Heloise rolled her eyes. Then she looked down at her phone again and sent one last message off to Copenhagen before switching her phone to airplane mode.

Me too.

CHAPTER

46

“COMPLETELY OUT OF the question.” Editor in chief Mikkelsen drove his point home by repeatedly hammering his chubby forefinger on the mahogany tabletop. “If that’s all you’ve got, then we’re not going to run it.”

“Why the hell not?” Heloise sat up straighter.

Mikkelsen looked from her to Karen Aagaard with a look that said he couldn’t believe his own ears.

“You’re asking why? Tell me, didn’t you learn anything from the Skriver case? Do you have any idea how many lunches at Café Victor I’ve had to pay for to sooth the egos of those goddamned fashion people? How much damage control I’ve had had to do to save your ass?”

“My ass or the newspaper’s?”

“Don’t get cute with me, Kaldan. If you had done your job to begin with, we wouldn’t have been in this mess with Skriver. And now you’re expecting me to publish a story that portrays Johannes Mossing as a predatory pedophile—like some kind of Danish Jimmy Savile—without having so much as a shred of evidence for the allegations?”

“I agree that, initially, the Skriver story was a disaster. I fucked up.” Heloise nodded as if she were negotiating. “But it did in fact turn out quite well for the newspaper, right? The revelation of the secretary of commerce’s role in the matter has been the top story in all the media outlets since the story broke last week. I mean, the man resigned, for crying out loud!”

“Yes,” Mikkelsen snorted. “Thanks to Bøttger.”

“Heloise was actually the one who handed him the story,” Karen Aagaard interjected.

“The point is that the real story came out in the end,” Heloise said. “Imagine where we’d be if we had been too scared to speak up. Then we would have a secretary of commerce who’d gotten away with trying to sabotage one of the biggest companies in the country.”

“That is a completely different scenario.”

“It’s Martin Duvall’s word against the secretary’s. What’s the difference?”

“Duvall turned out to be a reliable source,” Mikkelsen said. “That’s the difference.”

“And Anna Kiel isn’t? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“The woman is wanted for murder, Kaldan. She murdered one of the partners at one of the country’s most highly respected law firms. She is declared mentally unstable—psychotic, even—and now you want to smear an old man’s reputation because a mentally disturbed murderer has made undocumented accusations against him.”

“You’re not serious!”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You don’t really believe Mossing is innocent, do you?”