Invisible Murder

HE FIAT WAS gone when they got back to FEJøGADE. Sándor stared at the empty parking space on the curb where it had been an hour before.

“It’s gone,” he said.

If only he had just smashed the damn window and taken the jacket while he had the chance. But the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. That would have been Against The Rules. Of course at that point, he hadn’t known that Tamás’s life might depend on it.

“Then I suppose we’ll have to wait until it comes back,” Frederik said. “Because this is where she lives, right?”

“I don’t know,” Sándor said. “I think so. She went into that building there.” He pointed to the front door he was most convinced was hers. No reason to mention that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

“Find another place to park, Tommi,” Frederik told the driver. “So her spot is still free.”

Tommi nodded and slid the Touareg in between a Kia and a Škoda Felicia a little farther down the street. He turned on the radio and shoved a CD into the slot, and soon Johnny Cash was rasping through the speakers: “Saint Quentin, you’ve been living hell to me.…”

They sat in silence. Sándor had stopped asking them about Tamás, and there wasn’t anything else he wanted to talk to them about. The driver lit a cigarette.

“Open the window,” Frederik said, irritated.

After half an hour, during which Johnny Cash had sung “Folsom Prison Blues,” “The Man in Black,” “Ring of Fire,” and several other classics, Tommi suddenly opened the driver’s door.

“Can you see the Fiat?” Frederik asked, still in English, which suddenly puzzled Sándor. Why weren’t they speaking Danish to each other?

“She obviously didn’t just pop out for cigarettes,” Tommi said. “And we don’t have all night.”

Frederik sat there for a brief moment. Then he nodded.

“Okay. We’ll go in and have a look. Come on.” That last part was to Sándor.

“But I don’t even know her name!”

“You said she was a nurse, right?” Tommi said. “I’m sure we can figure out the rest. Get off your ass.”

Tommi tossed his ten-gallon hat onto the seat and took off his fringed cowboy jacket. He pulled two black sweatshirts out of the trunk, gave one to Frederik, put on the other, and stuck a couple of screwdrivers in his pocket. The Lab whined, wanting to go with them, but Frederik commanded it to “Lie down!” and at the same time cracked the window a little to let air into the car for it.

Frederik pressed the doorbells one by one and said a few words each time, completely incomprehensible to Sándor, until there was a buzz and a click and they could enter. Ten or twelve identical mailboxes were mounted just inside the door. With a quick, practiced wrench of the screwdriver, Tommi broke the first one open and passed the contents to Frederik, who quickly skimmed through it while Tommi set to work on the next mailbox.

“Bingo,” Frederik said of mailbox five, waving a window envelope. “Nina Borg, RN. Second floor on the right.”

Tommi carefully returned the mail to the appropriate boxes even though the doors were hanging open and could no longer be closed.

Frederik rang the doorbell for the second-floor apartment on the right, but no one came to the door. They could hear music from inside, something loud and heavy and apocalyptic, and when Tommi opened the mail slot, they could see that the lights were on. Frederik and Tommi exchanged glances, and Frederik nodded. Tommi pulled a floppy, crumpled nylon stocking out of his pocket and handed it to Frederik. Frederik sniffed it and made a face.

“For fuck’s sake,” he said. “Don’t you have any that hasn’t been worn?”

Tommi just shrugged. He had already pulled a stocking over his head so his facial features were grotesquely smushed and camouflaged.

“No,” Sándor said, aghast. “You can’t just.…”

Crunch. The doorframe splintered under the pressure from two screwdrivers at once. The door opened.

Sándor just stood there on the landing until Tommi grabbed hold of him, pulled him inside, and shut the door behind him. The music pulsed out to meet them on heavy bass feet.

“But.…”

“Shut up. You want to get your brother to the doctor, right?”

Sándor closed his mouth again.

“Is it one of them?” Frederik asked softly, pointing to the overloaded coat hooks on one wall. Tommi had begun opening doors, quickly and quietly—or at least quietly enough that the clicks were lost in the bombardment of death metal. Sándor obediently flipped through the untidy collection of raincoats, windbreakers, and jackets but couldn’t find anything that resembled his Studio Coletti.

Suddenly there was a feminine shriek and an outraged yell from an only slightly less shrill but still unmistakably masculine voice. A shudder ran through Sándor’s entire body, and he involuntarily took a couple of quick steps back toward the door.

Tommi was standing in the doorway to what was obviously a teenager’s room. On the bed that occupied most of the space lay a young couple, a girl with short, wispy, tar-black hair and a young guy with tattooed shoulders and a shaved head. They were both more or less naked, and the girl was trying to pull the blanket up to cover her breasts.

Sándor hurriedly looked away. Tommi didn’t.

“Keep going,” he told the shocked couple, clicking the record video button on his fancy phone. “They’re crazy about this kind of thing on the Internet.…”