Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (35 page)

“Peter Erhardsen works as an engineer for the City of Copenhagen.” The PET man didn’t seem to have noticed her stony facial expression and ploughed on, unperturbed. “It’s not an obvious place to run into Hungarian Roma. We suspect that Peter Erhardsen might be systematically working with illegal immigrants. Is this something you’re aware of?”

Was he bullshitting her? A single look at the man’s calm, resolute face made clear he wasn’t, and now to her annoyance she noted a hard, sharp lump in her throat that made it difficult to swallow. She was about to cry for the second time today. The first time had been right after she woke up and remembered Morten and Anton and Ida in Morten’s sister’s house in Greve. She had thrown up on the floor. The nurses had scooped it all up and packed it into the bright-yellow hazardous waste bags, but at least after that she had been left alone to cry into the enormous, bouncy hospital pillow. But sobbing hysterically in front of this imperturbable PET man, studying her right now over the rim of his glasses with that oh-so-patient look of his.… Nina resolved to buck up and fight her tears, and with a certain sense of relief, she felt the rage starting to grow somewhere inside her.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” she hissed, slowly getting up from her chair. Her knees wobbled beneath her as she straightened, and she was forced to support herself with one hand on the wall behind her to regain her balance, but that didn’t matter. “I haven’t done anything to you or to anyone else for that matter. All I did was buy some diarrhea pills, salt, sugar, and bottled water for a couple of Roma children who really needed it.” Nina was forced to pause for breath. Exertion and rage sizzled and throbbed in her temples. “I hope you find what you’re looking for out there in Valby, but the rest of my life is none of your damn business, and I’m not going to trot it out for your inspection, so you can just get the hell out of here and leave me alone. If you want to haul me off to jail for that, you’re more than welcome. It just so happens I don’t have anywhere else to stay right now.”

She tried to forget the gown, the mesh underwear and the white legs as she pointed to the door with a trembling finger. Even if he tried to act on his threat, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to yank her out of a hospital bed. Happily the PET man seemed to have drawn the same conclusion.

“My card,” he said, handing her a small, white card with tasteful black lettering.
Søren Kirkegård
, it said.
Inspector
. “In case you change your mind.”

He stood there for a moment with his arm outstretched, holding the card out to her but ended up leaving it on the table next to his empty coffee cup. Then he loaded his things back into his briefcase, calmly and methodically, nodded briefly, and left. The door closed behind him with
a subtle click, and Nina stood there for a second, glaring at it with the remnants of her anger. Then she staggered over to her bed and sat down while she tried to get control of her breathing.

“It’ll be okay,” she told herself. “This will all work itself out.” But as she said it, she realized she wasn’t quite sure what was going to work out. The trouble with the PET, the apartment, the nausea, or Morten. Just all of it, she thought. Please make all of it turn out all right. And hopefully soon.

ÁNDOR’S LEFT HAND
was the only thing tying him to reality. He wanted to disappear into the black fogs that shrouded his consciousness, but the aching pulse in his hand was an anchor that wouldn’t let go. He was stuck, even though it had been hours—he had no sense of how many—since Tommi had grabbed hold of his hand and yanked it free from the nails which were still lodged in the floorboard. No messing around with pliers or a hacksaw, just a hard, wet yank that unfortunately hadn’t even made him faint.

He was in a room next to the eggplant-colored one, lying on a rug that smelled strongly of brown Labrador retriever. In the adjoining living room he could hear Tommi and Frederik arguing over breakfast. He had figured out why they spoke English together. Tommi wasn’t Danish. According to Frederik he was a “Finnish pea brain.”
Can’t you get it into that Finnish pea brain of yours that.…

Frederik had showed up again an hour ago with pastries, Nescafé, juice, and newspapers, after having been home to spend the night with his wife and those two point five kids in Søllerød.

“Right, let’s plan this,” he had said in an enthusiastic tone, as if they were going to organize an orienteering activity for the local Boy Scout troop. But the “Be Prepared!” mood had quickly turned belligerent.

“… of course I want the money,” Frederik snapped at Tommi. “I’ve got bills to pay, the Valby place is a dead loss now, and this dump is useless as long as that thing is out in the garage. And in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re having an economic downturn.”

“So what’s the problem? We can dump the damn thing in a creek somewhere and be left with fuck-all, or we can dump it on the buyer and walk
away with a cool half million. And if you really need to play the good citizen, we can always just call the cops later.”

“The problem, you dimwit, is that we don’t
have
a buyer. I drove past that nurse’s building, and the whole street is full of police and cordons. She’s the only one who knows where that Gypsy’s stupid jacket is.”

“Couldn’t we just sell it to someone else?”

“Do you know anyone who wants to buy a can of hot cesium? By all means, speak up if you do.”

It was quiet in the living room for a few seconds.

“Why didn’t you get milk?” Tommi complained. “You know I don’t drink it black.”

“Shut up, Tommi. You should be happy I even brought food.” Silence again. Then a newspaper rustling. “Holy shit,” Frederik said.

“What?”

“That’s her. It has to be!”

“Who?”

Frederik didn’t answer him. Instead there was a scraping sound from a table or a chair, and a few seconds later, Frederik was bending over Sándor.

“Look!” he said and thrust the front page of the newspaper right in Sándor’s face. “Is that her?”

Sándor reluctantly opened his eyes. The front page of the paper proclaimed something or other dramatic in big red letters, but it was the picture next to the headline that Frederik was frenetically jabbing at with his index finger.

An official looking photo of a serious woman with short, dark hair and intense gray eyes. It
was
her. The nurse who had patched up his eyebrow. The nurse who had his jacket.

“Well?” Frederik poked him insistently on the shoulder. It sent a wave of pain all the way out to his fingers and back again.

“Uh, maybe. Yes,” he said, just to make the man go away.

Frederik went back to the living room and slapped the newspaper down in front of Tommi.

“Well, at least now we know where she is,” he said.

ØREN MARCHED INTO
the meeting room with a seething sense of rage and no real target for it. The fact that he hadn’t heard about the attack on Nina Borg’s teenage daughter until he was in the middle of questioning her was an almost unforgiveable mistake, and yet the explanation was so simple that he couldn’t rake anyone over the coals for it.

“The attack in Fejøgade was reported by a Morten Sindahl Christensen” was the explanation provided by the young detective he had phoned while driving back from Rigshospitalet. “It doesn’t say anything about a Nina Borg.” Søren could hear her fingers flying over the keys. “I’ll send you the case file right away.”

He had printed out the report as soon as he got back to his office in Søborg and managed to skim through it before the group meeting. It made unpleasant reading. The three men who had broken into Nina Borg’s apartment Saturday night hadn’t exactly raped and pillaged, but it wasn’t far off. And the girl was only fourteen years old. In addition to the violence and the sexual aspects of the attack, it was very clear that this wasn’t your ordinary break-in. Nothing was stolen, apart from the girl’s school bag and some personal papers, and one of the three English-speaking men had repeatedly asked for Nina, which made it all the more irritating that the officers investigating the case hadn’t flagged it right away. Nina’s husband stated in the same report that his wife was in the hospital and would no longer be living in Fejøgade because they had decided to separate and, moreover, he had no idea why three angry foreigners were looking for his wife. If only the investigating officers had taken the trouble to dig a little deeper.… He left a message asking Mikael to drive over and see if the daughter could recognize Sándor Horváth’s passport photo and asked the crime team to prioritize the case. There was nothing more to
be done, and there was no reason to waste time apportioning blame. Yet his anger wouldn’t abate.

He surveyed the meeting room grimly. In addition to the people from his own group, there were now four extra investigators who had been assigned to the case first thing that morning, plus an analyst sent by Torben “to fill everyone in on the bigger picture.”

“Go ahead, Gert,” Søren said. “Let’s hear it.”

Gert Sørensen was a mild-mannered man in his early forties, with curly, flame-red hair that somehow seemed misplaced given his natural reserve and discreet tweed-gray appearance. He hadn’t gone to the police academy but had a degree in political science, and he managed the more academically gifted members of the PET’s ranks, the Terror Analysis Department. He stepped over to the projector and pulled up the first PowerPoint slide on his computer.

“November, 1995. Chechen separatists bury a cesium-137 source in a park in Moscow. The cesium source was equipped with a detonator, but it was never triggered. There were no injuries in connection with this event.”

Click.

“December, 1998. The Chechen Security Service finds a container filled with a mixture of radioactive materials. An explosive mine was attached to the canister, which was placed in Argun, a suburb of Grozny. No injuries.”

New click.

“June, 2003. Thai police arrest several men in possession of a large amount of cesium-137 intended, as far as could be ascertained, for the manufacture of a dirty bomb.”

Gert turned off the projector so as not to have to talk over the fan noise. Søren switched on a couple of the overhead lights.

“We also know that al-Qaeda tried to make a bomb with the substance in the United States at least once. Dirty bombs are obviously a part of the contemporary terrorist’s arsenal that we’re going to need to deal with. The world has been spared a full-on attack of this type so far, but in a case like ours, where we have positive affirmation that a radioactive source has been and probably still is active right here in Copenhagen, we have every possible reason to take this seriously. The National Institute for Radiation Hygiene says they found traces of cesium chloride, and that cesium is currently one of the most easily accessible radioactive materials, especially
in the former Soviet bloc. Based on the traces, it is not immediately possible to determine how much radioactive material was at the address in Valby, since the extent of the contamination largely depends on how well the source was shielded.”

“And what exactly can a dirty bomb do that other bombs can’t?”

Gitte Nymand’s dark eyes gleamed with something that looked like equal parts professional curiosity and concern.

“Aside from the fact that they explode, which can obviously inflict serious injuries and damage depending on the force of the explosion, the goal is to spread radioactive material throughout the area,” the red-headed analyst said. “Which doesn’t necessarily have a significant impact on the fatality rate. It’s more the
nature
of the fatalities that causes the concern, and the long-term effects. And especially the psychological effect it can have on the civilian population.”

Søren was on his feet now.

“I don’t need to give you my whole terrorism lecture again, do I?” he asked, and an only partially stifled groan spread through the room. “Terrorism is called terrorism because …?”

“Because the goal is fear,” a couple of them said almost in unison.