finished dinner at ten o’clock. He escorted her back to the hotel but didn’t show any interest in following her inside.
Chapter 12
JONNY WAS ASLEEP BEFORE they left Copenhagen. He woke up when they rattled onto the ferry. Irritable, he tottered into the ferry’s candy store and pulled a wrinkled shopping list from his coat pocket. Absentmindedly, he put bags of Drungelvrål, Dumlekola, and gummy bears into the shopping basket for his four kids. Irene noted that he didn’t buy anything for his wife, unless the bottle of Black Velvet he purchased in the liquor store next to the hotel was for her.
Jonny cheered up after consuming a strong beer in the cafeteria. Irene had two cups of coffee. He fell asleep again as soon as they got into the car and didn’t even wake up when they drove down the ramp.
The trip home along the coast of Halland went by quickly and uneventfully on the new highway. Jonny slept all the way to Kungsbacka. Jonny had to make a quick pit stop at Statoil. Irene filled up the car while she waited.
She dropped Jonny off outside his row house in Mölndal and continued home to Fiskebäck. It was almost two o’clock and she was hungry. She planned to unpack the car and get a bite to eat. Then she was going to drive to the station and speak with Andersson.
At three thirty she stepped into the superintendent’s office. He looked up from a stack of papers lying on the table in front of him.
“Hi. Good that you came. Where’s Jonny?” he asked.
Irene tried to look surprised. “He hasn’t come in yet?”
She was reluctant to reveal her suspicions to her boss. Jonny had probably gone straight to bed and was fast asleep now.
“No. When did you get home?”
“At two thirty. I dropped him off at his home so that he wouldn’t have to carry his things around with him and so that he could pick up his car. He hasn’t arrived?”
“No.”
“Maybe the car wouldn’t start. . . .”
“Possibly. While we’re on the subject of cars, that ‘Mats’ from Copenhagen called. He’s so damned difficult to understand but I got that they’ve found Marcus Tosscander’s car.”
“Marcus’s car! Where?”
“In a garage. He said that I should tell you it was in Emil’s garage.” Emil’s garage? Emil had a garage? Where?
“ ‘Mats’ wants you to call him. He gave me some blasted number in Danish but I didn’t understand it. Fours and threes . . . completely incomprehensible!”
Irene smiled.
“I’m thinking about asking for extra money for language assistance for these joint investigations.”
Since she had the numbers for both Peter Møller’s and Jens Metz’s direct lines she said, “I’ll call from my office. Then I’ll report to you. Prepare yourself because it’s going to take quite a while. Load up the coffeemaker.”
She nodded in the direction of the old coffee pot, which was standing on top of Andersson’s bookshelf. In recent years a coffee machine had been installed in the corridor but Andersson had kept his percolator. Irene knew that he always hid a package of coffee in the bottom drawer of his desk.
“YES. THIS is Inspector Metz.”
“Hi. Irene Huss. Thanks again for your assistance.”
“Thanks to you, too. It got real quiet here in Copenhagen after you left. Nothing is happening.”
Metz laughed and Irene politely laughed, too, before she interrupted him. “You spoke with my boss and said that Marcus’s car was found in Emil’s garage.”
“That’s right. There’s a garage under the building. Some of the tenants have parking spaces in the back lot but Emil had a spot in the garage. We did a routine check and found a Swedish-registered red Pontiac convertible. It turns out that it belongs to Marcus Tosscander.”
“The photo above Emil’s bed . . . the model is Marcus Tosscander,” Irene said. “I wasn’t sure when I saw it the first time, his face is so fuzzy. But I’ve seen other similar pictures of Marcus. The picture in the bedroom and the calling card on Emil’s bulletin board clearly point to their having known each other. The car in Emil’s parking spot confirms it. I also think we can go ahead and assume that Emil was the one Marcus was staying with during his time in Copenhagen.”
“Quite possibly.”
“Both of them fell victim to the same killer. That must mean that they knew him.”
“That’s what we think as well. But the question is, why didn’t Emil report Marcus missing? And why did he let that nice car stand there in the