The Killing Forest Read Online Free Page B

Gamst during the arrest at the gamekeeper’s house. She also realized in that split second that she didn’t regret a thing, even though it could affect her career.
    “Hi, Mik,” she said, her voice calm. She sat down.
    “We have a case here that I’m passing on to you,” he began. Nothing in his voice hinted that she’d poured out the tale of her shattered life to him the day before.
    Louise immediately pulled herself together; after all, she headed up the Special Search Agency of the Search Department.
    “Why, what is it?” she asked.
    “It’s a missing person report from a few weeks ago, but there’s something suspicious about it. Rønholt asked me to give it to you,” Mik hastened to add, as if he was apologizing. “A boy from Hvalsø disappeared.”
    She groaned inside. She didn’t need more ghosts from her past creeping into her life, and certainly no more cases involving people she’d known while growing up.
    “The boy’s name is Sune Frandsen,” Mik continued. “He’s the son of Frandsen the butcher. The one with the white van.”
    Louise stiffened. The butcher. She had reported him for illegal sale of meat and dealing on the black market. Actually, all she had done was tell Mik about it, because she never could catch the men who once had been part of Klaus’s circle. He’d probably escaped with a warning, she thought.
    “Okay,” she managed to say. “I didn’t even know he had a son.”
    “Sune disappeared on his fifteenth birthday, which was about three weeks ago,” Mik said. “And we haven’t found a trace of him. He left his wallet and phone in his room. The family is already in a bad situation—his mother is dying from cancer. That’s had a big impact on the boy.”
    Louise jotted notes down on a pad.
    “He was in the eighth grade at Hvalsø,” Mik continued. “The principal of the school and the boy’s parents are afraid that he ran away from home to take his own life. His father describes him as unusually quiet before he disappeared. As I’ve said, he was very unhappy about his mother’s illness; he was having trouble dealing with it. The school reports that Sune had skipped a lot of classes the past few months, and that his classwork generally wasn’t going well. Apparently that wasn’t like him.”
    Louise nodded. She was well aware that boys committed suicide more often than girls. Especially when carrying around this type of emotional burden.
    “I still don’t see why you and Rønholt decided to give us the case.”
    “Sune’s class teacher has just been in to see me,” Mik said. “He brought along a newspaper, Midtsjællands Folkeblad . It’s a local rag. Delivered door-to-door,” he added, as if the explanation was needed.
    Louise knew the paper, which her parents got.
    “He showed me a photo of a few fox cubs from an article in the paper’s nature section. They were taken from one of those photo hides that nature photographers use, so they don’t scare the animals away. The cameras take pictures automatically; they have a motion sensor or an invisible infrared ray. In other words, the photographer wasn’t there when the picture was taken.”
    “Okay,” Louise mumbled, nudging him on.
    “The fox cubs were, of course, in the foreground, but far back to the right there’s a boy sitting on the ground beside a small campfire. The teacher is absolutely certain it’s Sune.”
    “Okay then, so all you have to do is find out where the photo was taken. Then drive out and bring him home,” Louise said. She still didn’t understand how this involved her unit.
    “It’s not that simple,” Mik said. “Yesterday, when the paper came out, the teacher drove to the parents’ home to show them the photo, and it ended up with him being thrown out of the house, literally. Sune’s father ordered him to keep out of the family’s business. He refused to look at the photo, and he didn’t want to hear that his son could be hiding, in need of help.”
    “How much