Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy: an Inspector Sohlberg mystery (Inspector Sohlberg Mysteries)

by Amundsen, Jens

  “Great . . . give it to me.”

  “First he interviewed this cranky old coot who lives near the school.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “At a dead end . . . where Orreveien ends in a circle. That location is less than a half mile from Karl’s school. The old man hates people who come down his street to drink and party. So he writes down the day and time of the event and the make and color of the vehicle whenever he sees anyone parked on the dead end . . . and if he’s able to he uses his binoculars . . . he looks through them and writes down as much of the license plates as he can see from his home.”

  “Very good . . . sounds promising.”

  “Sometimes he can see all the letters and numbers on the license plates or a little or nothing . . . based on how and where the cars are parked and the position of the sun and the shadows from the nearby trees.”

  “Very good. This is what we’ve needed to help solve this case.”

  “Listen to this . . . during the two week period before Karl disappeared . . . the old man twice saw a green Volvo SUV . . . the XC90 model . . . park at the dead end on Orreveien. The driver . . . a short pudgy woman with short curly light brown hair in her early forties got out of the car and went into the forest all alone for about twenty-five minutes. The old man was able to read the first two letters and numbers of the license plate . . . and. . . .”

  “And?”

  “And those partial plates match an Oslo vehicle that matches his description of the car. I looked up the owner’s name and . . . lo and behold . . . Danica Knutsen turns out to be a bodybuilding friend of Agnes Haugen.”

  “So. . . .”

  “It turns out that this Danica Knutsen has no reason for being on that dead end . . . she lives in Togrenda . . . a suburb off the E-Six Highway.”

  “Where about . . . more or less?”

  “Fifteen miles south of where you live.”

  “So she does not even live close to Holmenkollen.”

  “That’s right Chief Inspector . . . and she does not have any children at Karl’s school.”

  “None?”

  “None. She has no priors. Never married. But I did find a newspaper article on her. . . . She sued a drug company a few years ago and won a substantial judgment in the United States against a California drug company because she can’t have children . . . seems she fried both of her ovaries with all of the steroids that she took beginning in high school and kept taking until she turned forty.

  “I did more research and found out that within a year of getting her lawsuit award she had spent all of it and fallen into debt . . . she then got a job as a secretary at a law firm but was fired a year later . . . also she’s known for promoting organic farming.”

  “Anything else on her?”

  “No. That’s it for now.”

  “Find out more about her . . . find out exactly what she did the month before and the month after Karl Haugen disappeared. Find out . . . hour by hour . . . what she did and where she went on the day that Karl vanished.”

  “There’s more I need to tell you about the old man.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “On the day that Karl disappeared he saw . . . from nine in the morning to nine-thirty . . . and from three-fifteen to three-thirty . . . a woman drive a large white vehicle into the dead end . . . his description of the vehicle matches the description of the Toyota pickup truck owned by Karl’s father.”

  “Did he get the license plates?”

  “No . . . the car was parked in such a way as to make it impossible for him to see the plates with his binoculars. He said it was almost as if the driver knew the old man was watching from his vantage point.”

  “Who did he see in the car . . . a man and a woman . . . was there a passenger . . . maybe a little boy?”

  “He didn’t see a child that afternoon but then again the child may’ve been too low inside the truck to be seen and the child could’ve come out the passenger side door which the old man could not see from his vantage point . . . the woman had long hair in a ponytail and she wore a cap and sunglasses . . . he again said it was almost as if the driver was doing everything possible to avoid being identified.”

  “You said he didn’t see a child that afternoon . . . when did he next see the vehicle?”

  “Are you ready for this Chief? . . . He saw the white pickup at two in the morning of the following day.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. The same pickup parked at the dead end . . . the driver again left the engine running for almost half an hour . . . from two to about two-thirty that morning. Now . . . the interesting thing is that one of his neighbors . . . a young mother with a baby saw the same white pickup in the afternoon and again at two in the morning. That night she got a creepy feeling with the pickup truck being there again at two in the morning so she let her dogs loose . . . they went barking down the street . . . a few minutes later the pickup left in a hurry . . . speeding at over fifty miles-per-hour up the street.”

  “So the old man’s not inventing this. Did the old man or young mother see the driver or any passengers the second time at two in the morning?”

  “No Chief . . . the tree shadows fell right over that spot.”

  “Too bad. These two incidents at the dead end on Orreveien confirm our theory that the entire kidnaping was carefully planned down to the last detail.”

  “Did you notice something interesting Chief? . . . It’s Agnes Haugen who drives her husband’s pickup on the day Karl vanishes.”

  “I want this Danica Knutsen put under round-the-clock surveillance. The same goes for the stepmother Agnes Haugen. I want to know exactly what these two women are up to because they’ll soon find out that Gunnar Haugen has been arrested in the kidnaping of his son. So please focus on putting together a minute-by-minute timeline showing the whereabouts of both women that day.”

  “I’ll go and look at the binders. I think someone in the force interviewed Danica Knutsen because she repeatedly kept showing up at the Haugen home during the days after the kidnaping. Anything else?”

  “No . . . but the timeline is urgent. Haugen will be out of jail in two days or less. We have forty-eight hours or less to prepare for our interrogation of Agnes Haugen and her friend Danica Knutsen. Get as many people as you need to help you. If you have to— ”

  “I know Chief . . . if I have to I’ll work on it all night long.”

  “Thank you. Please call me anytime as soon as you finish. . . . even if that’s at four in the morning.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I doubt if I’ll be getting much sleep anyway . . . the case is always on mind.”

  Sohlberg spent the next two days at home. Fru Sohlberg knew better than to engage in any conversation with her husband. He spent most of his time reading binders on the case down at the guest cottage by the beach. Their conversations consisted mostly of him saying “Of course dear. . . .” and “Oh?”

  A few months later Sohlberg found out that Fru Sohlberg had wisely cancelled her parents’ visit because she knew that they’d probably feel ignored if not slightly insulted by her husband’s mental and physical absence during the investigation.

  Chapter 14/Fjorten

  INTERROGATION OF AGNES HAUGEN,

  MORNING OF 1 YEAR AND 28 DAYS

  AFTER THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4

  A media firestorm broke out during the two days after the arrest of Gunnar Haugen. The headlines said it all: IS IT MURDER? ARRESTED FATHER WILL NOT SPEAK ON KARL HAUGEN CASE SAYS DEFENSE LAWYER.

  Most of the tram’s passengers in the 7:15 AM commute on Line 18 into downtown Oslo were reading newspapers with the latest about the Karl Haugen case. Those who were not reading about the arrest managed to steal a glance at the man who got on the tram and walked straight into a pole near the compartment’s middle doors. He bounced off the pole and kept on walking as if in a trance.

  “Drunk at this hour in the morning,” said an elderly woman loudly. “Imagine
that at his age.”

  But the man was not drunk. It was Sohlberg lost in thought and oblivious to his surroundings. He always got that way at the end of every investigation when all the loose ends had to be tied down and fully explained. Sohlberg was legendary for his absent-mindedness when thinking about how to wrap up an investigation.

  One question after the other swirled in Sohlberg’s mind.

  How much did Gunnar Haugen know about the facts leading to his son’s kidnaping?

  How much did the man know about the kidnaping itself?

  Why did Karl’s father refuse to make any statements against his wife Agnes Haugen with respect to the disappearance of his son?

  Most other parents would have cooperated with the police when confronted with evidence that their spouse was likely to be involved in a crime against a stepchild. But not Gunnar Haugen.

  Why didn’t Gunnar Haugen implicate Agnes Haugen after he was arrested and given plenty of chances to finger her as the main suspect in his son’s disappearance?

  Did the father and stepmother act together in the boy’s disappearance?

  Was one of them perhaps an after-the-fact accessory?

  Why did Gunnar Haugen have an acid disposal barrel that was more the right size for a large adult body than for a small child’s body?

  Sohlberg was jolted back into reality when the tram braked to a complete stop at the Jernbanetorget station near the Oslo Central Station. He meandered over to downtown Oslo’s loveliest boulevard—the Karl Johans gate—and he sauntered over to its northern point. Tree leaves shimmered in the gentle end-of-summer sunlight. Strollers cast wary looks at the man with a pinched face and narrow eyes and an enormous flopping raincoat. His mind churned over the case facts. He tried to connect all the facts together to make sense of the kidnaping of Karl Haugen.

  How could someone as smart and educated as Gunnar Haugen have made so many obvious and dumb mistakes in marrying and staying married to Agnes Haugen?

  Sohlberg was surprised at the immense pity he felt for Gunnar Haugen. The man reminded him of so many others who mistakenly think that their education and their income and their titles and their success outside the home would render them immune to failure inside the home.

  What wise man had once said, No success outside the home can compensate for failure in the home?

  Sohlberg wondered if the man had instead perhaps said, No other success can compensate for failure in the home.

  Regardless of the exact words the underlying thought bothered Sohlberg.

  Had he been too quick to seek success at the expense of his first wife Karoline?

  Sohlberg remembered the many evenings and nights and weekends and holidays that he had abandoned Karoline to stay working at the law firm. He also remembered how often he had also abandoned Emma and their now-dead son when he investigated crimes.

  After bumping into a group of tourists Sohlberg looked up and was shocked to see the Royal Palace up on the hill. Sohlberg muttered a curse when he realized that he had missed his turn and was now far off course. Even more embarrassing he got lost in thought again and took several wrong turns as he tried to find his way back to the police offices at 12 Hammersborggata.

  The increasingly agitated Sohlberg walked up and down the narrow and odd-angled and confusing streets for almost 30 minutes before someone kindly pointed him to the corner of Hammersborggata and Torggata.

  As soon as he got out of the elevator the receptionist sent Sohlberg to Ivar Thorsen’s office.

  Commissioner Thorsen sat behind his desk smug and preening. He said in the most patronizing way possible:

  “Sohlberg you’ve done good. An arrest so soon! Excellent. Excellent. I knew you’d pull the proverbial rabbit out of the old hat. Good job. Good job.”

  “Not so fast.”

  “What? . . . Oh you’re always so . . . so . . . how shall I say it? . . . Nitpicky? . . . Crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s. Alright. Go ahead. You deserve it in this case. Besides . . . we’d like to get a rock solid conviction on the father.”

  “Look Thorsen . . . we may have found bottles of acid . . . and a large barrel to store acid waste at the barn . . . all plastered with Gunnar Haugen’s fingerprints. But that doesn’t prove by a long shot that Gunnar Haugen kidnaped or killed his own son. Why would he need such a large barrel for such a little boy?”

  “Well. . . .”

  “We also found from Nokia’s records that several mysterious telephone calls were placed to and from Agnes Haugen’s cell phone on the day of the boy’s disappearance. The calls to and from her phone started at around twelve-thirty and ended at about one-thirty in the afternoon.

  “Nokia traced the calls from pings on cell phone towers and their records show that all of the calls took place along Sørkedalsveien near Ring 3 . . . there’s a bunch of stores and businesses down there in the Smestad neighborhood.

  “Several calls were placed in or near a furniture store . . . Hus and Hage . . . where Gunnar and Agnes Haugen did a lot of shopping.”

  Thorsen scratched his head and then his groin and said, “Aha . . . these calls would support the stepmother’s afternoon alibi . . . that she was driving around in the afternoon trying to calm her baby down after she went to the gym.”

  “Maybe. Seems that way.”

  “Alright then. It’s obvious that the father did it.”

  “I don’t know that for sure. Look Thorsen . . . you need to let me finish the investigation . . . let me nitpick. Seems to me that the father only needed a barrel that was a quarter as large to dispose of Karl Haugen’s little body.

  “It looks more to me like he had plans to dispose of an adult body . . . but even if that’s what he planned on doing you have to ask yourself . . . where’s the body he wanted to put in the large barrel? . . . And even more important . . . where’s Karl’s body?”

  “It’s there Sohlberg. It’s there. Sooner or later we’ll find the boy’s body. I have no doubts he’s somewhere in that farm. Right now we’ve got forty-two police officers and crime scene investigators out there at the grandfather’s farm. We’ve dug up the barn. We already found the boy’s lunch pack . . . a key item that you noticed was missing from the boy’s backpack. Really . . . what more do we need?”

  “Anyone could have put the boy’s lunch box out there . . . matter of fact we have cell phone records showing that the stepmother Agnes Haugen was there at the barn one month before the boy’s disappearance. Seems she forgot to turn off her cell phone . . . it rang and sent a ping off a cell tower near the barn.”

  “Her husband could’ve gotten the call at the farm with her phone.”

  “Nope. At the time he was traveling on a long business trip with another Nokia manager.”

  Thorsen frowned. “Well then why in the world did you arrest the father if you haven’t finished the investigation?”

  “Because the arrest is part of the investigation . . . the father’s arrest will set off a chain reaction on the part of the other suspects . . . especially the stepmother . . . as I told Constable Wangelin . . . to get a cold case to full boil you need to turn up the heat and concentrate it where it’ll get results.”

  “The arrest of the father is more like a blowtorch.”

  “You said I could use any means . . . do whatever it took to solve this case . . . right?”

  “Yes. But be careful Sohlberg . . . because if you fail . . . you’re on your own.”

  “I see that nothing has changed.”

  “Obviously not when I see that you’re playing with fire again Sohlberg.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Constable Wangelin drove Sohlberg straight to the residence of Agnes and Gunnar Haugen on Ryghs vei. A short distance from the Haugen house Constable Wangelin stopped the car at the corner of Ankerveien and Ryghs vei to review one more time with Sohlberg the phone records of Agnes Haugen and the timeline for Agnes Haugen and Danica Knutsen on that fateful June fourth. They also went over reams of other information that Wangel
in had mined from the massive amounts of material in the binders at the Karl Haugen room back at headquarters.

  “One more thing Chief Inspector.”

  “What?”

  “You asked me to look into Agnes Haugen’s statement that she used her husband’s pickup on June fourth because Karl’s science project would not fit in her Audi sports car. I measured the car . . . and it turns out that his exhibit could have fit in the back with room to spare.”

  “How interesting,” said Sohlberg slowly as his eyes got that misty far-away look that he was famous for when he was about to tackle and try to solve the most complicated aspects of a crime. “I think we’re ready to pay Agnes Haugen a visit.”