They checked the apartment carefully and discovered Johannes in the bedroom. It was a grotesque scene. In an abstract painting of blood, Johannes was lying in his bed, his comforter carefully tucked in, looking like he was asleep. The blood had come from a dark hole to the back of his head.
“Shit, Johannes,” Søren exclaimed. The two men were silent for a moment. The bedroom smelled stuffy.
“The time is ten eighteen,” Henrik said laconically, took his cell and called for backup. Soon they heard the sound of approaching sirens. Søren watched the body and, for once, he found it hard to suppress his feelings.
“Johannes is my best friend,” Anna had said.
The rest of the morning was pure routine. Bøje, the Deputy Medical Examiner, and the team from Forensics arrived simultaneously. Bøje quickly established that Johannes had been dead somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, which instantly filled Søren with guilt because it meant Johannes had been alive while they were looking for him. Why the hell hadn’t he just answered his cell! The bloody trail on the floor proved Johannes had been killed in the living room, and Bøje asked the crime scene technicians to look for the murder weapon, a hard, pointy object. It took the chief technician three minutes to locate it.
“Right there,” he said, waving his colleagues closer. They focused on one of the four decorative orbs on the corners of the cast-iron sofa.
“Blood, brain tissue, and hair,” the technician informed Søren, who was watching from the hallway to avoid trampling on potential evidence.
Bøje glanced at the finial from where he was in the bedroom doorway and announced, “Looks about right,” before resuming his work.
Søren and Henrik left the apartment and watched from the landing while the technicians identified evidence on the floor, the walls, and on fabric. Flashlight exploded from their cameras, and Søren scratched his head. His job now was to canvas the immediate neighborhood with door-to-door interviews. The coroner’s assistant arrived with a body bag and removed Johannes’s body; Johannes’s bed sheets and his mattress were sealed and taken away. Bøje said good-bye and disappeared down the stairs. Just after 3 p.m. everything had been measured, photographed, and all the evidence collected. They had to wait for the autopsy, and it would be hours before they got any information. Søren would be none the wiser until tomorrow. He instructed five teams of two officers each to ring doorbells. When the apartment had been sealed, he plodded down the stairs. It was snowing lightly, but even so, a crowd had gathered outside the house, staring nosily at the stairwell and the red-and-white police tape flapping in the wind. Another four officers arrived—Søren waved them over and briefed them in the shelter of the stairwell. When they had been given their orders, Henrik joined Søren. Søren was freezing and couldn’t feel his wool socks, in fact, he couldn’t even feel his feet.
“We had better tell his parents,” Søren sighed.
“I’ve taken care of that,” Henrik said, patting his shoulder. “I sent Mads and Özlem.”
Søren was grateful, and he listened to Henrik while he tried to memorize the faces of the spectators. The group was starting to break up, he thought, people were getting cold. Two elderly ladies, with granny trolleys and berets, were shifting from foot to foot next to three young men in neon pink quilted jackets and backpacks and a young woman with a child in a stroller. A younger guy was talking into his mobile, his cheeks were flushed and, to the far left, were a couple of women in their forties with two teenage children.
At the far end of the group was Anna.
She had put up her hood and her body language told Søren she had just joined the onlookers and was trying to push her way to the front. Henrik was about to say something, but he made no sound, and he tried to catch Søren’s eye. A frightened Anna looked at the building, the police cars, and the cordon and, for a fraction of a second, she looked straight at Søren. Then she turned around. Søren set off after her. Brusquely, he pushed Henrik aside, skidded across the pavement, got caught up in the tape, pushed the young guys out of the way, finally got free of the crowd, and ran out into the road. The street corner was 150 feet from the stairwell, and Anna had already turned it and was long gone. He was certain it had been her. Her eyes, her mouth, the hood covering her hair. He turned into Enghavevej. Traffic was heavy and slow, and he stopped. A bus started to pull out, the driver beeping his horn at the cars who refused to let him out. Søren ran to the bus and tried peering inside, but the windows were steamed up. He banged on the side while he ran alongside it. He punched the tires, which began rolling, hammered on the door, and finally made eye contact with the driver.