Only One Life by Sara Blædel Read Free Book Online Page B

children were Aida, a girl who was four, and Jamal, a boy of about two. Louise and Mik said thank you and apologized for disturbing her. The neighbor stayed in the doorway watching them until they got back to their car.
    Right as they were about to exit the lot, Louise yelled, “Stop!” There was a red car parked there matching the description. She jumped out and went over to an older-model red Peugeot 306. She wrote down the vehicle registration number and walked back over to her partner.
    “Should we just try to go upstairs again and see if they’ll open the door?” she suggested, but she could tell that he really wanted to get going and thought they had already done enough.
    “You can wait,” she said. “But it does look like their car is here.”
    Mik stayed in the car with the engine running while Louise quickly ran back upstairs and pressed the bell. She stepped away and looked in through the window next to the front door. She could see the kitchen, and it was completely dark. There was a bedroom on the other side. Louise leaned over the railing and peered in. That was the window with the light on, but the room was empty and the door to the hallway closed. It was a girl’s room, she noted.
    After pressing the doorbell a second time, she went back down again and went over to the other side of the building, but everything upstairs was off and dark, Louise noted. So she returned to the car.
    The drive back to the police station took ten minutes, and they agreed that Mik would check the car’s registration in the motor-vehicle registry when they arrived to find out whether the Peugeot was registered at that address. Again Louise had a feeling he was eager to get the job done so he could go home.
    “Not much new information. No one was home,” she reported to the others sitting in the command center. “But what we do know about this girl fits the description we have. Samra al-Abd is from Jordan. She has long hair, and her clothes also match the description pretty well.”
    “We need to find someone who can come to the Pathology Lab and identify her,” Skipper said, filling his mug with coffee.
    “With her parents’ permission we could take Dicta in to do that,” Søren suggested. “We have to be sure it’s someone who knows the deceased well.”
    “She’s too young,” Bengtsen interrupted. “We should use Dicta only as our very last option. It’s too hard for such a young girl to be confronted with a corpse, even if it turns out not to be her friend.”
    It surprised Louise to hear him make that objection.
    “What about her homeroom teacher?” she suggested. “She would know her student well enough that we can trust what she says.”
    Storm nodded and asked her to get in touch with the teacher so they could get the identification done that night.
    “The press has started pushing for more details. But I’ll take care of them,” he continued.
    That sounded good to everyone, because it wouldn’t be much help if everyone was taking calls and they didn’t have a chance to coordinate the information before it leaked out.
    Louise got up and left the meeting to call Dicta and get the name and number for their ninth-grade homeroom teacher. Mik stayed in the office to check the red car in the motor-vehicle registry and had an answer ready when she came back.
    “It’s good enough: it belongs to Ibrahim al-Abd,” he said, pronouncing the name slowly and trying to put the stress on the right syllables. “The address also matches,” he added. “And there was a cell phone number registered for the same name, but the phone seems to be off.”
    “We should be prepared for things to go late tonight,” Louise said. She told him about the impending identification before dialing Dicta’s number and waiting for the girl to answer. Mik and Louise had family living in the area around Holbæk, so the task had fallen to them. To her surprise he nodded absentmindedly and stood up, pulling on his