Single? Yes, probably. Not likely to be a family man. Possibly divorced.
Working? Maybe, but hardly in a nine-to-five job. He was probably self-employed in some way and running his own business.
Nationality? Native Icelander—had to be. He was very familiar with the countryside.
Sex? Male…But Birkir had second thoughts. Was that certain? Could the killer be a woman?
He thought about this picture for a long time while the disc played. When the music stopped, he opened the door to the balcony and inhaled the evening air. A faint cooking smell came wafting in from the restaurant next door, and suddenly he was starving.
He had forgotten to eat supper.
21:00
This was the first murder investigation Dóra had taken part in, and now there had been three homicides in the space of four days. It was not a good start, and, for some reason, she felt responsible. It was their job to stop this, but Dóra and her colleagues seemed to be like helpless preschoolers in this business. What in heaven’s name were they doing wrong?
She returned to the office after the visit to Tómas’s place. One telephone call to the widow had confirmed the lawyer’s account; Helga had readily admitted to spending the night with him. She hadn’t had anything better to do, she’d explained.
Dóra was a bit embarrassed that she’d lost her temper during the interview with Tómas. Not all truths need be told—she’d learned that early in life—and Símon had gone ballistic afterward, he of all people, berating her for “unprofessional behavior.” He’d asked where she’d seen the bedroom video and seemed disappointed when she admitted that she’d never laid eyes on the footage. Her comments on Tómas’s performance had been mere speculation.
Well, Dóra decided, she wasn’t going to let these assholes ruin her evening. She had plenty of other things to occupy herself with.
Dóra was from Bolungarvík, a small fishing village in the far northwest of Iceland. The fifth of eleven siblings, she had quickly realized it was necessary to show a certain determination to get what she wanted; she’d also learned about responsibility and independence. Her brothers, younger as well as older, had taught her how to fight. It had not been an easy childhood, and she had experienced plenty of loss: her oldest brother had died at sea working on a shrimper; another had perished in an avalanche in Flateyri; and her next-to-youngest sister had died in a car crash. Dóra was a passenger in that crash, and the scar on her cheek was a reminder of it. The scar on her soul was, however, much deeper.
She’d graduated from high school in Ísafjördur, the town next to her own, and then moved to Reykjavik with her boyfriend. He enrolled in a business administration course, and she got a job with the police. Three months later, the boyfriend announced that they had grown apart—she was unable to sustain conversations that fulfilled his needs as an intellectual and an academic, he claimed. The relationship ended and he moved in with a girl that he’d gotten to know during his university seminars.
Dóra enrolled in the police academy and came in third from the top in her year. After that she was offered a permanent post in the uniformed division.
That job suited her well. It wasn’t particularly well paying, but previously she’d always been broke. The paycheck allowed her to buy a cheap studio apartment in the Hlídar district; it was only twenty-five square meters, but it was comfortable. She’d never had so much space to herself. At home in Bolungarvík, she had shared a room with her two sisters; at lodgings in Ísafjördur she had shared a room with a girlfriend; and during the first months in Reykjavik she had lived with her boyfriend in a tiny student apartment.
Dóra’s chief asset was her energy. Not afraid of hard work, she tackled everything that came her way, however unpleasant, with speed and efficiency. Her superiors quickly noted this and even took advantage of it, frequently sending her to disorderly domestic situations where alcoholic excess and violence were the norm. Places where mothers were tyrannized and children neglected. Places where the problems were difficult to resolve or ameliorate. Yet in such situations, Dóra was in her element. She had a natural ability to handle drunks, and was quick to identify the correct tactics for each case.
On one occasion she had to remove a baby from a home in the middle of the night. The blind-drunk husband followed her out of the house, got behind the wheel of the family sedan, and accelerated into the side of the patrol car. Dóra was sitting in the backseat with the baby, and the impact snapped her femur; the baby sustained only scratches from the broken glass that showered from the side window.
When she was more or less back on her feet, Dóra got a temporary office job with the detective division. It was only meant to keep her busy during her rehabilitation, but a permanent position came up, and she applied for it. She had already demonstrated her fine organizational abilities in the department and was given good references by her supervisor in the uniformed division. Her boss was actually very sorry to lose such an efficient employee, but couldn’t find an excuse for hanging on to her and was honest enough to write a glowing recommendation. As a result, she had become a detective.
Dóra sat in the squad room, reading carefully through all the reports that had been written about the three murders. She considered the sequence of events and tried to picture the circumstances. She looked at timing, distances, and methods in due order, taking notes the whole time. There had to be a clue somewhere.
She read the report she had written after visiting Helga the previous Thursday morning. The encounter was the closest she had gotten to talking with an actual victim in this case, and she pondered whether her assessment had been sufficiently professional. She had, in fact, followed it up by making discreet inquiries among the couple’s friends and neighbors about their matrimonial situation. Then Birkir had shown up at a progress meeting with a completely different picture of the widow than the one she had constructed.
At half past ten, a uniformed officer showed up bearing a small package addressed to Birkir. Dóra signed for it and phoned Birkir for authorization to examine the contents. It contained DVDs with the security-camera images from the Hvalfjördur tunnel.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
09:30
The investigating team’s morning meeting began with Magnús listing the day’s tasks for himself, Gunnar, Birkir, and Dóra.
Item one on the agenda was looking at the photos from the Hvalfjördur tunnel security cameras. Dóra had already found images that confirmed when the two victims had driven through: Ólafur at 04:21 on Thursday, and Vilhjálmur at 04:34 on Sunday. She’d also noted down the license plate numbers of all of the cars that had passed through the tunnel within thirty minutes of the victims. Naturally, traffic had been very light, but there were a few cars that merited further investigation. There was also a motorcycle that had gone through on both days—04:27 on Thursday and 04:50 on Sunday—but unfortunately, she couldn’t decipher its license plate from the pictures. What she could tell was that the rider appeared to be wearing black leather gear and a white helmet. He didn’t seem to be carrying anything that looked like a shotgun. But they needed to find a way to contact this guy and interview him. They would also have to get anyone who’d driven a car through to explain their movements; that was a simpler task, since all of the license plates were clearly visible in the pictures. This particular job went to Símon.
Item two was doing a follow-up interview with Ragnar, the son-in-law of Vilhjálmur Arason, who had witnessed the murder. They needed to ask him for a list of names of relatives and friends, along with some other questions. Assuming he was now in a more balanced state mentally, they also hoped to get from him a better, more detailed description of what had happened. Birkir took on that task.
Suddenly, there was an interruption.
“Magnús, what am I supposed to do with this?”
A slim man of about sixty barged into the room clutching a brown envelope in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other.
“I can’t scan something
like this into the archive. There’s no identification,” he continued. “You have to give me a case number.”
“We’re in a meeting,” Magnús said.
“Right, you’re in a meeting and so you send stuff like this down to me, and I’m just supposed to sense what to do with it.”
“What stuff are you talking about?” Magnús said. “I haven’t sent you anything. Not lately, at any rate.”
The man thumped the envelope and the piece of paper onto the conference table. The envelope was addressed, “Detective Division, Violent Crime Unit.” Below this, someone else had added, “Document archive.”
Magnús said, “I didn’t send you this.”
The paper bore the words Monday, September 25, 10 o’clock. [email protected]—password shotgun123.
The e-mail address told them nothing, but the objects stapled to the sheet immediately captured their complete attention: two small pieces of camouflage material with dark brown spots.
“Where’s Anna?” said Magnús.
Dóra replied, “In the lab.”
Magnús grabbed the sheet of paper, got up, and stormed out with the others in hot pursuit. The archivist was left abandoned.
“What on earth is going on?” he said, addressing an empty room.
09:50
In the northern district of Thingey, the weather was pretty good—the morning was overcast but dry. There was a slight breeze from the north and the temperature was just above freezing. On a barren plain near the western route to the Dettifoss waterfall, a little to the north of Route 1, a mechanical digger was excavating. In the shelter of an old Land Rover nearby stood a thin man wearing a well-worn sheepskin parka and a wool hat. He leaned on a shovel and peered at the dirt being dug out. The arm of the digger disappeared further and further into the ever-deepening crater, scooping up heaps of wet gravel in its jaws as groundwater trickled from the sides of the hole and collected in the bottom.
The man in the wool hat was a geologist, Fródi Bergkvist. He was a graduate of the University of Iceland and had post-graduate degrees from two foreign universities. His specialty was construction material technology. On this particular morning, his work was to look for a new gravel pit for the Icelandic Roads Administration.
His firm, Bergfródi—of which he was CEO and also the only permanent staff member—had been tasked to prospect for extraction sites that contained material that could help build a new road. Its starting point was east of Lake Mývatn, and it was slated to run northward, west of Jökulsá River and through to Axarfjördur. This new road would, among other things, improve tourist access to a national park that included Europe’s most powerful waterfall, Dettifoss; the hiking trails at Hólmatungur; and the echoing rocks of Hljódaklettar. The road was to be properly leveled where necessary, and paved. The existing track was a low-grade dirt road and suitable only for SUVs and large vehicles; it simply wasn’t adequate for the region’s ever-increasing traffic.
In his office Fródi had examined aerial photographs of the region, identifying and marking potential sites. Then he had spent a few days exploring the area on foot—checking out the landscape, taking photographs, and collecting small soil samples. Over many millennia, Jökulsá River had frequently changed its route within an area several kilometers wide, and it was very likely they would find suitable material in one of the many dried-up sections of riverbed. But first they’d have to get to it through the thick layers of dirt and vegetation that had covered the gravel deposits over thousands of years.
Fródi’s research had now reached the stage where he had hired a digger to do test excavations at a few selected sites. They had dug in five places this morning, but all of the results had been disappointing. In two of his chosen locations, the layers of dirt had been too thick to remove, while in the others the hard rock substrate was too close to the surface.
Things looked hopeful, however, where they were now. The earth layer was, admittedly, more than a meter in depth, but beneath it they had found fine gravel as far as the arm of the digger could reach. It promised to be a very productive source once the earth and vegetation were bulldozed out of the way.
The gravel that the digger had piled up seemed to be excellent road-construction material, with good size distribution. Best of all, it didn’t seem to contain too much fine grit.
Fródi signaled to the digger operator that the hole was now deep enough. He would have to come back with a drill to check out the depth to solid rock. Hopefully it would be several meters.
The operator got down from his rig, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, and watched in satisfaction as Fródi shoveled gravel samples into three strong plastic bags.
But the job was not finished. Fródi wanted to get down into the hole to check for stratification of the gravel deposits; it might be necessary to take samples from individual layers. He was prepared for this. He had brought his trusty five-meter wooden ladder, which the digger operator helped him to get down from the roof of the Land Rover and slide down the hole. It protruded above the edge of the hole by about a meter; Fródi climbed down, rung by rung, scrutinizing the gravel. It seemed to be pretty uniform all the way down to the bottom. It wasn’t until he was on his way up again that his attention was drawn to the earth layer. It occurred to him to look for ash deposits formed during major eruptions in the north of Iceland. This natural phenomenon had been his chief interest during his geology studies at university, and the subject of his final dissertation. You could use the ash layers to date the various strata. Investigating that type of detail had no practical value for the current search, but he could never resist doing so when he was in holes like this.
He spotted something black half a meter from the surface, and probed it with his fingers. To his great surprise, he found it was plastic. He tried to scrape the earth away to work out what it was.
“A plastic bag?” he said to himself. Was he digging in an old garbage dump? Surely not. Not here.
“Pass me the spade,” he called to the driver, who was smoking his pipe by the edge of the hole.
He took the spade and scraped the earth away to reveal what seemed to be a long bundle wrapped in black plastic. He tore a small hole and pushed a finger through, touching something soft and yielding. He withdrew his finger, sniffed it, and instantly recoiled from the nauseating smell of putrefaction. Hastily wiping his finger on his pants, he sprang like a shot from the hole, yelling at the driver, “There’s something dead down there!”
09:55
“It’s the same color.”
Anna held the scrap of camouflage material with a pair of steel pliers and compared it carefully with Ólafur Jónsson’s parka, which was laid out in front of her on an examining table. The piece fit neatly into the hole in the outer layer—or, rather, half of the hole, as this was a section that had been snipped from the original missing patch.
“He’s sending us a message,” Gunnar said, pointing at the sheet of paper. “Date, time, and e-mail address.”
They all looked at their watches.
“It’s two minutes to ten,” Gunnar said.
“We can use my computer,” Dóra said.
They hurried back to the squad room and clustered around Dóra’s desk. With practiced fingers, she tapped in the address and password, and the inbox immediately appeared.
“There’s no e-mail here,” she said.
“What’s the time?” Gunnar asked.
“Ten o’clock,” Magnús replied.
“Hang on. Here’s something,” Dóra said. An e-mail arrived with the subject line: GOOD MORNING COPS. The sender’s address was [email protected].
Dóra opened it, but there was no text.
“What should I do?” she asked nervously.
“Let me.” Gunnar almost yanked Dóra out of the chair and threw himself down in front of the computer. Selecting Reply with History, he typed with his pudgy fingers a single word—WHY?—and clicked Send.
They all held their breaths. Nothing happened f
or what seemed like ages, and gradually tension relaxed and groans of disappointment could be heard.
Suddenly there was a beep. Gunnar opened the new e-mail and began to read aloud: “You ask why. I don’t know if it’s possible to answer or explain it…”
10:15
Birkir had gone to bed at ten thirty the previous evening, woken up fully rested at five thirty, and run thirty kilometers in two and a half hours. This speed of twelve kilometers per hour, or five minutes per kilometer, was not up to his average performance for running the 42-plus kilometers of a marathon course; but it was a very good training run under the circumstances. His best time in a marathon was three hours twenty-seven seconds, and his next-best time was three hours thirty-four seconds. His goal was to someday do it in less than three hours.
When he had showered after the run, he’d felt really good, and that feeling remained as he left his colleagues in front of Dóra’s computer. There were other things to be done this morning, and he was quite content to review these e-mail exchanges later. His immediate task was to have a talk with Vilhjálmur’s son-in-law about the events he had witnessed the previous day.
Ragnar Jónsson lived in a trim little apartment building in the Fossvogur district of Reykjavik. Before going in, Birkir appraised the house and its surroundings. Rarely had he seen an apartment building with such an attractive and well-kept lot. The yard was well looked after, with thick green grass and neatly trimmed trees and shrubs. The flowers in the beds were, truthfully, a little faded because of the recent frosty nights; the leaves had taken on the colors of the fall. Suddenly he felt rather sad. Perhaps the feeling was owed to the incomplete line of verse that suddenly came to him: Autumn of my mind, night feeds my fear. He wasn’t sure if the words came from a poem he’d once read, or if he’d improvised them.
He didn’t dwell on the origin of the phrase; he had long since given up trying to do that. Usually when something popped into his head like this, he imagined it was something he’d once read, or poems he’d recited during his Icelandic lessons with old Hinrik. It was always just a line or two, never a whole poem. At times he recited such things aloud, to the wonderment of those present, but usually he just kept the snatches to himself.
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