Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (19 page)

However, standing a few feet away, on the
edge of the photograph, half out of the frame, was a police officer
in regulation blue: a young Johan Steen. He looked a lot like he
had when she’d seen him earlier, only a few decades younger.

“Is that your dad?” Curt asked, over her
shoulder.

Annika nodded. “The one in the blue and
brown. The jester is Gustav. The man we saw yesterday.”

“The one who’s dead,” Curt said.

“They’re both dead.” Although he didn’t have
to sound quite so unfeeling about it. “The one in the uniform is
Johan Steen. He’s still alive. He’s chief of the Visby police now.
I don’t know who the last man is.”

“Niels Halmquist,” Curt said. He pointed to
the screen, where the names were written under the photograph.

“Wonder if he’s still alive?” If he were,
maybe he’d talk to her about her father. She had struck out with
Gustav, and Chief Steen had sounded like he didn’t know her father
well. But this Halmquist had been hamming with him during Medieval
Week, so maybe they’d been friends.

Curt shrugged and turned away. “How much
longer are you going to be doing this?”

Annika glanced at the clock on the wall.
“Until they close.”

“I’ll pick you up outside at closing time,”
Curt said. “We’ll have dinner.”

“Sure.” It might be nice if he’d asked
instead of ordered, but she wasn’t surprised he wanted to leave.
This must be boring for him, to do nothing but watch her sit and do
research.

She listened to his footsteps walk out of
the room and away, while she keyed in a new search, of Niels
Halmquist this time. The first thing that came up was an article—in
Swedish, of course; she should have realized she’d need Curt to
translate—just a few weeks after the picture from
Medeltidsveckan
. The headline said
Inbrott på Gotlands
Museum – konstskatt försvunnen – man död
, with lots of
exclamation marks.

A few of the words were easy.
Gotlands
Museum
, for instance. Something had happened there.
Man
was probably the same in Swedish and English. And
död
...
could it mean dead?

It looked like it could. It was the same
vowel as in the name Björn—her grandfather’s name—and she knew how
to pronounce that. Most of the world had heard of Swedish tennis
ace Björn Borg, even so many years after his retirement from the
game. And one of the guys from the music group ABBA was named Björn
too, wasn’t he?

Did the article say that a man had died at
Gotland’s museum, then? Niels Halmquist, presumably, since his was
the name she had searched?

What about the
konstskatt försvunnen
,
though? She had no idea what that might mean. There was an
ö
in there too, but the rest of it didn’t sound like anything in
particular.

The article was accompanied by two
photographs. One was of Halmquist, in a suit and tie this time,
standing next to a small woman with long, fair hair. He still
looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place him. The woman was
someone she was sure she’d never seen.

The other photograph was from the museum
itself. She really should go there and look around, if this was
what they had on display. It looked like a pile of silver or pewter
coins or maybe buttons with strange engravings, along with
bracelets and rings in the same metal. The bracelets were lovely.
Some were just simple circlets with a few engravings, but others
were wider, and heavily carved. A few had other pieces of worked
silver hanging from them, like old-fashioned charm bracelets. A
tiny hammer was probably the sign of the thunder god, Thor, while a
small humanoid figure might be another of the Norse gods. One
especially fabulous bracelet was formed like a snake, with four
separate curves; it looked like it would extend halfway up
someone’s forearm. Maybe it was supposed to be the
Midgarðsormr
, the sea
serpent that circled the world of the Norse gods and bit its own
tail.

Annika sent the article to the
printer and kept going. Maybe she’d ask one of the librarians if
they’d tell her the gist of what it was about. On her way out.
Right now, she had more scrolling to do.

The next thing to come up
was an obituary for Niels Halmquist, and by then it was pretty
obvious that
död
did indeed mean dead. Date of death
was the day before the newspaper article ran, and the obituary
said—or seemed to say, best as Annika could figure it—that Niels
was survived by his wife—
kone
—his
mor och far
—mother
and father, along with a long line of other names, none of which
she recognized. Her own father was not on the list, nor were Gustav
Sundin or Johan Steen.

Nonetheless, she printed that out too, and
went on. If Halmquist and her father had been friends, and Carola
Halmquist was still alive, maybe the older woman remembered Carl
Magnusson.

However, when she got back to the front
desk, the friendly librarian who had helped her when she first came
in was gone. Another woman was manning the desk, and her
information made Annika feel as if she was destined to find no one
she could talk to about her father.

“I’m sorry,” the librarian said. “I wish I
could help you find someone who knew your father, but I remember
Mrs. Halmquist. She doesn’t live here anymore. Not for a long time.
Thirty years or more. She left after the tragedy.”

“When her husband died?”

The librarian nodded. “It was very sad. They
hadn’t been married long, and Carola was expecting. And then Niels
was shot and killed during a robbery.”

Oh. “This—“ Annika brandished her printed
articles, “means robbery?”

“That does.” The librarian pointed to the
word
inbrott
. “I was just a teenager when it happened, but I
remember it well. Probably because of the murder.”

“What happened?” Annika leaned on the
counter. The librarian gave the printed pages a pointed look, and
Annika added, “I don’t understand them. Just a word here and there.
I don’t read Swedish.”

“Of course.” The librarian’s face cleared.
“Well, it happened during
Medeltidsveckan
. Things are crazy
then. Several hundred thousand people come to Gotland for the
festival. It wasn’t as bad back then as it is now, but there were
still a lot of people here. Thousands. And in the middle of it,
someone broke into the museum and walked off with some of the
Viking silver.”

“Wow.”

The woman nodded. “It was never recovered.
There were too many people here for the police to do a thorough job
of investigating everyone. They had to start letting people leave
eventually.”

Annika supposed they did, and of course,
once the thieves had left Gotland, it would be almost impossible to
catch them and get the treasure back.

“That’s not the worst thing, though,” the
librarian said. “Niels Halmquist was one of the guards at the
museum. And the thieves shot him.”

“That’s awful.”

“It was. Very sad. Carola was devastated.
She left Gotland soon after. And went to America, I think. Maybe
you’ve met her.”

“I doubt it,” Annika said apologetically.
“It’s a big place.” Unless she’d lived right down the street,
Annika probably wouldn’t know who she was. “So they had no idea who
stole the silver?”

The librarian looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“There was talk, of course.”

“Talk?”

“There was a man, a local man, who
disappeared the night of the robbery. He was here the day before,
and then he was gone. There was speculation that he’d taken the
treasure and left, before anyone realized it was gone.”

“Wow.”

The librarian nodded. “What made it worse,
was that he and Niels Halmquist were friends. The police kept
talking to his friends and his family, but none of them had any
idea where he’d gone, and from what I know, he never contacted any
of them again.”

“So maybe he died too,” Annika said. “Maybe
he had an accomplice, and they robbed the museum together, and shot
Mr. Halmquist, and then the other man shot him.”

The librarian shook her head. “He’s still
alive. Or was, until recently.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me,” the librarian said. “I’m
sorry, Miss Magnusson, but it was your father.”

Where the hell was she?

Nick shot another glower at the painted
grandfather-clock ticking away in the corner of the parlor. It was
after nine o’clock. He’d left her at the police station just after
noon. Where the hell was she?

The fact that he was waiting up, pretending
to read the newspaper, just like his mother used to do when he was
a teenager, wasn’t lost on him. But dammit, what was he supposed to
do? He’d hoped she’d come back to Lena’s at some point, so he could
talk her into having dinner with him, but she hadn’t. So he’d gone
out to look for her instead. But she’d been nowhere, in none of the
logical places, and he’d ended up feeding himself and coming back.
To sit here, in Lena’s parlor, listening to the clock ticking down
the minutes.

Fretting.

What if something had happened to her?

Police Chief Steen hadn’t arrested her; he
did know that much. She’d left the police station under her own
steam in the early afternoon, and no one had brought her back there
since. He’d called Fredrik and Fredrik had checked. Fredrik had
also told him that the investigation into Gustav Sundin’s death was
progressing, but that the Visby police was not ready to make any
arrests. Their day had been spent going through the crime
scene—Gustav’s cottage—and in talking to the neighbors. Not
surprisingly, since the nearest neighbor was more than a quarter
mile away and since it had been determined that the killer had shot
Gustav through a sofa pillow, no one had heard a gunshot. Time of
death was still up in the air, but seemed to be within a few hours
of the time Annika and her friend had seen Gustav alive at the
tavern. She might have had time to walk out there, Fredrik said—or
she might have borrowed Lena’s bicycle, Nick added silently—but
they had no proof that she’d done either.

Kitty was still working on tracking down the
information about Curt, and Nick knew better than to hustle her.
There were fourteen agents on the Art Crime Team, and Kitty had her
hands full assisting all of them. She’d get back to him when she
had something to report. If he’d had his tablet, Nick could have
done some of the research himself, but he wasn’t about to sit there
and peck away at his Smartphone. It was easier just to let Kitty do
it. She had the equipment and the clearances, not to mention the
ability to circumvent any barriers she came across.

So basically, there was nothing for Nick to
do but to sit and think. And that’s what he did. Sat and thought
and—as time passed with no sign of Annika—worried.

Where was she? Not in jail; he’d checked.
Not in her room; he’d have seen her if she’d come in. Not at the
library; it was closed. Not at the tavern where she’d had dinner
last night. The waitress remembered her, and said she hadn’t been
back since then.

Why hadn’t she come back to Lena’s after the
police station? He’d have stayed with her the rest of the day. He’d
have made sure she wasn’t upset by what had happened. He’d have fed
her and talked to her. Hell, he’d have spilled his guts and told
her exactly who he was and who her father had been, and then he
would have helped her deal with it and would probably have ended up
doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, so in reality it was
probably a good thing that she hadn’t been here... but dammit, he
wanted to know that she was safe.

It was late by the time he heard a puttering
noise outside in the street. It dawdled for a moment outside
Lena’s, then continued on. After a few seconds, he heard the key in
the front door, and then steps in the hallway. A moment later
Annika walked in.

She looked like someone who’d just been
kissed. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled behind the
glasses. Her hair was tousled, as if someone had grabbed handfuls
of it the way Nick had envisioned, wrapping the long lengths around
his hand to keep her in place while he sank into those soft
lips.

The idea that someone else had done just
that grabbed him like a fist in the lower belly, and twisted. He
didn’t even try to keep the growl out of his voice.

“Where the hell have you been?”

She jumped. Clearly she hadn’t realized that
he was sitting there, in the semi-dark, like an over-protective
older brother, waiting for her. When he uncoiled from the chair and
came toward her, she took an instinctive step back. He’d probably
scared her. No doubt he had tension rolling off him in waves. But
hell, she’d scared him too.

When he didn’t say anything else, just kept
going until he was standing directly in front of her, she
swallowed. He could see her throat move, and couldn’t keep his gaze
from lingering for a moment. She had a lovely throat, long and
smooth. Just perfect for bending his head and—

Something of what he was thinking must have
shown in his eyes, because she took a step back, away from him. “I
was... um... I was out with a friend?”

Her inflection made it sound like a question
when it wasn’t. Nick quirked a brow. “A friend?”

“Um... Curt?”

Bastard
.

Nick reached out and plucked a leaf from her
hair. And held it up. “Were you rolling around on the grass with
him?”

Her eyes shot to his for a second, enormous
behind the lenses. “Of course not.”

When he didn’t answer, she seemed compelled
to continue. He’d used the same technique before when interviewing
suspects. It was a time-honored practice in law enforcement. Keep
quiet and give them enough rope to hang themselves.