The cold doesn’t bother me anymore. Twenty-three days at Svartmyr and my body’s learned to ignore what it can’t change. I’ve worked construction sites in January, dug foundations when the ground fought back like concrete. This is just another hole in the earth, another job where my hands do what my brain tells them while better-educated men watch from heated tents.
The fractured ribs tell a story I’ve read a hundred times: perimortem trauma, the bone breaking while still fresh, while blood still pumped and nerves still screamed. I adjust the scale bar beside the remains, the yellow plastic garish against dark peat. Three clicks of the camera from different angles. My breath fogs the viewfinder. I wipe it clear with a calloused thumb and shoot again.
The field notebook comes out next, leather cover stiff with cold. I sketch the fracture patterns with fingers that stopped shaking from the temperature weeks ago. Each line deliberate. Each notation beyond reproach. Because that’s what men like me have to do. Work twice as hard, document three times as thoroughly, give them no excuse to dismiss what I’ve clawed my way toward understanding.
The skeleton lies in classic Viking burial position, arms crossed over chest, legs extended. Corroded iron rivets scatter around the remains like dark seeds: all that’s left of the boat that carried this warrior into the next world. Everything appears textbook authentic. The stratigraphy’s right. The artifacts match the period. The preservation’s consistent with nine centuries in acidic peat.
Except.
Except for something I can’t articulate yet. A wrongness that sits in my gut like bad coffee, that makes me photograph the same angle four times instead of three. The kind of instinct you develop when you’ve spent years reading what bones refuse to say out loud.
I’ve learned to trust that instinct. It’s kept me alive in places where academic credentials mean nothing.
The crunch of boots on frozen ground announces her before she speaks. I don’t look up from the pelvis I’m exposing with a dental pick, each scrape revealing bone the color of old coffee.
“Sigrid wants the samples rushed.” Ragna’s voice cuts through the wind’s howl, thin and tight. “Priority analysis.”
I set down the pick and reach for the rib fragment I’d already bagged for extraction. The bone’s lighter than it should be, porous from its long sleep in the peat. When I climb the ladder, Ragna’s already got the evidence log out, pen shaking in her grip. Not just cold. “You alright?” I ask, though I know better than to expect honesty.
“Fine.” She scrawls the catalog number, letters cramped and uneven. “Just tired.”
Our fingers meet during the handoff. Even through two layers of gloves, I feel how cold she is: the deep cold that comes from inside, not from the Arctic air. She clutches the sample like it might escape and retreats toward the mobile lab without another word, her headlamp beam swallowed by darkness within ten meters.
I work another hour alone, darkness pressing against the generator’s light like something physical. The peat surrenders each bone with a wet sucking sound: centuries of acidic preservation undone by my dental pick. I’ve excavated dozens of bog bodies across Scandinavia: leather skin like ancient upholstery, faces frozen in their final moment, fingernails still holding traces of their last meal. This one’s different. The bones gleam too white where I’ve cleaned them, arranged with geometric precision no natural burial achieves.
I photograph the surrounding matrix from six angles, documenting the soil stratification my university colleagues might ignore in their rush to publish. My hands know what my mind doesn’t want to accept yet.
Something here doesn’t belong to the Viking Age.
I peel off frozen layers in the equipment shed’s diesel-warmed air. Peat crumbles from my thermal gear like ancient skin. Erik Voss materializes from the corner shadows, gray coat snow-dusted, those ice-blue cop eyes cataloging my evidence bags with professional hunger.
“Find anything interesting?” His voice carries twenty years of unsolved cases.
I recognize another man the system tried to break. “Just old bones.”
The lie tastes like metal. We both know I’m protecting something neither of us understands yet.
The satellite phone’s buzz cuts through diesel warmth, Sigrid’s voice clipped, professional, wrong. “Lab. Now.”
Eleven forty-seven. Nothing good happens at this hour.
I drag the parka back over shoulders that haven’t been warm in weeks. The walkway creaks under my boots, wind trying to peel me off into darkness. That shipping container glows like a surgical theater, and through the frosted window I catch her: platinum bun perfect as always, but her hands shake over whatever’s spread across that steel table.
The door fights me. Ice in the hinges, or maybe just reluctance. Metal scrapes metal, and I’m inside, shaking off crystals that melt instantly into dark patches on my shoulders. The heater’s doing its pathetic best, pushing warm air that dies two feet from the vent. My face prickles with the temperature shift, forty degrees in three seconds, the kind of shock that makes your sinuses ache.
Sigrid doesn’t turn. That’s the first tell.
She’s got both hands on the examination table now, not just one. Palms flat, fingers spread, like she’s holding herself up or holding the world down. That cashmere fleece she ordered from Oslo probably cost more than my first semester’s tuition. It doesn’t have a single stain. Mine’s got peat ground into the fibers so deep it’ll never wash out.
Her shadow stretches across the photo wall, elongated by the overhead fluorescents into something that doesn’t look quite human. Behind her, the documentation stares back. Rows of skulls and femurs and vertebrae, each labeled with grid coordinates and catalog numbers. We’ve been living with those images for weeks now. You’d think you’d stop seeing them.
You don’t.
Those empty sockets follow you everywhere in this room. Track you while you work, while you eat the sandwiches you shouldn’t consume in a sterile environment, while you pretend the cold and the dark and the isolation aren’t getting to you. Right now they’re all looking at Sigrid’s rigid spine, at whatever’s got her standing like she’s forgotten how to move.
The generator coughs outside. The lights flicker once, twice, hold.
“Sigrid,” I say.
Nothing.
I move closer, boots loud on the ribbed metal floor. Close enough to see her reflection in the steel table. Her face colorless, jaw set.
She doesn’t speak. Just slides the papers across the steel, that whisper-soft sound like secrets being passed in church. I catch them before they reach the edge, leave smudges on the pristine white. Construction worker’s hands. They never really clean up, no matter how much you scrub.
The numbers hit me like a fist to the solar plexus.
Sample 7A-North, 900 CE ±30 years.
Sample 7B-North, 2011 CE ±5 years.
My throat closes. Same trench. Same depth. Same goddamn grid square.
I force myself to keep reading, though everything in me wants to put these papers down and walk out into the dark and keep walking until the cold takes me. Sample 7C-North. Sample 7D-North, 2015 CE ±3 years. The bones lie together in the same stratification layer, sealed in peat that should have been undisturbed since Vikings walked this earth.
Laboratory error. My mind reaches for it like a drowning man reaches for driftwood. Sample contamination. Mislabeled specimens. We’ve triple-checked everything. I’ve watched Ragna’s shaking hands follow protocol like scripture.
Each explanation turns to ash before I can even speak it.
I keep reading because stopping would mean acknowledging what the numbers are telling me. Sample 7E-North. Sample 7F-North. The pattern holds. Ancient and contemporary, woven together like someone braided timelines. My fingers leave moisture on the paper. Not sweat. The lab’s too cold for that. Condensation from my breath, maybe, or something deeper leaking out.
“Geologically impossible,” I finally say, and hate how my voice sounds. Like I’m trying to convince myself.
Sigrid’s ice-blue eyes don’t blink behind those expensive frames. She’s been sitting with this longer than I have. Long enough to work through denial and arrive somewhere darker.
“Unless,” she says quietly, “someone opened the bog.”
The words hang between us like a body on a rope.
I set the papers down like they might detonate. My hands (scarred knuckles, broken nails, twenty years of honest labor before I ever touched a scalpel) stay steady through pure spite. She’s watching for the crack, waiting to see the working-class fraud exposed.
“The lab doesn’t make mistakes like this,” I say. Each word costs me. “Someone’s been burying bodies in a Viking grave.”
The silence stretches between us like the kilometers of frozen bog outside. When she finally speaks, her voice has lost that Oslo University polish. Just exhaustion and something darker underneath.
“Twenty years in academia,” she says, still cleaning those spotless lenses. “I’ve seen colleagues falsify data for tenure. Fabricate entire excavations.” Her hands stop moving. “I’ve never seen someone use a Viking burial ground as a dumping site for murder victims.”
The numbers don’t lie, but they don’t make sense either. I’ve triple-checked the calibration, run the samples twice through equipment that cost more than my first car. The peat tells one story: undisturbed layers compressed over centuries, each stratum a page in a book nobody’s opened since the Vikings stopped reading. But the bones tell another story entirely.
I push the report across the metal examination table. The paper whispers against steel like a confession nobody wants to hear.
“Look at specimen 7-B,” I say, tapping the data with a fingernail still harboring yesterday’s dirt. “Femur, adult male, found at 2.[^3] meters depth. Tests to 920 CE, plus or minus thirty years. Right where it should be.” I slide my finger down to the next entry. “Specimen 7-C. Radius and ulna, adult female, same trench, same depth, same goddamn grid square. Tests to 2003.”
Sigrid’s jaw tightens. She’s not arguing. That’s what makes my hands want to shake.
“Equipment malfunction,” I offer, but the words taste like ash. Twenty years of fieldwork, and I’ve learned to trust the science more than my own eyes. The science doesn’t care where you learned it: correspondence courses or marble halls. The science just is.
“The dental work,” she says quietly. “You saw it too.”
I did. Modern amalgam fillings in a skull that should predate metallurgy by centuries. I’d photographed it, documented it, then spent an hour staring at the images, trying to convince myself I was wrong. That maybe Vikings had better dentistry than we thought. That maybe I’d finally lost it, pushed too hard for too long, my working-class desperation to belong finally cracking something fundamental in my brain.
But Sigrid saw it too. And she’s got credentials nobody questions.
The photographs don’t just show bones anymore. They show the end of something. Maybe my career, maybe something worse. I’ve arranged them like I was taught: proximal to distal, cranial to caudal, the grammar of death made orderly. But order’s a lie when the evidence refuses to behave.
“Perfect preservation,” I repeat, but the word tastes wrong. Perfect means predictable. Perfect means the rules apply. These bones break every rule I’ve spent two decades learning to trust.
I can hear it in my own voice. That edge, that need to justify. Like I’m back in those correspondence course oral exams, some professor with three degrees and a family name asking why a construction worker thinks he understands osteology. Proving myself then. Proving myself now. Always proving.
But Sigrid’s not challenging the stratification. She’s not questioning my competence. She’s standing there with her designer glasses in one hand and something worse than doubt in her eyes.
She’s scared.
And if someone like her is scared, someone who’s never had to fight for legitimacy, never had to prove she deserves to be in the room,
Then maybe we should all be terrified.
I watch her fingers work the evidence bag’s seal, methodical despite the tremor I can see now that I’m looking for it. The fabric inside catches the fluorescent light, nylon, maybe polyester. Machine-woven. The kind of thing you buy at any outdoor store in Tromsø.
“Same grid square,” I say, making her repeat it, making it real. “Same depth.”
She nods once, sharp. Professional. But her jaw’s tight.
I’ve cataloged enough crime scenes to know what this means. Someone didn’t just dump a body in the bog and hope for the best. They studied the site. Understood the stratigraphy. Knew exactly where to place modern remains so they’d nestle against Viking Age bones like they’d always belonged together.
Someone who thinks like an archaeologist.
The heater’s death rattle fills the silence between us. I’ve spent three weeks proving myself to people like her, clawing for respect I’ll never quite earn. Now we’re conspirators instead.
“Someone with access,” I say, watching my breath fog the air. “Someone who understands preservation rates, soil chemistry, excavation protocols.”
Someone on this team.
The words stay locked behind my teeth, but from her expression, Sigrid’s already thinking it too.
I’ve watched enough people lie to recognize the architecture of deception. Sigrid’s tremor isn’t fear. It’s rage, controlled and cold. She’s already catalogued the possibilities, eliminated the unlikely, arrived at conclusions she won’t share with someone like me.
“Documentation stays here,” she says. “No digital copies. No preliminary reports.”
She’s not protecting evidence. She’s protecting herself.
The silence stretches like frozen wire. Three heartbeats. Four. Lund’s smile doesn’t waver, but his eyes (those flat green eyes) track Sigrid’s movement to the cabinet with the focus of something that hunts.
“Verification,” he repeats, tasting the word. “Of what, specifically?”
I’ve spent twenty years reading soil layers, learning to see what doesn’t belong. Lund doesn’t belong here. Not in the way his boots are too clean, or how his breath doesn’t fog in the cold that seeps through every crack. It’s something deeper. The wrongness of a predator wearing human courtesy like an ill-fitting coat.
Sigrid’s hand rests on the cabinet, casual, territorial. “Dating inconsistencies. Standard procedure when dealing with peat preservation.” The lie comes smooth, practiced. She’s had time to prepare this answer. “The bog chemistry affects carbon readings. We need to recalibrate against known samples.”
“I see.” Lund shifts his weight, and I catch the outline of something under his parka. Phone, probably. Wallet. Or something else entirely. “The university board will want assurances. They’re already nervous about the timeline.”
“The timeline is fine,” Sigrid says, each word clipped. “Unless you’d prefer we publish findings that can’t withstand peer review?”
There it is: the threat wrapped in professional concern. She’s telling him she knows something, daring him to push harder. My hands have gone still on the bone sample I’d been cataloging. The fluorescent lights hum their endless monotone. Outside, the wind shrieks across the bog like something dying.
Lund’s smile finally cracks, just at the edges. “Of course not. Scientific integrity above all.” He glances at me, and I feel the weight of that assessment: calculating whether I’m a problem or just furniture. “Don’t work too late. The cold does strange things to judgment.”
The door seals behind him with a pneumatic hiss.
I watch her hands move: steady now, professional, but I’ve seen enough crime scenes to recognize the performance of calm. The reports disappear into the drawer. The lock engages with a sound like a rifle bolt.
“Nothing that affects deliverables,” Sigrid says, and there’s steel beneath the academic polish. She turns to face Lund fully, putting her body between him and that cabinet. A territorial claim. “Carbon dating anomalies are common in anaerobic environments. We’re simply establishing baseline corrections before we proceed with publication.”
The lie is good. Technical enough to sound legitimate, vague enough to deflect. But I catch the microexpression that flickers across her face: something between defiance and fear. She’s protecting those findings like they’re evidence in a murder trial.
Which, given what I’ve seen in those preliminary reports, they might be.
Lund hasn’t moved closer, but somehow his presence fills more of the room. The space heater rattles, losing its battle against the cold that follows him like a shadow. My fingers ache around the bone sample I’m still holding. Femur fragment, supposedly ninth century, except the marrow cavity tells a different story entirely.
The fluorescent tubes buzz louder as Lund crosses the threshold, his Italian leather boots incongruous against the laboratory’s industrial flooring. The air shifts: something predatory entering a confined space.
“Timeline concerns are precisely why I’m here,” he says, and now the smile has thinned to something sharper. “Stakeholders become… anxious when unexpected complications arise.” His eyes drift to the locked cabinet, then to me, cataloging. Measuring. “Dr. Magnusson, you understand the practical realities of funded research, yes? Coming from outside traditional academia?”
The question lands like a hook baited with condescension. He knows my background. Knows I’ve got everything to lose.
Sigrid’s hand moves to her throat, unconscious, protective. She’s recognized something I’m still processing: this isn’t about timelines.
It’s about control.
“The timeline holds,” Sigrid says, removing her glasses with deliberate precision. She polishes the lenses with her sleeve: buying seconds to think, I’ve learned. “Verification is standard protocol. Rushing analysis compromises credibility.” The glasses slide back into place, and she locks eyes with Lund. “Your investors appreciate legitimate findings, I’m certain.” Her tone carries an edge sharp enough to draw blood. My heart hammers against my ribs.
The silence stretches like frozen wire between us. Sigrid’s jaw works. Grinding teeth, calculating odds. I’ve seen corpses with more color in their cheeks.
“He knows,” she finally says, voice barely above the generator’s drone. Her fingers drum the drawer’s edge: tap-tap-tap, nervous rhythm I’ve never seen from her before. “Tomorrow I’m driving to Tromsø. Police, not university administrators.”
She meets my eyes. “Can I trust you to keep working if I don’t come back?”
The photographs feel wrong in my hands. Not just what they show (though Christ knows that’s bad enough) but the weight of them. Evidence that could end careers. Or lives.
I hold each image up to the LED work lamp, letting the harsh white light catch every detail. Forensic training kicks in, that cold analytical part of my brain that kept me sane through medical school while working double shifts. The amalgam fillings aren’t just present. They’re recent work. Smooth margins, modern composite bonding technique. Maybe five years old, ten at most.
“When did you take these?” My voice comes out rougher than intended.
Ragna flinches like I’ve raised a hand to her. “Five days ago. After the carbon dating came back wrong.” Her words tumble out fast, defensive. “Dr. Halvorsen pulled me aside, told me to document everything I found but keep it quiet. She said,” Her voice cracks. She swallows hard, tries again. “She said if anything happened to her, I should show you everything.”
The generator outside stutters, and for a moment the lights flicker. Through the lab’s small window, I can see the main tent where the rest of the team is gathering for breakfast. Normal morning routine. Coffee and complaints about the cold. Nobody looking this direction yet.
“Show me the rest,” I tell her.
She pulls a tablet from her parka, fingers shaking so badly she nearly drops it. The screen fills with images. Dozens of them. Systematic documentation of impossible things: modern dental work in Viking jaws, surgical pins in supposedly ancient femurs, a cervical vertebra with drill marks that match contemporary autopsy technique.
I’ve spent twenty years learning to read bones. These bones are screaming.
“Jesus Christ, Ragna. This isn’t contamination. Someone’s been planting bodies.”
The examination table becomes a map of deception. I arrange the photographs in grid formation. Seven sets of remains. Seven impossible contradictions scattered through layers that should be separated by a thousand years.
My camera clicks methodically. Wide shots first, establishing the pattern. Then details: each filling, each surgical pin, each mark that shouldn’t exist. The forensic photographer in me takes over, the part that learned to document horror without flinching. Steady hands. Proper lighting. Chain of evidence.
Ragna hovers at my elbow, gnawing her thumbnail bloody. “If this gets out.”Sigrid knew. That’s why she’s dead.”
The words hang between us like condensation in the cold air.
I pull an encrypted USB drive from my field kit: the one I bought in Tromsø before heading up here, paranoid habit from years of protecting research. “Transfer everything. Your images, mine, the carbon dating reports. All of it.”
She plugs in the tablet with shaking hands. “What do we do with it?”
“We prove it. Soil samples from each location. Stratification analysis. And I’m re-examining every goddamn bone that’s been logged as Viking Age.”
The radar scans glow phosphorescent on my laptop screen, each anomaly a wound in the earth’s timeline. I’m marking the third disturbance, soil compression from within the last five years, maybe less, when the lab door bangs open without warning.
Bjorn. That investment-banker smile plastered across his face like cheap veneer.
“Burning midnight oil, Doctor?” Too casual. Too interested.
My hand moves to minimize the window, muscle memory from years of protecting findings from academic vultures. “Routine documentation. Dr. Halvorsen requested comprehensive cross-referencing.”
“Thorough as always.” His eyes drift past me to the examination table. The photographs. Shit. I’d left them exposed. Seven sets of impossible evidence spread like tarot cards predicting death.
His smile never wavers. But those green eyes calculate, measure, assess threat level.
I pocket my phone, her cryptic message still glowing behind my eyelids. The photographs burn in their locked drawer like radioactive evidence. Through the lab’s frosted window, I track Sigrid’s silhouette crossing the compound. That notebook clutched against her chest like armor that won’t save her.
She knows something. Something worth documenting before witnesses.
Something worth dying for, though neither of us knows it yet.
The hours grind past like bone against stone. I catalog femurs that should be ancient, marking each modern filling with clinical precision my hands learned in night school. Bjorn circles the perimeter, vulture in cashmere, that investor smile never slipping. Ragna attacks Trench 7 like she’s digging her own grave, won’t meet anyone’s eyes.
Four PM. Darkness swallows the bog whole.
Sigrid emerges from communications, face carved from marble. Our eyes lock across frozen mud. She nods once, sharp, final, then vanishes into the lab.
I stay crouched by the radar equipment, breath crystallizing on my collar, watching through that frosted window like some working-class voyeur. The glass distorts everything into impressionist smears, Sigrid’s platinum hair catching fluorescent light, her fingers moving across that keyboard with the kind of speed that comes from fear, not efficiency.
She types in bursts. Frantic clusters of keystrokes, then nothing. Staring at the screen like it might bite back. Then more typing, faster now, the kind of documentation you do when you know time’s running out.
Twice her head snaps toward the door. Waiting for the knock that’ll end whatever she’s recording. I’ve seen that look before. In construction foremen cooking books, in hospital administrators burying mistakes. People who’ve discovered something that’ll destroy them whether they speak or stay silent.
The notebook comes out. That leather-bound journal she guards like scripture, the one she writes in during her tent time when she thinks nobody’s watching. Not the expedition logs we all contribute to, not the official documentation destined for Oslo University’s archives. This is her insurance policy, her personal record of whatever truth she’s uncovered in this frozen hell.
She flips pages with gloved fingers, cross-referencing something on screen with handwritten notes. Her lips move. The laptop’s glow paints her face corpse-blue.
My knees ache from crouching. The cold’s worked through three layers of thermal gear, settling into bones that remember every night I studied pathology textbooks after twelve-hour shifts pouring concrete. But I don’t move. Can’t. Because Sigrid Halvorsen, who never shows fear, who built her career on ice-water composure, is terrified.
And in archaeology, in forensics, in every field I clawed my way into, there’s one rule they don’t teach in universities: when the expert starts running, everyone else should already be gone.
Bjorn materializes from the darkness between equipment sheds like he was born from it. Hands buried in that thousand-dollar parka, breath fogging the generator lights, moving with the easy confidence of men who’ve never doubted their place in the world. The kind of walk I learned to recognize on construction sites. Supervisors who could fire you with a signature, who knew it, who made sure you knew it too.
Sigrid spots him through the glass. Her spine goes rigid, shoulders pulling back in that aristocratic posture they probably teach at Oslo University. The laptop closes with controlled precision. Not a slam. That would show her hand. Not casual either. That would be dishonest, and whatever else Sigrid is, she’s never learned to lie with her body. Just firm. Final. The way you close a coffin.
Something disappears into her coat. Flash of black plastic catching fluorescent light. USB drive, maybe. Or SD card. Small enough to hide, large enough to matter.
Through condensation-streaked glass, I watch their silent film. Bjorn leans in, all teeth and charm. Sigrid shakes her head once. Definitive. The kind of no that ends conversations.
His smile never wavers.
Three minutes. I count them off against my watch’s luminous dial, each second marked by the generator’s diesel heartbeat. Sigrid hasn’t moved. Just stands there, palms pressed flat against steel that’s cold enough to burn, head bowed like she’s studying the metal’s grain for answers it won’t give.
When her hand finally reaches for the satellite phone, it’s shaking. Not the tremor of cold, I know that shake, lived with it through twenty years of jackhammers and concrete dust. This is fear. Pure and simple.
Her lips move. Rehearsing lines for an audience she hasn’t reached yet. Or praying to gods who stopped listening to this place centuries ago.
She punches in numbers. Waits. Nothing but the static of Arctic emptiness.
Static crackles like ice breaking. Her jaw sets, that Oslo-educated determination I’ve seen her wield against grant committees and rival academics. She adjusts the antenna, precise movements, surgeon-steady now, and tries again.
This time something catches. Her spine straightens, mouth forming words I can’t hear through double-paned glass.
Then the lights die.
Not flicker. Die. Complete darkness swallows the camp for three eternal seconds before generators cough everything back to sputtering life.
The phone’s screen is black. Dead as the bones we’ve been cataloging.
Sigrid’s face, though: that’s what stops my breath. She’s looking straight at me through the window, and in her eyes I recognize something I’ve spent twenty years trying to bury: the moment you realize the ground beneath you isn’t solid anymore.
I lift my hand (half greeting, half question mark) but she’s already moving. Coat. Scarf. The mechanical efficiency of someone who’s made a decision they can’t unmake.
She stops at the threshold, fingers on the doorframe. Looks back at her laptop like it’s evidence at a crime scene. Her other hand finds that pocket, confirms whatever she stashed there.
The lights die when she steps outside.
Not her doing. Just timing.
But in this business, timing is everything.
The wind screams across the bog like something dying. I follow the footprints toward Trench 7, my flashlight beam swallowed by horizontal snow. Twenty years of construction sites taught me to read weather: this blizzard’s got another six hours in it, maybe more. The kind that erases everything.
My light catches something at the trench edge. Wrong color. Wrong texture.
I know what it is before I reach the walkway.
Sigrid lies fifteen feet down, her body twisted against the peat like a discarded doll. The platinum hair fans across dark earth, matted on one side with something that froze hours ago. Her designer glasses, the ones she wore like armor against people like me, reflect my beam in fractured starbursts.
I’ve seen enough bodies to know. The fall didn’t kill her.
My hands move on autopsy, documenting what my gut already screams. I descend the ladder, boots finding purchase on ice-slicked rungs. The cold bites through three layers of thermal gear. Down here, sheltered from wind, I can work.
Blood spatter on the walkway above tells the first lie. Impact pattern’s all wrong. Too dispersed, wrong angle. She didn’t fall. Someone wanted me to think she fell.
I crouch beside her, not touching yet. Documenting. The skull fracture runs from left parietal to occipital. Classic blunt force, single strike from behind. But the blood pooled beneath her is minimal. She bled out somewhere else.
Her parka pocket gapes open. I photograph it before reaching in with gloved fingers.
USB drive. Waterproof case, the expensive kind.
And folded paper, the edges crisp despite everything. I unfold it carefully, angling my light.
Lund knows about the others.
Her handwriting. Hurried. Frightened.
The blizzard howls above me, and I’m alone with a murdered woman in a hole in the earth, holding evidence that transforms everything.
I make the rounds through camp like a man checking traps. Each prefab door gets three sharp knocks. Each face that appears gets the same question.
Nobody’s seen Sigrid since she locked up the lab around eleven.
The unease I’ve carried since finding her workspace empty sharpens into something with teeth. I’m halfway back to the main path when my flashlight catches them: footprints in the snow, already half-erased by the wind’s relentless work.
Two sets. One small. The other larger, deeper. Someone walking beside her. Or following.
I track them toward the excavation grid, watching the wind erase evidence in real time. In an hour, there’ll be nothing left. The prints lead past Trenches 1 and 3, veering toward the oldest section of the dig.
Toward Trench 7.
My breath comes harder now, and it’s got nothing to do with the cold. I know where this trail ends. I’ve known since I found her desk lamp still warm, her coffee half-finished.
I just don’t want to be right.
The walkways creak their warnings with each step, wood protesting against cold and my weight. I call her name into the Arctic dark. The wind catches it, tears it apart, throws the pieces back at me like mockery.
Trench 3. Empty except for yesterday’s tarps.
Trench 5. Nothing but equipment covered in fresh snow.
Trench 7 stops me cold.
The safety railing hangs wrong, one section twisted outward at an angle that speaks of violence. Fresh splinters catch my light, pale wood exposed like bone. Someone went through here. Or got pushed.
I don’t want to look down. My hands are already reaching for the radio, but I look anyway.
That’s when I see her.
The light finds her in pieces. Platinum hair first, then the unnatural angle of her neck, then the dark halo spreading beneath her skull. Twelve feet down where yesterday we’d uncovered a Viking warrior. Now Sigrid lies there instead, designer glasses crushed beside her face, one arm flung wide like she’s reaching for something that isn’t there. The peat’s already claiming her, black water seeping into expensive fabric.
My hands know what to do even when my brain’s screaming to run. I check her carotid (nothing, skin like frozen wax) then her pupils, fixed and dilated behind cracked lenses. Rigor’s set in, which means she’s been here hours, maybe since last night when the storm hit. The peat preserved her expression: not surprise, but recognition. She knew who killed her.
Clinical detachment is a muscle I’ve spent twenty years building, through correspondence courses taken in construction site trailers, through night shifts at the morgue while classmates slept in dorm rooms their parents paid for. I flex it now, forcing my vision to narrow, to see only what matters for the report that’ll determine whether I’m credible or just another working-class fraud who got lucky.
The depressed fracture at the left parietal bone measures approximately four centimeters in diameter. I lean closer, my headlamp beam catching the edges. Too clean, too uniform for impact against the irregular basalt outcropping they’ll want to blame. The bone’s compressed inward in a circular pattern, the kind of signature that screams premeditation to anyone who’s read the literature. Something cylindrical struck her. Something heavy. A pipe wrench, maybe, or a geological hammer with the pick end reversed.
I’ve seen this before, in photographs from cases I studied while eating lunch on scaffolding forty meters up. The killer knew anatomy, knew exactly where the temporal bone thins, where a single calculated blow could drop someone without the mess of repeated strikes. Professional. Or someone who’d practiced.
My gloved fingers hover millimeters above the wound, mapping the trajectory without contaminating the evidence. The angle’s wrong for a fall, even accounting for the walkway’s height. She was struck from behind while standing, then carried here and arranged. The blood spatter on the trench wall, I catalog it with my camera, three shots from different angles, tells the real story. Cast-off pattern, arterial spray, all pointing back toward the mobile lab.
They moved her in the storm, counting on the snow to cover their tracks. Almost worked. But peat doesn’t lie, and neither do fracture patterns, no matter how many degrees hang on your wall or whose family name opens doors mine never could.
The USB drive won’t come free. Her fingers have locked around it with the kind of desperate strength that only comes when you know you’re dying, when the last coherent thought firing through your synapses is preserve the evidence. I’ve seen it before in case studies. Cadaveric spasm, they call it in the textbooks I couldn’t afford until I was thirty. The body’s final act of defiance.
I photograph her hand from three angles, the camera flash bleaching her already pale skin into something that belongs in a morgue drawer, not at the bottom of a trench where Vikings once buried their dead. Then comes the delicate work, the kind they never teach you in correspondence courses. Each finger has to be worked back individually, gentle pressure against joints that want to stay frozen in their final purpose.
The drive itself is unremarkable: standard issue from Oslo University, the kind they hand out to graduate students by the dozen. But Sigrid’s labeling is meticulous even in crisis: “Site Analysis - CONFIDENTIAL” in her precise block letters. The plastic feels like a bomb as I slip it into my pocket, warm against my ribs despite the cold.
The graph paper tears further as I extract it, fibers catching on the zipper’s metal teeth. My fingers leave smudges on the evidence. But I need to read it before I make this official, before Voss arrives and everything becomes procedure and protocol.
“Lund knows about the others.”
Five words that turn an accident into murder, a dig site into a crime scene. Others. Plural. Not Viking remains catalogued and carbon-dated. Something else buried in this cursed bog.
I key the radio with hands that won’t stop shaking. “This is Dr. Magnusson at Svartmyr. We have a fatality. Suspicious circumstances. Send police.”
The words taste like failure.
The radio spits static and bureaucratic distance. Four hours. Voss himself: the broken inspector who still dreams about bodies in bogs. Until then, preserve the scene. Nobody moves.
I climb out, mud and ice on my knees, and face the circle of headlamps. Counting. Ragna’s bitten nails draw blood. Bjorn’s expensive parka doesn’t have a single speck of dirt. The graduate students huddle like prey animals. Someone here swung the killing blow, and now we’re all locked in the dark together.
The thermal blanket settles over her like a shroud, silver catching the work lights. My hands don’t shake: twenty years of cutting into the dead teaches you that much. But Sigrid wasn’t supposed to be one of them. She’d sneered at my correspondence degree, sure, yet she’d slipped me that note during yesterday’s briefing. Trust from contempt. Now someone knows what she knew.
The sound cuts through me worse than the wind, raw, animal, the kind of noise you make when your body rejects what your eyes are telling it. I’ve heard it before, in field hospitals and mass graves, but it never gets easier. Ragna lurches away from Trench 7’s edge like the earth itself is burning her, one hand clamped over her mouth, the other white-knuckled on the ice-slicked railing.
She’s going to fall. The thought comes clinical, detached, the way my mind works when things go sideways. But she catches herself, boots skidding on the wooden planks, and I watch her freckles emerge against skin gone the color of freezer-burned meat.
I know that expression. I’ve worn it myself, back when I was green enough to think the dead were still people instead of puzzles. It’s not just shock. Any first-year can handle shock. This is the specific horror of recognition, of seeing someone you argued with over coffee this morning transformed into a problem that needs documenting, photographing, cataloging. Of knowing you’ll be the one taking samples from what used to have a name.
She’s thinking about the last conversation. They always do. Wondering if that argument about stratigraphy methodology was the last thing Sigrid heard from her. Wondering if anyone noticed the exact moment she became the last person to see the victim alive.
The victim. Already my brain’s making that translation, filing Sigrid under case evidence instead of colleague. It’s a survival mechanism, this clinical distance. You can’t do this work if you keep thinking of them as human.
But Ragna’s still at that threshold, caught between the person Sigrid was and the evidence she’s become. She dry-heaves again, nothing left to give, and I should move toward her (offer water, support, something) but I’m watching her hands instead. Checking if they’re stained. Checking if she’s positioned herself to obscure something.
Twenty years teaches you everyone’s a suspect until the body tells you otherwise.
Bjorn materializes from the equipment shed like he was staged there, waiting for his cue. His parka’s still pristine, not a speck of the peat dust that coats everything within fifty meters of the trenches. The zipper’s done up to his throat: nobody dresses that carefully in an emergency. Nobody except someone who knew they’d be performing.
“Nobody touch anything.” His voice cuts through the wind with the kind of authority that makes people’s spines straighten automatically. Not the concerned suggestion of a funding rep watching his investment bleed out in the snow. A command. The kind you give when you’re used to being obeyed.
I watch him move to the trench edge, and it’s a masterclass in calculated proximity. Close enough that the others will remember him showing appropriate concern. Far enough that his thousand-dollar boots stay clean, that he won’t leave any trace evidence in the snow around the walkway. Three feet. Exactly three feet. Like he measured it.
His eyes do a sweep of the scene. Not the horrified dart-and-flinch of someone confronting sudden death, but a methodical inventory. Checking boxes. Cataloging problems.
Yeah. I know that look too.
The satellite phone comes out smooth as a card trick. Gloved hands. When did he put those on? The rest of us are still bare-knuckled from scrambling down into the trench. He turns his back to us, voice dropping into that corporate murmur that carries just enough to sound urgent without revealing content.
“Tragic accident… proper protocols… yes, immediately…”
But his eyes. They keep sliding back to Sigrid’s body with the focus of a man doing inventory, not mourning. Calculating angles. Measuring distances. That’s not how you look at a colleague’s corpse.
That’s how you look at a problem you’re already solving.
My gut twists. I’ve seen enough death to know the difference between shock and assessment.
The wind cuts through my thermal layers while I crouch beside her, my knees sinking into frozen peat. Twenty years clawing my way up from construction sites to operating theaters taught me one thing. The dead don’t lie, even when the living arrange them carefully. I pull out my field camera with numb fingers. Document everything. That’s what separates legitimate forensics from convenient narratives.
The skull fracture radiates from a single impact point. Not the diffuse damage you’d see from tumbling fifteen feet onto frozen earth. I photograph the blood spray on the trench wall, the arc all wrong for gravity. My construction days taught me physics the hard way. Bodies fall predictable. This one was placed, arranged like a museum exhibit by someone who thought archaeologists wouldn’t notice the difference between accident and murder.
The peat gives under my weight like rotten flesh, that same resistance I remember from my first autopsy. The moment before the scalpel breaks through. I crouch beside Sigrid’s body, knees cracking in the cold, and let my headlamp play across her position. She’s arranged too carefully. Her left arm extends toward the trench wall as if reaching for something, but rigor mortis has already set in. That arm was positioned post-mortem, placed with intention.
I pull out my camera with hands that shake from cold and something darker. The university types who run these digs, they see what they expect to see. Ancient bones, ritual sacrifice, academic glory. They don’t notice when the narrative doesn’t match the evidence. But I spent ten years pouring concrete before I ever touched a skeleton, and concrete doesn’t lie about physics. Neither does blood.
Her skull depression is localized, clean-edged. I’ve seen construction accidents: heads meeting rebar, falling from scaffolding. Those impacts create spiderweb fractures, bone fragments driven inward at multiple angles. This is singular, deliberate. A weapon with a defined striking surface. I photograph it from four angles, the flash turning the peat walls into a strobe-lit nightmare.
The drag marks are subtle, almost lost in the trench’s natural irregularities. But there. Two parallel depressions in the peat leading from the walkway edge to where she lies. Boot prints partially obscured by fresh snowfall, size eleven or twelve. Larger than Sigrid’s. I document them knowing the blizzard will erase them within the hour, knowing that whoever did this counted on the weather as an accomplice.
My fingers find her pockets with practiced efficiency, the same methodical search I performed on Jane Does in the county morgue. The USB drive is in her inner pocket, wrapped in plastic. Professional paranoia. And beneath it, folded twice, the note.
The blood pattern makes my stomach clench: not from squeamishness, but from recognition. I’ve seen this before, in autopsy photos from construction site fatalities. Arterial spray arcs across the walkway support beam three feet above ground level, a fan-shaped constellation of droplets that could only come from a skull fracture while standing. The physics are unambiguous: heart still pumping, victim upright, blood ejecting under pressure.
But Sigrid lies six feet away at the trench bottom.
I trace the trajectory with my headlamp, looking for the blood trail that should connect beam to body. Nothing. The peat walls are clean except for excavation marks and the natural seepage of bog water. Someone moved her after the fatal blow, carried her down here and arranged her like she’d fallen. Like it was an accident.
My camera clicks mechanically as I document everything: the beam, the body, the impossible geometry of the scene. The shutter freezes each angle, each damning detail. My fingers are already losing sensation despite the thermal gloves, that deep ache that precedes frostbite. I ignore it. This evidence won’t wait for comfort.
The drag marks resolve into focus when I angle my headlamp lower: two parallel furrows carved through the peat’s surface, running from the walkway’s edge to where she’s positioned. Fresh snow is already filling them, nature erasing evidence with each passing minute. Someone tried brushing them away afterward, I can see the sweeping patterns, but they didn’t understand peat. It holds impressions like wet clay, remembers everything you do to it.
I photograph them from four angles, racing the snowfall, then freeze.
Boot prints. Larger than Sigrid’s size seven field boots. Size eleven, maybe twelve. The tread pattern is distinct even half-obscured by snow. Someone with money was down here.
I work the examination like I’ve done a thousand times, documenting lividity patterns that scream she was moved postmortem. Core temperature puts death between two and four AM: hours before anyone admits being awake. My fingers find the USB drive first, tucked deep in her inner pocket where the cold couldn’t reach it. Below that, folded university letterhead, ink running like tears through expensive paper.
The note unfolds like a confession under my headlamp. Blue ink bleeds through university letterhead. “Lund knows about the others.” Seven words. Seven reasons to kill.
The USB drive sits heavy in my palm, dense with secrets worth dying for. I photograph everything before the evidence bags, but my hands won’t stop shaking. What others? Lund’s always watching, always immaculate, always there.
My thumb hovers over the disconnect button. Something in that single syllable, Voss, carries weight I don’t understand yet. The kind of weight that accumulates over decades of unanswered questions.
“Svartmyr archaeological site,” I manage, forcing the words through a throat gone dry. “We have a body.”
The line crackles. Wind screams past the equipment shed where I’m huddled, trying to keep the satellite phone aligned. My other hand clutches the evidence bag: note and USB drive sealed together, already contaminated by my fingerprints, my desperation.
“Dr. Sigrid Halvorsen,” I continue. “Lead archaeologist. Blunt force trauma to the occipital region. Someone staged it to look like she fell from the walkway, but the blood spatter. Voss cuts through my explanation like a scalpel. Not where did you find her or when did this happen. Just that single word, surgical and specific.
The question throws me. I’ve reported deaths before: construction accidents, a drowning during my residency. Nobody ever asked about position first.
“Trench 7,” I say slowly, brain catching up to instinct. “Bottom level. Approximately two meters down in the peat stratum, near the Viking Age layer. But she wasn’t killed there. The blood. His voice has changed. Sharper now, focused in a way that makes my stomach clench.
I close my eyes, seeing it again: Sigrid’s platinum hair dark with blood and bog water, her body pressed into earth that’s been undisturbed for centuries. Except it hasn’t been undisturbed. Not entirely.
“Disturbed,” I tell him. “Recently. Within the last few weeks, maybe months. The stratification’s wrong. Someone’s been digging here before us.”
The silence stretches so long I think I’ve lost the connection. Then Voss speaks again, and his voice carries something worse than surprise.
It carries confirmation.
I stare at the evidence bag in my hand, the plastic already fogging from my breath in the sub-zero air. Through the translucent material, I can make out Sigrid’s handwriting on the note: precise, controlled letters that must have been written in terror.
“The condition of the peat,” I say carefully, choosing each word like I’m testifying in court. “It’s been compromised. Not just surface disturbance from our excavation. Deeper. The stratigraphy shows backfill: darker peat mixed with lighter sediment, probably within the last six months. Maybe less.”
I hear something on Voss’s end. Not quite a breath, not quite a word. The sound a man makes when his worst suspicions crystallize into fact.
“And the note in her pocket,” I continue, unable to stop myself now. “It mentions ‘the others.’ Inspector, what others?”
The wind hammers against the equipment shed. Inside my thermal gloves, my fingers have gone numb around the phone.
“Don’t let anyone leave,” Voss says finally, and his voice has aged a decade in the span of our conversation. “I’m coming personally. This isn’t the first time.”
I pull the field journal from my parka, flipping to yesterday’s notes with fingers that barely work. The pages are stiff with cold, my handwriting cramped and urgent.
“The stratification’s wrong,” I tell him, watching my breath crystallize. “Layers that should be uniform show mixing. Dark peat cut with lighter sediment, maybe six months old. Someone excavated here before the university permits were even filed.”
The silence stretches. Ten seconds. Twenty. Static crackles like ice breaking.
“Inspector? You still there?”
When Voss finally speaks, his voice carries the weight of twenty years. “I know. I’ve been waiting for someone to dig there again.”
“Third question,” Voss says. Through the static, I hear papers rustling. The dry whisper of old case files being pulled from boxes that should’ve stayed sealed. “Have you found remains that don’t fit your timeline? Modern dental work, synthetic fabrics, anything from the last thirty years?”
The question hits like a fist to the solar plexus. My throat closes. I think of Ragna’s trembling hands, her refusal to meet my eyes when I asked about the carbon dating. The amalgam filling I’d spotted in that skull we’d catalogued as ninth century. The fragment of Gore-Tex buried three meters down.
The line goes dead before I can ask what he means. I stand in the generator’s diesel haze, watching snow bury Sigrid’s blood trail. Twenty years. The phrase loops through my exhausted brain like a skipped record. I’ve spent three weeks cataloguing the wrong crime scene. We all have. The Vikings didn’t leave these bodies. Someone just wanted us to think they did.
The photographs don’t lie, even when everything else does. I lay them out in chronological order. My hands shake, and it’s not from the cold.
Trench 4, Grid Section B: A femur with a titanium pin. The kind they started using in the mid-nineties. Sigrid had photographed it from six angles, included a ruler, circled the manufacturer’s serial number in red ink.
Trench 7, Grid Section F: Fabric fragments that practically glow under UV light. Synthetic fibers. Polyester blend. The Vikings wore wool and linen, buried their dead in natural materials that the bog would consume over centuries. This stuff would last forever.
Trench 9, Grid Section A: Skull trauma that makes my stomach turn. I’ve seen enough violence to recognize execution-style damage. Single impact, posterior cranium, the kind of methodical brutality that has nothing to do with battlefield honor or ritual sacrifice.
I pull Bjorn’s funding documents from the locked drawer where Sigrid had hidden them. His signature appears seventeen times. Every permit extension, every authorization to expand the dig into areas our initial survey had flagged as empty. Archaeologically insignificant, the reports said. Nothing of historical value.
But Bjorn knew better. He knew exactly what was buried there.
The dates align with surgical precision. Each new excavation section corresponds to a permit he’d filed, always six months after the original survey declared the ground worthless. Always in the deepest parts of the bog, where peat preservation would keep bodies intact indefinitely. Where an archaeological dig would provide perfect cover for exhumation: or for explaining away what we found.
Sigrid had drawn lines connecting it all. Red ink spider-webbing across documents, linking Bjorn’s signatures to grid coordinates to her photographs of remains that should never have been here.
She’d figured it out. And it had killed her.
I plug the USB drive in with fingers that have forgotten how to stay steady. Most files demand passwords I’ll never guess, but one folder opens like an invitation. Or a confession.
Geological surveys. Fifteen years back, twenty, twenty-five. The same coordinates, this same cursed stretch of bog, surveyed again and again by companies with forgettable names and identical Oslo addresses. Shell corporations, the kind that exist only on paper and in bank accounts designed to hide money’s true origin.
Sigrid’s handwriting fills the margins. Dates circled in that precise way she had, the archaeologist’s need to document everything. Each date corresponds to something. The pattern has weight.
I pull up Erik Voss’s cold case files on my laptop. The ones he’d shared reluctantly, eyes hollow with old grief.
The dates match.
Every survey corresponds to a disappearance. Bodies that were never found, families that never got closure, cases that went cold and stayed frozen.
Until we started digging.
Until Sigrid connected what should have stayed buried.
The window’s too small, too grimy, but I can see enough. Bjorn’s out there pacing tight circles in the snow, phone clamped to his ear like he’s trying to strangle it. That polished veneer he wears, the one that got him past university administrators and permit offices, it’s cracking. His free hand cuts through the darkness, sharp gestures that speak a different language than his usual boardroom diplomacy.
I’ve watched him for weeks now, always hovering near the trenches. Always there when we pulled something from the earth that shouldn’t exist in Viking strata. That smile of his, the one that never quite reaches those cold green eyes, it stayed fixed even when Ragna went white at what we’d found.
He’d insisted on Trench 7. Specifically. Personally marked the coordinates.
Right where Sigrid died.
I watch the bullet casing roll across stainless steel, catching fluorescent light. Modern. Nine millimeter. The soil still clinging to it dates back a thousand years according to our stratigraphy. Impossible, except it isn’t.
“How many?” My voice sounds distant, clinical. The pathologist in me already cataloging evidence while the part that wants to survive screams to burn it all.
Ragna’s hands shake as she meets my eyes. “Seventeen. Different calibers, different depths. All in sections Bjorn personally designated for excavation.”
The blizzard hammers the lab’s walls, snow piling against metal like earth on a coffin. I finally understand the architecture of it. Remote enough that no one hears, peat acidic enough to preserve while corrupting forensics, an archaeological permit that makes disturbing graves look legitimate.
Sigrid figured it out. Now she’s in Trench 7.
And Bjorn Lund knows exactly where the evidence sits. Knows who has it.
The generator coughs. Lights flicker. Outside, Voss’s helicopter circles, descending.
The trap closes.
The cold makes my fingers stiff, clumsy with the camera controls. I’ve been at this for three hours now, and the fluorescent lights have started to pulse in time with my heartbeat: or maybe that’s just exhaustion playing tricks. Each click of the shutter echoes off the metal walls like a judge’s gavel.
I arrange the remains in systematic rows on the examination tables. First the legitimate finds: a warrior’s skeleton, ninth century, bronze arm-ring still circling the ulna. The bone is the color of tea-stained parchment, proper for something that’s been sleeping in peat for eleven hundred years. I photograph it from six angles, include the scale marker, note the catalog number in my field book with handwriting that’s steadier than I feel.
Then I move to the others.
The skeleton from Trench Seven looks ancient at first glance: same dark staining from the bog, same contorted positioning. But the ribs tell a different story. Caught between the third and fourth, a scrap of fabric that my preliminary analysis tagged as polyester. Polyester. I zoom in until the camera’s autofocus hunts, capturing the synthetic weave in brutal detail. The Vikings didn’t wear Gore-Tex.
I should stop. Log what I have, lock the lab, get four hours of sleep before the generator needs refueling. Instead I pull out the mandible from Trench Twelve, the one Ragna showed me with trembling hands before Voss sequestered her. Under the examination lamp, the amalgam fillings shine like accusations. I photograph them from every conceivable angle, knowing each image is evidence that someone used this ancient burial ground as a dumping site.
Knowing that someone killed Sigrid to keep that secret.
The camera’s battery warning blinks red. I swap it for a fresh one and keep shooting.
I open my field notebook to a fresh page, date it, time-stamp it: 0347 hours. My handwriting looks like someone else’s. Too controlled, too careful. The kind of documentation that holds up in court.
Subject RDE-07, mandibular fragment, Trench 12, depth 2.[^3] meters. I write it out longhand, no abbreviations. Three amalgam restorations visible in molars M1, M2, M3. Composition consistent with mercury-silver alloy, standard dental practice 1970-2000. Material analysis pending, but preliminary assessment: late twentieth-century origin.
Each word feels like I’m signing something I can’t take back.
Fabric sample TF-04, recovered adjacent to RDE-07. My pen scratches across the paper. Synthetic polymer, likely polyester blend. Degradation minimal despite alleged burial context of 800-1000 CE. Inconsistent with known preservation patterns for organic materials in peat bog environment.
I flip back three pages, cross-reference the carbon dating results Sigrid logged two days before someone caved in her skull. The numbers don’t match. Someone’s been feeding false data into our reports, creating a paper trail that buries the truth under a thousand years of legitimacy.
I scrape peat from the trench wall with a trowel, watching how it crumbles. The stratification’s wrong: anyone with eyes could see it if they knew what to look for. Dark layers interrupted, then reconstituted. Amateur work, but good enough to fool administrators who never leave their offices.
I measure the depth again. Two point three meters. Then I check the adjacent section: two point seven. The floor slopes where it shouldn’t, dips where someone dug deeper than our grid pattern accounts for.
The bog’s chemistry would freeze decomposition the moment a body hit that acidic water. Dump something here last month, last year, last decade: the peat doesn’t care. It preserves everything at the moment of contact, creating a timeline that’s deliberately scrambled.
Someone knew exactly what they were doing.
The camera shutter clicks like a countdown. I frame the walkways first: pressure-treated lumber that could bear the weight of men carrying something heavy. Then the generator placement, positioned where its noise would mask other sounds. The tent walls flap violent enough to hide movement, and I’m cataloging my own isolation: three hours from help, surrounded by people who might have reasons to keep me quiet. Each photograph adds weight to what I know and can’t unknow.
I work with the paranoia of a man who’s learned that evidence disappears. The drives click into place like bullets in a chamber. My sister’s name on the cloud upload: insurance she doesn’t know she’s carrying. The specimen jar goes behind the formaldehyde samples where nobody looks twice. My personal drive stays against my ribs, cold through the thermal layers. When legitimacy and truth finally collide, I’ll have chosen survival over reputation, and that knowledge tastes like the peat bog smells. Ancient and rotting.
I watch Voss step down from the helicopter through the lab’s frosted window, and what strikes me first isn’t the theatrical coat or the cigarette he’s already lighting before his boots touch ground: it’s the way he moves. Like a man who’s been carrying a corpse on his back for twenty years and has finally found somewhere to set it down.
The rotor wash throws up snow that looks like static in the generator lights. His hands tremble as he cups the flame, and I know that shake. It’s not the Arctic cold working its way into bone. It’s the kind of tremor you get when you’ve stared at crime scene photographs so long they’ve burned themselves into your retinas, when you’ve memorized victim files the way other men memorize prayers.
He doesn’t head for the command tent where the university administrators are waiting with coffee and bureaucratic pleasantries. He comes straight for the lab, straight for me, and when those ice-blue eyes lock onto mine through the window, I see myself reflected back. Another man who clawed his way up from nothing. Another man who chose obsession over peace of mind.
The recognition is mutual and immediate. We’re the same species of damaged.
He doesn’t knock. The door opens and Arctic air floods in with him, along with the smell of Norwegian tobacco and something else, desperation, maybe, or vindication. Up close, his face is a roadmap of sleepless nights. The hollows under his eyes are deep enough to hide evidence in.
“Dr. Magnusson.” His voice is gravel and smoke. “I’ve been waiting a long time to visit this site.”
Not to investigate Sigrid’s death. To visit. Like he’s been expecting this dig to happen, expecting these bodies to surface, expecting everything to finally circle back to where it started.
I don’t offer my hand. Neither does he. We understand each other already.
The space between us fills with cigarette smoke and unspoken calculations. Voss spreads photographs across the steel table: not of Sigrid, but older images, their edges yellowed with time. Bodies pulled from peat bogs two decades ago, skin like leather, features preserved in eternal silence.
“Same patterns,” he says, tapping ash onto my floor. “Same preservation. Same positioning.”
I lean forward despite myself. The remains are arranged identically to what we’ve been excavating. Hands bound. Faces turned north. But these aren’t Viking Age. The dental work is twentieth century, the synthetic fibers still visible in the peat-stained clothing.
“You knew,” I say. “Before Sigrid died, you knew this site was wrong.”
His smile is bitter as the coffee gone cold between us. “I’ve had twenty years to know. Question is, Dr. Magnusson: how long have you known?” Those ice-blue eyes dissect me like I’m another specimen. “A man with your training, your eye for detail. When did you realize we’ve been digging up a graveyard that’s still in use?”
The fluorescent lights hum. Outside, the wind screams across the bog.
I don’t answer. We both know silence is its own confession.
My construction days taught me to read men the way I read soil layers. What’s surface, what’s buried deep. Voss doesn’t care about my correspondence courses or calloused hands. He’s excavating me, testing how much pressure it takes before I crack.
“The lab keys,” he says, circling back. “Six people have access. But only three understand how peat preserves tissue, how to read post-mortem interval in these conditions.”
He lets that hang there. Three people. Sigrid’s dead. That leaves Ragna and me.
“Staging an accident requires specific knowledge,” Voss continues, his voice flat as the tundra. “Forensic pathology. Trauma patterns. Someone who knows exactly what investigators look for.”
Someone like me.
I meet his hollow eyes. We both know where this is heading.
Between interviews, Voss stands in the brutal cold, chain-smoking, staring at the trenches like they’re confessing secrets. I watch through the lab window as he pulls out a worn leather notebook (not police issue, something haunted) and scrawls notes with fingers too stiff to grip the pen properly. He won’t come inside. Won’t stop writing. A man communing with ghosts.
The metal walls amplify every word. Ragna’s voice starts defensive, rises to panic, breaks into something raw and desperate. Voss doesn’t raise his volume. Doesn’t need to. I’ve heard interrogations before, back when I worked construction sites where accidents weren’t always accidents. This isn’t questioning. This is a man fitting a living woman into a grave he’s been digging for two decades.
I watch Voss work the photographs like a dealer arranging cards he’s already memorized. Each image slides into place: parallel edges, precise spacing, the kind of order a drowning man imposes on chaos. Twenty years of staring at these faces will do that. Turn them into talismans. Prayer cards for the unsaved.
“Body three,” he says, tapping yellowed paper with a finger the color of old bone. “Found in Storfjord bog, March 2003. Female, twenties, cause of death undetermined.” His voice has that hollow quality you hear in men who’ve stopped sleeping. “Dental work suggested Norwegian origin. DNA went nowhere. No missing persons match.”
I lean closer despite myself. The woman in the photograph wears the bog like a second skin, dark, leathered, compressed by peat into something that barely registers as human. But I’ve seen enough bodies to read what the preservation can’t hide. The angle of the cervical vertebrae. The defensive fractures in the ulna.
“She was strangled,” I say. “Then dumped.”
Voss’s ice-blue eyes flick to mine. Something passes between us, recognition, maybe. The understanding that we’re both men who see what we’re not supposed to see.
“Body seven.” Another photograph. “Lyngfjord, October 2004. Male, thirties. Same preservation pattern. Same lack of identification.” His finger moves to the next image, then the next, a procession of leather-faced ghosts. “Eleven bodies total. Eleven bogs. All within two hundred kilometers of where we’re standing.”
The fluorescent lights hum their tuneless song. Outside, the wind tears at the container walls, but in here the air has gone still and thick. Voss arranges the final photograph. A wide shot of an excavation site that could be any of a dozen I’ve worked.
Could be this one.
“The preservation patterns,” he says, and his voice finally cracks. “They match what you’ve been digging up. Exactly.”
My hands know what my mind doesn’t want to accept before I’ve consciously registered the details. The way the hyoid bones sit fractured in body three. The patterned abrasions on body seven’s wrists. Ligature marks, synthetic fiber, nothing that existed in the Viking Age. Body nine has amalgam fillings visible in the photograph, the kind they stopped using in the nineties.
These aren’t archaeological specimens. They’re crime scenes wearing the bog’s disguise.
“You knew,” I say. My voice sounds distant, like it’s coming from someone else’s throat. “Twenty years ago, you knew these were modern.”
Voss doesn’t deny it. Just lights another cigarette with hands that shake worse than Ragna’s. “Couldn’t prove it. Carbon dating kept coming back centuries old. The peat does something to the isotopes, throws everything off. My superiors called it inconclusive. Closed the case.”
I force myself to look at each photograph again, cataloging what the preservation can’t hide. Synthetic fabric fragments. Dental work. Bone saw marks too clean, too precise. Someone’s been using these bogs as a dumping ground for decades.
And we just opened their cemetery.
The envelope’s edges are soft with age, worn from being handled too many times in the dark. Voss’s fingers leave ash smudges as he spreads the contraband across stainless steel. More bodies. More bogs. Tool marks photographed in harsh morgue lighting that makes the bone look like porcelain.
“Perimortem trauma,” he says, tapping one image. “Same implement. Same angle of approach.”
I lean closer despite myself. The marks are distinctive: parallel grooves, specific spacing. My forensic training wars with the part of me that wants to walk away from this.
“You kept these.” Not a question.
“Evidence room has accidents.” His voice is flat. “Files get misfiled. Photographs disappear into coat pockets during shift changes.”
He slides another image forward. Fresh. Digital. Sigrid’s skull.
The pattern matches perfectly.
“Someone could be using the dig,” I start, but my voice sounds hollow even to me. “Modern disposal disguised as. Voss leans forward, cigarette forgotten.”Or are you obstructing?”
The question hangs like a blade. His eyes have that look I’ve seen in mirrors during bad nights: the kind of certainty that comes from needing answers more than truth.
The notebooks lie open between us like an indictment already written. Page after page of Ragna’s name, circled in red ink that looks like dried blood under the fluorescent lights. Voss has mapped her movements, catalogued her expertise in staging archaeological contexts, documented her desperation to salvage what’s left of her career. He’s built his case the way peat preserves bodies and I can see he’s already sleeping better just believing he’s found his answer.
I find him hunched over the examination table like a man conducting a séance with the dead. The case files form a constellation of failure. Twenty years of photographs, witness statements gone nowhere, evidence that led only to more questions. His cigarette has burned down to ash between his fingers, forgotten.
“Look at this one.” His voice scrapes out like gravel on ice. He taps a photograph from 1999: a woman pulled from a bog near Narvik, her face compressed by peat into something almost peaceful. “Dental work placed her in the nineties, not the Viking Age. We knew it was murder. Never found who.”
He slides another photo across the steel surface. Different bog, same year. A man this time, leather jacket preserved perfectly while his flesh turned to tanned hide. “Three months later. Same MO: modern victim hidden where ancient bodies make everything ambiguous.”
The fluorescent lights hum their monotonous dirge while Voss builds his cathedral of coincidence. His fingers move across the photographs with the reverence of a priest arranging relics, drawing invisible lines between past and present. “Now we excavate here, and what do we find? The same goddamn thing. Modern remains mixed with Viking Age burials. Same preservation. Same remote location where nobody asks questions until it’s too late.”
I watch his hands shake as he lights another cigarette. The man hasn’t slept in days, maybe weeks. His obsession has worn grooves into his face deeper than the excavation trenches outside.
“She had everything she needed,” he continues, smoke curling between us like fog off the bog. “The knowledge to stage it perfectly. Access to the site. And the desperation, Christ, Magnusson, you’ve seen how desperate she is. Another scandal would finish her.”
He looks up at me then, those ice-blue eyes burning with something that might be certainty or might be madness. I’m not sure he knows the difference anymore.
The theory spills from him like confession, each word weighted with two decades of failure seeking redemption. Ragna’s mistake: another misidentification that would bury her career in the same bog we’re excavating. Sigrid discovered it, threatened exposure, promised to publish the incompetence that would make Ragna’s name synonymous with fraud. So a confrontation in Trench Seven, darkness and isolation, a shovel becoming something other than archaeological tool. Then the desperate theater of accident, staging what couldn’t be undone.
Voss arranges his evidence like a man building a gallows: witnesses heard them arguing about methodology, voices sharp with professional contempt. Ragna had access to every tool, every trench, every opportunity. Her expertise in archaeological contexts meant she knew exactly how to manipulate a scene, how to make murder look like misfortune in a place where death already saturated the ground.
“She’s done this before,” he says, smoke wreathing his gaunt face. “Not killed, but falsified. Lied about remains. It’s a short step from academic fraud to covering your tracks permanently.”
His certainty fills the laboratory like chemical fumes, toxic and suffocating.
I watch Voss pace like a wolf in a cage that’s become his whole world. Twenty years of failure have carved him hollow, left him hungry for an answer: any answer that lets him sleep again. The photographs spread before me tell truths he doesn’t want to hear. Sigrid’s skull fracture speaks in the language of physics: trajectory angles, force vectors, the geometry of violence. Ragna’s five-foot-four frame couldn’t generate this impact pattern. The blood spatter on frozen earth reads like script, methodical, controlled. Not panic. Calculation.
But Voss needs his narrative more than oxygen. I recognize the look: a drowning man clutching stones, convinced they’re lifelines.
“The biomechanics are wrong,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Ragna couldn’t generate that impact force. And she has documented alibis for,”
“You academics.” Voss’s whisper cuts deeper than shouting. “Always complicating simple truths.” His cigarette trembles between nicotine-stained fingers. “I’ve seen this pattern. I know how it ends.”
I’m watching a man mistake desperation for certainty, confuse obsession with investigation. He’s become the thing he hunts: unreliable.
The sleeping quarters go dark except for a single bulb. I watch Ragna’s shadow collapse against the wall, her body language screaming innocence or brilliant performance. Voss stands outside smoking, his gaunt profile carved from the same darkness that’s been eating at him for twenty years.
The fracture pattern tells me what the killer was: right-handed, approximately five-foot-eight, striking with something cylindrical. Probably a geological hammer, the kind we all carry. I photograph the beveled edges from six angles, the camera shutter clicking in rhythm with the generator’s diesel heartbeat outside.
My hands don’t shake anymore. Twenty years of construction sites before medical school taught me that much. Steadiness under pressure, the kind of precision that university boys with their smooth palms never develop. I rotate the skull, noting the secondary fracture lines radiating from impact point. Defensive wounds on the ulna tell me she raised her left arm, tried to block. The angle’s wrong for accident. Everything’s wrong.
I move to the soil samples collected from around her body. Under the microscope, synthetic fibers glint like accusations. Modern polyester, the kind from outdoor gear, embedded in peat that’s supposed to be untouched for centuries. I catalog each fiber, tweezers extracting them onto evidence slides. The university investigators missed this. Or chose to miss it.
The dental work in the supposedly Viking remains sits in labeled containers across the examination table. Amalgam fillings, porcelain crowns, one gold inlay that couldn’t be more than fifteen years old. I’ve documented twelve sets of remains that don’t belong in this stratum. Twelve bodies that someone buried here, using an archaeological dig as cover, counting on ancient peat to hide modern crimes.
My camera’s memory card fills with evidence that’ll destroy careers: or get me killed. Each photograph is time-stamped, GPS-tagged, cross-referenced with excavation coordinates. This is what separates me from them: I document everything. Construction taught me that too. When you’re the working-class interloper, you need twice the evidence to be believed half as much.
Outside, Voss’s cigarette glows like a dying star. He knows what I’m finding. He’s been waiting twenty years for someone thorough enough to prove it.
The blood spatter doesn’t lie, even when everyone else does. I measure the arterial spray on the trench wall: one meter twenty centimeters from ground level, chest height for someone Sigrid’s size. The pattern radiates outward in a clean arc, droplets elongated in the direction of travel. Physics doesn’t care about convenient narratives.
She was standing. Facing whoever killed her.
I photograph the concentration point where the spray originates, then work outward, documenting each satellite droplet. The density tells me she was close: less than a meter from her attacker. Close enough to see their face. Close enough to recognize them.
No stumble. No accident. The trajectory analysis is textbook: a single overhead blow from someone she trusted enough to stand talking with in the dark. I log the measurements in my field notebook, the pencil scratching loud in the metal container’s silence. My handwriting’s gotten worse over the years, but the numbers don’t lie. Never have.
The university investigators called it accidental. They didn’t even measure the spatter pattern.
The porcelain crown catches light under my magnifier like a tiny accusation. I photograph it from four angles, then measure: twelve millimeters, standard modern molar restoration. The lab in Oslo can date the ceramic precisely, but I already know. Nineteen-nineties, maybe early two-thousands.
I bag the tooth, label it with coordinates and depth. Evidence locker three.
The nylon fibers come next. Dark blue threads woven through peat that’s supposedly a thousand years old. I extract three samples with tweezers, seal them in separate containers. Cross-contamination is what they’ll claim. That’s what they always claim when working-class hands find inconvenient truths.
But the isotope ratios: those are harder to dismiss. The bone collagen screams modern diet: industrial agriculture, processed foods, twentieth-century Scandinavia. Not a Viking warrior. Someone’s neighbor. Someone’s son.
I spread the site map across the steel table, marking each modern burial with red ink. Eight meters. Eight meters. Eight meters again. The precision makes my hands shake. This isn’t opportunistic disposal: it’s methodical, calculated. Someone understood peat chemistry, knew exactly how deep to dig for preservation. Someone who’s been using this ancient burial ground as their personal graveyard for twenty years, maybe longer.
The photographs slip from my calloused fingers. Twenty years of bodies, all buried at intervals that match Lund’s investor site visits. Sigrid knew. She’d mapped the entire operation before confronting him. I press my palms against the cold steel table, understanding finally why she died: and why I’m next if anyone sees what I’m holding. The generator hums. Footsteps crunch through snow outside. Someone’s coming.
The lab door rattles shut behind me. I spread the photographs across the examination table like evidence at trial: which is what they’ll become if I live long enough to testify. Sigrid’s field notes lie beside them, pages I’d lifted from the evidence locker while Voss was interrogating Ragna. Academic theft. Chain of custody violation. Twenty years clawing my way up from construction sites to this, and here I am destroying my credibility to chase a dead woman’s paranoia.
Except it isn’t paranoia.
Her handwriting crowds the margins in tight, controlled script: the kind you develop when you’re trying to hide what you’re writing. GPS coordinates that mean nothing until I cross-reference them with the official excavation grid. They’re offset. Deliberately. Every single notation points to locations fifteen to twenty meters from where we’ve been digging.
The dates she circled in red ink blur together until I fetch Lund’s visitor log from the filing cabinet. My hands shake as I line them up. Perfect correlation. Every unscheduled site inspection, every time he showed up with coffee and that practiced smile, claiming he wanted to “see where the money was going.”
One word appears three times in her notes, underlined so hard the pen tore through: planted.
I taste copper. I’ve been biting my cheek without realizing it.
The radar surveys are in the locked drawer. I jimmy it with a screwdriver, another crime for the pile, and pull out Lund’s glossy reports. Promising anomalies highlighted in yellow. Ground disturbances suggesting significant finds. I know these patterns. Spent enough years reading soil to recognize when someone’s selling a story.
The university’s original geological assessment is buried in the back of the filing cabinet. Pre-funding. Before Lund’s money made this dig possible.
I spread both surveys side by side under the fluorescent glare.
Archaeologically sterile. That’s what the university geologists called every location Lund later marked as priority excavation.
My construction background screams at me from these documents. The radar penetration depths are wrong. Ground composition readings don’t match what we’ve been pulling from the trenches. Someone doctored these surveys, but they didn’t understand the science well enough to fake it convincingly.
I pull out my field journal, flip to the sketches I’ve been making of soil stratification. The layers tell stories if you know how to read them. Ancient peat, undisturbed for centuries, has a specific compression pattern. Recently disturbed earth tries to hide, but it can’t match the weight of time.
Every location Lund flagged shows disturbance patterns in my notes. I’d attributed it to natural bog movement, to frost heave, to anything but the obvious.
The fluorescent lights flicker. Generator hiccup.
I photograph everything with my phone, hands steadier now that I’m documenting rather than discovering. This is what I know how to do. Evidence. Chain of custody. Building a case that can’t be dismissed by academics who think my diploma came from the wrong kind of school.
The door handle turns behind me.
I don’t look up fast enough.
The equipment shed logs sit open on the metal table, my finger tracing entries that should’ve raised flags weeks ago. Lund’s signature appears on dates crossed out in the weather records. Whiteout conditions, wind speeds that kept everyone huddled around space heaters.
He’d signed out the backhoe attachment. Ground-penetrating augers. Tools for moving earth, not examining it.
My throat tightens. Those were the nights I’d wake to generator surges, attribute the sound to storm interference. While I catalogued bones in this lab, Lund was outside in minus-twenty darkness, arranging his stage. Planting bodies where our careful excavation would find them. Where Sigrid’s reputation would authenticate them.
Where modern murders could be carbon-dated into ancient history.
The perfect laundering operation. Not money. Evidence.
The cold spreads from my gut outward. Lund didn’t stumble into opportunity. He engineered it. Chose Svartmyr for its preservation properties. Hand-picked Sigrid because her credentials would sanctify whatever we unearthed. Built an entire academic operation as cover, transforming murder victims into Viking artifacts through our meticulous documentation. We weren’t archaeologists. We were his cleaning crew, legitimizing disposal sites with carbon dating and peer-reviewed publications.
My hands shake as I photograph every document, every discrepancy, uploading files to cloud storage I pray he hasn’t already compromised. Then I see them through the frosted window. Fresh boot prints, size eleven, that distinctive Norwegian tread pattern. The same prints I documented near Sigrid’s body. He knows. Has known since I started asking questions. And men like Bjorn Lund don’t leave loose ends breathing.
The spreadsheet columns blur together after the fourth hour, dates, amounts, account numbers swimming in my vision like artifacts in murky bog water. My construction-worker hands weren’t made for this white-collar forensics, but I learned to read soil stratification by correspondence course while pouring concrete, so I can damn well learn to read a money trail.
“Artifact acquisition - Site 7B - €45,[^000].” Except Site 7B doesn’t exist in any of our official documentation. The date matches a missing person report from Tromsø. A Romanian construction worker who vanished after threatening to report workplace safety violations.
I click through another folder. More spreadsheets dressed up in archaeological language, like putting a lab coat on a corpse. “Preservation costs” that coincide with police reports. “Transportation fees” paid the same week families filed missing person reports.
The voice memo plays again. I’ve listened to it six times now, each playback making Sigrid’s fear more tangible. Her whisper cuts through the laptop’s tinny speakers: “The dental work is modern. Porcelain crown, probably installed within the last five years. But the carbon dating came back ninth century. Someone’s tampering with the samples, and I think. Wind howling in the background of her recording.
“I think Bjorn knows I know. He keeps asking about my findings before I’ve logged them officially. How does he know what I’m finding unless he already knows what’s buried here?”
Her breathing quickens on the recording. “I’m documenting everything. If something happens to me. I pull up Erik’s cold case files on my second screen. Cross-reference the dates from Lund’s spreadsheets with the inspector’s obsessively maintained timeline. Five matches. Then seven. Then twelve.
Twelve names. Twelve families who never got answers.
Twelve bodies that might be lying beneath Viking Age skeletons, hidden in plain sight where no one would think to look for them.
The names swim up from Erik’s files like bodies rising from bog water. Andrei Popescu: the Romanian worker from Lund’s spreadsheet. Listed in Erik’s cold cases from eighteen months ago. Maria Sørensen. Erik’s file shows her car found abandoned near Svartmyr, search called off after two weeks.
I cross-reference twelve names. Twelve perfect matches between Lund’s accounting euphemisms and Erik’s ghosts.
My hands shake as I overlay the dates on our excavation map. Trench 4, where we found “Viking Age remains” with that inexplicable dental crown. Paid for with money labeled “artifact transport” the same week a whistleblower vanished. Trench 7’s “ninth-century warrior” wearing a pacemaker we all pretended not to see while Lund smiled and talked about contamination from modern burials above.
Twenty years. Maybe longer. How many bodies has this bog swallowed while we catalogued them as archaeological treasures? How many families attended our press conferences about Viking discoveries, not knowing their missing daughters and sons were the ones we were carefully brushing dirt from, measuring, photographing, reburying?
The lab door is locked. I checked it twice. But locks mean nothing when someone has master keys, when someone controls the entire operation, when someone has already killed once and knows the Arctic night swallows screams like the bog swallows bodies.
I pocket the phone, feeling the SD card press against my ankle bone. Three copies. Three chances someone finds the truth if I don’t make it out. The footsteps circle the container. Professional. Not Ragna’s nervous shuffle or Erik’s exhausted drag.
The lights hum overhead. I’m backlit, visible through every window. A perfect target.
I kill the fluorescents. Darkness floods in like cold water.
The boot print freezes me mid-breath. Size eleven Sorel Caribou, I’d photographed that tread beside Sigrid’s body, outside the equipment shed, everywhere evidence got compromised. The pattern clicks into focus with the clarity of a bone saw hitting vertebrae. Lund hasn’t just been watching. He’s been orchestrating. Every disturbed sample, every missing photograph, every convenient explanation. He knows I know. Now it’s just timing.
I force my lungs to work, counting breaths like I counted paychecks before medical school. Survival math. Running’s for people with options. The satellite phone routes through Lund’s equipment. Erik’s the only variable, but finding him without surveillance means crossing open ground. So I do what construction taught me: build a dead man’s switch. The email drafts itself, evidence, names, bank accounts, scheduled for dawn unless I stop it. Twelve hours of insurance. I save it, pocket the drive, and walk out like a man who’s just logged overtime. Somewhere in the Arctic dark, Lund’s watching. Let him wonder what I know.
The printouts curl at the edges where condensation has seeped in. I flatten them against the steel table, feeling the cold metal through my work gloves. Three anomalies. Three graves that shouldn’t exist.
My finger traces the northwestern cluster. The numbers don’t lie: they never do, not like people. Depth readings: 1.[^2], 1.[^5], 1.[^8] meters. In twenty years of digging through Scandinavia’s frozen earth, I’ve learned what Viking Age burials look like. They settle deep. The peat swallows them slowly, generation by generation, until they rest at 2.[^5] meters minimum. These are shallow. Recent. Wrong.
The soil compression patterns tell their own story. I’ve read enough stratification to know disturbance when I see it. The layers show disruption. Clean cuts through peat that’s been accumulating since the Bronze Age. Someone dug here. Not centuries ago. Within the last decade, maybe less.
Lund’s yellow tape makes sense now. “Archaeological sensitivity,” he’d said, that practiced smile never wavering. Keep the university people away from the northwest quadrant. Protect the site’s integrity. Except what he was protecting had nothing to do with Vikings.
I pull out my field notebook, cross-reference the coordinates. The tape went up on day three, before Sigrid started asking questions. Before she found whatever she found. Before someone caved in her skull and arranged her body in trench seven like she’d slipped on ice.
The fluorescent lights hum their monotonous song. My eyes ache from too many hours staring at evidence that keeps pointing the same direction. Construction taught me to trust measurements over explanations. A wall’s either plumb or it isn’t. These graves are either ancient or they’re not.
They’re not.
Three bodies in shallow graves. Three anomalies Lund doesn’t want excavated. Three reasons Sigrid had to die.
She’s building a house of cards with scientific jargon, each explanation technically sound but collectively desperate. I’ve heard this kind of reasoning before: from contractors trying to explain why a foundation cracked, from site supervisors justifying shortcuts. The words are right but the music’s wrong.
“Iron deposits,” I say, not looking up from the printouts. “From a mining road that’s been abandoned since the seventies.”
Her fingers tighten on the table edge. White knuckles through chapped skin.
“Frost heaving in peat that’s been stable for three thousand years.” I tap the depth measurements. “Equipment failure that somehow only affects the one quadrant Lund cordoned off.”
“It’s possible. I finally meet her eyes. They’re red-rimmed, exhausted, terrified.”I spent fifteen years pouring foundations. You know what happens when you make excuses for bad concrete? Buildings fall down. People die.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Her gaze slides toward the evidence locker, then away. Whatever she’s hiding in there, she’s not ready to show me yet.
But she’s close. Fear does that. Pushes you toward confession or conspiracy. Nothing in between.
The timeline’s wrong. That’s what keeps scratching at the back of my skull like a splinter working deeper.
I spread both surveys across the examination table. Same coordinates, different story. She’d marked the northwest quadrant with red ink: ship burial, high probability, excavate first. Standard protocol. You go where the artifacts are.
Then Lund’s money arrived and suddenly those same coordinates became restricted. “Structural integrity concerns.” “Preserve site stratification.” Academic horseshit wrapped in a bow.
Now the radar shows disturbances exactly where Sigrid wanted to dig. Not ancient. Recent.
Someone knew what she’d find there. Someone needed to get there first.
I work fast, muscle memory from years documenting crime scenes before anyone could sanitize them. Personal camera, not the expedition’s Nikon that uploads to shared servers. Click: radar printouts showing those too-regular disturbances. Click: Sigrid’s survey with her red annotations. Click: her field journal, that question mark beside “Priority. Possible grave goods” now reading like prophecy. Everything goes into the encrypted folder: her financial evidence, my autopsy findings, Ragna’s terrified confession about modern dental work in ancient jaws.
I freeze mid-breath, laptop screen reflecting in my reading glasses. Those damned bifocals that mark me as older, slower than I used to be. My calloused fingers rest on the keyboard, one wrong keystroke from revealing everything. The container’s metal walls suddenly feel thinner than paper, the locked door behind Lund a joke I should have seen coming when a man like him funded this entire operation.
The USB drive burns in my peripheral vision like a hot coal, but I don’t move to close the laptop. That would be admission, guilt written in body language. Instead I lean back in my chair (the cheap office furniture groaning under my weight) and meet those green eyes with the flat stare I learned on construction sites when foremen tried to short my pay.
“Bjorn.” I keep my voice level, the way you talk to dogs that might bite. “It’s two in the morning.”
He shrugs, and the gesture is too fluid, too practiced. Everything about this man is rehearsed. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d check on our progress.” His gaze drifts to the laptop, lingers just long enough to confirm he knows exactly what I’ve been looking at. “The cold plays hell with my circadian rhythm.”
The lie sits between us like a third person in the cramped container. The snow on his parka is fresh, crystalline. The kind that falls during active weather, not the dry powder that’s been sitting on the ground for days. Someone told him I was here. Someone’s been watching.
I think about the keys to this container. Sigrid had one. I have one. Ragna has one. And Bjorn, of course, because men like him always have keys to everything they fund.
“Sigrid used to work late too,” he says, conversational, and there it is: the knife sliding between my ribs with a smile. “She had trouble sleeping toward the end. The isolation, the pressure. Erik mentioned you two had been discussing her state of mind.”
My jaw tightens. Erik Voss, the broken inspector with his cold case obsession, hasn’t mentioned any such thing. But now I know Lund’s been talking to him, shaping the narrative, building his defense before anyone’s even accused him of anything.
The explanation rolls out like a prospectus presentation. Lund settles against the examination table, the same steel surface where we photographed Sigrid’s skull fracture, and his hands move through the air, conducting an orchestra of bullshit. Shell companies, he says. Legitimate tax optimization. Heritage investment vehicles structured through Dublin and the Caymans. His tone carries that particular patience reserved for explaining multiplication tables to slow children.
I’ve heard this music before. University administrators used it when they assumed my correspondence degree meant I couldn’t grasp their Byzantine funding structures. But Lund’s version has teeth hidden in the melody. Each technical term lands with the weight of a threat gift-wrapped in silk.
He’s telling me I’m out of my depth. That men like me, with dirt under our fingernails and self-taught credentials, shouldn’t play in waters this deep. That questioning his story would reveal my own inadequacies, not his guilt.
The condescension is tactical. Professional. And it’s working, because part of me, the part that still feels like an impostor in academic spaces, wants to believe him just to stop feeling stupid.
Sigrid’s name becomes ammunition. Lund deploys it with surgical precision: the concerned colleague mourning a brilliant mind undone by Arctic darkness and ambition. He scrolls through his phone, angles the screen toward me. Emails from her, timestamped and damning. Feeling watched. Something wrong with the permits. Activities that don’t match schedules.
“Paranoia,” he says, soft as a eulogy. “Classic isolation syndrome.”
Each message he shows me reframes her discoveries as delusions, her meticulous documentation as obsessive spiraling. He’s building a narrative where her death becomes inevitable tragedy. The fragile academic who cracked under pressure, not the whistleblower who got too close.
The bastard’s rewriting her murder as mental health crisis, and his evidence looks cleaner than mine.
The pivot to Ragna comes smooth as oiled machinery. Lund’s voice drops, confidential now, reminding me of her scandal. Those misidentified remains that nearly torched her career. Someone that desperate to matter might see conspiracies in carbon dating errors, might fabricate importance where there’s only incompetence.
He’s weaving the noose around her neck while I watch, knowing damn well mine’s already measured.
The lawyers arrive gift-wrapped in corporate concern. Lund stands, brushing imaginary lint from his thousand-dollar parka, explaining how his firm protects its investments. Meaning us, meaning our reputations, meaning the convenient story they’ll construct. Helicopter lands at dawn. Protocols established. Narrative managed.
I’ve excavated enough graves to recognize when someone’s measuring mine. That word, protocols, settles between us like permafrost. Cold. Permanent. Suffocating everything underneath.
I hold his stare while the question hangs between us, my palms pressing into examination table metal cold enough to burn. The fluorescent lights hum their constant dirge overhead. Somewhere outside, the generator coughs, and shadows shift across the photographs pinned to the wall, Sigrid’s skull, the fracture pattern I’ve memorized like scripture.
“Where were you,” I say again, not asking this time.
Lund’s smile doesn’t waver. That’s the tell right there: the absolute stillness of it, practiced until it’s become muscle memory. I’ve seen corpses with more genuine expression.
“Working,” he says. Reaches into that Canada Goose parka, movements unhurried. Produces his satellite phone like a magician pulling rabbits. “Oslo investors get nervous when they can’t reach their money. Or the people protecting it.”
He scrolls through the call log. Manicured fingers on the screen, not a callus anywhere. The kind of hands that sign documents, not dig graves. Though I’m learning those aren’t mutually exclusive.
“Two hours,” he continues, turning the device toward me. “You can verify the timestamps. Right through the window when poor Sigrid had her accident.”
The word accident lands wrong. Too careful. Too weighted.
I don’t take the phone. Just read the screen from where I stand, noting the duration, the number, the relay tower identification buried in the metadata. Something Voss taught me to look for. The inspector’s got decades of watching people lie, knows which details matter.
“That’s convenient,” I say.
“That’s documentation.” Lund pockets the phone. “I understand you’re upset, Kristoffer. We all are. But paranoia doesn’t honor Sigrid’s memory. Facts do.”
He’s good. I’ll give him that. Probably believes his own performance by now. The peat bog outside has preserved bodies for centuries, kept them pristine in their lies.
I wonder how long it takes for the living to fossilize the same way.
The inspector’s ice-blue eyes lift from the screen, and I watch recognition settle into those deep-carved lines around his mouth. Twenty years of cold cases have taught him to read metadata like I read bone trauma: looking for the story beneath the surface.
“This tower,” Voss says, voice flat as the Arctic horizon. Taps the screen with a yellowed fingernail. “Fifty-two kilometers south. Near the E8 junction.”
Lund’s smile finally shifts. Just a millimeter, but I catch it. The same way I catch the hairline fractures in ancient skulls that tell me someone died badly.
“The signal bounces,” he says. Smooth recovery, but there’s effort behind it now. “These systems aren’t precise in remote areas. Ask anyone who’s tried to. Voss cuts him off, still studying the phone like it’s evidence at a murder trial. Which maybe it is.”Every one connected through the northern relay. Twelve kilometers away.” He looks up. “You’d need to drive to hit this tower.”
The generator coughs again outside. In the silence that follows, I can hear my own pulse hammering against my ribs.
The silence stretches like frozen leather about to crack. Lund’s green eyes move between us, calculating odds I can almost see him tallying. His hands rest on the metal examination table, steady, no tremor. That bothers me more than nervousness would.
“Gentlemen.” He straightens, adjusting his parka with deliberate calm. “I understand how this looks. But I’ve been cooperative from the beginning.” His voice carries that boardroom authority, the kind that makes university administrators sign contracts without reading the fine print. “I took a walk. Needed to clear my head after another sixteen-hour day in this godforsaken place. The access road has better reception: everyone knows that.”
He’s right. Everyone does know that.
But his boots are bone-dry.
I’ve worked construction sites where men lied about safety checks before someone died. Same energy here: words polished smooth as river stones, deployed to fill space while his brain works three moves ahead. The fluorescent tubes buzz overhead like flies on week-old meat. Lund spreads his hands, reasonable man dealing with unreasonable suspicions, and launches into technical details about satellite relay protocols, atmospheric interference, standard operating procedures for remote communications.
Every word perfectly calibrated. Every gesture rehearsed.
The old cop’s got instincts honed by two decades of watching liars work. He doesn’t raise his voice. Just lets the silence stretch like a garrote while his finger traces the timeline, the impossible geometry of Lund’s alibi. And I’m cataloging details the way I read bone trauma: those boots cost more than my first car, Italian leather that would show every goddamn snowflake. They’re immaculate. Which means either he never left, or someone’s already thinking about evidence disposal.
The pixels resolve into certainty, and my stomach drops like I’ve stepped through rotten ice. I zoom in until the image degrades, then back out just enough to see it clearly: that scar’s not just distinctive, it’s a signature. Temple to jaw, the kind of wound that tells a story about violence survived and lessons learned wrong.
Voss moves into my space, all coffee breath and nicotine desperation. The man’s practically vibrating. When he speaks, his voice comes out strangled, like he’s been waiting twenty years to say these words to someone who might actually listen.
“Strand. Håkon Strand.” He taps the screen with a yellowed fingernail. “Construction worker. Heavy equipment operator. The kind of man who knows how to move earth, how to dig deep enough that things stay buried.”
I pull up another of Sigrid’s photos. Then another. Strand appears in four more, always in the background, always in conversation with Lund. Never looking at the camera. The kind of careful invisibility that comes from practice.
“He’d disappear,” Voss continues, pulling out a battered notebook held together with rubber bands. His hands shake as he flips through pages dense with cramped handwriting. “Three, four months at a time. ‘Jobs up north,’ he said. Remote sites. Archaeological surveys. Environmental assessments. All legitimate on paper.” He looks up at me, and those ice-blue eyes are haunted. “None of the companies ever had proper records. Permits issued, then the firms dissolved within a year. Different names, same pattern.”
I think about the ground-penetrating radar results. Three more anomalies. Three more bodies that don’t belong in a Viking burial ground.
“How many?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want the answer.
Voss’s jaw works. “Seven confirmed. Maybe more.”
The phone screen glows blue against Voss’s gaunt face as he scrolls through files that should have been incinerated years ago. His finger stops, trembling, on a photograph so degraded by age and digital compression that I have to squint to make sense of it.
“There.” His voice cracks. “Tire tracks. Peat bog outside Narvik, 2003.”
The treads are distinctive: wide-set, deep grooves, the pattern of something built for unstable ground. Specialized equipment. Not the kind of thing you rent from the local hardware store.
I pull up Sigrid’s photos again, filtering for equipment shots. Third image: there it is. Same tread pattern, visible in frozen mud beside our excavation trench. The vehicle bears a faded logo I’ve seen on half the paperwork in the site office. “That company,” Voss says, anticipating my question. “Didn’t exist in 2003. Officially incorporated in 2008.” He meets my eyes. “Five years after these tracks were photographed at a murder scene.”
The implications spread through my mind like frost across glass. They’ve been doing this for twenty years.
The pattern isn’t just horrifying. It’s elegant. Seventeen sites. Twenty years. Each excavation permit legitimate enough to pass regulatory scrutiny, each location remote enough that heavy equipment arriving in the middle of the night wouldn’t raise questions. They’d perfected the system: archaeological digs provided cover, peat preservation obscured time of death, and when the projects concluded, the sites were officially documented and sealed. Protected by heritage laws. Untouchable.
I spread the documents across the metal examination table, my calloused fingers arranging them like evidence at a crime scene. Because that’s what this is. Not seventeen separate investigations. One continuous operation. Lund hadn’t stumbled into using archaeology as cover. He’d built an entire infrastructure around it. Investment firm, equipment leasing, permit expediting. A machine designed for one purpose: making people disappear into history itself.
My hands shake as I place the transparent overlay on the map. The radar anomalies glow green beneath missing persons data. Five perfect alignments. Not coincidence. Mathematics of murder.
Each disappearance corresponds to active excavation windows. The dates match permit renewals. Grid spacing identical across sites, professional, practiced. They’d been refining the system for twenty years.
I taste copper. Bit my cheek without realizing.
“They turned archaeology into an assembly line,” I whisper.
The inspector’s confession comes out like gravel through a sieve. DNA evidence. Strand’s DNA. Two crime scenes, twenty years cold. But contaminated. “I let him walk,” Voss says, each word costing him. “And Lund gave him legitimacy. Access. Cover.”
A partnership baptized in peat and darkness. Sigrid had discovered their assembly line of death.
The camera’s shutter clicks like a countdown in the fluorescent silence. Each angle captures Sigrid’s handwriting. The confident loops of someone who’d spent her career documenting discoveries, not realizing she’d become evidence herself. Meeting him tonight to negotiate. The academic hubris bleeds through every word. She’d thought her credentials were armor, that her publications and university connections made her untouchable. She’d walked into that meeting the way she’d walked into faculty senate hearings: prepared to present findings, expecting rational discourse.
I’ve seen that mistake before. Construction sites, back when I was swinging hammers instead of brushes. Educated engineers who thought their degrees meant the concrete wouldn’t crush them if they ignored the warnings. Physics doesn’t care about your credentials.
Neither do men like Lund.
The northwest quadrant coordinates burn into my vision as I pull up Ragna’s radar data on the laptop. She’d run the scan six days ago, her meticulous notes documenting three distinct anomalies. The timestamps don’t lie. She’d known exactly where to look because the pattern was already there, a constellation of graves hidden beneath Viking legitimacy.
One anomaly sits precisely at her coordinates. The radar signature shows disturbed soil, organic matter, the telltale density variations of something buried within the last decade, not the last millennium. The peat’s preservation qualities work both ways: ancient bodies mummify, but so do recent ones. Perfect disposal for anyone who understands the chemistry.
Twenty years, Voss said. How many bodies in that time? How many families still searching, still hoping, while their loved ones decomposed three meters down under the cover of academic respectability and research permits?
The site wasn’t discovered. It was selected. Lund didn’t fund this dig: he weaponized it.
The backup logs show something else: the deleted entry used Sigrid’s access credentials. Two weeks after her death, her keycard swiped the lock, her six-digit code entered perfectly on the first attempt. No hesitation, no fumbling in the dark. Someone who’d watched her enough times to memorize the rhythm of her fingers on the keypad.
I cross-reference the generator logs. The power fluctuation wasn’t random. Someone manually triggered the emergency shutoff, let the system cycle through its restart protocol. Fourteen minutes of controlled chaos while backup batteries kept essential systems running. Long enough to swap evidence, short enough that nobody questioned it in the morning briefing.
The replacement fragments are museum-quality. Carbon dating would confirm Viking Age origins because they are Viking Age: just not from this site. Whoever made the switch had access to authenticated collections, probably Oslo University’s storage facilities. The kind of access Lund’s investment firm would have arranged through their “cultural heritage preservation” contracts.
Sigrid’s dental evidence didn’t just disappear. It was professionally erased by someone who understands how archaeological proof works, how to make inconvenient truths vanish into academic ambiguity.
I check the camera’s maintenance log. No authorized adjustments recorded. The mounting bracket shows fresh scratches where someone used a screwdriver: wrong tool, amateur work, probably done in the dark. The angle shift is surgical though: whoever moved it knew exactly what they needed to hide.
I pull up the camera’s motion-detection records. Three alerts during the power fluctuation, all flagged as equipment errors. Except motion sensors don’t care about power: they run on separate batteries. Someone triggered them, then buried the alerts in system diagnostics where nobody looks unless something catastrophic fails.
The security liaison’s name isn’t on any expedition roster I’ve seen. Lund mentioned him once, called him “our insurance.” Never saw a face, never got a real name.
Just credentials with administrator access.
The camera’s digital timestamp doesn’t match the physical wear on the mounting screws. Someone adjusted it twice: once during the power outage to hide their initial approach, then again afterward to make it look like equipment drift. Professional paranoia meeting amateur execution.
I photograph the misalignment from three angles, including the tool marks. The metadata will prove when I documented this, before anyone can claim I’m manufacturing evidence.
Then I check who accessed the camera’s settings panel.
Administrator credentials. Logged in remotely.
No physical presence required.
The satellite connection takes thirty seconds to authenticate: thirty seconds watching boot prints multiply in the snow outside through the frosted window. The email confirms sent just as shadows cross the threshold.
I’m closing the evidence locker when Lund enters with two men wearing the kind of expensive gear that costs more than my first car. Their faces have that corporate security blankness. Trained not to remember what they witness.
“Working late, Doctor?” Lund’s smile could sell insurance.
The darkness when the generator died wasn’t just absence of light. It was total. Arctic night swallowing everything, the kind of black that makes you forget where your body ends. I’d been in the lab, comparing Sigrid’s skull fractures to the “accidental fall” narrative nobody believed anymore, when the fluorescent hum cut out mid-breath.
Three minutes of nothing. Long enough for someone to work fast.
When the backup kicked in, sputtering diesel and weak yellow light, the computer monitor glowed blank. File directory empty where two hundred evidence photographs had been. Not deleted, erased, the kind of thorough job that takes preparation. Someone had been waiting for darkness.
I found Ragna in the equipment shed, hands shaking so badly she couldn’t light her cigarette. Took three tries before I did it for her.
“The mandible from Trench Seven,” she said, smoke curling from her lips. “Section 7-B, supposedly ninth century.” She pulled out her phone, showed me a photograph she’d taken before the computer purge. Bone fragment, jaw section, and there a modern amalgam filling. “Composite resin. Maybe ten years old.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I should have reported it immediately. I know. But after what happened in Bergen, after they destroyed me for one misidentification…” Her voice cracked. “I needed to be certain. Needed more evidence before I accused anyone of planting remains.”
“So you kept quiet.”
“I kept quiet.” She looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. “And now Sigrid’s dead and someone’s erasing evidence and I’m the one who looks guilty.”
I tried Voss on the satellite phone. Dead air. Checked the unit: wiring pulled, clean sabotage. We were cut off now, truly isolated.
That night I didn’t sleep. Just watched my window, breath fogging the glass. At 3:[^15] AM, I saw them: boot prints in fresh snow, circling my quarters in a slow, deliberate pattern. Someone measuring distances. Someone planning.
The mess tent stank of burnt coffee and fear. Lund had his laptop positioned just right, screen angled so everyone could see Ragna’s digital guilt glowing in red: 02:[^47]:03 - EVIDENCE LOCKER - ACCESS GRANTED - ERIKSDOTTIR, R.
“I was checking my own documentation,” Ragna said, voice breaking on every third word. “After I found the dental work, I needed to verify. Lund’s smile was sympathetic, reasonable. He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to.”Why would verification require evidence locker access at three in the morning?”
“Because I was afraid,”
“Of being caught?” He let the question hang there, poison in the air.
I watched him work. Never accused her directly. Just asked questions, nodded at the right moments, let the exhausted team fill in the blanks themselves. Someone muttered about Bergen, her previous scandal. Someone else remembered she’d argued with Sigrid the day before the murder.
Lund’s green eyes tracked it all, cold and satisfied, while Ragna’s career dissolved around her. Classic misdirection. Make them look at the frightened woman with shaking hands, not at the man in the expensive parka asking all the right questions.
Voss tried. Give the old bastard that much. He stood up, cigarette trembling between yellow fingers, and pointed out that keycard logs prove presence, not intent. “She had legitimate access. Being there doesn’t mean,”
“Doesn’t mean what?” One of the graduate students, a kid from Bergen who should’ve known better. “Doesn’t mean she tampered with evidence? Then why hide it?”
They turned on her like wolves. Every exhausted face found relief in having someone to blame. Lund never raised his voice, just nodded at the right moments, asked if anyone else found Ragna’s behavior “concerning.” His green eyes stayed flat and cold while he conducted the orchestra, transforming a colleague into prey with nothing but strategic silence and a sympathetic smile that never reached those reptile eyes.
I kept my voice level, conversational. “Those financial irregularities Sigrid mentioned (maybe we should)”
Lund’s smile died. Just for a heartbeat, something ancient and hungry looked out through those green eyes. Then the mask snapped back, smooth as oiled leather.
“Conspiracy theories won’t help Ragna.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Let’s focus on documented facts.”
His security goons straightened, hands drifting inside their jackets. Not casual anymore.
I’d just painted a target on my own back.
The vote went how these things always go: hands raised, eyes averted, everyone grateful someone else would do the dirty work.
Ragna’s gaze found mine across the tent. Not the cornered-rat panic of guilt. Something worse. The hollow recognition of a woman who’d seen this script before, knew exactly how it ended.
Lund’s voice cut through: “My men will ensure proper protocols.”
Proper protocols. Christ.
She wasn’t a suspect anymore.
She was bait in a trap already sprung.
The cold hit like a fist when I stumbled outside, half-dressed, gear pulled on wrong in the dark. My breath crystallized before it left my lungs.
Voss was already there, a gray shape against blacker gray, his flashlight beam swallowed by horizontal snow. He didn’t acknowledge me. Just pointed toward the northwest quadrant.
Someone had strung work lights. They swayed in the wind, casting shadows that lurched and twisted across fresh excavation marks. The dig was crude, frantic. None of the careful grid work we’d maintained for weeks. Someone had torn into the peat like an animal digging for buried meat.
We fought our way across the site, the wind trying to peel us off the earth. My eyes watered, froze, watered again. By the time we reached the quadrant, I couldn’t feel my face.
The hole was maybe four feet deep. At the bottom, where the peat gave way to older, denser layers, something pale caught the light.
Plastic sheeting. Industrial grade. The kind you buy at any hardware store.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard myself say, but the wind took it.
The shape beneath was unmistakable. Human. Curled fetal, the way bodies compact when you need them to fit in a space not meant for them.
Voss was already moving, dropping to his knees at the edge, pulling evidence gloves from his coat with hands that shook from more than cold. He reached down, worked a corner of the plastic free with the careful reverence of a man who’d waited twenty years for this moment.
I saw his face change in the work light. Saw the color drain until he looked like one of the bog bodies himself. “Three years,” he said. His voice cracked. “Maybe four.”
I dropped beside him, phone already out, camera function activated with numb fingers. The flash illuminated what the work lights couldn’t reach: the careful folds of plastic, the way it clung to what it contained. Professional. Methodical. Not a panicked burial.
“Don’t touch anything else,” I said, though he knew better. Started shooting. Wide angles first, establishing context. Then closer. The soil stratification told its own story. This grave cut through layers we’d dated to the ninth century. Someone had dug down through history to hide their present.
Twelve photos. Maybe fifteen. Each one proof that Sigrid had been right, that this site was more than ancient bones and academic glory. Each one a death sentence if the wrong person knew we had them.
That’s when I heard it. A sound like the earth sighing. Like something old and patient finally losing its grip.
“Move,” Voss said, but I was already looking up at the bog wall, watching the peat face bulge outward, cracks spiderwebbing across its surface.
The world came apart in slow motion that felt like seconds.
The bog wall exhaled, a wet, sucking sound, and then the peat face just gave up. Centuries of compressed earth, waterlogged and heavy as sin, slid down in a black avalanche. I was moving before thought caught up, boots scrambling on treacherous ground, but physics doesn’t negotiate.
Tons of it. Cascading, swallowing the trench, burying our evidence like it had never existed.
I lunged back toward where the body had been. Stupid. Desperate. Voss’s hand clamped on my arm, yanking hard as the ground beneath us shifted with a groan that came from somewhere deep and wrong.
We retreated. Watched helplessly as the bog reclaimed its secrets.
And I knew (with the sick certainty that comes from years of reading crime scenes) that timing this perfect doesn’t happen by accident.
The engines cut through the wind’s howl before I saw them. Two vehicles materializing from the white-out like they’d been waiting just off-stage.
Lund stepped out, concern painted on his face thick as stage makeup. “Thank God you’re both safe.” His timing was exquisite. His surprise, rehearsed.
Behind him, three men unloaded equipment with the efficiency of pallbearers who’d already measured the grave.
The geologist’s clipboard might as well have been a tombstone. She pronounced the quadrant dead with the authority of someone who’d been briefed on what to find before she arrived.
“Catastrophic failure risk,” she said, not looking at the collapsed section. Not looking at anything real.
Lund’s concern dripped like glycerin. “We can’t risk more lives after Dr. Halvorsen’s tragic accident.”
The word accident hung there, daring me to choke on it.
Voss’s hand found my elbow: a warning, a restraint. His cop instincts reading what mine already knew: we’d just watched a grave get consecrated with paperwork. That body, wrapped in plastic like takeout, would stay buried under “unstable” peat for weeks.
Weeks we’d never have.
The photograph wasn’t just surveillance. It was intimacy weaponized.
I knew that coffee shop. Knew Emma ordered the same oat milk latte every morning at seven-fifteen, sitting at the window table with her laptop, earbuds in, oblivious to the world. Knew because I’d sat there with her last Christmas, watching her edit grant proposals for the marine biology program, her nose scrunched in concentration the same way her mother’s used to.
They’d photographed my daughter from where I’d drunk coffee with her.
My hand moved toward the satellite phone before my brain caught up. The mobile sat in my jacket pocket, useless as a brick this far above the Arctic Circle. No towers. No signal. No way to warn her that someone had turned her morning routine into a threat.
The reply cursor blinked. Patient. Expectant.
Take the helicopter when it comes for Voss.
Simple transaction. My silence for her safety. Walk away, let the bog keep its secrets: both ancient and plastic-wrapped. Let Sigrid’s murder get filed under “tragic accident” alongside whatever bodies Bjorn Lund’s people had been burying here.
My hands hovered over the keyboard, calloused fingers trembling. Twenty years I’d fought for legitimacy, clawed my way from construction sites to operating theaters to excavation trenches. Built a reputation on evidence, documentation, truth.
But Emma was twenty-four. Had her whole career ahead of her. Shouldn’t pay for her father’s stubborn integrity.
The lab’s fluorescent lights hummed their indifferent song. Outside, wind shrieked across the bog like something dying. Inside, I stared at that blinking cursor and felt every year of exhaustion, every slight from colleagues who’d never let me forget my working-class origins, every compromise I’d refused to make.
Wondered which compromise would finally break me.
The screen’s death wasn’t mechanical failure. Too precise. Too timed.
I jabbed the power button. Nothing. Held it down: ten seconds, fifteen. The computer stayed dark, taking my proof with it into digital oblivion. My reflection stared back from the black monitor: hollow-eyed, unshaven, exactly the kind of paranoid wreck nobody believes.
Just like Voss.
The thought hit like cold water. That’s what they wanted. Discredit me before I could talk. Make me sound unhinged, desperate, seeing conspiracies in equipment failures. Who’d believe the working-class interloper over Bjorn Lund’s polished credibility?
I grabbed my phone, thumbed to the camera roll. Empty. The screenshot I’d taken three seconds before the crash: gone. Not deleted. Vanished, like it had never existed.
But phones don’t wipe themselves.
My hand went to the USB ports on the computer tower. Found the thumb drive I hadn’t inserted. Small. Professional. The kind that runs scripts on contact, wipes targeted files, then erases its own presence.
Someone had been in here. Recently. While I’d been staring at my daughter’s building, paralyzed by fear, they’d been working.
I tore through the filing cabinet like a man drowning, metal drawers shrieking protest. Printouts. Backup drives. Anything Sigrid might’ve hidden from digital eyes. My breath came in ragged clouds. The heater was losing its war with Norwegian winter.
Outdated manuals. Requisition forms. Supply inventories. Then: “Preliminary Carbon Dating - Anomalies.” Sigrid’s handwriting on the tab.
My hands shook opening it. Three pages of data tables, normal ranges, standard methodology. Then nothing. Clean edges where a razor had kissed paper, surgical precision removing everything that mattered. Someone had known exactly which pages to take.
They’d been thorough. Professional. The kind of thorough that comes with practice.
The kind that doesn’t leave witnesses.
Through the frost-etched glass I caught movement. Shadow separating from shadows between the equipment sheds. Too deliberate for wind-blown canvas. The silhouette stopped, angled toward me. No face visible across that distance, just the certainty of being measured, catalogued, found wanting.
I stepped back from the window. My pulse hammered in my ears.
They’d herded me here. Alone. Compromised. Perfect.
The darkness swallowed everything. Generator’s final cough echoed through steel walls, then nothing but wind and the laptop’s pale death-glow fading to black.
Boot crunch on ice. Close. Then another set, opposite side.
They’d coordinated this.
My fingers found cold metal: the Zeiss microscope, five kilos of German engineering. I pressed my spine against the rear wall, tracking footsteps by sound alone. Two outside. Maybe three.
The message hadn’t been a warning. It was a countdown.
The cold from the microscope base had seeped into my palms by the time Ragna’s whisper cut through the darkness. Not the darkness now. That was hours ago, before the power clawed its way back. This was the fluorescent-lit aftermath, the kind of exposure that makes everything worse.
“I’ve been recording everything since the scandal.” Her voice had the hollow quality of someone confessing to a priest they don’t believe in. “I needed insurance.”
She moved like a woman defusing a bomb, slow, deliberate, each motion telegraphing the weight of what came next. The micro SD card emerged from behind the fire extinguisher, a hiding place so obvious it circled back to clever. Nobody checks the safety equipment.
Her personal laptop (not the compromised site computer) woke with a glow that carved shadows into her face. Made her look older. Made her look like she’d already been convicted.
I should have stopped her. Should have said we needed Voss present, needed proper chain of custody, needed a dozen things that would’ve protected us both. But my feet had grown roots through the container floor, down into the peat below.
The footage stuttered through days of mundane horror. Ragna measuring bones. Sigrid arguing with someone off-screen. My own hunched form, working late, always working late. Then Ragna’s finger (bitten nail, cuticle raw) stabbed the space bar.
2:[^47] AM. Timestamp burned into the corner like a brand.
Bjorn Lund moved through the frame with the efficiency of a man who’d done this before. Evidence bags switched with surgical precision. No hesitation. No looking over his shoulder. The confidence of someone who knew exactly how long he had.
“That’s enough,” I said. “We take this to,”
“Here.” The word came out strangled. “This is what I can’t explain.”
Her finger advanced the timeline. My stomach understood before my brain caught up.
4:[^15] AM.
Three hours I’d sworn I was unconscious in my quarters, dead to the world from exhaustion.
The figure on screen moved with purpose I didn’t recognize. Not the fumbling exhaustion I remembered from that night. Not the tremor in my hands that had become permanent. This version of me handled evidence bags with steady fingers, examined labels with methodical precision.
“I wasn’t there.” The words tasted like copper. Like blood. Like lies.
But the timestamp didn’t care about my certainty. 4:[^15] AM glowed accusatory in the corner while my doppelganger did things I couldn’t remember doing. The rational part of my brain (the part that had clawed through medical school, that had built a career on evidence and methodology) started cataloging possibilities. Sleepwalking. Rohypnol in my coffee. Some kind of fugue state brought on by stress and Arctic darkness.
The desperate part whispered darker options. That I’d been so obsessed with proving myself I’d contaminated evidence without conscious knowledge. That the working-class kid playing archaeologist had finally cracked under the weight of pretending to belong.
“How long?” My voice came from somewhere distant. “How long was I in there?”
Ragna’s silence was answer enough.
The floor wasn’t level anymore. Or maybe it was my inner ear finally giving up, surrendering to the impossibility of what I was watching. That thing on screen wore my face, my clothes, moved through my workspace like it owned the place. Like it knew exactly what it was doing.
“I was asleep.” The protest died in the chemical-thick air between us.
Because I’d said the same thing after finding dirt under my nails that morning. After discovering my thermal layer inside-out. After tasting something bitter at the back of my throat that no amount of coffee could wash away.
The working-class fraud finally exposed: not by lack of credentials, but by his own traitorous hands doing God-knows-what while his mind checked out.
The laptop clicked shut like a coffin lid. Ragna’s fingers wouldn’t stop trembling: or maybe that was just the fluorescent lights making everything shake. Her eyes had that hollowed-out look I’d seen in bathroom mirrors lately.
“Four hours,” she whispered. “Woke up outside. Boots caked in peat I never walked through.”
The chemical smell suddenly made sense. Not just formaldehyde and reagents.
Something to make you compliant. Suggestible. Useful.
The microscope’s weight in my palm felt wrong. Defensive. Like I’d grabbed it before: muscle memory from hours I couldn’t account for.
If they’d dosed us both, we were puppets with cut strings. Guilty of everything. Nothing. Whatever they needed.
I set the microscope down carefully, watching my own scarred knuckles like they belonged to a stranger.
What had these hands already done in the dark?
The photographs spread across steel like a hand of cards I didn’t want to play. My fingers left condensation marks on the glossy surfaces: sweat in a room cold enough to see your breath. Professional distance, that’s what they taught us. Observe, document, conclude. Don’t think about the hours you can’t remember. Don’t wonder what your hands were doing while your mind was somewhere else.
Sigrid’s body in the trench. Face-down, right cheek pressed into peat-black soil.
But the lividity told a different story.
I’d seen enough corpses to read them like topographic maps. After death, blood settles to the lowest points, staining tissue that purple-red you can’t fake. Takes six to eight hours to fix permanently. Sigrid’s discoloration pooled along her left side, her back, her left shoulder blade. Clear as a signature.
She’d been lying on her left side for hours after she died. Somewhere else.
Then someone moved her. Positioned her face-down, right side against the earth, where the lividity patterns screamed the impossibility of it.
Bodies don’t lie. Even when everything else does. Even when your own memory is Swiss cheese and your hands shake because they might have. Focus on what you can prove.
I pulled out my field notebook, the pages water-stained and dog-eared. Drew the body position we found. Drew the lividity pattern. The contradiction was textbook. First-year forensics students could spot it.
Which meant whoever staged this scene either didn’t know enough to care, or knew we’d be too compromised to notice. Too drugged, too paranoid, too busy suspecting ourselves.
The generator hummed its unreliable rhythm. The photographs stared up at me, Sigrid’s gray face in a dozen angles. Someone had killed her elsewhere. Waited for the blood to settle. Then brought her back to this godforsaken bog to make it look like an accident.
The question that made my stomach turn: had I helped them do it?
Voss didn’t knock. Just pushed through the lab door trailing cigarette smoke and Arctic wind, his hollow face carved deeper by shadows. He moved like a man who’d stopped sleeping years ago.
“Fuel records,” he said, dropping a folder on the examination table. His nicotine-stained finger traced columns of numbers, the nail beds gray as corpse flesh. “Lund’s helicopter. Pilot logged departure from the village at 5:[^47] AM. Twenty-minute flight to here.”
I leaned closer, my breath fogging the plastic sleeve protecting the documents.
“But the fuel consumption.” Voss tapped the page hard enough to make it jump. “Burned enough for a round trip hours earlier. Around 2 AM. Someone made an unlogged flight.”
The implications settled into my bones colder than the metal walls around us. Sigrid killed in the village where Lund had his alibi witnesses. Her body loaded onto the helicopter in darkness. Flown back to this cursed bog. Staged in the trench like an archaeological find.
“He brought her back,” I said. “Made it look like she died here.”
Voss’s ice-blue eyes met mine. “Question is: who helped him carry her?”
The words hit like a physical blow. I turned from Voss’s fuel records to find Ragna trembling in the doorway, her red braid coming undone, lab coat buttoned wrong. How long had she been standing there? The door hung open behind her. My hand moved to my pocket, found the key still there.
“Show me,” I said.
She crossed to the evidence locker, movements too quick, too jerky. Pulled out sealed bags of soil samples, her bitten nails catching the fluorescent glare. “Different peat composition. Different depth. The bog where she died,” Her voice cracked. “It’s not this bog, Kristoffer. It’s somewhere else entirely.”
Two crime scenes. One body. And someone who knew both locations.
The camera’s weight turns foreign in my calloused hands. I stare at the timestamps while my mind gropes through fog for any memory of standing here, framing these exact shots. Nothing. Just hours of missing time, swallowed by exhaustion or something worse.
Voss’s nicotine-stained fingers reach for the Nikon. I jerk it back, protective. If my mind’s unraveling, he can’t know. Not yet. Not when my credibility’s all that stands between truth and convenient conclusions.
I sketch their timeline across the whiteboard with marker that squeaks like bone on bone. Sigrid at the village inn, 10:[^30] PM, arguing with shadows. Helicopter rotors at 2 AM. No flight plan logged. Her body arranged in the trench by dawn, theatrical as hell.
The pattern crystallizes through my exhaustion: helicopter access, village connections, the cold competence to stage death as accident.
Then the lights stutter, and in that strobing darkness I catch Lund’s reflection in the steel cabinet. Motionless. Watching. How long has he been standing there, cataloging every word?
The carbon dating report sits between us like a corpse at dinner. Fourteen hundred years, give or take fifty. The bone density charts don’t lie. They never do. I’ve read enough of them to know when science is telling me to shut up and accept reality.
My hands shake as I hold the spectrometry results up to the fluorescent glare. The dental modifications Ragna swore were modern crowns? Pre-Christian Norse work. Filing patterns consistent with warrior class burial practices. The kind of detail I should have recognized immediately, the kind that separates real forensic archaeologists from construction workers playing dress-up with correspondence degrees.
Twenty years clawing my way up from nothing, and it takes one week of Arctic darkness to expose what I’ve always feared: that I’m still just a fraud with calloused hands and a mail-order education.
I cross-reference the isotope analysis against the stratigraphic documentation. Every test confirms it. The remains are genuinely ancient. Which means either Ragna lied about what she found, or my judgment has deteriorated so catastrophically that I’m manufacturing evidence from exhaustion and paranoia.
The university administrators’ words echo in my skull: isolation psychosis. Maybe Lund’s right. Maybe we’re all losing it out here in the endless dark, seeing conspiracies in shadows, modern crimes in ancient bones.
I think about Sigrid’s body in the trench, the staging that seemed so obvious. But what if it wasn’t staged? What if a woman simply slipped on ice-slick duckboards, cracked her skull on frozen earth, and died alone in the dark while I was sleeping fifty meters away?
What if the only real crime here is my desperation to prove I belong in a world that’s never wanted me?
The marker squeaks against the whiteboard as I draw a line through my timeline. Evidence doesn’t care about my theories. It just is.
I watch Ragna’s hands tremble as she spreads her field photographs across the stainless steel table. The fluorescent light makes her freckles stand out like blood spatter against skin gone the color of old bone.
“That’s not,” She stops, swallows hard. Her finger hovers over an image, not quite touching. “I saw crowns. Modern amalgam fillings.”
But even as she says it, I hear the doubt creeping in. The same doubt that’s been eating at me since the carbon dating came back. The photographs don’t lie any better than the spectrometry results. Ancient dental modifications stare back at us, clear as confession.
She scrolls through image after image, each one contradicting what she swears she documented. Her breathing goes shallow and rapid. “I documented everything.” The words come out desperate now, pleading. “I know what I saw.”
But she doesn’t. Not anymore. I watch her look at her own evidence like it’s written in a language she used to speak but can’t quite remember.
I’ve spent twenty years clawing my way up from construction sites to operating theaters, and I know the sound of doors closing. Lund’s voice has that particular smoothness. The kind that comes from practice, from talking people into things they know are wrong.
“The university has liability concerns,” he continues, pulling out his phone to show us something. “Insurance won’t cover continued operations given Dr. Magnusson’s… state.”
Ragna’s shoulder twitches under his hand. She’s looking at me now, waiting for me to fight back, to say something that proves I’m not the broken thing they’re all deciding I am.
But my mouth tastes like copper and exhaustion, and the photographs keep not showing what she swears she saw.
The voices through the satellite connection have that particular crispness that comes from expensive conference rooms. Temperature controlled. Coffee in porcelain cups, not chipped thermoses.
“Dr. Magnusson.” The department chair’s tone carries practiced sympathy like a scalpel carries germs. “Your background has been… inspirational. But this environment requires certain resilience.”
Translation: construction workers don’t belong making decisions that matter.
“Evacuation in forty-eight hours. Oslo will handle the analysis.”
They’re already writing the narrative. The one where I’m the problem.
The whiteboard mocks me with its careful timeline. Evidence chains I can no longer trust. My fingers find my temples, pressing against the headaches that have become constant companions. How many days since real sleep? When did the observations start sliding sideways?
The metal cabinet reflects someone I don’t recognize. Wild-eyed. Unraveling.
Then I see it: fresh mud tracked across the sterile floor. Boot prints leading to where Lund stood. Sigrid’s file cabinet hanging open like a broken jaw.
The tent’s canvas walls snap and billow with each gust, making the shadows dance across Voss’s gray face. I keep my fingers pressed to his carotid. Pulse thready and irregular, the kind of rhythm that makes you think about how far we are from a real hospital. Three hours if the weather holds. Six if it doesn’t.
His pupils respond to the penlight, but slowly, like he’s watching something behind his eyes that’s more interesting than my diagnostic routine. The thermometer beeps again. Still 39.[^2]. I’ve seen hypothermia cases warmer than this fever should allow, given where we are.
“Inspector,” I say, knowing he won’t answer but needing to try anyway. “Can you tell me what day it is?”
His lips keep moving in that soundless pattern. I lean closer, trying to read the shapes. Numbers, maybe. Or coordinates. His right hand claws weakly at his coat pocket, fingers scrabbling against the canvas with desperate insistence.
That’s what gets my attention. Not the fever or the collapse, but the specificity of that gesture. In twenty years of fieldwork, I’ve learned to recognize when someone’s trying to communicate something that matters more than their own deterioration.
I reach into the pocket he’s indicating. My fingers close around something small, plastic. An evidence bag.
Inside: a scrap of fabric, maybe three centimeters square. The material catches the light wrong. Too synthetic, too bright. Modern. The kind of technical outdoor gear that costs more than my monthly salary. Voss’s handwriting on the label is barely legible, shaking worse than usual: Trench 3, 2.4m depth, grid ref. N47-E23.
Trench 3. Where we found the Viking grave goods. Where nothing manufactured after 1000 CE should exist.
I look back at Voss. His eyes have opened, fever-bright and fixed on my face with terrible clarity.
“They’re still burying them,” he whispers.
The tent flap jerks open and Ragna’s there, backlit by generator floods, her breath fogging in the cold that rushes in with her.
“I heard. Voss on the cot, me standing over him.”I have paramedic certification. Field school requirement.”
Her eyes aren’t on the inspector. They’re tracking across the examination table, cataloging what’s visible. The evidence bag catches the light like a signal flare.
I shift my weight, casual, blocking her sightline. “Appreciate it, but I’ve got this stabilized. What I really need is someone prepping the evacuation documentation. Medical history, incident reports. Lab’s got the forms.”
“I could. You know how particular they are about paperwork.”
She doesn’t move. We’re both pretending this is about medical protocol, both knowing it’s not. Her fingers worry at her braid, pulling it over her shoulder, a tell I’ve watched develop over three weeks of mounting pressure.
“Right,” she finally says. “The documentation.”
She backs through the tent flap, but her eyes linger on that evidence bag until the canvas falls between us.
The fabric under magnification tells a story that shouldn’t exist. Gore-Tex, manufactured within the last five years, I can date it by the weave pattern. The spatter isn’t rust or ancient residue. It’s arterial spray, the kind you see when someone’s carotid opens up and they’re still conscious enough for their heart to pump it everywhere.
Three meters down in strata that carbon-dated to 950 CE.
Someone dug deep, planted evidence, then restored the layers with enough precision to fool ground-penetrating radar. Professional work. The kind that requires equipment, time, and knowledge of archaeological methodology.
Voss’s notebook is water-damaged, pages stuck together. His handwriting deteriorates across entries. Steady documentation collapsing into frantic scrawl. He’d been testing samples off-book, comparing isotopes, building a case he’d shared with nobody.
Not even me.
The seizure leaves Voss’s lips flecked with foam. I check pupil response, sluggish, uneven. Not stroke presentation. The timeline’s wrong for natural collapse too. He was coherent four hours ago, arguing about jurisdiction with that same methodical intensity he’d maintained for weeks.
Coffee. Lund’s always playing benefactor, bringing thermoses around like he’s everyone’s concerned colleague.
I catalog symptoms: tachycardia, hyperthermia, altered consciousness, seizure. Could be benzodiazepine withdrawal. Could be organophosphate. Could be I’m seeing murder weapons in kindness because I’ve spent too long staring at bones that whisper contradictions.
The needle slides in clean. Three vials, serum, plasma, whole blood. I label them with the same methodical precision I use on skeletal samples, though my hands betray me with tremors I can’t quite control. Chain of custody matters. Documentation matters. If Voss was poisoned, these vials are evidence. If he wasn’t, they’re proof I’ve finally cracked.
I lock them beside the fabric scrap, feel the key’s weight in my pocket like an anchor or a noose.
The door opens without a knock. That’s the first tell. He fills the doorway, expensive parka dusted with snow that hasn’t had time to melt. Which means he came straight here. Not to check on Voss in the medical tent. Not to consult with the officers trying to keep their inspector coherent. Here. To me.
“Terrible situation,” he says, and I watch his eyes do the calculation before the concern settles over his features like a mask pulled from a pocket. Those green eyes flick to the vials, to my hands still gloved, to the locked evidence cabinet. Assessing threat, not offering sympathy. “I’ve arranged everything. Helicopter from Tromsø at 0600, direct to University Hospital.”
I don’t ask how he got through to arrange a medical evacuation in the middle of the night when our satellite phone’s been temperamental for days. Don’t mention that University Hospital is where convenient diagnoses get written, where inconvenient questions get medicated into silence.
“His department’s been notified,” Lund continues, already moving past me toward the wall of photographs. Claiming territory. “They’re sending someone to accompany him.”
Someone. Not a name. Not a colleague Voss would trust. Someone to ensure the inspector arrives sedated, compliant, ready to be filed away as another casualty of obsession and Arctic darkness.
The efficiency is impressive. Almost as if Lund had the helicopter on standby, the hospital bed reserved, the paperwork pre-signed. As if he’d been waiting for Voss to break, or planning to help him along.
I keep my hands steady on the evidence cabinet. The key burns cold against my thigh through the pocket fabric.
“When did you make these arrangements?” I ask.
“The inspector’s been under tremendous strain,” Lund says, and now he’s at the photographs, hands clasped behind his back like a museum patron admiring art. Not touching, but claiming. Making the lab his briefing room, my workspace his stage. “Twenty years carrying that case: it’s no wonder he’s seeing connections that aren’t there.”
I watch him study Sigrid’s autopsy photos with the same practiced concern he probably uses at investor meetings. The same careful distance.
“The mind does strange things under pressure, especially at our age.” He glances back, including me in that assessment. Forty-seven suddenly feels ancient, unreliable. A working-class degree from correspondence courses, exhaustion from weeks in the cold. Maybe my judgment’s compromised too. That’s the suggestion hanging in the generator-warmed air between us.
“Sometimes the kindest thing,” Lund continues, turning from the wall of the dead to face me directly, “is to recognize when someone needs help rather than enabling their… obsessions.”
Obsessions. Not investigations. Not dedication. The word choice is surgical, precise. Pathologizing persistence, reframing evidence as symptom.
I think about the vial in the locked cabinet. The one that doesn’t match any timeline that makes sense.
The two officers shift their weight, nodding like altar boys receiving gospel. One’s maybe twenty-five, fresh academy polish still on him. The other’s older, should know better. But Lund’s got that boardroom gravity, that expensive-suit authority that makes working stiffs defer without thinking.
“The preserved bodies,” Lund says, shaking his head with practiced sympathy. “Erik couldn’t let go of his old case. Started seeing his victims everywhere.” Fixation, not evidence. “These timeline connections he kept mentioning?” Pattern-seeking behavior, not investigation. “The coincidences that troubled him so much?” Paranoid ideation, not legitimate suspicion.
Medical terminology deployed like a scalpel. Clean cuts that bleed out credibility.
The younger officer actually writes it down. Building the official record in real-time, Voss’s conclusions already autopsied and diagnosed before the helicopter even arrives.
I’ve been in enough construction site trailers to recognize a foreman taking control. Lund’s voice carries that same weight. The guy who decides what gets built and what gets demolished.
“Recent conclusions… unreliable.” He pauses like he’s choosing words carefully, but I’d bet my degree he rehearsed this. “Stress, insomnia, now collapse. Tragic, but we can’t let one man’s breakdown derail legitimate work.”
The officers nod. Not at me. At him.
The power just changed hands, and I’m holding nothing but dirt under my fingernails.
The lab’s empty now. Three AM by my watch, though time means nothing in this darkness. I lean against the examination table where we first laid out Sigrid’s body, staring at the wall of photographs: ancient bones and modern dental work, Viking grave goods and synthetic fibers, everything Voss saw that nobody else wanted to see.
His blood samples sit in the refrigerator. Standard protocol after collapse.
Or evidence I might need later.
The coffee’s gone cold against my palm. I’ve been standing here long enough to watch the whole thing fall apart. The careful academic veneer cracking like ice over black water.
Andersson’s voice carries across the common area, high and tight. “We have rights. You can’t keep us here like prisoners.” Twenty-three years old, first major dig, probably thought archaeology was all dusty libraries and gentle brushwork. Kjelstad nods beside her, already zipping his duffel with shaking hands.
Petersen’s the one that gets me, though. Thirty years in the field, published in every major journal, and now he’s pacing the room like a caged animal, spinning theories about environmental contamination. “Mass psychogenic illness,” he says, the words tumbling out too fast. “Shared delusions brought on by isolation, sensory deprivation, the constant darkness, it’s documented, there are precedents,”
He’s trying to logic his way out of what we’ve all seen. What Voss saw first.
I open my mouth to defend the inspector’s findings, to point out the physical evidence that can’t be explained away by bad air or spoiled grain. The words line up in my head: the modern remains, the timeline inconsistencies, the pattern of disposal that matches. Hear how I sound exactly like Voss did three hours ago, before his eyes rolled back and he went down hard on the plywood floor. That same desperate certainty, that conviction that only I can see the truth everyone else is too blind or too compromised to acknowledge.
My mouth closes. The coffee mug feels suddenly heavy.
Maybe Petersen’s right. Maybe we’re all losing it out here in the dark, seeing conspiracies in coincidence, murder in accident. Maybe there’s nothing to solve except our own unraveling.
But Sigrid’s still dead. And the bones don’t lie.
I watch Ragna from across the room. She’s gone still as a specimen, dinner turning to paste on her plate. Hours since she’s said a word. Just sits there examining her fingernails like they’re evidence from someone else’s crime scene.
She’s got her back to the wall. Smart. Eyes tracking every movement in the room. When Lund pushes through the door, all expensive parka and concerned investor face, she jerks like she’s been shocked.
“Helicopter’s coming at first light,” Lund announces. “We’ll get Inspector Voss proper medical attention.” His voice drips with reasonable concern. “These conditions, the stress, it’s clearly taking a toll on everyone.”
Ragna’s knuckles go white on the table edge.
Nobody else notices. They’re too busy watching themselves fall apart, too focused on their own fear to see hers. But I’ve spent twenty years reading bodies, living and dead. I know what terror looks like when it’s trying to stay perfectly still.
She’s not afraid of the darkness or the isolation or shared delusions.
She’s afraid of Lund.
The words keep coming even as I watch myself lose the room. “The positioning isn’t random (Voss documented seventeen cases where the bodies faced magnetic north, hands positioned)”
I stop. My reflection stares back from the window glass, all wild eyes and emphatic hands sketching coordinates in empty air. Voice pitched high and urgent, just like Voss’s before they sedated him.
The silence has weight.
They’re not looking at evidence anymore. They’re looking at me the way they looked at the inspector three hours ago, right before he started screaming about patterns in the peat.
I’ve become the thing I was defending. Another obsessive seeing connections that aren’t there, another broken man the darkness has claimed.
Lund materializes beside me, hand on my shoulder like we’re old friends. “Doctor Magnusson, you’ve carried this weight long enough.” His voice drips sympathy that doesn’t reach those green eyes. “Working your way up from nothing, always proving yourself: and now this nightmare. Anyone would crack.”
The kindness lands like an accusation. Unreliable. Compromised. Next to be removed.
I force my head to nod, accept the pill he presses into my calloused palm, retreat before I start ranting about magnetic north.
I palm the pill instead of swallowing. White circle of oblivion sitting on my nightstand while darkness presses against the window. The camp settles into uneasy sleep: whispers dying, generators throttling down.
I should take it. Should let the chemical fog roll in, drown the connections I keep seeing.
Instead I pocket the sedative and slip outside. Frozen ground crunches beneath my boots. The lab waits, fluorescent and unforgiving. Behind me, movement I don’t register, Lund’s silhouette at the administrative tent, phone pressed to his ear. His voice carries across the stillness: “The situation’s becoming manageable.”
The fluorescent tubes buzz their monotonous sermon while I sort evidence like a man playing solitaire with corpses. First pass: chronological. The Viking remains cluster early, proper burials with grave goods and ritual positioning. Then the anomalies start appearing. Scattered bones in wrong strata, preservation that doesn’t match the carbon dates.
Second pass: spatial distribution. I sketch the dig site from memory, mark where each set of remains emerged. The ancient burials follow a pattern, radiating from what Sigrid identified as a sacrificial stone. The modern ones, because that’s what they are, no matter what the paperwork claims, those cluster near the access road. Convenient for delivery.
Third pass: pathology. Viking Age trauma tells stories of violence and disease, readable in bone lesions and healed fractures. The others show different signatures. Clinical. Efficient. The kind of damage that speaks to someone who knew exactly where to strike.
The generator stutters. Lights dim to amber, and in that failing illumination the photographs rearrange themselves in my vision. Not the bodies: the backgrounds. The same blue tarp edge in three supposedly unrelated excavation photos. The same boot print in mud that should have been pristine. The same shadow falling across evidence that was documented on different days.
Someone’s been staging the site. Not just hiding bodies in an ancient burial ground, but actively manipulating the excavation itself. Planting remains. Contaminating strata. Creating archaeological chaos that would take years to untangle, if anyone bothered trying.
The lights surge back to full brightness, harsh and accusatory.
I spread Sigrid’s notes flat, reading them backward from her death. The funding irregularities she mentioned weren’t about money. They were about access. Who could authorize equipment deliveries, who controlled the excavation schedule, who decided which trenches got opened when. She’d been documenting a system, not an embezzlement scheme.
She’d figured out the dig site was a machine for making bodies disappear into history.
I lay Voss’s annotations across the steel table, watching his handwriting deteriorate from precise police script to something a psychiatric patient might produce. Names circled in red ink, arrows stabbing between unrelated facts, question marks breeding in the margins like mold. The man’s been chasing ghosts so long he’s become one himself.
But underneath the paranoia, there’s method. Voss wasn’t tracking bodies. He was tracking paperwork. Permit applications. Access authorizations. Funding transfer approvals. Every document that allowed this site to exist, that gave someone legitimate reason to be here with heavy equipment and privacy. The inspector had been building a bureaucratic map of how you hide murder inside archaeology.
I find his notation on a three-year-old environmental impact assessment: “Same signature as 1998 mining survey: impossible.” The signature belongs to someone who’d been dead two years when they supposedly signed off on our dig permits.
Voss wasn’t crazy. He’d just seen the pattern twenty years before anyone else: someone’s been using remote sites as graveyards, hiding behind official paperwork and academic legitimacy.
The question isn’t who’s burying bodies. It’s who’s been signing the permission slips.
I pull up the file directory, sorting by modification date instead of name. The timestamps tell their own story, Sigrid’s budget files, touched at 2:[^47] AM the night she died. Her grant compliance forms, edited three hours after Voss found her body in the trench. Someone with her credentials, her access codes, her authority to make changes that wouldn’t raise flags in university systems.
I check the login history. Her account shows activity every night since her death, always between 2 and 4 AM when the rest of camp sleeps. Someone’s been wearing her digital identity like a mask, systematically erasing whatever trail she’d uncovered. The metadata doesn’t lie, even when everything else does.
I light another cigarette with hands that won’t stay steady. The requisition forms blur together until I stop reading words and start reading white space: what’s absent speaks louder. Lund’s facility never questioned impossible preservation. Never flagged anachronistic materials. Never asked why Viking graves needed rush processing at triple cost. They weren’t analyzing evidence. They were manufacturing a narrative, one sample at a time.
The realization hits like a fist to the gut. They didn’t just fund the dig. They controlled the narrative from soil to certification. Every sample that might expose the truth got routed through their lab, processed by their technicians, stamped with their authority. The Viking Age wasn’t discovered here. It was purchased, fabricated, a historical alibi written in falsified isotopes and manipulated stratigraphy.
The cold metal of the examination table bites through my gloves as I lean over the scattered reports. Three in the morning and I’m chasing ghosts through paperwork, but that’s what it comes to. The truth hiding in bureaucratic fine print while bodies pile up in the permafrost.
I pull the sample logs closer, squinting at the handwritten notations in the margins. Someone (Sigrid, her precise script unmistakable) had circled the lab codes in red ink. Question marks pepper the margins like bullet holes. She’d seen it. Of course she had. Twenty years in academia teaches you when the game’s rigged.
My laptop screen casts blue light across the forms as I dig deeper into Nordisk Heritage Analytics. Their website’s all Nordic crosses and heritage preservation rhetoric, the kind of nationalist nostalgia that opens wallets at fundraising dinners. But the company registration tells a different story. Incorporated eighteen months ago. Single client. Board of directors reads like a who’s who of Lund’s business associates. The legitimate ones, anyway, the names he can afford to have in public records.
I cross-reference again, this time matching sample numbers to the photographic record. Every skeleton that showed modern dental work in preliminary examination got the Nordisk treatment. Every remain with suspicious trauma patterns. Every burial that violated known Viking Age practices. All of it sanitized, rebranded, certified ancient by a laboratory that exists solely to launder inconvenient corpses through respectable science.
The generator coughs outside, lights flickering. In that moment of darkness, I see Sigrid bent over this same table, red pen in hand, connecting the same dots. Understanding what it meant. What it would cost her to speak up.
She’d documented everything. Built her case with the same meticulous care she’d applied to every excavation. And then she’d confronted them.
That’s when they killed her.
The implications settle in my gut like swallowed glass. Lund didn’t just bankroll this operation: he owned every step that mattered. I spread the sample manifest across the table, match it against the excavation photographs pinned to the wall. Every skeleton that screamed wrong in preliminary analysis got the Nordisk treatment. “Specialized dating techniques,” the paperwork calls it. Academic doublespeak for making problems disappear.
The university lab, the legitimate one, the one that answers to peer review and professional standards, never touched the bodies that mattered. They got the safe remains, the ones that fit the narrative. Everything else vanished into Lund’s private pipeline and came back certified ancient.
Sigrid would’ve spotted this in a heartbeat. Her protocols were legendary, the kind of methodological rigor that made junior researchers weep. Standard procedure meant standard labs. Deviation meant questions. Documentation. The kind of paper trail that ends careers.
Or lives.
I stare at the routing slips, at her handwriting growing more urgent in the margins. She’d built the case against them, one misfiled form at a time. Then she’d made the fatal mistake of letting them know she knew.
The laptop fan whirs in the silence, loud as accusation. I navigate through her correspondence with the precision of someone who’s violated enough crime scenes to know what matters. The emails read like a woman building her own coffin, one polite inquiry at a time.
She’d started cautious: professional questions about turnaround times, methodology clarifications. Academic courtesy masking suspicion. But Sigrid had been thorough, the kind of thorough that gets you tenure or gets you killed. By November, her tone shifted. Direct questions about chain of custody. Requests for raw spectrometry data. The kind of questions that don’t have innocent answers.
The draft to the Directorate sits there like a loaded gun she never got to fire.
I scroll through the attachments she’d been gathering. Lab reports with handwritten notes in the margins. A spreadsheet tracking which samples went to which labs, color-coded red where Lund had intervened. She’d documented everything except the one thing that mattered: who to trust with it. That hesitation bought her a cracked skull and a convenient accident.
The photo archive opens like a wound. “Comparative Analysis”: her academic euphemism for evidence of murder. I click through images she’d taken after hours: molars with amalgam fillings, femurs showing power tool striations, polyester threads embedded in rib cages. Each photograph methodically paired with its falsified report. The timestamps tell their own story: she’d worked alone, trusting no one. Smart woman. Dead woman. The final image loads: Trench Seven at twilight, and there, half-shadow against the tent, Lund watching her document his graveyard.
The files multiply like evidence of metastasis. Sigrid had built her case with the methodical precision of someone who knew she’d only get one chance to expose it. Folder after folder of side-by-side comparisons: the field photographs she’d taken immediately upon excavation, then the sanitized versions that appeared in official documentation three days later. Same remains, different stories.
My fingers are numb: not from cold, though the heater’s given up its ghost again. From recognition. From understanding exactly how she must have felt, sitting in this same chair, watching her career-defining discovery transform into an elaborate lie.
She’d documented the workflow. Remains excavated, photographed, logged. Then the requisition forms: “Additional isotopic analysis required. Transport to Nordic Heritage Solutions laboratory, Oslo.” Standard procedure. Except the remains that returned weren’t quite the same. Oh, the bones matched. She’d been clever enough to mark them with UV-reactive codes invisible to anyone not looking. But the accompanying documentation told different stories. Modern dental work became “post-mortem damage from excavation tools.” Saw marks from power tools transformed into “perimortem trauma consistent with Viking Age weaponry.” Synthetic fabric fibers catalogued as “possible contamination from handling: disregard.”
The laboratory had been the chokepoint. Every piece of evidence that threatened the fiction got routed through Lund’s facility, returned with credentials that made questioning it professional suicide. Who argues with isotopic analysis? Who second-guesses radiocarbon dating from a certified laboratory?
Sigrid had. She’d kept tissue samples, hidden in the -80 freezer under false labels. Taken her own photographs with metadata intact. Built a shadow archive that proved systematic falsification.
The final document stops my breath: a draft email to the Norwegian Bureau for the Investigation of Police Affairs, dated the morning she died. Subject line: “Evidence of Criminal Activity at Svartmyr Site.” Saved but never sent.
She’d been twelve hours from destroying everything Lund had built.
I cross-reference the laboratory’s corporate registration against the expedition’s funding trail. The connections emerge like bone structure from peat: Nordic Heritage Solutions shares three board members with Lund’s investment consortium. Not just funding the dig. Controlling the entire evidentiary pipeline.
Every sample that raised questions had been routed through their facility. Every modern marker that threatened the historical narrative got scrubbed before reaching university oversight. The process was elegant: field documentation showed one thing, official reports another. Who checks the laboratory’s work? Who questions certified analysis from a facility with impeccable credentials?
Sigrid had questioned it. She’d documented the transformation: remains excavated with clear modern characteristics, sent for “additional testing,” returned with reports that rewrote their stories. Dental work became excavation damage. Tool marks became ancient trauma. Evidence didn’t disappear. It got reinterpreted by experts whose paychecks came from the same source as the expedition funding.
The laboratory wasn’t just falsifying results. It was manufacturing legitimacy, transforming crime scenes into archaeological sites with the stroke of a pen and the weight of scientific authority.
The timestamp on the draft shows she’d been refining it for three weeks, adding evidence, strengthening her case. The final additions came from two days before her death: photographs she’d taken secretly, showing discrepancies between field documentation and official reports. A skeleton catalogued with Viking Age grave goods, but her photos captured modern amalgam fillings before the skull was sent for “verification.”
She’d even recorded conversations. Audio files buried in nested folders, voices discussing “problematic findings” and “narrative management.” Lund’s voice, smooth and reasonable, explaining how certain discoveries would “complicate the historical record unnecessarily.”
The email sat in her drafts folder, complete and damning. She’d never pressed send. Whatever had stopped her, fear, doubt, one final attempt at confrontation, had killed her.
I stare at the spreadsheets until the numbers blur into accusations. Equipment costs that could fund a small university. Analysis fees paid to labs that don’t exist when I cross-reference them. Permits that should take months, approved in days. Seven sites across Finnmark and Troms, each one a grave pretending to be history. Each one near where people vanished without explanation, their families still waiting for answers that are buried under official conclusions and backfilled earth.
The cursor blinks in the scheduled send queue. Empty. Someone sat at Lund’s terminal after Sigrid stopped breathing, methodically erasing her insurance policy while her blood cooled in the trench outside. Professional. Thorough. The kind of cleanup that comes from practice.
I close the laptop. My hands don’t shake anymore. Too tired for that luxury. Around me, the lab hums its fluorescent requiem, and I understand finally that knowing isn’t the same as proving, and proving isn’t the same as surviving.
I’ve been doing this long enough to read bodies. The living ones tell you as much as the dead if you know what to look for. The way Ragna’s weight shifts from foot to foot, how her fingers dig into the metal doorframe hard enough to blanch white at the knuckles, the rapid eye movements scanning the darkness behind her before fixing on me with something like desperation. This isn’t guilt. This is prey animal terror.
“I need to tell you something.” Her voice cracks on the second word. “Before. Before I can’t anymore.”
I set down the femur I’ve been examining, some poor bastard from the fourteenth century who’s got nothing to do with our current mess. The fluorescent lights make Ragna look corpse-pale, shadows pooling in the hollows under her eyes. She hasn’t slept. Neither have I, but I’m used to running on fumes and bad coffee. She’s young enough to still expect the world to make sense.
“Close the door,” I tell her.
She does, but keeps her back pressed against it, like she needs an escape route. Smart. In this place, everyone should keep their exits mapped.
“The night before Sigrid died.” She’s forcing the words out, each one costing her. “I went to her tent. We’d argued earlier about the carbon dating discrepancies, and I wanted to. I wait. Silence is a tool, and right now Ragna needs the space to break.
“Lund was already there.” Her eyes meet mine, and there it is. The thing she’s been carrying like a stone in her chest. “I heard them through the tent fabric. His voice. Her voice. And then what he said to her.”
The words come faster now, like she’s lancing an infection. She’d stood there in the dark between the tents, boots frozen to the boards, listening to Sigrid’s voice climb from professional disagreement into something sharper. Accusations. Lund’s responses getting quieter, more controlled: the kind of quiet that makes your hindbrain scream warnings your conscious mind tries to rationalize away.
“She said she had documentation. That she’d already contacted someone in Oslo.” Ragna’s breath hitches. “And he said, Christ, the way he said it, he told her that would be ‘unfortunate for everyone involved.’ Not a threat. Just a statement of fact, like he was discussing weather patterns.”
I can picture it. Lund with that boardroom smile, explaining consequences the way you’d explain gravity to a child about to step off a cliff.
“I should have,” She stops herself, knows that road leads nowhere useful. “I backed away. Went to my quarters. Told myself I’d misunderstood, that I was paranoid because everyone already thinks I’m the fuckup who can’t be trusted.”
The rationalization machine kicked in, that survival mechanism every academic with a scarred reputation develops. She’d reframed it as professional tension, convinced herself that reporting would look vindictive after their documented methodology dispute. With her history, the misidentified remains that nearly ended her career, she’d be gift-wrapping the case against herself. The junior pathologist who’d benefit from the lead archaeologist’s removal. The woman already whispered about in department hallways, her competence perpetually questioned.
So she’d swallowed it. Let fear masquerade as pragmatism. Chose self-preservation over truth, then spent three days watching that choice calcify into something she couldn’t walk back without destroying what little credibility she had left.
Until the weight of silence became heavier than the risk of speaking.
I watched the confession tear through her like she was drowning in it. The tent zipper at 23:[^20]. She’d checked her watch, that damning specificity. Lund emerging into generator light, his thousand-dollar parka pristine, moving with the unhurried confidence of a man who’d just handled business. She’d crawled back to her bunk and swallowed pills to murder the implications before they could accuse her of anything worse than cowardice.
The math wrote itself in the cold air between us. Forty-eight hours. That’s what my cowardice bought him. Time to wipe her laptop, rewrite her field notes, plant the staging that screamed accident. Time to erase the email scheduled to send to Oslo, to the police, to every goddamn newspaper that would listen. Her fear had been his accomplice, and we both knew it.
The photographs looked like they’d been handled too many times: edges soft, surfaces worn where his thumb had pressed the same spot year after year. Seven faces that had kept him company through failed marriages and sleepless decades. I recognized the ritual in how he laid them out, left to right, oldest to newest. A liturgy of the unsolved.
“This one.” His nicotine-stained finger tapped a woman with dark hair and a department store smile. “Marte Johansen. Twenty-three. Disappeared May 2003 during a Bronze Age excavation near Bodø. They found her three weeks later in a bog, called it accidental drowning. The pathologist noted bruising inconsistent with the finding, but the site director (guess who funded him) pressured for quick closure.”
I pulled the file closer. The bruising pattern screamed manual strangulation, not drowning. Any first-year student could see it.
“The site was backfilled within days,” Voss continued, lighting another cigarette with hands that had forgotten how to be steady. “Emergency order, citing structural instability. The director published a brief paper in an obscure journal, then the whole thing vanished from academic record. I tried to follow up. The permits had been issued through a shell company that dissolved six months later.”
Ragna’s camera shutter clicked like a nervous heartbeat behind us. She was documenting everything, building the case I should have built when Sigrid first came to me with her suspicions. When she’d asked if certain bone trauma patterns looked wrong to me, and I’d told her to take it up with the lead archaeologist.
“Seven sites,” I said, spreading the remaining files. “Seven bodies. How many more did he bury that we haven’t found?”
Voss exhaled smoke toward the fluorescent lights. “The ones we found were mistakes. The bog preserved them when they should have rotted away. How many didn’t make mistakes?”
I laid them out like a coroner arranging organs. My hands didn’t shake. Ragna’s did, her camera clicking compulsively as she documented what Voss had hidden from his own department for two decades.
“May 2003,” I said, pulling the first file. “Lund’s firm gets its license. August 2003, Bronze Age mound near Bodø gets excavated and buried again inside three weeks.”
The license application sat beneath Marte Johansen’s smiling face. Same month. Same region. The kind of coincidence that stops being coincidence when it happens seven times.
“He needed legitimate access to remote sites,” Voss said, smoke curling from his words. “Archaeological permits let you dig anywhere, stay as long as you want, no questions. Cultural heritage protection actually protects him. Authorities don’t interfere with academic work.”
I traced the timeline with one calloused finger. Between each victim’s disappearance and the subsequent dig, never more than six weeks. Never less than two. Enough time to let the search go cold. Enough urgency to justify rapid excavation.
“He’s been doing this for twenty years,” Ragna whispered. “Right in front of everyone.”
The map looked like a disease spreading. Twenty-three red marks bleeding across the northern territories, each one a grave masquerading as history.
“He chose places already significant,” I said, studying the constellation. “Bronze Age mounds, Iron Age settlements. Real archaeological value, so nobody questions the permits.”
Voss’s nicotine-stained finger traced connections I’d missed. “Always winter excavations. Harsh conditions mean small teams, quick work. Academic publications buried in obscure journals nobody reads.”
The pattern was elegant. Brutal, but elegant. You don’t hide bodies in empty ground: too obvious when someone digs. You hide them where digging is expected, where disturbed earth and human remains are the whole goddamn point.
“Professional,” I muttered. “This is professional.”
“Twenty years professional,” Voss agreed.
The laptop screen cast Ragna’s face in corpse-light as she scrolled through archived PDFs. Her hands had stopped shaking: fear replaced by something colder.
“Dr. Henrik Strand,” she read. “Lead pathologist on all seven publications. I tried finding his credentials last year for a citation.” She looked up. “He doesn’t exist. Never did.”
Voss leaned closer. “Lund’s ghost.”
“Lund’s signature,” I corrected. “On every fraudulent report.”
The methodology sections read like photocopies. Identical phrasing across seven years, seven sites. I traced the carbon dating protocols with my thumbnail: same equipment serial numbers, impossible unless they’d used one machine for digs three hundred kilometers apart. Grid section C-7 missing from every photographic record. Not sloppy work. Deliberate erasure. They’d industrialized it: murder dressed in academic language, victims catalogued as artifacts, then buried again under legal protection of cultural heritage laws.
I laid out Sigrid’s documentation like autopsy photographs. The invoices from Nordic Heritage Solutions lined up against permits for six bog sites. Each one yielding “Viking Age” remains with preservation patterns that made my teeth ache. Too consistent. Too convenient.
The shell companies nested inside each other like Russian dolls. Nordic Heritage Solutions funded the excavations. Fenris Laboratory Services handled the carbon dating. Both registered to addresses in the Cayman Islands, both listing Bjorn Lund as “cultural consultant.” Clean enough to pass university oversight. Dirty enough that Sigrid had spent weeks mapping the connections in her private notes.
I traced the money backward through her photocopied bank transfers. The investment firm paid universities to secure permits. The laboratory subsidiary got exclusive contracts for analysis. Lund sat in the middle, controlling which bones got scrutinized and which got filed away as catalogued artifacts. A closed loop. Self-authenticating fraud.
The permits themselves told the story if you knew what to look for. Identical language across seven years, seven sites. Same bureaucratic phrases, same technical specifications. Someone had created a template, refined it until it slipped through regulatory approval without triggering questions. Archaeological permits as murder weapons. Cultural heritage protection as criminal shield.
Sigrid had annotated everything in precise handwriting. Question marks beside dates that pushed remains back exactly enough centuries to avoid modern forensic protocols. Asterisks next to laboratory technician names that appeared at multiple sites despite working for supposedly independent institutions. Red circles around GPS coordinates where her ground-penetrating radar showed fresh disturbance beneath ancient strata.
She’d built a prosecutable case. Documentation that would survive academic peer review and hold up in criminal court. That’s why she was dead. Not because she’d discovered the scheme. Because she’d proven it with methodology nobody could dismiss as speculation or coincidence.
The carbon dating reports showed identical phrasing across five years. “Margin of error ±40 years” appeared in every conclusion. Same sentence structure. Same cautious academic hedging that made fraud look like scientific rigor. Sigrid had underlined the repetition in red ink, written “TEMPLATE” in capitals across the top page.
I cross-referenced her grid maps against the photographic archive. Sections C-7 through C-9 at Svartmyr. No images. E-4 and E-5 at the Finnmark site. Documentation gap. The missing photographs corresponded exactly to coordinates where her radar showed wrong-textured soil. Fresh disturbance. Modern compaction patterns beneath medieval layers.
Lund had controlled which sections got documented. Which trenches received thorough analysis. Which bones disappeared into storage catalogues without proper examination. The gaps weren’t accidental. They were surgical. Precise removal of evidence before it could become evidence.
Sigrid had mapped every omission. Every suspicious gap in the photographic record. Every grid square that should have yielded images but produced only blank entries in the database. She’d turned absence into proof. The negative space of a cover-up rendered visible through systematic documentation.
The photographs spread across the examination table like an autopsy of failure. Twenty years of faces Voss couldn’t save. I recognized two locations immediately: the Karasjok site where we’d found “Viking Age” remains with polyester fibers in the peat. The Lakselv excavation that yielded “medieval” bones with titanium hip replacements that somehow never made it into the official reports.
“Not ritual killings,” I said, my voice flat as the Arctic horizon. “Just business. Bodies needed disposal, archaeological sites needed funding. Elegant solution for everyone except the corpses.”
Voss’s fingers left prints on the photographs, decades of guilt made visible in condensation. “I had three missing persons. He gave me ancient history. I believed what the experts told me to believe.”
The experts Lund paid for. The laboratories he owned. The narrative he controlled.
I studied the documentation with the cold precision twenty years of fieldwork had taught me. Sigrid’s annotations read like an indictment written in academic language: clinical observations that screamed murder to anyone willing to see. She’d photographed everything: the too-clean cuts through bone, the metal fragments that didn’t corrode, the dental amalgam that shouldn’t exist in Viking graves. Every discrepancy catalogued, every anomaly documented. She’d built a case that would destroy Lund’s empire.
Then she’d become evidence herself.
The scope made my stomach turn, Lund had industrialized murder disposal, wrapped it in academic respectability. Each excavation permit bought him legal access to remote killing grounds. Each research team became unwitting accomplices. Each falsified carbon dating report buried truth deeper than any bog.
And I’d signed off on three of those reports myself.
My fingers trace the pattern on Voss’s photographs, connecting dots that should have been obvious years ago. The missing persons: all of them had something in common. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong knowledge. Witnesses to shipments. Accountants who asked questions. A journalist investigating labor trafficking. People who made themselves inconvenient to men like Lund.
“How many?” My voice sounds distant, clinical. The archaeologist’s detachment, measuring body counts like pottery sherds.
“Seventeen confirmed missing. Eight sites.” Voss taps ash into an evidence bag, past caring about protocol. “Your dig makes nine.”
I do the math. Sigrid’s body. The three sets of remains Ragna flagged with modern dental work. The ground-penetrating radar showing anomalies we hadn’t excavated yet. This bog alone could hold half a dozen victims, preserved in peat, waiting for some fool with academic credentials to legitimize their burial.
“The university approved every permit,” I say. “Peer-reviewed his funding applications. He had references from the Ministry of Culture.”
“Money buys respectability.” Voss lights another cigarette from the dying ember of his last. “And respectability buys access. He turned archaeology into the perfect crime: legal excavation of illegal graves. If anyone found modern remains, contamination. If carbon dating showed recent death, equipment malfunction. And if someone like Sigrid got too close…” He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to.
I look at my own signature on the preliminary reports, my careful documentation of what I’d been told to see rather than what was actually there. Professional caution. Protecting my reputation. While Sigrid had risked everything.
“She knew what would happen,” I say, touching the journal entry. “She wrote this knowing Lund would come for her. And she did it anyway.”
“That’s the difference between courage and survival.” Voss exhales smoke toward the photographs of the dead. “She chose wrong. We chose right. And we get to live with that.”
The weight of it settles in my chest like bog water. I’ve spent fifteen years clawing my way up from construction sites to excavation sites, proving I belonged despite the wrong accent, the wrong schools, the dirt that never quite washes out from under my fingernails. And here’s Lund, born into the right circles, using that privilege to turn science into a graveyard.
“The university will protect him,” I say, the words tasting like peat and ash. “Too much invested. Too many reputations tied to his funding.”
Voss’s laugh is bitter, decades of disillusionment compressed into one sound. “They already are. Called me this morning. Suggested Sigrid’s death was accidental, that we’re seeing patterns where there’s only coincidence. Mentioned your background, how stress affects judgment.” His ice-blue eyes meet mine. “They’re building the narrative. Working-class archaeologist with something to prove, unstable cop obsessed with cold cases. We’re the conspiracy theorists. Lund’s the victim of our delusions.”
The fluorescent lights hum their indifferent song. Outside, the wind screams across the bog, and somewhere beneath the peat, the dead wait for justice that may never come.
I watch her finger shake as it moves across the map: construction worker’s daughter recognizing the con. Twenty years of bodies, all buried where Lund’s money bought access and silence. The kind of scheme that requires the right education, the right connections, the polish that opens doors people like Ragna and me have to kick down.
“He knew you’d be perfect,” I tell her, keeping my voice flat. “Previous scandal, no institutional protection. They’d have hung Sigrid’s murder on you, closed the dig, reburied everything.” I light a cigarette despite the NO SMOKING sign. “Academic sacrifice to preserve academic funding.”
Voss adds another pin to the map. “You were never the suspect. You were always the patsy.”
I arrange the evidence like I’m laying out bones at an excavation. Sigrid’s journal anchors the display. Voss’s cold case files form the historical layer. Ragna’s falsified reports expose the contamination. And those photographs, modern dental work grinning from supposedly thousand-year-old skulls, they’re the artifacts that don’t lie.
The fluorescent lights leave nowhere to hide. Every detail screams its truth.
Now we just need Lund to confess what the dead already know.
The words taste like ash in my mouth, but I’ve learned to swallow worse. Lund’s smooth voice crackles back. Of course he’ll come, anything for scientific integrity. He’ll be there in twenty minutes.
I hang up and meet Ragna’s terrified eyes across the examination table. Her hands shake as she arranges the bone samples we’ll use as props.
Twenty minutes to prepare the trap.
The satellite phone feels heavier than it should in my calloused hand. I’ve made thousands of calls in my career: to coroners, police departments, university administrators who barely concealed their contempt for the construction worker playing archaeologist. This one’s different. This one’s bait on a hook.
I keep my voice flat, professional. The tone I’ve perfected over two decades of proving myself to people who thought I didn’t belong. “Mr. Lund, we need you at the lab. Preliminary analysis of Dr. Halvorsen’s cranial trauma has revealed irregularities in the fracture pattern.”
Silence on the other end. Just long enough to make my pulse quicken.
“Irregularities?” His voice is smooth as expensive whiskey. No alarm, just mild curiosity. He’s good.
“The injury presentation doesn’t align with the fall scenario. As expedition liaison, you should review the findings before we file the official report.” I let bureaucratic language do the heavy lifting: vague enough to provoke questions, specific enough to sound legitimate.
“Of course.” That practiced warmth that never reaches his eyes, audible even through static. “Scientific integrity is paramount. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
The line goes dead.
I set the phone down carefully, like it might shatter. My hands are steadier than they have any right to be. Maybe because I’ve spent my whole life in situations where one wrong move meant falling off scaffolding or losing a job I’d fought to get. This is just another kind of high-wire act.
Voss will be listening through the equipment shed wall, recording every word. Ragna will play her part: the nervous junior pathologist, exactly what everyone expects. And I’ll do what I’ve always done: use the fact that people underestimate me.
Twenty minutes until Bjorn Lund walks into a trap disguised as a consultation.
Twenty minutes to get this right.
I watch Ragna arrange the evidence with hands that shake just enough to sell it. She’s better at this than I expected. Maybe desperation makes good actors of us all. The photographs go in chronological sequence: excavation shots, initial documentation, close-ups of the skull fracture that tells a story no accident could write.
“You’re sure about this?” Her voice cracks on the last word. Not performance. Genuine fear bleeding through.
“No.” Honesty feels like the only currency worth trading right now. “But Voss has done this before. He knows how to get people talking.”
She positions the trauma analysis report where Lund will see it immediately, her bitten nails leaving slight impressions on the folder edge. The fluorescent lights catch the red of her braid, turn her freckles into constellations of anxiety.
“If this goes wrong,”
“Then we’re already dead.” I adjust the examination lamp, creating the clinical theater we need. “He killed Sigrid for knowing less than we do now. Our only advantage is he doesn’t know we’ve connected the pattern yet.”
She nods once, sharp. Takes her position by the evidence locker.
We wait.
The equipment shed smells like diesel and old metal. I’ve wedged myself between a broken ground-penetrating radar unit and stacked core sample boxes, the kind of tight space that reminds you how much real detective work involves physical discomfort nobody mentions in the reports.
The directional mic goes against the wall where frost has etched patterns like skeletal fingers. Through the headphones, every sound from the lab translates with brutal clarity. Even the fluorescent hum comes through.
I adjust the recording levels. Twenty years I’ve waited for this. My hands don’t shake anymore. They stopped shaking the night I accepted I’d probably die without answers.
Now maybe I won’t have to.
The photographs look clinical under the fluorescent glare, but I’ve arranged them to tell a story. Fracture patterns that don’t match accidental falls, journal entries where Sigrid’s handwriting gets increasingly erratic, carbon dating results that scream wrong to anyone who knows how to read them. Not enough to prove murder outright. Just enough to make a guilty man explain himself into a corner.
I’ve done this dance before, back when my hands were steadier and my marriage wasn’t yet collateral damage.
I watch his pupils contract as they hit the photographs. Recognition, just for a heartbeat, before the mask slides back into place. Ragna shifts behind me, her breathing too quick. The space heater rattles. Outside, Voss will be pressing record now, his nicotine-stained fingers steady for the first time in twenty years.
“Dr. Magnusson,” Lund says, smooth as black ice. “What exactly have you found?”
The container door swings open with a metallic groan that sets my teeth on edge. Lund fills the frame, all expensive concern and practiced worry lines. “Dr. Magnusson,” he says, voice pitched perfectly between authority and sympathy. “I heard there was some urgency,”
But his eyes aren’t on me. They’re mapping the room like a battlefield commander assessing terrain. He clocks Ragna first, hunched against the far wall, then the photographs spread across my examination table. The evidence locker standing open. Voss’s bulk blocking the chemical station.
“What exactly have you found?” he asks, stepping inside.
The movement is too smooth. Weight on the balls of his feet, that Canada Goose parka unzipped despite the cold, arms loose at his sides. I’ve seen enough bar fights in my construction days to recognize a man ready for violence. The expensive haircut and tailored suit don’t hide what he is any better than my medical degree hides what I was.
“Close the door,” I tell him. “You’ll want privacy for this.”
His smile never wavers, but something shifts behind those green eyes. Calculation. He’s wondering if we’re alone, if anyone knows he’s here, how many problems he’s looking at. The door clicks shut. Now we’re all trapped in this metal box together, breathing recycled air that tastes like formaldehyde and fear.
I pick up the first document. My hands don’t shake. Twenty years of steadying scalpels over corpses taught me that much. “Let’s start with the subsidiary connections,” I say, my voice flat as the Arctic horizon. “Your firm, Nordic Heritage Investments, has funded seventeen archaeological excavations in the past decade.”
Lund’s jaw muscle flexes. Just once. It’s enough.
Behind me, Ragna’s breathing hitches. She knows what’s coming. So does he.
I spread the financial records like a dealer showing a losing hand. “Seventeen sites. Shell companies nested three layers deep. Same board members rotating through different positions. Same pattern: remote locations, minimal oversight, expedited permits.”
Voss moves then, deliberate as a glacier. He places the first photograph on the steel table. A woman, mid-thirties, last seen near a Bronze Age excavation outside Bodø. Then another. A man who vanished after working construction at a Viking settlement dig in Finnmark. Five more faces. Seven total. All disappeared within twenty kilometers of sites Lund’s money touched.
“Carbon dating’s a beautiful thing,” I continue, watching his pupils contract. “Peat bogs preserve bodies for centuries. Makes it real convenient when you need to hide something modern among something ancient. Who’s going to question a few extra corpses at a burial ground? Especially when the funding comes from respectable investors.”
Lund’s breathing changes. Slower. Controlled. He’s not looking at the evidence anymore. He’s measuring distances. Exit routes. Threat assessment.
The words come out of Ragna like confession, like she’s been drowning in them for days. Her hands won’t stop shaking. “11:[^47]. I checked my watch because I couldn’t sleep. Saw him go into her tent. The wind was screaming but I heard her anyway. I watch Lund’s face. The smile holds three seconds longer than it should, muscles fighting what’s underneath. Then it cracks. Not gradually. All at once, like ice breaking under weight you can’t see.
What’s beneath isn’t anger. Isn’t panic. It’s cold assessment. Reptilian. He’s stopped performing shock, stopped pretending he gives a damn about Sigrid’s death. His eyes move between us, Ragna, Voss, me, calculating. Prioritizing. Deciding which problems need solving first.
I’ve seen men realize they’re caught before. Usually there’s something human left, fear, desperation, the animal instinct to run. Lund’s got none of that. He’s doing math. Cost-benefit analysis. His gaze lingers on Ragna longest. She’s the weak link, he’s decided. The one who’ll break easiest if he needs leverage. When his eyes finally settle back on me, I recognize what I’m looking at: a man who’s already killed once this week and found it disappointingly easy.
I spread Sigrid’s photographs across the metal table like a poker hand. Carbon dating reports. Dental X-rays showing amalgam fillings in supposedly thousand-year-old skulls. Her notes documenting the subsidiary shell companies, all leading back to his investors.
“She was thorough,” I say, watching his face. “Documented everything before you caved her head in.”
Lund’s smile doesn’t waver, but his fingers drum once against his thigh. Calculating.
I’ve been standing here fifteen minutes, watching him unravel my career piece by piece, and the bastard thinks it’s funny.
“. Your background.” The words land like he knew they would. Construction worker playing dress-up in a lab coat. He’s not wrong about what they all think.
My hands are flat on the cold metal table between us, the evidence spread out like autopsy photographs. Which some of them are. The fluorescent lights hum overhead, that maddening frequency that’s been drilling into my skull for three days straight. Since we found her.
“Yes, all of it. Every word true.”
Just like that. No hesitation. The confession I’ve been building toward for seventy-two sleepless hours, and he hands it over like a business card.
Ragna’s breathing has gone shallow behind me. I don’t turn to look at her. Can’t take my eyes off Lund, the way his expensive watch catches the light as he gestures at the documentation. At my work. The soil samples that don’t match. The dental records that shouldn’t exist in a Viking grave. The financial trails I traced through university accounts while my hands shook from exhaustion and too much coffee.
“Fifteen bodies over eight years.”
The number hits different when he says it. When I wrote it in my notes, it was data. Evidence. Now it’s fifteen people who died so this smiling sociopath could balance someone’s books.
“The bog’s chemistry is remarkable: better than any concrete foundation.”
He’s lecturing me. About preservation. About the very science I’ve spent two decades mastering while people like him bought their way into rooms I had to claw through walls to enter.
“Really, Dr. Halvorsen should have appreciated the elegance of it.”
Sigrid. He means Sigrid. The woman whose skull fractures I documented. Whose blood I found under my fingernails for two days after the examination.
The sound Ragna makes behind me cuts through the lab’s sterile air. Half gasp, half sob, the noise of someone watching their worst fears confirmed. But Lund doesn’t even glance her way. His cold green eyes stay locked on mine, like I’m the only one in the room who matters. Like this is a performance just for me.
“Fifteen bodies over eight years.” He says it the way other men discuss profit margins. Quarterly reports. Return on investment. “The bog’s chemistry is remarkable, you know. Better preservation than any concrete foundation, and infinitely more poetic for men in our line of work.”
Our line of work. Like we’re colleagues.
“Viking burial ground permits,” He gestures at the paperwork between us, my documentation, my evidence. “, grant access to remote sites that would otherwise raise uncomfortable questions. The university funding provides perfect cover. Academic legitimacy. Really, Dr. Halvorsen should have appreciated the elegance of it.”
Dr. Halvorsen. Sigrid. The woman whose shattered skull I held in my calloused hands. He uses her name like it’s just another word, stripped clean of the person who wore it.
My hands are already fists. Knuckles white, nails cutting crescents into palms callused from years of real work. The kind this bastard has never done. I force them open, finger by finger, because that’s what he wants. A reaction. Evidence of the working-class thug they all see when they look at me.
“She was brilliant,” Lund continues, studying his manicured nails like they’re more interesting than murder. “Noticed the stratification inconsistencies, the soil compression patterns. Started asking questions.” He pauses, lets it hang. “I offered her a partnership. Very generous terms. But Dr. Halvorsen had principles.”
The word drips contempt.
“Principles are expensive, Doctor. They cost her everything.” His smile never wavers. “They’re about to cost you the same.”
I’ve spent twenty years proving I belong in rooms like this. Earned every degree while pouring foundations, studied anatomy during lunch breaks on construction sites. But Lund’s recitation, shell companies, falsified permits, bodies shipped in equipment crates, reminds me how little any of it matters to men like him. He catalogs fifteen murders with the detachment of quarterly earnings. Then that watch again. Tag Heuer. My year’s salary on his wrist. “Twenty-two minutes,” he says, smile sharpening like a scalpel finding bone.
The parka rustles: expensive technical fabric that doesn’t belong in a place like this. His hand slides inside with the confidence of a man who’s done this before, who’s solved problems, eliminated complications. I’ve catalogued enough trauma to recognize intent in a gesture. Beside me, Ragna’s breath catches, sharp and terrified. My own hands, calloused from decades of honest work, curl into fists. Documentation won’t save us. Evidence won’t matter. Just two more bodies for the bog.
The recording runs. Voss knows this with the certainty of a man who’s spent two decades checking and rechecking evidence, who’s learned that paranoia and preparation are the same thing. His thumb finds the button despite the cold that’s turned his joints to rusted hinges. The phone’s screen glows against the container’s corrugated metal, casting his hollow face in blue light.
Through the wall, Lund’s voice carries with that same boardroom calm he uses to discuss quarterly projections. “The Halvorsen woman was unfortunate. She had ambition, I respect that. But ambition without discretion?” A pause. The sound of footsteps on metal grating. “She wanted to be a hero. Whistleblower. Thought she could leverage what she’d found into a museum directorship and moral superiority. Tedious.”
Voss watches the waveform spike and valley, each syllable captured, preserved. His other hand presses against the container wall as if he could reach through it, could stop what’s about to happen. But he’s learned patience. Twenty years of watching guilty men walk free because he moved too soon, because he didn’t have enough, because the evidence was circumstantial.
Not this time.
His phone shows three confirmations: messages delivered to the police commissioner, to the prosecutor who’d believed him when no one else would, to his daughter who hasn’t spoken to him in five years but deserves to know her father wasn’t crazy. The recording uploads to cloud storage in real-time, redundant and indestructible.
In the distance, beneath the wind’s howl, he hears it: the low thrum of rotors cutting through Arctic air. Not Lund’s people. His. The distress call he’d triggered an hour ago, when instinct told him this confrontation was inevitable.
Voss’s cracked lips pull into something that might have been a smile once. He moves toward the door, one hand still recording, the other reaching for the service weapon he’s carried for thirty years.
The cold spreads from my chest outward, not fear exactly (I’ve been cold for weeks) but recognition. The way a forensic archaeologist recognizes cause of death in bone trauma patterns. This is how it ends: catalogued, documented, filed away.
My hands, those calloused tools that’ve scraped truth from frozen earth, hang useless at my sides. Beside me, Ragna’s breathing comes in shallow gasps, her fingernails releasing my forearm to leave crescent indentations I’ll carry to whatever comes next.
“Nothing personal,” Lund continues, and I believe him. That’s what makes it worse. To him, we’re just problematic data points requiring correction. I spent fifteen years clawing my way up from construction sites to operating theaters to excavation trenches, proving I belonged despite wrong accent, wrong background, wrong everything. And here’s the joke: I finally found something that matters, evidence that could give the dead their names back, and it’s going to burn with me.
The generator hums. Fluorescent lights flicker. Through the thin walls, I swear I hear something.
The pistol’s weight in Lund’s hand looks practiced, comfortable. He’s done this before. Maybe to the bodies we’ve been cataloguing, the ones with modern dental work and synthetic fibers in their clothing. My mind, trained to reconstruct death from fragments, maps the trajectory: center mass, professional, no hesitation.
“Forty minutes,” he repeats, checking an expensive watch. “Enough time to stage everything properly. You understand documentation, Kristoffer: it has to look right.”
I do understand. That’s the bitter part. I’ve spent my career making death legible, translating violence into evidence. Now I’m becoming the text someone else will read, misinterpret, file away. Another tragic accident in a cursed bog.
But that sound through the walls. It’s not wind.
The recording icon pulses green on his cracked screen. Twenty years of failure, of being the department’s cautionary tale, compress into this single upload. His arthritic fingers find the Glock at his hip, cold, familiar weight. All those preserved faces in the peat, their silent accusations. All the families he failed. The younger officers’ pitying glances. His ex-wife’s final words: You care more about the dead than the living.
She was right. But maybe the dead deserve someone who cares.
The door slams inward. Metal on metal, violent punctuation in the sterile space. Voss fills the frame like something excavated from the bog itself, all hollow cheeks and ice-blue fury, his Glock tracking Lund with the steadiness of a man who’s already died inside. The fluorescent lights catch his eyes: not triumph, not vindication. Just the cold satisfaction of a debt finally coming due, paid in full after two decades of compound interest.
I’ve been around enough death to know its smell. The sweet rot of failure, the copper tang of violence cut short. But this is different. This is the moment when all the scattered bones finally articulate into something you can recognize, something that makes you wish you’d stayed ignorant.
Voss holds position in the doorway, weapon steady despite the tremor running through his gaunt frame. Two decades of insomnia and cigarettes have carved him down to something essential, something that can’t be intimidated by Lund’s boardroom calm. I’ve seen that look before: on men who’ve already lost everything that matters, who’ve got nothing left to bargain with except the truth.
“You’re early, Inspector.” Lund’s voice carries that same smooth confidence, like he’s rescheduling a conference call instead of staring down a Glock. He doesn’t even straighten from where he’s leaning against the examination table, doesn’t reach for anything. Just checks his watch with theatrical precision. “My people won’t arrive for another twenty minutes. This is rather inconvenient.”
The words land wrong in the cramped space: too casual, too controlled. Like he’s reading from a script he’s performed before, in other labs, other remote locations where cleanup crews arrive by helicopter and evidence disappears into peat bogs.
My body moves before my brain catches up, construction-worker instincts overriding academic training. I shift left, putting myself between Ragna and the door, between her and whatever’s about to happen. My hands are empty. No weapon, no defense except the bulk I’ve earned through years of manual labor before I clawed my way into this world of degrees and dissertations.
Behind me, I feel Ragna trembling. The air tastes like chemicals and fear and something else. That electric charge before a storm breaks, when the pressure finally equalizes and everything buried comes rushing to the surface.
The USB drive feels like a splinter of ice in my palm. My hands know tools but this tiny piece of plastic weighs more than any skeleton I’ve ever excavated.
I slot it into the lab computer. The machine whirs, reluctant in the cold. Behind me, Voss hasn’t moved, his weapon still trained on Lund like he’s afraid the man might evaporate into the Arctic night. Ragna’s breathing comes in shallow gasps, condensation clouding around her face.
The screen flickers to life. Sigrid’s files cascade open, methodical, damning, organized with the precision of someone who knew she was documenting her own death warrant.
Photographs first. Close-ups of dental work that gleams too modern against ancient bone. Amalgam fillings. Crown work. Techniques that didn’t exist until the twenty-first century, buried in strata that carbon dating insisted was a thousand years old.
Then the excavation logs, Sigrid’s handwritten notes tracking disturbances in the peat. Bodies placed carefully, deliberately, in the last five years. Not archaeology. A graveyard masquerading as history.
And then the DNA report.
Voss makes a sound like he’s been gut-punched. “Henrik Dahl.”
The name hits me like a fist to the sternum. Henrik Dahl. The prosecutor who’d been building a corruption case against half of Oslo’s municipal government. Vanished from a parking garage two years back. National manhunt. International alerts. Nothing.
And here he is. In my trench. Wrapped in Viking grave goods like a prop in someone’s sick theater.
I scroll deeper. Sigrid had cross-referenced dental records, matched bone measurements, even found fragments of his suit fabric preserved in the peat’s anaerobic embrace. She’d known. For weeks, she’d known she was excavating a murder victim while his killer smiled and signed her funding checks.
My throat closes. Every bone I’ve catalogued suddenly has a face, a family, someone waiting for answers that I’ve been too blind to see.
The truth detonates in my skull: not just bodies, but witnesses. Prosecutors. Journalists. Auditors. Anyone who’d glimpsed the rot beneath Norway’s clean facade. The bog wasn’t a dumping ground. It was an archive of inconvenience, preserved in peat like the Vikings we pretended to study.
Lund moves before I can process it. His polished veneer cracks like ice, and suddenly he’s all violence, diving for the laptop with the desperate fury of a man who knows his handlers will erase him next.
The tackle happens in slow motion: three bodies converging on Lund’s designer parka, driving him into steel flooring that rings like a bell. His manicured fingers claw air inches from the delete key. The USB drive blinks green, indifferent, uploading terabytes of damnation through Sigrid’s dead-woman’s-switch protocol. She’d understood something I’m only learning: the dead make better witnesses than the living. They can’t be threatened, bought, or disappeared twice.
I watch through the chemical-smelling air as reality rewrites itself across Lund’s face. The polished facade doesn’t shatter. That would be too dramatic, too clean. Instead it erodes like peat exposed to weather, revealing the calculating machinery beneath. His green eyes track the Oslo specialists with the precision of a man inventorying his dwindling options.
“You’re making a mistake,” he says, voice still smooth despite the zip ties biting into his wrists. “I have representation. Constitutional rights. You’ve contaminated the chain of evidence by. The lead specialist doesn’t even look at him. She’s cataloging the lab with professional efficiency, already building the prosecution’s case in her head.
Lund tries a different angle, addressing me now. “Magnusson. You’re a reasonable man. You understand how the world works. People like us, we’ve had to fight for everything,”
“Don’t.” My voice comes out rougher than intended. “Don’t pretend we’re the same.”
But we are, in ways that make my stomach turn. Both outsiders who clawed our way into spaces that didn’t want us. The difference is what we did with that hunger. I built something. He fed it bodies.
Through the open door, I watch them erecting crime scene lights around the trenches. The bog looks different now. Not mysterious or ancient, just a dumping ground. Somewhere under that preserved earth are victims whose families stopped hoping years ago. Sigrid understood that. She’d built her dead-woman’s switch not for justice but for documentation. For making the invisible visible.
Lund’s still talking, voice dropping to a confidential murmur about offshore accounts and witness protection, but nobody’s listening anymore. He’s already evidence, already past tense.
The inspector moves like a man who’s carried weight so long he’s forgotten what lightness feels like. His hollow cheeks catch the fluorescent glare as he navigates between evidence tables, and I see the ghosts he’s been chasing finally given substance.
“Twenty years,” Voss says, holding up the recording device like it might evaporate. “Twenty years I knew something connected them. The placement. The preservation. Nobody believed me.”
His ice-blue eyes find mine, and there’s no triumph there. Just the exhausted recognition of a man who’s proven himself right at terrible cost.
He produces an evidence bag with practiced precision, hands steadier than they’ve been since he arrived. The USB drive drops inside with a soft click. “Logged at 03:[^47], January 18th, 2024. Inspector Erik Voss, witness Dr. Kristoffer Magnusson present. Audio confession of Bjorn Lund regarding multiple homicides, 2004 through present.”
The recitation is ritual, incantation against the chaos. Every syllable another lock on the cage.
“This time,” he says quietly, sealing the bag, “nothing slips away.”
I watch Ragna’s hands shake as she spreads the evidence across the steel table. The fluorescent lights make her look like she’s drowning.
“I knew something was wrong,” she whispers, and there’s twenty years of academic shame in those words. “But after what happened before, I needed to be certain. Absolutely certain.”
She’d been building a case while I’d been building walls. Different survival strategies, same instinct that the system wouldn’t protect us if we were wrong.
Johansen catalogs each piece with clinical efficiency, and I see Ragna’s shoulders drop. Not relief, but the exhaustion of finally setting down unbearable weight.
“You documented everything,” Johansen says. Not quite approval, but acknowledgment.
Sometimes that’s all redemption looks like.
Johansen’s questions come rapid, methodical. When did Sigrid find the modern remains? When did Lund’s mask slip? When did the threats start?
And I realize my gut had been right all along. That unease around his expensive smile was recognizing a predator in tailored wool. My testimony carries weight precisely because I’ve got nothing to lose. No reputation to protect. No institution demanding loyalty.
Just the truth, documented in dirt under my fingernails.
The helicopter’s rotors fade to nothing. I stand there, wind cutting through every layer, watching the speck disappear toward Tromsø and cells that won’t be bought off.
The bog stretches dark around me. Fifteen bodies, maybe more. Months of testimony ahead. Cameras. Questions. Everything I clawed my way up from, finally meaning something.
Voss touches my shoulder. “Ready to get back to work, Doctor?”
I am.
The cold doesn’t bother me anymore. Three weeks into the recovery operation, my body’s forgotten what warm feels like. I kneel in trench seven beside Ragna, our breath making ghosts in the work lights. Her hands don’t shake now. Haven’t for days.
She brushes peat from a femur with the kind of reverence I’ve only seen in churches. “Male, mid-twenties. Perimortem fracture to the distal end.”
I photograph the position, measure the depth. Fifteen years in the ground, not fifteen centuries. The carbon dating came back yesterday. Another kid who disappeared when Voss still had brown hair and hope.
“This one’s got dental work,” Ragna says quietly. Her voice has changed. Lost that edge of panic, gained something harder. “Composite fillings. I can see the manufacturer’s mark.”
Above us, Voss leans on his cane, face carved from the same gray stone as the mountains. He’s been standing there for an hour, watching us work. Waiting. Always waiting.
“Can you get me a clear shot of the molars?” His voice is rough from too many cigarettes, too many sleepless nights finally ending.
I adjust the lighting, frame the shot. Through the viewfinder, I see what he needs. Evidence that’ll have a name by morning. Some mother’s son. Some father’s daughter. The bog kept them preserved, kept them waiting for someone to care enough to look.
“Got it,” I tell him.
He nods once, pulls out his phone with shaking hands. Making the call he’s rehearsed in nightmares for twenty years. Behind him, the university’s lawyers hover like carrion birds, already calculating liability. The academic journals that wouldn’t publish my early work are calling now, wanting statements.
I ignore them. Focus on the work. On giving the dead back their names.
That’s all that matters anymore.
The specialists descend like an occupying force. Which it is, but not how they think.
I become the translator nobody wanted. Explaining to some Copenhagen detective why soil stratification matters, why you can’t just dig straight down like you’re planting tulips. Teaching archaeologists about chain of custody, evidence logs, the bureaucratic rituals that turn bones into courtroom testimony. My construction-site Norwegian and correspondence-school credentials suddenly worth something when the university professors can’t explain a trench profile without three-syllable Latin words.
The investigation metastasizes. Four other sites across Scandinavia. Each one Lund’s operation hiding bodies under research grants. Bergen. Stavanger. Two in Sweden. All remote. All legitimate on paper. All corrupted.
I work eighteen-hour shifts, sleeping in the lab between briefings. My hands know the difference now: can feel centuries in bone density, read violence in fracture patterns. The dead don’t care about my credentials.
They just want their names back.
The plastic changes everything.
Ragna’s hands don’t shake when she presents it. Fragment no bigger than my palm, preserved in the peat’s anaerobic embrace like everything else this cursed ground swallows. Her documentation is surgical. Carbon dating on the polymer: manufactured 2004. Wrapped around femur and pelvis: female, mid-twenties, dental work contemporary.
The room goes quiet. Not the suspicious silence she’s endured for weeks. Something else.
Recognition. Respect.
She meets my eyes across the evidence table. We both know what this costs: admitting we’ve been excavating a crime scene disguised as history, that our science was someone’s cover story.
But she doesn’t flinch.
The dead deserve better than our convenient blindness.
The calls take him until dawn. Each one the same script, voice steady despite trembling hands: “We’ve found your daughter. Your husband. Your sister.” Twenty years of silence breaking in phone static and disbelieving sobs. Outside, smoke rises from juniper fires, the Sami words carrying across frozen ground where violence has layered itself across centuries, each generation adding its dead to earth that remembers everything.
The corruption ran deeper than anyone wanted to admit. I spent months in sterile conference rooms, watching distinguished professors squirm as I laid out how they’d rubber-stamped grants without questions, how Lund’s money had bought legitimacy through their reputations. My rough hands and working-class vowels suddenly mattered less than the fact I’d never been part of their compromised circle. The outsider finally inside, carrying testimony they couldn’t dismiss.
The bog doesn’t forgive. It just forgets.
I watched it happen through April and May, driving up twice to see the site’s dissolution. The first time, the walkways groaned under my boots, wood swollen and treacherous. The second time, I had to stop at the perimeter: the paths had vanished entirely, swallowed by water the color of old blood. The trenches where we’d found them, where Sigrid had died, where I’d spent those endless polar nights cataloging horrors. All of it smoothed over like a scar on dark skin.
Nature’s crime scene cleanup is more thorough than any professional service.
The ancient dead kept their secrets, as they always had. Whatever Viking Age mysteries lay beneath the peat would stay there, undisturbed now by academic ambition or criminal convenience. The site had been officially closed, permits revoked, funding sources investigated. No one would dig there again in my lifetime.
But the modern graves: those we’d excavated properly, finally. Police teams in white suits, proper documentation, chain of custody that would hold up in court. Forensic odontology, DNA analysis, missing persons databases. The bog had preserved them too well for anonymity. Each body got a name back, a family notified, a funeral that actually buried them instead of hiding them.
I attended three of those funerals. Stood in the back in my one decent suit, hands still showing dirt under the nails no amount of scrubbing could reach. The families didn’t know who I was. That was fine. I wasn’t there for recognition.
Voss went to all of them. Looked ten years younger at each one, the weight lifting incrementally. At the last, he caught my eye across the cemetery, gave a single nod. We’d done what we could. The dead were accounted for. The living could begin to heal.
The bog, indifferent to human justice or grief, continued its patient work of forgetting.
The technical college didn’t care about my correspondence courses or construction years. They wanted someone who could teach students how to read death in bone, how to document what others wanted hidden. My office overlooks the harbor, gray water under gray sky, and the kids who show up, because that’s what they are, nineteen and twenty with rough hands and rougher backgrounds, don’t flinch at my accent or the way I still measure things in worksite terms.
Last week, a girl from a fishing family asked how I made the jump from building sites to burial sites. I told her the truth: one careful step at a time, never apologizing for where you started. She nodded like she understood. Maybe she did.
The university types still publish their papers, still chase their grants. That’s fine. I’ve got a classroom full of students who know that legitimacy isn’t inherited. It’s earned in the field, in the cold, in the dark, doing work that matters because someone has to do it. My calloused hands turn pages of forensic texts they actually read, hungry for knowledge that might lift them up the way it lifted me.
Pedigree is just another word for assumption. Integrity is what you prove when no one’s watching.
I heard Voss retired with full pension, something about medical necessity. The department threw him a dinner, I wasn’t invited, which suited both of us fine. Word is he sleeps now, really sleeps, the kind that doesn’t end at three a.m. with your heart hammering and someone else’s death playing behind your eyes.
He earned it. Twenty years carrying those faces, that failure, grinding himself down to nothing while the rest of us went home to warm beds and forgot. Some men break under that weight. Some men use it to build something harder than bone.
I respect that. The working-class way: you don’t quit until the job’s done, even when the job’s killing you.
Justice delivered. Finally.
I think about that stone sometimes. Two dates, nothing else. No speeches about justice or remembrance, no prettied-up lies about closure. Just numbers carved deep enough to outlast the next century’s weather.
The bog took back everything we disturbed. Good. Some ground shouldn’t be easy to walk on. Let it stay difficult. Let it remind people that forgetting costs something.
The world keeps turning, indifferent. Corruption finds new shadows, remote places conceal fresh crimes. But here, now, we dragged one particular darkness into fluorescent light. Named the victims. Broke the machinery that ground them up.
Small victory. Local. Can’t undo what’s done.
But it proves something: even systems built to bury truth crack open when the wrong people, people with nothing left to lose, refuse to stop digging.