Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (2 page)

Way to go
. She’d made a fool of
herself in front of the same guy twice. The same really handsome
guy.

Up close he was even better looking than
from a distance. Handsome enough to make her forget the stinging in
her knees for a moment as she stared into that perfect face.

And then he opened his mouth. “Did you have
a little too much to drink on the plane?”

Annika stiffened.
What a jerk!
“I
don’t drink.”

“Of course you don’t.” He kept pushing her
toward a bench a few yards away.

She tried to slow down, glancing over her
shoulder. “My bag—”

“We’ll see it go by. I’ll grab it for
you.”

That wasn’t the bag she meant, but he
wouldn’t allow her to turn back. Instead he deposited her on the
bench and squatted in front of her. “You banged yourself up pretty
good, didn’t you?”

She had?

Annika followed his gaze and saw that sure
enough, the ride on the carousel had shredded her nylons and left
her knees a bloody mess. She hadn’t had scrapes like those since
she was five years old and had fallen off her bike in Prospect
Park. “Oww!”

“Right.” He glanced around. “You’re gonna
need bandages for those. Let me grab the bags and I’ll help you
find someone.” He got to his feet.

“I really don’t need...” Annika tried,
tilting her head back to look up at him. He quirked a brow, clearly
not convinced, and why would he be? Of course she needed his help.
Her knees were hurting more and more with every second that passed,
and she had zero desire to go near the baggage carousel again.
Easier just to let him do what he wanted. Saving things was his
specialty, after all. She could let him save her the trouble. “I
have a black cloth suitcase with wheels, and a black carry-on bag.
It’s over there.” She pointed to the other side of the baggage
carousel, where she’d been standing when she took her undignified
tumble. “I put it down when I went to grab my suitcase. The tags
say Annika Holst.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Nick Costa.” He
glanced over his shoulder. “Excuse me. I think I see my bag. I’ll
be back.”

He headed toward the carousel, leaving her
sitting there. Annika watched him for a second, as he threaded his
way between the other travelers still waiting for their suitcases,
and bent to check the tag on a piece of luggage making its way
past. His posterior in the black slacks was every bit as nice as
she’d expected.

Then she turned her attention to her own
knees. Shreds of pantyhose were stuck to the bleeding scratches,
and would probably get stuck if she didn’t peel out of her nylons
soon. She’d done that too before, and it hurt.

“Here.” Nick Costa was back, to dump a
suitcase next to her. It was black, but wasn’t hers. Hers didn’t
have that very nice silver monogram on it, and had probably cost a
fraction of the price. She’d opened her mouth to tell him so when
he added, “Keep an eye on it. I’m going back for yours. And the
carry-on.”

He did an about-face and headed back into
the press of bodies around the rolling band. Annika could see his
dark head making its way toward the place where she’d been standing
when the carousel incident had happened.

Two minutes later he was back, pulling her
suitcase behind him. He parked it next to his own, where it looked
like a poor relation. “Tell me again where your carry-on is?”

“It’s over there.” She pointed again. “Near
where the man in the green jacket is standing. Somewhere in that
area. A black carry-on bag that matches the suitcase.”

Nick shook his head. “I was over there. I
looked for it.”

Obviously not hard enough.

“It was just a few feet away when I fell.”
Annika struggled to her feet. “I’ll find it.”

Nick looked doubtful, but he grabbed her
elbow and helped her hobble—like an old lady; very sexy,
Annika!—toward the place where she’d been standing earlier. Each
step made her knees twinge, and she gritted her teeth, determined
not to let it show. Bad enough that he’d seen her sprawl like an
overturned beetle, but she was damned if she was going to let him
know it hurt!

“I was standing right here.” She stopped a
half dozen feet from the carousel. There were only a few bags left
now, and most of the people who had been there earlier were gone.
Then, she’d been in the middle of a crowd of bodies, all jostling
and pushing her. Now she was alone save for Nick Costa’s presence
at her elbow. It shouldn’t have been hard to see the black
overnight bag. But he was right, it wasn’t there.

“Maybe it got pushed out of the way. There
were a lot of people. Maybe someone put it aside so they wouldn’t
step on it.” She spun in a slow circle, and Nick spun with her. No
bag.

“Maybe someone took it by accident,” Nick
suggested. “Or they could have thought it got left behind, so they
took it to lost and found.”

“Maybe.” By now, Annika’s heart was beating
hard enough that she was surprised it didn’t show on the outside of
her dress, and she could feel tears prickle behind her eyes. She’d
always felt like a failure in her father’s eyes—not as driven as
Astrid, nor as charming as Andy;
can’t you get your nose out of
that goddamn book for once, Annika, and live in the real
world?
—and now she’d failed him again.

Nick glanced down at her, and he must have
realized some of what she was feeling, because he smiled and patted
her shoulder. “We’ll find it. If it’s not in lost and found, we’ll
talk to airport security. If someone took it by accident, they’ll
bring it back once they realize it isn’t theirs.”

“Sure.” But her voice was toneless; she
could hear it herself.

His eyes sharpened. “Was there something
valuable inside? Money? Jewelry?”

Annika surprised herself by laughing.
Darkly. “Do I look like someone who owns valuable jewelry?”

His eyes made a slow trip over her, from
face to feet and back. “Why not?”

Why not?
Because she looked like what
she was, a librarian. Not some femme fatale who’d carry expensive
jewels around in her carry-on. “No, nothing like that.” Just a box
of ashes and her eReader. But if she told him about the cremains,
he’d probably think her crazy, and then he’d leave her to deal with
this situation alone, and she didn’t want him to. And not just
because he was easy on the eyes, but because having
company—American company; someone who spoke her language, someone
who understood—made her feel a little less lost.

“What about your identification?”

“It’s in my handbag.” Along with her money,
her keys, and her ticket to Gotland. Things could have been a lot
worse. Although— “I lost my eReader.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick Costa said. “Let’s grab
the stuff we do have and check lost and found. Maybe we’ll get
lucky and it’s there.”

Maybe. He probably wished it would be. That
way he could be finished with her and on his way wherever he was
going. To save the world.

“I appreciate you doing this,” Annika
said.

He grinned down at her. “It’s no problem. We
Americans have to stick together, right?”

“Right.” She managed a smile back, even
though that grin had made her stomach swoop worse than when the
plane dropped earlier.

“C’mon.” He took his suitcase in one hand
and put the other on her back, and off they went. Slowly.

The missing bag wasn’t at lost and found, of course. Nick hadn’t
imagined it would be, but they had to go through the appropriate
motions.

No, he knew exactly where the bag was. Or if
not exactly, he knew who had it. Fredrik Berggren had called him
three times in the last ten minutes. Even now, he could feel his
phone vibrate in his pocket yet again. And although he hadn’t been
in a position to answer, he could make a reasonable guess as to
what the calls had been about. Fredrik had called once to tell Nick
that he had arrived at the airport, once to tell Nick that he had
located the suspect and the bag, and once to report that he had the
bag in his possession. Admittedly, Nick couldn’t imagine why
Fredrik had found it necessary to push the poor girl onto the
baggage carousel to obtain it—she’d said herself she’d stepped away
from the bag; all he’d had to do was pick it up—but maybe it had
been an accident. Maybe someone else had jostled her and that’s why
she’d fallen. Or maybe she’d lied about being tipsy, and no one had
pushed her. Or—hell—maybe Fredrik had, to make sure everyone’s
attention was on something other than himself. If that was it, it
had certainly worked. Nick hadn’t even noticed him being there, so
much of his attention had been on Annika Holst and those long legs
waving in the air.

Man, she had a great pair of legs on
her!

Anyway, he supposed the end justified the
means, really. He imperatively needed to get a look inside that
bag. All Fredrik had done, was get it for him.

But even so he felt bad looking at her. She
was clearly distraught, probably in pain, and very upset. Her
bottom lip was quivering, and there were tears in those big blue
eyes behind the round glasses.

She didn’t look like a crook. Not even a
little bit.

But he knew appearances could be deceiving,
and he couldn’t afford to be careless. In his almost nine years
with the bureau, he’d seen guilt masquerading as innocence,
innocence masquerading as guilt, and every variation in between.
Just because Annika Holst looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her
mouth, didn’t mean she wasn’t guilty as sin.

In fact, she looked so much like the
grieving daughter that it almost had to be put on. Head to toe
unrelieved black: shoes, pantyhose, and shapeless dress that hung
from her shoulders. Dishwater blond hair scraped into a no-frills
ponytail, and not a drop of makeup on her pale face.

Did anyone really mourn like that these
days?

The getup looked doubly sinister when he
knew she hadn’t been close to her father. She spent her life at the
Brooklyn College Library, while her father lived and worked in
Greenpoint. Barely twenty miles separated them, but they were
worlds apart. All his research had indicated that Annika only
rarely saw her father and that he made no effort to contact
her.

Not that the others were any better.
Annika’s brother Andy had been in Costa Rica when the old man died,
and he hadn’t bothered to come home, not even so he could join
Annika on this pilgrimage to Sweden. And Astrid, the older sister,
was too busy working on her swimsuit collection to worry about the
fact that her father had been rolled for his wallet on his way home
from work one night and hadn’t survived the encounter. Life had
pretty much gone on as usual for all three Holst siblings for the
past few weeks, as if nothing at all had happened.

Until yesterday, when Annika had stayed home
from work. Until she had emerged from her apartment in the
afternoon, dressed all in black, with a suitcase and a carry-on
bag, and had taken the subway into Manhattan and from there a bus
out to Newark Airport.

It was all open and aboveboard. She’d booked
the flight weeks ago, shortly after learning of her father’s death.
Newark direct to Stockholm and from there to Visby, on the island
of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Where her father had grown up. And
where he had—or so Nick believed—stolen a priceless silver treasure
from the Visby Museum, just before leaving the island, never to
return.

Oh yes, and had shot and killed a security
guard while he was at it.

That was the last time anyone had seen the
coins and jewelry. There had been no rumblings of its availability
on the black market, and it hadn’t surfaced anywhere legitimate
since. And Calle Magnusson had for all intents and purposes dropped
off the face of the earth.

It wasn’t until his death that the Art Crime
Team’s technical analyst put two and two together and determined
that he’d been living in Brooklyn for the past thirty years under
the name Carl Holst, estranged husband of Anne Holst, professor at
the Pratt Institute. The two of them married in Denmark and
emigrated to the U.S. when Anne, an authority on medieval art, had
accepted a position at Pratt. They’d separated ten years later, but
had never formalized the divorce.

And now Carl was dead, and his youngest
daughter was on her way to Sweden with a black bag that she’d
carried onto the plane as carefully as if it contained
explosives.

The same black bag Nick couldn’t wait to get
his hands on.

And that was why he’d called Fredrik. He’d
worked a case with the Swedish
Rikspolis
once before, when
he had helped them retrieve a painting that had been stolen from a
private collection in Stockholm; a painting which later turned up
in a San Francisco art gallery. He and the detective in charge,
Fredrik Berggren, had hit it off. Fredrik was always up for an
adventure—or dinner and a beer. Just as soon as Nick had taken care
of Annika Holst, he and Fredrik would get together and he’d finally
discover what Annika had been keeping in the bag she’d cradled so
carefully. And if it wasn’t a thousand year old silver treasure,
he’d eat it, whatever it was.

They passed a door with the international
sign for ladies room next to it, and she slowed down. “I...
um...”

She seemed to have a hard time meeting his
eyes. Was she really embarrassed to have to tell him she needed to
go to the bathroom?

“Sure.” Probably a good idea for her to get
out of that pantyhose before it got stuck to her scratches. “I’ll
wait here. And guard the suitcases.”

That got him a smile. “Thank you.” She
hobbled off before he could say anything else. Good thing too,
because he found himself staring dumbly at the spot where she’d
been for several seconds before he shook himself out of it. But
damn, that smile had changed her whole face.