Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (23 page)

Kitty stopped to take a breath before
continuing.

“Curt works in information technology. He’s
thirty four, has never been married, and has no current romantic
relationship. He lived with his mother until she died and then he
inherited her house. He still lives there. His mother was born in
Sweden, but became a naturalized American when she married. Curt
had dual citizenship until he was twenty one, and then he chose his
American passport and gave up the Swedish. He’s never been to
Sweden before. Carola never went back once she left, either.”

He thought that was it, but then she added,
“Curt left St. Paul a week and a half ago, spent a few days in
Manhattan—at the Marriott in Times Square—before flying to Sweden
on the same flight you did. He’s staying at the Best Western Visby.
Here’s the address.” She rattled it off. “It was his second visit
to New York this year; he was also there seven weeks ago, also at
the Marriott Times Square. Before that, there’s no record of
traveling.”

She took another breath. “He’s not licensed
to carry. However, his father had a gun and a license. And there’s
no record of the gun being turned in, or surfacing anywhere else,
after daddy died. So there’s a chance Curt might still have it. Be
careful, Nick.”

He waited, but this time she was done.
“That’s all I have for now. I’ll keep digging. Let me know if you
need anything else. Mwah!”

She pronounced the kiss, then disconnected,
and Nick dropped the phone into his pocket before bending to snag
his shirt from the floor. After stuffing his feet into shoes—he
really did need to stop somewhere today and pick up something else
to wear—he headed down the stairs at a run, still buttoning the
shirt, to meet the cab driver at the north gate.

Digging a hole in the dirt with just her hands turned out to be a
lot harder and more time-consuming than Annika had expected. Just a
few minutes went by before she had dirt embedded under her
fingernails, those that weren’t broken, and her fingers hurt from
clawing at the ground. The dirt was hard-packed, too, which didn’t
make it any easier. It probably hadn’t rained in a while, because
the ground was almost as hard as rock.

She’d sometimes wondered if it might not be
nice to live somewhere other than Brooklyn, other than New York
City. Somewhere other than any big city. Somewhere with dirt, where
she could have fresh air to breathe, and flowers, and a little
garden. She could grow vegetables and roses. She’d imagined herself
on her hands and knees, working in the garden. Planting seeds,
watering them, watching them grow.

Now she was digging in the dirt, and it
wasn’t what she had imagined. Then again, she’d imagined gardening
gloves and a little shovel too; not this crazy scratching at the
ground with her fingernails.

Should have brought a tool from Lena’s
garden shed. Stupid, Annika
.

But stopping in Lena’s garden shed would
have meant two more minutes before she could leave; two more
minutes when Nick might wake up and catch her. She’d have to talk
to him eventually—unless he’d left by the time she got back to
Visby—but she hadn’t wanted it to be this morning, when she was
still so affected by last night. Not when she could still smell
him, and taste him, and feel him. She’d needed to go off on her own
for a bit, get her bearings, do what Nick had stopped her from
doing when he stole her bag.

She needed to put her father to rest. Needed
it for herself, and for him, who counted on her.

And then she’d be able to face Nick.

If this digging didn’t kill her first.

How deep did this hole need to be, anyway?
The Tupperware container was the size of a shoebox. She would have
used a shoebox, had it not been for the fact that she wanted a lid
that fastened—what if the bag fell out of the overhead bin and the
lid came off? She’d have little pieces of her father strewn
everywhere!—and the fact that the TSA required a semi-transparent
container, something that could go through their security scanner
without setting off any alarms. They weren’t able to open the box,
she knew that—that was the rule for cremains—but if the box was
transparent, at least they’d be able to X-ray it.

She was just about to stop and decide the
hole was deep enough when her fingernails scraped against
something. Plastic, by the feel of it. Soft, like a bag. Maybe one
of those thick, luxurious-feeling shopping bags the Swedes
used?

They weren’t free, you paid a few cents for
them, but they were strong, thick plastic. The one she’d gotten at
the boutique in Stockholm had been strong enough to handle half her
wardrobe the whole way to Gotland, and it still looked no worse for
wear.

There was something inside this bag too, but
it wasn’t clothes. She scooped away a few more handfuls of dirt to
poke at it. Her fingers closed around something thin and hard
through the plastic. And lots of small, round somethings.

Lord, it had better not be a dead baby
someone had buried! Skinny bones and tiny little vertebrae...

That idea stilled her hands for a second, as
thoughts of Knut Stare’s missing son flitted through her head.

But no, that was silly. They didn’t have
plastic bags back then. And if the story was true, Knut’s son had
been older. And anyway, this stone hadn’t been here at the time the
boy disappeared. There was a date on it. It was just thirty-some
years old. It had been raised right around the time her father left
Gotland.

Was that why he’d asked to be laid to rest
here? Had he maybe worked on getting the stone erected? One of the
locals who had wanted to commemorate Knut Stare?

It didn’t matter, she supposed. Maybe she
should just forget whatever was here and pour him in on top? It
could have been something they’d put there in the process of
erecting the monument. Some sort of time capsule or strange
offering to appease the ghost.

Or was it her father who had put it there,
and now he wanted her to dig it up? The idea of burying cremains
was a strange one to begin with. Usually people who wanted
cremation wanted their ashes strewn somewhere. Or kept on the
mantel in a pretty urn. They didn’t want their children to travel
halfway around the world to mix them with the soil.

Funny how she hadn’t really thought about
the ridiculousness of that until now.

But if he’d sent her here specifically to
dig up this... thing, then it made sense. Dig it up, put him here
in its place—it had a certain rightness to it.

She scooped away as much of the dirt as she
could, then reached in, with hands that shook, and tried to grab
the bag. The contents shifted beneath her hands, under the plastic,
and for a second she imagined tiny bones rustling and rubbing
together. But the sound they made... it was more metallic. Soft
clinks.

She pulled the bag toward her, as dirt
skittered and fell, brushing over her battered hands. And then it
was out, and she sat back on her heels and inspected it.

A plain plastic bag, just as she’d expected.
Thick white plastic, nondescript, and dirty now from soil and rain.
The handles were double-tied, and it took her aching fingers a
minute to unravel the knots. While she was jostling it, the
contents of the bag knocked together and made more of those
clinking sounds.

She had just untied the last knot and pulled
the bag open, to reveal tarnished silver—bracelets, rings, and
coins with strange inscriptions—when she heard a sound. A scuff of
a shoe and a click.

When she looked up, a man had stepped out
from behind the monument. He was pointing a gun at her, and
although he was smiling, it came nowhere near his eyes. “I’ll take
that now,” he said.

As soon as he was in the cab, and the cab was moving, Nick called
Fredrik back. “I need another favor.”

“Did you find the taxi?” Fredrik said.

“I’m in it, on my way to Martebo.”

“That’s where she’s gone?”

“That’s where I think she’s gone. She’s not
in her room, and wherever she is, she took the bag with the ashes
with her. But that’s not important right now. Listen to me. There’s
a guy. An American citizen. He arrived in Sweden on the same flight
I did. He traveled to Gotland on the same ferry Annika did. He’s
staying at a Best Western in Visby. I don’t know the number there.
I need you to look it up and call them and find out if he’s in his
room.”

“Name?” Fredrik said.

“Curt Gardiner. I’ll hold.”

He waited while Fredrik made his phone call.
Outside the cab, the Swedish countryside rolled by, all waving
grass and yellow flowers and small red cottages up against dark
pines and white-trunked birch trees. Inside, his heart was beating
double-time, and he had to stop himself from begging the cabdriver
to go faster. They were already breaking several laws, and the last
thing he needed was to be pulled over for a traffic infraction.
Chief Steen would have a field day with that.

“He’s not,” Fredrik’s voice said in his ear,
sudden enough that Nick startled. It took him a second to remember
where in the conversation they’d left off.

Curt Gardiner
.

“The receptionist called his room and he
didn’t answer,” Fredrik added. “He could still be there, sleeping
or just ignoring the phone, but chances are he’s gone out.”

Great.

“Yesterday, he had a scooter. Annika said he
took her to Martebo and tried to scare her with the spooky
lights.”

“There are no spooky lights,” Fredrik
said.

“I know that. I told her the same thing. She
said she knew. She’s not suggestible at all.” At least not in that
sense. “He didn’t come here with a scooter, so he must have rented
it. Can you find out whether he’s still got it, or whether he
turned it back in?”

“That might take a while,” Fredrik warned.
“I’ll call you back.”

“Please.” Nick disconnected and leaned back
on the seat, considering whether there was anything else he could
do while he waited. Fredrik had the Curt Gardiner angle covered. It
was the middle of the night in Washington, so Kitty wouldn’t be at
her desk; she couldn’t do anything to help him. And Annika was out
there somewhere, possibly in the sights of a man with a gun. While
he was sitting here, in a goddamn cab, unable to do anything at all
to help her.

The phone rang, and he answered it.
“Yeah.”

“That was easier than I thought,” Fredrik
said. “I got lucky on the first call and found the place he’d
rented from.”

He considered for a second and added,
“Actually, it wasn’t just luck. I thought about it, and started
with the rental place closest to the Best Western, and...”

“You’re brilliant. Tell me.”

“Fuck you,” Fredrik said, but without
rancor. “He picked it up last night. Hasn’t returned it yet.”

So Gardiner was out there with
transportation and possibly a gun. Even better.

“Is it time to call in the local cops yet?”
Fredrik wanted to know.

Nick hesitated. And then thought,
to hell
with it
. “No. She can’t be that far ahead of me. If she took
the bus, it would have taken her longer than it’ll take me to get
there. If she rode with Gardiner, it would still take her longer
than it’ll take me. And if something’s going on, I don’t want to
spook them.”

“Whatever you say,” Fredrik said.

“I’ll call for backup if I need it.” And he
wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t risk Annika’s life—or his own—unless
there was no other choice.

“Call me if you need me,” Fredrik said.

Nick promised he would, and sat back, foot
tapping, to wait for the cab to reach Martebo.

“I wasn’t hiding it,” Annika said.

“Of course not.” Johan Steen smiled, but the
gun in his hand didn’t waver. Annika eyed it for a moment, then
returned her focus to his face.

“What’s going on?”

“Perhaps you should tell me,” Police Chief
Steen said. He glanced at the bag with the silver. “What have you
got there?”

“Silver. Rings, bracelets, coins.” Probably
the same rings, bracelets and coins that had gone missing the night
her father left Gotland.

“Anything else in the bag?”

She pulled the handles apart and peered in.
“It doesn’t look that way.”

“Give it to me.” He wiggled the fingers on
his empty hand. Annika glanced at the gun and did as he asked; tied
the handles of the plastic bag back into a knot and reached over to
place it on the ground in front of him. He reached down without
taking his eyes off her, hoisted the bag, and moved it out of
sight, to the other side of the monument. The coins and jewelry
clinked melodically inside the plastic.

“Is that the silver my father stole thirty
five years ago?” Annika asked. Being faced with a gun was a new
experience; not altogether pleasant even if the man holding the gun
was a cop, and supposedly one of the good guys. She was honestly
rather pleased to hear that her voice was steady.

Chief Steen’s eyes narrowed. “How do you
know about that? Did he tell you?”

Annika shook her head. “He never talked
about Sweden. Ever. I read about it yesterday. At the reference
library in Visby. An old newspaper article.”

Chief Steen nodded. “How did you know to
look for it here? If your father never spoke of it?”

“He left a note,” Annika said, and watched
something move in Chief Steen’s eyes. “My mother found it after he
died.”

“May I see it?”

It sounded like a request, but wasn’t.
Annika fumbled in her purse for her wallet, and the scrap of paper
with her father’s handwriting. The gun never wavered, even when
Chief Steen took the paper from her and scanned it. “I’m afraid
I’ll have to keep this,” he said, sounding not at all sorry. “As
evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” She didn’t want to give
up the piece of paper—it was the only thing of her dad’s she had
left—but another worry overran that goal. The chief of police
wasn’t thinking of arresting her, was he? “I haven’t done anything
wrong.”