“Logical and straightforward,” Jeppe said, smiling at his partner. “But that’s not how life is. Everything organic sends up shoots and branches, and twists in unexpected directions, crimes included. There could even be a totally different perpetrator who killed Malthe and maybe Oscar too. Although now that you mention it, you’re right about one thing. Life in the Dreyer-Hoff family might not be as harmonious as they want it to appear.”

“The family bed.” Anette sneered and stopped the car across from Fredericiagade 64. “It’s just freaking weird.”

Jeppe unbuckled his seat belt and said, “What I find seriously weird is Kasper Skytte. Can it really be a coincidence that he was the one who found the body of Oscar’s teacher?”

“Let’s go in and ask him.”

They got out of the car, crossed the street, and buzzed him on the intercom by the building’s front door. No answer. Anette leaned heavily on the doorbell. Still no response. They waited two minutes in case he had been asleep and needed time to get up. Then Anette buzzed his apartment again. Jeppe looked at his watch. It was two o’clock.

“Not at work, not at the hospital, and not at home. Where the hell did he go?”

THORVALDSENS MUSEUM WAS deserted. The afternoon sunbeams fell on the statues, making the white marble shine like newly fallen snow. Esther strolled through the exhibit spaces. The vaulted ceilings swallowed up the noise of her careful footsteps as soon as she trod them. She walked through the red, green, and yellow rooms and stopped in front of a statue of a boy with an eagle.

“You have the place to yourself today.”

Esther turned toward the voice and discovered an attendant right behind her. She was wearing a dark blue uniform and stood with her hands crossed behind her back.

“We’re usually closed on Mondays,” the woman explained, coming over to stand next to Esther. “Today is a new pilot program, so most people don’t know we’re open.” She nodded at the statue. “Do you like it?”

Esther looked at the marble eagle again.

“Uh, I haven’t really had a chance to think about it. Actually I’m here to see the museum’s collection of death masks, but I can’t seem to find them.…”

“Why do you want to see those?”

Esther hesitated.

“I have a professional interest in them… for a book I’m writing,” she said.

The attendant nodded slowly, as if in approval.

“The museum doesn’t consider them art. Who’s to say? I work with images myself, and I have no damn idea what’s art and what’s not.”

The attendant had a ravaged face, wrinkled and swollen, but it was evident that she had once been very beautiful. Before life’s concerns and the passing years had taken their toll.