She doesn’t need whiskey, though. She first needs the clear stuff. Aisle two has that, and she finds four bottles that she’s going to need later and places them in her basket. They have a fake Russian name and are bottled in New Jersey, but they are one hundred proof, and that’s value for money.
What she wants for herself, though, is rum.
Rum is not so popular in Oslo. Ron Zacapa 23, which is good, has more or less completed its world domination and now colonizes the upper shelves of all the Vinmonopolets, leaving the lower shelves for Bacardi, which is less for drinking than spilling on the floors of bad clubs. Here, though, is a bottle she once bought at a duty-free in Brussels. The El Dorado 21. And it is only a hundred dollars.
That same bottle would have been over three hundred in Oslo.
“Excuse me,” Sigrid says to the man at the counter, who resembles a leather-clad bear. “I’d like that bottle of El Dorado Twenty-One, please. It’s in the locked cabinet.”
It is ten o’clock at night. There is no music in the store. A quartz clock ticks behind the man.
“That’s a hundred bucks plus tax. You know that, right?”
“It’s a bargain, believe me. You should try it.”
The man snorts through his fur. “I can’t afford that,” he says, collecting a cabinet key attached to a giant plank of driftwood so that, she assumes, it won’t be lost or stolen or carried off by someone smaller than himself.
When he returns with the rum and starts ringing up the sale, he looks down at the vodka she’s stockpiled like artillery rounds.
“You know these other bottles are garbage, right? Even the Royal Gate is better than those.”
“It’s what I need.”
As she waits for the man to charge her credit card she watches the silent television playing above his head. A portly middle-aged woman is standing on a ledge in front of four enormous red balls mounted over a pool of water. As Sigrid stares, trying to figure out the purpose of this game show, a massive wall swings into view, slapping her from behind and sending her hurtling over the top of the first ball before she falls headfirst into the gap with the second ball and then sort of ricochets between the two until dropping face-first into the pool below.
“What is that?” she asks as he hands back the card.
“Wipeout.”
“Why would people put themselves through that?”
“For your viewing pleasure. And money.”
“What channel’s it on?”
Back at the motel, on the bed, the television tuned, Sigrid pours a generous portion of rum into her bathroom’s tumbler. Shoes off, toes out, she closes her eyes and sniffs, allowing it to transport her to places where the colors are primary and rich, the sea is turquoise and white, and the sunset creates a new kind of evening warmth in the company of people who could talk for hours and hours about forensics, criminal investigation, and comparative methods of violence reduction. With some great music playing, of course.
She touches her lips to the rum and draws the tiniest of sips.
The phone rings and she ignores it.
She takes another, longer, and more languorous pull, allowing it to roll across and around her tongue for the duration of two, three, and finally four rings before swallowing. The warmth of the Caribbean glows inside her and for a brief moment she is young and hopeful and possibly someone else.
She answers the phone.
“Hello?”
From the phone comes a cold bitter wind that blows from the lips of Sheriff Irving Wylie.
His tone is the message, so she holds the phone away from her ear. Whatever he’s ranting about, an arm’s length away, now sounds like a couple of bumblebees in divorce court.
During a pause, when Irv stops ranting to inhale, Sigrid places the receiver against her face and says, “Everyone knows where I am, Irving. I wanted to get an early start when we look for Marcus tomorrow. Have a few moments alone with Frank Allman. What else did you think I was going to do, Irv? Really. I flew here from Norway. I’m not going to sit around in your jail cell until your schedule clears up.”
Irv grumbles in what might have been Hebrew, Latin, or Greek.
“How’d it go tonight?” Sigrid asks, pouring more.
Irv says something about no one getting shot.
“Come on,” she urges. “How did you deal with the protesters?”
“It was a mob with pitchforks going after innocent monsters, but monsters all the same.”
“Is that how you treated them?”
“No. I treated them like legitimately angry citizens and members of my constituency who deserved to be understood, in the hopes it might calm things down.”
“You talked to them?”
“No. I sent the local reverend. Or, more to the point, I asked for his help and he begrudgingly obliged.”
“That was either very cowardly or very wise,” Sigrid says.
“It might have been both.”
“So why do you sound like your puppy died?”
“You alone?” he wants to know.
Sigrid isn’t sure why he is asking. “Yes.”
“I’ve come around to the idea that maybe Lydia committed suicide and Marcus . . . I don’t know, failed to stop her or something. The thing is, Fred Green doesn’t want me to arrest Marcus.”
“Why doesn’t Green want you to arrest Marcus?”
“Because we might let him go.”
“Perhaps because it’s late, and I’m drinking, Irv, but I’m not following you.”
“I’ve been rolling it around in my head and the best I can land on is this: It would be worse to arrest Marcus and then let him go than to not arrest him at all.”
“But the alternative to murder would be suicide, and that would be a bad conclusion too.”
“Yes. But an unsolved crime is better than a solved one where justice is denied. In the first instance the police are simply uncaring or incompetent. In the second, we’re actively racist. Which is what releasing
