He laughed. “You’re funny. It’s good to inject a little humor. When Whitney has finished his breakfast, he and I are going to strategize. If anyone can see a way through this mess, it’s Whitney.”
Dinah got back in the elevator and rode it down to the second floor. She rapped on Sheridan’s door and waited. “Senator Sheridan, it’s Dinah. I need to speak with you.” She rapped again. “It’s important.”
No answer.
“I’ve heard from Erika.”
The door opened. His face, haggard and unshaven, stared out at her like a defeated warrior feeling the flutter and rush of Valkyrie wings overhead. He looked like a man who knew already that he’d been singled out by Axe-Wielder and Wrecker-of-Plans. “Is she all right?”
His undeniable misery brought Dinah up short. He wasn’t acting. If there was a plot, he wasn’t in on it. “May I come in?”
He searched her eyes. “She didn’t call you.”
“No.”
He turned and walked back into the room. Dinah followed him. His suitcase was open on the bed. He went back to taking his clothes out of an open dresser drawer and folding them in the suitcase.
“What do you want?”
“I’d like her to call, Senator. I’d like to know that she’s all right, too.”
“It’s too late. Everything’s ruined now.”
“Why is it too late?”
“She thinks I killed that man. Eftevang.” He went to the mini-bar, pulled out a beer, and twisted off the cap. He expelled a bitter laugh. “Soon, everyone will think I killed him.”
Dinah glanced back at the door, which was still open. “Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“Why would Erika think that you did?”
“Haven’t you swapped the latest developments with your inspector friend this morning?”
“No.”
“He found a printout of an e-mail from me to Valerie telling her not to worry, that I’d be meeting with Eftevang and I’d make sure he didn’t give us any more trouble. I don’t think the inspector believed me when I said my account had been hacked.” The senator gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Who would?”
Dinah would and did. She couldn’t believe that anyone in his right mind, let alone a senator and a scholar, would write an e-mail announcing a murder he planned to commit. “Was this e-mail what the inspector found in Jorgen’s room?”
“Erika must have left it there, ‘though how she got hold of it is a mystery.” He took a drink of beer, set the bottle on the dresser, and continued his packing. “I don’t know if I’m packing for a return flight to the States and a perp walk across the Washington Mall or a stint in a Norwegian jail.”
“You didn’t write the e-mail? Not even as a joke?”
“No. It’s completely bogus.” He let out another bark of bitter laughter. “Maybe Val wrote the note to herself and gave it to Erika to turn her against me. Maybe Val wanted to punish me for not falling in love with her.”
So he did know that Val fancied him. Dinah could understand Valerie trying to get Erika out of the way by hook or by crook, but surely it defeated her purpose to frame Sheridan for murder. “Did Valerie have your password?”
“Probably.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t mean what I said about Val. She’s on my side no matter what. She showed me the damn e-mail as soon as she saw it. It must have been sent before the Internet went down and stayed in her inbox. She didn’t receive it until the morning of the vault tour and immediately suspected that I’d been hacked.”
Dinah could imagine the consternation that e-mail must have caused. No wonder Sheridan muffed his lines during the video.
He flumped into one of the armchairs in front of the window and hiked his cowboy boots up on the hassock. “Valerie and Tipton have been trying to figure out how the hacker got through our firewall. However it was done, and whatever the police make of it, it’ll go viral and my career will be water over the dam.”
“Did Erika know your password?”
“I don’t know. She may have. Maybe she wanted to punish me. Eftevang’s not the only death she blames me for.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t suppose it matters now that I’m out of the running and no longer have to lie my head off to get elected.” He took a long pull of beer and fell silent.
She prodded him. “What other death does she blame you for, Senator?”
“I asked her to terminate a pregnancy. We’d only been married a few months. I said I didn’t want the distraction of a newborn during my first big campaign. I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to share her with a baby. Anyhow, I sent her back to Norway to…” he made air quotes, “‘to visit her folks.’ My conservative constituents would never know that my right-to-life rhetoric was pure hypocrisy. Later, when Erika and I were ready to start a family, she couldn’t get pregnant.”
“Is the abortion what you were afraid Erika would talk about?”
“It was a risk. Since I moved us from Montana to Washington, she’s been lonely, more regretful and obsessive. She talked as if the child might actually exist.”
“Maybe she does, Senator. Did it ever occur to you that she didn’t go through with the abortion?”
His eyes widened. “Did she tell you…?”
“Colt!” Whitney Keyes stormed through the open door with his hand raised. “I advise you not to say anything more until you’ve spoken to Valerie. I advise you specifically not to say anything more to Dinah.”
Sheridan frowned and his eyes remained glued on Dinah.
“I’m not the mole,” she said. “How could I have hacked into your e-mail?”
“With Erika’s help,” said Keyes.
Sheridan’s face went slack and old, Asgard to Midgard in a split second. All it would take to drive him over the edge was another Valkyrie circling overhead. Nothing Dinah could say would help him now. She turned on her heels and left as Keyes began to lay out Valerie’s theory of Dinah’s treachery.
She took the elevator back to the third floor and banged on Valerie’s door. It was time she heard the theory from the horse’s mouth.
Mahler answered. “She’s not here.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“In hiding if she knows what’s good for her. She’s dropped a bomb on Sheridan, me, the whole damn enterprise.”
His emanation of menace took the steam out of Dinah’s anger. She took a step back. “How?”
“She’s succeeded in getting Sheridan accused of murder, that’s how. Not just any murder, but the murder of one of Tillcorp’s most vocal critics, which makes me look like a co-conspirator. She’s succeeded in setting back all our efforts, not just in Norway but all over the world. The media will be crawling over this like ants at a picnic. If you track her down, tell her she’s fired and she can find herself alternative transportation back to the States.” He ran a hand across his bald head and his eyes bulged with anger. “No. You tell her to stay in Norway. If I see her Judas face again on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ll wring her neck.”
Before he closed the door in her face, Dinah caught a glimpse of Lee and Rod. One of them was working at a laptop. The other was sorting through a stack of loose papers that had been strewn across Valerie’s bed.
Chapter Twenty
Dinah was pretty sure there was a Valkyrie maiden named Cloud or Fog. Evil Fog, Noxious Fog, Fog of War. Something stealthy and pernicious. The Radisson Blu Polar seemed to be enveloped in a pernicious fog and there was nothing she could do but wait for Thor to return and tell her about this e-bombshell that had shattered everybody’s plans.
Mahler’s anger seemed to be centered on Valerie, which must mean that he blamed her for the fact that she had allowed Sheridan’s incriminating e-mail to be stolen. She
obviously hadn’t gotten around to telling him that Dinah was the spy who stole it and the chaos was all her fault. Dinah was grateful for that. Mahler scared her. He was a man she could as easily picture in a maximum security prison cell as a boardroom. Before discovering that e-mail, Thor had considered Mahler his prime suspect and with good reason. Eftevang hated Tillcorp, he had hounded Mahler across Europe, and he had told Aagaard he had a dynamite story and the documents to prove it. That was motive aplenty. And was Mahler just a little too quick to accept Sheridan’s guilt? Maybe that hasty acceptance and his anger at Valerie were contrived to cover his own guilt.
Someone had hacked into Sheridan’s computer, sent Valerie an e-mail, then stolen it and printed it, and left it in Maks Jorgen’s room—presumably with the intention that the police would find it. It would take a computer forensics expert to say whether the e-mail had been sent to a printer by Sheridan’s computer or Valerie’s. Maybe Valerie herself had printed it. There was only her word that it had been stolen. But it went against logic that she would frame Sheridan for murder. She was too professionally and romantically invested in him.
Only two things can derail him. Both of them are women.
Mahler’s words resounded in Dinah’s ears. She still couldn’t picture Erika as a murderess, but she no longer thought of her as a helpless victim. Her disappearance had hurt her husband already. Would she go so far as to frame him for murder? A late-life revenge for domestic crimes, real or imagined? If the scandal of a runaway wife didn’t nip his political ambitions in the bud, a charge of murder in the first certainly would.
Both of them are women. Erika Sheridan and Valerie Ives—either one of them could be Sheridan’s Valkyrie angel of destruction.
Waiting for anything or anyone was worse than tedious for Dinah. It was an affliction, and today the waiting was unbearable. She had to do something to burn off her mental fog. The hotel had a fitness center and a sauna. She would have to be careful because of her arm, but she could run on the treadmill or ride a stationary bike. She needed to move or she’d go berserk and it would feel good to work up a sweat inside a nice, warm building.
***
The elevator doors opened and Dinah stared straight into the eyes of a giant painted polar bear on the facing wall. This obsession with bears was beginning to seem overdone, although she supposed it was only to be expected on an island with twice as many polar bears as people.
At the far end of the hall, a blond girl in a maid’s uniform was vacuuming. She had earbuds in her ears and didn’t look up. There was a faint smell of chlorine embedded in the carpet and a suggestion of mold spores kicked up by the vacuum. Dinah followed the signs to the fitness center, passing murals of the less fearsome Arctic fauna—snow-colored foxes, caribou, and a rather sad-eyed walrus with enormous tusks.
There were a few doors en route marked ANSATTE, which she assumed meant Employees Only. Double doors at the end of the hall proclaimed SVØMMEBASSENG og BADSTUE and below that in English, POOL and SAUNA. She didn’t know the proper pronunciation of Badstue, but bad stew sounded appropriate to the circumstances. She pushed on through and, with the aid of the standard male-female figures on the locker room doors, she went into the women’s room and stripped down to her zebra striped bra and panties, which would have to double as a bathing suit as she hadn’t planned on any Arctic swimming when she packed her bag.
A sign in several languages instructed her to shower before entering the pool. She rinsed off, careful to keep her bandage dry, took a towel from a rack beside the door and went into the pool area. It was a small pool, but she didn’t intend to swim, just wade around a bit and loosen up. It was empty so no need to feel self-conscious about her underwear. She stepped into the shallow end and jumped out clutching her heart.
Holy moly! The pool must be fed by a glacier. She shivered. Oh, well. This would make a good story to tell them back in Hawaii. She sucked in her breath and waded in up to her waist. She did a few leg lifts, but she had chill bumps all over and her teeth were clicking together like castanets.
She got out of the water and toweled off. There were murals in this room, too—on one wall, a mother isbjørn and two cubs meandering across the tundra against a backdrop of white, pointy mountains. On the facing wall, a rampant bear. It appeared to be snarling at her.
The emptiness felt creepy. It was early in the day, but there ought to be a few fitness fanatics taking the polar bear plunge with her. She had started back into the locker room when she noticed a sign on the far side of the pool. “If booze, tar, or the sauna won’t help, the illness is fatal. Suits Required.” The sauna. She didn’t know if it had cured Norris’ gout, but it would warm her icy bones.
She edged around the pool, dodging a set of dumbbells somebody had left in the middle of the floor, and peeked inside the cedar plank sauna. It seemed to be more like a steam room than a dry heat sauna. The touch-pad controls mounted on the outside wall showed the temperature was already set to the maximum. Excellent. She pulled open the door. A billowing cloud of warm steam engulfed her. She let the door shut behind her and groped through the fog to a low wooden bench on the right. She sat down, drew her knees up against her chest, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the wall.
Now this was heaven. A hundred percent humidity. It felt like July in South Georgia, only without the mosquitoes. The steam permeated her pores, diffusing warmth throughout her body. She thought about Thor mushing across the icy tundra in a dogsled. Did he really fantasize about visiting Miami? She pictured him in a tight t-shirt and cut-offs. And then without.
Sweat began to trickle out of her hair, into her eyes and down her neck. A little of this heat was restorative, but a full five minutes and she’d cook. She uncurled, wiped the sweat out of her eyes, and looked up. Good grief! There was someone on the upper bench across from her. Someone in a long-sleeved green turtleneck and dark ski pants.
She must be seeing things. Hallucinating like…
She stood up. It wasn’t a figment.
“Hello!”
No response.
Jerusalem! What was she doing in here with her clothes on? Dinah leapt up and bumped the door open with one hip to let out some steam so she could see through the mist. She shook the woman’s shoulder. A tendril of wet blond hair fell across her hand. “Hey, you’ve been in here too long. Come out!”
One thin green arm fell off the bench and dangled, limp as a vine. Her bright red fingernails looked like blossoms.
“Valerie!”
Dinah held open the door with one hand and turned off the steam.
“Val, wake up!” She reached in and shook her again. No movement. She was unconscious.
The door wanted to fly shut. Dinah looked around desperately for something to prop it open. Her eyes lit on the dumbbells. She let go of the door and ran to get them. She grabbed up the ten pounder. A fiery pain shot up her left arm and she remembered that she’d been shot. She hefted the five pounder in her left hand and the ten pounder in her right hand and carried them back to the steam room. She pulled the door open wide and tried to prop it open with the dumbbells, but it continued to slide.
Skitt! She went back for the twenty-pound weight. She carried it in her right hand and another five-pounder in her left and stacked them in front of the door. This time it stayed open. She shook Val again and felt for a pulse. She couldn’t tell if what she was feeling was Valerie’s pulse or her own trembling. She thought, if I try to lift her off that bench one-armed, I’ll drop her and she’ll break her neck if she isn’t dead already.
“Hang on, Val. I’m going for help.”
She raced back through the locker room, jerked on her pants and shirt, and ran into the hall. The girl who’d been vacuuming was gone and the elevators weren’t there. She took the stairs two at a time and tore barefoot into the lobby, dripping wet, shirt unbuttoned, and yelling for help.
She pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “I think Valerie’s been murdered.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Separate the witnesses. That was Cop 101 back in the States. Apparently, things were different in Norway or else Thor had missed the episode of Law and Order where that dictum was delivered.
Two hours after the discovery of Valerie’s body, Dinah sat at a long conference table in the Radisson business center with Whitney Keyes, Colt Sheridan, Norris Frye, Jake Mahler, Lee Keany, and Rodney Craig. Tipton had been picked to be the first interviewee and ushered down the hall to a different room. Watching over the remaining seven were two uniformed policemen. Legs apart, eyes aloft, side arms at the ready, they stood inside the room blocking the door. Matters had reached a point where the Norwegian police felt obliged to strap on pistols to keep the peace in the wake of the American crime wave. The faces around the table were solemn, if not exactly grief-stricken. Dinah couldn’t judge the emotional impact of Valerie’s murder on anyone else. She hadn’t absorbed the impact yet, herself. Her thoughts kept returning to the scene of the crime, to the moment when Thor lifted Valerie out of the steam bath and they saw that she had been bludgeoned.
Dinah had been allowed to shower and make herself decent, but her alliance with Thor was kaput. It ended when Sergeant Lyby, the policewoman who’d given Dinah a hard time at the airport, noticed blood on one of the five-pound dumbbells that Dinah had used to prop open the steam-room door. When she also noticed blood on Dinah’s hands, the jig was up.
“Dybdahl oughta be here,” said Mahler. “He was here this morning to renege on clearing us to leave. He came to my suite to tell me it was out of his hands until Erika shows up. Then he and Val got into some kind of a rhubarb.”
“About what?” asked Keyes.
“Damned if I know. Two words in, they lapsed into Norwegian and Val left.”
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