The picture that had appeared on the screen was a snapshot of Copenhagen’s red and black roofs. The dome of the Marble Church dominated the frame, and Heloise recognized the terrace from where the picture had been taken, the ripped dark-green windbreak.

She typed a number and waited while the phone rang.

“Hello, is this the police? Someone is breaking into my apartment. Yes, now! She’s in there right now.”

CHAPTER

8

THE 150-YEAR-OLD WOODEN staircase creaked loudly under Detective Sergeant Erik Schäfer’s feet as he climbed the 127 steps to the fifth floor. On the top landing, the apartment door stood open, and he knocked on the doorframe with a gloved hand before entering.

“Hey,” he said, nodding at a dactyloscopy tech from NFC, the National Forensics Center, who was dusting the small foyer for fingerprints with a fine brush and a container of aluminum powder. “Are you finding anything?”

“Yeah.” The man offered his fist to Schäfer for a fist bump, a form of greeting that made Schäfer feel older and dustier than the building they were in. “This place is practically crawling with both partial and complete hand- and fingerprints,” the tech guy said.

“Ah, well, then I guess you know what you’ll be doing for the rest of the day,” Schäfer said, and patted him on the back in encouragement.

Schäfer edged around him and stepped into the living room. It was a large room with panoramic windows and a door leading out to a little balcony, and he could see that a number of fingerprints had already been lifted from the glass door.

He peered around.

There was a brown apple core and a half-empty cup of coffee with some dried-up milk foam down its sides sitting on the windowsill, and the coffee table was covered with papers, dirty plates, and bread crumbs. With the exception of what he would categorize as everyday clutter, there was no real mess, nothing that screamed break-in or vandalism.

He heard voices from an adjoining room and walked over to the coffee table and glanced at the stack of papers lying there. With one quick motion, he spread the documents on the table out like a fan of playing cards and studied the contents. They were printouts of old articles about Christoffer Mossing’s murder case. His eyes scanned the documents, stopping at a quote he himself had made to the press a couple of weeks into the investigation:

We have reason to believe that Anna Kiel has left the country, and Interpol is now searching for her internationally.