The Forgotten Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

quietly. “Hello!” She squatted down and protected her hand with the sleeve of her jacket asshe reached through the thorns to lift the branches aside. The woman’s pelvis was exposed and her lifeless body lay in a contorted position.
    “There’s a woman over here on the ground,” she yelled loudly without considering whether the children would sense that something was amiss. Then she got out her cell phone and called for an ambulance.
    The dispatcher at the emergency call center hesitantly admitted he was unfamiliar with the area. “The easiest way to find it is coming into Bistrup Forest from the road in Hvalsø,” she explained. “Then they just need to go straight past the forester’s house. I’ll walk up to the road so I can guide them the last bit of the way.”
    Louise couldn’t see the woman’s face, so she walked around to the other side of the bushes. The branches tore at her pants as she pushed through the scrub.
    The woman’s forehead was badly battered. It almost looked as if her head may have been knocked against a tree, she thought, looking at the woman’s eyes, which stared blindly up toward the treetops above the dense bushes.
    Louise didn’t need to check the pulse to know that the woman was no longer alive. She looked at her face. She was probably around her own age, she guessed, and heavyset. Her hair had been pulled up in a ponytail but only a little of it was still contained by the elastic band. Louise looked at a strand that had come loose.
    Which seemed to indicate that perhaps the woman had tried to escape and then the perpetrator had grabbed her long brown hair and pulled her back. The injuries to the woman’s face were so brutal that Louise immediately thought there must have been rage involved. This victim had been beaten to a pulp.
    Louise took a few steps back then stopped for a moment and looked around. What first struck her was that someone had tried to hide the woman in the scrub, but she was puzzled by how sloppily it was done. If anyone walking on the forest road looked down, they could have easily spotted her.
    A shoe and a pair of pants lay on the ground some distance away. Louise walked over and bent down over the light-washed jeans. The button was torn out, the zipper ripped apart. The perpetrator had simply torn the pants off the woman without bothering to open them first.
    Then some dark shadows on the green forest floor nearby caught her eye, but she couldn’t tell if they were blood. It appeared that the assault had taken place between the trees.
    Louise, worried that the dispatcher might not have understood her directions, considered calling again as she walked back to Eik and the children.
    “She’s dead,” she said. “We’ll have to leave the stroller until the police get here.”
    “Yes.” All three children had fallen asleep and were settled next to each other on the ground. One was sucking his thumb. “Was it a crime?” he asked, standing up.
    Louise nodded.
    “If she’s a child care provider, I suppose it won’t take long before some of the parents notice their children are missing,” he guessed.
    She’d had the same thought herself. The deceased woman would not be difficult to identify. Presumably, she lived nearby or she wouldn’t be walking down to the lake with the children.
    “I’m going up to the crossroads to wait for the police and the ambulance,” she said, then hesitated. “Or do you want to go meet them?”
    He quickly shook his head. “I can’t find my damn wayaround here,” he said, getting his cigarettes out of his coat pocket.
    Louise started up the steep path. Her legs felt heavy; she was panting over the last part of the slope. She took a right onto the forest road and found after the first turn that the stretch to the intersection and the small triangle where the roads parted was farther than she remembered. She half-regretted not driving.
    When she finally got to the main forest road, she sat down on a tree stump by the