Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (46 page)

They had asked about whether the Opel had been stolen, and he had said no. But now it suddenly occurred to him that there had been that day a few weeks ago when he’d had to adjust the seat. It was much farther forward than he cared for, which had puzzled him. Should he call the police lady and tell her that? What if someone had taken the car and put it back again without his having noticed?

Yet another stab in his chest. The pills. First he had to take one of those pills.

He trundled into the bathroom, careful not to hurry even though he was increasingly afraid that this was a heart attack coming on. Helle had put all his medications into a lunch-box-sized, white plastic crate in the cabinet over the sink. Centyl, aspirin, Fortzaar, Gaviscon, Nitromex. He shook a blister pack from the box, pressed the little tablet out of the foil, and put it under his tongue. There. Now it was just a matter of waiting. Breathing nice and easy, nice and easy. He sat down on the lid of the toilet and closed his eyes.

Then he opened them again. Because there was something was missing, wasn’t there?

Centyl, aspirin, Fortzaar, Gaviscon, Nitromex … but no box of Imovane. His sleeping pills were missing from the white crate.

He got up to see if they were elsewhere in the cabinet and was overcome by a sudden wave of dizziness. He made a grab for the sink. The medicine crate flew off to one side and the Centyl bottle hit the toilet tank with a crack and shattered, scattering shards of glass and pale-green pills all over the floor tiles.

Skou-Larsen clung to the sink for a few minutes until his dizziness subsided. Pathetic old wreck, he snarled at himself. Hopeless, helpless, useless old man. What was that crude phrase of Claus’s? Couldn’t take a crap without busting the crapper.

Saying the word
crap
helped a little, even though it had just been quietly to himself. He tried again.

“Crap,” he whispered to himself. “Everything is crap.”

His respectable upbringing stirred uncomfortably in him. But where had it actually gotten him, being so impeccably
decent
his whole life? It hadn’t protected him from having the police invade his home. And it certainly hadn’t kept his marriage alive. His sense of propriety had settled like a membrane between him and Helle so they walked around playing
their carefully rehearsed roles without ever talking about anything that really mattered.

Enough of that, he decided. When she comes home, I’m going to talk to her.
Really
talk to her.

He decided he had better clean up the broken glass first. And gather up the pills. There was no reason to let her see how close he had come to fainting. His physical frailty was only all too noticeable as it was.

It had been years since he had touched the vacuum cleaner, but he did know where it was—in the closet under the stairs. An older model Nilfisk, good Danish quality and very durable.

There was a padded envelope in the vacuum closet, on the shelf next to the vacuum bags and the neatly folded stack of dust cloths. A grayish-white envelope without an address.

What’s that doing there? he thought. What a strange place to put it.

He opened it and peered into it.

It was full of five hundred kroner bills, and it didn’t take him long to guess how much was in there.

About six hundred thousand kroner.

ØREN HAD BROUGHT
the girl up from the basement and into the kitchen. His plan had been to suggest a cup of coffee to distract her and make the situation feel more normal, but the only visible coffee-making equipment was an espresso monstrosity the size of a small space station, and with the clock ticking in his head, the whole palaver of grinding beans and fumbling around with the settings and weird little filters was simply insurmountable.

The girl sensed his skepticism, and a tiny little pseudo-smile raised one corner of her mouth.

“We never use,” she said. “Too hard.”

She said “we,” he noticed.

“Is Tommi your boyfriend?” Søren asked.

Her smile disappeared as if someone had erased it. She nodded, one time, a quick, abrupt motion.

“Where is he?” Søren asked, without much hope of receiving a helpful answer. Nor did he get one. She just shook her head.

“He not tell me.”

Where was she from? Somewhere in Eastern Europe, probably, from the look of her. And if the Italian passport was bought in Italy, then it was likely to be one of the more southerly countries—former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, maybe Albania. The false passport was probably as much to hide her age as her nationality, he guessed.

“How old are you, Mini?” he asked, to have some kind of baseline for what she looked like when she was lying.

“Nineteen.” She looked him straight in the eye, but she couldn’t keep her hands still. One hand flopped around restlessly in her lap, and as soon as she had delivered her lie, she looked away.

Good. One more time, just to test the theory. “Where are you from? What country?”

“I am Italian girl.” She looked at him, and this time both her hands and her feet were fidgety. Little Mini didn’t like to lie.

He asked a couple of neutral questions and determined that she had been in Denmark for four months, that she had come to do some modeling work, that she was going to be in a movie soon. She actually believed all of this; Søren had to restrain a dark, bitter rage that wouldn’t have done the interview the least bit of good. It was certainly possible, he thought, that they intended to film her. But the very idea of the kind of movie it would be made him want to smear Tommi Karvinen over a wide swath of Amager’s asphalt.

Then he asked again if she knew where Karvinen was. And she fidgeted restlessly with one hand when she said no.

“Mini,” he said in the plainest, clearest English he could think of. “He took a girl. A Danish girl. She’s fourteen years old.”

She didn’t say anything, but the light in her eyes, which had sparked to life when she talked about her modeling career and her movie plans, died away again.

“Where did he take her?” Søren asked.

She pulled all her limbs in close to her body, like a spider when you blew on it. Self-preservation. Extreme self-preservation.

“Where is she?” he asked gently. “Don’t you want to help her?”

She was hyperventilating. He could both see it and hear it. Slowly she keeled to one side on the chair. When he realized the chair was about to tip over, he reached out a hand to stop it, but he was a second too late. She slid onto the floor and lay there with her knees pulled up against her chest and her eyes closed. She actually
had
fainted, Søren confirmed. She wasn’t pretending.

Suddenly Christian’s broad silhouette appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked down at the girl.

“What did you do to her?” Christian asked.

Søren maneuvered her gently onto her side, wadded up his dark windbreaker into a sort of pillow and pushed it in under her head. He shook his head.

“She was hyperventilating,” he said. “Keeled right over. Do you have anything for me?”

“Yup. We got lucky. This little girl here officially owns a property a little farther out quite near the airport, just off Tømmerupvej. And get this—it’s exactly where we traced the IP address back to.”

“
Yes
. Jankowski and I will head out there.” Pity the Dove had needed to take off, but there wasn’t time to call him back. “Would you get an ambulance for this one?”

She was conscious again, he sensed. Lying there listening to their foreign voices in a language she didn’t understand.

“An ambulance? But if she just hyperventilated …?”

“Christian. Get her out of this house. Get her admitted to a nice, clean hospital with friendly people who will take care of her. We’ll take it from there tomorrow. Right? Just say she’s unconscious, and you can’t wake her up.”

The penny finally dropped, Søren observed, and Christian merely nodded.

Without his jacket and with Jankowski on his heels, Søren trotted down the suburban street to where they had parked the car.

“What was wrong with the girl?” Jankowski asked as he slid in behind the wheel. “Did she just faint?”

Søren yanked his seatbelt into place with barely restrained fury.

“Drive,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell he does to terrorize these women. But it is going to stop right now!”

ÁNDOR AND NINA
didn’t talk. They just sat there next to each other as the throb of the diesel engine resonated inside the cold metal box of the van, drowning out most of the street sounds. The first time they stopped, Sándor started kicking the back doors with both legs, but Nina grabbed his arm.

“Ida,” she said, and there was a feral imperative in her eyes that could not be ignored. “You risk getting my daughter killed.”

The car started moving again, presumably they had just stopped for a red light.

His injured hand throbbed and pulsed in time with the diesel engine. His head hurt so much that he was wondering if it wouldn’t be a relief to just let that Finnish psychopath shoot it off. His weary heart still had room for empathy for Nina and a shiver at the thought of that dark, subterranean oil tank and the girl down there, struggling not to gasp up the oxygen too fast and shorten the time she had left. But someone was going to have to try to think beyond that. He certainly understood that Nina couldn’t do it. It was her child. But someone
had
to think about everyone else, about unsuspecting people sitting on the metro or going to sleep in a hotel bed or jumping up and down in the stands at a concert somewhere, not knowing that their world was about to be blown into a thousand pieces, into a thousand radioactive particles, in a week or a day or an hour.

Someone had to think about them.

Tamás hadn’t. He had thought only about the money, about immediate injustices, about his family’s survival and dreams. The metro passengers, the hotel guests, and the Copenhagen music fans weren’t really people to him. The Roma in Valby had called him a
mulo
, an evil spirit. An impure
death brought curses with it, and you couldn’t die much more impurely than Tamás had.

When Sándor closed his eyes, it was Tamás he saw. Not a living memory of him, but a dead Tamás, who stared at him with burning eyes like the ghosts in Grandma Éva’s stories, blazing eyes that cried blood. He wondered if he would ever be able to sleep again without seeing
Mulo-
Tamás in his dreams. He wondered if he would ever get the chance to go to sleep again at all or if it would all be over in an instant, with a bang he wouldn’t even hear before the projectile smashed its way into his brain and snuffed everything out.

The van stopped. For longer this time, too long for it just to be a traffic light. Then it slowly drove forward again, now over a somewhat more uneven, bumpy surface.

Nina’s eyes shone in the reflected lights from the driver’s cabin, and she moved uneasily. Then the doors were flung open, and the Finnish psychopath ordered them out.

They were at a construction site, Sándor noted. Muddy tire tracks, pallets of drywall wrapped in plastic flapping gently in the breeze. Spotlights on high posts and sharply delineated black shadows in the May night darkness. Tommi had parked the van between two portable office trailers so it wasn’t immediately visible from the street.

“He wants it inside,” Tommi said. His face mask made his heavy accent even heavier, or maybe it was just because he was excited. “Come on. We’re not going to get any money until he gets it where he wants it.”

Sándor measured the distance with his eyes, but Tommi was too far away. He was rocking back and forth on his feet like an athlete getting ready to make his approach to the high jump, with a phone in one hand and the gun blatantly on display in the other. Either he figured no one could see them or he just didn’t care. Frederik was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was already inside the half-finished building a little further away, behind Tommi’s agitated, rocking form.

Nina started to push the top slab off.

“Help the lady, now,” Tommi said. “It isn’t fair to let her do all the work, now, is it?”