"It wasn't until quite late that he suddenly changed," Karin said, as if she could tell what Louise was thinking. "At first he was kind, and everything was good. We smoked in bed afterward and cuddled."

She hid her face in her hands and sat perfectly still.

After the cigarette in bed, the a.s.sailant had tied her hands to the bedposts with his tie and raped her for hours, with and without paraphernalia.

Once Karin calmed down again, Louise thanked her for the coffee and said that they were in the middle of an investigation. She prepared Karin for the fact that they might need to talk to her again if the case turned out to involve the same man.

"Have you talked to anyone about what you've been through? Have you been in therapy?" she asked on her way to the front door.

Karin gave her a look that said she had overstepped her bounds and grumbled "That won't change what happened."

"You may be right about that," Louise said, "but it may change what happens in the future. It can make it easier to move on."

"I've gotten used to it. That's not what was supposed to happen, and now it's best for things to just be calm here." She'd opened the front door and was waiting for Louise to exit.

It hurt to say good-bye. It wasn't hatred that hung like a fog around Karin: it was despondency. She clearly no longer believed in the good in people, and it would take more than some everyday conversation to restore her faith in their goodness.

Louise felt glum on her way back to police headquarters. It was simply unfair that a guy who had caused so much damage was free, she thought, strongly suspecting without any concrete proof that Kim Jensen was the man who had attacked Susanne. She tried to throttle her instincts. There were similarities, but surely there was a s.h.i.tload of dark-haired rapists out there with comely features. As she drove down Hambrosgade and drove the car into the precinct garage, she thought about the even larger number of dark-haired men who had put their photos up on the various online dating sites. This sucks, she mumbled to herself as she parked. She waved at Svendsen, who'd been in charge of the fleet of squad cars here for many years. She wasn't surprised to see him there so late in the day. He watched over those vehicles as if they were his own private property.

- HEILMANN WAS IN HER OFFICE WHEN LOUISE CAME UP.

"Jrgensen got ahold of the women who we know were in contact with the suspect," Heilmann said. "He made a list of them. Those women are coming in tomorrow. But then Jrgensen's wife called. One of the twins is in the emergency room, so he had to go home to watch the other one," she said. "I doubt we'll see him back here before Monday; you'll have to talk to some of the women when they show up."

Louise nodded. "I haven't had a chance to start searching for dark-haired men yet," she reminded Heilmann. "If we need that right away, someone else will have to take over."

"That's fine. That can wait. The girls' statements are more important. And," Heilmann paused for effect, "I really want to have you talk to Karsten Flintholm. We have an appointment with him tomorrow afternoon. He says he wasn't even in town last Monday, but he has dark hair and dark eyes, and was one of the three men Susanne picked out of the books. If he doesn't have a watertight alibi, we'll do a lineup on Monday."

That suited Louise just fine. She relished the thought of talking to him. Even just hauling his a.s.s in here will be fun.

"How many of the women are coming in tomorrow?"

"Nine. I'll divvy them up between you and Stig."

"It doesn't seem likely that a woman who's been subjected to the kind of a.s.sault we're searching for would keep her profile up online," Louise said. "Wouldn't she go in and delete it right away?"

She had a hard time imagining what kind of information could be gained from interviewing the women, and how much of a description they could get. But, of course, you never knew.

Heilmann rubbed her forehead and said, "We don't have anything else go on. The crime-scene investigators didn't get anything else from Susanne's apartment. Suhr is pacing around the division unable to decide if we should ask the public for help or if we should wait for the lab results to come back on the DNA and just hope we find a match in the database. Right now we have nothing, so we just have to work with what we've got and hope more leads turn up over the next few weeks."

With that outlook, Louise realized there would be time to enjoy a quiet Friday night with Peter and a pleasant weekend with Markus; before she even left Heilmann's office, she started planning a little trip out of town to visit her parents. Markus and Peter would both enjoy that.

She went in and studied the list Lars had compiled. Four women to interview, the first at ten o'clock. She turned off her computer and locked the door behind her.

Her bike was still parked outside the building and the air was still warm. She rode down across the cobblestones on Halmtorvet Square and felt like stopping for a cup of coffee at one of the cafes. She pulled off to the side and called Peter at home to see if she could entice him to join her.

"Doesn't that sound nice?" she asked convincingly. She could sense him trying to find a way out of it, and when he finally did say yes, she was sure it was more to humor her than because he really wanted to. They'd hardly spent any time together all week because she'd come home so late each night. They agreed she would go in and order, and he would leave right away and be there shortly.

She waved as he came striding up the sidewalk. He looked tired, but like he was trying to snap out of it.

"Hi, honey," he said, kissing her and taking a seat.

The coffee was already on the table, and she filled him in on her plan to go visit her folks out in the country the next day.

"What did Camilla say about Markus coming with us?" he asked, taking a cautious sip of his coffee.

"I haven't asked her yet, but I can't imagine her having any objections. He loves going out there. Camilla's meeting a guy, so I bet she'll just be glad to know that Markus is in good hands and being entertained. That way, she can relax and enjoy her weekend."

Peter looked at her in surprise. "She's seeing someone? When did all that happen?"

"I don't actually know," Louise said. "I was just thinking she's been a little distracted lately. You know her. She usually calls several times a day, and now I hardly ever hear from her. I talked to her briefly earlier today, but it was mostly about my current case. And then she said she was having someone over on Sat.u.r.day and asked if we would watch Markus."

"Well, we'll see how it goes," Peter said, smiling. He sat for a bit, lost in thought, until he eventually stroked her cheek and then asked the waiter for a refill.

11.

"CAN I TAKE THE CAR?" SHE YELLED FROM THE BATHROOM. "I won't be late getting home, and I'll stop and pick up the groceries on my way."

Normally they kept their weekends free for each other, and Peter was the one who usually did the grocery shopping and cooking. They would eat breakfast together on Sat.u.r.day, and afterward they would sit on the sofa talking about everything they hadn't had time to do during the week.

Peter came back out of the kitchen holding a cup of coffee and dug the car keys out of his pocket. When he turned back toward her, she noticed dark circles under his eyes. She'd heard him get up at some point during the night and a.s.sumed he had been up working while she was sound asleep.

"I'll suggest to Camilla that I pick Markus up today," Louise said. "That way, we can get an early start tomorrow morning. You look like someone who needs to unwind and relax a little."

Having practically inhaled the first one, Peter turned around and went back to the kitchen to pour himself a second cup of coffee. "Okay," he said from the kitchen, and then a moment later added that he wasn't sure when he'd be able to get away from the office.

"I'm doing interviews all day, so I'll be at Camilla's place around five," Louise guessed.

Peter stuck his head into the bathroom when he was ready to leave. "I'll call when I know when I'll be home," he promised before turning to go. Louise heard the door click shut behind him.

- "LET ME f.u.c.kING TELL YOU SOMETHING, YOU f.u.c.kING b.i.t.c.h. I WASN'T anywhere near Tivoli or Valby on Monday or any other day."

Louise was losing her patience. For the last hour, Karsten Flintholm had been screaming and yelling and swearing at her. He'd been aggressive from the moment she sat down across from him and had pretty much repeated the same few sentences for the whole session.

"I told you. I was an hour away from Copenhagen in Ringsted with my wife and new baby."

It turned out that he had gotten married during his last stint in jail. He had gotten a barely legal woman pregnant just before he went in, and now they were living in a glorified shack of a cottage out in her allotment garden on the outskirts of Ringsted.

Louise let him talk. Toft and Stig were on their way out to the address to see if the girl could give him an alibi, and until they had talked to her, Louise was going to keep Flintholm under close observation. He hadn't known in advance what the police had wanted to talk to him about, so he hadn't had a chance to coach his young wife on the answers. However, Louise was prepared for the possibility that he might have instructed her to back up his story: that they'd been together the whole time since he'd gotten out of jail.

"Here I am starting a family and settling down, and you're all over my f.u.c.king a.s.s here because of my past." He sounded like a petulant child, but certainly didn't look like one with his unkempt hair and tattoos covering most of his exposed skin.

"We're not all over your a.s.s," Louise said calmly. "We just want to know where you were Monday night. You were identified, and you ought to be familiar enough with how things work to know that we have to check out your story."

He leaped out of his chair and lunged at Louise, but she was on her feet before he got to her. She grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. She gave it an extra jerk upward, which really wasn't necessary, but he could take that as thanks for all the s.h.i.t she'd had to sit here listening to him spew for the past half hour.

He glared at her but backed down. She sat down again, ready to proceed. He was thirty-two, but looked much younger. His short, dark hair was gelled back. When he looked at Louise, there was a measure of detached evil in his eyes, but she had no doubt that some women would find him charming. He had an attractive nose and soft lines around his mouth, although it was a little hard to see anything charming about him right now. There was something unsympathetic and cold in his face. He had a lack of respect and an obvious desire to show it.

"And you still don't want to tell me what you were doing Monday night? You, your wife, and your child?"

He didn't respond, didn't bat an eye. She didn't want to get all worked up. She was very conscious of her own short fuse.

Louise calculated that the others would soon be at the location down in Ringsted. It couldn't take more than an hour to drive down there and find the house. Before she'd started questioning him, she had arranged with Toft and Stig that they would call when they arrived and let her know if the young woman was home; when the phone call came, the phone hardly had time to ring once before she had the receiver to her ear.

"They're there and getting started now," Heilmann said.

Louise hung up and sat silently for a moment, watching Flintholm. He had been staring daggers at her, trying to figure out what was going on from the moment she answered her phone.

"They're in Ringsted," Louise said. "Now we'll just wait and see what your wife has to say."

"She won't say s.h.i.t!" he snorted, and his tensed jaws relaxed a little.

"Well, that'd be dumb," Louise said, "because then they'll haul her in here, and your child will be placed with social services."

She held her breath, a little nervous that this would provoke a new outburst, but he seemed to have regained his composure. So she continued: "If she feels any shred of responsibility, she'll talk. And if you're sure she's going to confirm your story, then everything will be fine."

"You obnoxious b.i.t.c.h!" he hissed, but he stayed in his seat.

"You'd best shut up. Otherwise I might start getting the impression that you're hiding something."

She made a show of picking up the stack of interview summaries from the women she'd spoken with earlier in the day. As she'd predicted, none of them had met "Mr. n.o.ble," only exchanged e-mails with him. But two of them had kept up their correspondence long enough that they'd swapped e-mail addresses with him instead of writing via their dating profiles.

She knew that CCU was already working on the two women's computers to see where "Mr. n.o.ble" had written from. It didn't take them long to figure out that he had used another publicly accessible computer each time. She kept reading, intentionally ignoring Flintholm, who grunted or swore periodically.

One thing both women had in common is that they were similar to Susanne Hansson, personality-wise. They were introverts and weren't all that self-confident. Since her first chat with Susanne, Louise had been struck by the fact that Jesper Bjergholdt had never planned to exchange photos. He'd written to her that he preferred what was inside a person to what was on the outside.

Two of the women Louise had spoken to that morning had also fallen for that wording, whereas the other two had written him off for that same reason. They apparently a.s.sumed it meant he didn't consider himself attractive, and they'd consequently lost interest in him.

She thought it was striking that "Mr. n.o.ble" had insisted that they should write to each other for a long time before they considered meeting in person. Experts usually advised people involved in online dating to meet relatively quickly, or at least to talk to each other by phone after writing for a week. This can help them figure out if they have any chemistry sooner rather than later. But Mr. n.o.ble and Susanne and these other women took the completely opposite route.

Louise could appreciate how the former would be very hard to gauge through a computer screen. Online, it was all too easy to fall for a person who was good at expressing himself in writing, and when you finally met in person it might turn out that you'd fallen in love with the words and not the person, hence the encouragement to make contact outside of cybers.p.a.ce as soon as the spark struck. However, for "Mr. n.o.ble," these women falling in love with his words was exactly what he wanted.

"Mr. n.o.ble" hadn't given his phone number to any of the women Louise or Stig had talked to that day. Only one of the five women Stig had interviewed was still in touch with "Mr. n.o.ble." The rest had all quickly brushed him off as uninteresting or weird. The one that was still interested was yet another woman who was hungry for his words of rea.s.surance: that perfectly ordinary people could find happiness too. And she seemed to feel like things were finally going her way.

The phone rang again. "Let him go," Heilmann's voice said. "His wife says he was home. Her parents came to visit, which has been confirmed. But make sure he knows we'll call him in for a lineup if necessary."

Louise hung up. She sat and looked at him for a minute before nodding to the door.

Finally something happened in his eyes. He leaned forward a little and glared at her before saying anything. His voice was malevolent: "If I ever get involved in some kind of situation that makes you guys lock me up again... ," he let his eyes roam provocatively up and down her body, "I think I'd pick someone like you."

Louise quickly counted to ten in her head, extended that to fifteen, and then stood up. "Good-bye."

She stood there watching him as he shuffled out the door. f.u.c.king a.s.shole, she thought. An obnoxious idiot, he didn't have the b.a.l.l.s to attack her. It was pathetic. She'd just read up on his previous sentences, and according to the police reports the women he'd raped had all been weak targets. He'd a.s.saulted one of them right as she left a bar, so drunk that her stomach would have been pumped if a medical evaluation had been requested. He'd pulled her into the bushes and raped her. Afterward, he'd run off and left her lying there. The woman hadn't come to until the next morning, and even though she was pretty incoherent about what had happened, he was quickly apprehended. His DNA in her v.a.g.i.n.a made it impossible for him to deny the a.s.sault, although he'd claimed she was depraved and had gone to great lengths to lure him, a total stranger, into having s.e.x with her. Even from the first interrogation session, he'd claimed the s.e.x was consensual, but witnesses from the bar had confirmed that the victim, eerily also named Louise, had not been in any condition to say what she actually wanted when she'd left the bar. And his defense attorney had finally conceded that point, leading to a plea bargain.

There was no reason for Louise to stay and wait for Toft and Stig to return from Ringsted. She agreed with Heilmann that they would meet on Monday after Lieutenant Suhr's morning briefing to see where their group stood with the investigation.

A couple of guys from the computer crime unit had stopped by Heilmann's office late in the day with the results of their search of the three women's computers. Determining that the women had exchanged e-mail addresses with "Mr. n.o.ble" had given them all hope, but even from the very end of the hallway Heilmann could read, from the faces on the CCU team as they walked into the division, that the search hadn't come up with anything useful. "Mr. n.o.ble" had used the Internet cafe on H. C. rstedsvej and the sterbro Library on Dag Hammerskolds Alle, so they were back to square one. A couple of detectives from the downtown precinct had been a.s.signed to check in at those locations regularly. They were supposed to meet with the regulars Toft hadn't yet spoken with, to look for anyone who might have noticed the dark-haired man, but that was a shot in the dark, as Suhr would say.

"People who go to places like that do it precisely to avoid contact with other human beings. They're only f.u.c.king paying attention to what's on the screen in front of them," Suhr had said when they originally decided to ask around for people who might have noticed Jesper Bjergholdt. "But of course it's one of the things we ought to try," he conceded in the same breath.

- LOUISE DROVE TO THE GROCERY STORE TO GET SOMETHING TO FIX FOR dinner before she picked up Markus. Camilla had said "Great!" right away when Louise asked if it would be okay if she picked Markus up before dinner.

"We'll be home about four thirty, so I'll have his bag packed when you get here," she said, sounding excited that her son was getting to go out of town for the weekend.

Maybe her excitement also had something to do with the fact that she had suddenly been given a whole Friday night to herself, Louise thought, smiling, as she parked in the garage underneath the Kvickly Mart on Falkoner Alle. She was still thinking about her friend as she navigated her shopping cart along the refrigerated cases, trying to decide what to make for dinner. She sensed that Camilla was very eager to meet this new acquaintance. It wasn't like her to be so secretive, and that made Louise curious. Camilla wasn't normally one to hold back on details when she met a man, but it rarely lasted longer than a couple of dates. And there were long dry spells in between her relationships.

Louise had occasionally suspected that Camilla went on these dates just to please her friends-and especially her mother in Skanderborg, who never hid her opinion that her daughter spent too much time on her career and way too little time on herself and her own needs. On the other hand, the few times Camilla had kept her dates to herself, it was usually because they meant a little more to her. Over the years, Louise had learned that, in those cases, there was no point in asking.

She gave up on the idea of anything that required more culinary skill than turning on the oven. She'd spoken with Peter before she left police headquarters, and he still couldn't tell her when he would be home. He'd been curt, and she'd hurried to say that she would fix something for herself and Markus, so he shouldn't feel any pressure to rush. She grabbed a bag of chicken wings from the frozen-foods aisle, deciding that that would be a good thing to eat in front of the TV.

- LOUISE PARKED IN FRONT OF THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO CAMILLA'S building and rang the buzzer.

"Is it you? Come on up!" Markus's voice yelled through the speaker on the entrance phone.

She noted her own happiness as she hurried up the stairs. A loaner kid was really the perfect arrangement for the way her life was set up, she thought before preparing herself for the maelstrom of a reception she usually got.

"Mom's in the shower," Markus said when they finished hugging.

Louise smiled at him and said that they'd best not bother her then.

"You're not bothering me at all," Camilla said, sticking her head out of the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a green towel. A second later, she came out into the hallway wearing a short terrycloth bathrobe, smelling of perfume, and gave Louise a kiss on the cheek.

"Markus is looking forward to this," she said, going out to the kitchen to turn on the oven.

Louise followed her and stood in the doorway. "Is your date coming over here?" Louise mimed so Markus wouldn't hear her question.

Camilla nodded.

Markus was off packing the toys he wanted to bring.

"He asked if I'd rather meet at a cafe, but it's a little less formal if he comes here," she said, putting a bottle of tonic water into the fridge to chill.

"Since you're meeting for the first time, don't you think it would be wise to meet somewhere public with other people around?" Louise suggested, almost knowing what would come next.

Camilla sprinkled flour on the kitchen counter and was rolling out some puff pastry with a rolling pin when she turned around. "You know I have written several pieces about the safety tips SafeChat.dk recommends you follow when you meet someone you've only had contact with online," she said with a joking scowl. "So nice to know you read my articles."

She kept rolling until the puff pastry couldn't be stretched any further.

"Well, since you've written about them, I would think you'd follow them!" Louise tried, having a hard time seeing how the one thing precluded the other.

"Those safety rules are meant for children and teenagers: 'Don't meet someone you met online without telling a grownup.' I am a grownup, so I've been told, and I can just shoo him out the door if he's up to no good," she continued.