Why don’t you have any children? I know why I don’t, but what about you? You must be getting that question all the time, and I am sure that you have a scripted response for it by now, because, well, you’re no spring chicken.

No spring chicken. Not quite so … fertile anymore.

TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK.

My mother. She was not a good mother.

Maybe it’s hereditary. Anyway, my own clock never ticked.

Maybe I was born defective.

Maybe I am that way because of her.

There’s so much I want to tell you.

While I am denied your presence, Heloise, give me at least through your words some sweet semblance of yourself.

Anna Kiel

“Ouch, that’s gotta sting, right?” Augustin looked up. “She’s basically saying, ‘Hey, you’re old and dried up and may have lost your chance of ever having children.’ ”

Bertelsen asked, “How old is Kaldan?”

“She’s thirty-six,” Schäfer replied. “So still very much a spring chicken, if you ask me.”

“What did she say to the development in Andersson’s case?” Augustin asked.

“That it’s a homicide, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t told her.” Schäfer said. “That’s not something we want the press to know until we know a little more about what we’re dealing with here.”

No one said anything for a while. Then Lars Bro broke the silence. “Okay, so who’s doing what here?”

“I want you and Bertelsen to look into Ulrich Andersson’s coworkers and friends and find out if he talked to anyone besides Heloise about the Mossings,” Schäfer said. He took Andersson’s byline photo from Ekspressen out of the case file and pushed it across the table. “Take this and drive up to the racetrack in Klampenborg. Show it around and see if anyone remembers him. We need to know who he talked to and what they said to him.”

“What about me?” Augustin asked.

“You go talk to the ex-wife again.”

Augustin made a face and winced. She and Schäfer had driven out to Ulrich Andersson’s ex-wife’s house in Amager the day before. The couple’s two children, a girl of seven and a boy of nine with unruly, rust-colored curls, had been eating pasta with meatballs and watching an old episode of Hannah Montana on an oversized flat screen in their small living room. The children hadn’t even looked up when Andersson’s ex-wife invited Schäfer and Augustin in.

She had asked them to follow her into the kitchen, where they had conveyed the tragic news to her. She had cried in silence, her mouth open and her eyes full of fear, with the canned laughter from the TV in the living room and Miley Cyrus’s affected voice serving as an absurd soundtrack.