The Torso: A Detective Inspector Huss Investigation, Vol. 2 (11 page)

Irene’s undisguised surprise must have been obvious because Tom Tanaka made a hint of a bow and said in English with a strong American accent, “If you’re surprised to see me here, it’s nothing compared to how I feel about seeing you.”

His voice was very deep and his tone ironic. Irene couldn’t keep from smiling.

“Good day. My name is Irene Huss. I’m a police officer from Göteborg, Sweden, and I’m investigating . . . a crime. May I ask a few questions?” she said in her broken English.

Tom Tanaka looked at her without expression through dark eyes embedded in the huge rolls of fat on his face. Irene didn’t believe that the man in front of her was an out-of-shape, harmless mountain of lard. Fighting with a sumo wrestler was like running right into an oncoming steam locomotive traveling at full speed.

The Japanese man nodded slightly. In a deep bass he rumbled, “Emil.”

The door behind Tanaka opened almost instantaneously, and a tall, ruddy young man stuck out his head and also answered in English, but with a heavy Danish accent, “I’m almost done eating—”

He stopped himself when he became aware of Irene and Peter. His gaze locked onto Peter but quickly shifted. Irene suspected there had been a hint of recognition. Emil swallowed hard several times, and his prominent Adam’s apple yo-yoed up and down his thin throat.

“Will you take over the store while I’m speaking with the police officers?”

Emil hurried to finish chewing. He slipped through the door and stood behind the counter as far away from the arm of the law as he could get, nervously pulling at his red goatee.

With a massive hand Tom Tanaka gestured toward the door. They passed through a small windowless employee lounge with soft lighting and two comfortable black leather recliners. Tom Tanaka went over to a heavy door and unlocked it.

Inside there was a huge, very modern kitchen done in white, black, and stainless steel. The floor was laid with wide polished boards of cherrywood. A strong smell of fried fish hung in the air. On the other side of the kitchen Irene glimpsed a sizeable room like a living room. She heard the sound and saw the color flickering from a TV. Between the kitchen and the living room there was a small hallway.

“I live here,” Tanaka said simply.

“So you don’t have far to go to work,” Irene tried to joke.

“True,” the Japanese man replied.

He led the way through the kitchen and then headed to the right. The floor beams creaked under his considerable weight. He opened a door and preceded them into the room. There was no other option since neither Irene nor Peter would have been able to squeeze past him.

“My office,” said Tanaka.

This room was also large. A pleasant smell of expensive cigar smoke encircled the visitors. The room was sparsely furnished in Japanese style. The desk was made of black shiny wood, and the black leather desk chair had obviously been specially constructed to hold Tom Tanaka’s colossal body.

Along the short side of the room there was a glass cabinet containing knickknacks and prize buckles. Irene observed, “You must be a good sumo wrestler.”

One of the corners of Tom’s mouth twitched and Irene took it to be an amused smile.

“
Was
a good sumo wrestler. I’m retired.”

Irene looked at him, surprised. He couldn’t be older than she was.

“We retire at age forty.”

She didn’t know why she volunteered, “I’ve also worked with Japanese wrestling—jujitsu.”

Tanaka didn’t respond. He pointed at two cloth-covered chairs next to the desk.

“Please,” he said.

Irene and Peter Møller sat. Then Irene realized that Møller hadn’t said a word since they’d entered the store. She looked at him but he remained silent so she started talking about the dismembered male corpse they had found in Sweden. She emphasized that the only clue they had to the man’s identity was a dragon tattoo, and raised her gaze over Tanaka’s head to look at a silk painting that was evidently the original of both the sign and the tattoo.

There was one important difference: there was no sign for
man
on the painting. Instead, a pointy mountaintop could be seen. Irene recognized the holy mountain, Mount Fuji. She said so and Tanaka nodded.

“Colleagues here in Copenhagen contacted us when we sent out the picture of the tattoo via Interpol. That’s why I’m here. Do you know who the man might be?”

“No. No idea.”

“You don’t know of anyone who has had a tattoo done based on your sign or this painting?”

He shook his head in denial.

“I’ve had the store for less than two years. I inherited it from my cousin. He was the one who started it, years ago. Maybe the tattoo was made during his time. The idea for the sign and for replacing Fuji were also his,” he said.

Irene thought a moment, then asked, “Do you know of any tattoo artist in the area who is especially skilled?”

“A master? No.”

They rose at the same time, and Tanaka led the way. At the kitchen door he stopped with his hand on the door handle and turned to Irene.

“Keikoku. Uke. Okata?”
he asked softly.

He warned her of enemies and asked if she had understood. She didn’t know the Japanese language but these words and expressions were used in martial arts. In a calm voice she answered,
“Hai.”

Tanaka let them out through the shop, which now contained many more customers. With a neutral “good-bye,” he closed the door after them.

“What was it he said in Japanese?” Møller asked when the door shut behind them.

Irene concluded that he hadn’t understood Tanaka’s warning. She didn’t know anything about him, and he, too, might have been familiar with Japanese martial arts. But she was willing to take the risk.

“He asked if I remembered any terms from jujitsu,” she said indifferently.

They walked back to the Police Department in silence.

 

“ THIS IS Inspector Jens Metz.”

Peter Møller introduced Irene to the heavyset, reddish blond colleague in an office that smelled like stale smoke. Jens Metz looked so typically Danish that Irene had to hold back a giggle. Instead, she gave him a friendly smile and let her hand be encircled by his sausage-like fingers. He wasn’t in Tanaka’s class, but he was heading in that direction. Irene guessed his age to be somewhere around fifty-five.

“Welcome to Copenhagen. But the reason could have been more pleasant.” Metz smiled with nicotine-stained teeth.

He appeared to be friendly and efficient. Out of nowhere he magically made three steaming cups of coffee appear on the desk. This sort of thing always earned bonus points in Irene’s coffee-dependent existence. That the coffee tasted like it had been brewed from crushed pieces of vinyl was a completely different matter. One can get used to Danish coffee, Irene tried to tell herself.

Jens Metz tapped a pile of thick folders that was lying on the table.

“Here is the material from the case of the murder-mutilation of Carmen Østergaard. You’ll get to meet the medical examiner tomorrow at eleven o’clock. One of us will drive you there,” he said. And he briefly went through the investigation of the dismembered corpse that had floated onto the beach in Hellerup. The first sacks had been found on June 3, 1997. Two more sacks were found the day after. The head, limbs, and the intestines were never found. Both breasts, including the musculature, along with the buttocks, were gone. The outer genitalia and the rectal opening had been removed. The victim had extensive bruising on her pubic bone as a result of extremely brutal force.

“She was as empty as a watch case,” Metz commented.

“The dismemberment sounds strikingly like that of our corpse,” Irene observed.

“You’ll get more details about it from the pathologist tomorrow. We didn’t know who the victim was, but two days later, on June 5, a man named Kurt Østergaard reported that his wife, Carmen, was missing. He hadn’t seen her since the last week in May. He started missing her then since she was his source of income. Both of them were on heroin. We could rule out Kurt as the murderer pretty quickly. He wouldn’t have been able to hold a knife in the shape he was in. Actually, I heard that he died last winter of an overdose.”

Metz caught his breath, wet his index finger, and turned the page. “At the time of her death, Carmen was twenty-five years old. She had been a prostitute for four years, the same period during which she had been married to Kurt and hooked on heroin. Her mother was Danish and her father Spanish. The girl was a souvenir from a hitchhiking trip to Spain. Many of us in the district knew Carmen, since she lived here in Vesterbro. The mortician established that she was HIV positive. She probably wasn’t aware of it since she wasn’t registered anywhere for testing. We interrogated Kurt but he couldn’t give us any information. Carmen never told him about her customers; she just gave him money.”

Metz looked down at the papers and continued, “We interrogated all the prostitutes in Vesterbro. A lot of the women had been threatened by customers during that time, with everything from strangulation to assault. But nothing sounded like the murderer we were after. Sometimes Carmen hung out with two other prostitutes. They talked with each other in between clients and ate together. Carmen supposedly talked to one of them in a café about a police officer who had frightened her in the days before she was killed. A customer who paid well but had strange requests and was also a cop. Carmen never said what in particular the police officer wanted. Before they left the café, Carmen allegedly said, ‘The policeman or the doctor will be the death of me.’ Her friend asked her if she had to see them again and she just said, ‘Yes. Money and drugs.’”

“Did any of the other prostitutes know anything about a suspicious policeman or doctor?”

“One broad talked about a strange doctor and another started talking about a policeman. But she was high on God knows what. When she started to come down, she denied everything and claimed that she had made it all up. We never found any evidence that these two characters existed.”

“Did you ask the girls at the bordellos?”

Both Møller and Metz smiled. It was Metz who answered. “Do you realize how many nightclubs, escort services, strip bars, and so forth there are in Copenhagen? Not to mention all of the girls at these places? And boys, for that matter.”

He paused, then said, “Since Carmen never worked at a place like that—she worked the street—we only asked the girls on the streets. The papers printed a lot about the murder. Had any of the girls at the clubs experienced something terrifying, they could have gotten in touch with us. But no one did.”

They didn’t dare to because they would lose their jobs, Irene thought, but she didn’t say anything.

“It’s the whores on the street who are addicted to drugs who fall victim to the most gruesome violence. At least in the clubs they have some degree of protection,” Peter Møller added.

“Mmm. We worked the whole summer on this case but during the fall we had to shut it down. It was at a complete standstill. No new witnesses and, thankfully, no new murders.”

“Until now. In Göteborg,” said Irene.

“Yes, it’s really strange. If it hadn’t been for the tattoo, I would have said that there was no way there could have been a connection, even if the dismemberments were identical and extreme. But the sign is located here in Vesterbro. Everyone at the station has seen it,” said Metz.

Møller started talking about their visit to the gay sex shop. Irene noticed that he didn’t mention Tom Tanaka’s short sentence in Japanese. She hoped he had forgotten about it. He finished up with his own theory about the tattoo, “I think the victim in Sweden had taken a photo of the sign. The tattoo looks like the sign and not like the painting in Tanaka’s office.”

Irene nodded.

“That’s not impossible. We have to find the tattoo artist,” she said.

“But if the tattoo was based on a souvenir photo, it could have been made anywhere in the world,” Metz pointed out.

“That’s true but we have to begin somewhere. I’m going to start in Vesterbro,” said Irene.

She unfolded the picture of Isabell Lind and put it on the desk in front of the two Danish crime investigators. “At the same time, I’m thinking about trying to locate this girl. She’s the daughter of a friend.”

She briefly went through the story about Isabell. Møller and Metz examined the picture thoroughly while she was talking. When she was finished, Metz said, “I understand why the mother didn’t find a photographer or agency for photo models that recognized her. You’ll probably find her in one of the clubs. Usually they call the girls at these establishments hostesses or models.”

“Scandinavian Models . . . I think it must be an escort service,” said Peter.

Metz gave the picture back to Irene. With a big yawn, he stretched his arms out and straightened his back. “My friends, it’s almost six o’clock, and I want to go home to my dinner. See you tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”

Peter and Irene went into the corridor. He walked beside her in silence. Finally he said, “And you . . . where are you going to eat dinner?”

“Superintendent Bentsen has invited me to a restaurant not far from my hotel.”

“Good . . . I mean otherwise I would have asked you . . . but as you’ve already made plans with Beate . . .”

The relief in his voice couldn’t be missed, and Irene was just as relieved. There was a reserve about Peter Møller that was difficult to overcome and she didn’t feel particularly motivated to try. She didn’t have that kind of time here in Copenhagen. There were other more important people to focus on.

Møller drove her back to the Hotel Alex. The traffic was heavy but he was accustomed to it and navigated skillfully. He parked quickly in front of the hotel entrance. Before Irene got out he offered, “I can pick you up here tomorrow at a quarter to eight.”