A group of students spotted Jansen across the courtyard and assumed that he was a historical exhibit. So they walked closer, marveling at all the wonderful little details that made him seem lifelike: the color of his flesh, the horror on his face, the texture of his sandy-brown hair as it blew in the wind.
They crowded around him, begging to have their picture taken with the display. That is until one of them felt a drop. A single drop. That was all it took. One drop of blood and chaos erupted. Kids were wailing. Parents were screaming. Teachers scurried for help.
The local police were called to the scene but were in over their heads. They were used to car accidents and petty crimes, not murders. Certainly nothing of this magnitude. Yet that was to be expected in a quiet place like Helsingør. It sat on the northwestern coast of Sjaelland Island across the øresund from Hälsingborg, Sweden, away from the city life of Copenhagen. The last time anyone was brutally killed here was back in 1944, and that had been done by the Nazis.
Still, they shouldn’t have made the mistakes that they made. Some of them were inexcusable.
The first squad arrived by boat, landing on the same shore as the killers. Since the castle’s beach was private, the cops should’ve cordoned off the area, protecting all the information that was scattered in front of them. Clues about the murder. The number of assailants. Their approximate sizes. Their time of departure. All of it was there in the sand, just waiting to be found. But not for very long, because the commanding officer failed to think ahead, opting to sprint across the beach like a soldier at Normandy, soon followed by the rest of his men.
In a flash, the evidence was buried.
Of course, their next error was far worse. The type of screwup that occurs when people are crying, sirens are blaring, and there’s no time to think. When the cops reached the body, they heard the story about the dripping blood and assumed that Jansen was still alive. His temperature should’ve told them otherwise. Same with the color of his skin. But as it was, they ripped the cross out of the ground, hoping to bring him back to life with CPR, yet all they managed to do was destroy evidence. Crucial evidence. The kind of evidence that could’ve stopped the killers before they could strike again.
Ironically, their effort to save a life guaranteed that others would be killed.
Nick Dial was an American, and that made him very unpopular in certain parts of the globe. So did his career. He ran the newly formed Homicide Division at Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization), the largest international crime-fighting organization in the world, which meant he dealt with death all over the globe.
Simply put, he coordinated the flow of information between police departments anytime a murder investigation crossed national boundaries. All told he was in charge of 179 different countries — filled with billions of people and dozens of languages — yet had a budget that was dwarfed by an American school district.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Interpol is their role in stopping crime. They rarely send agents to investigate a case. Instead they have local offices called National Central Bureaus in all the member countries, and the NCBs monitor their territory and report pertinent information to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France. From there the facts are entered into a central database that can be accessed via the Interpol’s computer network. Fingerprints, DNA, terrorist updates, the works. All of it available twenty-four hours a day.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t always enough. Sometimes the head of a division (Drugs, Counterfeiting, Terrorism, etc.) was forced to hop on a plane and take control of a case. Possibly to cut through red tape. Or to handle a border dispute. Or to deal with the media. All the things that Nick Dial hated to do. He figured in his line of work the only thing that really mattered was justice. Correcting a wrong in the fairest way possible. That was his motto, the creed that he lived by. He figured if he did that, then all the other bullshit would take care of itself.
Dial arrived in Helsingør in the late afternoon. He didn’t know much about the case — other than someone had been crucified and the president of Interpol wanted him there — but that was the way he preferred it. He liked forming conclusions based on personal observations, instead of relying on secondhand information.
Most investigators would’ve rushed to examine the body, but that wasn’t the way Dial worked. He preferred to understand his surroundings before he dealt with the crime, especially when he was in an unfamiliar country. If the murder had been committed in France, he would’ve gone right to the corpse because he had lived there for the past ten years and knew how French people thought.
But here, he was a little unsure of the landscape. He needed to understand Denmark — and Danes in general — before he could understand the crime. So instead of studying the victim, Dial headed down a long corridor and searched for someone to talk to. Not to interrogate, but someone to chat with. Someone to give him the lay of the land. It took three attempts until he found someone who spoke English.
‘Excuse me,’ he said as he flashed his Interpol badge. ‘May I ask you a few questions?’
The man nodded, half intimidated by Dial’s credentials and half by his stare. Dial was in his early forties and had a face that looked like it was chiseled out of granite. Clean lines, thick cheekbones, green eyes. Short black hair with just a hint of gray. Not overly handsome, yet manly as hell. Black stubble covered his features even though it wasn’t enough to conceal his chin. His massive, movie-star chin. It sat at the bottom of his face like a tribute to Kirk Douglas.
‘So, what’s a guy have to do to get a cup of coffee around here?’
The man smiled and led Dial into a tiny office. Work schedules and pictures of Kronborg decorated the walls. A metal desk sat in the corner. Dial took a seat just inside the door and was handed a mug of coffee. ‘So, I take it you work here?’
‘For over forty years. I’m the senior tour guide.’
Dial grinned. He had hit the jackpot. ‘You know, I’ve traveled all over the world to every continent on the globe, but I’ve never seen a country like this. Denmark is simply gorgeous.’
The man beamed with pride. ‘It’s the best-kept secret in Europe.’
‘Well, if I promise to keep my mouth shut, will you tell me about it?’
Their conversation went on for ten minutes, filled with the facts and figures about the area. Dial spoke every once in a while, gently steering the conversation in the direction he wanted, but for the most part kept quiet. ‘Out of curiosity,’ he asked, ‘what type of tourists do you get?’
‘Mostly people between the ages of forty and sixty, equal mix of men and women. Though we tend to get a lot of students during the school year.’
‘What about nationalities? Are most of your tourists from Denmark?’
He shook his head. ‘Just the opposite. Most of them are from the surrounding countries. Sweden, Germany, Austria, Norway. We get a lot of Brits because of Shakespeare.’
‘Shakespeare? What does he have to do with anything?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
Dial shook his head, even though he was very aware of the Shakespearean connection. Of course he wasn’t about to tell the tour guide that. Better to play dumb and get the story from him.
‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes place in the castle at Elsinore.’
‘Elsinore? Is that somewhere around here?’
‘You’re in Elsinore! Elsinore is Helsingør. Hamlet took place here! Sometimes we even give performances in the courtyard. You should stop by and see one.’