Frost and Ashes (Daniel Trokics Series Book 2) Read online

  He handed her his card, and she gripped it hard in her hand without looking at it, as if he'd just given her a ticket to someplace far from the maniac terrorizing the town.

  "Of course. Please, please catch this killer. All of us close by are so frightened. Well, the whole town is, of course."

  The two policemen said goodbye and walked on to the next house. There was only one place Taurup would rather be less–where Trokic was at this very moment.

  Chapter Eight

  At precisely eight-thirty, Trokic walked into the Department of Forensic Medicine and greeted everyone there. He'd lain awake the night before, thinking about the surveillance camera video. Lisa would have to take a closer look and try to do something with it. But the autopsy had first priority.

  It wasn't his favorite place. Mostly what bothered him was the smell. The sickly sweetness tended to activate his memory and images from the war would scroll by. But now, standing in the autopsy room, he realized he hadn't thought about his aversion one single time that day. Late last evening, Lukas's parents had identified his body, and Trokic was glad they weren't there to see this.

  Two others from the police were there: Lisa and Kurt Tønnies, a tech who would be photographing the proceedings. Also in the room were Torben Bach, the forensic pathologist; Bach's assistant; and two students, a male and female, in their 20s. Trokic caught Lisa's eye. Somewhere behind her calm expression, he sensed her horror when they rolled Lukas Mørk's body in. The vein in her neck was throbbing; her jaw muscles were taut.

  * * *

  The boy was still clothed in a pair of blue jeans, white Kawasaki sneakers, a light blue sweater with the emblem of a turtle, and a hoodless green down coat. The fishing line was also still wound around his throat. He caught a whiff of something burnt in the air. Trokic had never watched an autopsy of a child, and the unnaturalness of it affected him. He had the feeling it would be like going through his first autopsy.

  * * *

  All the clothes were photographed, examined, then carried off and laid in marked paper bags. The police would hold onto the clothes; they might be used as evidence in a trial.

  Bach began the examination of the body. "As we earlier concluded, he was strangled with fishing line." He put two pieces of tape around the line and cut between them. Trokic had seen him do this before; it would preserve the knots and other things on the line and allow them to measure its circumference later. Bach laid it carefully in a bag and handed it to Trokic. "It's been wound several times around his neck, which shut off his veins and in part his arteries. Which in turn restricted the oxygen to his brain. Ischemia. There's significant hemorrhaging associated with the strangulation, also in the mucous membrane of the nose."

  "What's that on his cheek?" the male student asked. His voice was a bit shaky, but he seemed unruffled. They all stared at the splotch on the boy's cheek that looked like dirt.

  "Soot," Bach said. "Obviously, he's been close to a fire. There's soot several other places on his body. It's possible he was exposed to smoke inhalation, but we'll see that in the respiratory tracts when we open him up."

  He continued speaking into the recorder. "There are distinct scratches on the upper neck under the jawbone, probably from the boy's fingernails as he tried to rip away the fishing line. It seems he put up a struggle. There are also two older bruises on his shoulder; I would say four to five days old. Possibly someone grabbed him hard. His hands are covered with second-degree burns; there is blistering and disruption of the epidermis. The extent and appearance of the burns indicate contact with open fire."

  He examined the rest of the front of the boy's body without further comments of any significance, then the body was turned.

  "There’s extensive livor mortis on the back of the body. Livor mortis is the red discolorations, right here," he explained to the students. "Gravity causes the blood to sink to the part of the body lying lowest; it's visible through the skin. There's no discoloration where the skin was in direct contact with whatever the body was laying on. Livor mortis appears thirty minutes to an hour after death, and it gradually becomes more pronounced until ten to twelve hours after death. The discolorations may shift a bit between the fourth and twelfth hours if, for example, the body is turned. In this case, the livor mortis is more diffuse, but you can see where in some places he was hanging with his weight on several branches underwater, while other places he was simply hanging in the water. In fact, the discolorations are also visible where the line contacted his neck."

  Trokic thought about the clothes they'd just removed from the boy's body, the dirt on his coat. In all likelihood, he'd been dragged over the ground and thrown into the creek, where he floated until getting tangled up in the branches where he'd been found. In the meantime, though, all evidence of what had taken place was covered with snow.

  Bach's experienced hands now began the part of the examination that Trokic dreaded the most.

  "There are no visible abrasions in the mouth, anus, or genitals indicative of sexual abuse," Bach confided to his recorder.

  Trokic felt a hint of relief, of hope. That Lukas had been spared that atrocity.

  "That surprises me," Lisa mumbled. "Even though he had all his clothes on. I expected something. Some sign. Sperm on his body or clothes."

  "Did you?" Bach said. "That’s probably because you don't see the cases of child abuse I examine. But I'm not finished here yet. Some sexual assaults don't leave visible signs, and that includes assaults on boys. I'll be taking samples for the microscope; we'll check them for sperm and DNA."

  "Even if we don't find anything, that doesn't mean the motive isn't sexual," Trokic said. "Maybe he didn't have time to go through with it, or maybe his sexual satisfaction came from inflicting pain on the boy. We've seen examples of sadistic pedophilia, and anyway, we can't rule out any possibility. But let's wait for the results before we start theorizing so much."

  The male student pointed at the boy. "There's something yellow in his hair, up by the neck."

  Bach picked up a pair of tweezers and plucked out a bit of something almost too tiny to see. "This is for you, too. It slipped by us yesterday."

  Trokic stepped over for a closer look. "What is it?"

  "Yarn, possibly several different fibers."

  "From a rug, or clothes?"

  "Who knows?" Bach did his best to scratch under his chin with a plastic glove on his hand. "That's for your fiber expert to say."

  * * *

  Bach concentrated for an hour on examining the victim's inner parts. Trokic stared stiffly at the pathologist's hands while trying not to let the sounds get to him. Bach always seemed calm. How many child autopsies had he done over the years? He was one of the few pathologists in the country qualified to perform forensic examinations on homicides, and therefore a child murdered in this part of the country would end up on his table. And Bach had been doing this for a long, long time. At least twenty years, Trokic calculated. His father had also been a professor in forensic medicine and had written several textbooks on the subject, and recently his twenty-four-year-old daughter, Christiane, who was studying medicine, had announced she would follow in their footsteps.

  "There's soot in the lower respiratory passage," Bach said. "I'm collecting a sample to determine the carboxyhemoglobin levels in the blood. That will tell us just how serious the smoke inhalation was. But together with the burns…well, at least for the moment, we know it was serious."

  "When do we get the results on that?" Trokic asked.

  "I'll send the sample to Forensics right now; we’ll know later on today."

  Trokic mulled that over. If the smoke inhalation really was so bad, why didn't he die from it? Why did he also have to be strangled? It didn't add up.

  * * *

  Trokic waited for Tønnies to take the last photos, then he packed everything up to take to the technical center. He was exhausted, and his eyes were tired from the bright lights that left spots in his eyes. Bach removed his plastic gloves and was
hed his hands.

  "I'm expecting an oral report from our radiologist at any moment."

  "Radiologist?" Lisa said.

  "We did a CAT scan before the autopsy. I'll call you as soon as I've spoken to him. I understand you haven't spoken to the family's physician. But I think you should compare the results of the scanning with information from his physician to get a picture of his medical history."

  "We will," Trokic said.

  "And about the bruises I spotted. They're old. Someone grabbed hold of him, hard. If I were you, I’d check out the parents."

  Chapter Nine

  Trokic and Lisa drove past the wintry fields to Mårslet on the small, winding roads the snowplow had yet to clear while listening to a CD of Mute Math playing "Chaos" at a tolerably low volume. He'd chosen them for Lisa, who apparently hated everything else he listened to. But she'd said something almost nice about the New Orleans band, who played a breakneck, energetic style of rock. Had almost admitted that she liked them. "They're not unbearable," she'd said, after sighing.

  The land outside the car windows stood in sharp contrast to the bustling city Trokic lived in. They had just passed a barrow, Jelshøj, the highest point in Århus. It also marked the city limits. He thought about how different Mårslet was from the ghetto he'd grown up in. The people living within the small town's postal code had the highest average income in the entire district. Not because of any concentration of great wealth, but because there was a complete lack of social housing. An air of idyllic charm still prevailed over the town.

  Not that he would trade houses with any of the four thousand residents. True, the center of Århus was only twenty minutes away by the little orange local train, Oddergrisen, but he needed the chaos, noise, the ethnic, social, and cultural diversity. Out here, there were no contrasts.

  Now the town was in a temporary state of panic. Extreme panic. Residents in emotional states ranging from uneasy to terrified had been tying up Agersund's phone that morning, wanting news of what was happening in the case. Parents refused to let their children out of the house before the killer was caught, and an elderly self-appointed spokesman for the town had blamed the mayor for all the "bands of hoodlums running around the country."

  * * *

  It was a short drive to Lukas's parents. Lisa had been going through the surveillance videos all night, and he noticed her dozing off in spite of the music. Her long, sleek legs were curled up on the seat. She looked peaceful. Her strong features, ever-changing hairstyles (currently blonde with light purple stripes), height, and lack of female curves had never attracted him, but for a moment, he thought she was almost beautiful. Lisa was very sensitive, and Trokic couldn't understand why such a person would end up in the police, not to mention in a unit like her previous one, which dealt with child pornography and pedophiles. Had she been searching for the limits of human degeneration and evil? To him, that was like looking for a foothold in quicksand. Maybe she'd seen something she just couldn't handle, and that's why she left the National Police. Or maybe she’d realized that the boundaries of evil were continually being pushed further out.

  He parked in front of the parents' house. "Rise and shine, Kornelius."

  As he reached to open the car door, his phone buzzed in his jeans pocket. Bach.

  "I'll send a preliminary autopsy report to you in a bit. I just spoke with the radiologist and looked at the scans. At some point in the past, he suffered a transverse fracture of his right arm."

  "Which means?"

  "Apart from the fact it was broken, it's exactly the type of fracture that results from a blow to the arm. It should be looked into. I also spoke with Forensics; they say the carboxyhemoglobin level was around twenty-seven percent."

  "And that means?"

  "It indicates symptoms of smoke inhalation. Anything much higher would mean loss of consciousness. We've also had a look at the first results from the samples; there's no sign of sperm. We're waiting for the final results from Genetics."

  Trokic thought for a moment. Everything so far still pointed to the boy not being sexually assaulted.

  "Christiane says hello, too," Bach said with a hint of disapproval.

  Several years earlier, the pathologist had brought his teenage daughter along to police headquarters, and for some unknown reason, she'd fallen for Trokic, who hadn't taken the thin, much-too-young girl seriously. He'd been firm with her when she kept saying she loved him, and he returned her many letters. Now, he wasn't sure how to take her sending him a hello. He hoped–prayed–that she'd moved on.

  * * *

  Finally, they got out of the car, and Trokic got his first look at Skellegården. The air was cold and crisp; thousands of ice-glazed twigs tinkled in the trees. The place looked like an old farm from the early 1900s, and Trokic guessed that the surrounding land had been broken up into plots. All that was left was the farmhouse and an old stable. It was divided into four separate residences, three of them in the farmhouse, the fourth in the stable. The grounds were spacious, around two thousand square meters.

  The house was a splotchy dark yellow with large lavender windows, and the paint was peeling in several places, especially around the black foundation. Strips of lacquer hung from the wood front door. The fiber-cement tile roof needed replacing.

  Lukas had lived with his parents and little brother on the second floor. Why did they live in this dump instead of buying their own house? The parents may not have been in the top income bracket, but anyway it was odd–as if they’d moved here after they were married and somehow got stuck.

  * * *

  Trokic had trouble imagining a grief-stricken Jytte Mørk throwing out the two officers who'd given them the horrible news. The woman sitting across from him was slim, ant-like. She was in her mid-40s, with a sharply-chiseled face swollen from hours of crying. Her graying reddish-brown hair, a bit darker than Lukas's, hadn't been anywhere near a brush in the past few days. Her pale eyes showed traces of makeup, and they continually locked onto some object in the room and glazed over, as if she were playing something over and over in her mind. She moved slowly, stiffly. Trokic felt something stirring in his stomach, and for a moment, he sensed their intense pain.

  Karsten Mørk sat beside her in silence with crossed arms. Was he afraid of collapsing emotionally, or did the police make him uncomfortable? Trokic felt uneasy himself, more so all the time, about suspecting the parents. They might have lain awake all night with numberless scenarios of what had happened running through their heads. Their son put on his coat, waved goodbye to the aide working in the club, walked down the trail by the school and out onto the street–that much was known. But then what? And how many monstrous acts had they imagined in the past few days with the same grisly ending?

  Trokic began by explaining in layman's terms the results of the autopsy. He emphasized that there was no sign of sexual assault. Jytte Mørk began crying again, sobbing noiselessly, gasping for breath as she clutched her jogging pants. She squeezed her eyes shut as if she wanted the world to disappear. Lisa reached into her pocket for a tissue and handed it to her.

  "Tell us about Lukas," Trokic began. "Could he have gone along with someone voluntarily?"

  The parents stared at each other, searching each other's eyes for an answer.

  "He wouldn't have gone with a stranger," the father said. "I'm sure of that. He was a little…well, not easy to get to know. That's what the people at the daycare center said when he started there. It took a little time for him to open up to people. I just can't imagine him going along with someone voluntarily. He must've been kidnapped, in a car. And drugged. Just like that girl in Belgium–"

  He realized his mistake, but it was too late; his wife's hand flew up and covered her mouth at the reference to the tragedy. His eyes darted around the room before resting a few moments first on the wall, then the heavy oak bookcase filled with books from the 70s, then the glass coffee table, and finally on a point beside Trokic's chest.

  Trokic made a note and
reminded himself that they should ask around, that maybe someone had noticed a suspicious car shortly after Lukas left the after-school club.

  "You say he was reserved by nature. Did he usually keep to himself?"

  "No, he wasn't that way," Mørk said. "It was more that he sized people up before letting them in. He wasn't at all anti-social if that's what you mean. He was very happy. Very interested in things. We always talked about him being a lot smarter than us. Sometimes wise beyond his years, you could say."

  "And the day he disappeared, when was the last time you saw him?"

  "About eight that morning, right before he went to school. I mean, Jytte saw him, she sent him off. I'd already left for work."

  "Isn't it dark then?"

  "No, it's getting light, and anyway there are lights along the paths around here. He wasn't afraid; it's only a little way to school, and honestly, we felt it was safe enough to let him walk by himself. But now…"

  His voice broke, and he stared blankly out the window.

  After a few moments, Trokic asked, "Why didn't he bike to school?"

  Jytte Mørk took over. "Normally he biked around other times of the day, but I didn't like him biking on Obstrupvej in the mornings. Some people don't drive very carefully."

  "We're still looking for the place where he could have been…burned." Trokic could barely say the word. "You told the constable he didn't have a cell phone, but he had a school bag with a ladybug on the back. We haven’t found it or the blue cap he was wearing. He did have it on that morning, right?"

  "Yes."

  "And that's all he was carrying around? You know, like, did he have a Game Boy, for instance? His coat pockets were empty when we found him, except for a few rocks and paper clips."