Invisible Murder by Lene Kaaberbøl Page B

was a man he had never seen before.
    Sándor didn’t say anything. You couldn’t contradict the headmaster, he had learned that very quickly. But there must have been some mistake.
    “Hi, Sándor,” the man said, holding out his hand for an oddly adult handshake. “You’re coming home with me now.”
    Then Sándor finally understood who the man was. His Hungarian father, his
gadjo
father, the man whose fault it was that he wasn’t his stepfather Elvis’s son, but just Valeria’s-kid-from-before-we-got-married. And he also understood the rest—this man could take him, and he wouldn’t need to stay at the orphanage anymore.
    “If you would just sign here, Mr. Horváth,” the headmaster said.
    “What about Tamás and the girls?” Sándor blurted out. “Aren’t they coming?”
    Mr. Horváth squatted down in front of Sándor, so that Sándor actually had to look down a little to look him in the eye.
    “No, Sándor,” he said in the tone that Grandma Éva used whenever she had to explain that something or other wasn’t possible because his mother was sick. “They’re not my children, but you are.”
    And so Sándor had gone with the man, out of the office, down the dark, wide staircase, and out into the parking lot in front of the main building where a little blue car was parked. He crawled into the back seat when he was asked to and let Mr. Horváth buckle his seatbelt with a click. Then Mr. Horváth got into the front seat, started the car, and smiled at him in the rearview mirror.
    “We’ll get to know each other after a little while,” he said.
    Sándor didn’t say anything. He just sat there quietly as the car rolled down the drive and turned onto the paved road, leaving Tamás, Feliszia, and Vanda behind in the cold, gray buildings on the other side of the fence.
    T HE NBH INTERROGATED Sándor for three to four hours at a stretch, three to four times a day, for a little over forty-eight hours. He didn’t tell them about Tamás. How could he?

 
    E HAVE A problem.”
    Christian from IT had gone to the trouble of coming up to Søren’s second floor office from the ground floor. Usually he just telephoned. He was standing in the doorway with a piece of paper that looked very small in his large hands.
    “All right,” Søren said, rolling his chair back from his desk and flipping a hand in an attempt to seem encouraging. “Tell me about it.”
    He liked Christian, but he needed to read at least two hundred more pages to prepare for the training exercise evaluation later that day, and he was meeting with a couple of visiting American police officers very shortly. Why was it that IT problems never seemed to fall into the solved-in-ten-minutes category?
    Christian moved a little further into the office. He was a tall man, in his mid-forties, with wrists as thick as tree trunks and a solid barrel chest. He had been in IT for as long as Søren could remember, and he had recently taken over responsibility for most of their Internet surveillance.
    “We’ve started tracing the IP addresses you sent down to us yesterday,” Christian said, placing the piece of paper in front of Søren. “Three of them are familiar faces from the right-wing extremist scene, and they don’t seem to have gone in too deeply. They were probably just drooling over the specifications for an M-79 or something. I’ve done a report on it that I’ll send up later.”
    Søren nodded. All of this was what he had expected.
    “Two of the IP addresses that visited the alleged hospital equipment page look like normal search errors. In other words, people got there by accident and left again as soon as they saw the trashy layout. The third, the one you underlined … well, that one is a little more problematic.”
    “And?” Søren glanced at his watch. He was supposed to meet the American delegation in ten minutes.
    “Well,” Christian said and cleared his throat. “The IP address belongs to a technical college in northwest