Invisible Murder

ØREN HAD BROUGHT the girl up from the basement and into the kitchen. His plan had been to suggest a cup of coffee to distract her and make the situation feel more normal, but the only visible coffee-making equipment was an espresso monstrosity the size of a small space station, and with the clock ticking in his head, the whole palaver of grinding beans and fumbling around with the settings and weird little filters was simply insurmountable.

The girl sensed his skepticism, and a tiny little pseudo-smile raised one corner of her mouth.

“We never use,” she said. “Too hard.”

She said “we,” he noticed.

“Is Tommi your boyfriend?” Søren asked.

Her smile disappeared as if someone had erased it. She nodded, one time, a quick, abrupt motion.

“Where is he?” Søren asked, without much hope of receiving a helpful answer. Nor did he get one. She just shook her head.

“He not tell me.”

Where was she from? Somewhere in Eastern Europe, probably, from the look of her. And if the Italian passport was bought in Italy, then it was likely to be one of the more southerly countries—former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, maybe Albania. The false passport was probably as much to hide her age as her nationality, he guessed.

“How old are you, Mini?” he asked, to have some kind of baseline for what she looked like when she was lying.

“Nineteen.” She looked him straight in the eye, but she couldn’t keep her hands still. One hand flopped around restlessly in her lap, and as soon as she had delivered her lie, she looked away.

Good. One more time, just to test the theory. “Where are you from? What country?”

“I am Italian girl.” She looked at him, and this time both her hands and her feet were fidgety. Little Mini didn’t like to lie.

He asked a couple of neutral questions and determined that she had been in Denmark for four months, that she had come to do some modeling work, that she was going to be in a movie soon. She actually believed all of this; Søren had to restrain a dark, bitter rage that wouldn’t have done the interview the least bit of good. It was certainly possible, he thought, that they intended to film her. But the very idea of the kind of movie it would be made him want to smear Tommi Karvinen over a wide swath of Amager’s asphalt.

Then he asked again if she knew where Karvinen was. And she fidgeted restlessly with one hand when she said no.

“Mini,” he said in the plainest, clearest English he could think of. “He took a girl. A Danish girl. She’s fourteen years old.”

She didn’t say anything, but the light in her eyes, which had sparked to life when she talked about her modeling career and her movie plans, died away again.

“Where did he take her?” Søren asked.

She pulled all her limbs in close to her body, like a spider when you blew on it. Self-preservation. Extreme self-preservation.

“Where is she?” he asked gently. “Don’t you want to help her?”

She was hyperventilating. He could both see it and hear it. Slowly she keeled to one side on the chair. When he realized the chair was about to tip over, he reached out a hand to stop it, but he was a second too late. She slid onto the floor and lay there with her knees pulled up against her chest and her eyes closed. She actually had fainted, Søren confirmed. She wasn’t pretending.

Suddenly Christian’s broad silhouette appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked down at the girl.

“What did you do to her?” Christian asked.

Søren maneuvered her gently onto her side, wadded up his dark windbreaker into a sort of pillow and pushed it in under her head. He shook his head.

“She was hyperventilating,” he said. “Keeled right over. Do you have anything for me?”

“Yup. We got lucky. This little girl here officially owns a property a little farther out quite near the airport, just off Tømmerupvej. And get this—it’s exactly where we traced the IP address back to.”

“Yes. Jankowski and I will head out there.” Pity the Dove had needed to take off, but there wasn’t time to call him back. “Would you get an ambulance for this one?”

She was conscious again, he sensed. Lying there listening to their foreign voices in a language she didn’t understand.

“An ambulance? But if she just hyperventilated …?”

“Christian. Get her out of this house. Get her admitted to a nice, clean hospital with friendly people who will take care of her. We’ll take it from there tomorrow. Right? Just say she’s unconscious, and you can’t wake her up.”

The penny finally dropped, Søren observed, and Christian merely nodded.

Without his jacket and with Jankowski on his heels, Søren trotted down the suburban street to where they had parked the car.

“What was wrong with the girl?” Jankowski asked as he slid in behind the wheel. “Did she just faint?”

Søren yanked his seatbelt into place with barely restrained fury.

“Drive,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell he does to terrorize these women. But it is going to stop right now!”