The Golden Calf (3 page)

The house was large and built in a bungalow style using dark-brown wood and white Mexican tiles. As Irene pressed the doorbell, she could hear children screaming happily inside the house. After Irene rang the doorbell a second time, a woman opened the door. For a confused moment, Irene thought she was looking at Sanna, but this woman had more crow’s feet around her eyes, revealing her as the older sister.

“Hello. I’m Detective Irene Huss. May my colleague, Tommy Persson, and I come inside for a moment?” Irene held out her hand to greet the woman.

“Just tell me what happened! My mother called.…” Tove Fenton’s voice was shaking, and it was obvious she’d been crying, but she didn’t step aside to let them in.

“We’re here to tell you, but we’d prefer to come inside first,” Irene said calmly.

The woman reluctantly stepped out of the doorway. They could see a little girl with golden curls, about three-or-four years-old, scampering naked through the hallway. She squealed happily, pulling a heart-shaped Winnie the Pooh balloon by a string. When the girl saw Tommy and Irene, she stopped and stared.

“Hello,” Tommy and Irene said in unison. They smiled and waved.

“Felicia! You’re supposed to be taking a bath! Get right back in the tub this minute!” Tove shrieked at the little girl, who looked at her mother in fright. “Are you listening?”

The mother stopped her frantic yelling abruptly when she saw a pool of urine forming at the girl’s feet. Tile floors are certainly practical, Irene thought. No one spoke and everyone heard the trickling sound get interrupted by the click of a key going into the front door lock. The door opened to reveal a man Irene assumed to be Dr. Fenton coming home.

He was a large man of about fifty, balding and somewhat portly. As soon as he saw the police officers, he held out his hand to greet them, something his wife had not yet done. His smile was wide and friendly, and his tan face looked pleasant and good-natured.

“Morgan Fenton,” he said with a British accent.

Irene and Tommy introduced themselves. From the corner of her eye, Irene could see Mrs. Fenton carrying away the crying child.

“My wife called me at the office, and I came as soon as I could. What happened to Kjell?”

The doctor had trouble pronouncing the name Kjell, but otherwise his Swedish was very good.

“I’d like to speak with you together once your wife is able to join us,” Irene said.

“Sure, sure. Go ahead and hang up your coats,” he said as he pointed to the hangers in the hallway.

He escorted them into a large living room. Here, too, an enormous glass window highlighted the magnificent ocean view, and Irene could just make out a generous terrace outside in the darkness. The room had Chesterfield sofas and a table and cupboards in dark, polished wood, and its focal point was a large, open fireplace. Combined with the paintings and textiles, the furnishings gave a distinctive English feel. The contrast between the two sisters’ living rooms was striking. Dr. Fenton must have actively taken part in the interior decoration. It was classically English and a bit old-fashioned.

Irene and Tommy sat down in leather armchairs as Tove came into the living room, a red flush spreading from her neckup to her cheeks.

“Tell me right now what’s going on!” she demanded.

“We must ask you a few questions before we can go into detail,” Irene said mildly.

Tove Fenton struggled with her impatience as she looked at Irene expectantly.

“Could you tell me what time your sister arrived here yesterday?” Irene began.

“Right after four in the afternoon,” Tove replied promptly.

“What was she wearing?”

“Wearing? Her brown mocha outfit.”

“What does it look like?”

“Pants and a short jacket in light-brown mocha. Why do you need to know?”

“Routine. How did she seem?”

“What do you mean?” Tove was tense, and her face revealed her irritation. In the background, children were screaming with increasing volume, which seemed to unsettle her even more.

Dr. Fenton stood up. “My dear, let me take care of them.”

Tove sat down in the space her husband had vacated. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest as if she were trying to hold on to the last bit of warmth her body had.

“Was she upset? Worried? What was her mood?”

“No, she was just like normal.”

“Did she surprise you, or were you already planning for her and the baby to come over?”

“We’d talked about having a nice evening together on one of Morgan’s on-call nights. Yesterday, Sanna called me up, and we decided it was a good night.”

“According to your sister, you enjoyed some good food and wine.”

“That’s right.”

“So it was just the two of you?”

“And the children, of course.”

“The children are still quite young.”

“Well, Ludwig, Felicia, and Robin are still small, but Stoffe … Christopher … was also here.”

“Who is Christopher?”

“Morgan’s son. He’s fifteen.”

“Does he also live in this house?”

“Every other week. This week he’s here.”

Irene made a mental note that she’d also have to question Christopher to check on timing. “Is he home right now?”

“No, but he’ll be here any time. He has hockey practice.”

“Did Sanna call her husband on the phone at any time while she was here?”

Tove appeared to think this through carefully, but finally she just shook her head.

Dr. Fenton returned to the living room with a wide-awake baby in his arms. The baby was a few months older than Ludwig, and Irene realized this must be Robin. He looked tired as he leaned his fuzzy head against his father’s chest and sucked hard at his bottle. The smacking sound rang through the room.

Irene explained what had happened to Kjell. Tove threw her hands up over her face and began to wail. Her husband turned white.

“Good Lord! Murdered!” he exclaimed.

Tommy asked, “Have either of you heard anything about Ceder being threatened?”

“No, never, although there are some tough characters in the restaurant business,” Dr. Fenton replied.

Tove let her hands fall away from her face. She glared accusingly at Tommy.

“That’s why you were asking about Sanna! You believe she did it!” Her voice rose hysterically. “She most definitely did not! She couldn’t have—she was with me!”

Her husband laid a protective arm around her shoulders while simultaneously trying to calm his tiny son, who had responded to his mother’s cries with his own.

From the corner of her eye, Irene caught the flash of a disappearing face near the entrance to the living room. She rose quickly and followed the shadow. On the other side of the kitchen, a door was being carefully and quietly shut. She strode to the door and knocked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she walked in.

Christopher Fenton was almost as tall as she was and bulky despite his age. He was going to be a good-looking man once his acne cleared up. Irene hoped he’d change his style in clothing from baggy pants and Fubu T-shirts to something more fitting by then.

“Hello. My name is Irene Huss, and I’m a police detective. My colleague and I are investigating a serious crime.”

The boy didn’t move, just glared at her. Since Irene was used to teenagers, both her own and others’, she wasn’t thrown off. “We’ve just begun our investigation, and we need to find a few witnesses to fine-tune the timeline. We have to check some alibis and that kind of thing. Totally routine. You’d be a real help to us if you let us ask you a few questions.”

Irene saw his attitude soften out of pure curiosity. She was always amazed that a few words of police jargon had the power to provoke curiosity in all kinds of people, no matter their age.

Irene took a quick look around the messy room. The bed hadn’t been made, and on the overloaded desk, there was a computer surrounded by a scattered heap of empty potato chip bags. It was hard to walk without stepping on clothing, comic books, CDs, or just plain garbage. There were a number of posters on the walls: hockey stars and hip-hop groups as well as a few of Britney Spears in various stages of undress. The room smelled of a teenager at the peak of puberty.

Mostly for effect, Irene took out her little notebook and a pencil with a broken point. That didn’t matter, since she didn’t expect to write anything down. In her most official tone, she asked, “When did you arrive home last night?”

The teenager shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“Your best guess?”

“Maybe, like, four thirty?”

“Was Sanna Kaegler-Ceder here when you arrived?”

“Yeah. Her car is sick!” For a second, he forgot to be cool.

“It’s an unusual automobile.” Irene was non-committal.

“You can’t buy CLK-class in Sweden! You got to, like, import it from the US,” Christopher said.

“Really? She must be really rich.”

“Her old man has got it made.”

Irene pretended to write that down in her notebook. Then she asked, “So, were you home the rest of the evening? In this house?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you with Tove and Sanna?”

Irene realized that she’d implied something she hadn’t meant to. The boy stared at her. “What the fuck! I’m not with either of them!”

“No, of course not. I just wanted to know if you knew where they were the rest of the day. Did they leave the house that afternoon or evening?”

“No, don’t think they did. I heard them, like, laughing and shit.”

“You weren’t with them when they had dinner in the kitchen?”

“No, I ate in here. I was on the computer.”

Irene looked toward the desk and noticed it was by the room’s only window. “Would you have noticed if the Mercedes drove away during the evening?”

“Yeah, of course. It was right there, like, where your car is.” He nodded toward the window. She could see their police car beneath the circle of light from a streetlamp.

“So what happened? Why is Tove crying?” Christopher asked abruptly.

“Sanna’s husband Kjell is dead. He was shot—murdered.”

Christopher stared at her for a long time. The gangly teenager showed no fear or sorrow, but rather curious interest, as if the murdered man had been a character from a television show and not a person he knew.

“What did you think about Kjell B:son Ceder?”

Christopher shrugged again. “Hardly knew him. I saw him, like, two or three times.”

Perhaps this explained why the boy didn’t seem perturbed by the news.

“Can you remember what Sanna was wearing last night?”

He thought for a moment. “Some kind of brown pants and a blue T-shirt.”

“No jacket?”

“Nah.”

“Was it the blue blouse cut low in front?”

“Yeah.” The boy blushed. Irene realized that Sanna certainly could not have left the house without Christopher knowing about it. Irene couldn’t think of any more questions, so she thanked Christopher for his helpfulness.

Back in the living room, Tommy stood by the doors to the deck talking to Dr. Fenton. Tove was on the sofa with her baby on her lap. Both of them had calmed down, and the baby was nearly asleep. Tove looked up at Irene.

“So I see you talked to Christopher,” she stated flatly.

“That’s right. He confirmed that Sanna was here from four thirty in the afternoon and on through the rest of the evening.”

“That’s exactly right,” Tove said, content. She stood up and perched her baby on her hip. “I’m just going to give Robin another bottle and put him down for the night. Then I’m going to my mother’s to be with her and Sanna.”

I
N THE CAR
, Tommy rehashed his conversation with Morgan Fenton.

“Fenton told me that he’d known Ceder for quite a few years. He also told me that Sanna knew Ceder for a long time before they became a couple and decided to get married. They met while Sanna worked in the finance industry. If I understood him correctly, Fenton has a brother who worked for a London bank that had invested in Sanna’s high-tech business. Ceder also knew this brother, and the two were partners when Hotel Göteborg was built. It was all a little muddled, but I think I got the gist of it.”

“Hmm. So there were a number of connections before Sanna and Ceder had their unexpected wedding—a bank in London where Fenton’s brother is employed, and the
friendship between Morgan Fenton and Sanna’s soon-to-be husband, Kjell.”

“So it appears.”

“I bet Fenton put his sister-in-law in contact with his brother at the London bank.” Irene was thinking out loud.

“That’s pretty obvious. But Fenton said he was surprised that Ceder had been shot at his home in Askim and not his apartment in the city. It sounds like Ceder was seldom at the house.”

“Why not?”

“According to Fenton, Ceder didn’t much care for the house. It was mostly Sanna’s creation. She wanted a more child-friendly place to raise her son.”

“So Ceder had the house built for Sanna and her baby?”

“That’s what I got from Morgan.”

“Strange. That place is practically a mansion. It must have cost—” Irene stopped in the middle of a sentence as a thought hit her. “Do you think that they might have been thinking of a divorce?”

“It’s possible.”

“Sanna would have been better off as the widow of a rich man than as a divorced single mother.”

“Again, it’s possible.”

“You said yourself that statistically she’s the most likely suspect. In that case, she must have shot him before she headed over to her sister’s place. Christopher had a good view of the car because it was parked right outside his window. And he said he heard the sisters laughing and chatting all evening.”

“So where’s the weapon?”

“No idea. We’ll have to search along the road between the two sisters.”

“We still don’t know the exact time he was killed.”

“No, we don’t, but I put my money on four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“S
TRIDNER CALLED YESTERDAY
before I left. She told me that Ceder was shot sometime between five and nine at night. She is going to follow up with a more exact time of death once she’s done with the autopsy. Beyond that, we have to wait for test results—and we sure as hell know how long that takes.”