A Father’s Child
Anders Kjelsen knew his city and that included knowing its underside. Copenhagen was not a violent place even compared to the rest of Scandinavia, and his unit was not nearly as busy as it would have been in Stockholm or Oslo, to say nothing of megalopolises like New York and London. But any city had major crimes. Homicide most of all.
In the summer, the girls who worked the night shift in the old red-light district Vesterbro had only a few hours of true darkness to walk the streets before dawn came. Then the ‘industry’ shifted to the native-born women who hadn’t yet moved their operation to a less gentrified part of the city. Anders had walked the neighborhood at all times of day and night while working kidnaps and murders. He sometimes made a pass through on his way home or on his way to work, carrying a victim’s photograph and hoping this time someone had seen her and one more cold case could be laid to rest.
Today he saw one of the daytime regulars standing in front of a porn shop, watching the police vehicles and no doubt totaling up the lost business from the disruption. Her gaze wandered his way, and her painted lips quirked in a professional smirk as she recognized him.
“Looking for company, Inspector?” She crooked a finger, the iridescent blue nail varnish sparkling in the lights from the cruisers.
“Not that kind, Bibiana.” And even if he were, she was not the sort Anders would have chosen. She had been attractive at some point in her life, but there was a hard edge to her face that mirrored something hard inside her. Whenever he showed around pictures of missing girls, Bibiana barely glanced at them before saying no. “I’m here on business.”
“So am I.” She took a drag on a cigarette that was nearly burnt down, and examined it before apparently thinking better of throwing it on the ground in front of a cop. Instead she gestured with it toward the alley. “Nothing down that way but the clap. Only the Nigerian girls are desperate enough to do it back there.”
“Did you see who was working there last night?” He’d have to ask her later anyway.
Bibiana shrugged. “Just the usual – new girls off the boat. Is it one of them?”
“Is what one of them?” She didn’t even bother answering, only looked disdainfully at the coroner’s van. Anders shrugged in return. “Did you see something?”
“Only new girls. Tourists looking to buy young. You know.” She tossed the cigarette on the pavement and ground it with the toe of her boot. “You look like you’d prefer experienced. I might even do a special price.”
“Some other lifetime. Don’t go too far, though. I may have questions.” He turned off Istegade into the narrow side street, ducking under the police tape and nodding to the constable keeping watch over the crime scene. The body was still on the ground, marked off by more tape, and Sandsgård, one of the sergeants from his department, was already crouching beside it, using a flashlight to illuminate the remains. He barely glanced up as Anders joined him. “Photographer’s on the way,” he said, shifting the light a fraction of an inch down the girl’s torso. He wasn’t taking notes, but Anders knew he’d have a list of details he wanted recorded when the photographer did arrive.
Anders took his first, establishing look at the victim. The girl was African, probably Nigerian. Most of the foreign girls in Vesterbro were these days. He tried not to think of just how young she looked – seventeen or eighteen, probably. Her clothes – short-cropped jeans, an inexpensive but tight-fitting shirt, boots with the heels not yet worn down by walking the pavement – looked new enough and generic enough she had probably bought them or been given them in Denmark. Either she had made some cash quickly, or more likely whatever pimp had paid to bring her in had given her the clothes.
Anders grimaced and looked away. “Does she have any identification?” It was a long shot, and if she did it was probably a forgery, but there was a chance the name was right. It was also possible the quality of the forgery would be helpful in identifying the forger and the purchaser.
“A residence card.” Sandsgård had already bagged it, of course. It was either real or a better-than-average fake, identifying their victim as Adanna Obialom. She was indeed from Nigeria, seventeen (barely), and if the card was accurate she’d been in Denmark for a little over three months. “No other cards on her, no cash.”
“Either she hadn’t had any business yet, or whoever killed her robbed her, too.” It was also possible she had a phone to take payments, or that her pimp had controlled the money. Finding him, and it was almost always a ‘him’ with the girls trafficked from Africa, would be difficult, as profiting off prostitution was illegal even if the sale or purchase of sex was not. Even if the pimp was not her killer, he would have no desire to admit the relationship to police. “Nothing else?”
“No phone, no keys, no transit cards.” Sandsgård stood up, stretching his back wearily. “They do have a client, though. He called it in. A foreigner,” and Anders knew by that he meant English-speaking, probably American or Canadian, and either a boy looking for free-for-all sex tourism that suggested he’d confused the Dutch and the Danes, or a business traveler who knew exactly what he was looking for and was counting on a quick departure to cover it. “The constables are holding him. I thought you’d want to talk to him yourself.”
“Hm. In a minute.” Anders looked at the body again, crouching down beside her. Adanna, if that was her real name, had been a pretty girl under the makeup. Seventeen was far too young to be lying dead anywhere. He wondered if her family thought she had gone to make a better life, whether she had a family at all, and if someone would wonder what had happened to her.
Chances were he’d never know. Crimes like this robbed him of one of the only truly satisfying moments in working a homicide: giving a victim’s family and friends some sort of closure. Even when the punishment never quite fit the crime, even when nothing could fill the void in their lives, certainty brought a particular kind of comfort. Usually it was all he could give.
He studied Adanna’s face, glad her eyes were closed, and saw no bruises. Her head was tilted to one side, but not at the extreme angle of someone who’d taken a hard blow or fall and broken their neck. But there was something about her throat that drew his eye. “Get the light on her neck here,” he said, and Sandsgård obliged. “Did you notice these contusions?”
“Finger marks, I think.” They were deep, the bruising harder to see against the girl’s dark skin, but under close inspection they looked distinctly like hands. Tiny crescent marks were pressed into her skin. Fingernails. “John who got rough?”
“Maybe.” Anders had far too much experience with the variety of ways transactions in the sex trade could go wrong. Half his caseload wouldn’t exist without them. But he also had been a policeman long enough to know not to jump to conclusions. “No other witnesses?”
“None so far.” Sandsgård shrugged. “But it’s still early. Not many people out here who aren’t in the trade themselves. Even if they saw something you know it’ll be like pulling teeth. Anyway, chances are we’ve already got him. If we’re lucky they can lift fingerprints from her neck in the post-mortem and keep it quick.”
Anders didn’t reply. Instead he tugged out the pair of disposable vinyl gloves he kept in his coat pocket and pulled them on. When he gently pried back one of her eyelids, besides the usual dullness of death, he saw the telltale red of burst blood vessels in the sclera. She’d put up a fight, however futile. “Someone wanted her dead. That kind of pressure isn’t an accident.” He straightened up, feeling all his thirty-two years in this business in his knees and back and soul. “I’ll talk to the john. Probably he’s our man, worse luck. I’d rather get the pimp.”
“It’s something. Might convince the sex tourists to stick with Amsterdam.” Sandsgård pointed down the alley opposite the way Anders had come in. “Down there.”
The john was the former type: a boy more than a man, university age or just past it, and he was American. Anders switched to English after asking the constables to take a step back. “I’m Detective Inspector Kjelsen, Copenhagen Police. I’m handling this case. You called the police?”
“I—yeah, I called you.” Anders couldn’t tell American accents apart, so he didn’t venture a guess what this one was. California? The boy was blond enough to blend in here, reasonably fit for someone from the US, and dressed in student sloppy-casual rather than tour-group sloppy casual. From the dark circles and bloodshot eyes, this was the end of his night, not the start of his day, or so he’d planned. “That girl – is she dead? I know I should have done CPR or checked her pulse or something but the hook – the girl I was with started screaming, and she ran, and I ran after her, but I couldn’t find her.”
Anders kept his expression professionally blank, hoping it wasn’t obvious how many mental contortions he needed to follow the rapid-fire English. It was a painfully convoluted to his ear. “What’s your name?”
“Mike – Michael Weeks, I’ve got my passport here somewhere,” he said, fumbling in his pockets until Anders waved him off. He’d probably given it to the constables and forgotten. “I’m just visiting, I’m going on to Stockholm tomorrow, or I was, and I thought…there was an article about Vesterbro, and the kind of…shops and things there are—”
“Yes, I’ve read some of these articles.” He could happily have lived without them. “You were going into the alley with a girl? A prostitute, you mean?”
Now he saw the kind of anger he expected with foreigners. “Yeah, okay, she was a hooker – a prostitute. A prostituteret? It’s legal, isn’t it? I just wanted…”
“Et prostituer,” Anders corrected. “And English is fine.” Vastly preferable to Google Translate Danish, in fact, but it would have been rude to say so. “Yes, buying sex is legal. That doesn’t mean killing prostitutes is overlooked.”
“I didn’t – you don’t think I killed her?” Anger, and unless he was mistaken, real fear. But not, Anders thought, the sort of fear when someone saw punishment coming. The disbelieving sort. “I never even saw her!”
“You just said you saw her in the alley. That’s why you called the police.”
“No! I mean, I saw her dead. The girl I was with saw her first, then she ran out in the street, and I didn’t know what to do so I ran after her. But she disappeared, and I called the police. I swear, the girl in the alley was dead before we found her!”
“I thought you said you didn’t check.” It was pro forma, and Anders almost skipped the challenge entirely. It was a pat story, but it had the benefit of sounding true. Some instinct, three decades’ experience, was telling Anders this boy might be rude and probably not the most respectful client to the working girls on his European tour, but a killer? It felt wrong.
“I didn’t! But she looked dead, and hooker I was going to – she screamed like she was next!” The look was definitely fear, and desperation. Disbelief, maybe? He’d probably anticipated a very different visit to the red-light district. “I figured if she was running I better run. But there was no one there, and I waited – I was here when your cops arrived, you can ask them!”
“I believe you,” at least about the last. “I don’t suppose you know the name of the girl you’d hired? Or how to find her?” Small chance of that. Girls working the late night or early morning in the alleys here were not the sort who took clients by advertisement.
Of course, the boy was shaking his head. “No. I met her on the street. She said her name was Annika, but I didn’t ask for a business card! And I didn’t see anyone in the alley – besides, well, the dead girl.” That look of slow-dawning horror was certainly convincing.
“No one on Istegade – the main street there?” Anders pointed back through the alley.
He looked blank. “No, I don’t think so. Well, there was that other woman. She was standing on the other side of the street, smoking, but she just ignored me when I called for help. I think she was pissed,” and Anders remembered to Americans that meant angry, not drunk like it did to Brits. “She’d said something to me when I came down the street before but I passed. Not my type, you know?” He paused, with the look of someone remembering details they hadn’t expected to. “She lit another cigarette instead. I don’t know if she didn’t understand I needed help, or she just didn’t care.”
Anders frowned. “Could you describe her?”
He shrugged, shaking his head. “Old. Maybe forty. Blond hair, kind of…not curly, sort of ratty, you know? Lots of makeup – dark nail polish, really red lips. Boots, short shorts, okay…you know…for her age?” He made a vague gesture in the direction of his chest, and a very half-hearted attempt at a male-camaraderie grin.
Anders kept his expression studiously neutral, mostly at the notion forty was old. Instead, he considered the description and found it familiar. “She was standing across from the alley. Are you certain?” The boy nodded too eagerly. “Could you recognize her again?” Another nod. “All right. I would appreciate you giving your information to the constables – your hotel, your mobile number, address at home. And that you do not leave Copenhagen until given permission to do so. Your assistance may be required.”
The boy looked absurdly relieved, and Anders left the constables to deal with him. Obnoxious, the kind of tourist he wished would stick to Amsterdam or better yet America, but a murderer? He hadn’t been completely useless, though. Not quite a witness, but he had noticed more than could be expected.
Back in the alley, the photographer had arrived, and the coroner’s assistants were waiting with the stretcher while he photographed Adanna where she’d been found. As soon as the documenting was done she’d be bagged and taken away for the post-mortem examination. After that…if they found her family, her body would be returned to them. If not, cremation, most probably, after the hold period ended and no one claimed her. Anders had attended more than a few committals for victims who had no one but the police and the undertaker to stand for them at the end. He looked at her face again, noticing the slackness of death and the graying, even of darker skin, starting to set in.
Then he paused. “Give me the flashlight again.” Sandsgård looked puzzled, but complied. Anders crouched down, waving the photographer back, and shone the light on her neck, looking at the finger marks and specifically at the tiny glitter that had caught his eye in one of them. “I need tweezers and a small evidence bag. And photograph this, I want to make sure we document.”
He worked the point of the tweezers into the nail mark, knowing how the medical examiner would complain, but he needed to know now if his hunch was correct. Sandsgård held open the bag for the tiny flake that Anders had seen glittering in the light of the photographer’s flash, sparkling against Adanna’s skin where the force of the strangling grip had dug it in. Anders held it up to the light, studying the paint-like chip of blue nail varnish before depositing it delicately into the evidence bag.
This time when he stood there was no pain, from his back or otherwise, only a strange lightness he always felt when he knew he was going to close a case. “Tell the medical examiner to make sure to examine the neck wounds for more of this. And I want any fingerprints they lift sent over as soon as they’re lifted. Sandsgård, go tell the constables I’m going to need them on the Istegade end of the alley.” He started walking before he heard the acknowledgment.
Bibiana was still standing by the door of the porn shop, smoking her third cigarette judging by the number of butts discarded on the pavement. She watched him coming, that same smirk on her lips. “Looking for company after all, Inspector?” She flicked the ash from her cigarette, the chipped blue nail varnish glittering in the light from the street lamp.
Anders didn’t smile, only looked back to make sure the constables were coming from the alley. “Not that kind, Bibiana,” he said, and her smirk started to fade. “Not that kind.”
