by Inger Wolf
Dreams, nightmares. Maybe this guy wasn’t just blowing smoke, Trokic thought. There had been nothing in the press about Maja’s twisted thoughts and anxiety. How else could he know?
Suddenly, Trokic believed him, and he put on a friendlier face. “But what about this person she talked about? Did she mention his name? Or anything else that might help us identify him? His work, his appearance?”
“I’m not even sure it was a man. All she said was that she couldn’t get out of it, and that she felt like it was going to kill her. Of course, I felt terrible, hearing that. Sitting there in a stupid chat room, feeling like I couldn’t help her. It was like she was trapped.”
After a few moments, Trokic said, “Anything more?”
He shrugged and glanced at the clock on the wall. They’d been talking for ten minutes, and it was a busy time of day for the store.
“That’s all I know. It was just a few short chats, and I didn’t have any idea at the time it would be important. If I’d only known, I would’ve listened a lot closer.”
“You did the right thing in contacting us, and you have a great memory,” Lisa said. Her enthusiasm made Trokic’s toes curl. “And I think we’re through here. Thank you very much for your help.”
He smiled, obviously flattered. Now, he had a story to tell on coffee break. He was part of an important investigation.
“If there’s anything more I can help you with, just stop by.” As if meeting someone on the net who died under mysterious circumstances happened to him all the time.
They thanked him again—one more reluctantly than the other—and threaded their way through the crowds outside toward headquarters.
On the way, Trokic called Clara Jørgensen. She answered on the first ring.
“Hi, this is Detective Trokic, from the police. I have just one short question for you. Did Maja know someone called Louise?”
Pause.
“No. I don’t think so. She never mentioned a Louise to me, anyway. It must be someone she met after I left for the States.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
Back at headquarters, Trokic rapped on the door to the office Simon Møller shared with another officer. Both of them looked up when he walked in.
“Is there anything new?” Møller said.
“I have a few questions about Maja. She talked to a guy on the net about a girl named Louise. Do you know her?”
He frowned. “Louise? No, I don’t think so.”
“If you remember anything, call me.”
Møller’s frown deepened. “No, wait. I think I heard Maja talk about a girl she was jealous of. Maybe somebody Martin Isaksen flirted with?”
“Maybe. Anyway, something tells me this Louise was involved, and I want to know how.”
Chapter Nineteen
Buller Bar looked like one of those places where people chip in to help pay the fine if the cops catch people smoking inside. A heavy fog hung in the air, nicotine clung to the pigeon-blue walls, and the black tables were dotted with overflowing ashtrays. Maja Nielsen had been in there at least once a week, and something told Trokic the real estate man would not have approved. Eyes from the bar followed him; cigarettes were discreetly snubbed out. As always, Trokic and Jasper weren’t in uniform, yet they were spotted the second they stepped through the door.
While questioning customers in the far corner, they suddenly noticed everyone staring over at the bar. Trokic instinctively turned; the man stood out because of his dark skin, but there was something else too. Small restless movements, wiping off his nose with his hand, an unnatural brightness. He was high on something, and he was probably there to supply people with that something. He had shown some of them what was under his shirt, and now he was tucking it back in.
When he noticed the two detectives, he pulled up the hood on his orange sweatshirt and headed for the door. Trokic and Jasper slipped over and cut him off.
The man trained his black eyes on Trokic. “What do you two cops want?”
He spoke with a thick accent Trokic couldn’t place. His face was broad, with skin stretched tightly over his right cheekbone. In his twenties, Trokic guessed. His eyes revealed nothing; it was like looking at a creature caught somewhere between life and death.
“We’re from Homicide,” Trokic said. “You in a hurry?”
“Have to get home.”
“In a minute. First, we want to hear what you know about Maja Nielsen, the woman found dead in Town Hall Park yesterday morning.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know her.”
“That’s odd. She hung out here.”
“Maybe so. Probably a lot of people do, but I’ve only been here a couple times.”
“And now, suddenly, you’re in a hurry to leave?”
“Nothing illegal about that, is there?”
“You want to show us what you have in your pockets?” Jasper said.
The man showed them his crooked, brown teeth in a smile that vanished as quickly as crystals of ice under a heat lamp. “Take a look yourself. I got nothing.”
“You have any needles I could stick myself on?”
“No.”
Jasper gave the man a routine frisk and shook his head at Trokic.
“Told you.”
There was a glint of something in his eye, though. Worry. Jasper sensed it, too. “You got coke written all over your face. I wonder how much you got rid of in here before we showed up. Did you sell to Maja Nielsen, too?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lucky you, you get to follow us down to the station and tell us what you do know.” Jasper zipped up his leather jacket.
“What? You’re arresting me? I hope that’s a bad joke. For what? I don’t have anything on me.” His voice was as lively as a bored announcer at a bingo hall, spouting out numbers.
“We’ll think about it on the way to the station. Sometimes, we don’t worry a lot about details like that. And you get to stay overnight with us, free. They might have cut down on the cleaning crew again, might be some vomit on the floor, and piss too, mixed up. You know, like art. What do you think, Lieutenant? Shall we start by showing him the inside of a patrol car?”
This was where the man was supposed to break down and confess something. Or at least look very worried. But Jasper might as well have been talking to a stone wall. Trokic studied the guy a few more moments.
“No, let’s wait on that. May we see some identification?”
He shrugged and pulled out a worn driver’s license from his wallet. “My name is Federico Carlos. I’m a Colombian citizen and only visiting family for a short time.” He laughed. “I’ll be gone in a few days anyway, so what’s the damn point?”
“Give us your address here in town,” Trokic said. “We’ll call that good for now. And the next time you visit us, leave your jungle medicine behind.”
Federico spat something unintelligible out, and he gave them an address in the north part of town and turned away. The interview was over.
“Shouldn’t we have hauled him in?” Jasper said. “The guy’s creepy.”
Trokic shook his head. “He’s not important to our case, and it’s not our job to round up coke dealers. Go home and get some sleep; we’ll see you in the morning.”
Jasper took off. It was foggy outside, and dark. When Trokic got to his car, he checked his phone. One text from Tønnies, three words. “That goddamn coltsfoot.”
Chapter Twenty
Trokic was restless. He’d made it home at eight-thirty, and since then he’d been staring blankly at the television, his thoughts racing through his head too fast to hold onto. On some level, he registered the rerun about Saturn and a space project costing thirty billion crowns, complete with computer animated images of the planet’s many rings. They’d been colored according to age. The project team’s challenge was to insert a space probe into Saturn’s orbit without it being smashed by the rocks, sand, and dust in the rings.
Then he remembered the colts
foot and decided to give Tønnies a call. Everyone called him late at night, why shouldn’t he do the same?
“The little yellow bushy shit,” Tønnies said. “Your twins tore apart a bunch of construction sites around here this afternoon, looking for something yellow, before some genius checked when it blooms.”
Trokic sighed. “Let me guess. Not now. And the soil samples are no help, right?”
“I wouldn’t say that. They brought fifteen or twenty samples back with them, and it looks like we’ve narrowed it down to somewhere close to the harbor. The closest match comes from a section on the north part of the harbor, but it’s not perfect. And we’re still missing the pollen from our little yellow friend. But we’re zeroing in on it.”
Trokic bit his lip and pictured the harbor area. He seldom made it down there, but he could see the yellow, red, orange, and green containers. Silos, cranes, heavy traffic.
“Where the hell are you, anyway?” Tønnies said. “I can’t hear any of that sicko music you listen to all the time.”
“At home.”
“You’re not alone, maybe?”
“No. I’m alone.”
Lately he hadn’t felt like female companionship. Women, these strange creatures whose noblest goal in life seemed to be to dig their way inside him with kamikaze-like precision. Apparently, his reserved personality attracted them like a magnet.
What had been occupying his thoughts was his cousin. Once more he pictured her long black hair and wiry figure. Sinka was a kind, thoughtful person, someone he could confide in. What had gnawed on him all these years was not knowing what had happened to her. Had she been killed? What could he find in a camp led by Bosnian-Serbian soldiers? Is that where her life had ended? Or had she really been spotted in Beograd, of all places? On the way home, he’d checked his email. Police Chief Dragan Delic had contacted the war crimes tribunal, who had consented to forward the question about the Croatian girl to the witness in the case. Now it was simply a matter of waiting, Delic wrote.
“Is it possible to get up in some of the buildings on the harbor?” Trokic said. “A lot of them are tall enough.”
He might have imagined the sigh on the other end. “I have no idea, but the twins say there are only four or five spots where there’s soil.”
“They’re building there. I haven’t seen it, but I think they’ve started the harbor project, anyway. We’ll send the twins down there again; they’ll have to be more precise this time.”
“We’re busy enough as it is, and it’s not just Maja Nielsen. There’s the hit-and-run, and it’s not like the other departments have shut down. We can’t keep up.”
“I know,” Trokic said. “A good long time off in lieu will do all of you good when this is over.”
“Time off? What, are you crazy? Since when have we been able to take time off? Anyway, I have to go.”
Trokic pulled a stack of reports out of his bag. The television showed illustrations of how Titan, Saturn’s mysterious moon, might look. A yellow mountainous landscape, with rivers of liquid hydrocarbon. A brown atmosphere. Methane snow.
Soon, he would be flying down to his second homeland. Usually twice a year, in summer and winter, he stayed with his cousin, who lived in a small city in the Medvednica Mountains. He’d been doing so since the end of the war, during which he’d worked for a humanitarian aid organization in Zagreb. Now the capital had grown into a modern western metropolis, and as a result it seemed a bit less exotic to Trokic.
He was about to read a report on the license plates when Tønnies called back.
“Good news on our four-wheel-drive. We contacted the importer of the Vredestein tires and found a mechanic in Egå who sells them. We got hold of him a few minutes ago, and he remembers changing the tires on a white four-wheel-drive two weeks ago. He knows the guy pretty well, a regular customer, Kurt Egebjerg. He lives in the area. Apparently sort of a drunk—I just checked him out; he’s a part owner of a business involved in the project down at the harbor. Ripe for the picking, I’d say.”
“Good work,” Trokic said. “So maybe there’s something to the soil samples from the harbor after all. We’ll find the guy and bring him in.”
Friday, May 8
Chapter Twenty-One
Kurt Egebjerg meandered along in the park, sensing every blade of grass, every tiny mound, every rock strafing his thick skin. He slipped through the grass and dead plants, all the way down through the topsoil, down into the graveyard and past every layer of freezing earth, until he could smell the rotted corpses. He breathed with his skin, could barely distinguish between light and dark. Time had collapsed around him, an implosion, leaving only this. The ultimate terror.
He woke up with his forehead against the wheel of his four-wheel-drive. A sour, bitter taste coated his mouth; his head was pounding and nausea rumbled in his stomach. Wednesday’s exploits had been dead and buried, but the nightmare had resurrected them.
Beside him on the passenger seat lay a bottle of whiskey, the cause of his body’s rebellion. Almost empty, yet he’d had the presence of mind to screw the cap back on before passing out. The radio was playing the latest in an endless stream of pop numbers from Nova FM. The windshield was fogged over, but at least he knew he was in a parking lot near the new harbor construction. He’d been driving around all evening, unable to find peace of mind anywhere other than inside the bottle.
As always, he’d tried to forget, but it was dawning on him that instead of saving him this time, the bottle would only delay the inevitable. When the fog lifted, reality would come roaring back, ten times as strong. Events had burrowed under his skin and through his muscles and bones, all the way into the marrow, feeding on his weakness. He took a deep breath and turned up the radio. Soon, it would be coming…the news he’d feared the last few days, the hourly reports that awoke his inner demons.
“And now the latest developments on the death of Maja Nielsen,” the radio speaker blared out. “The body of the twenty-one-year-old Århus woman was found in Town Hall Park Wednesday morning. Police still regard it as a suspicious death, and they’re not ruling out homicide. Anyone with information concerning her death, especially anyone in the vicinity of the park between four and five-thirty on Wednesday morning, are asked to contact the police. Police are also looking for a white commercial van or four-wheel-drive with a license plate number starting with the letters SV.”
He fought down the bile rising in his throat. They would find him. And everything he’d worked for would be ruined. He couldn’t allow that to happen. If only he hadn’t had so much money tied up in the project. All his financial eggs in one basket. He leaned his head against the wheel again and clenched his teeth until his jaws hurt. What now? Should he get rid of his four-wheeler? And how? He was tempted to drive it into the harbor, but that was something better suited for an American film than reality. After all, it was broad daylight. Not to mention that the vehicle had set him back a half million crowns.
Get ahold of yourself, he thought. Think. How many four-wheel-drives and commercial vans were there in the metropolitan area? A lot. And they couldn’t be sure about the SV on the license plate, could they? It might take them months to do all that legwork. He chuckled to himself. When they got to him, he could simply shoo them away. After all, he had no motive. All he needed was a little time to recover and figure out some explanation. And with that in mind, he started the 4 x 4. He would go home, put some coffee on, and sober up. Go back to square one, like he’d done so many times before at the end of a drunk. He also needed to get back to work before people started asking too many questions. He put it in reverse and turned to back out.
A patrol car pulled up on the gravel road and blocked his way.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The light fell low into the car. Lisa was parked beside the cathedral, lost in thought. In debate, actually, centered on a dilemma. If a psychopath couldn’t change, if he couldn’t love people as a result of defective genes, a bad upbringing, and other exter
nal factors, did it mean he didn’t deserve to be loved? And what happened to someone who loved this man anyway, whose emotions vanished into the psychopath’s black hole, who got absolutely nothing back from him? It was a disturbing thought.
Lisa started the car. A shower had snuck in among the rays of sunlight and left sparkling raindrops on her front windshield. She’d taken a fifteen-minute break to buy a baby-blue teddy bear for a friend’s one-year-old son, and now she sang along with Kerli’s Walking on Air. The dispatcher broke in, and she listened while staring blankly at the cathedral’s brickwork. Then she turned and headed for Anja Mikkelsen’s apartment on Grønnegade.
Mette opened the door to the apartment. “Thanks for coming so soon. I have a key, and I empty her mailbox. We’ll have to see how it goes later on. I can’t keep doing this, I live all the way on the other side of town.”
Lisa followed her into a sunny room with a wood floor and so many plants that the place looked like a greenhouse. Lisa smiled at the sight of the meter-high window. She wanted one in her own apartment. A view of the stars and infinity, the stillness of night. A reminder to remain humble. But then she noticed the plants were plastic. Fakes. She shivered. To think that the animal activist wouldn’t even have plants—how extreme was she, really?
“What is it you wanted to show me?” Lisa felt a bit uncomfortable, an uninvited guest in an apartment owned by someone in a coma.
“Follow me,” Mette said.
They walked into a small office with a tiny pine desk and blue-cushioned chair. Mette pointed at the desk. “That looks a little strange to me.”
