The Lost Woman

Book 9: Louise Rick Series

by Sara Blaedel

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Suspense

Synopsis

Following the #1 international bestsellers The Forgotten Girls and The Killing Forest, Inspector Louise Rick—head of the elite Special Search Agency in Denmark’s National Police Department—returns in Sara Blaedel’s newest crime thriller.

The Lost Woman

A housewife is the target of a shocking, methodical killing. Shot with a hunting rifle through her kitchen window, the woman is dead before she hits the ground. Though murdered in England, it turns out that the woman, Sofie Parker, is a Danish citizen—one who’s been missing for almost two decades—so Louise Rick is called on to the case. Then the police discover that the woman, Sophie, had been reported missing eighteen years ago by none other than Eik, Louise Rick’s police colleague and lover. Impulsive as ever, Eik rushes to England, and ends up in jail on suspicion of Sofie’s murder. Unsettled by the connection, and sick with worry for Eik, it falls to Louise to find the killer in what will become her most controversial case yet…

Release date: February 7, 2017

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

Prologue

Limbs snap under his feet as he wrestles his way deeper into the underbrush. Twilight closes in around him, as water from the drizzling rain runs off his leather jacket. Lights are on in the kitchen and in a few rooms toward the back of the house. He sees her through the window, standing at the sink in the warm light, her hands busy under the running water.

The damp January fog shields him from sight as he leans forward. There is something sensual in the way she dries her hands on her apron—slowly, painstakingly, yet with a certain energy—before grabbing her long hair and putting it up in a bun behind her neck.

He feels his sorrow, his loss.

Her daughter walks into the kitchen. She shrugs out of her short leather jacket and tosses it on the chair by the oval kitchen table. Fifteen, sixteen years old, he guesses. He’d spotted her earlier when she arrived home from school, walking up from the street in her uniform, a bag slung over her shoulder, eyes glued to the ground. Silent, sulky, teenager-ish, he’d thought, as he hid in his car. Yet beautiful in an aloof, introverted way.

Still at the sink, the woman occasionally turns to speak; she laughs at what the teenager says. Through his binoculars, he focuses on her narrow face, studying and committing to memory her feminine features, the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles. He wants to remember every last detail.

One of the girl’s shirt straps falls down over her shoulder. He sees her prominent collarbone and the attractive curve below her throat. Taking a few steps closer, he pushes aside a few branches. The mother laughs again and turns. Her back is to him, a silhouette in the window.

Though he’s outside, it almost feels as if he’s part of what’s going on in the kitchen. He imagines the odors from the stove and their lighthearted conversation, how they talk about their days in that uniquely intimate way of a mother and daughter.

He steps out of the brush, closer now. The field is open behind him, as the duplexes stand shoulder to shoulder behind the main road and the half-empty parking lot of the pub. The crowd has thinned out and the rain is keeping people indoors. Lights are now on in the surrounding houses, and once in a while someone drives down the narrow street, but everyone seems focused on getting out of the rain.

A car goes by slowly. Quickly, he steps back into the brush, his heart pounding. He curses under his breath when a branch scratches his cheek and warm blood runs down his chin. The car’s headlights narrowly miss exposing him. He closes his eyes and holds his breath a moment. He exhales, heavily. Easy now. Suddenly, he feels the cold; he’s freezing in spite of his warm coat and gloves, the chill penetrates deep inside his body. Everything about him is wet and cold after waiting first in the car, then in the rain. He should have remembered to wear thermal socks.

He ducks instinctively when the woman’s husband walks into the kitchen carrying a bottle of wine. The man says something to his wife and gestures in seeming irritation at the daughter. Then he moves toward her and pushes her shirt strap back onto her shoulder.

Though he can’t hear a word of what they’re saying, it’s easy to read the girl’s reaction. Her face darkens, and she screams at her father, turns on her heel, and storms out. He can almost hear the door slam.

The father opens an upper cabinet door and grabs two glasses. Opens the wine. The woman still stands at the sink, pouring boiling water from the pot she took off the stove. Chills run down his spine when she suddenly looks up and out through the steam, as if she has spotted him there in the twilight, or somehow senses his presence. The steam fogs up the window, the grayish film transforming her into a moving outline. It evaporates quickly, however, and once more he sees her clearly.

In the drizzling rain, he lifts the stock of his gun to his shoulder, concentrates on sighting through the scope, takes a deep breath, and pulls the trigger. The bullet rams into the middle of her forehead, just above her eyes.

He watches the man’s reactions; it’s as if he’s in slow motion. The bottle of wine falls from his hand, and he turns to the shattered kitchen window and his wife, her blood gushing out and splattering him before she collapses onto the floor.

Seconds later, just as he is retreating into the underbrush, a door slams. He catches a glimpse of the teenage daughter standing on the step outside the front door. They both freeze for a second in the gray late-afternoon fog, then she sees the window and screams as she runs back into the house.

He backs his way out through the brush and walks rapidly to his car.

1

Louise Rick leaned back in her chair in the Search Department office and eyed her partner, who sat on the floor attending to Charlie. The retired police dog lay on his side, patiently allowing his paws to be cleaned of snow and road salt. Eik Nordstrøm rubbed him with a towel; he clipped the hairs between the pads of his paws and smeared them with Vaseline, praising the dog constantly until Louise at last rolled her eyes and shook her head.

A book about dog care lay on Eik’s desk.

Whoa, she thought. She hardly believed that a little snow on the street required this level of grooming. Never had she cleaned Dina’s paws of road salt or smeared them with Vaseline. If anyone had, it was Jonas. After all, her foster son was the one who’d loaned the book to Eik.

Watching the tender way the black-haired policeman nursed the big German shepherd, she had the realization that if he moved out of her apartment now, she would miss him terribly.

He scooted over and grabbed Charlie’s back paw.

Six months ago, Louise had been anxious about how it would go when her relatively new love—her partner, Eik—moved in with Jonas and her, while Louise’s friend Camilla stayed in Eik’s studio apartment in South Harbor with her husband, Frederik, and son, Markus. But it had worked out fine. So fine, in fact, that the thought of him moving back to his own apartment now felt all wrong.

Eik had come up with the idea that Camilla and Frederik stay at his place. They’d needed somewhere to live after their manor house near Roskilde had burned down. Markus had left for boarding school along with Jonas, so even though the place was small, it felt crowded only when he was home on weekends.

Louise suspected that Camilla and Frederik had actually grown tired of the manor house, with its high wainscoting and beautiful stucco ceilings, and wanted to move back to the city, though living in a five-hundred-square-foot space when they were used to ten thousand square feet had to be quite an adjustment. When Frederik left the hospital after the fire, he had made it clear that he wasn’t going to rebuild his childhood home. Louise understood why. Too much bad karma, too many strange old stories clung to the property, making escaping the past while living there very difficult.

But now they were moving on. They had just taken possession of a roomy penthouse in Frederiksberg, a few blocks from where Camilla and Markus lived before she met Frederik. The past six months had gone by so fast, however, that Louise and Eik hadn’t really talked about what they would do once his apartment was free again.

“I wonder what such an uptown dog will think about moving back to South Harbor,” she said, teasing him now.

“Yeah, the neighborhood probably isn’t his cup of tea.” Eik spoke without looking up, while working on the last paw. “You know how Charlie loves sniffing the fancy ladies on Allégade. Plus, there’re all his girlfriends in Frederiksberg Gardens.”

“Maybe,” Louise said. Eik got to his feet and tossed a treat to his now clean dog. “But Frederik and Camilla moved yesterday. And let me see…if I remember correctly, the deal was that you were only going to stay with me until they found another place.”

Eik was caught off guard for a moment, but then he smiled. “Oh, didn’t I tell you that Olle is coming by with his station wagon this afternoon to pick my things up?” He looked down at the big German shepherd. “And really, a dog needs to learn how to run around all sorts of places.”

He said this so offhandedly that Louise had to lower her eyes. Suddenly she went quiet inside. She didn’t want him to leave; living with Eik felt so natural, so secure.

“Hey!” He walked over and kissed her on the neck. “I’m not going anywhere. We just need to decide if we should keep the South Harbor apartment. Who knows? Maybe Jonas will want it someday, or maybe we should just get rid of it. But it’s so cheap to hang on to.”

The knot inside Louise loosened. He swiveled her chair around to him, and she stood and held him tightly. Losing him for a second, only to get him back, made her cling even harder as he pulled her blouse up. She breathed him in, the smell of leather, cigarettes, hair wax, and something indefinable yet unmistakable, an odor that was his and his only. She ran her hands down through his longish black hair, kissing him back.

Neither of them reacted in time when the door behind them opened. Rønholt stood in the doorway, mumbled an embarrassed apology, then stepped back and closed the door. He pounded on the door three times and cleared his throat before walking back in. “Would you be so kind as to step into my office?” As he turned to leave, he added, “Properly clothed, please.”

Ragner Rønholt had been the head of the Search Department for more than two decades. A year ago, he had snatched Louise away from Homicide. He was steadily approaching retirement age. No one knew when he planned to step down, but it was becoming clear he was looking forward to the third stage of life, with a lot of cultural travel and bicycle vacations around Europe. Louise had only a sketchy knowledge of his private life. She knew he wasn’t married, though he split his time between two steady woman friends. He invited Pytte to concerts in Denmark Radio’s new concert hall, and took her on vacations to major cities, while Didder thrived in the kitchen of her home in Skodsborg, where he played the role of handyman. He lived in a large apartment on Østbanegade, a street in an exclusive part of Copenhagen, and grew orchids on his windowsills.

The head of Homicide, Hans Suhr, had once called him a lone wolf and bon vivant, a man who had tailored his life to fit his desires. The Search Department director didn’t spend his days making concessions to others. He did the things he wanted to, when he wanted to.

“This can’t go on. But then you’re both aware of that, aren’t you?”

Louise and Eik sat in his office. On the wall behind the door hung three newly pressed white shirts wrapped in plastic from a dry cleaner on Vesterbrogade, and below them lay a pair of bicycle shoes Rønholt changed into before riding home on his new road bike. Standard equipment for a man approaching retirement. Though Louise had never seen him wearing a jersey from one of the teams in the Tour de France. Or cycling tights.

“Everyone knows you’re living together. We have to face the fact that one of you is going to have to transfer.”

Silence.

“For now, let’s just keep our eyes and ears open.” He reached for a paper on his desk. “There’s a position at the police station in Næstved, for example.”

He pushed the paper over to them. “I’m willing to listen to suggestions about how else we can solve this problem. Which one of you is open to trying something new?”

Again, neither of them spoke. Louise stood up and grabbed the paper, promising they would find a solution.

“He’s right, you know,” she said on the way back to the office. “We can’t be partners if we plan to keep living together. But Næstved? No way!”

“You know Rønholt, it’ll blow over.” Eik put his arm around her. “We’re a good team, and if people start talking, I’ll just go back to my old office.”

Louise raised her hand. “No. It’s no different for us than for anybody else here. We can’t be out there together.”

“All right, I surrender. We’ll find a way.” He closed the door to their office and patted Charlie. “You looking forward to tonight?”

Louise smiled. “Nick Cave is more your cup of tea, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a concert. I can’t wait! I talked to Camilla and Frederik. They’ll meet us in front of Vega a half hour before it starts, so we can grab a beer. Do you have the tickets?”

Eik lifted an eyebrow and stared at her. She got the drift; she was being too motherly. “Everything’s under control” was all he said, and then switched on his computer.

For a moment, she was flustered. They hadn’t yet sanded off all their rough edges, and she knew this type of thing would happen now and then as they settled into a life together. It was still mostly one long party for them, and she loved waking up beside him every morning and falling asleep with him every night. But a few times she had caught herself picking his black jeans up off the floor and laying them on a chair, and now she had run into one of his borders. Got it, she thought, as she focused again on the job opening.

“One of us will end up working outside of town if we don’t start asking around,” she said. “And since I’m the last one in, it’s only fair that I’m the one who leaves.”

Eik was standing now, pulling the dog leash from his coat pocket. “We’ll see.” It still didn’t sound as if he were taking this seriously. “I’m going to run down for a pack of smokes and walk the dog. Come on, Charlie.”

She heard him whistling down the hallway. Most likely Nick Cave, though she didn’t recognize the song.

2

February 1996

The voices had died down in the confirmation room. The teenagers sat still, listening to the priest talk about death being a natural part of life, about how God didn’t always let us know it was coming. Her husband excelled at getting restless adolescents to listen. Sofie had never quite figured out why. Maybe it was because they found what he said interesting. Or maybe the boys respected his success as coach of the sports club’s handball team, and they wanted to be on his good side now that it was moving up into a higher league before the tournament.

Stig had been on the junior national team before he became a priest and moved to town, and after he began coaching, she ran a concession stand at the arena. Thinking about it now, she smiled as she grabbed a pencil from the table, lifted her hair up into a bun, and stuck the pencil in. She arranged butter, thin wafers of chocolate, and sliced cheese on a platter, and filled a bread basket with freshly baked rolls.

“Okay, fresh bread right out of the oven,” she said, interrupting their confirmation studies as she entered the room. Stig smiled and waved her in. “There’s juice, and tea, too. The paper cups are in the cupboard.”

Refreshments were always served at the parsonage. She and Stig had discussed whether it might be seen as a type of bribery, but in the end, they’d decided they wanted visitors to feel welcome there, and besides, preparations for confirmation weren’t meant to be a punishment. The afternoon class got a sandwich or a dessert, while the early class was served breakfast.

While the teenagers ate, Sofie listened as a girl asked Stig if he believed in life after death. He answered that there was no way to stop life from ending. But no, he found no solace in the belief that a new life awaited on the other side. He took comfort in knowing that when the time came and God called you, it was because you were ready to leave this life. Even when death seemed unmerciful and abrupt. He believed the only thing waiting on the other side was heaven’s peace.

“And only God knows when the time is right for each person,” he said, when Sofie had emptied the bread basket.

The phone in the kitchen rang. Sofie smiled at Stig, closed the door behind her, and answered.

“Your mother won’t drink the protein drink I leave for her,” her mother’s home care aide jumped right in. “It’s not good, not at all. She’ll get even weaker and start aspirating again, and she’ll end up back in the hospital. You have to talk to her!”

“I’ll come over right now,” Sofie said. She turned off the oven and wet the dishtowel covering the rolls that were rising.

She was about to dig her boots out from under the mountain of teenage shoes when she noticed the open gun case. Which made her so mad, she could scream! Stig seldom irritated her, but this thoughtlessness, forgetting to lock up his hunting guns when the house was full of kids, was so typical of him.

“Will you please come out here and lock your muskets up,” she yelled to him through the door. Several of the boys snickered; she’d done this before, and it was always good for a laugh.

Not much was left of her mother. Less than a week ago, she had been released from the hospital after a serious case of pneumonia. Her white blood cell count had been sky high, and the infection had spread to her blood. Now she sat on the sofa with a blanket over her and a thick book on her lap. Was she reading the book, or did it simply give her a sense of dignity? Sofie had once caught her mother sitting with a book turned upside down.

She was sixty-seven, but after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she had gone downhill fast. Suddenly, she was an old woman. She also had arthritis in her hands, shoulders, and back. Sofie knew the pain was worse than her mother let on, and she couldn’t hide her exhaustion. The once-energetic woman had disappeared. She still cleaned her small apartment above the flower shop, but it was a far cry from back when she had kept her large house, mowed the acre of lawn, and washed the windows before driving down to shop—without anyone thinking a thing about it. It was as if the energy had seeped out of her.

“Ohhh, it is so irritating being old; I’m no good at it,” she often said. Her mother was now at the point where the day was a success if she had the energy to get out of bed and drink a cup of morning coffee while reading the newspaper.

It was okay to be a slow starter, as Sofie put it. “There’s nothing you absolutely have to do. It’s okay to slow down,” she said, when her mother felt terrible about being old and unable to do anything.

She kissed her mother on the cheek. “Mom, you have to sip on the protein drink, otherwise they’ll stick you back in the hospital.”

Her mother’s steely blue eyes had softened over the past year. “Oh, Sof. I don’t want to go on. You have to understand, my time has come, my strength is gone.”

“Let’s not get into that now, Mom.” Sofie walked out into the kitchen for the protein drink. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Sofie sat down beside her mother on the sofa. “And I’m not leaving before you drink this. Then I’ll go down to the pharmacy and pick up your medication. What do you need from the store?”

Her mother laid her hand on Sofie’s arm. “Honey…you said it yourself, can’t you hear? I can’t even walk down the street anymore.”

“It’s only for the time being. You just got home. Being in the hospital is exhausting.”

“No. This is my life now.” Her mother let her hand fall. “I’m not myself anymore.”

Sofie couldn’t hold back her tears. They’d had this talk many times, but it had never felt so serious, so close.

Her mother had made it clear that she wanted an out when she lost the will to live. They’d talked about it even before Sofie’s father died. In fact, Sofie had feared her mother would take her own life if her father went first. But it hadn’t happened; she hadn’t even spoken of it back then, though it was obvious how terribly she missed him.

A year after his death, Sofie had invited her mother out, and for an entire evening they had talked about the right to choose when someone no longer wants to go on.

“Of course it’s not something to be taken lightly,” her mother had said, to calm her daughter’s fears. “But life can take you to a place you don’t want to be, and that’s when I want to be allowed to end it. I promise you, though, I’ll hang on as long as I can.”
. . .