The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (14 page)

After a moment of uncomfortable silence during which he seemed disinclined to speak, I asked between cookie bites, “Why aren’t they back yet? It’s been weeks. For them, I mean.”

Quinn and Dr. Holm had taken off at around 4:00
yesterday
afternoon. The pair had been gone twenty hours, which, assuming they had stayed in the past that whole time, meant that three weeks had passed for them.
Three weeks.
What had they been doing all that time? And what were they doing for food, I wondered as I munched on another of the cookies. Hunting, fishing, eating granola bars? Quinn hated granola bars.

There were too many questions and not enough answers.

“We’re not giving up on finding them. We just have to be smart about it.” Nate shifted in his chair, causing it to creak. It looked a little small for his lanky frame. “As for why they aren’t back yet, I can think of several reasons.”

He dipped the cookie I had given him into his coffee, looked at it with suspicion, and then put the whole thing in his mouth. “All right,” he said after a moment. “One, they could be camped out on Runestone Hill in 1362, waiting for the Norsemen to show up. Two, they got what they needed but overshot the present like we did coming back from Pompeii, and can’t do anything about it because they drained their Slingshot. They might show up out of thin air in a few weeks. Three, they’re finding the Slingshot difficult to control, and they’ve ended up someplace completely unexpected. Even Dr. Mooney admits that his Slingshot 2.0 still needs some work.” He rubbed his chin, which had stubble on it, as if he hadn’t bothered with a morning shave. It looked good that way. “Four, it hasn’t really been three weeks because they’re jumping back and forth between the past and the present to replenish their supplies. For all we know they could have had
dinner
last night and, uh, spent the night in Quinn’s hotel room, or in Dr. Holm’s apartment.” I thought I heard him gnash his teeth at the possibility that they’d been so close. “That occurred to me this morning, and I drove out to check both places. No trace of them. The manager at Lena’s Lodge hasn’t seen Quinn since yesterday, but that’s about it. I’ve asked the town police to keep an eye out on both places.”

“I never would have thought of checking the hotel.” I added, considering his words, “It sounds like you’re starting to give Quinn the benefit of the doubt. If they’re having dinner at Dr. Holm’s apartment, she can hardly have been forced into it.”

“Like you say, it’s been three weeks. She may have very well succumbed to Stockholm syndrome and become invested in helping Quinn.”

“Oh.”

“There is one last possibility I can think of,” he added, shifting uncomfortably in the chair again.

“Which is?”

He offered me one of the cookies from the box I had set on the desk, taking another for himself. “If the Slingshot
did
send them into a ghost zone, they might be dead.”

He said it carefully, as if the thought of Quinn’s death might disturb me. I almost said,
You clearly haven’t spent much time around divorced people
, but didn’t think he was in the mood for humor. Besides, I didn’t belong to that group yet—the signed divorce papers still hadn’t arrived. I was keeping my fingers crossed that tomorrow’s mail would bring them, or Thursday’s at the latest, unless Quinn had completely forgotten to mail them in the excitement of planning his jaunt into the past. I washed the cookies down with some of the weak coffee.

Dr. Holm’s role in the whole thing still puzzled me. If she had gone willingly, there was no explanation for the disturbance in the lab or the text message she had sent me. If it hadn’t been for those two things, I would have pegged the most likely scenario as being (a) Quinn charms Dr. Holm, (b) Dr. Holm agrees to take him into the past, jeopardizing her career, which might have been stalled anyway, and (c) they steal their way into STEWie’s basket, with the goal of filming the carving of the runestone.

On the other hand, Quinn had tried to blackmail me, charmingly or not. Maybe there was a dark side to his personality that he’d kept hidden under all his charm, a side I hadn’t picked up on before. I considered myself a good judge of people, but only fools assumed they were never wrong. And I liked to think that I wasn’t a fool.

Realizing that Nate was watching me, I brought up another question. “So what do we know about Dr. Holm?”

“I’ve spent the morning on the phone with her colleagues, relatives, and neighbors.” He stopped to take a sip of his coffee.

I was happy to hear that he wasn’t taking her innocence for granted. “Did she pack a bag?”

He looked up from the cup. “What?”

“Oscar saw Quinn go into the TTE building with a backpack, right? What about Dr. Holm?”

He sat quietly sipping his coffee for a moment, as if weighing something. It dawned on me what that something was. He was questioning not only Dr. Holm’s colleagues and relatives but also
Quinn
’s colleagues and relatives, of which I was one. He was considering which category to place me into—person of interest, witness, or (I hoped) ally.

He leaned back in the chair, as if satisfied, and said, “Oscar remembers seeing Dr. Holm around the TTE
building
—
apparently
she’s taken a couple of Dr. Mooney’s STEWie orientation courses—but he wasn’t sure if she came by the day of Kamal’s defense.” He quoted Oscar, and I could picture the doorman saying the words in his raspy voice: “ ‘A lot of people came to Kamal Ahmad’s defense because of the Neanderthal mating thing, and, this being a school, they all had backpacks.’ She would not have stood out.”

So Oscar was a dead end.

“Dr. Holm lives alone,” Nate continued. “No roommate, and—as far as we could tell—she’s not dating anyone at the moment. Her landlord let me in. Nothing seemed amiss at the apartment, but, to answer your question, we have no way of
telling
if one of her suitcases was missing, or any clothing beyond what she was wearing. We showed the picture of Quinn you gave us to the landlord and around the building. No one recognized him. Several people on campus remember seeing him in Dr. Holm’s office on Friday, however.”

“I sent him there. After he came to my office that morning.”

This seemed to be news to him. “You did? Why?”

“Helen suggested that an expert might be able to explain to him why his plan was so unrealistic.”

“It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.”

“No.”

“Suppose Quinn got into the TTE lab on a pretext, maybe asked Dr. Holm to give him a tour. I’ve been told she didn’t have the door code to the lab?”

“She wasn’t on the authorized list. In the workshops that she attended, the students would have gotten hands-on experience in the lab, but they certainly would not have been given the door code.”

“I’ll ask around to see if anybody gave the code to either of them. In any case, they got in somehow, and Quinn would have needed Dr. Holm to program the Woodstock coordinates. Willingly or unwillingly, she did, and then she got into the basket with him. What did he say to you exactly? On the phone when he called during Sabina’s party?”

I tried to do my best to remember Quinn’s words. “When he popped into my office out of the blue, he said that he had evidence of Sabina’s secret and would reveal it to the world—plaster it all over the Internet, I believe were his exact words—unless I got him into the TTE lab. He, uh, also hinted that he’d hold off on signing the divorce papers if I didn’t arrange the STEWie run for him, although he seems to have changed his mind about that. He didn’t seem too bothered by my refusal and gave me until after the weekend to think about it. I sent him to talk to Dr. Holm.”

“Then what?”

“Then
I
went to talk to Dr. Holm.”

He glanced at me quickly. He hadn’t been aware of that either. I hoped that all my disclosures wouldn’t shift me out of the ally category.

“Mostly she and I talked about the stone and what it said,” I explained. “She showed me a poster of the runestone in the Coffey Library. When Quinn called later that day, during Sabina’s party, he said he had signed the divorce papers and put them in the mail. Also…”

“Go on.”

“He implied that he had a date that night. He was meeting someone at Ingrid’s over on Lakeshore.”

“And you think that might have been Dr. Holm. We can check. I’ll send Officer Van Underberg.”

“I just got back from Ingrid’s.”

He frowned, and I felt myself slip further out of the ally category. “What did Ingrid say?”

“That it was Dr. Holm.”

The whole thing had been somewhat embarrassing. When I showed up before the restaurant opened to ask questions about Quinn’s date, kindly, motherly Ingrid had assumed I was jealous. After all, Quinn and I were still married, so it was only natural that I’d want to know about his love life. Swinging her ample hips from side to side, she had led me to a table away from the kitchen, then fetched us both slices of lingonberry pie. She didn’t know Dr. Holm by name, but she recognized the photo I pulled up on the English Department website. According to Ingrid, the pair had stayed for two hours and had gone through as many bottles of wine. The leggings and Viking-themed shirt that Dr. Holm had worn to the library earlier in the day had been replaced with a black dress, low cut in the back. And dangly earrings, Ingrid had added, as if that made Dr. Holm even more of a home-wrecker. In order to keep up the fiction of being a jilted woman, I felt like I should pretend to be put off by the lingonberry pie. I ate my slice anyway.

As I told him about my sit down with Ingrid, Nate jotted a few sentences down on the pad in front of him. I wondered if he would send Officer Van Underberg to talk to Ingrid to double check what I had told him. He was a police officer, and it was his job not to take anything at face value, though I hoped he knew me better then that. There was the matter of his unfortunate experience with the pyromaniac, which had undoubtedly made him distrustful of people—especially people he had a personal interest in? Or was that side of it wholly my imagination? I pushed my coffee cup away and sat up straighter in the chair, suddenly feeling like I was at a job interview and not chatting with a friend in his office.

Officer Van Underberg stuck his head in the door. “Chief, I think you ought to see this.”

Nate left the room and I slumped back down, taking the opportunity to pull out my cell phone to check my email and do a quick Internet search on Sabina’s name, which I did every so often to see if any rumors about her past had started to seep out online. Sabina didn’t have what we might call a last name, so she had appended Abigail’s to hers—Sabina Secunda (after her father) Tanner.

There were no hits, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

As I was putting the cell phone away, Nate came in and slid into his seat across from me. “Did Quinn say anything about what he’s been doing in Phoenix?”

“Only that he had a couple of rundown properties he was flipping so he could sell them for a profit.”

“I’ve had Officer Van Underberg do a bit of research. Quinn obtained mortgage financing with no money down and bought three fixer-uppers. The work on all of them seems to have stalled because he stopped paying the contractors. Julia, he is deep in debt…which means he’s even more desperate than we thought.”

There wasn’t much to say to that.

“You didn’t find anything in his hotel room, did you?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“The signed divorce papers. I thought he might have left
them there.” If I wasn’t feeling embarrassed and awkward before,
I was now, but I had to know. I needed those papers. I was desperate for my connection to Quinn to be officially
severed
—especially now.

Nate wrote something down on his notepad and said, without
looking up, “I’ll check. You might want to talk to your lawyer. If you two are still married, you might be liable for Quinn’s debts.”

“Lovely.”

“One more thing. His car. He flew into MSP—adding to the debt on his credit card—and rented a vehicle at the airport. The rental isn’t in the parking lot at Lena’s Lodge.”

“Is it somewhere on campus?”

He shook his head. “No. We check all vehicles left overnight for campus parking stickers.”

“Well, that’s odd. I have no idea where it could be. I’d have expected it to be either in the campus visitor lot or at Quinn’s hotel. What
did
you find in his room at Lena’s Lodge?”

He paused long enough for me to wonder if he was thinking of going back to calling me Ms. Olsen since this was official business and I had connections to his prime suspect, then answered, “A suitcase, half-empty. Receipts for a large backpack, a flashlight, two sleeping bags, a water filter, freeze-dried meals, and other camping gear. And—a receipt for a hunting handgun.” He said it evenly, without changing his expression.

“Oh. And Dr. Holm?”

“No similar purchases on her credit card statement. No one at the Emporium remembers seeing her. Quinn bought enough supplies for two. Julia, why are you so reluctant to see him in an unfavorable light?”

Was I? It just didn’t seem characteristic of Quinn, who seemed much too lazy to concoct such an elaborate plan. I wasn’t sure how to communicate that to Nate, though, so I tried another tack.