Farewell to Freedom Read Free Page A

Høyer asked.
    â€œI’ve got a homicide. A young woman was found murdered in Vesterbro last night.”
    Høyer raised an eyebrow to show his interest.
    â€œThere’s not much to tell right now. An anonymous tip to the police. They found her down by Skelbækgade somewhere near the entrance to the Hotel and Restaurant Management School.”
    â€œSo it’s a prostitute,” Kvist said, leaning back.
    Camilla ignored him.
    â€œThe woman’s throat was slit, and Suhr has a team on the case,” Camilla continued. “They haven’t IDed her yet. But they’re willing to say—off the record—that they suspect she was from Eastern Europe.”
    â€œYeah, well, plenty of them are these days,” Kvist said, cutting her off, suggesting that he go to Silkeborg to talk to some of the victims who had had their expensive artwork stolen. “I’d really like to follow up on this story,” he said.
    Camilla raised her voice trying to hold her boss’s attention. “She was no more than twenty.”
    The editor-in-chief sat in silence for a moment, nodding as he thought. “Go ahead and write it up, Camilla, but keep it to two columns.”
    â€œIt sounds like a really brutal killing,” Camilla continued, frustrated that Høyer didn’t think the story deserved more space. “It could be a big story, especially if we haven’t got anything else.”
    â€œBut we do have something else,” Kvist interrupted from the other side of the table, and it looked like Høyer agreed with him.
    â€œI’ll call the forensic pathologist who examined the body last night. If it was a professional hit—”
    Camilla was interrupted by her cell phone ringing. She was just about to switch it off to continue her argument and make sure her story didn’t get buried by the art heist; but when she saw it was Markus calling, she pushed her chair back from the table, quietly answered, and told her son to make it quick. At the same time she kept her eyes on Høyer, who was asking Kvist to present his suggestions for the paper.
    â€œWhat do you mean, a baby?” Camilla asked, speaking into her cell and asking her son to speak up a bit. “In the church? When you were on your way to Nørreport Station?”
    Camilla could hear the irritation in her own voice. As her son’s words continued to spill out, she took a deep breath and calmly asked him to repeat everything he’d just said, but this time a little slower. Even though she could hear Kvist pushing his art heist, she turned to face the wall so she could concentrate on what her son was saying. Only now did she notice the quaver in his voice and how upset he seemed amid his disjointed sentences. She let him go on until he’d gotten everything out that he needed to say.
    â€œI’ll be right there,” she said, ending the call.
    The others at the conference table could see the change in Camilla and curiously looked at her as she returned her attention to their editorial meeting.
    â€œI’ve got to go. My son and his friend found an abandoned baby on the floor of Stenhøj Church.”

3
    D OWN ON G OTHERSGADE , C AMILLA WAVED HER HAND FOR A TAXI . The first three were occupied and drove right past, so she started jogging along Rosenborg Castle Gardens toward Copenhagen’s Nørreport Station, keeping her eye out for a cab.
    â€œStenhøj Allé,” she said when a minivan with its taxi light on veered to the curb to pick her up. The morning traffic had subsided as they headed out toward Frederiksberg, the well-to-do neighborhood of Copenhagen where she lived, but she still thought they were going too slow. She knew she ought to be using this time to put in a call to the Institute of Forensic Medicine and locate the forensic pathologist who had been out to Skelbækgade last night, but she couldn’t concentrate with all the adrenaline coursing