Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

“We still haven’t been able to find any connection between the IP address and the group of people in Valby,” Søren said. “But we’re working on it. What we do know, however, is that Sándor Horváth was in Valby.”

“But you haven’t found him?”

“No. His phone has been inactive since Saturday, he hasn’t used his credit card, and we don’t have a single witness who has seen him since Saturday evening, when he apparently helped break into the apartment of one of the Danes who was helping the sick children in Valby, a nurse by the name of Nina Borg. She was the one who led us to Valby, after she was diagnosed with radiation sickness.”

“And of course you’ve questioned her,” Gábor said.

“Apparently she’s just an overly idealistic nurse who was helping some people in need. But then.…” Søren hesitated. How to word this? “Escaped” sounded so drastic. “She left the hospital with a youngish man we still haven’t identified. We don’t know where she is at the moment.”

One of Gábor’s eyebrows rose a couple millimeters, and Søren swore under his breath. No trace of Horváth, and then one of the case’s lead witnesses just walks away without their having any kind of surveillance on her. The man must think they were amateurs. His phone vibrated in his pocket, but he ignored it. Whatever it was, it would have to wait until they finished the briefing.

He sensed Gitte fidgeting in the row of chairs behind him, and shortly afterward she leaned forward and handed him her phone.

“Boss,” she whispered. “I think you need to hear this.”

T HEY HAD BROUGHTthe boyfriend of Nina Borg’s daughter into one of the interrogation rooms in Building C. He looked nervous and had a bruise on one cheek, presumably from Saturday night’s attack.

He was alone—a five-foot-eleven teenager with a shaved head in a black Iron Maiden T-shirt and a pair of camouflage hip-hop pants—because they hadn’t been able to find his girlfriend Ida.

“We know each other from Greve,” he explained. “I live across the street.”

“I thought she lived in Østerbro?”

“Not anymore. Not since her mom went all glow-in-the-dark and contaminated their whole apartment. Now she lives with her dad’s sister in Greve. But she still goes to Jagtvejen School, and we had agreed to meet there after school. But she didn’t show up. And when I asked Anna, who’s in her class, she said Ida hadn’t been there for the last two periods.”

Søren raised his index finger in Gitte’s direction. She nodded and left the room. They hadn’t found Ida at the address in Greve either. Of course Ida might just have gone to a friend’s house, but too many of the people involved in this case were going missing. It wasn’t too soon to push the panic button.

“Ulf, we’d like to hear a little more about the three men who attacked you.”

He patiently led the boy through the statements, not pushing him, but providing opportunities. Was the first man taller than Ulf, or shorter? Was he a wearing a jacket, or a T-shirt, or a button-down? Did they speak English with the same accent, or did they have different accents?

“Different,” Ulf said. “The one without the mask didn’t really say anything. The two with tights over their faces … one of them was Danish, I think. The other one talked a little … kind of like those guys on The Dudesons .”

The Dudesons? Søren thought.

“And what is that?” he asked.

“You know, the TV show. Those crazy guys from Finland who run around and do all kinds of weird stuff. Set themselves on fire or sit down on an anthill with no pants on, that kind of thing. Kind of like Jackass .”

“Do you mean the guy might be Finnish?”

Ulf shrugged his T-shirt-clad shoulders. “I dunno. He just sort of sounded like them.” Ulf looked down, apparently at the tabletop, but Søren could hear from his breathing that he was struggling with something. Tears? Disgraceful, unmanly tears? After all, the man who talked “kind of like those guys on The Dudesons ” was also the man who had ripped the underwear off the boy’s girlfriend while the other guy filmed it on his phone. That might raise strong emotions even in souls more phlegmatic than Ulf’s.

“Why didn’t she show up?” the boy asked, still without looking up. “Did something happen to her?”

“Let’s not assume the worst,” Søren said. But he thought to himself that if the Dudesons guy had taken the daughter, it was no longer a mystery why the mother had chosen to go off with him without protest.

HE POLICE AREgoing to find us, right Mom? You can’t be kidnapped in Denmark for that long. It’s a small country. They can do all kinds of stuff with mobile phones and, and.…”

Ida’s voice was shrill, and she was searching feverishly for the right words in English as she looked dubiously from Sándor and back to Nina. Like the child of divorced parents, trying in vain to get a conversation going between mother and father.

Over on the sofa, Mr. Suburbia put an old James Bond movie into the DVD player and the sound of explosions rumbled out of the robust surround-sound system as Pierce Brosnan battled the villains. The flat screen’s stand was bent so that everything tilted precariously to the right, but it didn’t appear to detract from Mr. Suburbia’s viewing pleasure.

“Of course they’re going to find us,” Nina said calmly, in Danish. “And even if they don’t, I’ll take care of you. We’ll be all right.”

Sándor seemed to guess what Nina was saying and nodded slightly as if to support her optimistic interpretation of their situation, but their eyes met briefly over Ida’s head, and Nina saw the same conclusion in his eyes that she had reached. If they didn’t do something … unless something happened soon, Tommi and Mr. Suburbia were going to kill them. All three of them, but probably Ida last.

I DA HAD FALLENasleep again by the time Tommi came back.

The wind had picked up outside, and Nina could hear the rain rapping against the window over the radiator. Mr. Suburbia had made himself some instant soup using the electric kettle in the kitchen and conducted a long, quiet conversation on his phone that concluded with “kissy kissy, darling.” Nina guessed he was talking to the source of the red ceramic mug on the coffee table. Frederik, that was his name, Sándor said. But she kept thinking of him as Mr. Suburbia.

A fresh James Bond movie was playing on the surround-sound system, this time one of the classics with Sean Connery, and Mr. Suburbia had put his feet up on the longer of the two sofas while he sipped his instant soup and supplemented the meal with a pack of chocolate cookies. Nina tried to figure out what time it was. They had taken her watch at the hospital, and her last accurate point of reference was when she was sitting in the car next to Tommi; the digital clock on the dashboard had said 2 P.M. when they arrived. Now a yellowish, rainy-day twilight filled the living room, and she estimated that it must be between 6 and 7 at night—she couldn’t be any more precise than that.

They didn’t hear Tommi coming until he was actually in the house, gliding through the living room door with slow, cat-like motions. He still had the broad-rimmed leather hat pulled squarely down over his forehead, and Nina could tell right away that his trip had been a success. He looked less tense and walked right over to Mr. Suburbia on the sofa, triumphantly waving a folded piece of paper.

“I got it.”

The staccato Finnish accent caused Mr. Suburbia to turn and finally lower the cacophony of exploding cars and warehouses.