Frost and Ashes (Daniel Trokics Series Book 2) Page 10

  "But you are down at the creek every day?"

  "Yes, I try to stay as close in touch with nature as I can, so I take my daily walk. I live in such a beautiful place with so much history. And I give advice about natural medicine."

  "I don't suppose you're a psychic?" Trokic glanced at her strange hat.

  "No, nothing like that. But I help people find their own truth."

  "In what way?"

  "That's my secret. But if you can't find the answer in facts, you have to search what's behind it all."

  Trokic wished she would take that hat off. It was distracting. Or worse than that, actually. Much worse. "Were you down at the creek last Thursday?"

  "As I said, I'm down there every day. So, yes."

  "At what time of day?"

  "Afternoon. It was still light out."

  "You didn't see Lukas? He was eight years old. Chestnut brown hair, green down coat. Or maybe you saw someone else?"

  "No, nobody except Peter the fisherman. He was out walking his springer spaniel. But he's almost ninety…"

  "Do you still work?"

  Magdalena suddenly began staring out into space. "Chestnut brown, you say?"

  "Yes, almost red. And a green winter coat."

  "I saw a boy who looked like that. But it wasn't down by the creek; it was up by the church. Where Obstrupvej runs into Hørretvej. He was sitting in a car."

  Trokic’s heart began pounding as he visualized Lukas jumping in with the unknown killer. The K-9 officer might have been right after all.

  "What time was that, do you remember?"

  "Around three-thirty, I'd say. That's when I usually go shopping in town."

  "And do you know what kind of car it was?" Trokic waited anxiously.

  "I don't know anything about cars, but it didn't look particularly new. And I think it was green or blue."

  "How old? Just a guess."

  "I couldn't say."

  "Did it have any special characteristics? Any dents, markings, paint?"

  "I don't think so. But then I don't remember it." Magdalena sounded almost unhappy.

  "Can you remember any of the license plate number?"

  Magdalena puckered her lips and shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I really don't know."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Trokic was on his way out of Brugsen with a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a bottle of wiper fluid in the other. The supermarket was bustling with half the town doing their Sunday shopping just before closing time, it seemed. Near the exit, he bumped into Sidsel Simonsen, who was carrying a sack overflowing with groceries. It took him a few moments to recognize her, with all her long hair stuffed underneath a black knitted stocking cap. Her cheeks were red from the cold. The diving girl.

  "Supplies for you and the car?" She nodded at what he was holding.

  "Yes. I'm on the way home. Just had some tea with the local witch, and I'm not completely sure it's legal for me to drive a car right now."

  At once, her serious expression widened into laughter. "Good old Magdalena. She's a character. But she's harmless, and so is her tea."

  Her plastic sack was starting to split, an orange peeked out of one side, and she struggled to keep everything from falling out and causing a spectacle in the parking lot.

  "Let me carry that over to your car," Trokic said.

  "I didn't drive; I walked."

  "In that case, let me drive you home. Before everything spills out."

  He stuck his cigarettes into his coat pocket and took hold of her sack.

  "I was just going to pick up some stove briquettes, and somehow a whole bunch of stuff ended up in the sack," she said as if she found it amazing. She moved aside when a boy pushed past them with a shopping cart twice his size. Its wheels skidded out of control in the snow.

  "Okay." Trokic kept his mouth shut about his theory of the female shopping gene, seeing that he usually got home to find he'd forgotten half of what he needed. He studied her strained expression. She seemed uncomfortable with all the people around. "Is everything okay on the other end of town?"

  "Yes. But people are scared." She sniffed a few times. "Didn't you see their faces in Brugsen? Like stone. But you can't blame them; there are a lot of children in this town. Lots of people move here because it's supposedly a safe place to raise a family."

  She hesitated a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was monotone. "I saw the father down at the creek yesterday, where it happened. He was talking with somebody."

  "Man or woman?"

  "A man."

  "What did he look like, the man he was talking to?"

  "It was twilight, hard to see. But short blond hair, not too light."

  They hopped into the car and pulled out onto Hørretvej. Sidsel sat in silence, and Trokic mulled over what she'd seen. It might not be important, and yet he thought it was strange. But he was much more interested in what Magdalena had told him, which meant that Lukas might have been picked up by someone in a car. But what car?

  "You have an unusual name," she said, as they turned onto Bedervej. "Were you born here in Denmark?"

  "Yes, my mother was Danish. But the rest of my family lives in Croatia."

  "So, have you ever lived in Croatia?"

  "Just a few years when I was in my late 20s. With some of the family. Not far from Zagreb. It was during the war. I worked for a private humanitarian organization. We found new housing for people who lost their homes. Or at least we tried. It was a hopeless job. That was a long time ago."

  "But you chose to go down there even though the war was going on?"

  "They were my family. It didn't feel right to sit around here and not…"

  He mussed up his black hair. He needed a haircut again; it was a bit long in back, and the cowlick on one side apparently had sprung to life again after being outside in the cold.

  "So, do you know a lot of diver stories?" He maneuvered around a Ford halfway into the ditch.

  She chuckled and fingered a bracelet around her wrist. It looked like something a child had made, black and green plastic beads in no particular order. It was the only jewelry she wore. "Do I ever. I know the one about the SS Carnatic, a steamship that sailed into a Red Sea coral reef and sank in September 1869, with a load of gold coins. And then there's the horrible story about a Norwegian male diver, he disappeared during a diving expedition, and five days later he showed up, with a knife in his back. But you can hear them another time, maybe. How's the case going? Do you have any suspects?"

  "No, not anybody we have something on." Which was true enough.

  He parked the car in front of the house. The light was on inside; it looked warm and cozy. They sat for a moment. A snowplow drove by.

  Finally, she said, "Thanks for the lift. Would you like a cup of coffee?"

  He glanced at his watch. There would be a late briefing that evening, and before it started, he needed to read a stack of reports. "Could I take a rain check on that?"

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Not quite everyone had made it to the briefing room. Trokic felt a bit queasy; he wondered again if the witch's tea had talents above and beyond the medicinal. Some of his colleagues looked haggard. They'd probably been out on the town last night. Maybe he should have gone out with some of them. In fact, he'd thought about it, but then he'd decided it was too much trouble just for one beer. That would definitely have been the limit with work to do the next day. And anyway they always seemed to argue way too long about which bar to hit. There were places in town Trokic refused to go into at night. Some of them could be fine during the summer, but when you were stuck inside, they were stuffy and sweaty and a musical hell you couldn't drink your way out of.

  Then there was also the risk of running into a few former acquaintances who had yet to come to terms with their feelings about him. Awkward situations arose because they felt there were still things that needed to be discussed every time they saw him. He'd finally concluded that something about him triggered the analysis f
unction inside certain women. It was as if this need of his to be himself was a problem to be examined. At any rate, even the most independent, intelligent women were often transformed in the blink of an eye to self-centered, needy, possessive individuals. It became particularly intimidating when they began dissecting his past and concluded that his time in Croatia during the war had led to an inability to commit. The Lieutenant Detective was usually too polite to air his conviction that he would be fine with committing when the right woman showed up.

  * * *

  Kurt Tønnies, the head forensic technician, led things off. Nothing new to report on the fishing line and the melted snow hadn't revealed any new clues. According to Jasper Taurup, several local fishermen had been interviewed without much success. One of them thought that a certain man, Søren Wenke, used the type of fishing line they were asking about. It turned out that Wenke owned the house that Sidsel Simonsen was staying in, and currently, he was in New Zealand. The man also named two other men who fished, but they both had airtight alibis for the presumed time of the killing. Plus, they had shown their reels; their fishing line had neither been lost nor stolen. There was also the possibility that other spools of line had been "borrowed" by someone who knew the fishermen, but that hadn't given them anything to go on either. Lukas had disappeared at a time of day when most people were at work and could therefore account for their whereabouts.

  "But now we come to the composition of the fibers found on the boy," Tønnies said. "I heard from Copenhagen earlier today; they think it's from yarn. We've contacted all the yarn shops in town, but nothing has come of it yet. Which is very strange, because it doesn't seem to be a common type of yarn. We went through all of the brands. Several of the knitting ladies did say it's probably yarn used to make things like knitted caps or scarves."

  "Damn," Trokic said. "Is that really all they could say? This is important."

  "No need to gripe about it." Tønnies' assistant, Jan, was annoyed. "We're working our asses off here."

  "I'm well aware of that." Trokic looked out at the officers. Their faces showed no signs of enthusiasm. Were they already stuck, disillusioned? Or was it the time of day? Late Sunday evening, when you'd rather be sitting on the couch with your wife, watching some TV series half the country was watching? "Anybody else have anything new?"

  Lisa raised her hand. "I think I have something that might help. My old pal Morten Birk called about the photo from the bakery."

  Trokic perked up. "What? I thought he gave up on that."

  "In fact, he did. But he asked me if it was okay to show it to someone in the British defense ministry he used to work with. So I told him yeah, go ahead."

  "And?"

  "His friend apparently has very different techniques or equipment. He said he was crazy busy, but he thought he could deliver a photo that's much better. Something we could use to identify the man on the other side of the street."

  Trokic glanced around the room again. "Okay, let's go through what we know. Lukas left the club at three-thirty. We know he walked down to Hørretvej at the end of Obstrupvej, about a hundred meters from the school. According to a new witness, it's possible he got into a green or blue car there. After that, we know he was outside the bakery downtown a little before four-thirty. What he did in between, within about an hour's time, we don't know. But we do know he was alive around four-thirty at the bakery. The question is if that man across the street on the video picked him up in the car. And if he was following Lukas."

  "Have we eliminated the parents?" Taurup said. "Am I the only one thinking they might have found him right when they started looking for him–maybe he was setting fire to something, and the father lost his temper?"

  "From what we know, I just can't see it," Trokic said. "Remember, they asked the neighbors to help look for him at five-thirty. The father couldn't possibly have been home from work before a quarter to five. That would give them forty-five minutes to kill him and erase every trace of evidence before contacting the neighbors. Without appearing to be all that shaken up."

  "What about the poker guy?" Agersund said.

  "Nothing there," Taurup said.

  He looked like a creature who had been living too long on junk food. His skin was sallow, and his acne scars stood out more than usual on his thin face. And now his facial muscles had seized up into a surly expression.

  "Nothing?" Trokic said. "Could you be a little more specific?"

  "I happen to know somebody who plays there. He says the place is pretty well-known. There's a game three or four days a week. Mostly poker. Some evenings it's only for the big shots, the pros. They play Hold 'Em or Omaha or sometimes even China to rip each other off, mostly for fun."

  "I don't know what that is. Is it legal?"

  "Hard to say. Whether or not poker is actually gambling is still up in the air, legally. But the primary income for these people are the rich guys who like to play, but they suck at it. They always drop a bundle. There's some dealing going on, hashish I mean, just small amounts though. Once a year, they all take a trip to Vegas for the annual poker tournament."

  "And what about Karsten Mørk, Lukas's father?"

  "He's in debt, big time."

  Trokic nodded. That could explain the argument Sidsel saw. Someone wanted their money. And why did the family still live in such a small apartment, when most people their age with jobs and kids have a house? Maybe that even explained the father's short fuse. Nothing could put pressure on a marriage like money problems.

  "I wasn't happy about pumping my friends for this information," Taurup grumbled. "I've known them twenty years."

  "Don't worry," Trokic said. "I don't have time to report somebody who forgot to declare some side income. How about the debt? Is he paying off on it, or what?"

  "I don't know. Unfortunately, my friends don't know everything. We could bring Mørk in and ask him."

  "That's one of our options," Trokic said.

  "Any other suspects?" Agersund said.

  Trokic shook his head. "But of course we'll start looking for the car that Lukas presumably was in."

  "In other words, we still don’t know anything." Agersund frowned.

  * * *

  The officers filed out of the room until the only one left besides Trokic was Jacob. More than ten years had passed since the two met in Croatia, when Jacob was in the UN peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR, near Sisak. Unlike Trokic, the war seemed to have left him unmarked. His spiky blond hair and smooth face made him look to be in his early 20s. But he'd definitely experienced the war first-hand since he was stationed in Krajina, and despite how he’d remained neutral in the conflict between the Serbs and the Croats, his familiarity with Trokic's second homeland was one of the reasons they were close friends. The other reason was Sinka, Trokic's younger cousin.

  "Impressive how Jasper's suddenly the poker expert," Trokic said.

  "Yeah, he told me one evening a while back how he was one of Århus's top poker sharks for fifteen years. He started out studying mathematics, but it bored him, and he played quite a bit in his free time. He won several thousand a year, and if it had been as popular back then as it is now, he says he could have won millions."

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "No, really. You know the guy has a photographic memory. I believe it, that he's a card shark. The only reason he stopped was because somebody reported him to Tax and they started snooping around. But they couldn't prove anything. By that time, he was sick and tired of math, and he applied for the police academy. He didn't dare take any chances with his record, so he stopped playing. Sounds like he still has connections, though."

  Trokic began gathering up all his papers.

  "Is there something you want to tell me?" Jacob asked.

  Trokic tried to look him in the eye. It was true, there was something he'd been holding back. "Not right now."

  "I think there is. Hey, I can take it, you know that."

  "How about some Dalmatian roast beef one of these days?"
<
br />   "Croatian dog food?"

  "No, you idiot. From Dalmatia. With ćevapi on the side. And cabbage? And the bottle of wine I brought back at Christmas."

  "No ajvar?"

  "Can you eat without it?"

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was almost midnight by the time he got back to his house in Højbjerg. The murder of Lukas Mørk had ruined the good mood he'd been in since visiting his Croatian family, but it had also pushed aside an old issue that had been occupying his thoughts. An issue that popped up again for a moment when he saw Jacob.

  It concerned his cousin Sinka, who, like so many other women venturing out on their own during the war, had vanished. Sinka, barely twenty. And Jacob's girlfriend. At the time of her disappearance, he'd been taking care of several military matters in Zagreb, home of the UNPROFOR headquarters.

  Trokic understood how a family could refuse to acknowledge the possible fate of a missing relative. He himself had trouble dealing with it. Every summer, he visited the Croatian archipelago and showed Sinka's photo to people everywhere he went. He still lived in hope that someone would remember her. There had been sanctuaries during the war, some of them on small islands around Istria and in the Mediterranean, untouched because of their non-strategic location.

  In his mind, he could still see her before she left. Once in a while, she’d worked with him in the aid organization in Zagreb, but she had a hard time handling it. Every new wave of refugees from Serbian-controlled Krajina arrived with new horrific stories. He couldn't stand seeing how her eyes at times turned black, how she began losing her faith in humanity. It was almost as if meeting Jacob brought her back to life. But she’d decided to spend a few days on the island of Krk. A peaceful area. And she never returned.

  Losing Sinka had devastated Trokic. At a time when he'd lost his closest family to cancer and war, she had been there to help him. They had similar temperaments, and gradually he found he could confide in her in a way he’d never been able to with anyone before. He lost a part of himself when she disappeared.