Only One Life by Sara Blædel Read Free Book Online

rigidly square grid Bengtsen had begun when he took the first piece.
    He nodded, drawing the ends of his narrow lips up only just enough that Louise dared interpret it as a smile. But whether the smile was an expression of a lifelong devotion to his wife or whether it was because he was a little shy about having food made for him, she couldn’t say. She was quick to praise the cake as soon as she had gotten a bite into her mouth.
    “How did it go out at the crime scene today?” she asked Dean, who was sitting on her other side and who had loosened his tie a bit. “Did anything turn up?”
    “The Frogman Corps has been doing dives up and down the cove, but they haven’t found anything,” he replied, referring to the elite special forces unit of the Royal Danish Navy. He poured her a cup of coffee before saying that forensics had kept the girl’s beige jacket out at the scene so the dogs would have something to go by.
    “Various things have been collected from the scene,” he continued, but he was interrupted by Storm, who asked him to speak up so everyone could hear.
    Dean Vukić looked around and reiterated that the divers hadn’t found anything they could link to the girl or her murder and that the canine units weren’t finished yet.
    “There are some tire prints we’ll research. And we have several footprints that we need to take casts of. And the CSI team has secured some evidence from the soil in the form of cigarette butts, chewing gum, mucus from globs of saliva that will be checked for DNA, and then we’ll see what we have,” he said.
    Yes, we’ll see , Louise thought. But first they had to find out who the girl was.
    “We haven’t located a purse, bag, or cell phone,” Dean finished after a pause.
    Now it was Mik’s and her turn, and Mik updated everyone on the autopsy.
    “We’re obviously ruling out an accident, given the concrete slab she had on her abdomen,” Storm stated when they finished.
    “What about suicide?” Søren asked.
    “In that case she would have had to jump into the water from a boat,” Skipper said, but he added that they had not come across any unmoored boats in their survey of the area.
    “If she had been attacked at that location, there would have been prints in the dirt or on the bluffs near the water,” said Dean, who had spent the whole day working with the CSI team. “There were no signs of any struggle. And, again, some kind of boat was needed to get her so far out into the water.”
    “There are some boats moored out at Hønsehalsen that the fishermen use,” Bengtsen interjected, who evidently had in-depth knowledge of the area.
    “All those boats are accounted for,” Skipper said. “They’re all moored, so she couldn’t have used them herself, in any case. But we should take a closer look at them.”
    “Most likely she was killed somewhere else and brought out to Hønsehalsen,” Dean added. “Otherwise, the dogs would have responded at the scene. We ran the dogs through the little marina with all the dinghies too, and they didn’t find anything.”
    Everyone nodded and seemed to agree.
    Storm sat sorting some scraps of paper as though they were playing cards.
    “These are the tips that have come in response to the missing-person report so far,” he said, dropping them nonchalantly on the table. “Probably nothing of much interest. All of the girls are native Danes, but let me flip through them quickly,” he said, fishing out his glasses. “There’s a Lisette Andersen, age seventeen, from Kalundborg. Her mother called in. Her daughter has short blonde hair.”
    “Didn’t it say that our girl has long dark hair and might be Arab?” Søren asked pessimistically, disqualifying Kalundborg.
    “A Tove Mikkelsen called in about her daughter, age twenty, from Roskilde, but she pointed out that her daughter looks very young and could well pass for sixteen.”
    “We get a couple hundred missing-person reports about teenage girls every year,” Ruth