Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

better than the first, now that he was an experienced cop. Maybe he had thought wrong. His subconscious demanded time to deal with it, and there was nothing he could do about it, however tough a cop he was.
    Bummer.
    *
    Reykjavík Metropolitan Police Headquarters was a busy place early on Sunday morning. Exhausted uniformed police led pale and shaky citizens along the corridors, taking them through the later stages of the weekly Saturday-night arrest cycle.
    As soon as Magnus arrived at his desk, he turned on his computer. He smiled as he saw the e-mail from Johnny Yeoh. The kid had come up with the goods.
    At the morning meeting, Baldur looked as if he hadn’t slept much either. Dark bags drooped under his eyes, and his cheeks were sunken and grey. Magnus surveyed his fellow detectives around the table; they had lost a lot of their earlier bounce.
    Baldur began with the latest reports from forensics. With Agnar, Steve Jubb and Andrea, three of the four sets of fingerprints in the house were accounted for. The footprints were confirmed as Steve Jubb’s. But there were no bloodstains on any of Jubb’s clothes, not even the tiniest spatter.
    Baldur asked Magnus if it would be difficult to smash someone over the head and then drag them out of the house and twenty metres down to the lake without getting any blood on your clothes. Magnus had to agree that it would be difficult, but he contended it was not impossible.
    ‘I spoke to Agnar’s wife yesterday,’ Baldur said. ‘She’s an angry woman. She had no idea of the existence of Andrea. She believed her husband had kept his promise to be a good boy.
    ‘Also she has been through Agnar’s papers and discovered that he was in a much deeper financial hole than she had realized. Debts, big debts.’
    ‘What has he been spending the money on?’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor asked.
    ‘Cocaine. She knew about the cocaine. And he gambled. She estimates he owed about thirty million krónur. The credit-card companies were beginning to complain, as was the bank that held the mortgage on their house. But now he’s dead, a life insurance policy will take care of that.’
    Magnus did a quick mental calculation. Thirty million krónur was a bit over two hundred thousand dollars. Even by the standards of Iceland’s debt-addicted citizens, Agnar owed a lot of money.
    ‘All in all, Linda had a motive to kill her husband,’ Baldur continued. ‘She says she was alone with her young children on the Thursday night. But she could easily have slung them in the back of the car and driven to Thingvellir. It’s not as if they could tell us, one’s a baby and the eldest isn’t even two yet. We need to keep her in the frame. Now, Vigdís. Did you speak to the woman from Flúdir?’
    Vigdís ran through the interview with Ingileif. She had checked out Ingileif’s alibi: she had indeed been at her artist friend’s party until eleven-thirty on the evening Agnar was murdered. And with her ‘old friend’ the painter afterwards.
    ‘She might have been telling the truth about that, but we think she was lying about other stuff,’ said Magnus.
    ‘What other stuff?’
    ‘She was very coy about Agnar,’ said Vigdís. ‘My hunch is there was more going on there than she let on.’
    ‘We’ll go back and talk to her in a couple of days,’ said Magnus. ‘See if her story sticks.’
    ‘Any progress on Isildur?’ Baldur asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘I found someone calling himself Isildur on a Lord of the Rings forum on the Internet. I got hold of his e-mail details and asked a buddy of mine in the States to check him out.’
    ‘Are you sure it’s the same one?’
    ‘We can’t be absolutely sure, but it looks highly likely to me. This man is obsessed with magic rings and Icelandic sagas, just like Steve Jubb.’
    Baldur grunted.
    Magnus went on. ‘His name is Lawrence Feldman and he lives in California. He has two houses, one in Palo Alto and one in Trinity County, which is two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. That’s where the e-mail message came from.’
    ‘Two houses?’ said Baldur. ‘Do we know if he is wealthy?’
    ‘He’s loaded.’ Although Johnny hadn’t been able to pull the police files on Feldman, if indeed there were any, he had found plenty of stuff on the Internet about him. ‘He was one of the founders of a software company in Silicon Valley, 4Portal. The company was sold last year, and each of the founders walked away with