Invisible Murder

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.

“Yes. And that’s exactly what makes a dirty bomb an effective weapon of terror. It’s exceptionally well suited to spreading fear.”

“Decapitated heads,” Mikael said suddenly. “At Antioch the crusaders chopped off enemy heads and lobbed them into the city with the trebuchets. It’s nothing new.”

Sometimes that man knew the strangest things, Søren thought. Mikael had had the dubious honor of escorting the corpse from the gas tank to the medical examiner’s and observing the autopsy, which might explain why his thoughts were a little gorier than usual.

“Let’s just get it over with, Mikael,” Søren said. “The autopsy report?”

Mikael stood up. He looked tired, but then he had been on his feet since 4 A.M. like the rest of the team.

“According to the preliminary report, the guy died of radiation sickness, presumably Thursday or early Friday.”

“Not later than that? Maybe Saturday night or Sunday?” Søren asked.

“No.” Mikael cleared his throat and reached for a water glass. Jytte from the cafeteria had also stocked the meeting table with a plate of open-face sandwiches, but apparently Mikael had lost his appetite. “The pathologists and the staff at the National Institute for Radiation Hygiene pretty much agree that he was exposed to very powerful radiation two to three weeks ago. From accidents elsewhere in the world, we know that the illness typically begins with nausea and vomiting, fever, and in serious cases diarrhea. After that people often improve, but if the exposure was significant, for example four to six grays, the immune system is so compromised that, after a few days, the patient starts to develop infections, another fever, hemorrhages, sores.…” Mikael caught Søren’s eye. “Well, you saw him yourself. When they opened his mouth, his gums were almost gone. God-awful sight.”

Mikael’s last statement hung in the air for an uncomfortably long time, and again Søren had to wave the disturbing images from Valby out of his mind.

“Can they say anything about how he was exposed?”

“Yes. He presumably took in the brunt of the radiation through his hands. The pathologists found wounds there that were reminiscent of burns. There were also a number of other signs that suggested he might have handled the radioactive source.”

“What about identification?”

“Wasn’t there something about a passport? Sándor Horváth, right? Isn’t that why they woke you up in the middle of the night?” Gitte asked.

“I don’t think it’s him,” Søren said. “The nurse recognized the passport photo. The man in the photo was still alive Saturday night when the nurse treated him for a minor eye injury. Alive, and in Denmark. Besides, Sándor Horváth is in his early twenties, and I think our corpse is younger than that. An overgrown boy, no more.”

“Our John Doe was missing a canine in his upper jaw,” Mikael said. “The pathologist thinks he had probably never seen a dentist, unfortunately. At any rate he had no fillings. That’s typical for some of the poorest of the Eastern European Roma.”

“So there won’t be any dental records,” Søren said. “But there must be a link between him and Sándor Horváth. If we haven’t done it already, send a picture of the body to the NBH.”

“It’s been done,” Gitte said. “They were actually very helpful. A man’s on his way up here to assist us in our search for Sándor Horváth, and they also assigned a couple of people to dig up a little more on his family and friends in Budapest. They’re going to keep us up to date.”

“And how’s it going with our friend Khalid?”

“Not so well.”

That response came from Bjørn Steffensen, a generally unshaven and insolent aging homeboy from the rough part of Amager. He normally worked with the Organized Crime Center. He was one of the team members Torben had managed to borrow, and he didn’t look too happy that his first job here was to be the bearer of bad news.

“This whole line of enquiry is a ticket to Shitville” he said, having apparently decided that offense was the best defense. “The technicians have been working on the kid’s computer since 5 A.M., and we have fuck-all on the guy. To begin with, it wasn’t even his computer that was used to contact Sándor Horváth. Or at least not the one we confiscated. I suppose he could have another one stashed somewhere.”

Søren felt an uncomfortable sinking sensation somewhere in that part of his mind where he was trying to keep all the facts in the case straight. “What do you mean?” he said. “I thought that we’d at least established that much?”

“The MAC address doesn’t match. You’ll have to ask IT about the details,” Bjørn said. “And when we sent one of the tech guys to look at the school’s network, he reported that the security system has more holes than a Swiss cheese. The head of the school’s IT department has apparently been busy with more important things. He teaches Danish and English as well.” That last bit was said with a snide curl at the corner of his mouth, as if nothing could be more laughable than a literature teacher being in charge of the school’s Internet security.

“Christian was able to get onto the school’s wireless network from his own laptop without any trouble,” Mikael added. “The security was so bad that he didn’t even need a username or password, and that means that anyone within a radius of thirty meters of the school could have used the school’s IP address to visit those shady sites.”

“So I high-tailed it out there to pick up the footage from the surveillance cameras that cover the schools’ outdoor areas,” Bjørn said.

Søren listened with a growing sense that everything was falling apart.

“But if Khalid didn’t do it, why wouldn’t he let us look at his computer?” Søren asked.

Bjørn smirked.

“As I said, it’s possible that he has another computer and needed to win himself a little time so he could swap the two machines. But personally I think he was just worried about his little side business. I’ve never seen so many pirated music files in one place before. He could get in real trouble for that, and I guess that would be reason enough.”

Søren curbed his desire to kick something. Bjørn, preferably. Don’t shoot the messenger, he admonished himself. But couldn’t the man control his gloating just a little?

“And what do the surveillance cameras say?”

“We know that our potential buyer went online Saturday, May second, at 8:52 P.M. and was logged on for about forty minutes. We can see only one car that was parked at the school for that entire time frame, and it left the site immediately after. It’s impossible to read the license plate, but luckily it’s an old banger, an Opel Rekord E, probably from the early ’80s, and there aren’t that many of them in the motor vehicle registry. About two hundred or so in the whole country, a hundred and eighteen of which are in the Copenhagen area.”

Okay, thought Søren. At least that was something. A start.

“Check it out. But I also want people out canvassing the area around the school. Find out exactly where he might have been holed up, aside from in the car. What about the neighboring properties? Can you go online from them? Talk to the residents. And find out if they noticed the car or any other cars that spent a long time in the area on the evening in question. The surveillance cameras have blind spots.” Like people, he thought. Admittedly, Khalid had been an obvious suspect with his nervousness and his little display of civil disobedience. But they couldn’t afford to make another mistake like this.

“HC wasn’t happy,” Gitte remarked. “He was pissed off when he found out we’d called him out of his training exercise to question a smart-mouthed teenage bootlegger.”

“HC’s mood is not our biggest problem,” Søren said. “But okay. I suppose I could offer him an apology. I’m assuming we’ve already released Khalid?”

Gitte nodded. “At 11:23 A.M. His uncle threatened to sue us for false arrest, but Khalid talked him down. He doesn’t want to have to discuss his pirated files with the prosecutor.”

Exit Khalid, thought Søren, picturing the cocky, young café shark who had so familiarly offered him a drink and a smoke at their first meeting. Hopefully HC hadn’t managed to shred his self-confidence too much before the word came from IT to stop the interrogation.

“What about the property in Valby? Anything on that front?”

“They just called up from reception,” Gitte said. “A Birgitte Johnsen from the NEC is on her way up to talk to you.”

“The NEC?” Søren looked at her over his reading glasses. The NEC was the Danish National Police Investigation Center. “What the hell do they have to do with this case?”

Gitte shrugged her broad swimmer’s shoulders. “She’s in the sex trafficking and immoral earnings division,” Gitte said.

BIRGITTE JOHNSEN WAS unbelievably navy blue, Søren thought. Navy blue skirt, navy blue jacket, navy blue nylons, and navy blue shoes with oversized gold buckles. The blouse under her jacket was white, but otherwise she was an unbroken vision of blueness.

They shook hands, and Søren showed her into the external meeting room that was located right off reception. Unauthorized visitors were not allowed to wander the PET’s corridors, not even unauthorized police employees.

“I understand that you have some information on 35 Gasbetonvej?” Søren said, gesturing with his hand. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

“No thanks,” Birgitte said. “But if there’s a mineral water?”

“Of course.” Søren opened a Ramlösa for her. The writing on the label was, very appropriately, printed in navy blue.

“The property is owned by a Malee Rasmussen. And we know her quite well over in our section. She’s originally from Thailand and is married to a former factory worker named Hans Jørgen Rasmussen, who is on disability allowance. We presume the marriage is just a sham, but we haven’t been able to prove it. She, however, has a conviction for living off immoral earnings and has been part of the local prostitution scene for many years now.”

“Prostitution? But surely … the property in Valby could hardly have been used for that?”

“You’d be amazed if you saw some of the places people are prepared to go to buy sex,” Birgitte said. “But no, regardless of sexual predilection, concrete floors and inspection pits are not particularly well suited to running a brothel. We have no reason to believe that that’s what they’ve been doing out there. It probably is what it looks like: a flophouse for Roma and other Eastern Europeans who come up here during the summer months and pay about eighty to a hundred kroner a night for permission to sleep under conditions that would make the inmates at Vridsløselille State Prison riot.”

“Then that’s a bit of a career change for her, isn’t it? Is the property really hers, do you think, or is she just the front for someone else?”

“I think she has a backer. But the career change, as you call it, isn’t actually that unprecedented. Earnings are way down in the prostitution business due to the financial crisis.”

“Do you know why?”

“Fewer courses, conferences, and fringe benefit trips. Greater need for security. The average John can’t really afford trouble with Mrs. John right now. And while the demand is falling off, the supply is increasing. In the wake of the social hardship that has spread in countries even worse affected by the financial crisis than Denmark, more and more girls flock to the trade. Malee and her backer aren’t the only ones who’ve had to restructure their businesses.”

“Okay. Any guess who this backer is?”

“We’ve asked her, of course. I brought a recording for you to watch. But first I want to show you a previous clip, from when we were investigating the immoral earnings case. That was five years ago now, and she’s in her late thirties in this recording.”

Birgitte slid a DVD into her laptop and rotated the computer so he could see it better. A woman with jet-black hair and spirited dark eyes appeared. Vital. Expressive. There was a self-awareness of her appearance and attire, jewelry, and the heavy but stylish makeup. And her eyes twinkled as the questions hit her.

“… she said that?” The lilting Thai accent was obvious; her eyes were bright and ready for a fight. She laughed a short, hard laugh and snorted disdainfully. Clicked her tongue when the lead interrogator asked about one of her acquaintances. “She’s full of lies. Lies. And she’s jealous!”

Birgitte stopped the DVD and clicked on another file.

“Now watch this. This recording is from this morning.”

At first Søren thought she had selected the wrong file. It wasn’t the same woman. And yet it was. But Malee Rasmussen’s smile was so strained that her face resembled one of those grotesque grinning Balinese masks that his ex-wife Susse had bought on a trip back in the ’90s. If she was in her late thirties in that first clip, she must be forty-two or forty-three here, but she looked ten years older than that. Her makeup was so very cliché for the prostitution world that it looked like stage makeup, and although her voice was still light and lilting, there was no trace of vitality left in that hardened face.

“What happened to her?” he asked. “She’s … is she sick or something?”

“Not that we know of. But there are rumors that she has a new backer. And that he’s taught her some new tricks. The hard way. As you’ll see, she’s not very forthcoming these days.”

The camera zoomed out a bit, and Malee’s whole body could be seen. Her short, sturdy silhouette was dressed in a mint green dress with flowers around the neckline and matching stiletto heels. Her legs were crossed. Her hands lay motionless in her lap, but she was rapidly whipping her foot back and forth as the questions were repeated interminably. Who was using the repair shop? Who had the keys? Why had she bought it anyway? Where had she gotten the money from?

Malee’s forehead glistened damply under her elaborately arranged black hair. She was still smiling, and at regular intervals, she chose to respond but only to repeat what she had already said.

“I didn’t know there was anyone at the repair shop. It was an investment. I haven’t been there since February. I didn’t know there was anyone there. The repair shop is just real estate. An investment.”

“Try to catch her eyes right there.”

Birgitte rewound a couple of seconds and started it playing again. Søren looked at the woman again. Her eyes flickered nervously in the midst of the hardened mask of her face.

Birgitte shook her head.

“I don’t know who or what she’s afraid of now, but it certainly isn’t us. I don’t think we’re going to get anything else out of her, but I’ve asked the Fraud Squad to dig a little deeper into her finances. Maybe that will give us a few names.”

“Something happened to her,” Søren maintained. “It would be good to know what.”

“Yes. She wasn’t exactly a lovey-dovey person before, and she’s always been quite tough on her girls. But now.…”

Søren looked at the pale, fossilized face on the screen. “What now?”

Birgitte snapped her computer shut and placed it in her briefcase.

“We don’t know. But we’ve talked to girls who’ve worked for her, and they refuse to testify. There’s a whisper that you get buried alive if you don’t do what Malee says. That you wind up in the ‘Coffin.’ ”

Buried alive.… Søren thought of Snow White.