Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

T HEY ENTERED QUIETLY. Jankowski dealt with the patio door without any major difficulties, and they crept down the stairs to the basement together. Now Søren could hear the sound, too.

“Show me your arrrse,” the sleazebag commanded in strangely guttural English. “Yeah, that’s right. Come to Daddy.”

She was at it again with the vigorous thrusting motions, now down on all fours. The dildo was sticking out between the cheeks of her butt like some grotesquely docked tail. Her eyes were closed, and now that her face was turned away from the webcam, the act was over. Apart from a pained little wrinkle between her eyes, her face was completely devoid of expression.

The sleazebag on the Internet spotted them first.

“What the hell.…” he swore.

The girl opened her eyes and screamed.

“Easy,” Søren said in English, because he was pretty sure she wasn’t Danish. “Police. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Fuck,” the male voice hissed, and there was a click and a brief bit of white noise from the speakers on the computer, which Søren hadn’t been able to see with his minicam because it was hidden behind the bed.

Søren didn’t care. If the girl was under eighteen, then Christian would deliver the sick sleazebag’s IP address straight into Birgitte’s eager hands. And if she was over eighteen, then there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it anyway. It wasn’t illegal to buy sex online. And although he was pretty damn sure that the profit from the girl’s efforts was going directly into Tommi Karvinen’s till, it would no doubt be a thankless job to try and get her to admit it. Karvinen’s girls don’t blab, Birgitte had said.

Karvinen. Dudesons .

Oh, fuck.

He ran the mental tape one more time. Show me your arrrse . With the slurred S and the rolling guttural R sounds. Exactly like in the Dudesons episode when the insane Finn plunked himself down on an anthill with his backside bared.

It was him. The man on the other end of the Internet connection was Tommi Karvinen. And he had seen them.

INA HAD BEENfeeling sick. She was pregnant with Ida, it was morning, and the morning sickness had overpowered her and made it hard for her to breathe. She was in bed next to Morten, trying to lie completely still in the sweat-dampened bedding as she listened to the traffic outside on the overpass. If she didn’t move, she could sometimes postpone the inevitable. The sudden rush of saliva, the sharp burning feeling of vomit in her throat, and the hurried scramble to their tiny bathroom with its cold, black-specked terrazzo floor. Sometimes thinking about lemons and ginger and cool, fresh, green grass helped, too, and she tried thinking about the baby as a good thing. Something happy.

She rarely succeeded. She could see that her body had changed, her breasts were bigger, and just beneath the skin, there was a fine network of light-blue veins. Her flat stomach had also taken on a small, discreet bulge, and although she knew that there was a living being in there under her skin, she didn’t really feel anything. It didn’t have a face. It didn’t exist, and as Nina lay on her knees on the cold terrazzo floor, the nausea finally overtaking her body, she sometimes wished the baby wasn’t there, and that she and Morten didn’t have to do this. Together. And with that thought came the anxiety of doing the whole thing wrong, because she didn’t love the little unborn life enough. Because you were supposed to love your own baby. Weren’t you? She didn’t dare ask Morten if he loved the child, because he probably did. His feelings were always proper, healthy, and normal. Nina, on the other hand, felt panic and anxiety creeping in, from all the black crevices of her childhood. Mostly she was afraid of herself. The nausea washed over her again, and she was so terribly thirsty. But if she moved now, if she stood up now, there would be no going back.

Bang .

A door was yanked open in the outskirts of Nina’s consciousness, and now there was someone yelling, too. She opened her eyes. The nausea was still there, but she wasn’t lying in bed next to Morten, nor on the bathroom floor of their first apartment. Her left shoulder was painfully stretched, her arm still bent awkwardly behind Ida’s neck and tied to the radiator. She must have dozed off, but not for very long, because there was still that same hazy, yellow half-light in the room.

“Fuck. We have to go. Now.”

Tommi had stumbled into the living room, swearing and trying to zip up his jeans.

Mr. Suburbia got halfway up from the sofa and shot a questioning look at the Finn, who was now struggling to put on his worn white sneakers.

“What’s going on? I thought we had to wait for the address.”

“We’re out of here now,” Tommi hissed. “The police are at Rhodesiavej. They got Mini.”

Something somewhere in the living room beeped, and the Finn looked around, searching, spotted his phone, and picked it up with a satisfied grunt. “I think we just got our address.”

He browsed down through the menu.

“41 Lundedalsvej. This is it, Frederik.”

Ida squirmed anxiously. She was wearing her favorite jeans, Nina noticed, a pair of skinny black jeans with ratty holes in the thighs and knees. She pulled her legs up against her chest so her bony white knees were visible. They were trembling faintly.

Mr. Suburbia stood there for a second staring mutely at Tommi.

“Rhodesiavej. How the hell did they find you?”

The Finn, who was now on his way over to Sándor in quick, decisive steps, sulkily shrugged. “No clue. It’s not my fault. But Mini has got her passport and all that shit in the house, and if they look up her name, they’ll find this place, too. So the new plan is.…” He pulled a flimsy pocketknife out of his back pocket and was now standing in front of Ida, Nina, and Sándor. “The new plan is we get the money, I take a little trip to Thailand and enjoy some Asian cunt, and you slink off back to your house in the ’burbs and keep a low profile until the police find something else to waste their time on.”

Mr. Suburbia looked like he had just woken up. He glanced around the living room, stuffed the laptop roughly into his computer bag and started randomly dumping DVDs, ring binders, loose change, and his red ceramic mug into a plastic bag. The Finn shot him an irritated look.

“Just leave all that shit, Freddie, and get over here and help me get this lot on their feet. I can’t be doing every fucking thing by myself.”

O UTSIDE, THE RAINwas coming down in a steady drizzle, and the moisture settled like a cool, wet film on Nina’s face and hair, making her thirst burn worse than before. Ida and Sándor walked ahead of her across the wet, shiny gravel of the U-shaped drive in front of the house. Ida looked small and stooped, her backpack dangling absurdly from one hand as if she were just on her way home from a normal day at school. Sándor was holding himself straight in an almost-defiant way but kept his injured hand tucked against his belly, as if to protect it from the rest of the world. Tommi was behind them, with the gun aimed at their backs. He seemed a little less tense now that they were all out of the house but was hurrying them along the whole time. When they rounded the corner of the house, Nina felt a sharp shove, which almost sent her nose-first into the knee-high stinging nettles growing up along the wall.

“Faster!” Tommi yelled, loud enough that Ida and Sándor also got the message and obediently sped up. Nina got up slowly but then stumbled again without provocation and dropped to her knees in the wet, stinging stalks. The ground rolled dizzyingly beneath her, and for a brief panic-stricken second, she thought she wasn’t going to be able to get back up again. What would he do then? Shoot her right there, in front of Ida? The thought flitted through her as she stared into the lush, dark-green jungle of nettles in front of her. She had broken the fall with her hands and felt her palms burn and sting as she struggled to regain her footing. Ida dropped back silently to pull her to her feet. Her daughter’s face was unreadable, her eyes narrow, black cracks in a sheet-white mask.