19

I started after Brynja, thought better of it, and instead walked up the embankment that led back to the main road, where I had a better view of the parking lot. A figure sprawled beneath the evergreen, his hair a blaze of silver in the cruiser’s headlights. A shadow seemed to obscure his face. Then I realized that was his face, collapsed like a rotting jack-o’-lantern. I quickly retraced my steps.

More cruisers pulled into the lot. Brynja’s screams were swallowed by the blast of a police bullhorn. A cop restrained her as she fought to get to Baldur’s corpse; she pummeled the cop, and a policewoman hurried to pull her away. Lights appeared in apartment windows, and more people began to emerge from the building’s back door. Several cars had pulled onto the side of the main road to rubberneck. A tall man stood beside an older Range Rover, staring at the scene below, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the snow and something cradled against his chest. He seemed to be breathing heavily. When he turned to get into his vehicle, I saw it was the guy who’d chased me—Einar Broddursson.

I glanced back but couldn’t find Brynja in the crowd of cops and onlookers. I hurried to the Opel, started it, and drove back up to the main road. An ambulance wailed past, racing toward the apartment complex, and another police car.

In all the confusion, no one stopped me or the Range Rover a few car-lengths ahead. I remembered that repeated refrain: There are few murders in Iceland. I could only assume that nobody on the Reykjavík police force wanted to miss this one.

Traffic moved slow and tight, which made it easier to keep track of Einar. Sleet crackled like sugar glass beneath the Opel’s studded tires; more than once the car began to slide. I don’t spend a lot of time behind the wheel, and stealing a car belonging to someone whose brother had just been murdered probably wasn’t the best way to ease myself back into crosstown traffic, especially on ice-covered roads in a place where the sun only shines for fifteen minutes a day.

Not to mention the onset of alcohol- and light-deprived psychosis that made me feel as though ants were tunneling into my skull. I knew the signs and I knew the cure. When the going gets tough, the tough get fucked up. I kept hold of the wheel with one hand and dug inside the slit in my jacket until I found the Baggie I’d hidden back in New York.

The Range Rover was a block ahead of me. We were somewhere near the water. From the corner of my eye I saw black sky unrolling above thickets of steel masts. There were fewer cars here, so when the Range Rover slowed, I did the same, letting a truck pull between us in case Einar had noticed me tailing him. I cupped the little glassine envelope in my palm, opened it, and tipped a tiny blast onto the back of my hand; snorted it, then shoved the envelope into my jeans pocket. By now the Opel had drifted into the other lane. I yanked the wheel and hit the wipers, smearing slush and grit across the windshield until I picked out the Range Rover’s taillights through the sleet.

The crystal engulfed my brain like sunrise over an ice floe. Phil was right: This was the stuff. My exhaustion vanished; my eyes could pierce the dark like lasers. The first rush of crank is like a miracle from God: You can’t believe you can feel this great and still be alive. Of course, a lot of times you’re not alive for very long. You have to pace yourself, which is hard to remember when your neurons are moving so fast you can see them dancing in front of your eyes. The trick is to have a goal, something to think about besides doing another line. The difficulty is finding a potentially useful goal. I once spent two days playing Crazy Eights with a bassist and another twelve hours fucking him. Neither of us ever got off, and we might still be doing it if the lead singer hadn’t broken the door down and sucker punched his bandmate.

At the moment, here in Reykjavík, I wasn’t quite that far gone; just wasted enough to think that following a guy I didn’t know down a side road that looked like it’d been firebombed was a good idea. I skirted potholes bigger than apartments I’ve crashed in. Unfinished construction lined both sides of the street, squat duplexes that looked as though they’d been designed by the winner of the Best Gulag-Inspired Architecture Contest. There were no streetlights, no lights in any of the buildings; just graffiti scrawled on an enormous concrete culvert that, judging from tracks in the slush and a pyramid of cigarette butts, had been recently used as a half-pipe by skate kids. At least someone in Reykjavík was having fun.

About three blocks ahead of me, the Range Rover came to a stop, right before the street ended in a tangle of construction equipment. I swung the Opel down the next side street and turned off the ignition. My entire body shook—adrenaline on top of crystal meth: a cardiac-arrest cocktail. Some booze would have calmed me down, and I did a fast recon of the Opel, hoping Brynja might have stored some Brennivín under the seat.

Unless it was in the wheel well, I was out of luck. I considered hanging on to the keys, but decided I’d risk going on foot. If and when the Reykjavík cops got over their excitement at having a real-life murder victim, they’d start looking for the Opel. I wiped the wheel and keys with my scarf and dropped the keys on the seat. Maybe I’d get lucky and one of the skate kids would make off with the car.

I slung my bag over my shoulder and stepped outside. Sleet lanced my face as my hair froze into a brittle helmet. God knows where I’d left my watch cap. The crank made me sweat, so the cold felt nice; a bad sign, but I was too hyped to care. I walked past empty duplexes and piles of black tephra gravel, treacherous going with the icy pavement underfoot, until I reached the block where the Range Rover was parked in front of the last unit.

These houses looked like they’d been built before the money ran out. There were windows, even if most were broken, and the buildings had doors and bright red sheet-metal roofs. Einar’s vehicle was the only car, though two bicycles leaned against the front stoop. The duplex had a good view of a chain-link fence, beyond which stretched a vacant lot where a forest-green excavator gleamed like a Tonka toy that had just been unwrapped.

I stared at the duplex. Its windows glowed faintly with parchment-colored light, and I heard the throb of bass-heavy music. A broken window had been patched with plywood. A shadow moved across another window, and I crouched behind the Range Rover, expecting Einar to materialize with a tire iron. Instead a woman shouted angrily, her voice immediately drowned by music loud enough to make the door shake. After a minute I straightened and peered through the Range Rover’s passenger window.

Inside was a frozen blur. I scratched the ice with my fingernails, then used the spiked wristband to splinter it so I could see the car’s interior. It was empty except for some oversize magazines strewn across the backseat.

Only they weren’t magazines. I saw a flare like Saint Elmo’s fire erupting from a spoon jammed into a man’s tongueless mouth, and beneath this, the corner of another print.

“Fuck me,” I said.

Ilkka’s photos.

I yanked at the car door. It was frozen shut. I banged my fist against it, glancing at the house. The music thumped on and nothing moved inside, so I hammered at the door until the frozen latch gave way. I scrambled into the backseat. I pushed the photos aside so I wouldn’t drip on them, yanked a T-shirt from my bag, then flattened each print on the seat beside me.

They were badly creased, and a corner had been torn from Svellabrjótur, the man beneath the ice. Worse was a long tear in the photo of the girl in the blizzard, like lightning splitting the sky. Photoshop would make it disappear.

But as an investment, a one-of-a-kind original monoprint, the photo was ruined. They all were. I remembered Ilkka’s eerie calm as he peeled the protective tissue from each one; the rapture that filled his face as his masterworks were revealed for the first time to another pair of eyes.

All that malign, beautiful light had been extinguished, and Ilkka with it. If I’d stayed to have dinner with him in Helsinki, I’d probably be dead myself. But I might have learned the secret of those photos.

I stared through the car window at a street glazed black with ice, the rows of shoddy, half-constructed buildings left to collapse beneath the weight of winter and neglect. Whoever wanted these prints had killed three, maybe four, people to get them, then treated the photos like junk mail. They were worthless now to any collector.

But not to me. I grabbed the photos and began to roll them into a tube, when I realized something was wrong.

There weren’t five photos, but six. I shuffled through them again, trying to remember the bizarre litany of names: Door Slammer, Icebreaker, Window Peeper, Spoon Licker, Meat Hook.

And one other. Unlike the rest, it was an interior shot, taken in a darkened room with a wide-angle lens. No windows or lights of any kind. Somehow he’d positioned his camera so that it captured a faint gleam reflected in a fragment of broken glass, a beer bottle, an ashtray where a cigarette still burned.

And eyes. Like the bright pinpoints of rodents trapped in a root cellar—only these weren’t rats but people standing in a loose semicircle, their bodies almost indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness. I could discern the dim outlines of legs and arm, and the curve of a hand cupping a match that illuminated the face above it—a heavyset man with thinning hair and a high forehead, the only figure that might be recognizable to someone who knew him.

Even though I’d never seen him, I knew I was looking at Anton Bredahl. It had to be him: That was why he was so intent on acquiring all six photos. Maybe he thought Ilkka had destroyed it, but here was the proof he hadn’t.

I counted the figures—five. Ilkka would be elsewhere in the room, behind his Speed Graphic. It was a camera you could use for blackout photography: Just replace the ordinary bulb with one that had been coated inside with a special lacquer that would block out all visible rays and only transmit infrared. You’d need a slow shutter speed, like 1/30, and a wide lens.

And your subject would have to be within close range.

I looked closer and saw that there seemed to be a seventh person in the center of the group, head bowed or turned away so that the eyes weren’t visible. When I squinted, I realized what the seventh figure was: an inverted body, suspended from the ceiling by thick chains that I’d mistaken for metal posts. On the floor beneath was a dark object, a bowl or basin.

I swore, rolled the photo into a narrow tube, and stuffed it into the lining of my jacket. I did the same to the others, wrapping them in a spare T-shirt, and stuffed this bulky cylinder into my bag, beneath the Konica. Then I sat and tried to get my shit together.

Snorting crank isn’t like snorting coke. You don’t get that volcanic rush followed by a crash that sends you running for the next line. It’s more a steady pulse of electricity. You’re like one of those corpses hooked up to a battery and galvanized into motion. My heart felt like it was trying to punch through my rib cage. I couldn’t have slept if my life depended on it, though at this point it didn’t seem like my life depended on much.

I looked at the car window and saw a disembodied arm hanging there, fingertips glittering with crystallized blood. I bolted upright. The arm was gone.

I didn’t think I’d done enough crank to get spun, but maybe I should have factored in the general atmosphere of being in a country that looked like the set for a zombie remake of the Shackleton voyage. Nothing was going to make me feel any better, except maybe being able to make someone else feel worse.

I needed a weapon. The glove compartment held only a stash of Icelandic candy bars and documents that identified Einar Broddursson as the Range Rover’s owner. I pocketed the candy bars and retrieved the crank. I guessed Einar had about six inches on me and another sixty pounds. I’d be crazy going up against him, but that was how the berserkers did it, right? I scooped some crystals into my pinkie nail and snorted them. I could smell my own sweat—bleach cut with grain alcohol. Eyes streaming, I grabbed my bag, stumbled out, and walked to the back of the car.

There was still no sign that anyone in the house had noticed me. The sleet had changed back to snow. The rear door’s latch was frozen, so I stepped back and kicked it. The door popped open, and I pulled up the floor liner. There was a large sandbag in the storage area beneath, jumper cables, and a rusted shovel. I grabbed the shovel and headed for the front door of the house.

Inside it was dim and sounded like a battle of the bands where both groups had taken the stage at the same time. The amplified screech of guitars barely held its own against some kind of percolating electronica. I followed the electronica to where candlelight seeped from an open doorway, and stepped inside. Someone screamed, and I saw a figure scramble into the shadows cast by a row of flickering votive candles. There was a narrow bed, a beanbag chair, and a laptop on the floor, opened to a Facebook page.

The music continued to bubble from a tiny speaker beside the laptop. I strode over and stomped on it. The room immediately grew quiet enough that I could hear panting. I grabbed one of the votive candles and traced the sound to a teenage girl cowering against the wall, clutching a blanket. She stared at me, terrified, and babbled incomprehensibly until I ordered her to shut up.

“Where’s Einar?”

She shook her head. I slammed the shovel into the wall so hard the point got stuck in the bare Sheetrock. The girl squealed and gestured toward the hall. I handed her the votive candle, extracted the shovel, and kicked through a litter of shattered plastic back into the corridor. Behind me I heard the front door slam. Run, rabbit, run, I thought.

With the electronica silenced, there was only the blare of some kind of grindcore. I hoisted the shovel and walked toward a glow at the end of the corridor. Tiptoeing was hardly necessary: The chain-saw Muzak made the walls shake. I passed a room filled with cardboard boxes, furniture, rolled-up rugs, lamps. Tarps were nailed across unfinished windows; bare wires poked from the walls. The air smelled of mildew and rotten eggs.

But it was still a lot cleaner than any squat I’d ever seen. And it was warm, which made me think that whoever lived here must’ve figured out a way to tap into the geothermal grid.

Abruptly the clanging music fell silent. I stopped, held my breath, and heard a woman’s querulous voice; then a man’s, reedier than I’d expected from a guy Einar’s size. He sounded pissed off. The music roared back on, then off, then on. I headed for the kitchen and halted just outside the door.

Einar and a buxom, well-coiffed blond woman sat at a table with the remains of a take-out pizza, a bottle of vodka, and an iPod, screaming at each other. Plywood had been nailed across the room’s sole window, but someone had tacked a brightly colored piece of fabric onto it, and a matching rug covered the concrete floor. Coats hung from the wall—Einar’s loden-green overcoat; a black anorak; a cotton-candy-pink fake-fur jacket. A laptop and a stack of papers had been shoved into a corner beside a set of iPod speakers.

It was like some weird diorama of twenty-first-century domestic life, illuminated by a conical, battery-powered Ikea lantern: Homeless Middle-Class Couple Arguing Over the iPod. I waited till the music rose to a deafening pitch, then walked over and kicked the chair out from under Einar. He hit the floor, bellowing. I grabbed the battery lamp and shone it in the woman’s face.

“Get out of here,” I said.

Her face twisted as she swung at me but missed. I clocked her with the shovel’s handle, and she dropped like a stunned grizzly. The room fell silent as the iPod skidded across the floor. Einar cried out, bending over her, then turned to me, his face white.

“You killed Gilda!”

I nudged her with my boot. “She’s not dead.”

He shouted and lunged at me, and I decked him with the shovel. He fell, groaning. I waited for him to catch his breath, then prodded him with the shovel’s blade.

“Where’d you get those photos?” He stared at me blankly. “Where’s Quinn?”

“Who?”

“Don’t you fuck with me.” I swung the shovel across the table, scattering plastic glasses and plates. “What did you do with Quinn?”

“Nothing! I haven’t seen him.”

“Like you haven’t seen Baldur? Or Ilkka? Who are you?”

“Einar. Einar Broddursson.” He raised a hand imploringly. “I’m sorry, you’re in the wrong house. We have no drugs here, no money—”

“I don’t care about your goddamn house. I’m looking for Quinn O’Boyle. Since you just killed his partner, I figured you might know where he is.”

“Quinn? What are you talking about?” The reedy voice cracked. “I didn’t kill Baldur! Fucking shit—”

He started to bolt. I kicked him and he reeled against the wall. I drew the shovel’s blade to within an inch of his throat.

“I saw you at Baldur’s apartment. I went inside your car; I found the photos. I know where they came from; I know who took them. Don’t lie to me; I was fucking there. Now tell me where Quinn is.”

“I don’t know. It’s true! I swear it. I drove by, I saw the accident and recognized Baldur, that’s all. Just like you, if you stopped to watch.” He stared at the door behind me, his eyes widening. “Where’s my daughter? If you hurt her, I’ll—”

“If you want to keep being her daddy, you better answer me. Inside the flea market—I saw you watching me, and then you came after me with a gun.”

“A gun?”

“Or something. You were reaching into your pocket.”

“I was reaching for my fucking mobile.” He looked incredulous. “I saw that Quinn was gone; I thought I would help you find him. You looked lost. Yes, I know, I’m a terrible, stupid person.”

He had to be lying, though it was hard to square this whimpering hedge-fund manager with whoever had crushed Ilkka’s head with a silver punch bowl. This guy was big, but he didn’t look like he’d spent much time at the gym lately. Maybe it was the crank, but I couldn’t get a fix on him. He was unshaven and wore a pinstriped suit jacket and trousers, creased button-down shirt, leather shoes stained white with road salt. It was a look incongruous with his feral amber eyes and the fact that he reeked of cheap vodka. He kept glancing at Gilda’s unconscious form like it was the Pietà someone had taken a hammer to.

“Yeah, stupid just about covers it,” I said at last. “Why were you at Baldur’s place?”

“It’s on my way home.”

“To here? This your squat?”

He said nothing until the shovel poked him again. “Only for now. I lost my job, and then we lost our house. We have no family in Reykjavík, so we moved in here. The buildings are just going to waste. We haven’t damaged anything.”

“The girl’s your daughter?”

“Élin. She’s just a girl, please—”

“Anyone else here?”

“No. In some of the other places, maybe. People move in and out, squatting. I try to keep Élin away from them. It’s difficult.” He pushed a hank of blond hair from his face and looked at me beseechingly. “We’ve lost everything.”

“Yeah? Ilkka and Suri and Bredahl lost more. Who killed them?”

The beseeching look hardened into an obdurate glare. I shifted, keeping a tight grip on the shovel. My skin was starting to itch from the crank. I raised my foot and pressed my boot’s steel-capped toe against his groin.

“In the parking lot where Baldur died—you were holding something. What was it?”

He remained silent, then finally pointed at the table. I leaned over and saw an object behind the bottle of Pölstar, a wooden bowl with a lid, about six inches in diameter. Its lid was ornately carved with abstract swirls that, when I looked more closely, resolved into three interlocking, skeletal hands with a ghostly face in the negative space between them. I stuck the shovel under my arm and picked up the bowl.

“What is this?”

“An askur. An antique ash bowl. Very old. Five hundred years, maybe.”

I ran my fingers across its carved top, over the whorls smoothed from god-knows-how-many other fingers over five centuries. The lid was hinged with silver and fastened by a tiny silver latch. I weighed it in my palm. “Is there something in it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”

I slid my fingernail beneath the silver hasp, then carefully raised the lid. Einar gagged and I covered my nose as a putrid stench filled the air.

The box contained a wad of red-and-white paisley cloth. I picked it up gingerly, saw that it wasn’t paisley but the remnant of a white T-shirt, clotted with dried blood. I grimaced, then unfolded it.

Inside was a clenched human hand, its flesh the color of milky ice. The nails were painted indigo; there was a ring on the third finger, a thick silver band inset with a moonstone. Several blond hairs had snagged on the stone’s setting. I raised the hand to the light and saw where the bone had been severed, frayed skin wrapped around tendrils of vein and tendon. She’d had delicate wrists; it wouldn’t have taken much of a blade. Just a very sharp one. I bound the grisly relic in its soiled wrappings and replaced it in the wooden bowl, leaned on the shovel handle, and stared at Einar.

“Did you know whose that was?”

He shook his head without looking up.

“I do. Her name was Suri. She lived in Helsinki. I saw her there two days ago. She was murdered after I left. What is her hand doing in your antique bowl?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” He lifted his head, his face stricken. “I didn’t open it; I didn’t know it was there.”

“Did she?” I pointed at Gilda, still out cold.

“No! Of course not. I just arrived here; we hardly spoke. She wanted me to turn off the music and talk to her; we were arguing.”

“About what?”

“About nothing! We were always arguing. About Élin; she was always worried.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“What? No, of course not!” He stumbled to his feet, cheeks splotched with anger. He was younger than I’d thought, maybe thirty-five. With a better haircut and shave, he’d be someone you’d trust with your money, if you’d never seen the movie Wall Street. “Who the hell are you? Why are you here? Why did you follow me? Answer me!”

“I was with Baldur’s sister. She’s talking to the cops now. Either you tell me what happened, or I’ll call them. Then you and Gilda will have something else to argue about.”

His face went slack. After a moment he leaned back and gazed at the ceiling.

“It’s my brother,” he said. “Everything in the car—it’s his. He’s mentally ill. Schizotypal—it’s a milder form of schizophrenia. He’s supposed to take medication for it but he never does. He lives on his own in the highlands. I hadn’t seen him in a while, almost a year. Then he called early this morning and asked if I’d pick him up at the airport. He wanted a ride to Kolaportið. He said he was going to meet some friends. It wasn’t open yet but he said that was okay, so I got him at Keflavik and dropped him at the market and left. He said he’d call me later but he never did. I saw he’d left some things in the car but I didn’t look at them; I was busy, I had some work to do downtown. Then when I was on my way home tonight I saw there had been an accident. I was curious, and…”

“Did he know Baldur?”

Einar ran a hand through his hair. “Of course. Everyone knew Baldur. Everyone here knows everyone. They did business together sometimes.”

“Vinyl business?”

“Nei. Cocaine, mostly. Baldur knows people in Norway and Estonia, and my brother has trouble with drugs. He thinks they work better than his medication. Maybe they do, I don’t know.”

“Why would he kill Baldur?”

“How would I know?” Einar ran a hand through his hair and groaned. “God, this is horrible! Some drug thing?”

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“His given name is Jonas Broddursson. But since university, he calls himself Galdur.”

Help Galdur.

The breath froze in my throat. “Galdur?”

“It’s not his Christian name,” Einar went on. “It’s an old word that means magic, sorcery. But Jonas made it his name, declaring he is now a sorcerer. He went to university in Oslo to study astrophysics. Jonas is a kind of genius. But he got involved with the black metal scene there, and that was when he began to act strangely, maybe fifteen years ago. He was nineteen or twenty. I am a year younger, and I went to visit him once. He and his friends, they would all be at Helvete—you know, the store where all the famous black metal musicians would hang out. Before they were all dead.” His mouth twisted slightly. “Back then, everyone wanted to believe in the Black Circle, black magic. Most just pretended to.

“But Jonas really did—he really thought it was true. He told me he had risen the Devil by sacrificing a man. He said he could kill people by looking at them. At first I thought he was just making it up, and then I thought maybe he was doing a lot of drugs. And he was. But really, it was the illness. They did a genetic study here; it showed that brilliant mathematicians are more likely to become schizophrenics. Our great-uncle, he went mad; he was a biochemist. In Jonas it was simply less severe. Or so it seemed.”

“What about you?”

He bared his teeth in a humorless, vulpine grin. “I was also good at mathematics, but I went into the banking business. It would have been better for Jonas if he had done so as well. He went to prison in Norway for killing a man. He claimed it was self-defense, that the man had attacked him at a club. There were witnesses, people who tried to catch the man, but he ran away. He followed Jonas back to his flat and jumped him again, but this time Jonas beat him unconscious with a guitar. He broke his neck, then drained the blood from his throat and kept it in the refrigerator. That is where the police found it when they arrested him. Jonas said the blood was to raise the dead man, so he could use him as a sending—a ghost that would do his will.”

“What kind of guitar was it?”

Einar scowled. “I don’t know! An electric one. Obviously he was mad, so they hospitalized him, then sent him to a minimum-security prison on Bastøy Island. When he was released he returned here. He gets a disability from the government and lives in the interior, so he bothers no one. He is very antisocial. I was surprised when he called me from the airport.”

I thought of the sixth photo, of Baldur’s corpse, and the bodies in Ilkka’s house. My stomach knotted. “Quinn—does your brother know him, too?”

“I’m sure he does. He has the stall with Baldur, yes? Jonas might have seen them both at Kolaportið.”

“Would they have gone willingly with him?”

“Of course, yes—why not?” Einar raised his hands. “You have to believe that I had no idea about this or that Jonas would kill someone now, after all he’s been through. I simply can’t believe it.”

“You just said he killed someone in Oslo!”

“That was manslaughter, not murder.”

“When you picked him up at the airport—where’d he been?”

“Helsinki.”

I swore furiously. “Is your brother rich?”

“Of course not. He lives on disability and a little money we inherited from our parents. But it’s not expensive to fly to Helsinki. And he is permitted to travel. Within the Scandinavian countries you don’t even need a passport if you’re a citizen. You think he murdered Baldur for money?” Einar laughed. “He’s not that crazy. Baldur has no money. No one here has money anymore.”

So who was willing to pay half a million euros for Ilkka’s photographs? For a minute we were both silent.

“Have you tried calling Quinn?” said Einar.

“I don’t have a cell phone,” I admitted. “Or his number. He said he’d come back for me this afternoon at Brynja’s. He never showed up, and he never called there.”

“He’s your lover?”

“A long time ago, when we were in high school. We hadn’t seen each other since then.”

Einar shook his head. “My brother’s friends, the only people he remained close to—they were from when he was young, in Oslo. Something ties us to the past.”

He looked at Gilda, still out cold, then at me. His gaze fell upon my wrist, and he frowned. “Where did you get that?”

I raised my hand, the spiked band brazen in the dim light. “Brynja gave it to me; she has them in her store. Why? Do you have one?”

“No,” he said slowly. “That was my brother’s idea. His friends—his followers—they all wore them. It was a sign of loyalty, and that you had taken part in an initiation. There were only a few of them. And now Brynja has them in that elf shop?” He grimaced. “Everything is devalued, right? She’s smart to sell them.”

“She says no one buys them.”

“Well, maybe that’s good, too. Listen. I need to see Jonas. If he’s in trouble, if he’s really done this thing—Jonas will talk to me. You have to let me go to him.”

“So call him.”

“He has no phone either. He lives very primitively.”

By now I was vibrating into methamphetamine overdrive. “What if Quinn is with him, too? He and Baldur were both supposed to be at the market, but they never showed up. What if your brother kidnapped them and killed Baldur, but Quinn is still alive?”

“This is crazy.” Einar’s voice rose to a desperate pitch. “Quinn isn’t with my brother! I have nothing to do with any of this. I want only to be sure that Jonas is okay.”

“He is obviously not okay!” Einar stared at his hands, and I prodded him again with my boot. “I need to find Quinn. I’m going with you. You know where your brother is now?”

“You have no idea what you’re doing! It’s a long way from Reykjavík—five or six hours.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how far it is.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He rubbed his eyes and pointed at the shovel. “Only if you promise not to hit me with that.”

I looked at Gilda. “And she stays here.”

Einar said nothing. I grabbed the bottle of vodka. We both stared at the carved wooden bowl on the table.

“Leave it,” I said, and turned to go.

“No.” Einar picked it up. “I don’t want it here with Gilda or Élin. They know nothing of any of this. We can dump it somewhere in the country.”

“Whatever. Let’s go.”

“Okay. But I need to get—”

I dug the shovel into his back. “You need to get in the fucking car.”

He grabbed his overcoat. With a farewell glance at Gilda, he followed me outside.