Invisible Murder

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!”

IT 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 …?”

“Yes,” said Søren. “That’s where they’re building that new mosque.”