by Mark Davis
Back on the road, the last vestiges of suburbs gave way to the bucolic Norway that matched Elizabeth’s expectations. The overcast day couldn’t bleach out the vivid colors of the countryside, iridescent grass, Van Gogh bales of hay, red barns with green thatch sprouting on their roofs. The farmland rolled to a horizon that looked as if giants had once played marbles with boulders. The road rose into highlands and soon split a forested mountain chain. They crested a hill and a fjord opened before them.
A ferry sat by a dock, the gate up and the attendants waiting to lead the two police cars into an empty lane with reserved spaces at the bow end of the ferry. The craft was off in a minute. Elizabeth rolled down the window of her police car. Wind cut through the strait and raised small white caps and flecks of foam off the gray waters. After a night of interrupted sleep, the cool air made Elizabeth feel fresh and alert.
Ten minutes later, the ferry slowed to moor into its berth at the other side of the strait. Their caravan went straight out as soon as the metal arm was up. They took a winding ribbon of a road that followed the mountainous terrain up and down. A half-hour later, the driver parked next to the dark blue sedan on a hillside.
Reporters were waiting for them, a clot of television cameras and upheld smartphones tracking the inspectors as they walked by. No one barked a question. Elizabeth had been at a few public crime scenes in her career, but she had never encountered a press mob that was so respectful.
One question finally came from the leader of the pack.
“Inspector, sir, can you please tell us the identities of—”
Stenstrom waved him off.
A park ranger bounded forward to lead the inspectors to huddle over a map. A thin, balding man, with the world-weary expression of a detective, joined them. Stenstrom said something and they lined up behind the park ranger. Nasrin motioned for Elizabeth to get in line behind her. Several policemen guarded the entrance to a hiking trail. A sign in Norwegian and English said that the trail to the Preikestolen was closed for the day.
They began the ascent, leaving the journalists and a small crowd behind.
“How long?” Elizabeth asked.
“Two hours at brisk pace,” Nasrin Jones said.
“I do it in an hour and a half,” Inspector Dahl said.
“I have no doubt that you do,” Nasrin said.
“Elevation?” Elizabeth asked.
“Six hundred and four meters,” Dahl said.
Almost two thousand feet.
“And the name of this place, preka?”
Nasrin shot a village-idiot glance at Elizabeth.
“You’ve really never heard of this?”
“Humor me.”
“Preikestolen—means the Pulpit Rock, or preacher’s rock,” Nasrin said. “World famous. You’ll recognize it when you see it.”
The trail, all loose rubble and gravel, became suddenly steeper. Elizabeth felt the burn in her chest and her breathing edge into a pant. Nasrin gave her an ‘are-you-all-right’ look. Elizabeth often ran along the C&O Canal and did a fair amount of hiking in the Blue Ridge two hours west of her U Street condo. Exertion always began like that for her until she adjusted, her breathing regularized, her pulse—still quickened—leveled off.
The trail became less steep as it wound through piney woods, a large blue lake glinting through the trees. The trail grew tough again as they stepped up stairs hewed out of natural stone.
Catching her breath, Elizabeth glanced backwards and saw the radio towers and church steeples of a nearby town. The trail flattened and became a wooden walkway across a green, mossy bog. Back on the trail, they climbed through birch woodland surrounded by giant boulders. The air was cool and sweet and the sun stung her cheeks and the backs of her hands.
They reached the top of the mountain in a little more than two hours. Sweat clung to her skin, making Elizabeth feel clammy inside her hiking clothes. They came to a crest and clambered over a ridge of stone.
“This is the Lysefjord,” Dahl said.
The blue of this water was as dark as that of the deepest, coldest ocean. But it was no ocean. It was a thick channel that ran between gray cliffs topped by green pastureland and massive trees under mountain tops riven by bright-white glaciers. Most of the ridges and peaks of granite were well below them.
The Pulpit Rock was an enormous spade-shaped outcropping that tapered to an irregular point over the vast space overlooking the fjord. A diagonal crack ran across its flat base. It was big enough to hold a hundred people.
“It is 25 meters by 25 meters at its widest and longest,” Dahl said, as if reading Elizabeth’s mind.
The rock had only two people on it, a Norwegian policeman and a policewoman standing guard at a line of yellow police tape where the precipice joined the mountain. Several dozen hikers, like spectators at an amphitheater, had spread out on cliffs that rose behind and above the Pulpit Rock. Many had raised their smartphones to capture the investigators arriving at the scene.
Inspector Stenstrom led the way and came to a stop in front of the police officers. Elizabeth stepped around him, over the tape and out onto the rock.
The policewoman shouted something in Norwegian at her, but Stenstrom barked a countermand.
The wind rippled Elizabeth’s windbreaker and ran her hair sideways. She stiffened for a moment, as if the wind might lift her up and send her soaring over the fjord.
Elizabeth looked around. Above the vista of mountains and vast waters was a realm of pure nothingness. Space defined the scene, carving the mountains and the bowing horizon, an emptiness filled only with the molecules of thinning, light-blue atmosphere.
“No further,” the policewoman said in English.
Elizabeth nodded.
She looked straight up to the dark purple zenith, dome of the cosmos. She looked down and studied the seven shoes set in a neat line two-thirds of the way to the tip of the rock.
An elegant pump, metallic blue, sharp heel jutting into a surface fracture in the rock.
A white running shoe with creases, breaks and grass stains from many runs.
A man’s executive shoe, highly polished and black, strings neatly tied.
An old tattered house slipper.
A lady’s boot, high and sexy, the dark leather slick and shiny in the sun, top-half folded over.
An open-toed Birkenstock flat.
A light-brown man’s penny loafer.
The toe of each shoe pointed at the cliff’s edge like a compass needle aiming at magnetic North.
THREE
After catching up her on sleep at a small hotel for tourists and hikers, Elizabeth met Inspector Dahl, who drove her to the Lysefjord nature center.
Outside, the museum was a modernist take on an old stave church. Inside, a bored girl in a park service uniform behind the reception desk chuckled at something as she scrolled on her smartphone. Behind her were set pieces on the birch forest, stuffed mountain goats, replicas of giant cod and the history of the area that lit up when one approached.
Inspector Dahl motioned Elizabeth to a side door and led her into a birch-paneled conference room with a long table of unstained birch. On a sidewall a long mural of the Norwegian forest unfolded, a bas-relief of light, blonde wood representing trees against a dark-brown background. The front of the room was a panel of windows that afforded a spectacular view of the sun creeping down the opposite cliff of the Lysefjord. A bell pitcher of stainless steel sweated beads of moisture on a mat in the middle of the table.
Nasrin Jones and Lars Stenstrom both nodded at Elizabeth as she entered. Next to Nasrin was the same thin, bald man who had joined them yesterday. There were three more men she had not seen before. Inspector Dahl took a seat and motioned to Elizabeth to do the same. She took an empty chair next to Nasrin.
Stenstrom made introductions all around the table.
The bald man from yesterday was introduced as Harold Kober of the Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste.
<
br /> “PST is their Scotland Yard,” Nasrin whispered in Elizabeth’s ear, leaning in close enough for Elizabeth to feel the warmth of the inspector’s breath.
One of the strangers was a counselor official from the British Embassy, but she did not catch his name.
Another, a burly, red-headed man with a round, ruddy face and a chinstrap beard was Charles Bowie, from the U.S. embassy. Next to him was a thin, man with strands of hair across a bald pate and a hang-dog expression, Jim Norris, an FBI agent.
“And I am Lars Stenstrom, Chief Inspector of the Direktoratet for naturforvaltning.”
Nasrin looked up, startled.
“I appreciate you conducting this meeting in English for our benefit,” Nasrin said. “But you say you are chief inspector of what?”
“The Miljødirektoratet, to be precise,” Stenstrom said with a bland smile. “The Directorate of the Environment, parks division.”
“You’re a bloody park ranger?” Nasrin said. “And you’re leading a homicide investigation?”
“Yes, that is the protocol,” he said. “Bloody or not.”
“And this is fine with you?” Nasrin said to Kober.
“Why yes, of course, Inspector Stenstrom has jurisdiction within the park,” the little man said with a friendly smile. “I am more than happy for him to take the lead.”
Elizabeth smiled inwardly. In the many investigations she had assisted in the United States, federal agents had been ready to draw guns over who got to unwrap the yellow crime scene tape. Kober acted with all the deference of a pastor passing the salt at a church picnic.
“After all,” Kober said, “Lars Stenstrom is chief inspector over all of the park service.” He turned to Stenstrom and dipped his head. “I am honored to work under your direction, sir.”
Nasrin snorted.
“So what’s this all about?” asked Bowie, the redhead from the U.S. Embassy.
“Seven victims, three from the UK, the rest American,” Stenstrom said. “Among them, two senior corporate executives from the U.S., one a recently retired pharmaceutical CEO, a semi-famous British novelist, a very prominent playwright from London. All seem to have left a single shoe with an ID in that nice little row and jumped together to their deaths.”
“Time?”
It was Norris, the FBI agent, who barked the question, chin down while taking notes.
“We can narrow the jump to between 7:40 and 7:50 a.m.,” Stenstrom said.
“Witnesses?” Nasrin asked.
“We are canvassing the locals, putting out the word on social media for hikers who might have been in the area,” Stenstrom said. “Cruise lines frequent the fjord, but not that early, otherwise we would have abundant video.”
“They would have had to have started hiking up the mountain at what time?” Norris asked.
“Around 5 a.m., if they took time to compose themselves before jumping,” Stenstrom said. “We believe they each carried a torch to manage the trail in the dawn light, and took them with them over the edge.”
“A torch?” Elizabeth asked.
“That’s the Queen’s English for flashlight,” Nasrin said. “Where are we now on bodies?”
“District water police picked up one more last night, giving us only three,” Stenstrom said. “No notes found on any of them. Just the drivers’ licenses left in the shoes. None of the seven have returned to the hotel.”
“So how could four bodies still be missing from a straight fall down to the rocks?” Norris asked.
“They must have hit outcroppings and shot out over the Lysefjord, or rolled down the rocks and got pulled into the water,” Stenstrom said. “These channels cut as deep as the mountains around them, with roiling currents that move up and down with the water column. The current runs straight to a large channel that empties to the North Sea. So we’re currently checking every skerry between the point of impact and the outlet to the main channel.”
“Skerry?” Norris asked.
“Small islands of rock and coral at the mouth of the fjord,” Nasrin said.
“Who do we have?” Norris asked.
“Let me take you to the morgue in Stavanger later today,” Stenstrom said, “and we can all countercheck identities there.”
“Mobiles?” Nasrin asked.
“None were recovered with mobile devices,” Stenstrom said. “But they had all left plenty in the hotel—smartphones, pads, laptops. So we still have to regard the ones whose bodies were not recovered as potentially alive, if they jumped at all. We’ve collected—”
“They all stayed at the same hotel?” Elizabeth asked. “In Stavanger?”
“Yes, at the Victoria,” Stenstrom said. “And credit card receipts show that they had dinner together at the World Tree Pub the night before. A preliminary look into their email accounts shows no direct contact between them prior to that dinner.”
“How could that be?” Norris asked.
“It is a suicide pact,” Elizabeth said.
All heads turned to her.
“Most likely,” she continued, “they were joined together by the same website.”
“So they were all depressed, just got together in a chat room and decided to take a swan dive into a fjord?” It was Bowie, the embassy counselor.
“No, this isn’t that simple.”
“Then what?” Bowie leaned back. He wore a silver tie that cascaded down the ridges of his gut like a waterfall.
“There is a belief system at work here,” Elizabeth said. “Intelligent, imaginative people who were highly successful in very different domains. Something brought them together. Something shiny that lured them in and took control of them.”
“How could this be?” Kober asked.
Lars Stenstrom sat back, eyes narrowing as he appraised her.
“Yes,” he said, “something like that.”
___________
Elizabeth loved a hearty lunch, but on this day she had a cup of yogurt. She had enough experience with morgues to know that it was never a good idea to have too much in one’s stomach.
A caravan of police cars delivered the party of investigators to the examining room of the Stavanger coroner, a modernistic steel and concrete structure attached to the side of a hospital. A policewoman signed them in. She led them down a hall and through glass doors into an autopsy room of white tile and a dozen steel dissection tables with faucets, runnels and steel basins.
The room was chilly and thick with a familiar scent of hospital bleach and floral spray. Elizabeth always found that scent accentuated rather than masked the underlying stench of decomposition.
Three naked bodies were splayed out on steel tables under pivoting medical lights. One of them was a pear-shaped woman in her late fifties, with an apricot patch of pubic hair and dark-red hair slicked to her skull. The woman’s body bore the characteristic Y-shaped incision of an autopsy. Around the back of her hairline, Elizabeth could see the subtler suture marks from the removal of her brain.
“Anne Shrewsbury?” Nasrin asked. “The mystery writer?”
Stenstrom nodded.
“Front is too fine, almost undamaged,” Kober said. “She must have landed on her back.”
Shrewsbury’s face had a composed expression, as if she had just closed her eyes to prepare for a writing session.
“And so she escaped the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” Bowie said. “Sucks for her.”
Stenstrom locked eyes on Bowie for a moment.
“There will be respect in this room,” he said.
The next table held a young man’s body, the head exploded like a pulpy fruit that had burst in a microwave. His one remaining eye stood out on a stalk, like the eyeball of a crab.
“Hit a rock on the way down,” Norris said.
“His name is Mike Drummond, thirty-one,” Stenstrom said. “He was rising up through the ranks of PubX, the global PR firm, vice president, North America. Res
igned last year to pursue outdoor activities in . . . uh, Bend, Oregon . . . Lots of Facebook postings on rock climbing, hikes, kayaking.”
“I guess the outdoor life didn’t fill the void,” Bowie said. “Could’ve done this at home.”
Stenstrom cast Bowie another hard stare.
“Actually, Bowie is right,” Nasrin said. “Why come all the way from the Rocky Mountains—”
“Cascades. I grew up outside of Eugene. And it’s Charlie.”
“—Cascades, Charlie, just to jump off a cliff halfway around the world?”
“For a belief,” Elizabeth said. “And to join with his companions in that belief.”
“Even though they may not have known each other?” Stenstrom asked.
Elizabeth could only shrug. There was still so much to learn.
The third body was a slender woman, blondish hair with a sole strand interwoven purple and green. Her face was swollen on one side and mashed like a boxer’s on the other, arms and legs broken and twisted into unnatural angles. She had a small tattoo under her left collarbone that spelled out a message in Gothic letters: “Think It and It Will Happen.”
“Sophia Goddard,” Stenstrom said. “An administrative assistant to the CEO of a small Internet firm in Milton Keynes.”
His voice went down an octave.
“Only twenty-four years old.”
“And whom are we missing?” Nasrin asked.
“Sandra Armstrong, CEO of Therapso . . . Kenneth Woods, executive vice president of XRO Energy . . . Lionel Jacobson, playwright … and one Daryl Parnell, fifty-eight, a widower and restaurateur from Atlanta.”
“How many were married?”
“None,” Stenstrom said. “Armstrong, Woods and Shrewsbury were divorced. Parnell widowed, as I said. The others had never married.”
“I can see the headline now,” Charlie Bowie said. “Suicide of the Singletons.”
Stenstrom turned to Bowie to say something, shook his head instead, and then turned to Norris and Nasrin.
“I will leave it to you to bring me whatever information Scotland Yard and the FBI can collect from next-of-kin and other sources,” he said. “We will meet at 9 a.m. By that time, our digital forensic expert will be ready to report.”