Bonereapers (16 page)

Chapter Twenty

Dinah was pretty sure there was a Valkyrie maiden named Cloud or Fog. Evil Fog, Noxious Fog, Fog of War. Something stealthy and pernicious. The Radisson Blu Polar seemed to be enveloped in a pernicious fog and there was nothing she could do but wait for Thor to return and tell her about this e-bombshell that had shattered everybody’s plans.

Mahler’s anger seemed to be centered on Valerie, which must mean that he blamed her for the fact that she had allowed Sheridan’s incriminating e-mail to be stolen. She obviously hadn’t gotten around to telling him that Dinah was the spy who stole it and the chaos was all her fault. Dinah was grateful for that. Mahler scared her. He was a man she could as easily picture in a maximum security prison cell as a boardroom. Before discovering that e-mail, Thor had considered Mahler his prime suspect and with good reason. Eftevang hated Tillcorp, he had hounded Mahler across Europe, and he had told Aagaard he had a dynamite story and the documents to prove it. That was motive aplenty. And was Mahler just a little too quick to accept Sheridan’s guilt? Maybe that hasty acceptance and his anger at Valerie were contrived to cover his own guilt.

Someone had hacked into Sheridan’s computer, sent Valerie an e-mail, then stolen it and printed it, and left it in Maks Jorgen’s room—presumably with the intention that the police would find it. It would take a computer forensics expert to say whether the e-mail had been sent to a printer by Sheridan’s computer or Valerie’s. Maybe Valerie herself had printed it. There was only her word that it had been stolen. But it went against logic that she would frame Sheridan for murder. She was too professionally and romantically invested in him.

Only two things can derail him. Both of them are women.

Mahler’s words resounded in Dinah’s ears. She still couldn’t picture Erika as a murderess, but she no longer thought of her as a helpless victim. Her disappearance had hurt her husband already. Would she go so far as to frame him for murder? A late-life revenge for domestic crimes, real or imagined? If the scandal of a runaway wife didn’t nip his political ambitions in the bud, a charge of murder in the first certainly would.

Both of them are women
. Erika Sheridan and Valerie Ives—either one of them could be Sheridan’s Valkyrie angel of destruction.

Waiting for anything or anyone was worse than tedious for Dinah. It was an affliction, and today the waiting was unbearable. She had to do something to burn off her mental fog. The hotel had a fitness center and a sauna. She would have to be careful because of her arm, but she could run on the treadmill or ride a stationary bike. She needed to move or she’d go berserk and it would feel good to work up a sweat inside a nice, warm building.

***

The elevator doors opened and Dinah stared straight into the eyes of a giant painted polar bear on the facing wall. This obsession with bears was beginning to seem overdone, although she supposed it was only to be expected on an island with twice as many polar bears as people.

At the far end of the hall, a blond girl in a maid’s uniform was vacuuming. She had earbuds in her ears and didn’t look up. There was a faint smell of chlorine embedded in the carpet and a suggestion of mold spores kicked up by the vacuum. Dinah followed the signs to the fitness center, passing murals of the less fearsome Arctic fauna—snow-colored foxes, caribou, and a rather sad-eyed walrus with enormous tusks.

There were a few doors en route marked
ANSATTE,
which she assumed meant Employees Only. Double doors at the end of the hall proclaimed
SVØMMEBASSENG og BADSTUE
and below that in English, POOL and SAUNA. She didn’t know the proper pronunciation of
Badstue
, but bad stew sounded appropriate to the circumstances. She pushed on through and, with the aid of the standard male-female figures on the locker room doors, she went into the women’s room and stripped down to her zebra striped bra and panties, which would have to double as a bathing suit as she hadn’t planned on any Arctic swimming when she packed her bag.

A sign in several languages instructed her to shower before entering the pool. She rinsed off, careful to keep her bandage dry, took a towel from a rack beside the door and went into the pool area. It was a small pool, but she didn’t intend to swim, just wade around a bit and loosen up. It was empty so no need to feel self-conscious about her underwear. She stepped into the shallow end and jumped out clutching her heart.

Holy moly! The pool must be fed by a glacier. She shivered. Oh, well. This would make a good story to tell them back in Hawaii. She sucked in her breath and waded in up to her waist. She did a few leg lifts, but she had chill bumps all over and her teeth were clicking together like castanets.

She got out of the water and toweled off. There were murals in this room, too—on one wall, a mother
isbjørn
and two cubs meandering across the tundra against a backdrop of white, pointy mountains. On the facing wall, a rampant bear. It appeared to be snarling at her.

The emptiness felt creepy. It was early in the day, but there ought to be a few fitness fanatics taking the polar bear plunge with her. She had started back into the locker room when she noticed a sign on the far side of the pool. “If booze, tar, or the sauna won’t help, the illness is fatal. Suits Required.” The sauna. She didn’t know if it had cured Norris’ gout, but it would warm her icy bones.

She edged around the pool, dodging a set of dumbbells somebody had left in the middle of the floor, and peeked inside the cedar plank sauna. It seemed to be more like a steam room than a dry heat sauna. The touch-pad controls mounted on the outside wall showed the temperature was already set to the maximum. Excellent. She pulled open the door. A billowing cloud of warm steam engulfed her. She let the door shut behind her and groped through the fog to a low wooden bench on the right. She sat down, drew her knees up against her chest, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the wall.

Now this was heaven. A hundred percent humidity. It felt like July in South Georgia, only without the mosquitoes. The steam permeated her pores, diffusing warmth throughout her body. She thought about Thor mushing across the icy tundra in a dogsled. Did he really fantasize about visiting Miami? She pictured him in a tight t-shirt and cut-offs. And then without.

Sweat began to trickle out of her hair, into her eyes and down her neck. A little of this heat was restorative, but a full five minutes and she’d cook. She uncurled, wiped the sweat out of her eyes, and looked up. Good grief! There was someone on the upper bench across from her. Someone in a long-sleeved green turtleneck and dark ski pants.

She must be seeing things. Hallucinating like…

She stood up. It wasn’t a figment.

“Hello!”

No response.

Jerusalem! What was she doing in here with her clothes on? Dinah leapt up and bumped the door open with one hip to let out some steam so she could see through the mist. She shook the woman’s shoulder. A tendril of wet blond hair fell across her hand. “Hey, you’ve been in here too long. Come out!”

One thin green arm fell off the bench and dangled, limp as a vine. Her bright red fingernails looked like blossoms.

“Valerie!”

Dinah held open the door with one hand and turned off the steam.

“Val, wake up!” She reached in and shook her again. No movement. She was unconscious.

The door wanted to fly shut. Dinah looked around desperately for something to prop it open. Her eyes lit on the dumbbells. She let go of the door and ran to get them. She grabbed up the ten pounder. A fiery pain shot up her left arm and she remembered that she’d been shot. She hefted the five pounder in her left hand and the ten pounder in her right hand and carried them back to the steam room. She pulled the door open wide and tried to prop it open with the dumbbells, but it continued to slide.

Skitt
! She went back for the twenty-pound weight. She carried it in her right hand and another five-pounder in her left and stacked them in front of the door. This time it stayed open. She shook Val again and felt for a pulse. She couldn’t tell if what she was feeling was Valerie’s pulse or her own trembling. She thought, if I try to lift her off that bench one-armed, I’ll drop her and she’ll break her neck if she isn’t dead already.

“Hang on, Val. I’m going for help.”

She raced back through the locker room, jerked on her pants and shirt, and ran into the hall. The girl who’d been vacuuming was gone and the elevators weren’t there. She took the stairs two at a time and tore barefoot into the lobby, dripping wet, shirt unbuttoned, and yelling for help.

Thor turned from his conversation with the woman at the front desk. They both stared as if she’d gone stark mad.

She pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “I think Valerie’s been murdered.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Separate the witnesses. That was Cop 101 back in the States. Apparently, things were different in Norway or else Thor had missed the episode of
Law and Order
where that dictum was delivered.

Two hours after the discovery of Valerie’s body, Dinah sat at a long conference table in the Radisson business center with Whitney Keyes, Colt Sheridan, Norris Frye, Jake Mahler, Lee Keany, and Rodney Craig. Tipton had been picked to be the first interviewee and ushered down the hall to a different room. Watching over the remaining seven were two uniformed policemen. Legs apart, eyes aloft, side arms at the ready, they stood inside the room blocking the door. Matters had reached a point where the Norwegian police felt obliged to strap on pistols to keep the peace in the wake of the American crime wave. The faces around the table were solemn, if not exactly grief-stricken. Dinah couldn’t judge the emotional impact of Valerie’s murder on anyone else. She hadn’t absorbed the impact yet, herself. Her thoughts kept returning to the scene of the crime, to the moment when Thor lifted Valerie out of the steam bath and they saw that she had been bludgeoned.

Dinah had been allowed to shower and make herself decent, but her alliance with Thor was kaput. It ended when Sergeant Lyby, the policewoman who’d given Dinah a hard time at the airport, noticed blood on one of the five-pound dumbbells that Dinah had used to prop open the steam-room door. When she also noticed blood on Dinah’s hands, the jig was up.

“Dybdahl oughta be here,” said Mahler. “He was here this morning to renege on clearing us to leave. He came to my suite to tell me it was out of his hands until Erika shows up. Then he and Val got into some kind of a rhubarb.”

“About what?” asked Keyes.

“Damned if I know. Two words in, they lapsed into Norwegian and Val left.”

“You didn’t ask Dybdahl what she was upset about?”

“I didn’t have to. She was upset because of that note she let Erika get hold of. She was upset that she was the one who shot her boyfriend out of the saddle.”

Sheridan pounded his fist on the table. “I was not her boyfriend.”

“You would’ve been,” said Mahler. “Val wouldn’t have cared who you killed. I still can’t believe she was dumb enough to keep that note. I told her to burn it, but no-oh. She had a bee in her bonnet that you’d been hacked and thought she could trace the e-mail back to who sent it. In her mind, it was never going to be you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jake, but I didn’t kill Eftevang and if I was going to, I wouldn’t have written a note announcing my intention.” Sheridan had rallied since Dinah last saw him. He had shaved and put on a fresh shirt. And he seemed more in control, more willing to defend himself.

“It doesn’t matter to me who you killed or why,” said Mahler. “My investment’s down the tubes. Your wife’s humiliated you, your girlfriend’s been clubbed to death, and the Norwegian police have evidence that links you to a murder. Guilty or innocent, you’re done in politics. Luckily, I always hedge my bets.”

“Meaning what?” asked Keyes.

Sheridan hooted. “Can’t you guess? He’s been secretly supporting another candidate. Is it Zeb Warren?”

Thor appeared at the door and tapped. The policemen stood aside and he put his head inside. “We’re ready to interview Senator Sheridan now. Please follow me, sir.”

“You’d better hope they don’t let me cast a vote on that GMO food labeling bill, Jake.” Sheridan stood up and marched out past the policemen without a backward glance.

And then there were six, thought Dinah. The policemen closed the door and resumed their soldierly stance and disinterested gaze. She wondered if they were wired and everything that everyone said was being recorded. Could they do that in Norway without telling you?

Her hands were still quaking. She clasped them together in her lap, tried not to dwell on the vision of Valerie’s blood staining her hand. How could she have failed to see the blood on that dumbbell? How could she not have felt it? She felt it now. She’d scrubbed her hands until they were chapped.

Keyes took out his half-moon eyeglasses and placed them on his nose. “Is that true, Jake? Have you been secretly funding Zeb Warren?”

“Don’t act so shocked, Whitney. Val’s told me how you operate. She worked for you for ten years. She ought to know. You’ve got your eye to the main chance twenty-four, seven. Your wife’s late husband wasn’t cold before you swept in with the flowers and candy and look at you now, a billionaire philanthropist. If you haven’t put out feelers to Warren’s people, I’ll eat my hat.”

This time, the look of malice on Keyes’ face was flagrant. “A man with your vulnerabilities shouldn’t go out of his way to be offensive. You never know what repercussions will follow.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a fact.”

Mahler’s mouth crimped in a malign smile. “If Valerie were alive right now, she’d advise the both of us to keep our mouths shut.”

Valerie’s posthumous advice put the quietus on everyone. Ten minutes of silence passed before Thor tapped on the door again. The policemen stood aside and he looked in at the rancorous faces around the table. His own face revealed nothing. Dinah tried to make eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Mr. Mahler, if you will come with me, please?”

Mahler pushed himself up from the table so forcefully that he knocked over his chair. He held Keyes eyes for a tense few seconds and went out without a word.

And then there were five.

Lee righted the overturned chair and motioned to Rod with his eyes. The two got up and moved into the corner to powwow. Lee wore a worried look. Whatever he was saying to Rod brought a worried look to his face, too. Dinah wished she could hear what they were mumbling about.

Sheridan’s interview hadn’t taken long. Maybe he’d invoked his right to counsel, if there was such a right in Norway. And what questions was Thor asking? He must be trying to pinpoint the last time Valerie had been seen alive and by whom. How long had she been lying in that steam room? Dinah knew nothing of forensics except for the wizardry she saw on
CSI
. Could real medical examiners ascertain the time of Valerie’s death after even a few minutes in a steam room?

The clash between Keyes and Mahler confirmed her suspicion of bad blood between the two. What vulnerabilities was Keyes referring to? Was this the specter of WikiLeaks again? Or Myzandia? It seemed pretty clear that Valerie and Mahler had been arguing about the authorship and legitimacy of Sheridan’s e-mail, but what had she argued with Dybdahl about? So far, there was only Mahler’s word that Val and the agriculture minister had argued at all. Dinah hoped that Thor would have the authority to question Dybdahl. If Mahler killed Val—and he gave the impression that he was plenty angry enough to have done it—he would want to put her in as many arguments as he could.

Norris Frye poured himself a glass of water and shook his head. “It’s a tragedy, Whitney. A sad day for us all. Of course, I didn’t know Valerie well, but I understand she was a great asset to you. Same for Jake. And she was doing a bang-up job molding Colt’s image. You have to wonder, what was he thinking? Must’ve had it in his mind that Tillcorp’s troubles would come around to bite him and he couldn’t handle the pressure. Like he said, his life was under a microscope, false insinuations. The first murder, he probably just snapped. Didn’t know what he was doing. But killing Valerie, now, that was insane. The GOP will be better off with Zeb Warren. The charisma of a block of wood, but predictable.”

“I don’t believe that Colt murdered either one of them,” said Keyes. “And can the holier-than-thou shit, Norris. You’ll get the third degree same as the rest of us.”

Norris’ smugness grated on Dinah, too. He seemed to presume that he was the least likely suspect.

Norris shrugged off Keyes’ put-down. “You may be right that Colt’s innocent. Erika is the one with the drinking problem and I believe she was out on the town the night Eftevang was murdered. She and her Norwegian boyfriend could have knifed him. They may even have killed poor Valerie before they disappeared. Whether Erika had a hand in Valerie’s murder or not, it really was all her fault.”

“How do you figure that?” asked Dinah.

“If she hadn’t pulled her disappearing stunt, we’d be home by now. Valerie would be alive and maybe Colt’s candidacy, too.”

“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, Norris.” Keyes’ normally refined manners had turned nasty. “You could wind up with a libel suit or better still, your wife could wind up with a keepsake photo of you in the sack with Dybdahl’s pretty little assistant.”

Thor returned with a tall, very thin policeman and the blond policewoman. “We will do our best to speed up this process. Senator Keyes, I will interview you. Sergeant Lyby will interview Senator Frye, and Sergeant Tjølhelm will interview Mr. Rodney Craig.”

Four little, three little, two little Indians. Dinah watched the parade move off down the hall and proffered her fellow non-selectee an uneasy smile. “Well, Lee, it looks like they’re saving us for last.”

He came back to the table and sat down. “Do you know anything about the system over here? Can they keep us from leaving?”

“They can’t hold the senators for long without starting a war. I’m not sure how they’ll treat a low-level technical assistant and a pair of company bodyguards.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that. With Sheridan raising hell about me losing his wife, like I was in on kidnapping her or something, things could get sticky. The Norwegians may try to hold me ‘til she’s found.”

Once again, Dinah wondered if the guards had recording devices in their pockets or the room was bugged. If it was and if she could get Lee talking, she could maybe fill in some of the blanks inThor’s investigation. “Jake Mahler has clout with the Norwegian government. He’ll make certain that you and Rod leave when he leaves.”

“He has clout with the ag minister, that Dybdahl clown. I figure he’s got no say in a missing person case.”

“Did you and Erika talk at all while you were guarding her?”

“Not really. She was all the time asking about her husband. Was he still in the hotel, when would he be back, that kind of thing.”

“Did she seem afraid of him?”

“No. It was more like she was champing at the bit to tell him something and he was avoiding her.”

“And she didn’t say anything to suggest where she might have gone?”

“If she had, I wouldn’t be keeping it a secret. The airport’s closed. There’s no trains, no buses. She could’ve skied or dogsledded or snowmobiled to that Russian town, Barentsburg. If not, she’s still somewhere in Longyearbyen. If she’d call the police and tell them she was safe in the arms of her boyfriend, I’d be off the hook.”

Dinah tried not to sound accusatory. “There
is
the problem of Valerie Ives’ murder.”

“That’s nothing to do with me.”

“Even so, the police will probably ask what you and she were arguing about in the lobby this morning.”

“She was ragging on me about the e-mail Ramberg found in Jorgen’s room. She said it had been slipped into one of her files and then stolen. I told her I didn’t know anything about it.”

“Did she say when it was stolen?”

“No.”

Dinah reconstructed the timeline. The e-mail had showed up in Valerie’s e-mail on the day of the vault tour. She had shown it to Sheridan and probably to Mahler. That was obviously the “note” she and Mahler were whispering about on the drive back from the vault. Mahler had said he didn’t buy it and Valerie had replied that somebody was playing them. She must have finally deduced that it wasn’t Dinah and when she confronted the real culprit, he killed her.

Dinah tried again not to sound accusatory. “What were you and Rod looking for in Valerie’s room this morning?”

“All I know, Mahler had us looking for anything with the words Africa or Myzandia.”

Sergeant Lyby appeared at the door and called Dinah’s name. So Thor had recused himself. Fear mingled with disappointment. She got up, squared her shoulders, and followed her interrogator down the hall. Sergeant Lyby had her hand on the door when Thor came loping down the hall.

“They’ve found her. Adjourn the interviews. Let’s go.”

Sergeant Lyby gave Dinah a narrow-eyed, just-you-wait look and loped off after him. In Longyearbyen, it wasn’t necessary to warn the suspects not to leave town.