She has attended a few European conferences that have aimed to link academics with policymakers on matters of organized crime, cross-border cooperation, interagency workforce guidelines, new findings on smuggling routes, and the confusing overlap between criminal and terrorist activity. Three trips to Brussels. One to Geneva. But rather than exchanging ideas, the academic and policy practitioners were more likely to exchange fluids. Little was produced by such events aside from bastard children, misunderstandings, and heartbreak, so she stopped going when she had the choice.
More interesting and applicable to her job is Norway’s 1,600-kilometer border with Sweden, which has made smuggling and illegal immigration more of a problem since Norway joined the Schengen Agreement in 2001. That agreement opened the borders for freer movement of goods and people. It also created new undercover opportunities in Sweden in cooperation with the police in Gothenburg and Stockholm. She liked her Swedish police colleagues, aside from their stuffiness, and working undercover helped her rise more quickly in the ranks. But there were no planes in those jobs.
The first flight is only a few hours. There would have been enough time for a movie, but she opts for music and reverie. She chooses classical; a selection from the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who are playing something by Vivaldi. It is a solid choice as background noise to blot out the engines.
Norway disappears below her and exposes proof that there is a wider world. It looks like fresh air outside but it is separated from her by layers of plastic.
The latte-colored seat beside her is empty, and she stretches out by filling it with the correspondence between her father and brother, a bottle of water, the in-flight magazine, and that book by David Sedaris she’d failed to even start reading on the beach. It was one of two books she’d brought along. As the sun breaks through the clouds she feels momentarily hip and up to date. She opens to the copyright page. The cover art, she learns, is called Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette and is an oil on canvas piece by Van Gogh, sheltered in Amsterdam. Sigrid is no expert on these things, but the style seems to have more in common with Elvis on black velvet than The Starry Night.
The only reason she’d been at a bookstore at all was because Eli had insisted she start reading again. This was after Eli’s victory with the television streaming service, and—strangely—she didn’t find the two contradictory at all.
“You want me to start reading again because I don’t have a cat?” Sigrid quipped.
“What does a cat have to do with it?”
She returns the book to her bag for a second time because the author’s chipper tone disrupts her angst about finding Marcus.
The second book—insisted upon by Eli—is about yet another alcoholic male cop with a secret past unable to get along with authority. For no logical reason, though, he’s taking point against a serial killer in a Nordic country with one of the lowest crime rates in the history of the world. The murders are so ghastly, they should have made global headlines but instead only rattle the tranquility of a small town from which no one ever moves away or thinks to worry.
After an hour she is bored. As a professional investigator herself, she would have liked—just once—to have seen something of her own experience at least obliquely referenced inside a book that professes to be about her own life. Instead, the fictional investigation proceeds on instinct, character, happenstance, natural talent, and coincidence. It is a world without procedures, rules, templates, investigation strategies, analytical frameworks, resource allocation plans, time lines or punch clocks. It is uninformed by the realities of police work and does not acknowledge the existence of women unless they are the source of sexual tension or else have been physically dismembered.
She flags down a stewardess, who has been wearing the same smile since takeoff, and orders a Bloody Mary with a slice of lemon.
The letters demand her attention but she’s not ready to read them. Sigrid opens her iPad and creates a simple spreadsheet, which she populates expertly with the dates franked by the U.S. Postal Service on each letter. She builds a chronology that results in time series data about when the letters were sent. She has no questions or hypotheses now. She is simply setting up the frameworks that will allow for patterns to emerge from the data. From these, observations will be made that should lead to questions derived from the facts of the case. This is “terra firma.” Observation first. Questions next. Interpretation last.
Was any of this going to be productive and give her insight into Marcus, his life, and—if necessary—his whereabouts? Who knows. That’s how it really works in police investigations. No wonder no one writes about it.
Taking a break, she flips from the music selection to the films. One involves robots beating each other up. It looks promising. Unfortunately there is no time left to watch it all; she’d hate to miss the third act.
“Ma’am?” comes a man’s voice.
Sigrid looks up. A handsome man is smiling at her and she can’t think of a good reason why.
“Yes?”
“You’re working quite intensely,” he says in English.
“Is that a problem?”
“No. I . . . was wondering if you’d like a drink.”
The man is wearing an outfit provided by an airline, they are not in a bar, and he’s leaning in for an intimate and yet completely unthreatening personal conversation in the way that only gay men can. But for a brief, awkward, and mentally unhealthy moment she registers none of this and basks only in the blinding light of his generosity.
“Sure,” she says.
“The same?”
“Sure,” she says.
“What are you working on?”
“A Bloody Mary.”
“I meant the document.”
“Oh,” she says, looking down. “I’m looking for emergent patterns in the data using a grounded approach in order to advance
