Frost and Ashes (Daniel Trokics Series Book 2) Read online

  As if he were reading her mind, he said, "And I've already promised you'll be coming back to the same job you left. Remember to pack your raincoat, since it starts tomorrow. They say it's raining in Amsterdam."

  Suddenly, he looked like the poster boy for kindheartedness.

  "But what about the investigation?" Lisa said. "Does this mean you're taking me off the Lukas case?"

  "I'm not taking you off the case, Lisa. I'm sending you out to become one of my best people. The timing’s unfortunate, but the Lukas case could drag on for weeks, months, years even, and I want my people to be the best. There's no second chance with the seminar. Can I count on you?"

  "I guess I don't have much choice."

  Her boss dislodged something from between his front teeth and smiled. "No. You don't."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Trokic fumbled around with the coffee machine in the kitchen. An old wreck that likely hadn't been decalcified in this millennium. And now there was something blocking the water line. He sighed and turned it upside down over the sink. It was a Braun. For a second, he was back in the office at

  St. Patrick's in Zagreb, where they'd had an identical coffee maker. He could hear the children crying, the adults shushing them, comforting them in the back rooms. The summer had been sizzling hot, and Zagreb had felt like a pressure cooker. As he took the machine apart over the sink, he remembered the smell of the people packed together like sardines. The apathy, the insane noise from the cars on the street below the gray building, the people trying to drown out the cacophony with news reports on TV or male pop singers on ghetto blasters. But all that was many years ago, and the memories didn’t fit this reality.

  * * *

  Trokic finally got the appliance working, and a promising thick stream of coffee was running through it when someone knocked on the door.

  "I picked up the guy who wants to talk to you," Lisa said.

  He was in his mid-20s, with an enormous nose stuck on a small face, longish blond curly hair in a ponytail, and camouflage pants. He looked over her shoulder at Trokic, then he stuck his hand out. His handshake was wimpy.

  "I found your message in my mailbox. I'm Adam. I'm a substitute aide at the club. I'm the one who sent Lukas home Thursday. Actually, I talked to your people Friday evening, but since there was a message, I thought I probably ought to stop by."

  "Now that we know it's a homicide, we need to talk to everyone again," Trokic said. "It puts everything in a different light."

  "Sure. We all want to help however we can."

  Trokic showed him back to his office, told him to have a seat, and poured two cups of coffee. Finally, a decent cup of joe, now that he could make it himself. He enjoyed the feel of caffeine spreading through his body. "Tell me about Lukas."

  "He was a really decent kid. Not one of them who give us a lot of trouble."

  Adam set his lip against the rim of the cup and blew on the scalding hot coffee. "He was wild about insects. Especially ladybugs. He spent a lot of time collecting them outside in the summer. Wintertime, he played a lot of Game Boy. Believe me, there are a lot of insect games out there."

  Finally, he took a sip and winced. "You don't have any milk or anything?"

  "Only these." Trokic pushed a few small cartons of cream over to him. Adam picked one of them up and studied it suspiciously before finally pouring it into his coffee.

  "He didn't play with the others?" Trokic asked.

  "Yeah, if anyone wanted to play soccer. He was a big Barcelona fan. Everything had to be blue, or that Barcelona Bordeaux red. Clothes, shoes, everything. I talked to his mom about it one time; it was driving her crazy. It was like he was almost obsessed with the things that interested him. But otherwise, he spent most of his time with a girl, Julie. They're neighbors, I think. Not that I thought it was great for him…I guess I can say this…she was on him, all the time."

  "But she's a little bit older, isn't that right? Nine or ten? She was in the club too?"

  "Yeah, they gave her permission to be in the club an extra year. She's in fourth grade."

  "So, what was wrong with her hanging around him?"

  "She isolated him from the others. That's never a good thing. Especially if it's a kid who's not so outgoing in the first place. But she's also a little schemer, and she’s got a problem with lying if you ask me. After she appointed him as her little doll, or whatever, he had trouble making friends. She chased them off, no other way to put it. She kept him away from the others and acted bitchy. We see problems like that now and then, and we deal with them the best we can. We put them in different groups if it’s possible, stuff like that."

  "What about his family?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What was your impression of how he was doing at home?"

  "I don't know his parents all that well. We didn't talk to them much because he walked home by himself every day."

  "And the day he disappeared?"

  "Just a normal day. We've been a little lazy since Christmas vacation; no one's really felt much like starting up any big projects. We finally worked up the ambition to take down all the Christmas decorations; that took up most of the day."

  Adam swallowed. And swallowed again. He fiddled around with the thin gold ring in his left ear. "We had a nice day, actually. It's nice to think about that, now that he's gone. Those poor parents. How do you ever get over something like this?"

  Trokic paused while the young man got control of himself again.

  "The day he disappeared…was he sent home exactly the same way as usual?"

  "Yeah. It was the same time every day. A quarter past three. And I followed him out to the street and waved goodbye to him. You think somebody knew about the time and waited on him?"

  "Right now, we're looking into every possibility. It's important to know if anyone else knew about it; it's not impossible. But he was seen at the bakery an hour after you sent him home."

  "I was still working at that time. We had a meeting after work."

  "The club leader told us about that, yes. But do you have any idea what he could've been doing, in that hour's time?"

  "No. No idea at all."

  Adam leaned forward and drank the rest of his coffee. "But there's another thing I thought about since I talked to the other police on Friday. I don't know if it's important, but I thought I ought to mention it."

  "Okay."

  "We keep rabbits in the club. Eight of them at the moment. So the kids can have their own rabbit."

  Trokic shuddered. He didn't like rabbits at all. Once in a while, he had nightmares about them. Ash gray, thousands of them, with greedy white teeth. A memory from his time in Croatia, from a farm.

  Adam took a deep breath. "Lukas got one when he started. Ninus, it was called. But a few months ago, Ninus was killed. Somebody opened the cage and wrung its neck and smashed it on the floor. I was the one who found it the next morning; it wasn’t pretty. I felt sick about it for several days; it was really too bad for him. It tore him up."

  "Did you find out who did it?"

  "No, we never did, even though we reported it. The vet came by and examined the rabbit. It was definitely a human that did it. But the thing is, we didn't think about it as his rabbit being singled out. We just figured it was a coincidence. Now, I'm not so sure."

  "No matter what, it's good that you remembered it," Trokic said.

  Adam was engrossed in remembering the situation. "But the really creepy part is, it had to be somebody who knew where the key to the rabbit house is. Normally, it's locked, and the key hangs up under the roof. To get into the club after closing time, you have to crawl over the hedge, but most people can do that."

  "How long has the key been hanging there?"

  "Apparently, several years, so a lot of people could know about it. But now we've moved it inside. Oh, another thing…I don't know if it’s important. Sometimes, he played a game by himself. 'Don't get caught,' he called it. What it was is, he followed somebody around, an
d they weren't supposed to see he was doing it."

  "He was shadowing them, you mean?"

  "Yeah. But several of the workers complained about him following them that way. They thought it was a little spooky. Did you talk to his babysitter, by the way?"

  "He had a babysitter? We haven't been told about that."

  "He used to have one, anyway. I heard him talk about her a few times. She followed him home from daycare every day when he went there. So it's been several years ago. Her name's Dorthe. I know who she is. That's Mårslet for you. I think she works afternoons at the coffee bar in town."

  * * *

  After the aide left, Trokic closed the door, turned on his stereo, and let his brain roam. Could somebody have been after Lukas for a long time? The man on the surveillance camera? Could it be a daycare worker who hated him for some reason? Or had Lukas been playing his game and followed somebody?

  He glanced over at the folder on his desk. The results from Forensic Genetics. He looked through the papers; no trace of unknown DNA in the sample taken during the autopsy. He had mixed feelings about that. DNA might have helped them, but on the other hand, it was good to know that Lukas probably hadn't been sexually abused.

  He grabbed his jacket and picked up the keys off his desk. It was almost two o'clock; the babysitter was surely at work.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Trokic walked into Dino's Coffee Bar and ordered a double Irish espresso. When the nervous young guy behind the bar asked if he wanted schnapps or whiskey, Trokic changed his mind and ordered regular coffee. He sat at one of the tables in the back. Coffee bar. Right. They had a liquor license, and it looked like that's mostly what they served. The wallpaper was green with purple stripes, the floor was mahogany and should have been sealed off to protect it from the splatters of beer and whiskey. It was seldom he ran into such a heavy stench, not since back when he was on patrol.

  He felt the bartender's eyes on him, and instantly he regretted coming in there. It looked like the girl was off work for the day. The only others in the bar were two young men drinking beer and sharing a pizza at one of the tables. A greasy-looking jukebox spewed out Gary Moore, "Still Got the Blues." The deserted main street of Mårslet was visible through the window; a depressing frosty fog hung in the air. That morning, he'd spoken briefly with one of the office girls who grew up in Mårslet. She described the town as "a place where you couldn't take a dump without the rumors spreading like wildfire." That made him think about the importance of speaking to the people who had known Lukas. If the killer was a local man, which seemed likely, somebody had to know something.

  "Excuse me, mind if I sit down for a moment?"

  A young girl, eighteen or nineteen, stood in front of him. She blew on her black nail polish a few times, tossed her brown ponytail behind her, and sat down without waiting for an answer.

  "Have a seat."

  She flashed her pearly whites. "You're that police chief."

  "Not quite. Lieutenant Detective Daniel Trokic." He held out his hand.

  "Sorry, they're not quite dry yet." She showed him her nails. Some of the black polish had strayed outside the lines. Trokic stared.

  "I'm Dorthe. I work here. I saw you from out back when you walked in. My shift's coming up in a few minutes."

  Trokic looked her in the eye. She seemed friendly and sincere. "I heard you knew Lukas Mørk. Is that right?"

  She slumped. "I was his babysitter for two years when he was little. I picked him up at daycare sometimes and babysat him one night a week. Back when he was three, four years old. Then I got old enough to work here. The pay's better, so I gave up babysitting."

  Her voice broke. "A really nice boy. And so cute, with all that reddish hair. You don’t see that a lot. I really liked him."

  "How old are you?"

  "Eighteen. I'm a senior at Marselisborg." She sounded proud of that.

  "How did you get along with the family?"

  She sat silently for several moments. Trokic began to think she wasn't going to answer.

  "I don't like saying bad things about people."

  "Just be honest about how you got along with them."

  "It was a little bit uncomfortable. The mother was a real hen; it was like she was watching me all the time. Like she didn't trust me. Maybe I just don't have much in common with them."

  "How about Lukas, did he seem okay?"

  She was obviously struggling with herself. "I didn't see them together much. They always left when I came. So most of what I know is gossip, and I'm not so wild about spreading that around."

  "I want to hear it. Then I can sort it out later."

  "One of my old classmates' mom is a friend of Lukas's mom, and she told me a few things once in a while. That they might be getting a divorce because there were a lot of problems with Karsten, Lukas's dad. He has a temper problem."

  "Do you know if they hit Lukas?"

  She looked down at the table. "Lukas could be so, so scared of me getting mad at him. And he'd say, 'You're not going to hit me, are you?' I always felt bad about that, of course, I'd never dream of hitting him, he was so little back then. One time he pointed at the stove, the electric plate, and he said, 'Daddy spank.' So I asked him if he'd been playing around with the stove and got spanked, and he nodded. But I didn't say anything to anybody, I just thought like it was a normal thing for parents to do, to make sure a kid doesn't burn himself."

  "Do you know of anything else like that happening?"

  She hesitated again, this time longer. Trokic waited patiently while her eyes wandered over to the window. "I know he broke his arm once. They said he fell down off the front steps. Outside the house. But Lukas was scared to death of those steps. He even crawled down them because he fell down once and hurt himself. I just can't see how he could fall, crawling like that. I admit, I thought about it. Now, if they'd said it was some other steps…"

  She bit her lip. "But they'd never hurt Lukas like that. I'm sure they wouldn't. They loved him, really loved him."

  Trokic stuck his cigarettes in his pocket. "Thank you for coming over and talking to me."

  She nodded and sat there for a moment, looking as if she was trying to remember something. "Did you talk to Magdalena?"

  "Not that I know. Who's she?"

  "She's like a witch or something. At least that's what we always called her. She's down at the creek every day. Most of the kids in town are a little bit scared of her; she's a little bit creepy."

  She saw his look of skepticism, and she leaned her head to the side and laughed.

  "And where can I find this witch?" Trokic said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Trokic parked on a small residential street and walked the rest of the way, down a narrow gravel road to the address he'd been given. He tried to ignore the skepticism he felt. He liked working with evidence and logical argument. Many of his colleagues, he'd noticed, had the same attitude, Lisa in particular. She seemed to understand computer language as if it were her mother tongue. And despite being a sensitive person, she managed to keep her emotions out of an investigation. Trokic valued that trait, which made it difficult, to say the least, for him to relate to spiritual mindsets, weakly-supported theories about the afterlife, and alternative forms of medical treatment that hadn’t been properly tested. What did the babysitter mean by "witch?" What was behind it? Rituals in the dead of night, sacrificing chickens and goats? End-of-the-world prophecies and visions? Mysterious incantations to drive out evil spirits?

  Magdalena’s house was lower than the others in town. It had to be from the 1700s. The masonry walls were crooked, the white plaster was flaking off, the thatched roof seriously needed replacing. He had to duck to get in the front door. Immediately, a whole new world appeared before him. The room was filled with cacti of every possible shape, while large bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling. The furniture was old and cheap, but everything seemed to be in its place. Meticulously so.

  Magdalena was a small, thin
woman in her late 60s. She wore a long black dress and a knitted gray wool hat with flaps over the ears.

  "Come inside and have a cup of herbal tea. It's already brewed."

  "Uh, thank you." He wasn't at all sure he wanted to get too well acquainted with some of the things hanging around the room.

  "Have a seat, I'll be back in a jif." She vanished into the kitchen and returned with two steaming cups of tea.

  Trokic took a sip. It was sweet and tasted of licorice. He tried to guess what she'd put in it. Anise, licorice root, honey, valerian, rose hip. But there was something else with a tangy bite to it.

  "It's my own recipe," the witch said, not without pride.

  "Is that a peyote cactus over there?" he asked.

  "No. Unfortunately, I can't get them to grow here; it's too difficult. But it's in the same family." She smiled.

  Trokic was now officially nervous about the tea.

  "But you're not here to investigate the level of mescaline in my cacti, am I right?"

  "I'll get right to the point. You're down at the creek quite a bit, I hear. I'd like to know if you have any information that could help us concerning the murder of Lukas Mørk."

  "Who's Lukas Mørk?"

  "You haven't heard about the boy found in the creek, murdered?"

  Her eyes grew wide, and her cup clattered when she set it down. "Oh, no. I haven’t heard; I don't read the paper, and I don't have a TV. But I did notice the police roped off an area down at the creek. I can assure you, I don't do any magical witchcraft, nothing like that, and I didn't sacrifice the poor boy to any higher powers."