“That they’re cryptic?”

“Because they’re gibberish.”

“Maybe.” He smiled. “Or maybe you’re just reading them wrong.”

“Wrong? How so?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head slightly. He pushed a button on his armrest, and his large, upholstered wheelchair backed away from the table. He gestured that Heloise should get up.

Apparently, lunch was over.

“You may be right,” he said as he said good-bye to her at the door. “Maybe Anna should call you—and who knows? Maybe she will.”

CHAPTER

22

HELOISE HAD TURNED over the third letter to Schäfer before she drove out to Herlev. Now she sat at her desk at the newspaper and looked at the picture she had taken of the letter with her iPhone. She felt strangely struck by the wording Anna Kiel had used to taunt her with, but at the same time, she felt sympathy for her after having met her mother and Kenneth Vallø.

Sympathy for a murderer?

That wasn’t like Heloise.

It offended her sense of justice when violent offenders received sentences that were too lenient. On the one hand, she knew that rehabilitation was the only thing that worked. On the other hand, she thought that the sentencing guidelines in Denmark were laughable: violent offenders often received a scolding, a slap on the back of the hand, and they were rewarded with very brief, college-like stays in downright comfortable surroundings. It was an insult to the victims, who all too often were forgotten in the rush to accommodate the convict’s existence. Part of Heloise would have preferred to dump all the murderers, pedophiles, and rapists into a deep, soundproof pit, throw a heavy metal lid over it, and forget they ever existed. It wasn’t a particularly politically correct opinion, but she just got so overwhelmed with indignation, so filled with hatred.

But there was something about Anna that made her feel … something more. An inexplicable compassion and a desire to understand what had brought her to such an extreme that she had felt compelled to take another person’s life.

She pulled out her iPhone and found Schäfer’s number.

“Yeah, hello?”

“Hi, it’s me. Heloise.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m just calling to find out … Kenneth Vallø, you know …”

“What about him?”

“I visited him today.”

“You went to see him? Why?”

“To get closer to Anna. I talked to her mother too.”

“I hate to tell you this,” Schäfer said, “but I think you’re wasting your time by running around in my footsteps.”

“Yes, I know, you already talked to Vallø, but the weird thing is that it seemed like he was expecting me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was as if he knew I was going to come. I think he’s still in touch with Anna.”