DUNJA HOUGAARD WOKE UP to the sound of a flushing toilet. It took her several seconds to realize that she was in the bathroom of the violent crimes unit at the Copenhagen police station. She had been so busy over the past twenty-four hours that her only chance to get some rest was to lock herself in a bathroom at work.
Morten Steenstrup’s death had turned everything upside down. She’d heard about it just after two thirty this morning. She always went out on Tuesday nights — it was her only night out all week — and last night had been no exception. It was a ritual she’d had ever since she left her ex-boyfriend Carsten, which she’d done on a Tuesday night almost seven months ago.
She had gone up to Stockholm to surprise him; he was at a trade seminar with lots of other Nordea employees. But she found her live-in boyfriend/fiancé/father of her future children in bed with one of his Swedish colleagues, just the way it happens in bad movies. She turned around without saying a word and walked straight into the Stockholm night, her desire for revenge on the brink of boiling over.
She ended up at Kvarnen, an old beer hall in the heart of Södermalm. She had no problem finding someone to fuck. She couldn’t remember his name, and maybe he’d never even told her. All she remembered was that he had red hair and was bigger than Carsten.
A little over a week later, she felt like she was more or less over Carsten. She hadn’t given him a single thought since the redheaded Swede. A man would have done the exact same thing in my situation, she thought, and it had worked. She’d felt happier and lighter than she had in a long time, and she decided to make it a tradition. She would go out every Tuesday to top up on validation.
She had only ever missed three Tuesdays. Two of them could be blamed on the flu, but the third was because her father’s new wife died after a long battle with lung cancer. He’d called a bit later in the evening, when she already had a few drinks in her. As soon as she realized who was calling, she regretted picking up the phone, but she couldn’t bring herself to hang up. She agreed to keep him company even though she had never even met his wife and she’d stopped speaking to him several years before. She arrived at Rigshospitalet, where he was keeping vigil, twenty minutes later. She sat beside him and held his hands. Neither of them said anything all night. When the sun came up, he pulled his hands away and told her she could go and that he wouldn’t need her help from now on.
They hadn’t spoken since. She knew he was still alive, and she knew where he lived. Sometimes she even wondered how she would react if he died. She hoped she would shrug with indifference, even though she knew deep down that she wouldn’t be able to escape the grief — for everything they never had time to work out and for all the things she never said out loud.
She had spent this past Tuesday in Kødbyen, where she had met a black American who worked as a commercial director. His attempt at Danish put her in a good mood, and after a few mojitos her problems at work seemed as blurry as the mint leaves behind the condensation on her glass. She got the call from work just as the American was unhooking her bra and kissing her breasts.
The hospital was in complete chaos when she arrived twenty- five minutes later. No one knew what was going on. What was the cause of death? Had he taken his own life, or had someone murdered him? And if so, who — and how? The whole ward had been under heavy guard. And to be totally honest, she’d still been a little drunk.
She looked down at her phone and saw that she had slept for forty-seven minutes. She got up from the seat of the toilet, and fixed her hair and lipstick before she left the bathroom. On her way back to her desk she wondered again how the perpetrator had managed it. So far, they hadn’t been able to find any clues that might lead in any particular direction. Richter was still on the scene with his technicians. She emphasized, for the second time, that they would have to continue searching until they found something.
Her buzz was finally starting to wear off, and she mostly just felt hungover now. She cupped her hand over her mouth to smell her own breath. Just as she decided that she should probably avoid talking for the rest of the day, Jan Hesk caught up with her with an update: Oscar Pedersen in forensic medicine had just called with Morten’s cause of death.
“It was suffocation,” he said.
“Suffocation? How? There were no signs on his body.”
“No visible ones, but he had high levels of botulinum in his blood.”
Dunja was very familiar with botulinum toxin, which was basically the same neurotoxin used in Botox. In high doses it could paralyze the muscles of the chest and cause suffocation.
“Did they check the IV bag?”
Hesk nodded. “Apparently there was enough toxin in there to kill half of Denmark. And speaking of...” He smiled and held out a packet of Fisherman’s Friend. She ought to have been insulted, but she took a lozenge without protest.
“Take another one. Or a couple.”
She took two more and headed for her office.
“It might be best if you took the whole bag,” he yelled after her. She gave him the finger over her shoulder without turning around.
She put all the lozenges in her mouth at once as she walked to her desk. A man was sitting in her visitor’s chair. She had never seen him before, but she knew immediately who he was.