Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(14)

But instead of being her rock, instead of being the best friend she thought she would always have to lean on, Gunnar had left her.

She had come home from work and he was gone—along with the dog they had bought together. A week later, he served her with divorce papers. Her spiral back into drugs didn’t take long from there.

When Carl Pedersen found her, pulled her out, and forced her to get clean, she made herself two promises. One, she would never, ever touch drugs again. And two, she would never, ever fall in love again.

Turning away from the window, she began to pace, her thoughts returning to Pedersen’s murder. There were many avenues of investigation she could take. While there had been no physical evidence discovered at Pedersen’s home, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t turn up something, eventually.

The problem was that the first forty-eight hours after a murder was the most crucial for finding clues and tracking down the killer. After that, the odds turned against investigators—dramatically so. People’s recollections of what they saw or heard began to fade. Physical evidence started to degrade. Short of a confession or DNA showing up in a database, the crime wasn’t very likely to be solved.

Because Pedersen’s corpse had been in the house for days before being discovered, the killer already had a significant head start. Worse than that, the killer appeared to be a professional, someone who had targeted Pedersen because of his position as an intelligence officer. Whoever the assassin was, he probably wasn’t the type to offer up a confession or to allow his DNA to be uncovered.

With Kripos—Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service—leading the murder investigation, there were plenty of experienced hands ready to run down even the smallest of leads. That left S?lvi and NIS the freedom to get creative.

She already had their best teams combing CCTV footage from bus stations, railway stations, border crossings, and ports of entry. Anyone suspicious was run through facial recognition and compared against their databases, as well as all Interpol red notices from the last decade.

The killer hadn’t always been a pro. At some point, somewhere, he must have made a mistake. As far as she was concerned, no stone was too small to overturn. She was going to find that mistake.

But to find it, she was going to have to come at the case from a much different, much more personal angle.

Walking over to her desk, she glanced at the enormous etching hung on the wall behind it. It depicted Huginn and Muninn—thought and mind—the two mythological ravens said to bring the Norse god Odin his information.

She sat down, logged onto her computer, and thought for a moment. Then, she tapped out an email. Reading it back, she shook her head, deleted it, and tried again.

Ten minutes and three drafts later, she finally had something that struck the right tone.

It was a big ask—on a lot of levels. It was also embarrassing. She had to do it, though. Carl Pedersen would have done it for her.

Looking at the time, she debated whether she should head home or just crash on the couch in her office. It was late and she was wrung out—both emotionally and physically. The pull from Oslo’s seedier neighborhoods as she drove back to her apartment would be strong. Probably too strong to resist. She convinced herself it would be better to stay.

In the morning, she’d go for a run around the lake and then shower in the NIS locker room. There was a spare change of clothes in her office closet. By all appearances, she looked like a hard worker—and she was. Get far enough under the surface, though, and you saw that working—sometimes even spending nights at the office—was how she walled off her demons.

But there was no reason for anyone to suspect what she was wrestling with. Carl Pedersen had seen to that. He kept her drug use secret and had made sure that when she returned to work that she aced her physical and no residual traces of illicit substances were detected in her system.

That was the kind of friend he was. He had not only helped her weather her own particular storm, but he had lashed himself and his career to her. Sink or swim, they were in it together. He believed in her that much.

Ever the espionage chieftain, he had prepared a cover story for her. As far as anyone at NIS was concerned, her leave of absence had been due to the dissolution of her marriage. Dropping hints in the right hotbeds of office gossip, many coworkers suspected that she had gone through a period of depression. It explained everything without rendering her disqualified for her position. Human beings were logical creatures. Give them a simple, plausible explanation for an issue and, absent any contradictory evidence, they’d accept it.

And despite her fear, everything had worked out—just as Pedersen had said it would. There was only one wild card: the person who had suspected her drug use and had reported it to Pedersen.

They hadn’t spoken. They hadn’t even seen each other since she had returned to NIS. But that was the person she needed a favor from now. It was why she had agonized over the wording of her email. She was only going to get one shot, if at all.

The CIA’s Oslo station chief was as buttoned-up and professional as they came. There’d be a lot of questions. There’d also be some painful recriminations. They had been friends. Good friends. But a lot of murky, not-so-nice water had flowed under the bridge since.

Making up her couch, she turned out the lights and lay down. She tried not to think of Pedersen, but as soon as she closed her eyes, her mind was filled with him. The thin gray mustache, the chain-smoking, the turtlenecks and perfectly creased trousers. She remembered his smile, and his warmth, and his patience.