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could turn over three or four customers an hour.
    Louise and her partner hung back as Mikkelsen stepped over to the counter to show the guy the photo of the murdered woman found on Skelbækgade. Louise perused the DVD titles. Bare breasts and spread legs—the packaging was basically the same on all of them.
    Two men in their early twenties came out of the back room, which Louise later learned was a bar. Topless and bottomless , as Mikkelsen described it. She stepped aside to let the men pass. They gave her a knowing smile, and she made sure she had a response ready if they tried to proposition her. But just then a middle-aged man in a work jacket and white mason’s cap came barging out of the other corridor where the theaters and sex booths were. He was clearly in a hurry, and on his way to the door he happened to bump into one of the younger guys, pushing him into a rack. A couple of DVDs fell to the floor. Without even pausing, the man rushed up the three steps to the street, but before he got any farther, the young guys were on him. A punch slammed the middle-aged man into the shop’s front window with a loud bang.
    Louise was up the stairs by the time he had taken the second blow, and she grabbed hold of the assailant. With a quick twist she had his arm pinned behind his back and her police badge out before Lars had even reached the entrance.
    â€œAll right, that’s enough,” she said, nodding at the older man to let him know he could go. She was just about to ask the young guys for their names when a loud scream came through the open door. Lars quickly turned back, and Louise let go of the guy’s arm to follow Lars as he ran back into the shop and down the corridor with the booths, toward the screams. Mikkelsen had remained inside while his colleagues dealt with the young guys, but now he followed them into the hall.
    Inside the corridor Lars stopped abruptly. Louise ran into him with such force that he lost his balance and fell against the wall.
    The African girl’s body was naked. Small and slender, with her feet dangling thirty centimeters off the floor, she hung from a row of coat pegs on the wall with her arms stretched out on the coat hangers like a female version of Jesus on the cross. Her head hung limply to one side, her eyes were closed, and a thin stream of blood trickled down her cheek from a cut over her left eyebrow.
    The screams stopped, replaced by faint sobs coming from a blonde girl standing in the doorway next to the coat hooks. She was wearing black lace underwear and rocked from side to side as she wept.
    Mikkelsen and Lars lifted the girl down. Her legs trembled, but she was conscious. Louise took a blanket that someone handed her from a door that opened but then quickly closed again. She helped the girl sit down on the bed in a little booth that stank of sweat, semen, and poor ventilation.
    â€œDo you speak English?” Louise asked, wrapping the blanket around the girl’s shoulders.
    The African girl shook her head listlessly as she reached for a paper towel that she tore off a roll on a small table. The cut over her eye was bleeding heavily now, and she dabbed at her cheek first, and then pressed the paper towel to her eyebrow to stop the bleeding. She looked like she’d taken more blows than the one that had split open her brow, but she looked away every time Louise spoke to her. Finally, Louise got up and left the woman alone to collect herself.
    Mikkelsen was with the blonde who had summoned them with her screams. He knew her. The girl’s name was Anita, and the needle tracks on her arms were so visible that it was obvious she had been using for a long time. Her sobs subsided, and she blew her nose loudly on the tissue Mikkelsen handed her.
    â€œI heard him hitting her, but I had to finish with my customer before I could see if she was all right,” Anita said with a hacking cough. “And there she was, hanging there. Not making a sound. I