American by Day

any money, and he left no evidence behind. After the fact, it took Sigrid’s team over two weeks to reconstruct his movements. They fielded calls from movie theaters, hotels, restaurants, and from tourists and motorists. She and her partner, Petter, had built out Sheldon’s time line until it made sense, and eventually a navy dive team was deployed to locate and photograph a tractor that had been parked creatively at the bottom of a lake.

Sigrid did not know Sheldon. Not beyond the moment they spent together on the grass, clutching each other, outside the summer cabin as he lay dying. She had, however, had the chance to explore his mind and personality—both of which were expansive. She is half the age of the man who did all that. She is unquestionably in better shape now than he had been—the jet lag notwithstanding. Unlike him, she speaks the local language, and her life isn’t at risk. Most important, Sigrid doesn’t have a traumatized child in tow as she searches for Marcus. There really is no good reason, she figures, that she shouldn’t be able to outperform the old man aside from three facts: She has to shake the police with whom she is now living; she was never trained by the U.S. Marines during a war to avoid the enemy as a scout-sniper; and she simply doesn’t have the audacity of Sheldon Horowitz.

The first is circumstantial, the second is beyond consideration, and the third . . . well . . . it invites an interesting question:

“What would Sheldon do?” Sigrid asks aloud.

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘What would Sheldon do?’” Sigrid repeats.

“Who’s Sheldon?” asks Melinda, not glancing away from a doctor show on TV.

“A man who always seemed to find a way.”

“Maybe we should hire him,” she says.

As Melinda watches House on television, Sigrid uses the laptop to find what she needs. Her plan is simple—ditch Melinda—but it seems to require an unusual recipe of information, including satellite im­age­ry, some luck with line-of-sight considerations from Target’s parking lot, reasonable nighttime ambient temperatures, train timetables, and a prostitute. This all takes time to look up. In the meantime, she hears Dr. House yelling, “If her DNA was off by one percentage point, she’d be a dolphin!”

After ten minutes her plan has come together: She knows what to do, where to go, and how to get there. All she needs to do now is send a text message to Juliet, which she does.

Melinda laughs.

“Good show?” Sigrid asks.

“I think Hugh Laurie is sexy. Don’t you?”

A Sly One

When you asked me what time Target closes,” says Melinda from the driver’s seat of the patrol car, thirty minutes later, “it hadn’t occurred to me that you were actually wanting to come back here tonight.”

“Are you paid overtime for this?” Sigrid asks.

Melinda makes a thoughtful if sour face and says, “That’s a good question.”

“I’ll suggest it to Irv.”

According to the dashboard, the ambient temperature in the parking lot outside Target at 9:48 p.m. is 18 degrees Celsius, or 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about as warm as it gets in the daytime in Oslo. Behind Target is a fence that keeps children and hobos from wandering along the single operating railroad track that cuts across the county, far inland, parallel to the St. Lawrence.

Inside the superstore, staff wear beige trousers with the same pleats no one in Norway has worn since the Thompson Twins were ascendant. Their polo neck T-shirts are crimson red, and though it is night, and though the store is nearly empty, each cashier sports a smile of unnatural permanence. Above them, the store is lit with a checkerboard of rectangular lights through a dropped ceiling, shining down on a polished linoleum so clean it could warm the heart of a prison warden.

Sigrid watches a woman push a red cart holding two flatscreen TVs and a bag of school clothes.

Another heavy woman with thick ankles dotted with pimples is holding up what appears to Sigrid to be identical pairs of beige panties, each large enough to cradle a bowling ball. Through a pair of frame­less reading glasses she is reading the fine print on the satin tags. She looks up at Sigrid to read her face as they pass each other.

A nighttime news program is showing on twenty widescreen televisions. A distinguished man with a deep, calming voice is presenting a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll putting Barack Obama three points ahead of John McCain in the presidential elections.

Sigrid’s plan to shake Melinda is subtle and simple, and was proven effective years ago against a woman who was also smart, driven, but inexperienced: herself. Nine years back, in 1999, Sigrid was working a city beat and had slowly followed a woman through the Glas Magasinet department store on Stortorvet in the city center across from the Oslo Domkirke. The woman—a drug addict—had grabbed a Michael Kors handbag and stuffed it with perfume, leather gloves, and wallets. Sigrid pursued her undramatically through the store with the intent of making eye contact, telling her to stop, defusing the situation, and taking her quietly into custody.

Sigrid reasoned that as a druggie with money issues—and possibly psychological ones—the woman was probably used to being followed around for one reason or other. And so when she started walking faster through the woman’s clothing section in the direction of the bathrooms, Sigrid radioed to her colleague, Lukas, and told him to meet her outside the small bathroom hallway on the third floor that had only one way in and therefore only one out.

“Stay here,” she’d told Lukas, who took position at the choke point of the hallway as Sigrid walked confidently down the hall and into the women’s restroom. After a thorough search, she found it completely empty: no open windows, stalls empty, no storage closets, no space under the sinks.

“Did she come out?” Sigrid asked Lukas when she emerged.

“No.”

“Changed her clothing?”

“No one came out.”

“She must not have gone in,” Sigrid concluded.

“Or she turned into a bird and flew out the third-story window,” Lukas said.

“I don’t like either option.”

“Let’s