Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (11 page)

“Thank you,” Annika said again.
And found herself kindly but firmly ushered onto the street with
the door closed behind her. It wasn’t until she was halfway up the
hill that she realized that perhaps she should have waited to leave
until after they’d called the police and reported what had
happened. And she also wondered whether that wasn’t the real reason
the hotel owner had been so eager to get rid of her, before Annika
could insist on it.

She couldn’t blame the woman, she
supposed. Who’d want the police traipsing through the place, asking
questions and maybe waking people up? Nothing had been stolen, and
it was no wonder the owner of the hotel didn’t want the bad press
that would no doubt come if word got out that it wasn’t safe to
stay there.

The whole thing was weird, she
decided. First Arlanda, then Stockholm, and now here. What was it
people thought she had, that they kept looking for?

Something to do with her father?
It almost had to be, didn’t it? It wasn’t like Annika herself
looked like anything special. If it had been Astrid, that would
have been different. But Annika didn’t look like she’d have
anything worth stealing. So had the burglar at the Lady Hamilton
Hotel been looking for the cremains too? And the burglar here? Or
had they both, along with whoever had stolen the bag with the ashes
at the airport, been looking for something different?

Were they all the same person, or
two or three different people? And what exactly was it they were
they looking for?

Nick spent an uncomfortable and mostly sleepless night in a budget
motel near the ferry dock in
Nynäshamn.

It wasn’t the motel that was uncomfortable.
He’d slept in a lot worse places. It was clean and decent, and the
price was affordable, for being located in one of the most
expensive regions of the world. He was safe and warm, he had a roof
over his head, he wasn’t hungry or thirsty, the bed was soft... and
yet he spent most of the night looking at the ceiling, waiting for
daylight and the first ferry to Gotland.

He’d taken Annika’s suitcase with him from
Stockholm, after Fredrik’s people had finished going over it. Like
Fredrik had said, it contained clothes; nothing more and nothing
less. Nick had made sure of that himself, once he got here. He’d
taken everything out, shaken it, twisted it, prodded it, made sure
nothing was hidden anywhere in it, and put it back.

What he hadn’t done, was take the time to
pick up his own suitcase. If he ended up staying on Gotland for
more than a day, he’d have to find somewhere to buy a pair of jeans
and a couple of T-shirts, since all he had to wear was what he had
on.

It was hard to say what had him so bent out
of shape over the situation. It wasn’t like him. And it certainly
wasn’t that Annika Holst had wrapped him around her finger, no
matter what Fredrik suggested. She’d done nothing of the sort. He
doubted she knew how.

No, it wasn’t anything she’d done at all. It
was who she was. All alone, far from home, caught up in a situation
not of her own making, a situation way beyond her ability to
handle. She appealed to his protective instincts. She seemed so
fragile, so innocent. So utterly out of her depth.

Sure, he knew it could all be an act.
Fredrik could be right; she could be playing him like the
proverbial violin. Anything was possible. But he didn’t think so.
She’d have to be the world’s greatest actress to fake that reaction
to him yesterday. That mixture of nerves and anticipation in her
eyes when he leaned forward; and the breathlessness when he kissed
her.

He shouldn’t have done it. But she’d looked
so sweet standing there. Pretty, in that pale blue dress, with
those big eyes behind the glasses, blinking up at him, and her
teeth gnawing on that bottom lip. It was a near constant thing, and
it should have been irritating, but instead he’d spent most of
dinner watching her mouth, wondering how soft that lip would feel
if he were the one biting into it.

He’d stopped before going there. With,
strangely, just a bit of difficulty. It wasn’t
like
she was the type he usually got involved with, after all. With his
job, always in and out of town, rarely in the same place for long,
he mostly just found someone to blow off a bit of steam with for a
short time, and then moved on. No harm, no foul. He wasn’t looking
for a relationship, and he made sure to pick women who understood
that. But Annika was different. She wasn’t the type to have flings.
She’d expect it to mean something, to mean more. And he wasn’t in a
position to give her more. So yeah, it was a very good thing he
hadn’t taken that kiss any further than he had. Even if the
omission kept him awake nights, wondering about the softness of
that bottom lip.

Growling, he turned over on his
stomach and closed his eyes. If he didn’t get some sleep, he’d be
no good to her in the morning. And whether she knew it or not,
whether Fredrik believed it or not, she needed him. Something was
going on, something not of her making, and it made him worry.

Between dinner and the walk with Curt, and then the break-in and
getting settled into her new room in Lena’s hotel, it was another
late night—and another late morning. By the time Annika woke up,
the sun was already high in the sky. She rolled over to grab her
glasses and shove them onto her nose, in order to find out that
she’d slept past nine o’clock again.

This just wasn’t like her at all.
She was always up in plenty of time to get to work by 8:30.

But really, considering that
in Brooklyn it was just past three in the morning, maybe she wasn’t
doing too badly. No one could be expected to wake up at that time
of night. And she
was
on vacation.

Just for that, she allowed herself
a few more minutes to wallow in the warm softness of the bed, and
then she got out and padded to the bathroom to get started on the
day.

After showering and dressing, she
pushed the curtains aside to look out, across an expanse of
clay-tiled roofs to the Baltic sea, glimmering in the sunlight. The
first ferry of the day was on its way in to harbor, and she stood
for a moment and watched the sleek white shape cut through the
choppy waves. It was so beautiful here it hurt; so beautiful she
thought it would be hard to leave again in a few days.

So enjoy it
while you can
.

And there was no reason, really,
why she couldn’t come back. Now that she’d been here, she knew what
it was like. Next time would be less scary. It might almost feel a
little like coming home, going back here.

But for now, she had things to do.
Like finding Gustav and convincing him to tell her more about her
father. And visiting the church and the local library and the
newspaper archives, to see what she could learn about her
ancestors.

There was no time to dilly-dally.
She pushed away from the window and headed across the room and down
the stairs to cadge something quick to eat before attempting to
track down Gustav.

Nick’s phone rang just as he was on his way off the ferry. He
pulled Annika’s suitcase out of the way of the other passengers and
let the overnight bag drop from his shoulder before pulling the
phone out of his pocket.

“Hello?”

“Me,” Fredrik said.

Of course. “What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to check in with
you,” Fredrik said. “Are you there yet?”

Nick glanced over his shoulder at
the ferry. “Just docked. I’m on my way into town right now.”

“You got the bag with the
ashes?”

Nick nodded, although Fredrik
couldn’t see him. “Picked it up last night.”

“And?”

“There’s nothing in it but what’s
supposed to be there.” Annika’s eReader, loaded with books about
Gotland and—he’d been a little surprised to find—some pretty racy
romance novels; the kinds with half-naked men on the covers. Plus a
semi-transparent Tupperware container full of cremains. TSA
guidelines didn’t apply to the Swedish police, so the Nynäshamn
cops had opened the container to double check what was inside. A
technician had even donned a pair of rubber gloves and sifted
through the ashes and bone fragments to make sure nothing was
hidden below the surface.

“Are you sure?” Fredrik said.

“Positive. No secret compartment,
nothing unexplained. And the ashes are just ashes. Presumably
human, although there’s no way to be sure. But if she says they’re
her father’s, there’s no reason to doubt her. Other than that, and
her eReader—” full of racy novels, “there’s nothing.”

“Now.”

“Excuse me?” Nick was still stuck
on the novels.

“There could have been something
else before the bag was taken.”

There could, at that.
Especially to someone who was determined to make Annika out to be
the bad guy in this situation. Which Nick wasn’t. But he had a job
to do, so he had to consider the possibility. “So what you’re
saying is that you think she left the U.S. with the silver
and
the ashes.
She took both through security in Newark, because she knew they
wouldn’t check the container if she told them it contained
cremains. But she thought there was a chance that Swedish customs
would check—”

“Or she realized you were
following her,” Fredrik said, “and she thought you might be able to
convince them to look inside the container.”

“—so she arranged with someone
else to grab the bag, get it through customs, take the silver out,
and then drop the bag in Nynäshamn?”

“Something like that.”

It made sense. To someone who
thought it possible that Annika was guilty. Nick wasn’t that
someone.

“Or,” Fredrik added, “someone else
guessed, or assumed, she was bringing the silver back to Gotland
and grabbed the bag when she came off the plane. Someone who knew
the story. Not someone she called, but someone acting on his own.
He took the silver out, but since he didn’t care about the rest of
what was there, he left that in the bag and left the bag where he
knew someone would find it.”

“And Annika kept quiet because she
was trying to get the silver back to Gotland without anyone
noticing?”

“Something like that,” Fredrik
said. “If she’s trying to keep it quiet that her father’s had it in
a shoebox in the closet for thirty years, she wouldn’t tell you it
was in the bag that got stolen, would she? She’d be afraid of
getting in trouble.”

With good reason. “What do you
think she planned to do with it?” Assuming Fredrik was right and
she’d had it.

“I don’t know,” Fredrik said.
“Hide it and pretend to stumble on it accidentally? You’re the one
who’s there. Why don’t you ask her?”

Maybe he would. “When I find her.
And on that note...”

“Yeah. Let me know if you need
anything. I can put you in touch with the local police if anything
comes up.”

“I’ll let you know.” But hopefully
nothing would. Hopefully this sick feeling in his stomach—this
heavy sense of impending doom—was just jetlag and lack of sleep.
“Later.”

“Later,” Fredrik agreed, and rang
off.

Gustav’s little cottage turned out to be a bit farther away than
Annika had been led to believe. She wandered up the street to the
north gate and slipped through into the part of Visby that was
outside the wall, and kept walking. And walking. It must have taken
twenty minutes before she was out of Visby proper, past the densely
populated areas and into the countryside with rolling fields and
copses of trees.

The air was fresh and clean, very
different from what she was used to breathing, and redolent of
flowers and grass, with a hint of the sea mixed in for good
measure. Her surroundings were beautiful: blue sky, white clouds,
bright green grass, masses of yellow flowers, and a little red
cottage off the road, outlined against the darker green of the
trees.

That had to be it. The walk had
been longer than she’d expected, but it was the first little red
cottage she’d seen. And the description fit: it sat back from the
road and was isolated, with no other buildings or houses nearby.
The waitress at the tavern last night had given the impression that
Gustav was a bit of a loner.

Annika shuffled through the ankle
high grass and hesitated on the edge of the clearing around the
house, biting her lip.

Surely she’d be safe? She didn’t
know this guy from Adam, and there was no one around to hear her
scream if he attacked her. He hadn’t struck her as being a raging
sex maniac, or some sort of homicidal loon, but strange things had
been happening to her lately, and it might not hurt to be
careful.

Not that Gustav could have been
behind any of the things that had happened. He hadn’t been at
Arlanda to be able to steal her bag—she would have remembered him
if he’d been on the flight—and he also hadn’t been in Stockholm to
break into her room. And besides, someone with skills had done
that. Or someone with a key. Not a retired janitor from
Gotland.

The break-in in Visby last night
was different. Anyone could have walked into the hotel and up to
the second floor to her room. Including Gustav. The lobby had been
deserted when she’d walked through it herself, and there was no way
to know how long it had been that way. And while the Lady Hamilton
had had updated security, the Valdemar Hotel still used skeleton
keys. They’d probably been around since medieval times. Gustav—or
anyone else—would have had plenty of opportunity to get their hands
on one. For all she knew, one skeleton key was just like another.
Gustav probably had skeleton keys of his own. His house looked like
it was close to a hundred years old, if not more.

She looked at it again, worrying
her lip.