“I was telling a joke,” Sigrid explains.
“Really?”
Melinda pulls out into traffic. Sigrid has no idea where they are going.
Or maybe Sigrid has it backwards. Maybe Melinda is a comic genius.
“Wait. Are you joking?” Sigrid asks.
“No. Are you joking about me joking?” Melinda asks.
“No,” says Sigrid. “I’m being serious.”
“When Irv said you’re from Norway, did he mean, like, your heritage? Minneapolis or St. Paul?”
“No. The actual country.”
“Huh. So . . . why do you think your brother killed that woman?”
“Your name is Melinda, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Melinda, there is a difference between what we call the investigative question and the interview question. The first one is what you secretly want to know. The second one is what you ask in order to learn it. They are seldom the same question. That’s the science. The art is engaging your subject into revealing information you want to know through indirect questioning. If you’re treating me as an interviewee here, and you want me to reveal information, you’re going to have to try harder. I won’t blame you for doing it, but you’re going to need to raise your game if you want to win. OK?”
“I don’t remember this coming up in the police academy.”
“They were probably teaching you to shoot instead.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Where are we going?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“You first.”
“Nowhere, really,” Melinda admits. “I was just driving around hoping to ask you a few questions.”
“OK. I need to buy some clothing. Mine were stolen.”
“That sucks.”
“That’s the general opinion.”
“I’ll take you to Target, where you can ‘expect more and pay less.’”
“That sounds ideal.”
The prices at Target are so low that Sigrid feels a momentary pang of guilt for the abducted and enslaved children who surely weaved the clothing with their tiny little fingers. It is unsettling, though, how quickly that feeling fades as she holds up a pair of not-half-bad-looking jeans being sold on sale for twelve dollars: the price of coffee and a muffin in Oslo.
Melinda stands, bored, like a little sister being dragged around town. “They stole your suitcase?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“You’re gonna need a new suitcase,” Melinda concludes.
“They have suitcases here too?”
“They got everything.”
Sigrid’s shopping is partly a solitary affair and partly a team effort because Melinda is obviously under orders not to leave her alone for too long. She does, however, leave her alone long enough for Sigrid to snag the few items she is going to need to carry out her own work in parallel to that of the police department. Luckily, these items are small enough to slip under the clothing in the cart.
Melinda follows Sigrid toward the bathrooms and waits at the end of the short hallway for her to return.
Five minutes later, on reemerging, Sigrid says to her, “I’m still here.”
“We’re all on the same side,” Melinda says, neither convincingly nor enthusiastically.
“Of course we are,” Sigrid agrees.
At the cash register Melinda eyes over the purchases Sigrid isn’t hiding from her in the bag at her feet. “Good haul?” she asks.
“I can’t complain.”
She might have complained, though, because the cashier tried to stack the returned coins on top of the slippery receipt rather than handing over the coins first. They slid off and fell to the floor.
“Sorry. That happens all the time,” the girl says.
“So why do you keep doing it?” Sigrid asks.
“What?”
On the plus side, Sigrid bought a suitcase and new wardrobe for less than the price of the suitcase alone in Oslo with its twenty-five percent sales tax.
The parking lot grew crowded while they were inside. Sigrid looks at her surroundings as they place the suitcase and its contents into the trunk of the police car.
It is a rather desolate place, Sigrid notes, but no worse than certain areas of Oslo that are really an embarrassing knot of roads, roundabouts, warehouses, and sprawl. Areas like Økern. Adding to the general mood of disrepair and neglect is a shack-turned-bar tucked behind the Target that may have once been a homestead in the 1800s and remains standing only because it refused to sell out or fall down. It is the kind of structure that looks to be propped up by spite.
“What’s that?”
“Biker bar. The Inferno. Mean place.”
“You ever break it up?”
“They’re like hornets. They just come back again later.”
Melinda starts the car and switches on the police radio. Unlike in Oslo, where there is constant chatter, here it is mostly quiet.
As Melinda pulls out of the parking lot Sigrid decides to level with her. “You realize I’m going to have to shake you at some point and carry on alone?”
“I’ve been told to follow you but not get in your way,” Melinda says, not taking her eyes off the road.
“Were you supposed to tell me that?”
“Irv said it wouldn’t matter what I tell you.”
“You realize that I’m a section chief and a twenty-year veteran of a police force with one of the highest education levels in the world, right?”
“Yeah. Irv looked it all up on Wikipedia. He said none of that would matter either.”
“You both sound a little cocky to me.”
“The thing about Irv,” Melinda says, “is that he always seems to find the angle on things that no one else has ever thought of before. You should ask him about God sometime. He’s even got that all figured out.”
It’s Contagious
The state university campus is as flat as a pond and as green as its students. Sigrid and Melinda roll through the main gate, which proudly announces the name of the school on a black plaque with gold lettering. There is a long road to the primary visitors lot and it is empty. They park close to an old brick building that squats incongruously alongside a massive modern glass and steel structure housing a new science and engineering center.
It being mid-August, the campus is desolate despite the fine weather. Melinda knows where she is going. She’s been here before.
“It’s the middle of the summer vacation,” Melinda explains. “I doubt anyone’s even going to be there, but . . . it’s your investigation.” She walks like a cowboy
