Under a Black Sky (Part of the Daniel Trokics Series) Read online

  The pathologist, Jane Lohan, was leaning over a corpse on the steel table in front of her. She straightened up when she saw Angie. "Have you found Marie Vad?"

  Angie shook her head. "No. But we're doing absolutely everything we can. The whole town is on the lookout, we're turning over every rock."

  "I can't bear to think about it," Jane said. "It hasn't been the best of mornings here. You're just in time for the grand finale. The main character, so to speak."

  The room was spacious enough to perform four autopsies simultaneously. For a moment, Angie had imagined the entire Vad family would be lying there, each on a separate table. But Lohan had apparently decided to take them one at a time.

  Angie dried her sweaty palms on her black pants and stared down at the body of Asger Vad. There was surprisingly little blood, and had it not been for the small entry wound on his forehead, he looked as if he might have died of natural causes. Someone must really have been angry, she thought.

  Jane carefully cut the victim's clothes off and put them in a numbered bag, to be sent to the lab for analysis. She was in her late forties, with a small, angular face, clear green eyes, and dark brown hair in a ponytail. Her face seemed frozen in a worried expression, and Angie was always surprised when her face cleared up and she suddenly smiled.

  She raised an eyebrow in Angie's direction. "I've been busy all morning and I've just about had it. I've seen a lot in my time, but this…I think this beats everything. I'm sorry I didn't have time to talk to you earlier; it would've been good for us both. But it was important to get them in here as quickly as possible and get started."

  "I was more or less in shock myself," Angie confessed. "The crime scene. It spoke for itself, way too much."

  The pathologist nodded. She lived within walking distance of Angie, and occasionally they had a cup of coffee together. Even though they seldom talked about anything other than work, Angie considered her a friend, one who knew her deepest secret and had once saved her from going off the deep end and losing her job. A friend she could trust, whose abilities she had the greatest respect for.

  "Anyway, it's time for the last man," Jane said. "Like I said, the main character, the one it's possibly all about. And everything he was supposed to see. But we'll get to that later."

  That didn't sound good to Angie. "What do you mean?"

  "Let's look at him first, then I'll explain."

  Angie studied her; she was hiding something, and that made Angie nervous. But Jane liked to work systematically. She would talk about it when she was good and ready.

  "He was dressed in these clothes postmortem, no doubt about that. The same goes for the other two."

  "Yeah. That had to have been difficult. Some of the clothes might not have fit them all that well."

  "It is difficult to put clothes on a lifeless person," Jane acknowledged.

  She worked slowly and in silence. Took samples, weighed organs, measured distances. Once in a while, she mumbled into a Dictaphone and wrote a note. Angie made an effort to endure the sound of the saw. The sight of blood and inner organs didn't bother her, nor did the smell, but the sounds were hard to handle; despite spending a lot of time at the lab, she'd never gotten used to them.

  She glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror above a sink. Strands of black hair had loosened from her braid under her white knitted cap, and her nervous, brown almond eyes and angular cheekbones made her look like a frightened bird.

  A raven, she thought. Her clan's animal.

  "I can only confirm our theories up to this point," Jane said. "He was shot at close range. There's only a faint trace of gunshot residue, which means the gun was pressed against his forehead."

  She measured the entrance wound. "I would say, forty caliber. The entrance wound is always a bit smaller when a shooting occurs at such close range because the skin stretches some and then contracts. And the exit wound on all three family members is bigger because the bullet hit the skull and tumbled before exiting from the back of the head. I would say from the trauma on all three that the weapon was a common handgun."

  Angie licked her dry lips. The pathologist might as well have said that Asger Vad had been killed with a fork. It wouldn't be any more difficult to find the murder weapon, unless it was found in somebody's yard or some other place the killer had dumped it. Even if they stumbled onto it, proving it was, in fact, the murder weapon would be tough, since none of the bullets had been found. Gun permits weren't required in Alaska, where everyone had the right to defend themselves against the wildlife they encountered, whether at home or out in the country.

  "I wouldn't count on being able to identify the murder weapon," Jane said. "It all seems very calculated to me. A crime of passion is possible, but if that's the case, he had the presence of mind to cover some of his tracks."

  Jane pointed to Asger's wrist. "He'd also been tied up and tried to escape. Fought like a maniac. His skin is flayed in several places, there are wounds. That's not the case with the other victims."

  Angie couldn't erase the image from her mind. "So Asger was tied up while the killer took care of the rest of the family? Is that how it happened?"

  The pathologist pushed a stray hair back under her cap. "Yes. It was probably necessary. He was obviously a strong man, and I doubt it was easy to overpower him. But it also seems that he was supposed to watch it. The violation."

  "What do you mean?"

  The furrow between Jane's eyes deepened. "His wife was raped."

  "No."

  "Yes. He used a condom, and she was bitten repeatedly under her clothes. On her breasts, stomach, and thighs. And there was some bleeding around her vagina. Can you imagine? That he was forced to watch it? It's gruesome." She sighed. "But not as gruesome as watching your own son being killed. In a way, it's the sum of all these gruesome acts that makes this so thoroughly evil."

  Angie felt wretched. Her braid was stuck to the back of her sweaty neck. A silence fell between them as they digested Jane's description of what happened. Someone in the building laughed loudly, and they heard a metallic sound, something being drug across a floor. What would the people of Anchorage think about this if all the details came out? The dollhouse, the rape, the violent deaths? The quiet town would panic. People would keep their children home from school. Everyone was used to dangerous animals, but nothing like this.

  "All of this puzzles me," Jane finally said. "He rapes the mother, but then he takes the daughter with him. Maybe he knew the family, but Marie put up a fight, so he took her away and killed her somewhere else. Some of this doesn't make sense, anyway."

  She looked worriedly at Angie and bit her lower lip. Then she walked over to the sink, pulled off her blue latex gloves, and washed her hands with her back to Angie. "I have to say, I'm pessimistic about Marie. You know how it is. Every hour that goes by, there's less chance we'll find her alive. It's almost unbearable to think about it. I'm thankful I don't have any daughters that age. Or any daughters at all."

  Angie nodded and glanced at Asger one last time. What suffering had he gone through in the final minutes of his life? Who could possibly deserve that? His face gave her no answer.

  "Maybe," Jane said, "the murderer got a kick out of Asger watching him rape his wife. Maybe you're hunting one of the worst sex offenders we've ever seen in Alaska. That's what bothers me. Not only that he has Marie, but that this family might not be the last."

  Chapter Eight

  IT WAS dark by the time Angie unlocked the door to the trailer that had been her home for the past three years. She whistled shortly for Timothy, the raven who lived on her roof. Then she turned on the light and glanced around her kitchen. She sighed; she hadn't cleaned up after breakfast that morning, and there were still a few small plastic containers of yogurt, some apple peels, a sack of muesli, a dirty plate, and a half-empty cola can lying around.

  Very nice, Angie, she told herself. She tossed her bag on the floor. She found a bread bag and pulled out a slice, walked outside, and threw it
up on the roof for the raven. All she'd had to eat was a quick sandwich on the way to the university, and now she had a headache. This happened way too often, her not eating enough or well enough, but this time it was because she'd lost her appetite from thinking of the missing child. She checked her phone again, as if by some miraculous coincidence she'd missed a call telling her that Marie was safe.

  She thought back to the scene at the kitchen table. It was like some show they were all supposed to see. The murdered family. Late that afternoon, Marie's babysitter, Joanne, had called and, as promised, given her a list of the people Marie had mentioned. A few officers had been out talking to people, but no one knew anything about where Marie had been. It was as if she'd disappeared into thin air.

  And now she was going to have to drag a Danish policeman around with her. Hopefully, it wasn't some stupid detective the Danes had sent to snoop around. Or worse, to interfere.

  She sat at the small table in what was meant to be a living room, turned on her laptop, and did a search on his name: Daniel Trokic.

  It was a strange name, part biblical and part Slavic. Surely it wasn't Danish? But what did she know, really? Google showed two hundred fifty-five results. She clicked on the photos. The detective looked to be in his mid-forties, tall, with dark, unruly hair. Every photo was different, though she couldn't spot him smiling in any of them. Blue eyes, it seemed. He might have looked handsome if someone had managed to get a smile out of him. She kept looking, but no—not a single smile.

  It's probably going to be a lot of fun, driving around with some northern European grouch, she thought; Smith, you bastard. His clothes also looked more than casual. Sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers. Was he really a homicide detective? Apparently, they didn't have much of a dress code, not when it came to being well-dressed, anyway. Though, she was one to talk, living in a trailer for three years after her financial disaster.

  She clicked back to the search results and opened the first link. It showed photos of a boy around eight years old, and Angie thought she could make out the word "strangled" in the text. She shivered and thought again about Marie. Hopefully, they wouldn't find her that way. There was a photo of a police car in front of a small stream and some idyllic old houses. Is that how everything looked in Denmark? She had no idea. It looked like something from a fairy tale, an entirely different world. The roofs were covered with snow—so it snowed in Denmark. Good. That meant he wouldn't flip out over that.

  Daniel Trokic was standing in front of a forest in the next link, a beech forest, it looked like, though she was no expert on trees. The newspaper article seemed to be about a dead female anthropologist, Anna. The list also contained links to several articles, presumably homicide cases, possibly a few serial killers.

  She used Google to translate the next article. The partly-decomposed bodies of two murdered women had been found in a field outside Århus. The killer had used leeches on his victims. The investigation had also led to Africa and a religious hysteria. The city had breathed a sigh of relief when the killer was caught, and the city’s mayor had congratulated all the investigators.

  She shivered again. Leeches? How sick in the head were they over on the other side of the Atlantic? She knew nothing about Danish culture other than what she'd seen in an old documentary and through Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. Once, she had watched part of a film by a Danish director, but it was so weird that she'd turned it off.

  Less than a day later, though, she'd be riding around with this Daniel Trokic, this gruff-looking cop. At least he had worked homicide cases, and from her sketchy research, it appeared he wouldn't be shocked very easily. Now that she was snooping, she might as well check Facebook. But nothing showed up. All personal information about him seemed to have been wiped out. Not that she spent a lot of time on social media herself, but at least she could be found.

  She glanced at the photos again while fingering the small stone raven on her necklace. Maybe he didn't look so stern after all. You could call it contemplative. There was something a bit tough about his stony expression and face; maybe he was a touch handsome, too.

  Angie decided to be on her best behavior. As long as he didn't take the wheel or make a mess on the passenger side of the car, it would probably be okay. If he sat there telling family stories or pestering her with bad jokes, she could just tell him to shut up.

  She went back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a beer and part of a leek pie, which she shoved into her microwave. She leaned against the refrigerator and drank her beer. Then she unbuttoned her blouse, turned on the TV, and zapped around until she found a local TV station. A crew had followed some state troopers out to the Matsu Valley, where one of the troopers noted that it might be extremely difficult to find Marie if she was being held captive or if she was hiding. Alaska was big, with an endless number of places to hide someone. In addition, the snow would hide tracks, and many lakes were already frozen. It would be easy to shove a body under the ice, where it wouldn't show up until spring.

  They interviewed one of her teachers, who begged the killer to free Marie. Angie thought about the autopsy and immediately felt a lump in her throat. There was no mention of the mother being raped; hopefully, that bit of information would never come out.

  A short clip about Asger Vad followed, with several shots of volcanoes in the background. They also showed a few clips of him in the studio, talking about the latest Mount Redoubt eruption. There was nothing new under the sun.

  Weather forecast—more snow on the way. Lots of it. She glanced outside the trailer's small windows and saw it was already snowing heavily. Snow that would hinder them in their investigation. On the other hand…maybe it would be a snowstorm, with enough snow in precisely the right places to keep the Danish policeman out of Anchorage. Stranded in some tiny airport south of there, way out in the sticks. Someplace so crummy and unlivable that he would go home. The thought made her smile.

  She forced herself to eat the leek pie, despite her lack of appetite. She hoped when the Danish policeman arrived that he'd brought along some winter clothing and that he wouldn't whine about the cold. She checked her watch. She could get in a good night's sleep before picking him up at the hotel.

  Chapter Nine

  IT WAS dark everywhere when Marie woke up. Not just dark, like when she went to bed at night with the streetlight outside casting shadows in her bedroom, but completely dark, in a way she hadn't known it could be.

  Her thoughts had been foggy for a long time. Sort of like when she'd broken her arm and been put under to have it set. And she didn't have any idea where she was. Several possibilities ran through her head. The place most reminded her of the cellar underneath her grandparent's house in Denmark where they kept canned goods, but surely she couldn't be there? It smelled a bit moldy, and though she couldn't feel any walls, she sensed there wasn't much room there. She was lying on a damp mattress that smelled strange, and she had on her down coat, a pair of jeans, and boots. Had she slept with her clothes on? And her boots?

  She sat up with a start. Now she remembered something; it had been snowing, and she had built a snowman in front of the house with her little brother, Oliver. It had been hard to make the snow clump together. It was getting late, and they had to go back in the house. But she wanted to use a few rocks for eyes. "Come on, Marie, Dad and Mom are gonna get mad," Oliver had yelled. It was just those rocks. She couldn't find any in all that snow.

  Finally, they went inside. And she woke up in her bed when a big man covered her face with a washcloth. After that, there had only been darkness.

  But then she remembered something else. She had been standing in a parking area beside a big road, and she'd thrown up. The man had smoked a cigarette while waiting on her. She'd been carsick. More than carsick. Like that one time when she'd eaten some poisonous berries. Then it had turned dark again. Who was he, the man that made everything dark? She'd never seen him before.

  "Mom?" she called out. "Mom, are you ther
e? Mom, come get me."

  And now this. No one answered. A wave of terror rushed through her. Had he taken her away? Where to? Several ideas came to her. She was with a friend in the basement; a war had broken out, and she was in a shelter; she'd done something wrong and was being punished. But she couldn't remember anything except for the snowman, her bedroom, and where they'd stopped, and maybe she'd even dreamed that. Why was her memory so full of holes?

  She fumbled her way through the room. The cement walls were ice cold, and it wasn't any bigger than her own room back home. Then she felt something with her hand. A stairway, cement steps. She crawled up the steps, but at the top, she felt something else. A trapdoor.

  "Mom! Let me out!"

  No answer. She yelled again. Then she heard a voice very close by. "Marie."

  She almost stopped breathing while thoughts raced through her head. It was the man's voice. She remembered him asking at the parking area if she was finished throwing up. He was the one who had taken her.

  "Who are you?" she asked, in a voice that sounded small to her.

  After a short pause, he said, "You can call me Charlie."

  She thought for a moment; she didn't know any Charlie. Something in his voice made her cower. It was friendly but firm. A voice you don't want to talk back to. "Where's my mom?"

  Another pause. Instead of answering her, he asked, "Are there any flies down in the basement?"

  "No," she mumbled, with tears in her eyes.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm opening the trapdoor now, Marie. So you can come up. You behave yourself, okay?"

  Chapter Ten

  THE COLD HAD BROUGHT color to the face of the woman in front of Trokic. He guessed she was the detective he would be working with. Her long, braided black hair lay like a snake down along her shoulder. Eyes the shape of almonds; part Native American, he thought. Thin face. Her dark brown eyes regarded him with mild curiosity. She wore a thick, black coat of wind-resistant nylon, with pockets and a fur collar. Jeans, low-heeled boots. Her gray knitted cap was pulled down over her ears, and a small, black bird hung from a thin chain around her neck. A crow, or maybe a raven. In her mid-thirties, he guessed.