Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (24 page)

“There’s the small matter of illegally
disposing of human remains,” Chief Steen said mildly, with a glance
at the Tupperware container of ashes. Annika’s heart sank. “Not to
mention vandalism.”

“I didn’t vandalize anything!”

“Digging in a graveyard? Where you come
from, maybe that’s not a big deal, but around here we take it
seriously.”

“But this isn’t even a grave!”

“It’s hallowed ground,” Chief Steen
said.

Right. “Are you...” Annika swallowed. “Are
you going to arrest me?”

Chief Steen smiled. It should have been
reassuring, but wasn’t. “Can you give me a good reason why I
shouldn’t?”

“I was just trying to do one last thing for
my father. He wanted to come home after he died. You were friends;
surely you can understand that.”

“How do you know that we were friends?”

Other than the fact that he’d admitted to
knowing her dad in the interview yesterday? “I saw a picture. Of
you and my father and Gustav Sundin and the man who died in the
robbery. Halmquist. Just before it happened. During the Medieval
Week. The three of them were dressed up and hamming for the camera,
and you were watching.”

“That doesn’t mean we were friends,” Steen
said.

“You’re the one who shot him. Weren’t
you?”

“Calle?” Steen said. “Certainly not. I
haven’t traveled outside Sweden in years. I was nowhere near New
York when Calle died.”

“Not my father.” But that was an interesting
wrinkle she hadn’t considered. When she had time, she’d think about
it some more. Maybe in her cell in the Visby prison, after he
arrested her. If she survived. “I’m talking about the museum guard.
Halmquist.”

“Why would I have shot Niels?” Chief Steen
said, but something about the way he said it sounded off.

“You were a cop. Back then too. You had a
gun. I doubt my father did. Why would he? He didn’t work in a job
where he needed a gun. Gustav probably didn’t, either. The security
guard didn’t even carry a gun. But someone brought a gun to the
museum that night.”

He didn’t deny it.

“You knew them. And you’re here. You
followed me.” And what other reason could he have than that he
hoped she’d lead him to the treasure?

“Maybe I just knew your father was guilty,”
Steen said. “And I hoped you were returning the treasure to its
rightful place.”

Her father probably had been guilty. At
least of the robbery. But maybe not of the murder. He hadn’t been
much of a father, or much of a husband to her mother, but he’d
never been violent. She had a hard time believing he could have
killed anyone.

“Here’s what I think happened. Someone
either needed or wanted money, so he had the idea to rob the
museum. There’s been so many hoards of Viking era silver found on
Gotland that the museum’s filled to overflowing, and even if he
took a few coins and bracelets, there’s so much left they probably
wouldn’t even be missed. And there were so many people in town for
Medeltidsveckan
that the suspect pool was enormous. The
visitors would be suspected before the locals. And the chances of
finding the thief—or thieves—among all those people were slim to
none. You can’t keep several hundred thousand people in Visby
indefinitely; not without some kind of proof, and there was
none.”

Steen didn’t answer, but he also didn’t ask
her to stop, so Annika continued, laying it out in her own mind as
well as she spoke.

“Someone came up with the idea, and
convinced a couple of friends to help him. I don’t know whose idea
it was in the first place, and I’m not sure it matters. But I think
all four of you were in on it. My father, his friend Gustav, the
guard at the museum—that would be helpful, to have the guard
onboard, and the three of them looked friendly in the picture. And
you. The cop. That’d be helpful too.”

“How do you know I didn’t just stumble on
them?” Steen wanted to know. “Maybe I told them to stop, and Niels
came at me, and I had to shoot him. In self-defense.”

It might have happened that way. However—
“If it had been self-defense, I think you’d have thought to mention
it in the past thirty five years. Don’t you?”

A sound nearby made them both look up and
around. The gun moved up fractionally, the muzzle pointing away
from Annika’s chest, and she thought about making a grab for it. In
the movies, that kind of thing worked.

But before she could act on the idea, Chief
Steen had moved his attention back to her again. The churchyard was
still empty, so the sound must have been a bird taking off or a
small animal rustling the grass. Or perhaps the silver inside the
bag shifting.

“Go on,” Chief Steen said.

Giving her enough rope to hang herself?
Probably. But she had started; it was too late to back down
now.

“So you were there. At the museum. It
doesn’t really matter whether you were part of the robbery from the
beginning or whether you just realized that something was going on
later. You were the only one with a gun, so you must have been the
one who shot the guard. And instead of reporting it as self-defense
and turning my father and Gustav in for robbery, you kept quiet
about it.” And if thirty five years of silence didn’t imply guilt,
she didn’t know what did.

“If you truly did stumble on them and
accidentally shot the guard, I guess the others convinced you to
keep quiet for a share of the profits. If you’d been a part of it
from the beginning, I figure you probably hadn’t planned to shoot
anyone.” Unless he’d planned to kill all the others and keep the
treasure for himself. Or maybe he’d thought he’d shoot them
all—accidentally, like—and then “recover” the treasure and return
it to the museum and be the big hero.

He was staring at her, unblinking, and it
was one of the scariest things she’d ever seen. Especially in
combination with the gun. But she’d come this far; she couldn’t
stop now. “I can’t imagine you’d planned it that way from the
start. The other three were friends. I don’t think my father would
have gone along with anything he knew would kill one of his
friends. Taking the risk, sure. Life’s a risk—” She’d heard him say
that, more than once, “but not something he knew would blow up in
someone’s face. He wasn’t careless.”

“He and Niels weren’t close,” Steen said,
through lips that hardly moved at all. Her guesses must be pretty
close to accurate, she figured, to cause that kind of reaction. Too
bad she probably wouldn’t survive so she could tell the world. “It
was Gustav and Niels who were friends. Calle was the outsider. He
knew Niels worked at the museum, so he made friends with Gustav to
get to Niels, and then he convinced both of them to go along with
his plan. Niels needed money—his wife was having a baby—and Gustav
just wanted to be a part of what his friends were doing.”

“And you?” Annika asked, heart beating.

He scowled. “I needed money, too. My wife
was leaving me. Being a cop doesn’t pay much. And she was used to
better than I could give her. Calle said he knew someone who could
fence the stuff; we just had to get it out of the museum and over
to Denmark.”

“So what happened?”

“Niels happened,” Steen growled. “He said
without him, we wouldn’t have been able to get into the museum at
all. He thought he deserved a bigger cut than the rest of us.
Between Calle coming up with the plan and the fence, and me making
sure we didn’t get caught, it seemed to me we were about even.
Gustav was the one who didn’t have much to contribute. So I
suggested maybe Niels could just have his share. But of course
neither of them liked that idea.”

Big surprise there. Had he really expected
them to?

“So I ended up shooting Niels,” Johan Steen
said. “And suddenly the split wasn’t a problem anymore.”

No kidding.

“It was his own gun, by the way. It wasn’t
part of the uniform. The museum guards weren’t required to carry.
But he liked to play cowboy.” Steen’s voice was disgusted.

“What happened then?”

“We cleared out,” Steen said. “Calle took
the silver. I went to get rid of the gun. Gustav was a mess, so I
took him with me, too. We said we’d talk the next day. But Calle
never showed up. When we realized he’d left, I figured he’d gone to
Denmark with the silver. But time passed, and he never came back.
Years passed, with no word from him. I got Gustav a job at the
station, to keep an eye on him. And I got him a metal detector, so
in his spare time, he could try to find the silver.”

“You didn’t think he’d taken it with him? My
dad?”

“I thought he had,” Johan Steen said, “but
Gustav thought he hadn’t. He said Calle wouldn’t do that, that he
was more likely to hide it somewhere. Guess he was right.” He
glanced sideways at the bag she’d dug up.

“So...” Annika cast about for something else
to say. The Visby chief of police had just confessed to murder and
robbery. There might be a statute of limitations on the
theft—although probably not—but there definitely wasn’t on the
murder. He probably didn’t plan to let her walk away from here, to
share that news with anyone. And she wasn’t ready to die. “What
happened to Gustav? Yesterday?”

“Someone shot him,” Steen said, his face
darkening.

“It wasn’t you?”

“No.” He snarled it. “We had an
understanding, Gustav and I. He called me after he met you at the
tavern. Told me that Calle Magnusson was dead, and that his
daughter was in town asking questions.”

“And?”

“I told him to go home,” Steen said, “and
I’d take care of it.”

Annika blinked. “Take care of it, how?”

“I went to the Valdemar Hotel,” Steen said,
“and looked through your room. I thought you might have the silver.
You didn’t. And I thought you might have a letter or something,
from Calle, explaining everything. But I didn’t find that, either.
It looked like you might not know anything. But just to make sure
you’d get the point and leave soon, I tore up your room a bit. I
figured if you called us in and insisted on an investigation, I
could stop by then and that would account for any fingerprints or
DNA I may have left.”

Sure. But instead she hadn’t called and now
it was probably too late.

“So who killed Gustav?”

Steen smiled. Chillingly. His teeth were a
bit crooked, the way her father’s had been—the Swedes weren’t as
concerned with straight, perfectly white teeth as the Americans
were—and they were yellowed, like old ivory. It wasn’t a nice
smile. “You did that.”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Of course you did,” Steen said. “Your
father told you about the robbery and how he shot Niels. He went to
get rid of the gun while Gustav took off with the treasure. And
then your father left Gotland and never returned. Now he’s dead,
and you want his share. So you went to find Gustav, and you
threatened him to get him to tell you where the treasure is buried.
And after he told you, you shot him.”

“No, I didn’t!”

“With the same gun your father used on Niels
Halmquist all those years ago. This gun.” He reached behind him
with his free hand and pulled it out, a big, shiny, old-fashioned
gun.

“You said you got rid of it,” Annika said,
feeling numb. One gun was bad enough, but two were more than she’d
ever wanted to see at one time.

He clicked his tongue. “I didn’t mean I
threw it in the ocean,
Fröken
Holst. I hid it, just in case
I needed it again. It’s been upstairs in my attic for more than
thirty years. Not like anyone ever thought to look for it
there.”

Of course not.

“And now you’re going to shoot me with
it?”

He smiled. “Of course not.” He tossed it on
the grass beside her. It landed with a soft sort of plop. “It’s for
you.”

When she didn’t reach for it, he added, “Go
ahead. Pick it up.”

So he could shoot her in self-defense? No
thanks.

“Go on,” Chief Steen encouraged. “What are
you afraid of?”

Dying
.

She felt like she’d just started living in
the past few days. Up until she boarded the plane for Sweden, her
life had been secure, insulated,
boring
, there in the bowels
of the Brooklyn College Library. She’d been safe and protected,
from danger and from getting hurt. But she hadn’t really been
living. In the past few days, she’d become an international
traveler, had given herself a much-needed makeover, and had had
dinner with two handsome men, and sex with one of them. She’d found
a dead man and learned the truth about her father and dug up buried
treasure and broken several laws... She’d done all of that, in just
three days. Just think what she could do with the rest of her
life!

The gun was surely empty. He wouldn’t have
given her an actual loaded gun. Would he? If he said she’d been
threatening him, and her fingerprints were on the gun, who’d doubt
him? Whether the gun was loaded or not wouldn’t make much
difference.

She might as well pick it up. If she didn’t,
he’d just wrap her fingers around it after she was dead. And maybe
she could throw it at him.

She reached for the gun. Her fingers wrapped
around the handle just as the world exploded.

Shit!

The shot came out of left field, literally.
Nick had been a second away from blowing the gun out of Steen’s
hand himself when someone else took the shot before him. And
dropped Steen like a rock.

Dammit!
That wasn’t supposed to
happen. If Steen was dead, they had no way to prove anything he’d
said.

Annika was still on her knees on the ground,
eyes closed, breathing hard. But before Nick could make himself
known, before he could run to her and hold her and assure her—and
himself—that she was all right, the same someone who had shot Johan
Steen rushed across the grass and grabbed her. “Are you all
right?”