She flipped open to a random location and skimmed the page. It was a chat between two people. Their names and IP addresses were listed next to each statement, each disgusting comment. Someone had gone over them with a bright-yellow highlighter, and Heloise read the names: Reinar Boysen, Poul Mark Iversen. She had never heard of either of them. She scanned their chat messages to each other.

The Harbor Pool opened today!

I know. I was there. Took pictures of a pretty little bathing beauty wearing sunny yellow bikini bottoms.

No top?

No.

Blond?

Of course.

How old?

Six, maybe seven. JonBenét Ramsey lookalike.

Mmm, I like! Upload!

Tonight.

Can’t wait!!

Tonight.

OK, anything else? Other pictures?

Skydebanen Park in Vesterbro. I stopped by there this afternoon, after the harbor. There’s water in the wading pool now. You can sit nearby, cell phone out, and snap away. The moms don’t even notice.

Heloise flipped onward through the folder. The next page was a plastic sleeve with a matte finish. She couldn’t see what was inside it, so she tipped the contents out onto the table, at a safe distance from the puddle of tea that was beginning to soak into the tabletop.

It was pictures, pictures of children. But they weren’t taken on a warm summer’s day in Copenhagen, and they weren’t of children playing in a wading pool, nor were they pictures of a sunny-yellow bikini on a schoolgirl. They were naked children—a new face in each photo—lying on a blue-and-white-striped mattress on the floor of a junky room. Several adult men were standing around the mattress, some without shirts, saggy, hairy bellies, and others with their genitals exposed.

Heloise’s eyes filled with tears.

She had never seen anything more repulsive. But the children in the pictures weren’t crying. They didn’t even look like they were afraid. Their expressions were just completely vacant, with no discernible emotion.

Heloise looked up, suddenly aware that several minutes had gone by and Anna hadn’t returned yet. She got up and quickly strode through the doorway that led back into the front of the restaurant. She looked around. The couple who had been sitting over in the corner were gone now.

And so was Anna Kiel.

“Hey!” Heloise shouted to the waiter. “That woman I was with. Where is she?”

He looked up from his spot behind the bar and shook his head apologetically, holding his hands up in front of himself as if to say calm down.

“English, non.”

Heloise ran out the front door and looked down the street. There was no one to see. She chose a direction at random and started jogging, frantically looking around. Her voice cut through the air as she tried yelling.

“Anna!”