What happened?” asked Quinn as I slid into the passenger seat. “Somebody see you?”
I shook my head, out of breath, flapped my hand to urge him to drive. He put the car into gear and pulled onto the main road, peering into the rearview mirror to make sure we weren’t followed.
I looked behind us. The road was empty. “Find another place we can pull over,” I said. “Not near here.”
After a few minutes we veered down one side road, then another, driving past farms and villages that weren’t much more than a few houses clustered near a neat white church or café. The Jetta slowed as Quinn made another turn, down a lane bordered by wooden fences thick with blackened rose vines. We passed an overgrown cemetery, its gravestones nearly lost to weeds and creeping ivy. Maybe fifty feet away were the ruins of an ancient stone church, its roof gone and windows gutted. Beech trees grew where its nave had once been.
Quinn stopped the car, switched off the ignition, and turned to me. “So?”
I held out the first dart. “Look at this—careful, it’s still got something in it. I found another one, but it was empty.”
He took it from my fingers, frowning as he studied it. The wintry light made him look younger despite his four-day beard, the scarifications hidden so that it was easier to imagine the face of the teenage Quinn beneath. I touched his cheek, and he flinched.
“Careful,” he warned. He twisted the dart back and forth. “Where’d you find this?”
“On the ground, in the woods. Can you tell what’s in it?”
“No, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.” He glanced into the back seat. “See if you can find something to put this in.”
I found a wadded-up bag that had contained the groceries we’d bought and handed it to him. He wrapped the dart in it.
“Put that in your bag,” he said. “Let me see the other.”
He scrutinized this even more closely, cautiously removing the fletch and sniffing at the empty tube. He covered the cannula’s open end with his finger, tipped it upside down, and checked to see if any residue remained on his fingertip.
“So?” I asked.
“I’m not a chemist. But with a dart like this, my best guess is that it’s some kind of animal tranquilizer. Ketamine or fentanyl. Don’t get any ideas,” he added, and returned the dart to me. “Anything else?”
“Yeah.” I told him about the crude eye carved into the birch tree. “Someone was using that tree for target practice. I found feathers, too, like they’d shot a bird, probably more than one. A raven.” I hesitated. “Look, I know you won’t believe me, but I’ve seen those darts before—one in Victoria Park, one in a parking lot near Harold’s place. Dead birds, too.”
“So, some dead birds, and some darts.”
“And two dead people shot in the eye with no sign of a bullet’s exit wound, and maybe a dog. And a target—”
“That looks like an eye. That is a weird fucking MO, Cass.”
“As opposed to what? Whoever murdered Tommy wanted it to look like an accident. When Ludus Mentis made him freak out, they plugged him with a dart so he couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Getting tased by the cops was icing on the cake. If that’s fentanyl, he was probably already dead, or close to it.”
“Toxicology will show if he had drugs in his system. Your bookseller, too. And maybe the dog. Frigging amateurs,” Quinn muttered, taking out a cigarette.
We returned to Slagghögen. Back in the room I went onto Quinn’s computer. Quinn made himself a rum and Coke, heavy on the Myer’s, and sipped it while I scrolled for news. Other than the obligatory hand-wringing over the circumstances of Tommy’s death—person of color, white nationalists, when would there be a stop?—I came up cold.
“There’s nothing.” I felt like throwing the laptop out the window. “How can there be nothing?”
“It’s London,” said Quinn. “You’re talking nine million people, one dead book guy, one dead black guy. Oh, and a dead dog.”
“And Tindra.”
“A missing girl ain’t news.”
“It will be when someone makes the connection between all of them.”
“For Christ’s sake, give it a rest, Cass!” Quinn’s green eyes were bloodshot, his face more haggard than I’d seen it since we’d met up. “Your book is gone, that girl is gone. You’ve got at least two dead people killed by stupid people. If the girl’s dead, too, that’s too bad. I don’t give a fuck about your boyfriend Gryffin.”
His icy gaze held all the things he’d lost to prison and his work as a contract killer, to heroin and alcohol and despair. I knew he was ready to add me to that list.
“You’re spun, Cass. It’s crazy, all this stuff about voices and the app and pictures moving on the page. None of it makes any sense. You wanted to find that book because it’s worth money and we’d have a nut. So let’s find it. Otherwise we can leave now. Or I will.”
I took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. “Yeah, okay,” I said, and closed the laptop. Quinn’s expression didn’t exactly soften, but the cold rage in his eyes gave way to resignation.
“You know it doesn’t add up to much, Cass. Your darts and some feathers—actually, it doesn’t add up to anything.”
“It does if someone used a tranquilizer gun to kill Harold and Tommy and the dog. And Tindra, for all we know.”
“You can’t prove anything. You got zip, Cassie.” Quinn drained the rest of his drink. “They’ll claim Tommy got taken out in self-defense. A brown-skinned guy at an alt-right rally—witnesses say he swung at somebody, and why wouldn’t he? No one’s come forward to state otherwise.” He poured another shot into his mug. “And where’s his sister in all this? Any mention of her?”
“I don’t know. No.”
I went to the window and stared out at the slag heap. Quinn flopped onto the bed, yawning.
“We can drive to Norderby,” he said. “Have lunch and walk around. If the museum’s open, we can go there. But I gotta catch some z’s. You got me up way too goddamn early.”
Even with his eyes closed, his expression signaled that he was done. He’d given up any hope of us finding the book. He’d given up on me. He was trying to salvage the trip. Pretend we were on vacation, act like normal people. Tomorrow we’d be on a flight back to Reykjavík. He’d remain there. I’d return to my rent-stabilized shithole until I got booted out, go on unemployment and cadge money from my father, use whatever cash I could scramble together to buy booze and drugs so that I could pass out and pretend that I’d never found Quinn again, never lost him, never gave a fuck about him or anything else.
I sank beside him on the bed, placing my hand on his chest. “I just wanted us to be happy,” I whispered.
“People like us aren’t happy, Cass,” he said without opening his eyes. “It’s enough that we’re alive.” He rolled over and didn’t speak again.