Berg, Anna, and Lauren polished off the bottle of red wine before Berg drove Lauren back to the hotel. Even though she loved it, red wine always gave Lauren a headache, and her head was throbbing as much as her hands when he dropped her off.
Berg said he’d be back to get her at nine a.m. sharp. Lauren doubted she’d get that much sleep, or any sleep at all, even with the wine. Sure enough, it was another night of her lying in bed, rewinding the events of the day, trying to figure out where she went wrong.
She was showered, dressed, and ready at the agreed upon time. No use dicking around – Berg was a man in perpetual motion. Somehow Lauren knew that if she tried to sleep in, Berg would have pounded on her door until she was awake. Resistance seemed futile against that guy.
He came strolling into the lobby as she finished her third cup of complimentary coffee. ‘I thought I drank too much of that stuff until I met you,’ he said as she put the empty cup upside down on the serving tray provided for dirty dishes.
‘It’s the only thing keeping me sane right now,’ she shot back.
‘Is that what this is?’ he asked, grabbing her wrist and lifting her shaking hand.
She pulled away but couldn’t help but smile at his nerve. ‘Let’s just get to the hospital.’
‘There’s been a change of plans,’ he told her, walking with her through the early morning gloom to his vehicle. ‘We’re going to Bjarni’s mother’s house. I have a feeling he doesn’t have many places to stay, or else why would he use the bar as his mailing address. It’s nice and early for his kind. Let’s see if we can roust him out of bed.’
‘What do you mean “his kind”?’
Berg extracted some paperwork from the inside of his jacket. ‘The criminal kind. He has arrests for drug possession, petty theft, fraud, and assault.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ Lauren whispered as she looked over the record that Berg had so kindly printed out in English for her. A mugshot was paperclipped to the front. Like Gunnar, Bjarni had dark, almost black hair, but the resemblance ended there. Where Gunnar had soft features, Bjarni looked like he was carved from a block of granite, all sharp angles – from his cheekbones to his chin. He was also listed as six foot one.
‘He’s a big man,’ Lauren commented as Berg began to drive. ‘Do you carry a gun?’
Once again, he laughed at the absurdity of her American thinking. ‘No, I don’t have a gun on me. I hope it never gets so bad here that I have to carry one on duty. Certain cars are equipped with weapons if a critical incident occurs, but us everyday investigators have to use our wits and charm to subdue criminals.’
Lauren arched an eyebrow. ‘What a novel concept.’
‘Why would someone fight with me? We’re on an island. Where are they going to go?’
Board a boat, hop on a plane, or jump on a snowmobile, Lauren thought as the city streets rolled by. Maybe people can disappear here, go up into the mountains and never come down. Berg had told her all about the trolls his people still believed in. Maybe they’re just people who’ve made so many mistakes they don’t recognize themselves anymore and hide away in the hills.
As much as she wanted to allow her thoughts to take her to dark places, she had to stay sharp. She’d been an American cop for too long to disregard violence as a response to her presence. She would have thought Matt getting run down in the street would have driven that point home to Berg. He was still singing softly to himself as they pulled up in front of Bjarni’s current residence.
Bjarni’s mother lived in a rundown-looking building not far from the Wolf’s Den. Lauren made Berg wait while they watched the two-story building. He was not the wait-and-observe type of person, fidgeting with the keys, just like Reese used to do when they were on stakeouts. ‘An old lieutenant of mine used to say you should watch a house for at least ten minutes before you knocked on a door.’
‘Is he still alive or did he die of boredom?’
‘It’s funny you should say that because now he works as a maintenance guy at a cemetery.’
Berg nodded in agreement. ‘Sounds like a fitting place for a man such as that.’
‘I don’t see the car he was supposed to be driving last night.’ Lauren scanned every vehicle parked up and down the street. For the life of her, she could not figure out how people fit into the little boxy type cars that were so popular here. They looked like the toy cars Lindsey and Erin used to push each other around in when they were toddlers.
‘It looks like there’s a garage in the back. His mother’s apartment should be back there too, according to the report the uniforms who came here last night filed.’
‘Let’s go then. And watch your back,’ she warned, holding up her freshly bandaged hands for illustration. ‘Someone tried to kill us yesterday.’
It was a four-unit apartment house with four separate entrances. Every pair of headlights on the street was suspect now. Lauren listened for even a hint of an idling motor, but all she heard was the soft moaning of a light wind through the row of apartment buildings.
Bjarni’s mother lived in the ground-floor apartment directly behind the building. A fire escape led to another door on the second floor, but Lauren wasn’t sure if that was the main entrance or not. She wasn’t sure what was considered up to code by Icelandic standards. A rusted metal 3 was nailed into the door at eye level. Berg waited until Lauren was bladed to the side and gave three good knocks.
From inside there was a shuffling sound, like old slippers on a worn floor, and when a tired-looking woman pulled the door open that’s exactly what it turned out to be. She greeted them unenthusiastically in Icelandic, her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she looked them both up and down
Berg responded in his gruff but endearing way, not bothering to ask her to speak English. Lauren could tell this poor woman, who was maybe five years older than herself, was barely making ends meet. She yanked the door open and let them in.
The apartment was as shabby as the building, but clean. The living room and kitchen were one big room divided by a breakfast bar. In one corner of the kitchen a small television set was on, playing a cooking show. A mixing bowl with a wooden spoon sticking out of it sat on the counter. They had interrupted her making breakfast.
She turned her eyes to Lauren. ‘He’s in his bedroom. I’ll go get him.’ Then she shuffled off in her flowered housecoat down a side hallway.
‘What did she say to you?’ Lauren asked.
‘She told me the police had been here last night and Bjarni wasn’t home. She asked me if I’d come to take him away.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Lauren could hear Bjarni’s mother knocking on a door and calling to him in Icelandic.
‘That all we wanted to do was talk to him. She seemed miffed at that. Apparently, he doesn’t help her out much.’
A second later she came scuffling back down the hall with a man who was about thirty at her heels. He was the guy from the mug shot Berg had just showed Lauren, no doubt, right down to the Viking runes tattooed on his neck.
‘Can I help you with something?’ he asked Berg in English.
‘I think you know why we’re here,’ Berg said, squaring up with him. Bjarni was very fit and muscular, with dark hair that hung down to his broad, tattooed shoulders. ‘So don’t start playing stupid right off the bat.’
‘Look,’ Bjarni dropped down onto the worn brown sofa, as his mother made her way back around the breakfast bar to grab her mixing bowl, ‘I got a call from Helga. She said three police officers were coming to see me and I’d better clear out. So I finished my drink and went to a friend of mine’s house for a few hours. Then I hear that one of the cops got hit by a car on the way into the Wolf’s Den.’
‘Helga called you?’ Lauren asked. Why would Helga tip off the very guy she made it a point to tell them to seek out?
‘Yeah, what of it?’ he asked, his handsome face tilted upward in a little show of defiance. ‘She always liked me when I worked for Ragnar, but she’ll deny it. She’ll want to
keep her job. I took off because I heard about what happened to Gunnar and I don’t want any part of your investigation.’
‘That’s not exactly the actions of an innocent man,’ Lauren said.
He snorted. ‘You? An American cop telling me what I should do to protect myself? I read stories about what you do to your citizens every day. The last thing I want to get myself involved in is an American murder investigation.’
‘How long did you work for Ragnar?’ Lauren asked, trying to get back on track.
‘Almost a year,’ he said, the words highlighted by his Nordic accent. It was different from Berg’s. Thicker, somehow.
‘What was your relationship like with Ragnar?’ Berg asked.
He put his hands out in front of him as if to slow things down. ‘I respect you, but my former relationship with Ragnar is none of your business.’
Red rose to Berg’s cheeks. He wasn’t used to getting told no by a criminal, even if it was the nicest no Lauren had ever encountered in police work.
Lauren cut in to try to defuse Berg’s temper. ‘Have you left the country in the last four weeks?’
Behind them, Bjarni’s mother dropped her mixing spoon and swore loudly before picking it up. Bjarni smiled. ‘I’ve never left Iceland. Ever. But I’m sure you have ways to check that. I can also tell you that I was in Akureyri all last week working on a friend’s barn roof that collapsed. It turned out to be a five-day job just trying to save the horses. I can give you my friend’s name and number, and about six other men who were working there with me.’
‘Can we see your car?’ Berg asked, his agitation now in check.
‘If it will put an end to all of this, of course. It’s in the garage.’ He wiped his hands on his jeans and stood up. ‘Follow me.’
Sure enough, his white Toyota Corolla was parked in the cramped wooden garage. The old car was surrounded by spare tires, broken car parts and random junk. One thing was certain as they examined the car: the bartender at the Wolf’s Den wasn’t kidding when he said that if Bjarni hit anyone with it, he’d damage the car more than the person.
‘You didn’t drive this to Akureyri, did you?’ Berg asked, running his hand along the rusted hood. Lauren was surprised the thing had made it into the garage.
‘Of course not. The weather was good, so my friend sent me the money to fly in. He raises champion Icelandic horses. He needed that barn fixed right away.’
Lauren crossed her arms and leaned up against the driver’s side door. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to talk to us about you and Ragnar?’
Bjarni wagged a finger in Lauren’s direction with a smile. ‘I like you. You’re tough, like a TV cop. I’ve been waiting for you to pull your gun out and read me my rights. Maybe you’ll slap the cuffs on me.’
A crooked smile formed on Lauren’s lips. ‘Don’t believe everything you see on television. Believe some of it, but not all of it.’
He seemed to accept that answer. ‘All I’ll say is this, we parted on good terms. I miss working for him. I haven’t been able to find a job like that since. Now, if you both will excuse me, I have things to do.’
‘Give me your buddy’s name with the horses.’ Lauren tried to write down the Bjarni’s friend’s name in her notebook, causing Berg to grab it out of her hand and cross out what she wrote.
‘That is not an “A”,’ he lectured her as he corrected her Icelandic, ‘and this letter is … never mind, I’ll do it.’
‘Is he always so forceful with you?’ Bjarni asked Lauren, suppressing another smirk as Berg wrote.
‘I don’t know. We’ve only known each other three days,’ she replied. She couldn’t help returning the grin. Bjarni may have been a cocky asshole, but he was charming in his own way.
He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘That doesn’t bode well, I think.’
Not even pretending to be amused, Berg handed back her pen and notebook and walked out of the garage without a glance back or a thank-you to Bjarni.
They weren’t even halfway to the hospital before Berg said out loud what Lauren had been thinking all along. ‘Why would a serious professional like Ragnar hire a rough, petty criminal like Bjarni to be his assistant?’
THIRTY-SIX
Lauren’s phone buzzed in her pocket as they pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. She pulled it out and looked at the screen: Connolly. Holding a finger up to Berg she said, ‘Give me a minute, I have to take this.’
He gave her a gruff nod and dug his own phone out while she answered. ‘Detective Riley.’
‘Riley, it’s Sergeant Connolly. What time is it over there?’
She looked out the windshield across the parking lot bathed in the soft light of the Icelandic morning. ‘It’s 11:31 a.m.,’ she said, checking the time on the bottom of her phone.
‘That’s one easy question answered. Now the tough one: what the hell is going on over there? We send you to one of the safest countries in the world, and you still manage to get yourself in trouble.’
‘I got one of my partners in trouble, you mean.’
‘Don’t start boo-hooing on me now. It was rhetorical.’ Before she could tell him she didn’t think that word meant what he thought it meant, he told her, ‘I’ve actually got some good news for you.’
Her eyes slid to Berg, who was fully engrossed in texting something to someone. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense. Spit it out.’
‘The FBI managed to get in Gunnar’s phone. I just got the call. They’re sending the data to their translators as we speak.’
Lauren sucked in a breath. ‘This could be the break we’re looking for.’
‘And it could be nothing. But I’ll say one thing, those FBI people must work around the clock. It’s barely six thirty in the morning here and I just got the call from Matt Lawton’s boss.’
Silently, she wondered if Matt getting hit by the car lit a fire under their asses or if the FBI was just that good. Maybe it was a little bit of both. ‘Did they give a timeline? I need to know how long it’s going to be to have Gunnar’s text messages and emails translated.’
‘No idea. But they do this forensic computer stuff all the time. Cracking the phone was the hard part, translating it should be a breeze.’
‘I’m at the hospital right now, about to go in to see Matt. Call me as soon as you hear from Matt’s people.’
‘I’m on it over here on our end. Just you keep yourself safe, got it?’
‘Got it. Bye.’
Lauren turned to Berg, who looked up from his own text conversation and told him, ‘The FBI managed to get into Gunnar’s phone. They’re sending the contents to be translated now.’
‘I heard. Why don’t they just forward all his texts and emails to me? I’ll translate them right now and we won’t have to wait.’
‘I wish the world worked according to Berg,’ Lauren said. ‘But it doesn’t. If it’s any consolation, my boss said he doesn’t think it’ll take long.’
Berg grumbled something under his breath in Icelandic and got out of the car.
Matt was awake but groggy when they came into his hospital room. Propped up by pillows, he was staring at the television mounted on the wall, his left arm was in a navy-blue splint held close to his body by some kind of contraption. He gave a weary smile. ‘Hey guys,’ he said. His face was sickly pale, his eyes looked like he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him, moving around to the right side of his hospital bed while Berg planted himself firmly at the end.
‘I broke my ulna and radius. One of the bones went through the skin. It’s pretty ugly under there.’ He gestured with his chin to the split.
‘What about your clavicle?’ Lauren asked.
‘The doctor told me that’s the least of my worries. They had to reposition my bones in surgery and now they’re being held together with metal plates and screws. They really have to monitor me for infection right now. That’s the biggest danger.’ He tilted his head toward the IV bags pumping
him full of fluids. ‘They’ve got me on some heavy-duty stuff.’
‘Are you in pain, brother?’ Berg asked.
‘I think the anesthesia hasn’t worn all the way off yet, but yeah, it hurts like hell. Every time I breathe in it’s like two nice, sharp little knives sticking me in the shoulder and arm.’
He looked so young to Lauren, lying there like a middle-schooler who fell off the monkey bars at recess. Lauren’s stomach clenched in the familiar knot of guilt. ‘Cara called me last night,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘She told me. I got off the phone with her an hour ago. She stayed up all night, waiting until I was able to talk.’
‘I’m glad they let you use the phone,’ Lauren said, suppressing the motherly urge to pull his thin blanket up higher.
‘We FaceTimed, actually. The nurse had to hold the phone in front of me. My right arm is fine but when I try to move it or reach for something …’
‘You feel it on the other side,’ Berg finished for him. ‘I had a broken shoulder as a kid; not as bad as your injury, but I swear I felt it all over my body those first couple days. Don’t fret, it gets better.’
‘Cara is so upset. She wanted to jump on a plane and fly here. I told her not to. My little guy needs her there. And I’m still working. I can still work from this bed, see?’ For the first time Lauren noticed a hospital food tray angled under his right arm. His phone, a pad and a pen were positioned on it. ‘I can answer calls by putting them on speaker and take notes and relay information to the both of you.’
‘I don’t think your doctor is going to want you to do that,’ Lauren cautioned.
He shook his head, forehead creasing in frustration. ‘They aren’t taking me out of the game. No way. They tried, but I’m still in this investigation, no matter what.’
Lauren gripped the rail of Matt’s bed with both hands. ‘We do have some good news though.’
‘They got in Gunnar’s phone, your people,’ Berg told him. ‘We’re just waiting for them to have everything translated.’
A genuine smile stretched across Matt’s face. ‘Gunnar’s brother said he lived on his phone.’
A Full Cold Moon Page 20
