throat.
“We need to get a better handle on the situation before we go public with anything.”
“Of course. I can certainly understand that.” Heloise nodded. “But I’m assuming that means that our dinner plans for tomorrow night are canceled?” She smiled fleetingly.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” he said. “Connie’s really looking forward to seeing you, so …”
Heloise looked back over at Gerda Bendix, who was now squatting in front of her daughter and soothingly tucking the girl’s dark hair behind her ears.
Heloise lowered her voice.
“I’m not asking about the case only for, uh, professional reasons. I’m a bit curious, because I was with the boy’s father when he got the message.”
Schäfer squinted, his head shooting back.
“You were?”
Heloise nodded.
Schäfer raised both eyebrows in hesitant wonder. “But … what about Martin? Aren’t you two …”
They were interrupted by the sound of raised voices. Schäfer turned toward the ruckus and saw that Lukas Bjerre’s father had grabbed one of the young officers by the collar.
“Well, do something!” Jens Bjerre yelled. “You’re just standing here and … and … talking?!”
Lisa Augustin grabbed Jens Bjerre calmly around the neck.
“Calm down,” she said unflappably. “You’re going to need to calm down. Do you understand?”
“Well then, do something!” He turned to Augustin and pressed his palms together as if in prayer. His wife stood next to him, her mouth open and trembling, the expression on her face stiffened in infantile helplessness.
“Find him!” Jens Bjerre’s voice rang out in the winter darkness. “Find my son!”