Night on Fire

2

2A body sprawled face-down across the keyboard of my landlord’s Steinway grand. The man’s denim-covered backside balanced on the edge of the ebony stool, his spine curved forward. Blood welled from the back of his skull.

I turned to Blixenstjerne and tried to speak. I sucked in air, tried again. “Who is he?”

“We have the same question,” Blixenstjerne said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He wasn’t here . . .” I inhaled. “Nobody was here when I left.”

“Tell me if anything else has been altered,” Blixenstjerne said.

I turned again. My gaze skittered along the wall and across the glassed-in end of the living room, landing on the leather and chrome recliner I’d used for two weeks. The back hunched forward over the seat. The base of the telephone extended precariously past the edge of the teak end table, pushed aside last night while I tried to talk and take notes at the same time. Beside the phone was the stained envelope where I’d set my coffee cup. Everything was as I’d left it, but tarnished now by the emotional residue of violence. My skin itched, as if I’d been contaminated, too. I shook my head. “Nothing’s missing.”

Blixenstjerne said, “I must ask you to look more closely at the victim. Perhaps you have seen him before.”

I made myself step into the living room. The man had been bludgeoned from the rear, an impressive blow that jammed his forehead onto the keyboard. In the red pooling beneath the pedals were white specks—bits of bone, shattered ivory or broken teeth, I couldn’t tell.

The scent of fresh blood was strong. Beneath it, I smelled stale beer and engine grease, the odors clinging to the dead man a yard from me.

Blixenstjerne was breathing audibly through his mouth. I looked away from the body, trying to get myself under control. On the floor in the corner I spotted a miniature Ionic column, lying on its side. Not more than four feet long, it belonged in the foyer where my landlord might have used it to display a potted plant. The fluted stand was solid plaster and weighed about twenty pounds.

My gaze crept from that heavy object back to the man who’d been struck. The hairs on his bare arms were the same dark blond shade as my own. On his head, the strands had reddened to strawberry, the soggy pony tail partly covering the logo arching across the back of his denim vest so that it read BAN IDOS. Below was a cartoonish armed man in sombrero and serape and centered beneath him DENMARK.

I’d seen the insignia before in a local newspaper photograph of men with motorcycles. My memory supplied the missing letter. The victim was a member of the Bandidos biker gang. He wasn’t someone I knew. Yet sadness washed over me. I inhaled again, then I gagged. Spun around and pushed past Blixenstjerne into the hallway. I dealt with death regularly, lots of death. But not often with dead people. I wasn’t prepared for the bone-melting pity I felt for the man whose life had ended where I lived.

I stumbled outdoors breathing hard and leaned against the building’s exterior wall. It was in shade, but the bricks still radiated heat. My palm against them, I realized how cold my fingertips had gotten. I stared at my feet. The cement around them was smooth, as though someone had dusted away every particle of dirt.

A hand lightly touched my shoulder. I turned to face Jespersen. “We will have more questions,” he said. “Please wait.”

I nodded, too rattled to speak. The image of the man’s battered skull floated through my mind and I shuddered. From the moment Jespersen accosted me at Kastrup, I’d known bad news was coming. Immediately, I’d feared for Stefan. That was a habit I hadn’t yet broken. But I was trying.

I’d dreaded hearing bad news about Stefan Krajewski for as long as I’d known him. We’d met more than a dozen years ago when I was assigned to the American embassy in Warsaw. Stefan was posing as a Polish intelligence agent while secretly working undercover for the Danes. He was running a covert operation against a group of terrorists based in Warsaw and we ended up working together. We also fell in love—passionately, inextricably, and very inconveniently.

Because the Warsaw operation provoked one terrorist group into making death threats against me, I’d spent the last half of 1986 and part of 1987 on emergency leave in a safe house in Denmark under the protection of the Danish ministry of defense. The threats against me remained serious and when I returned to work, Diplomatic Security ruled that I could safely serve only in the US and Canada. My enemies were persistent and the department was cautious. The security restriction remained in effect for more than a decade. I wasn’t approved for overseas assignment again until early this year.

Meanwhile, Stefan’s contract with the Danish Defense Intelligence Service kept him in Europe. I’d never wanted a long distance relationship with a man. But I wanted Stefan and I put up with all the limitations. Eventually, he’d outlive his usefulness as a covert operator. He’d have to give up field work. He made jokes about that. When his cover was completely blown, he’d marry me to get a US visa and find an intelligence-related desk job in the DC area. We’d share six-packs after work, eat breakfast together every morning, wallow in fleshly pleasure during the hours between. Marriage, as I imagined it.

The airliner bombing last December had drawn me back to Europe and into an operation that involved Stefan. The mission ended well but Stefan injured his leg permanently and Danish intelligence canceled his contract. I returned to Washington and started looking for a larger condo. I thought Stefan would join me by Valentine’s Day. But he didn’t arrive until March and he stayed only a week. Long enough to tell me he was going to Poland. He had something he needed to do in Warsaw. From the careful way he’d said that—and declined to say more—I knew that nothing was going to change for us.

I was mad. Hurt. Jealous. I hated those feelings. In those seven days together, I said to him all the hateful things I now regretted. About spies, tarnished by the false lives they led, hoarding their unwhisperable secrets, so closemouthed that sham becomes reality. I got angrier, he grew more tight-lipped.

I couldn’t go on the way we were, waiting for him to make a life with me. Before that ever happened, I’d get a terse note advising that S. Krajewski’s life had ended and the message wouldn’t specify where he’d died. I wouldn’t wait for that. I was done, I told him.

When he looked at me, the sadness in his eyes was terrible.

He left anyway.

He gave me instructions on how to communicate with him, as if he hoped I’d change my mind. I didn’t use them. Not right away.

I’d made the correct decision last March. But my heart hadn’t yet caught up with my head. When Jespersen stopped me, my first fear was for Stefan.

My second was for my seventy-six-year-old father, slowly dying from Alzheimer’s back in the States.

Like someone whose car has been hit by a truck, I’d made sure my loved ones were all right. Foolishly, I’d thought because neither Stefan nor my father was involved, I could look at whatever was inside my flat and I’d feel no pain.

Wrong. I ached all over, a whiplash victim with no visible wounds. Again, I saw him, head resting on the keyboard. What was this rough-looking man doing in my apartment? And why had he uncovered the piano keys?

I braced my back against the bricks and watched Jespersen approach Blixenstjerne. Beyond them I saw sunlight flash on auburn hair. I recognized Bella Hinton. She greeted Jespersen with a handshake before she spoke rapidly to Blixenstjerne. I felt a surge of relief. Like me, Bella was a US citizen and a State Department employee. We’d served together in Warsaw where she’d been the embassy’s regional security officer, the RSO. By the time my work with Stefan climaxed in the spring of 1986, I trusted only two Americans in the embassy. Bella was one of them and, all these years later, she was still my closest friend. But more important, now she was the RSO at our embassy in Copenhagen and she worked closely with the Danish police. She knew me and she knew the two cops. She could get me out of this mess and on my way to Maine.

Bella shook hands with Blixenstjerne, then started purposefully toward me. She stood out among the black and white uniforms, her tunic a riotous bloom of tropical flowers over turquoise leggings and matching designer clogs. When we’d met in Poland, Bella camouflaged herself in earth-toned outfits to blend in with her mostly male colleagues in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. In the years since, she’d stuck with the case-hardened work-style their macho culture demanded, but she’d obviously tired of their dress code.

When she reached me she leaned in close to study my face. Her hair was slicked back into a club at the base of her neck, the individual strands pasted down with gel. At each side of her green eyes was a fretwork of tiny lines, wrinkled with concern. “You all right?” she asked.

“Nearly.” I pushed upright, no longer touching the wall. “I’ll feel even better if you drive me straight back to Kastrup.”

“Not likely you’re leaving Denmark tonight,” she said. “Man killed in your flat.”

I must have been there minutes before the murder. Then on my way out of the country like the guiltiest of killers. It would take a while to eliminate me from the list of suspects. “You have to convince them to let me leave tomorrow,” I said. “You know I don’t have connections to any outlaw bikers.”

“Outlaw bikers?” Bella’s expression showed only casual interest, but her tone was off, tinged with something like panic.

“Victim’s wearing a Bandidos vest.” I kept my eyes on her. “Blixenstjerne forget to mention that?”

She didn’t meet my gaze as she smoothed the hair back from her temples with the flats of her palms. “Interesting,” was all she said.

Then Blixenstjerne was back, Jespersen beside him, notepad in hand.

“Do you recognize the dead man?” Blixenstjerne asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know who he is.”

Jespersen jotted something down on his pad. The ink was smudged at the margins of his paper as though his fingertips were damp. He asked, “When you left the flat, did you see anyone unusual in the vicinity?”

I tried to recall the scene. When the taxi driver pushed my buzzer, I was closing my suitcase. I’d jammed it shut, grabbed my carry-on, and hurried out the door. It latched behind me. I remembered the taxi, a silvery blue Mercedes driven by a woman ten years older and twenty pounds lighter than me. I kept a tight grip on my suitcase handle, grunted as I hoisted it into the trunk. Embarrassed by the noise, I’d glanced around. I saw only an elderly gentleman in a cloth cap, strolling toward the corner market. “Nobody unusual,” I said.

Blixenstjerne started in again, and for the next five minutes I repeated in several different forms the same information I’d given to Jespersen in the car. I didn’t tap my foot or look at my watch, but my answers got briefer and I clipped off the ends of my words.

Finally, Blixenstjerne said, “We’ll need your fingerprints.”

“I’ll cooperate in any way I can,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if we could finish up my part of this tonight.”

“I’m not sure that will be possible.” Blixenstjerne plucked the notepad from Jespersen’s hands and frowned at it. “You spell your Christian name with a—?”

“Kathryn with a K. Excuse me,” I began, wanting to acknowledge his rank, the groveling that cops always seem to expect. I realized I didn’t know the correct way to address a kriminalinspektør. I settled for “Sir.” I added, “I need to leave as soon as possible for the US. I’m on the task force investigating the airliner explosion in Maine.”

“Ah, yes. I understand mass murder is your specialty.”

Touchy. “Not mass murder,” I said. “Acts of terrorism.”

He pursed his lips, two pink worms on the ruddy face. “We have little demand for your expertise in Denmark. But you may rest assured that we take each of our very few homicides quite seriously.”

Hurriedly I said, “I don’t know the man. I didn’t kill him. I don’t know who did. I don’t see how I can add anything useful.”

“Yes, well, we’ll have to be the judge of that, won’t we?” He looked back at his notes. “You go by the nickname ‘Casey’?”

He was going to dot every I, cross every T. I spat out my answer. “Casey, yes.”

He turned to Jespersen. “Take her to headquarters and get those prints.”

The double doors on the front of the building burst open with a squeal of hinges. An attendant with greasy hair and sweat circles under his arms held the front of the gurney. The wheels at his end unlatched and clanked against the sidewalk, as he paused at the bottom of the stairs. The second attendant was female, her biceps hardening under snow-white skin. Her wheels came down, too, and she waited while her partner wiped his forehead with his bare arm.

The gurney was a yard from me, at knee level. The body was covered by a sheet, strapped at shoulders and hips. The male attendant took the helm again, pulling the sheet to one side. I saw a blood-smeared cheek, thick strands of a handlebar mustache.

Bella growled low in her throat, as if she’d choked back a scream. Then she coughed loudly to cover the lapse.

The gurney clattered away.

Jespersen had his hand on my elbow, trying to move me toward his BMW.

Why wasn’t my security officer doing more to help me? “Bella,” I said to her, “please explain to these gentlemen. My presence here isn’t necessary. I’ve got to get to Bangor. Four hundred and eight people were on that flight. It’s critical—”

Blixenstjerne cut me off. “The victim has the capital letters K and C inked on the palm of his left hand.”

As I heard his words, I saw those letters, paired that so-familiar way. But I could not imagine those letters stark against that dead flesh. I swallowed hard.

Bella’s eyes jittered from the cops to me and back again, like a nocturnal animal surprised by a bright light.

In the Warsaw embassy, I’d seen Bella deal with both a suicide and a vehicular homicide. I’d watched her clamp down on her emotions and bury her horror under professionalism. She wasn’t acting detached now. What made this dead body so upsetting?

I said, “Bella—”

“Go ahead,” she told me in a strangled voice. “You stay with me and Woody tonight. We’ll talk.”

“Miss Collins.” Blixenstjerne slapped the notepad shut and handed it to his colleague. “The body was in your flat. With your initials—possibly your nickname—on his hand. Can you think of any reason for that?”

The man was looking for me. Start with the simplest explanation that fits the facts. First rule of investigation. This cop and I were using the same text. I said slowly, “I don’t know why anyone from the Bandidos would want to contact me.”

“We’ll have to learn why,” Blixenstjerne said. “Until we do, your hundreds of bodies will have to wait on our one.”