"Yes...." It sounded as if Susanne had forced the word out under duress.
"Susanne, this is Louise," she said trying to sound as if everything were calm and relatively under control.
"Shut up," he said into the phone.
She ignored his rough tone and continued calmly, "If you don"t do anything to her, I can help you out of this situation. I know you"re calling the shots, but won"t you tell me what this is about?"
Unfortunately she had a very clear sense of what this was about. Jrgen knew that Susanne could testify against him if the police managed to find him. Karin Hvenegaard would also be able to ID him. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn"t given a thought to Karin out in Rdovre since she had visited her. Maybe Jrgen had already paid her a visit. It wasn"t hard to see that things were heating up for him.
Of course he"s feeling threatened, she thought, his predicament becoming clear to her. The two aggravated s.e.xual a.s.saults were now the least of his troubles. The things he"d done to Karin and Susanne were serious enough, but Christina Lerche"s death brought his crimes to another level. No wonder he was feeling the pressure.
Louise spoke firmly in a calm, quiet voice, and strangely enough she also felt calm on the inside. She wasn"t thinking about the consequences of what might happen, just trying to win time. If she succeeded in talking him down enough, he might relent and accept the wisdom of coming out and letting Susanne go.
She continued in a controlled voice. "I know you didn"t kill Christina Lerche," she said into her phone. "Her death was an accident."
She registered that a number of squad cars had already pulled into the parking lot. More would be coming to set up a perimeter. Now it was a question of keeping the dialogue going until the negotiating team got there and took over, and there was a chance that they would succeed if she fed him everything he wanted to hear in a gentle stream.
He still wasn"t saying anything.
"It would go a long way if you came out on your own now," she continued. "Then you could keep the situation from spinning out of control."
If only he would say something. It concerned her that he remained so quiet. When the silence and the faint static on the line continued, she got nervous that he"d put the phone under one of the couch cushions or somewhere else that would block the sound. He could have closed the door to the bedroom where Susanne was. Louise was suddenly struck by the chilling realization that he could be a.s.saulting Susanne right now, even as she stood here, naively continuing to talk to him.
She went over to the door and knocked loudly. Leaned forward and listened.
"It"s too late," the ominous voice finally said into the phone.
She couldn"t be sure what he meant, if he meant it was too late for Susanne or for the situation as a whole. She hoped he meant the latter and seized on his words.
"It"s never too late if you act rationally. It will benefit your case overall if you let her go now."
"I don"t believe you. I can see the police."
"Those are just patrol officers. They"re here to cordon off the area. That"s the normal procedure before the negotiating team arrives to take over. I"m no expert, just an ordinary a.s.sistant detective."
"Negotiating team? You want to negotiate?"
"Yes," Louise said convincingly. "We want to make a deal with you so you make it out of this situation as levelheadedly as possible."
"So you actually think I can get something out of this?" His tone was full of contempt.
She hoped he would bite so they could keep the conversation going, and at the same time she glanced at her watch. It would take another half an hour at least before the team got out here from the city. That was a long time to wait, with things moving at this excruciating pace.
If he was desperate, he would start gushing like a waterfall and then demand they have a private plane waiting for him out at Tune Airfield to take him out of the country, and then he would recite anything at all that he could recall from similar situations in American movies. But he didn"t do that. He didn"t seem desperate in that way, didn"t get carried away and ramble on, talking faster and faster. Instead it was like he was sitting there, weighing and contemplating each word he said.
She could hear Susanne crying in the background.
"If you let her go, I"ll come in and take her place," Louise suggested.
"What am I supposed to do with you?" he asked, sounding surprised.
"You could talk to me."
Suddenly he seemed amused.
"But you don"t even know me. Why would it help to talk to you?" he asked.
It struck Louise that he sounded like a businessman on a conference call, and she didn"t really feel like she was bringing anything to the table that he would consider appealing.
She had a choice: tell him he was right, that maybe it wouldn"t do him any good to talk to her, or brazenly lie.
"First of all, I can guarantee that I will do everything in my power to help you so that we can wrap this business up calmly and quietly and find a solution that you will be satisfied with," she said convincingly. "Let Susanne go and I"ll come in, and then we"ll talk about it. I could also be your bargaining chip with the negotiating team if you"d rather wait for them and find out what they have to offer."
He mumbled something she couldn"t make out. Then: "You don"t know me, so you wouldn"t understand me. Plus, I don"t have any use for you."
He sounded resigned.
Louise took a deep breath, inhaling the air deep down into her gut.
"Actually, yes, I do," she said. "I know you, and you know me." Well, "know" was a bit of an exaggeration, but in a way they did know each other. They would have, anyway, if he"d shown up for their coffee date.
The silence on the other end of the phone became brooding.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Call me "Princess,"" Louise said, leaning against the wall by the front door.
Silence. She started shivering, even though the sun was beating down on her. She had pushed them both all the way, to a place where a response was unavoidable.
She heard a sound from inside the house and turned to wave Lars over.
"I"m going in," she whispered, so it wouldn"t be audible over the phone. "Call headquarters and get them to send a patrol out to Karin Hvenegaard"s place. He may have paid her a visit, too."
Lars looked away and was about to say something angry but stopped himself. She could tell from his clenched jaw muscles. Then he turned his face toward her again and put his hand on her shoulder.
"Watch out for him," Lars urged. "We don"t know why he came here today, but he"s already killed one person."
So far she agreed with him.
"He"s a hunted man," Lars continued. "If he lets her come out, it"s because he thinks he can get more out of this situation if he uses you as a hostage."
Louise knew her partner was right, but honestly right now she was afraid that Jrgen thought he would do better by holding on to Susanne.
She stepped back over to the front door and listened. She saw Suhr and Heilmann rushing across the parking lot, and she could tell that Suhr wanted to tell her something. But just then the door between the living room and the entryway opened and Susanne came into view, guided by an arm. She was bleeding from her neck and stood there frightened, staring at the floor. Her hands were tied together tightly in front of her, and Louise noticed that Jrgen hadn"t used his usual cable ties. This looked like some kind of cord he"d found lying around in the apartment.
"She won"t come out until you"re in."
Louise quickly glanced at Suhr, and, before he had a chance to object, she stepped into the apartment with all her muscles tensed and took up her position next to Susanne. She briefly considered trying to yank Susanne out the door with her so they could both be free, but she let go of the idea. If that didn"t succeed, there was nothing else to fall back on. She put both her hands behind her head to signal that she was not armed and would not attack, and she noticed his grip on Susanne"s arm loosen.
"Just go," she told Susanne.
Louise stood for a second, watching Susanne"s back hurrying away from the building. An effervescent feeling of relief and victory managed to trickle through her before, a second later, she felt a strong hand cinch in around her elbow and pull her into the living room, where she stumbled and struck the couch.
30.
JRGEN STOOD THERE FOR A LONG TIME, WATCHING LOUISE AS she slowly got up and hesitantly sat down properly on the couch.
"You knew?" he asked, standing over her so she had to crane her neck to look up at him.
She shook her head. Immersed in another role, she was speaking as the girl who had seen him in town.
"I went to Tivoli to meet you, but you didn"t come. I saw Henning instead."
She sensed his surprise when she mentioned his brother"s name.
"Your brother is dating my best friend," she said to explain.
"Camilla?"
He was still standing there, studying her. There wasn"t anything aggressive or menacing about his appearance, and, somewhere deep inside her, that hurt. He seemed confused and uncertain, as if he had been forced into accepting a deal he didn"t want.
"Yeah, Henning told me about your lunch together and about Camilla and how she had to go to Roskilde and how you left right after her," Louise said, presenting the chain of events in a slightly more simplified version that what had really happened. "Did you follow her here?" she asked.
It took a little while before he nodded, as if he was considering whether he had anything to lose.
"You look like each other, you and your brother-at least from the side. When I saw Henning, I recognized his silhouette," Louise said and explained that she had seen Jrgen on the subway CCTV footage when he had walked Christina Lerche to her train at Kongens Nytorv.
He listened, but she couldn"t tell what was going on in his head.
"Suddenly I could see how it all might fit together," Louise said. "So I came out here."
Louise did not dare mention that she had already known all that when she messaged him on Night.w.a.tch. Even though he didn"t seem particularly threatening right now, she was well aware that that could change in an instant. And there was something about his contemplative expression and the fact that he didn"t seem stressed that made her extra-vigilant.
He was waiting for her to say more. Suddenly the silence felt interminable and she sensed her own anxiety as she tried to think of something more to say. She didn"t dare glance down at her watch to see how much longer she had to stall.
"Camilla was the one who told me your name is Jrgen," Louise said.
She saw officers in SWAT gear walk past the window. They were getting into position, so she surmised the negotiating team had arrived.
"I didn"t kill her," Jrgen finally said. He had taken a seat and was moving the fingers of both hands in and out of each other like gears engaging and disengaging. "I didn"t do anything."
Louise refrained from commenting on that last remark, but she took it as an opening that might allow her to win his trust.
"I don"t think that either, that you killed her... intentionally," she added after a brief pause.
He pulled his hands back, as if he"d burned them, and then quickly leaned toward her.
"I didn"t kill her," his voice was suddenly a hiss. "She wasn"t dead when I left. She tricked me."
There was a clank as he gesticulated wildly with his hands and happened to knock over an empty teacup. He stared intensely into Louise"s eyes. "It was her own fault!"
She nodded to show she agreed with him. Suddenly there wasn"t much time. She had been trying to drag things out to this point, but now the problem was whether she had enough time to talk him down before the SWAT team outside was ready to take over the conversation and she would have to make do with being a weapon in the negotiations.
She tried to rea.s.sure him. "She didn"t die until you"d left the apartment," she said in a convincing voice. "The coroner called me and told me that it could easily have taken a fair amount of time before she died."
She could tell that he had heard the words but didn"t understand what they meant. He was focused solely on having his innocence confirmed, she noted, which was cla.s.sic behavior in these types of situations.
"You won"t be charged with murder," she said, hoping he would find that comforting because he would undoubtedly be charged with manslaughter. Actually, she wouldn"t be surprised if Suhr decided to charge him with second-degree murder anyway, since they were investigating the case as a death by aggravated battery.
"She wasn"t supposed to die." His voice didn"t have the same aggression in it, but it was still accusing. "She invited me over, and she was the one who wanted to take things into the bedroom," Jrgen explained.
Louise nodded silently as he spoke, noting that he wasn"t stupid. Of course he would stubbornly maintain that what happened was consensual. He was guaranteed to do that when Susanne"s case went to trial, too. So it would be up to Susanne and her lawyer to prove the opposite.
He glanced out the window, pa.s.sively following what was going on outside. Traffic had been stopped, pedestrians were being held back. The only activity was of various police who had taken up positions in the parking lot and all around the perimeter of the building. Louise glanced over at the clock on the living-room wall. It felt as though she had been sitting across from him for hours.
"There wasn"t anything wrong," Jrgen said, not really to Louise, "but then suddenly it went wrong anyway. Completely wrong, obviously."
For a second she thought he was going to start crying. She wanted to ask him which part he thought had gone wrong, but didn"t dare. She had the sense that that was precisely the problem-he didn"t understand what the catalyst had been. He had had his own plans when he packed his rape case and headed off on his dates; if those plans couldn"t be carried out to completion, perhaps he looked at that as something going wrong. That was a boil she had no intention of lancing right now. The forensic psychiatrist could deal with that one, because she was pretty sure there would be a psychiatric evaluation in his future. She heard voices outside the front door, not voices so loud they were meant to be heard inside the apartment; they were just the sounds of people discussing something, which told her it was almost time. Her stomach tensed, and she could feel her pulse.
"I promise that you"ll get the best defense attorney." Louise looked right at him. At first his eyes wandered, but then she managed to establish eye contact and she spoke slowly, with weight behind each word. "If we go out now, I"m sure Camilla will do everything in her power to help you."
She was just tossing things out there, but she got a response. She saw it in his eyes, and that made her proceed.
"The negotiating team is about ready to take over, so I can"t do any more for you. And in a second the SWAT team will come in. If we walk out first, they will no longer consider this a hostage situation."
She was running out of things to say, and he seemed calmer now. She saw the officers in tactical gear and the sharpshooters taking up their positions.
"It would also be nice to get this wrapped up before too many media people show up," she added.
She had already noticed a number of photographers standing back behind the barrier that the police had set up.
"If anything goes wrong, I"m taking you with me when I run," he said after a long pause for consideration. His voice was once again a hoa.r.s.e whisper.
She nodded, knowing he wouldn"t have a chance to run off anywhere once they stepped out the door. He would be shocked by the size of the armed police response. She felt a pang in her heart at betraying him and wished he would come with her now so he wouldn"t have to go through the whole negotiation process. If he didn"t come out voluntarily, they would send the elite anti-terror unit in after him. Of course he wouldn"t know it was them. He probably had no idea that in Denmark, taking someone hostage is cla.s.sified as an act of terrorism, nor in particular that the very best-trained forces were always deployed to extract a hostage from a situation like this.
He got up and paced back and forth a little in the living room.
"We"ll go together," he said, giving her a look that she had a hard time interpreting.
His eyes were both ferocious and scared, but outwardly he still seemed calm, as though he was sure this whole scenario was taking place because there had been some misunderstanding. As if there had been a mistake. A wrong number. Something that actually didn"t have anything to do with him. Louise was not entirely confident, but she stood up anyway and nodded, aware that this could end very badly.