Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

Gitte gave him a look that was not entirely devoid of compassion, or so he thought.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Skou-Larsen. But as I said, we have to follow up on every lead. Even the more unlikely ones.” She stood up. “Mikael?”

“Yes,” came the muffled response from upstairs.

“Are you about done?”

“Just about.”

A moment later, the policeman with the Geiger counter came back down to the living room.

“Clean,” he said. “Just background radiation.”

She nodded as if that was just what she had been expecting.

“There, you see now, Mr. Skou-Larsen. There’s no reason to worry. We have to take your hard drive with us, or would you rather have us wait here until someone from IT can come out and make a copy?”

“Take it,” he said hoarsely. The sooner he got them out of the house, the better. “We almost never use the computer. Not since Helle learned how to send text messages.”

They left, after a polite goodbye—even from the rude young male officer. But Skou-Larsen was shaken and dazed, not sure that anything made sense anymore.

Thank God Helle hadn’t been home.…

HODESIAVEJ. THE STREETname sounded so exotic, Søren thought, but ironically suburbian neighborhoods in Denmark didn’t come much more boring than this. Small boxy plots with slightly oversized boxy houses, most of them made of identical yellow brick.

The carport was empty. According to the motor vehicle registry, Tommi Karvinen was supposed to be the proud owner of a four-year-old BMW M6 Coupe, and that, at any rate, was nowhere to be seen.

Søren had managed to wangle two men from the evening shift’s overworked staffing roster. Kim Jankowski had just turned forty but was still the less experienced of the two—he hadn’t applied to the police academy until he was thirty-one, just before the age limit disqualified him, but had been extremely focused since then. Jesper Due Hansen was a couple of years younger and had just transferred to counterterrorism from the personal protection unit. He had inevitably been nicknamed “the Dove,” not due to any particulary pacifist tendencies, but because of his avian middle name.

They drove past the address and parked farther away, where the car couldn’t be seen from the house.

“The back garden abuts the Common,” Jesper Due said. “It would be pretty easy to go in that way.”

Søren nodded. “He may have hostages. So … nice and easy, right? Not too much noise. We don’t want to escalate the situation.”

He stationed Jankowski outside on Rhodesiavej, and then he and the Dove went down to the asphalt path that ran through the no man’s land between the back gardens of the houses and the wide-open green spaces of the Common.

“We should have brought a dog,” the Dove said. “Then we would have totally fit in.”

They could see at least four people out walking their dogs on the Common; luckily three of them were quite far away, and the fourth was preoccupied with some form of training that involved an extraordinary number of toots on a dog whistle that unfortunately wasn’t sufficiently high-pitched to be inaudible to human ears.

“It’s that one,” Søren pointed. “The brown wooden fence.”

The Dove leapt over it first, in one quick, athletic bound. Søren followed a second later. Luckily Karvinen wasn’t the type who went in for roses. His back garden was a big jungle of waist-high weeds, and the withered, yellow, knee-high grass from last year revealed that the lawn hadn’t been mowed anytime recently. A thistle in the Eden of suburbia, Søren thought. How symbolic.

They both ran, bent double, up to the house and the patio. Yellow grass seeds stuck wetly to Søren’s pants, and there was a strong stench of cat pee. The windows were bare and curtainless; the rooms inside had no lights on even though it was overcast and starting to get dark.

There was no one in the living room or the room next to it. Then Søren noticed some light coming from a basement window at the end wall of the house. He tapped his partner gently on the shoulder, and the Dove nodded and handed him the minicam—actually a miniature video camera on a stick, with a monitor so you could see what was going on in a room without having to stick your head up.

Søren lay down on his stomach in the dandelions and wormed his way along the foundation until he could put the minicam into position. Then he pulled back a little, sat up, and the Dove handed him the monitor. The Dove proceeded noiselessly around the house to check the windows in the other rooms.

The OLED monitor was about twice as big as a mobile phone. That was the most practical size for the field: You could operate it discreetly but still see the image clearly. What it provided Søren now was in razor-sharp high-definition; any sharper and he could have checked the girl’s thighs for cellulite.

She was naked aside from a garter belt of the type that was never intended to hold anything other than a pair of kinky stockings. Very young, with long blonde hair that had been made even blonder with a little help from the cosmetics industry. Her eyes were pinpoint flashes of light in dark caves of mascara, and both of her nipples were pierced with wide gold rings. She was lying on a satiny black bed with her abdomen pushed up and forward as if she were writhing below an invisible lover. But there wasn’t anyone else in the room as far as Søren and the minicam could tell.

“What the hell.…” Søren mumbled to himself as the girl buried both hands in her crotch and rocked wildly back and forth. There was something unnatural about this.… He fully appreciated that a young woman could have an intense erotic relationship with her own body, but this was more than a little teenage masturbation. Everything about the sight confronting him was purely for show. The girl’s exaggerated facial expression of pleasure, her vigorous motions, that porn bed.… The whole thing was designed to excite everyone but her.

She abruptly stopped her rocking and sat up. Waiting. Listening? He couldn’t see whether there was a phone near her, but that would explain some of the superficiality of the performance. He could see her lips moving. She was saying something. Her face distorted for a brief instant into a grimace that had nothing to do with desire. Then she stuck her hand under one of the big, overstuffed silk pillows and brought out an object that had been stashed there.

It was, predictably enough, a dildo. A vinyl version of the male member in a size that bore no relation to reality. She pushed herself over to the edge of the bed, with her legs spread and her heels all the way up against her buttocks. She hesitated in a revealing moment of discomfort before opening her mouth in a parody of orgasm and slowly began pushing the behemoth between her legs.

Søren turned off the monitor. He knew that when they went in he would find a camera in the basement room with the porn bed. Probably a webcam. And somewhere out there, in Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Berlin, was a sleazebag who was paying for permission to give orders to the young girl. Orders she carried out, no matter how humiliating or uncomfortable.

The Dove was back.

“There’s no one in the rest of the house,” he said quietly. “How many down there?”

“One,” said Søren, even though in a way he felt like he ought to count the sleazebag, too. “A young girl. And probably a webcam. I think she’s providing paid sexual services over the Internet.”

The Dove raised his eyebrows.

“Well, I guess that’s one way to work from home,” he said. “Shall we go in?”

Søren nodded. “Yes. She’s here. She must know him. Maybe we can get her to tell us where he is.”