Farewell to Freedom Read Online Free PDF

someone who talks louder than they do, so to speak, explains that these are the rules, they fall in line accordingly.”
    â€œSo who’s controlling the girls this way?” Louise asked next.
    â€œThe crime bosses. The ones who work with the Nigerian prostitutes, the Roma gypsies, and the ones from Eastern Europe. There are girls walking around out there …” He tilted his head toward the window. “… who have no idea how many months there are in a year, or how many hours in a day. Those kinds of girls aren’t going to rebel against someone who gives them an order. They do whatever they’re told.
    â€œThey’re here for only one reason, and that’s to make money,” Mikkelsen continued. “Either for themselves or for the crime bosses who force them into prostitution. But whether they’re here of their own free will or they’ve been forced into it, most of them dream of being able to put a little aside or to send money home to their families. When there’s a middleman involved, there’s not much money left over, so sometimes a few of them try to go it on their own.”
    â€œDo you think that’s what happened?” asked Louise, leaning forward a bit.
    â€œIt’s possible,” Mikkelsen said, nodding.
    Louise sat in silence for a moment, lost in her own thoughts, trying to put together a scenario that would explain the killing.
    â€œWell, should we head out and see if anyone has shown up who might recognize the woman?” Lars suggested, interrupting her thoughts.
    Mikkelsen stood up. “Let’s do that,” he said. “But just think of it as getting some exercise, because I don’t think our odds are all that good. If this is what I think, the girl didn’t want to follow orders. So the only motive for the murder is to send a signal or a warning to the other girls, to show them what happens if they don’t obey and do what they’re told. And those guys do their job so thoroughly that there won’t be any evidence for us to find, not even if we roll out our entire technical arsenal.”
    Mikkelsen put on a black leather jacket, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his desk drawer and stuffed it in his inside pocket.
    â€œAnd if anyone happens to be unlucky enough to have seen something, you can bet they’re not going to feel like picking the perpetrators out of a lineup,” he added.

    â€œBut it is still possible that the victim was Danish and that the perp was a john, don’t you think?” Lars asked as they made their way downstairs.
    â€œI doubt it.” Mikkelsen’s voice was quite firm. “If so, there would have been some indication of emotion. Not the kind of emotion that makes married people kill each other, but the more ambiguous kind that can pop up suddenly between a man and a prostitute: feelings of domination, rage, or possessiveness. We see it all the time when we pick up hookers who’ve been beaten. But there was no emotion in this case. She was slaughtered like an animal.”
    Out on Halmtorvet, Louise squinted in the bright sunlight. They started walking down Sønder Boulevard. There were fewer cars now that the street had been closed to through traffic, but there weren’t many pedestrians or bikers out either. Louise spotted a young drug addict leaning against the door in an entryway. The woman’s purse had slipped out of her grasp and was lying on the sidewalk. Louise guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She was wearing stylish clothes: tight jeans and a short, light-colored leather jacket. Her short brown hair was disheveled, and at the moment she seemed to be going through hell. Violent spasms racked her body. She leaned her head against the rough bricks of the building and clung to the door, her fingers trying to locate one of the doorbells. Convulsions shook her body again, and she doubled over, gasping for air.
    Mikkelsen went over to her and