Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (47 page)

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 thighbone 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.

So what did he want with the nurse and her daughter?

For one absurd, shaky moment, Søren imagined that the two things
had absolutely nothing to do with each other. That Karvinen’s motives had nothing to do with Valby or cesium or dirty bombs.

“Søren?”

“Yes. What now?”

“Just listen to the Geiger counter.”

Søren stuck one of the two earphones into his ear. The dry, sonar-like beeping was significantly stronger as they approached the garage.

“Get Radiation Hygiene out here,” he said. “Immediately.”

He thought back to that flashy PowerPoint presentation. The cesium source didn’t take up much room—the cylinder itself was smaller than an ordinary soup can. Could it be hidden somewhere in this garage?

He didn’t want this hope to jinx it, but at the very least he knew they had been here. Karvinen fell back into place, inextricably tied to Valby and the dirty bomb scenario. It was all connected. It didn’t make any sense yet, but it was all connected.

The wind was coming in across the flat fields, carrying the scent of seaweed and brine and jet fuel with it. With a sharp pang of longing, Søren thought of Susse and her white house and the hour’s peace he had snatched for himself earlier in the day. Why had he set up his life so that most of his time was spent trying to get inside the heads of parasites like Karvinen?

Pull yourself together, he snarled to himself. Think. Do something. You can feel sorry for yourself later.

Suddenly he noticed a movement in the sea of stinging nettles at the corner of the farmhouse. He glided sideways, closer to the wall, and drew his sidearm. Waiting. Listening.

The nettles rustled again, and now he could hear something. Scraping, and whining. He slipped along the wall of the house in a couple of stealthy, sideways paces and peeked around the corner.

A slightly overweight, brown Labrador retriever looked up at him with golden brown eyes and wagged faintly. Then it went back to digging again, dirt and pebbles flying out between its hind legs.

Søren stuck his gun back in its holster. He was glad he hadn’t had a chance to yell “Police!” or some other inappropriate action line. Instead he made a couple of encouraging clicks with his tongue so the dog looked up from his digging again.

“What are you up to, boy?” he asked.

The dog wasn’t just trying to dig up a mouse hole. It had scratched and clawed the entire way around a rusty metal lid like one that might cover a well or sewer access.

Snow White. Suddenly Søren had a flashback to the cold morning hours outside the garage in Valby, digging up the underground gas tank and the body they had found in that dark, diesel-stinking sarcophagus.

Fuck.

No.

Not again.

His heart skipped a beat before it hammered on. Not the girl. Please God, not that poor fourteen-year-old girl.

Then he heard a sound that wasn’t the dog’s whining and scraping. A faint, metallic knocking.
Thunk-thunk-thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk-thunk-thunk
.

SOS.

“Jankowski!” he bellowed. “Get over here! Now!”

He dropped down onto his knees in the trampled nettles and tried to lift the lid with his fingers, but he couldn’t get a proper grip. A screwdriver, a hook of some kind … something that could fit into those two holes in the lid. He tried with a ballpoint pen, but it snapped. Then he took his pistol and banged out a response rhythm with the butt so that she—in his head it was still the girl, he couldn’t get his mind off her—so that at least she knew someone had heard her and that help was on the way.

“We’re coming,” he shouted. “We’re going to get you out!”

I
T WAS THE
girl. Once they managed to wrench the outer lid away from the opening of the oil tank and cut the padlock off the specially mounted inner lid, what peered up at him was the chilled, pale face of a teenager. Her hands were bloody and her nails broken and chipped, and her fingers were convulsively clutching the bunch of keys she had been using to bang out her faint, scarcely audible SOS. Tears were streaming down her filthy cheeks and kept flowing even after they got her out and wrapped her in silver-colored heat blankets, given her water and sugar and more water.

“They have my mom,” she said. “And Sándor. He’s OK, he isn’t one of them, please don’t hurt him. And they have that thing.”

“The cesium unit?” Søren said.

“Yes. That. They want to sell it to some crazy old guy who’s going to give them half a million kroner for it.”

“Do you know where?” Søren asked, holding his breath. “Do you know where they’re going to meet?”

The girl was still breathing in a strangely arrhythmic, jerky way. Søren was amazed she was holding it together as much as she was under the circumstances. That she could talk, think, and respond at all.

“Lundedalsvej,” she said. “I wrote it down so I would remember it.” She showed him her forearms and the big, black, smeared letters written zigzagged across her skin. “I used my mascara.”

Søren wanted to give her a hug, but she wasn’t the kind of girl who would have appreciated that. She was so clearly clinging to her self-control with an iron will that reminded him of her mother.

“Respect,” he said instead, quietly and heartfelt. And was rewarded with a crooked, wobbly teenage smile.

Jankowski looked pensive.

“Lundedalsvej.…” he said slowly. “Isn’t that where …?”