Invisible Murder Read online

  “Mr. Skou-Larsen? Is something wrong?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just.…”

  “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Makes you envy those Muslims, huh?” Jansen grinned knowingly, with an admiration that Skou-Larsen assumed he otherwise reserved for expensive cars or the highlights of the soccer games he watched on TV. There was no sign he was having his foundation rocked.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The man’s voice was angry and tense, in a stressed-out way that might also be covering a certain amount of fear.

  When Skou-Larsen turned around, he spotted a well-dressed older gentleman—well, twenty years younger than you are, he corrected himself—clutching a length of copper piping in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.

  “Everything’s under control, Mr. Hosseini,” Jansen said quickly. “My firm is responsible for the ceilings in the entrance hall. Preben Jansen. We’ve met.”

  “And him?” The suspicion had not completely left the man, but his grip on the pipe relaxed somewhat.

  “This is Mr. Skou-Larsen, from the city,” Jansen said, conveniently forgetting to mention that Skou-Larsen’s tenure in that role had ceased a number of years ago. “We’re just taking a look around.”

  The man set down the copper pipe and held out his hand.

  “Forgive me,” he said, formally. “But the site is closed now, and we’ve had our fair share of vandalism and the like.… It puts one on one’s guard.”

  “Of course,” Skou-Larsen said, clasping the outstretched hand.

  “Mahmoud Hosseini. I’m the chairman of the organizing committee.”

  “Jørgen Skou-Larsen,” said Skou-Larsen, and then added, because it had to be said: “You are building a beautiful place, Mr. Hosseini.”

  Back home the coffee still sat untouched and a sugar-drunk housefly was crawling around on the marble cake. Helle wasn’t home. He didn’t know if he should take that as a good sign. It was hard for her to go out alone, even in the middle of the day when her anxiety was at its lowest ebb. On the other hand, it probably meant she was still mad at him about that business with the coffee. He started clearing the table, and while he was rinsing the Arabia cups before loading them into the dishwasher—she always insisted on that, as if they needed to avoid sullying the inside of the dishwasher—she came slowly up the garden path with her old Raleigh bicycle. He could just make out a grocery bag in the bike’s basket.

  “Where have you been?” he asked when she walked in the front door.

  “Out buying slug bait,” she said grumpily, setting a five-kilo package of Ferramol on the kitchen counter. “You keep promising, but you never actually manage to get anything done, do you?”

  ORVÁTH IS ON the move.”

  Károly Gábor spoke excellent, but slow, English, and that gave Søren’s brain time to leave its vegetative state and come up to speed. Horváth. That was the name of the Hungarian student, the one the NBH had hauled in for questioning. He fished around in his bag, flipping through the case folders he had brought home, and found his Hungary notes. Yep. Sándor Horváth.

  “Where is he?” he asked.

  “Germany. His phone was activated near Dresden yesterday and again this morning in the Potsdam area.”

  Søren knew that the NBH had let the young man keep his phone so they could keep track of his whereabouts if he should happen to use it again. Which he obviously had. Not exactly a hardened, professional operative, this Horváth.

  Dresden and then Potsdam.

  “You think he’s on his way to Denmark?”

  “Could be.”

  Søren looked at the sickly house plant in the pot on his kitchen windowsill without actually seeing it. Gábor had caught him right in the middle of his muesli, with a shoe on one foot and just a sock on the other. After having worked eleven days straight, he had treated himself to a calm, quiet morning and hadn’t actually been planning on going in until around noon. That might have to change now.

  He thanked Gábor for the message and called Mikael Nielsen, who was keeping tabs on the surveillance of Khalid Hosseini.

  “Where is he now?” Søren asked.

  It took just a second too long before Mikael answered.

  “Um. He’s actually sitting in Bellahøj police station.”

  “He’s what? What’s he doing there?”

  “He was arrested an hour ago. For assaulting and threatening an officer on duty.”

  “What happened?”

  “Apparently he got into an argument with one of our surveillance people. I was just about to call you. Bellahøj wants to know what they should do with him.”

  KHALID HOSSEINI SAT low in the chair, with his jeans-clad legs stretched out in front of him and his hands buried in the pockets of a black bomber jacket. When he saw Søren, he leapt up like a spring being released.

  “I knew it was your lot,” he hissed. “This is fucking harassment, that’s what it is. I bet it’s not even legal!”

  “As far as I’ve gathered,” Søren said, “you attacked a police officer, who is now receiving treatment at the ER.”

  “No!” The denial came instantly and with the force of conviction. “It’s a fucking lie, man. I didn’t even touch that guy. You should be asking him why he ran over my little brother in his fucking car!”

  What? There hadn’t been anything about a traffic incident in the reports Søren had received from Bellahøj’s uniformed officers. According to them, they had gone to Mjølnerparken in response to a distress call from the officer tailing Hosseini and had found the officer holed up in his patrol car, bleeding from a laceration over one ear and surrounded by a crowd of enraged residents who were rocking the car, hitting its roof, and screaming insults in a mixture of Danish, Arabic, and Urdu. The shocked police officer had been taken to the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital for treatment for the cut and a possible concussion. There had been no mention of a younger brother.

  Søren put a neutral look on his face and hoped his surprise wasn’t visible.

  “What I would really like to hear now.…” he said, sitting down on one of the desk chairs, “… is your side of the story. What happened out there?”

  His neutrality actually had a soothing effect. Khalid flopped back down in the chair again and stared at him with obvious, but controlled, aggression.

  “Like you give a crap,” he said. “This is a set-up. Don’t you think I’ve figured that out? Now you’ve finally got the towelhead where you want him, right? Well, what the hell do I care? Go ahead—lock me up. No fucking cop has a right to run over my little brother!”

  Søren said nothing. He just waited. He avoided Khalid’s aggressive stare, studying the domestic clutter on the borrowed desk instead, the stack of folders and loose papers, a mouse pad with the AGF soccer team’s logo and the slogan, “Stay loyal!”—the desk’s usual occupant must be from Aarhus—and a picture of a remarkably beautiful, blonde girl fondly embracing a golden retriever.

  “I didn’t touch him,” Khalid finally said in a different voice. Higher, more childlike. Plaintive. “Or, well, okay, I pushed him, but what would you have done? Kasim was sitting on the pavement sobbing. He was just trying to give me my phone, for fuck’s sake. He ran after me because I forgot it, and then that fucking idiot ran him down.”

  He was starting to get angry again in order to keep up his courage. Because underneath the aggression and attitude, Khalid was scared now, Søren guessed. He was nineteen years old, and this was the first time he had been arrested.

  “Then what happened?” Søren asked, still completely neutral.

  “Then the police came and dragged me in here.”

  Something was obviously missing from that chain of events, Søren thought. But right now he sorely needed to hear what the wounded officer had to say. Khalid wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I DIDN’T HIT the kid!” the police officer insisted. He was twenty-six years old, new to the surveillance unit, and his name was Markus Eberhart. He ha
d a shaved spot on one side of his head that made his otherwise stylish haircut look sadly asymmetrical. They had managed to fix up the scalp wound with just skin glue and butterfly bandages, and according to Bispebjerg Hospital, his pupils were normally responsive and he had displayed the ability to orient himself with regard to time, place, and personal particulars. In other words, things weren’t so bad.

  “What happened?” Søren asked with more or less the same neutrality he had used with Khalid.

  “The boy ran out the front door without looking right or left. I slammed on the brakes. But I didn’t hit him!”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Then the kid plunked down on his rear end on the asphalt and started bawling his eyes out. I think he was pretty shocked.”

  “And then?”

  “Then the suspect and his cousin jumped out of their car and came running. I got out to try to comfort the child, but they pushed me up against the hood and were acting menacing, and then all the neighbors came running, and … then I was struck by an object.”

  The officer was struggling to report this using professional terminology, but Søren noted the switch to passive voice—it started out I got out, they came running, they pushed, but then “I was struck.”

  “Do you know who struck you?” Søren asked.

  The officer hesitated. Then he said, “No. I can’t say with certainty. At first I thought it was the suspect, but … I think actually someone threw something. And Khalid was standing right next to me.”

  “And then?”

  “Then … I managed to get into the car and secure the doors. And call for backup.”

  Søren could just picture it. The crying child, the irate men, the neighbors and family members crowding round. And in the middle of the whole god-awful mess, a young police officer ready to shit his pants and not without reason.

  “How close were you to the front door?” Søren asked.

  “I was parked almost right in front of it. Ten or twelve meters away max. I had just started the car to follow the suspect when the accident happened. Or … nearly happened. I slammed on the brakes right away, and there’s no way I was going more than ten kilometers per hour.”

  “Why were you parked so close?”

  “We had been told.…” The officer hesitated again; it seemed like he felt he was being tested in some way and was afraid he would give the wrong answer. “Well, it was a close-tail surveillance assignment, right? They said it didn’t matter much if we were seen. That it was more important that we didn’t lose him.”

  “How long have you been working in surveillance?”

  “A little over a month.”

  Søren painstakingly avoided sighing. The assignment had been to put pressure on Khalid with surveillance that was fairly obvious at times. That was probably why the surveillance unit had decided to use it as a sort of training exercise for newbies. And that was why an insecure, young policeman had ended up in a situation that could have been dangerous to all involved. He could have hit the child. And he could have been seriously hurt himself.

  “But the child wasn’t injured?”

  “No. He was just crying because he was scared.”

  “And Khalid Hosseini didn’t hit you?”

  “No. It … I can’t say that he did.”

  “Good. Then I think we should let this whole incident die as quiet a death as possible. Agreed?”

  Markus Eberhart nodded. The gesture made him wince, and he carefully touched his head.

  SØREN CALLED BELLAHØJ from the parking lot in front of emergency room entrance.

  “Release him,” he told the desk officer, repeating Eberhart’s explanation. “We don’t have any actual grounds to hold him on.”

  “The father and the uncle are here already” was the response. “Looking appropriately aghast and appalled. They say he’s a good boy, and that we’re hounding him for no reason.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they do.” But somewhere or other north of Potsdam, Sándor Horváth was on his way to Denmark. And Søren was eager to find out what was going to happen when he met with Khalid Hosseini.

  So when Khalid left Bellahøj police station a half hour later with his father and uncle, there were not any surveillance newbies tagging along. But that didn’t mean he was unobserved.

  INA PULLED INTO the parking lot in front of the Valby garage at 1:37 P.M. Peter’s emergency call had come in the middle of the clinic’s drop-in hours. Snotty noses and infant vaccinations. Peter was his usual grouchy self as he outlined the situation. The young man had apparently disappeared, but the children were sick again. All of them. He needed a “professional on site,” as he put it, and Magnus had just thrown up his hands in exasperated acceptance when Nina asked for permission to pop out for a couple hours.

  This time it actually seemed she was welcome. The door opened before she had a chance to knock. They had been waiting for her, she could tell. The young mother with the missing front teeth was perched just inside the doorway and eagerly grabbed hold of her arm as soon as Nina crossed the threshold. The other women and a small group of men were behind her, and they followed Nina and the young mother with their eyes. Nina thought she could sense a new tension that didn’t have to do with her presence. Illnesses that didn’t go away on their own were poor people’s worst nightmare.

  “Ápolónö. Jöljön be, jöljön be!”

  Nina didn’t understand the words, but their meaning was clear enough. The woman pulled her into the garage so quickly that she almost tripped on the mattresses, stuffed plastic bags, and duffle bags.

  The boy was lying totally motionless on a filthy foam mattress pushed up against the wall, and when she cautiously squatted down next to him, his whole body jerked. A stream of yellowish vomit welled out from under his head; he opened his eyes, looking vaguely about, and then disappeared back into a fog. The young woman emitted something between a sob and a sigh and ran to get a new cloth. She must have had to do that quite a few times, and Nina could see the fatigue and worry in her eyes when she came back and started wiping sweat and vomit off the boy’s face. She gave up on doing anything about the mattress, just pushed a clean towel in under his head.

  “A fiam rosszul. A fiam rosszul van.”

  She looked up at Nina with a question in her eyes, and Nina cautiously began her examination. The boy was considerably worse than a couple days ago. He still didn’t have a fever, but he was exhausted from all the vomiting, and though Nina managed to get him to sit up for a couple minutes, he kept falling asleep leaning against his mother’s shoulder. His belly wasn’t distended; his biggest problem was probably dehydration. His skin was bone dry, and he was either going to need IV fluids here—or, better still, a hospital.

  Nina pulled out her phone, found Allan’s number in her address book and wedged the phone between her shoulder and cheek as she scanned the garage. The boy’s English-speaking father had taken refuge in the group of men over by the door, away from his son’s illness and his wife’s worried looks. Now she waved him over, Allan’s ring tone still chiming away in her ear.

  “The other children,” she said, pointing around the garage. “Where are they?”

  He pulled her further back toward the rear of the garage, where to her relief she saw the other children sitting with sleeping bags wrapped around their shoulders. Weak and pale, but clearly healthier than the boy on the mattress.

  Allan finally answered his phone. “Hi, Nina.”

  He sounded like he was in a relatively good mood, which was a plus. She hadn’t spoken with him since the previous August. Allan was a doctor with a practice north of Copenhagen, in fashionable Vedbær. He had also been moonlighting as part of Peter’s standing team when their “clients” had problems that required prescription medication or an emergency house call. But that was over now. He was no longer part of the Network, and the last time she had seen him he hadn’t been mincing his words when he told her to shove off and never come back.

  “I need you
r opinion,” Nina said, trying for Peter’s crisply managerial tone of voice. “I’m standing in an old auto repair shop in Valby with a lot of very sick children. One of them in particular is dehydrated, and I can’t really figure out how bad it is. I think it’s a stomach virus of some kind, but they’ve been sick for several days now and apparently it’s mostly the children who are getting sick.”

  Allan sighed.

  “Tell me more. Vomiting, diarrhea, fever, blood?”

  Nina summed up the situation and waited patiently while Allan chewed on a pen on the other end of the line.

  “Hmm. It’s a little odd that they’re having multiple bouts of it,” he said. “Maybe it’s some kind of poisoning. Industrial waste, heavy metals, or gasoline fumes could cause those kinds of symptoms if they were exposed to them for long enough. Might also explain the pattern of recurrences. Did you ask where the kids have been playing?”

  “Thanks,” she said quickly. “What else?”

  “Virus, bacteria, it could be anything. Make sure you wash your hands really well and get yourself some gloves and a face mask. You know the drill. Obviously the boy’s going to need fluids, and then I think it would be good for all involved if the group left the repair shop if there’s any way to make that happen. And be careful yourself.”

  Click.

  He was gone before she had a chance to say a proper goodbye. Allan really didn’t want to know, and he also wanted to avoid any request for impromptu house calls. And he was right. She might have asked if he hadn’t wrapped up the conversation so quickly.

  Poisoning. Nina didn’t have much experience with that kind of thing, but this was an old auto mechanic’s garage, and there could still be gasoline or other organic solvents stored on the premises. The children might have drunk or inhaled some toxic substance by accident.

  She looked at the child’s father who was standing next to her expectantly. His forehead was wet with sweat.

  “What did the children do yesterday? Where were they?”

  “Big children work. My son here. To rest. Get stronger.”