Invisible Murder

by Lene Kaaberbol Agnete Friis

  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?”

  Sándor helped her. Yet again they managed to work the rake under the paint can’s wire handle. Yet again they balanced the can between them, and the need to maintain its equilibrium absorbed all his attention for a while. Right up until his heel struck something both soft and unyielding. He looked down, forgetting about the horizontal line of the rake handle, and then had to abruptly adjust his end before the can slid all the way down to him and spilled its sand on the ground.

  It was a dog. A German Shepherd.

  At first he thought Tommi had simply shot it, but there wasn’t enough blood, and now he saw its rib cage rise in a brief gasp and the tongue hanging out of the dog’s half-open mouth quivered, wet and pink. It wasn’t dead, or at least not yet. He couldn’t tell if someone had hit the dog and knocked it out or if it had been drugged in some way.

  “Come on,” Tommi said, with an actual hop of happiness. “Aren’t you excited at all? The party is just beginning!”

  ICK. TICK. TICK. Skou-Larsen could hear the antique French table clock on the linen cabinet tick loudly in the silence. He was sitting on the third step of the hallway stairs and couldn’t make himself move any further.

  She would be home soon. They rarely sang for more than two hours. Supposing she was actually singing.

  I could call Ellen Jørgensen and ask, he thought. Mrs. Jørgensen lived a few streets away and was in the choir, too. Sometimes he drove her home after practice if he was picking Helle up anyway.

  He didn’t get up. The nitroglycerin had helped a little, even though he still wasn’t feeling quite right. But the reason that he kept sitting there was … the real reason was that he just wasn’t up to it. What was he going to do if Ellen told him he had made a mistake, that they didn’t have an extra choir practice tonight?

  Then he heard the garden gate click, and though he couldn’t see out into the front yard from where he was sitting, he could hear the crunchy click-click-click sound of the gears on Helle’s bicycle. His hearing was the only thing that still worked more or less as well as when he was younger. He struggled to his feet. His legs were all pins and needles; the hard staircase had taken its toll on the already poor blood supply to his lower extremities.

  She realized immediately that something was wrong. Her eyes flitted from his face to the open vacuum closet, to the envelope sitting behind him on the steps.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  “Helle, we have to talk about this. What were you going to do with the money?”

  “I hate it when you snoop in my things,” she hissed, trying to push her way past him.

  He propped his hand against the wall so she couldn’t walk past him. Her face looked like it usually did when she had been out of the house—tastefully made up with a touch of light eye shadow and a bit of pale pink lipstick, just a hint, nothing vulgar. She had pulled her hair back into a loose bun, and she was wearing her Benetton shirt, the one he had bought based on the careful instructions from her wish list last year. He remembered how Claus had complained—“Mom, this isn’t a wish list, this is an order form. Can’t you just let us surprise you?”—but Skou-Larsen thought it was nice and reassuring to have such neat directions to follow. That way you wouldn’t get it wrong.

  She looked the way she always did. Completely the way she always did.

  “This wouldn’t have been necessary if you had done something,” she said. “But you never actually get anything done, do you?”

  “I’m going to put that money back in the bank tomorrow,” he said patiently. “And then we need to have a power of attorney drawn up so Claus or I will also have to sign something before you can withdraw it again.”

  She wasn’t listening to him anymore. He could tell from the distant but focused look that made him feel like just a random object standing in her way.

  Suddenly she shoved him hard to one side, not with her hands, but with her shoulder. He staggered and tripped on the bottom step, landing badly on his hip and heard the dry, little crack as he felt his thigh
bone snap and slide.

  “Aaarhhh,” he moaned and then again when the pain came, “Aaaaaaaarhh.” The air wheezed out of him in an undignified, barely human sound.

  She grabbed the envelope with the money.

  “Call,” he said through clenched teeth. “Call the ambulance.”

  She looked down at him with that sharp, concerned wrinkle between her brows.

  “I don’t have time now,” she said. “You’ll have to wait until I get back.” And then she left, with the envelope clasped to her chest. Skou-Larsen heard the door slam but was no longer able to see it or her. It wasn’t the pain from his broken femur now; it was a bigger, more all-encompassing pain radiating outward from the back of his head, obliterating the contours of his body and shutting down all his other senses.

  I won’t be here, he managed to think. When you come back, I won’t be here anymore.

  A black tide was swelling irresistibly within him. He couldn’t hold on any longer and had to let it bear him away.

  OT A SOUL,” Jankowski said.

  Grudgingly, Søren had to agree with him. The house was deserted.

  “We were too slow,” he said. He had alerted “the uniforms,” as Torben referred to them, and had them send a squad car block off the dirt road leading to the dilapidated farm, but it had been too late. Karvinen was gone and so were his hostages. The knowledge ate away at his gut, and he regretted that last cup of coffee.

  “Get the techs out here, and let’s see what we can find,” Søren said, but he knew the likelihood of their finding anything they could use in time was depressingly small.

  He took a deep, deliberate breath and tried to clear his thoughts. His feelings of rage and failure weren’t going to do him any good, and they weren’t going to do Karvinen’s hostages any good either.

  Tommi Karvinen wasn’t some ingenious super-criminal. According to Birgitte, he had started out as an ordinary street pusher before moving into pimping, where he had channeled his talent for explosive, brutal violence into terrorizing both the girls and the customers as necessary. He obviously possessed sufficient intelligence to know who he could beat the crap out of without the police getting involved, and it was exactly this type of calculating instinct for self-preservation that made it hard for Søren to picture him as a fanatical bomber. His form of terror was more individual. He chose his victims with care and had an intense and intimate personal relationship with them; it was hard to see how he would get the same satisfaction from blowing random people to kingdom come.