Part 8 (1/2)

”h.e.l.lo,” she said, offering a hand. ”Detective Louise Rick. I'm with the Holbaek Police Department.”

The man shook her hand and introduced himself.

”Michael Mogensen,” he said, seeming a bit hesitant.

”I know,” Louise said, smiling. ”I was just looking at the pictures you've been taking of Dicta. Those are some big plans the two of you have been cooking up there.”

He nodded a little self-consciously.

”I'd really like to help her. It would be fun for me as well if she got discovered and became famous.”

”I noticed that you also knew Samra.”

”Yes, a little,” he said. ”I promised Dicta I'd drive her out to Honsehalsen cemetery so she can lay a bouquet of flowers and light a candle.”

The door behind Louise opened.

”I'll be right there,” Dicta yelled, disappearing back into the house. A moment later she returned, wearing a jacket and ready to go.

Louise went to her car and smiled at them as the photographer gallantly opened the station wagon's door for the young woman.

10.

WHEN LOUISE GOT BACK TO THE POLICE STATION, SHE MET Samra's father and a woman in the hallway. She guessed it must be the mother, Sada, because she was wearing a headscarf and keeping her eyes stiffly trained on the floor. They were following Soren Velin to the corner office where Bengtsen and both interpreters were ready for them. Louise nodded to them and hurried to her own office. Once there, she cautiously knocked before entering and found her partner in the middle of questioning Samra's older brother. Without interrupting, she took a seat and listened in.

”Where'd you get the car from?” Mik asked.

”From a friend, like I said!”

There was no trace of anger in the young man's tone, just a stubbornness that told them they shouldn't count on finding out any more than he'd already told them.

”But it isn't your car?” Mik continued.

Samra's brother shook his head.

”Does that mean other people might have used it in the last week?”

There was no response.

Mik Rasmussen leaned forward and asked, ”Did you use the car Tuesday night?”

Hamid nodded. ”I wasn't anywhere near Honsehalsen.”

His Danish was very good considering he'd only been living in the country for four years, Louise noted, although he did have a tough time p.r.o.nouncing Honsehalsen.

”I'm not saying you were,” Mik interrupted. ”I really just want to know if anyone else might have driven that car out there.”

Samra's brother shook his head.

”Did your sister have a boyfriend?”

Mik had changed topics so quickly that it seemed as if Hamid needed a moment to reboot before he answered the new question. He shook his head.

”Who do you hang out with?”

”People from school.”

They had determined that he went to trade school, and in addition to a morning job where his father worked, he also had an after-school job at the local Kvickly supermarket. Ruth was already working on getting a list of his cla.s.smates in case they needed to talk to them.

Louise leaned back to listen in on the questioning session. She was surprised that her partner was being so aggressive with his questioning. Louise was more a fan of the cognitive interview method, in which you guided the subject through an explanation in his own words at his own pace. She had always found that more productive. But every now and then it just failed to get anything out of a subject, and then of course you had to be more aggressive.

”Does it bother you when girls have male friends?” Mik asked, changing topics again.

”Why the h.e.l.l would I care about that? Girls can have male friends. What kind of silly preconceptions do you have?”

”So you feel that way even when your sister is involved?” The tone the question was asked in was filled with a confrontational sarcasm.

There was a bang as Hamid angrily slapped his hand against the desk instead of responding, and in a way Louise couldn't blame him for losing his temper if the interview had been going like this from the beginning.

”Was your sister dating anyone?” Mik asked again, in a more subdued tone.

The brother shook his head and hid his face in his hands as he shrugged his shoulders.

Mik set down the pen he had been holding in his hand. ”That's enough for now,” he said and asked Hamid to wait until the interview had been typed out so he could read through it and sign it. Once that was done, Mik said, ”It may be that we need to talk to you again.” He followed Samra's brother to the hallway and held out his hand, but the young man ignored it and just scurried off.

”I guarantee you that got to him,” Louise exclaimed as Mik stepped back in and closed the door.

”He spent the first half hour evading everything I asked about, so I did that to get a reaction,” Mik responded, and Louise got the sense that he had taken her comment as criticism. Instead of getting into it, she started focusing on her computer to avoid spoiling the mood just because they approached things differently.

”All right. I admit that he got to me too,” Mik said after they had each sat staring at their screens for a few minutes. ”But I'm having a hard time accepting his att.i.tude toward immigrant girls and their male acquaintances. There must be a fundamental acceptance of what's permitted for girls. And yet here it seems like everything is divided into two categories. There's plenty of tolerance toward immigrant girls in general, but that tolerance is severely curtailed when it has to do with the female members of your own family.”

Louise thought about that for a moment and then nodded. ”She was kind of viewed as the family's property and then suddenly that turns into something else,” she said, remembering what a sociologist from the University of Southern Denmark had explained to her when she was on the Norrebro case.

”That's really the crux of it when you're talking about honor and shame,” Louise continued after a moment. ”In families where those concepts are significant, people don't care that much about honor or shame when it doesn't have to do with their immediate family members. And in those cases when something does happen to offend the family's honor, it doesn't become dangerous until someone from the neighborhood starts talking about it. As long as the problem is only known within the family's four walls, no one has to react to it. It's so strange that there's such a huge difference between the world in general and the inner circle.”

Mik watched her while she talked, and she could tell that he wasn't putting much stock in her explanation. But that was one of the important things she had learned during the case she had just wrapped up. It wasn't until it became publicly known that the family couldn't control their own daughter that the girl had to die. In the case in Norrebro, the death sentence had been p.r.o.nounced by an uncle and his three sons. They wanted the girl killed before any of the other girls in the family became infected by her loose behavior.

”The world is a strange place. I don't understand that way of thinking,” Mik admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

Louise smiled at him and said that there weren't many Danes who did.

”Jette Petersen is here,” Ruth announced from the doorway. She asked if they were ready for her and when they wanted the cla.s.smates to come in.