Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (28 page)

“I don’t think there’s a lot of time for the doctor,” he said, sounding just as friendly and calm as before. A
thump-thump-thump
came from where the dog was sitting. The Lab was wagging because he had heard his master’s voice.

“I don’t have any keys,” Sándor said desperately.

“Well, I hope you do,” Frederik said. “It’s a short list, I believe. With some phone numbers and dates on it.”

Sándor closed his eyes. Oh, yes, I had one of those. In the pocket of the jacket that’s in the nurse’s car.

AGNUS SWORE WHEN
he saw her.

It had taken her more than half an hour to reach the Coal-House Camp because she had had to pull over by the Gladsaxe exit to throw up. After that she had sat for almost seven minutes with her forehead resting on the wheel before she had summoned up enough energy to drive on. Magnus had met her in the parking lot, stuck a long bear paw into the car, and practically scooped her out of the Fiat.

Now she was lying on the clinic’s examining table while Magnus, still cursing, tended to her.

“You have quite a high fever, thirty-nine point one, and your pulse is through the roof. I don’t understand how you even made it out here. I told you to take a cab. You’re acting like goddamn idiot, but I suppose there’s nothing new about that. Goddamn it all to hell.”

Nina didn’t respond. Magnus swore when he was worried, usually in his native Swedish; she was used to it, and even if she hadn’t been, she was beyond caring. She had spent the last of her energy getting here. Now she lay still, feeling the nausea settling over her like a heavy, cloying duvet.

“I could do some of the tests here, but we really need to get you into a hospital. I know someone in the infectious diseases ward at Rigshospitalet. I’m sure I could get her to admit you. She isn’t such a stickler for the rules, and if she can figure out what this is, she could probably do something for those children very quickly.”

Nina nodded and rolled over on her side. That reduced the nausea for a brief moment; then it came back with renewed vigor. She sat up and vomited into the basin Magnus had placed in front of her. He wrinkled his nose and took the basin away with a new torrent of cussing and swearing.

“As quickly as possible, Magnus.”

She lay there with her eyes closed while Magnus made the call. He talked for a long time, his voice was quiet and strained. Persuasive. But she wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying anymore. She drifted off for a few minutes but was forced to wake up again almost immediately as Magnus began the awful process of getting her to her feet and into his Volvo.

Some oversight must have occurred to him then, because he tossed her bag and jacket into the driver’s seat and left her sitting unsteadily in the other front seat, while he sprinted back into the clinic.

Only then did she notice that there were two jackets. Her own windbreaker and a man’s jacket that had definitely never been hers. The young man must have forgotten it in her car.

Magnus came back with his arms full of emesis basins, which he piled into her lap.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “But … you know. It’s the Volvo.”

Nina couldn’t help but laugh even though it mostly sounded like a long, hacking cough.

“My valiant hero,” she said weakly, feeling the fierce, familiar undertow of her longing for Morten. “What would I have done without you?”

HE FIAT WAS
gone when they got back to FEJøGADE. Sándor stared at the empty parking space on the curb where it had been an hour before.

“It’s gone,” he said.

If only he had just smashed the damn window and taken the jacket while he had the chance. But the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. That would have been Against The Rules. Of course at that point, he hadn’t known that Tamás’s life might depend on it.

“Then I suppose we’ll have to wait until it comes back,” Frederik said. “Because this is where she lives, right?”

“I don’t know,” Sándor said. “I think so. She went into that building there.” He pointed to the front door he was most convinced was hers. No reason to mention that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

“Find another place to park, Tommi,” Frederik told the driver. “So her spot is still free.”

Tommi nodded and slid the Touareg in between a Kia and a Škoda Felicia a little farther down the street. He turned on the radio and shoved a CD into the slot, and soon Johnny Cash was rasping through the speakers: “Saint Quentin, you’ve been living hell to me.…”

They sat in silence. Sándor had stopped asking them about Tamás, and there wasn’t anything else he wanted to talk to them about. The driver lit a cigarette.

“Open the window,” Frederik said, irritated.

After half an hour, during which Johnny Cash had sung “Folsom Prison Blues,” “The Man in Black,” “Ring of Fire,” and several other classics, Tommi suddenly opened the driver’s door.

“Can you see the Fiat?” Frederik asked, still in English, which
suddenly puzzled Sándor. Why weren’t they speaking Danish to each other?

“She obviously didn’t just pop out for cigarettes,” Tommi said. “And we don’t have all night.”

Frederik sat there for a brief moment. Then he nodded.

“Okay. We’ll go in and have a look. Come on.” That last part was to Sándor.

“But I don’t even know her name!”

“You said she was a nurse, right?” Tommi said. “I’m sure we can figure out the rest. Get off your ass.”

Tommi tossed his ten-gallon hat onto the seat and took off his fringed cowboy jacket. He pulled two black sweatshirts out of the trunk, gave one to Frederik, put on the other, and stuck a couple of screwdrivers in his pocket. The Lab whined, wanting to go with them, but Frederik commanded it to “Lie down!” and at the same time cracked the window a little to let air into the car for it.

Frederik pressed the doorbells one by one and said a few words each time, completely incomprehensible to Sándor, until there was a buzz and a click and they could enter. Ten or twelve identical mailboxes were mounted just inside the door. With a quick, practiced wrench of the screwdriver, Tommi broke the first one open and passed the contents to Frederik, who quickly skimmed through it while Tommi set to work on the next mailbox.

“Bingo,” Frederik said of mailbox five, waving a window envelope. “Nina Borg, RN. Second floor on the right.”

Tommi carefully returned the mail to the appropriate boxes even though the doors were hanging open and could no longer be closed.

Frederik rang the doorbell for the second-floor apartment on the right, but no one came to the door. They could hear music from inside, something loud and heavy and apocalyptic, and when Tommi opened the mail slot, they could see that the lights were on. Frederik and Tommi exchanged glances, and Frederik nodded. Tommi pulled a floppy, crumpled nylon stocking out of his pocket and handed it to Frederik. Frederik sniffed it and made a face.

“For fuck’s sake,” he said. “Don’t you have any that hasn’t been worn?”

Tommi just shrugged. He had already pulled a stocking over his head so his facial features were grotesquely smushed and camouflaged.

“No,” Sándor said, aghast. “You can’t just.…”

Crunch. The doorframe splintered under the pressure from two screwdrivers at once. The door opened.

Sándor just stood there on the landing until Tommi grabbed hold of him, pulled him inside, and shut the door behind him. The music pulsed out to meet them on heavy bass feet.

“But.…”

“Shut up. You want to get your brother to the doctor, right?”

Sándor closed his mouth again.

“Is it one of them?” Frederik asked softly, pointing to the overloaded coat hooks on one wall. Tommi had begun opening doors, quickly and quietly—or at least quietly enough that the clicks were lost in the bombardment of death metal. Sándor obediently flipped through the untidy collection of raincoats, windbreakers, and jackets but couldn’t find anything that resembled his Studio Coletti.

Suddenly there was a feminine shriek and an outraged yell from an only slightly less shrill but still unmistakably masculine voice. A shudder ran through Sándor’s entire body, and he involuntarily took a couple of quick steps back toward the door.

Tommi was standing in the doorway to what was obviously a teenager’s room. On the bed that occupied most of the space lay a young couple, a girl with short, wispy, tar-black hair and a young guy with tattooed shoulders and a shaved head. They were both more or less naked, and the girl was trying to pull the blanket up to cover her breasts.

Sándor hurriedly looked away. Tommi didn’t.

“Keep going,” he told the shocked couple, clicking the record video button on his fancy phone. “They’re crazy about this kind of thing on the Internet.…”

OMETHING WAS BEEPING
.

Nina detected it somewhere at the outer limits of her consciousness. First she tried to get away from the noise, burrowing back into the dim, gray semidarkness she had been inhabiting, but someone was moving around in the room again, and she reluctantly opened her eyes. There was a nurse next to her bed, fiddling with the machine that was beeping. She was wearing an aggressively yellow lab coat with a matching face mask of the type that meant “contagious,” but when she turned around Nina could see that she was smiling reassuringly behind the mask. Dawn was underway outside. A subdued, gray light filtered into the room through the voluminous, brightly patterned curtains.

“False alarm,” the nurse said. “Your pulse has just been a little too high for a little too long. It’s all over the place at the moment.”

Nina nodded and looked away. The nurse’s yellow coat made her feel sick to her stomach, or maybe she was just starting to notice the nausea again after her interval of dozing. She shifted uneasily, trying to see if she could move away from the discomfort, rolling halfway onto one side. That was as far as she could go because of the IV drip and the Venflon catheter in her left hand. She sincerely hoped the next round of vomiting would hold off for a while. She was unbelievably tired, and she didn’t know if she had the strength to sit up properly. It felt as if she hadn’t slept a wink, and that might not actually be an exaggeration. Since she had been admitted, she had thrown up twice every hour, on the hour. At least. She had stopped counting after 2 A.M. They took new blood tests, and two doctors had asked her the exact same questions. They had pressed on her abdomen, turned her over, made her stand up and sit down, and pulled up her hospital gown so they could study her skin. The piercing beeping
from the machines in the room hadn’t made it any easier to sleep. They were monitoring her pulse, and the device made a noise as soon as it went over one hundred, which it frequently did. She had wanted them to turn all this crap off, but their response was a firm no, and she had given up arguing with them at 2:24 A.M.

Now it was 5:32 A.M. Nina could follow the minute hand as it staggered its way in loud clicks around the clock over the door. She had established that she wasn’t allowed to leave the room, at the moment a completely unnecessary admonition. She couldn’t even get out of bed by herself.