Songbird (Daniel Trokics Series Book 3)

by Inger Wolf

  Trokic sighed and stood up. “What we said earlier about not leaving the area, that still goes. As long as this investigation is open, we want to be able to get ahold of you.”

  He nodded; he seemed less cocky now. And for a moment, he looked frightened again.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The big parrot turned one of the year’s first strawberries around in its claws, making smacking sounds as it kept an eye on Lisa. Jacob was back from Copenhagen, and apparently Flossy Bent P. had harassed him into giving it treats. Jacob had to be somewhere close by since the strawberries weren’t eaten yet. She scratched the parrot’s neck and stroked its long feathers with one hand as she texted Jacob with the other. The bird had once been a brutal reminder of a busted love affair, but the wounds healed, and she’d become attached to it. It peeped, a small sign of satisfaction, then it turned back to the strawberry that now was leaking red juice onto the sandy bottom of the cage. Flossy was happy. The bowl was filled with strawberries, ready to be eaten.

  She tossed her sneakers into the hall, laid a stack of books from the library on the kitchen table, and walked out to the bathroom and took off her clothes. She changed into a comfortable jogging suit and returned to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and a bag of peanuts. The apartment was a mess, which wasn’t unusual. In fact, Jacob had recently suggested they invite a physicist over to study the speed at which order becomes chaos. It could lead to uncovering great mysteries involving entropy.

  She sat on the sofa and stared into space. The parrot led her to thinking about South America again. Something was nagging at her thoughts, and she brought the books in from the kitchen. On a sudden impulse, she had stopped by the library and checked out everything she could find dealing with horses in legends. Now, she gazed at the stack of books in frustration. She read excerpts from a few of them, but nothing seemed to bear any resemblance to Maja’s strange horses. Her parrot ran through its repertoire of ring tones and Windows sounds in the background; for years it had been collecting them and now could spit them out with annoying precision.

  She tried to distract herself from the case and give her brain a rest by zapping TV channels. But reality refused to go away. Organic food was being criticized because crop yields were reduced by a third, while in other parts of the world, people were eating mud pies and corn oil. Paradoxes abounded, and ethical dilemmas poured out of the TV onto her coffee table. Zap. On to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suicide bombers, radical American foreign policy. She pushed the bag of peanuts away in frustration and landed in the middle of a rerun where someone applauded someone else who confessed to hitting his girlfriend. Finally, she shut off the TV and went back to staring into space. Michael Tarp from Transit kept popping up in her thoughts. Why the hell didn’t he call back, and what was his role in all of this? Did he have the hots for Maja? Or did he know something about her, some secret? Like, did one of the men in her life beat her? Could he be the killer?

  “Thinking things over, are you?”

  She’d fallen asleep before seeing his text.

  Jacob turned on the ceiling light, even though it wasn’t yet dark outside. He tossed his jacket over a chair.

  “Guess I zonked out. The case keeps buzzing around in my head.”

  He plopped down on the sofa beside her. For a second, she wondered if they would become another Mr. and Mrs. Denmark, a typical example of the consumer society. She hoped not.

  After a few moments, Lisa said, “You remember when I was at that seminar in Amsterdam on profiling? We were told it’s common that the more savage and personal a murder was, the more physical contact there’d been between the killer and the victim.”

  “Like snipers and hired killers, shooting from long distances, the opposite of that.” Jacob stuffed a handful of peanuts into his mouth.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking that shooting someone is impersonal, for example. But Maja’s murder is different. The killer was close to her. Had his hands on her. We’re also assuming that she was under the influence of burundanga, and that it was supposed to look like a suicide.”

  “But he didn’t need the drug; he could have just pushed her, and it would still look like a suicide, right?”

  “Yeah, but it wouldn’t have been so convincing. Plus, it looks like punishment. Like she was being made to suffer.”

  Jacob frowned. “But what exactly is it that’s bothering you? A lot of people could have been giving her that drug.”

  “In the first place, it was a bit risky to give her the drug, and a hassle, too. It’s a lot of work for something that could just as easily be taken care of with a bullet to the head if someone had a problem with her. And then there’s her nightmares, the ones she wrote about in an email to her friend Clara. Things keep popping up. These strange horses she kept returning to. What did they mean to her? I can’t help thinking the images or the idea of the horses was planted in her head.”

  “You mean that she was being manipulated?” Jacob looked skeptical. “Horses, though, it just doesn’t sound like anything significant in a young musician’s life. And really, why? What’s the point?”

  Lisa leaned back in the sofa and sighed. “Yeah, I know. It sounds far-fetched to me too, but I just have this feeling. That I’m on to something.”

  “Instead of all the symbolic gobbledygook, it could be something as simple as her riding horses when she was younger.”

  “But why that type of nightmare? They represent something negative, something bad.”

  “Maybe, but you could poke around, somebody must know about her and horses. Her family, old friends.”

  Lisa nodded. She was going to talk to Maja’s grandmother the next day anyway.

  “Okay then. Put some clothes on; we’re going to see a movie.”

  She’d just pulled on her jeans when her phone rang.

  “Hi, this is Michael Tarp. You talked to my sister at Atlantis, and I was told to call you.”

  Lisa clutched her phone. Finally, the call she’d been waiting for. “Yes, thanks for calling. We’ve been told you know Maja Nielsen from Transit, and we’d like to hear what you can tell us about her.”

  “A lot in some ways, not much in others. But actually, I don’t want to talk about this over the phone. It’s too private, and besides, I can’t be sure you are who you say you are. You hear so much about reporters, how they get people to talk. And this is a big case. Can you meet me somewhere?”

  Lisa frowned; what was it that Maja kept to herself? Why did she need to talk to Michael Tarp, an addiction consultant? Did it have something to do with her symptoms?

  “I’m at home now; you’re welcome to drop by.”

  He gave her his address, and Lisa jotted it down. It looked like the movie date would have to be the late show.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The greenhouse glowed faintly in the last gasp of sunlight. She’d found it, one of the missing pieces, something that connected Maja Nielsen and Anja Mikkelsen. And she was pumped.

  It looked like Michael Tarp wasn’t about to take a back seat to his catastrophe-loving sister when it came to bizarre, death-affirming hobbies. At least that had been Lisa’s first impression when she walked into the greenhouse filled with carnivorous plants of various sizes and colors of blossoms. The tall greenhouse took up half the yard, and the spring sun was already forming a warm, humid climate. The air was filled with the odor of mold and fertilizer. At first, she stood still, studying the man with the graying hair and lined face as he watered the plants. He might have been a very attractive person at one time, but now he looked sallow, and he moved stiffly. Lisa slid her hand lightly over one of the plant’s blooms, a red, butterfly-shaped flower that immediately closed at her touch.

  “That’s a Dionaea muscipula, a Venus flytrap.” Tarp set his green water can on the floor. “It was one of my first plants when I started ten years ago.”

  Lisa stared at the plant, completely closed now. “Why does it do that?”

  “It’s a type of reflex. If you�
�d been an insect, you wouldn’t be getting out. The leaf trap secretes nectar around its edges to attract insects. And it closed up because you touched the tiny hairs around the edge. Come here, take a look.”

  Lisa followed him over to the far corner. A hollow, Bordeaux-colored bloom hung from a leaf on a thin green plant. A type of long vase, white inside. Tiny red leaves lined the edge of the bloom’s mouth.

  “This is my pride and joy, one of them, a Nepenthes,” Tarp said. “When the insect falls into the funnel, it gets dissolved by a syrupy liquid in the bottom.”

  “Where does a plant like this grow?” She felt a bit queasy; the warm, humid air stuck to her neck. The plants seemed to be surrounding her, a claustrophobic feeling.

  “In the tropics.”

  “So, you know quite a bit about plants, maybe especially tropical plants?”

  The thought didn’t make her feel any better. Maybe she should have brought along a colleague. How many times had they been lectured about not being alone out on the job? He’d sounded so friendly on the phone, though. So open. Anyway, they knew where she was.

  “My knowledge of tropical plants is limited to the carnivorous variety.”

  “But maybe you know something about the South American burundanga?”

  Sunlight slanted in through the greenhouse plexiglas; Lisa felt the first drops of sweat on her face as she waited on Tarp, who was frowning studiously. Again, Lisa studied him. He did look harmless, but maybe there was a different Michael Tarp lurking underneath the surface. With other demons than those he’d obviously fought in his past. Was he capable of killing a young woman?

  He tilted his head and smiled modestly. “Burundaga? It sounds familiar. I think one of my plant-loving friends has talked about it. Is it in the Datura family?”

  Lisa stared at him as she nodded. “Something like that. Do you raise it here?”

  He slowly shook his head. “No, that’s entirely outside my area of interest. But you’re not here to talk about plants, are you?”

  “No, I’m here to talk about the murder of Maja Nielsen.”

  He sighed. “Yes, you mentioned that. Don’t worry; I’ll tell you what it was about. She’s dead now; I guess it can’t hurt.”

  He leaned over and scooted the water can away. “I saw Maja again a few months ago. I work for Transit as an addiction consultant, and she was there one afternoon when I came.”

  “Again, you say? So, you already knew her?”

  “Knew is an exaggeration. I met her once a long time ago. Here in the greenhouse, believe it or not.”

  Lisa’s skin felt prickly, as if something important was about to be said. “How did that happen?”

  “It was a summer evening, about eight years ago. I went outside to close the windows for the night, and when I walked back in, she was sitting there in the corner. She seemed to be in shock. She was around thirteen back then, filthy dirty, in riding pants and boots, with her legs curled up underneath her.”

  She felt a sense of dread again. Those evil horses. Why did they mean so much now?

  Tarp pointed to the other end of the greenhouse. “It was getting dark, but I caught a glimpse of her face before she ran out the door. She took me completely by surprise, and I didn’t have any idea who she was, but that one glimpse was enough. I never forgot it. I walked over to the corner, and one of the towels I keep out here was smeared in blood. At first, I figured she’d fallen off a horse. But that didn’t explain why she was hiding out in a stranger’s greenhouse. Then I thought maybe she’d had her first period, and she was too embarrassed to go home. But that didn’t sound right to me either. Nowadays, I don’t think girls feel it’s as shameful as they did in the past. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t even know who the girl was.”

  “And what about when you met her recently?”

  “I thought there was something familiar about her, that afternoon at Transit. And most likely she recognized me. She seemed uncomfortable, she avoided me, and finally I remembered where I’d seen her. It had turned into quite a mystery to me. I’d thought quite a bit about it. So, finally, I discreetly handed her my sister’s business card, there at the shop, and I told her I wanted to talk to her, asked her if she could meet me there one day. After all, she’d been in my greenhouse; you could even call it trespassing. I just felt she owed me an explanation.”

  “What happened then?”

  Tarp looked pale now, as if he suddenly felt nauseous. “I never saw her again.”

  He nodded and pulled a yellow leaf off a ground plant beside them. Lisa tried to remember; she’d read Maja’s medical records, but there had been nothing unusual from her early teenage years. She thought about the connection between the two girls.

  “Do you happen to know someone named Anja Mikkelsen? She was the victim of a hit-and-run driver Wednesday evening.”

  “No, I don’t recall the name.”

  She watched him carefully for a few more moments. His story sounded true to her. But Anja had known something about this greenhouse. She must have looked into it on her own. What had she found out?

  The sun was going down by the time she reached her small Ford and stuck her key in. Suddenly, chills raced down her spine; a car was passing by behind her much too slowly, and she whirled around. She watched the gray sports car creep by, saw the unfamiliar shadow of the driver stretched out on the street. She had the feeling he was looking for something. She hopped into her car, but the sports car took off and drove around the corner before she could catch the license plate. Didn’t Trokic say that Martin Isaksen had a gray Porsche? Lisa wasn’t up on cars, but something told her that the real estate agent had just paid a visit to Maja Nielsen’s old neighborhood.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Federico Carlos’s shadow fell in shifting angles as he hustled through stretches of light in the narrow streets. His sweatshirt’s hood covered his head. He breathed the fresh air deep into his lungs. It was late, but he was a night person. Even when he was little, he’d preferred the dark, had been impossible to chase into bed. Now, he was on his way to the airport, to catch his last flight. He would be going home a very rich man. He hummed as he walked up Paradisgade.

  The Latin Quarter was the oldest part of the city. A breath of history, cobblestone streets, shops with creaking wooden floors, atmosphere, charm. The buildings were from the 1700s, characteristic for the center of Århus, where any development was practically guaranteed to run into some sort of archaeological find. The buildings’ windows looked paper-thin, the walls were damp and dirty, but Federico Carlos couldn’t care less.

  The cafés and restaurants were silent now. No drunks shouting and carousing, the only sounds a faint rattling from a beer can dancing over the cobblestones, a door being shut somewhere, a car driving along Kystvejen, close to the harbor. Background, he thought.

  He was more than pleased with himself. The day would come when he would be complete, but he had a ways to go. The unfinished work of art hidden underneath his clothes, his enormous tattoo, still lacked some details. They were going to hurt, too, but pain didn’t scare him. He’d saved his face for last. The consummation. It would be expensive, but that was no longer a concern. He had the money, with more on its way.

  His laughter smacked against the surrounding buildings. He was the expert. The man in the know, who delivered the night. Thousands of years of wisdom handed down from an ancient civilization. And soon he would return. Someday, he would become one with the primordial force. A part of something much, much greater than this town, this little provincial dump. He was going back to the South American jungle. They were waiting for him. His people.

  As he walked along the Ditch, he heard someone faintly calling his name beside a courtyard entryway. It wasn’t much more than a whisper; for a moment he thought it was the wind. He wasn’t expecting anyone. Didn’t want to see anyone. A skinny cat scampered by. The raw cold rose up from the cobblestones under his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a curtai
n moving. Then the sound again. “Federico.”

  He didn’t recognize the voice, but it knew him. A deep, authoritative voice. A twitch in his face bared his white teeth. Somebody wanted him badly.

  But he couldn’t trust anyone, could he? That’s what he’d learned in Bogotá. In his younger days, here in Denmark, the bikers had been after him. Stupid losers, with their markings sewed on to the skin of cattle. Took no risks. They showed up at the most unexpected moments, and it was by the skin of his teeth that he avoided a beating. Or worse.

  He felt for his knife still in its sheath, hidden under his long, orange sweatshirt. He walked confidently over to the entryway, and finally he could see the person hiding there. Though it was dark, he could make out the face, the sharp features that looked chiseled in stone. But even the nastiest people could help him reach his goal. He had himself a customer.

  “Who are you?” Federico said.

  Now, he was close enough to smell this person. So close that he didn’t see it coming. The barrel of a gun entered his mouth. He could taste the metal and gunpowder; the weapon had been fired recently, he thought. All this happened in a fraction of a second, and the person had yet to answer him. Federico Carlos thought of the jungle, the brilliantly-colored birds, psychedelic dreams, evenings in Bogotá, as the person cocked the pistol. Was it already happening now? He wasn’t finished. Not ready.

  Sunday, May 10

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  A creature with messy black hair lay in his bed. Trokic stared in disbelief at his comforter rising and falling in rhythm to his hangover. Last night, during a delusional attack of financial invincibility bolstered by a sudden boldness, and to express his appreciation for her efforts, he had officially invited Christiane Bach to Dauphine on Frederiksgade for a multi-course dinner. A place that poured wine in such quantities that even the most hardened of lieutenant detectives would have been knocked for a loop.