Missing: White woman

6.

On Monday, Lund was walking with his team towards a small brasserie for lunch. They had just passed the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. A tongue-twister for a name in a majestic building plopped in the middle of many other majestic buildings and tongue-twisters.

They had also just passed the Embassy of Romania as Petrescu always insisted on walking the route leading past it. She claimed it helped with homesickness to know she was just a few steps away from Romanian soil. They all knew it technically wasn't, even Petrescu, but nobody ever felt like taking the thought away from her. The Embassy of Sweden was close-by too, about a 10-minute walk away. Where the Romanian embassy was in a beautiful old stone building with a garden, the Swedish one was an ugly office building with absolutely no character. It looked just like most of the bureaucratic buildings around Sweden. A soul-less bland house with the blue and yellow flag outside and the coat of arms with three crowns above the entrance. To Lund, that was perfect. It reminded him of home.

It wasn't common for the whole team to lunch together. Most of the time they were too busy or somebody was not around. They had agreed that for birthdays they will organize a lunch date, this time it was Kolinen who had turned 33 the day before.

For now, it looked like they were getting a reasonably easy week. The weekly morning meeting had been quick. Kolinen and Stjepanic had gotten a strong lead of their Balkan crook in Germany last week and the Polizei had picked him up on Thursday night. They all had their usual unidentified bodies to check out and a few missing persons. Petrescu would be leaving for Poland later this week to meet up their local people about the new developments with the Doves.

A Swedish prison avoider, Joakim Haraldsson, had been sighted in Finland. Haraldsson had been on Lund's list for a while. The kid was 22 and had been sentenced a 2-year prison trip mainly for being a troubled kid. A few thefts, a burnt car, graffiti. Most serious of the crimes was an assault. A store clerk had caught him stealing and confronted Haraldsson resulting with some broken ribs and a concussion. In Sweden, the system was far away from the drama you expected from American TV-shows. As none of the charges were considered grave the suspect had been released from custody to wait for his day in court. He was on probation for some earlier similar crimes which landed him with a prison sentence. He was supposed to check into Härnosand prison on 1st of February but never showed up. Haraldsson wasn't considered dangerous to society so there was no massive manhunt going on. As the kid was from the north, close to both the Finnish and the Norwegian border, it was expected he'd show up at some point in either one.

Lund was happy that Kolinen had offered to make the calls to Finland. Officially the Finns were supposed to speak Swedish as well, it being their second language and all, but the reality wasn't as bilingual. Towards the south, most at least spoke great English. But the north? Not so much. Didn't matter much which side of the tri-state border you went, in Lapland you needed the local language.

Lund was also happy that Simon Isaksen had called him on Saturday to inform there was a solid sounding sighting of Gabriella in Tarragona. It was a smaller city about a hundred kilometers south of Barcelona. The woman making the report was a Norwegian tourist who believed she saw the missing Danish girl in a park with a foreign-looking boy. The girl had seemed drunk, but otherwise fine. The woman said she had seen all the news about the missing girl and was positive she was right. She had tried to go up and talk to the couple but they had started making out. Unsure if she was perhaps mistaken, anyway she hadn't wanted to bother the loving couple.

Spanish police forces were trying to confirm if there was anything else to confirm Gabriella could be in Tarragona but so far there was nothing. Isaksen and Lund both felt happy despite lacking official confirmation. The woman's sighting fit in with the storyline they had hoped for. Another butterfly out in the big world, finding herself, falls in love. Disappears for a bit, pops out with herpes once the money is gone. Mummy and daddy will be angry as hell, several states have wasted important resources trying to locate her, but everyone will be happy that the story ended well.

The team had found a nice corner table on the terrace. Lund was in the mood for pasta.

"Anything new from Barcelona?" Matthieu Giuly asked once everyone had placed their orders and gotten their drinks.

"Not yet" Lund responded at the same time as Caroline Kerr next to him.

"Jinx!" She shouted out while pointing excitedly at Lund, causing laughter amongst the group.

"I didn't know you contacted Spain too," Lund asked his colleague slightly confused.

Confusion landed on Kerr's face.

"About my missing Danish girl" Lund clarified.

He saw Caroline connecting the dots in her mind.

"Oh no, I know nothing about her." she blurted out. "They had a few bodies over there this weekend so thought the question was for me. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual checklist."

She looked over to Giuly.

"Sorry, I guess you were asking Lund."

Giuly smiled and nodded.

"Okay, I thought since it's your area that maybe you reached out too." Lund continued. "Anyway, nothing on the Danish girl. They are still trying to confirm the sighting in Tarragona."

The waiter interrupted the casual chit chat that had followed and placed a deep dish of creamy pasta in front of Magnus. He was adding some parmesan cheese on top, when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.

Not when I'm eating, he thought and took a mouthful of his food. Needs salt.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Eero Kolinen placing something next to Lund's plate.

"It needs salt" the Finn next to him stated and dug back into his own plate of the dish.

The conversation around the table had been quieted by the food. For a few minutes, nobody was saying anything. Stjepanic broke the silence by commenting on how tasty his carpaccio was.

Lund felt his phone buzz again. He took it out to turn it off completely but noticed he had two messages from Isaksen.

'The GB sighting promising' the first one read.

The second message confirmed that it was Gabriella they had found. Isaksen would call later with more details.

"Well about time" Lund mumbled to his phone, mouth full of pasta. He looked up to see that he had the attention of his full team.

He took a sip of sparkling water to swallow down the food before continuing.

"They found the missing girl", he explained himself but realized the company he was in. They saw too much.

"Alive and well I mean" he clarified and felt the quick moment of tension pass.

He couldn't answer any of their follow-up questions for now. He knew Isaksen would have informed him the second he got any info so the details were still developing. Lund knew Simon would be busy right now getting information from Spain. Isaksen would need to inform the family, the press, his own high-ups. Depending on where the girl had been, it might not be the end of the story. If she was taken, there would be a full investigation. If she had been raped or abused, there would be doctors and therapists involved. The Danes would help the mother and her newly found daughter getting home safely. Isaksen might have to fly to Spain to help with the investigation, hell even Magnus might end up having to go.

Lund had never been to Barcelona, and there was some school play on Thursday he would be happy to miss. He made a mental note to himself to check bus routes in Barcelona once he was back in the office.

But for now, he couldn't do anything besides enjoy his lunch. He would have emails waiting for him when he came to the office and Simon would call him when he had the time and the details.

It had been a great lunch in all possible ways and his jeans felt tight around the waist. Viola preferred healthy foods. A big bowl of creamy pasta with extra cheese would be a major no-no at his house.

They had chosen a longer walk back, partly due to all of them feeling they needed to walk off a bit of the food but also because it was such a nice warm day. Now that there had been over a week of sun, the trees and flowers had started to come alive and the city was waking up to spring. Lund reminded himself to run 15-minutes extra on the treadmill tonight.

He wasn't exceptionally fit or muscled. The whole fitness thing had never been for him. He imagined though that maybe the feeling those who wanted to go the gym 7 days a week got there, was similar to what he felt on a bus. But regardless of him working mainly via his phone and computer, he was a police officer and had to keep up his basic fitness. They had a fitness test each year and, now and then even the Europol desk monkeys got in on some real action.

When his youngest was born, he'd lost it for a while. With so much going on and too many sleepless nights, the gym was the first thing to drop away from his priority list. He gained almost 10 kilos that year. A fortnight before the fitness test he tried to do a last-minute boot camp. He passed the test without any bigger issues, but figured out it would only get harder the older he got. After that, he had tried to get a run at least twice a week as well as regular gym visits.