Invisible Murder Read Free

set up for you that will change that. Unless she’s in favor of the power-of-attorney idea?”
    “She is not,” Skou-Larsen said. He had tried, but he just couldn’t get through to her.
    “No? Well, then.…”
    The meeting was over. That was clear from the way Ahlegaard gathered up his papers. Skou-Larsen remained seated for another few seconds, but all that did was draw Junior around to his side of the table to shake hands.
    “Shall I ask Lotte to call you a cab?” he asked.
    “No thank you. I have my own car.”
    “Really? Such a pain finding a parking spot around here, isn’t it?”
    Skou-Larsen slowly stood up. “So, you’re saying that you won’t help me?” he asked glumly.
    “We’re always here to help. Just call me if there’s anything we can do, and we’ll set up a meeting.”
    A N A PRIL SHOWER had just been and gone when Skou-Larsen left the downtown offices of his unhelpful lawyer. In the park across the street, sodden forsythia branches were drooping over the gravel footpaths, and the narrow tires on passing bicycles hissed wetly on the bike path.
    As his lawyer had predicted, he had indeed had a hard time finding a parking spot close to the firm’s offices, and Skou-Larsen was quite out of breath by the time he made it back to the parking garage on Adelgade where he had eventually managed to park his beloved Opel Rekord. Perhaps that was why he didn’t notice the black Citroën.
    “Hey, watch out!”
    He felt someone grab his shoulder, causing him to teeter backward and fall. Lying on the asphalt, he saw a car tire, shiny from the rain, pass within centimeters of his face. Grit from the wet road struck his cheek like hail.
    “Are you okay?”
    The car was gone. Skou-Larsen found himself staring up at a sweaty young man in a tight-fitting neon-green racing jersey and bike shorts, unable to answer his rescuer’s question.
    “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
    He shook his head mutely. No, no ambulance. “I’ll just go home,” he finally managed to say. Helle was waiting for him, and he didn’t want her to worry.
    He got up, thanked the neon-colored bike messenger, found his car keys, safely reached his Opel, and sat down in the driver’s seat. Nothing had happened, he told himself, and then he repeated it to be on the safe side. Nothing whatsoever had happened.
    But as he drove, he couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened. Not bit by bit, dragging out over months and maybe years, but now, in a single, raw instant, splat against the asphalt like a blood-filled mosquito on a windshield.
    One could pass away like that, too.

 
    OD , I WISH she had done it properly,” Magnus said. “Finished him right off, the evil bastard.”
    Nina glanced over at Magnus. His smile seemed forced and his morbid humor as awkward as his large body. He looked tired, she thought. Tired and wan, completely lacking his usual aura of a corn-blond Viking crusader off to fight dragons, infidels, and bureaucrats.
    “Check out the judge’s hands,” he hissed. “They look like they were made from Play-Doh. What a waste of space. Fucking paper-pushers. Fuck the fucking system.” The last of the air inside him leaked out in an ill-tempered snort, and the flimsy chair groaned ominously under his weight as he slumped against the backrest, staring up at the ceiling in resignation.
    Courtrooms had that effect on him, Nina knew. This wasn’t the first time she had seen her boss despair at Denmark’s foremost representatives of the “system.” Dueling with red tape and lawyers always wore him out.
    Her own rage was different. It stayed bottled up, lurking somewhere near her diaphragm.
    It was 1:24 P.M .
    Natasha had been sitting in the same position for more than an hour now, her elbows resting lightly on the edge of the table, a distant look in her dry, blue eyes. She looked vague and unfocused, her interest sharpening only briefly when the Russian interpreter broke into the proceedings to