Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (33 page)

“What did it take to move it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What kind of equipment? How big a vehicle? What are we searching for? A lone idiot with a wheelbarrow or a well-organized group with forklifts and trucks?”

Johansen raised a pair of thin, colorless eyebrows. The reflected glare from the windows of the minivan made the thinning hair on the top of his head glow strangely.

“Impossible to answer that one.”

“Why?”

“It depends on what kind of containment shielding they used. It could be anything from seventy to eighty kilograms of lead to a couple of bags of sand. The source itself isn’t very big on its own.”

Søren struggled to suppress his irritation. Presumably the man didn’t mean to be unhelpful, it was just his general condescending style that made him seem that way.

“The radioactive sand you found. Could that have come from the containment shielding?”

“It’s possible. Lead or concrete are better, but then there wouldn’t have
been such severe contamination if we were dealing with professionals, would there?” Johansen said. “Whoever did this obviously had no idea of the correct way to store this kind of material.”

Based on what Søren had seen so far, neither Horváth nor Khalid seemed like professionals. Nor did they need to be, unfortunately, to set off a dirty bomb, he thought. Besides, he had a strong feeling that the overall picture was going to include something else, something more than those two. If Horváth was the guy they had just hauled out of the gas tank, then he certainly didn’t have the cesium now. And based on their surveillance, Khalid had never been anywhere near the Valby address.

“How many of the people living here have you found?” Søren asked.

Birger Johansen looked at him with a weary expression and turned an expectant face to the two nearest police officers. They weren’t wearing uniforms, and Søren guessed they were the local detectives who had been assigned to the operation.

“A dozen adults, plus a couple of kids,” one of them said. “But we haven’t been able to question them all. They speak neither German nor English, so we’re still hunting around for interpreters.”

“And how many people were staying here?”

Birger Johansen pushed a pair of narrow reading glasses into place on his nose and flipped through the papers he was holding in his hand.

“Based on the number of makeshift beds, we’re missing at least thirty of the tenants, if you can call them that. I don’t know how those Gypsies do it, but they weren’t here when we moved on the address, and they haven’t been back since. Someone must have tipped them off. They aren’t exactly keen on the police, you know.…”

Frustrated, Johansen rolled a pen between two fingers and tipped it toward the two detectives.

“The police have asked all officers to be on the lookout for Gypsies in town, and so far they’ve picked up about sixty of them from locations such as the Central Railway Station, Vesterbro, and Strøget, but then that’s twice as many as we’re looking for, and we have no way of knowing if we’ve got the right ones. I don’t even think they’re all from Hungary. Some of them are sitting in the police station downtown right now, but of course they won’t say boo in any language any of us can understand. It’s a little like herding cats.”

Søren nodded.

“Then I suppose we’d better start with the Danish witnesses,” he said. “I understand there was a woman who tipped you off about the radioactive material.”

“Tipping off is perhaps not quite the word,” Birger Johansen said crossly. “She was admitted to the hospital with radiation sickness Saturday night and was then gracious enough to tell us where she’d been. A nurse. Apparently, she had been attending some of the children. Not entirely legit, you know. She’s pretty sick because of the radiation so it wasn’t all that easy to talk to her. If I were you, I’d start with her ‘colleague.’ ” Birger Johansen made air quotes with his fingers with a condescending smile, which for some reason or other particularly pissed Søren off. He ignored the sarcasm.

“And his name is?”

“Peter something-or-other. It’s all in there.” Birger Johansen detached a couple of sheets of paper from his clipboard and grudgingly offered them to Søren, then pulled out his phone again and entered a number. “If you have questions, just call me later.”

Søren folded the papers in half and started walking back to his car.

“I doubt you’ll get much useful information out of those two.” Birger Johansen was standing behind him in a jaunty position, his stance wide, phone held rather abortedly at head height. “They’re both bleeding-heart liberals. The kind who think they can save the whole world.”

Søren smiled as politely as he could manage. Farther up the road, he could still see the cluster of flashing police cars and fire trucks, and the image of Snow White from the gas tank flitted ephemerally through his mind. The edges of those weeping, crater-like sores, the yellowish fluid that had soaked the boy’s shirt, and the bloody tears. The ironic cynicism of Birger Johansen’s comment was wasted on Søren this morning. If anyone was volunteering to save the world, that was just fine with him. It certainly needed doing.

H
E CALLED GITTE
and woke her up.

“Yes?” she said in that aquarium voice people had when they’ve just been hauled up from the depths of sleep.

“Drag Khalid Hosseini in and get one of the real pros to interrogate him. HC or someone like him. And tell Christian that I need everything he can get out of that computer
now
.”

“HC is in the middle of a training exercise for the Summit,” she said.

“So call him back in. Right now there’s nothing out there more important than this. No, wait. You’re going to have to clear it with Torben first. Tell him I’ll call and explain. But bring Khalid in now. And make sure there’s a fresh report summarizing everything we have on him—phone contacts, surveillance, the works. Plus, I want to know everything we can dig up on this address in Valby. Gasbetonvej 35. Who owns it, who uses it, and for what.”

“Yes, sir. Will that be all?”

She wasn’t being sarcastic. That was just Gitte.

“No. Also … the Emergency Management Agency removed some Hungarian Roma from the Valby property. Find out where they are now, and see if you can get anything out of the women. You’re good with languages.”

“Um, not Hungarian.”

“I’m sure it’s just as important that you’re good at winning people’s trust. Get as much information on this group of people as you can. And ask them if they’ve seen the damned cesium. Birger Johansen from the Emergency Management Agency can tell you a little about what it might look like. Just keep pushing him until you get a real answer.”

He gave her Johansen’s number.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“We need to get in touch with Hungary and get the NBH to give us some more about Sándor Horváth’s background. But I suppose I’ll put Torben on that. No, nothing else for you. And, uh, sorry I woke you up.”

“
De nada
,” she said with a very authentic sounding Spanish accent. “Uh, but, boss … what exactly is going on? I mean what’s the big picture?”

“The fat’s in the fire,” he just said. “See you at the briefing at noon. I just have a couple of witnesses to grill first.”

EAD
?”

The tall, bony man in the yellow hospital gown stared at Søren in disbelief. He was a little disheveled to look at. In Søren’s opinion, his thin, blond hair should have been cut a few weeks ago. It stuck out in flat, greasy tufts, and below that he could just make out the man’s pink scalp, so that he looked vaguely like a newly hatched chick. Peter Erhardsen had already been in a nervous sweat when Søren entered the room, and when he heard the news about the body, he looked as if he had been punched in the face.

“Are you sure?” He shook his head. “I mean … what did he die from?”

“We don’t know yet, but his body was so radioactive the Geiger counters found him.”

Peter Erhardsen made a strange hiccupping sound and stared fixedly down at the palms of his hands, as if he expected to find some sort of explanation there.

“The first time you went out to the repair shop was May eleventh. Is that correct?”

Peter nodded, cleared his throat, and rested his apparently unhelpful hand on the table between them. He had positioned himself in the seating area by the window instead of in the hospital bed and had tried to make the situation seem normal by offering coffee that he was then unable to produce when Søren accepted it. The man had nearly recovered and was mostly in the hospital for follow-up treatment, but he wasn’t allowed to leave his room. At the moment it looked like he desperately wished he had a coffee cup to fiddle with.

“I got a call from one of my acquaintances who’d met some Roma on Strøget,” he explained. “My friend is one of those … well, he really
wanted to help them. Asked them if they needed clothes or medicine or that kind of thing. Everyone knows they have a hard time in Denmark. I mean, that’s why they’re always out begging.”

Peter looked over at Søren as if he expected some form of protest. Peter’s eyes were very light blue, and Søren thought he detected an almost aggressive obstinacy beneath the disheveled exterior. He was also guessing that Peter was unlikely to be an entertaining companion at a dinner party.

“But these Roma.… At first they didn’t want anything to do with him. They almost got angry even though my friend was just trying to help. Then suddenly, just a few days later, they called him in complete panic. Something about a young man who’d gotten sick, and they wanted someone to take a look at him. That’s why I went out there, and then I also called a nurse I know from.…”

Peter stopped and got that vacant look in his eyes again.

“The young man, was this him?”

Søren pulled out an enlarged copy of the passport photo from the dead man’s shoe and passed it to Peter. He shook his head doubtfully as he looked at the picture with his brow furrowed.

“I don’t know. I was never allowed into the room where he was. My friend called me in the morning when I was at work, and I didn’t have a chance to go out there until the afternoon, and by then they’d already had second thoughts. Or at least they wouldn’t let me see him properly. He was lying in a sort of back office. I was allowed to look in there from the doorway, that was all, but it was totally dark, and it stank to high heaven. Vomit and shit, to put it bluntly. So I called Nina. She’s the nurse I mentioned.”

“So you didn’t get a good look at him?”

“Well, I could see that there was someone lying on a mattress in there. Like I said, it was really dark because the windows were boarded up, but I could see a figure in a fetal position, I could hear him, too, of course. He was moaning, and every once in a while he would start to call out, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying. They said he was just sick to his stomach, and I didn’t think it was that serious, and Nina, well, she also said.…” Peter suddenly looked distraught. “Maybe he was already dying when I looked in at him.”

He hid his face behind his hands and sat in silence for a moment. Then he straightened himself up and looked at Søren again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just been a hard week.”

Søren nodded but didn’t offer any words of comfort. He had no interest in soothing the man’s guilty conscience.

“So you couldn’t say if it was the man in this picture?”

“No.” Peter raised a hand in a tired, apologetic motion, pushed his chair back, and got up on unsteady legs. “I have a meeting with the engineering department at eleven this morning,” he said, pointing to his watch with his long, bony index finger. “If we’re done here, couldn’t you just give me the okay.…”

He stood there with a slightly nervous, beseeching smile. Ran his hand through his thin, tousled hair. He must be almost six foot seven inches, Søren thought. Tall and gangly like a pubescent boy and apparently with the social graces to match. This man had been at the garage while the source was presumably still in the inspection pit. He had seen the people who were there at the time. And now he wanted to run off to a meeting.

“Sit down,” Søren said, knowing he was failing to hide his irritation. “We need to know who your friend is.”

Peter’s nervously optimistic smile visibly faded as he slid back down into the chair again.

“I’d rather not.…”

“Your friend, the people you talked to out there, the phone numbers you were given … everything. And we would also like access to your house.”

Now there was something akin to panic in Peter Erhardsen’s eyes.

“This is serious. For you, too,” Søren said. “We suspect potential terrorist activity on Danish soil, so if I were you, I would be bending over backward to explain exactly how you got it into your head that you and Nina Borg were going to help a bunch of Roma in Valby.”

T
HE WARD NURSE
had lent Søren an office and a coffee mug, the side of which was adorned with an amateurish photo of an irritable looking gray Persian cat. Søren gratefully downed the coffee, stale from sitting in the thermos too long, without a thought to its quality—it was the caffeine he was after—and flipped through the notes he had made and the inept descriptions he had managed to coax out of Peter Erhardsen. Maybe the man had done his best, but it was still a pretty poor performance: Roma male, about fifty years old, possibly missing one of his upper teeth, dirty
wine-colored shirt. Speaks a little English. Roma female, twenty to thirty years old, has one or more children, average height, very thin.…